by Dick Francis
My head had hurt so much that I had rather wished that I had remained so for another three.
‘What happened?’ I had croaked at her from inside a clear plastic mask that had sat over my nose and mouth and which, I’d assumed, was to deliver oxygen to the patient.
‘You fell off your horse.’
I had suddenly remembered everything – everything, that is, up to the point of the fall.
‘I didn’t fall off,’ I had croaked back at her. ‘The horse fell.’ An important distinction for every jockey, although the nurse hadn’t seemed to appreciate the difference.
‘How is my horse?’ I had asked her.
She had looked at me in amazement. ‘I have no idea,’ she had said. ‘I’m only concerned with you.’
Over the next few hours my headache had finally succumbed to increasing doses of intravenous morphine and the roaring fire in my throat had been extinguished by countless sips of iced water via a green sponge on a stick.
Sometime after it was dark, a doctor had arrived to check on my now-conscious form and he had informed me of the full catalogue of injuries that I had sustained, first by hitting the ground at thirty miles and hour and then having more than half a ton of horse land on top of me.
My back was broken, he had said, with three vertebrae cracked right through but, fortunately for me, my spinal cord was intact, thanks probably to the back protector that I had been wearing under my silks. Four of my ribs had been cracked and one of those had punctured a lung that had subsequently partially collapsed. My head had made hard contact with something or other and my brain had been badly bruised, so much so that a neurosurgeon had been called to operate to reduce the pressure inside my skull by fitting a valve above my right ear that would drain away the excess fluid. My left knee had been broken, the doctor had explained, and he himself had operated to fix it as best he could, but only time would tell how successful he had been.
‘So will I live?’ I had asked him flippantly.
‘It was a bit touch and go for a while,’ he had replied seriously. ‘But I think you will. There was no real damage to your main internal organs other than a little bruising to the left kidney, and a small tear in your left lung that will heal itself. Yes, I think you’ll be fine in time, especially now you are conscious and there doesn’t appear to be any major damage to your brain either.’
‘And will I ride again?’ I’d asked him more seriously.
‘More difficult to say,’ he’d replied. ‘Again, time will tell. I suspect it will depend on how mad you are. I personally think that all you jump jockeys have a screw loose. The same ones come in here year after year to be patched up and plastered.’ He shook his head. ‘They’re completely bonkers.’
‘How about my horse?’ I had asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he’d said. ‘But surely it wasn’t your own horse you were riding?’
‘Yes it was,’ I’d said. I had tried explaining about being an amateur jockey and the Foxhunter Chase but he hadn’t really been interested, and he had no idea whether Sandeman had been injured or not, or even if he was alive. It had only been when Paul and Laura Newington had come to see me later that evening that I had heard the full story of the disaster.
They had been watching the race from the stands and they were just getting excited about the prospect of another famous win when Sandeman and I had so spectacularly disappeared in a flurry of legs, and then we had both lain prostrate and unmoving on the turf.
Paul, it seemed, had run the half-mile from the grandstands, down the course, to where we had both been hidden from the sight of the thousands of spectators behind hastily erected green canvas screens. Sandeman, it appeared, had been badly winded and had also damaged his back. He had taken a full fifteen minutes to get gingerly to his feet and only Paul’s personal intervention had prevented the racecourse vet from putting him down there and then. Fortunately for me, no questions had been asked about whether or not to shoot the jockey. Paul told me that I had been lying on the turf being attended to by the paramedics and the racecourse doctor for nearly an hour before being lifted ever so carefully into an ambulance and driven away at a snail’s pace. The following race had been required to bypass the fence and was nearly abandoned altogether.
‘There was someone else down there as well,’ he had said. I had thought he must have meant Julian Trent but I’d been wrong. ‘Agirl. Ran all the way down the course in high-heeled shoes. Nice looker. Called herself Eleanor. Do you know her?’
I’d nodded to him.
‘She seemed a bit cut up about you,’ he’d said, almost surprised. ‘I thought she must have the wrong guy but she was certain it was you. She said she had met me before at that do at Newbury in December but I don’t remember.’
‘What happened to her?’ I’d asked him.
‘I think she went in the ambulance with you but I don’t know. I was so busy trying to get Sandeman sorted out.’
‘How is he?’ I’d asked him.
‘Not great,’ he’d said. ‘He was taken straight to the equine hospital in Lambourn. They are treating him for a badly strained back and severe bruising.’
I’d laughed at him. ‘Eleanor is a vet at that hospital.’
‘What a coincidence,’ he’d said laughing back.
But I didn’t like coincidences.
‘I think that cast can come off your leg,’ said the orthopaedic surgeon. ‘The X-rays show the knee mending well and there’s no reason why it needs to be immobilized any longer. How long is it now?’
‘Seven and a half weeks,’ I said.
‘Mmm,’ he pondered. ‘Should be fine, but you will need to keep using the crutches and just put a little weight on it for a while. Build up the weight over the next few weeks.’
‘What about my back?’ I asked him.
‘The scans show that the bones are mending slowly but you still need to keep that straightjacket on for another six weeks at least.’
He was referring to the hard white plastic shell that I wore to prevent me bending my back. The damned thing reached from just below my neck almost to my groin in the front and from my shoulder blades to the top of my buttocks behind. It was very uncomfortable and made sitting at a desk near impossible, but wearing it had at least allowed me to walk around. Without it I would probably still be lying flat on my back.
‘Six weeks?’ I said in exasperation.
‘You broke the T10, T11 and T12 vertebrae right through and you don’t want to finish now what your fall started,’ he said. ‘You are a very lucky man. With that injury you could have so easily been paralysed, or dead.’
I would just have to put up with the discomfort, and the ignominy of having to ask my downstairs neighbour to come and help me get out of the wretched thing at night and back into it in the morning. The shell was actually made in two halves that had been heat moulded to fit my torso exactly, the two parts being held together round my upper body by half a dozen Velcro-covered nylon straps that needed to be fed through metal loops and pulled tight. I even had to shower in the damn thing.
The surgeon inspected the device before I gratefully hid it again from sight beneath my shirt.
‘It’s damned uncomfortable, you know,’ I said to him. ‘It makes me itch all the time.’
‘Better than being paralysed,’ he replied.
And there was no answer to that.
‘How’s the head?’ he asked. It wasn’t technically his department.
‘Getting better slowly,’ I said. ‘I saw the neurologist last week and he is happy with my progress, but I still have some headaches.’
‘Do you still have the valve implant?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said putting my hand up to my right ear. ‘He took it out four weeks ago now.’
‘No problems?’ he asked.
‘A little dizziness at first,’ I said. ‘But that went after a couple of days. No, I feel fine, just a few headaches and they are getting more infrequent and less troublesome.’
‘When can I start riding again?’ I asked him.
He stopped writing and looked up. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
He put his pen down and looked at me with his head inclined to the side. ‘Well, I suppose from my point of view, all your bones will heal and they’ll be as good as new in a few months, but I would be worried about your head. The brain can only take so many knocks like that.’
I had to admit that it had been quite a bang. I had seen what was left of my racing helmet and it was cracked right through from front to back. Without it, I would have certainly died.
‘But I don’t intend to ever land on my head again,’ I said.
‘No one intended there to be a second world war after the first one. But there was.’
‘That’s a bit different,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he conceded. ‘But you should never try to predict the future.’
I knew that well enough. Especially in the law.
When I returned to chambers later that afternoon I felt I was walking on air, albeit with only one leg. In spite of the fibreglass and polyurethane material being much lighter than the old-fashioned white plaster of Paris, the full-length cast had still been very heavy and annoyingly restrictive. Without it, I felt at least partially released from the cage in which I had been existing.
The surgeon had told me that I would need lots of physiotherapy to get the knee back to full movement, and I still had to walk using the crutches, but it was such a joy to once again scratch an itch in my thigh, or to rub away an ache in my kneecap.
Arthur looked up at me from his desk as I hopped my way through the clerks’ room. ‘On the mend, I see,’ he said.
‘Slowly,’ I agreed. ‘I still have to wear this body armour for another six weeks.’ I tapped the hard shell beneath my shirt.
‘Still need the recliner then?’ he said, smiling.
He referred to the new chair I had acquired from a friend that sat behind my desk. It allowed me to lean right back and reduce the pressure that the shell made on my groin.
‘I might just keep it anyway,’ I said to him with a laugh. He had found me asleep in the chair two or three times when I had first returned to chambers about three weeks previously.
‘There’s another one of those hand-delivered envelopes in your box,’ Arthur said, immediately wiping the smile from my face. ‘It came while you were out.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
Arthur looked me in the eye and I thought for a moment that he was going to ask me straight out what was in the envelope, but he didn’t, instead returning his attention to something on his desk.
I went over to the boxes and looked into mine. I had been temporarily promoted to the top row as I was unable to bend down to my usual level, and there, on its own, was a slim A5-sized white envelope, just as before.
I was sure that Arthur was watching me so I picked it up casually and stuffed it into my trouser pocket before negotiating the corridor on my crutches to the safety and privacy of my room. Thankfully, the two others junior barristers who also shared this space with me were both away in Manchester acting for a big local football club that was up to its neck in a taxevasion scandal involving half a dozen of their most highly paid players.
I sat in my recliner chair and carefully opened the envelope. As before there was a single sheet of folded paper, and a photograph. On the sheet of paper there were just two short lines, again in black capital letters.
JUST REMEMBER, LOSE THE CASE
MITCHELL GETS CONVICTED
The photograph showed Eleanor in her blue scrub tunic and trousers walking along the gravel path between the house she lived in and the equine hospital in Lambourn.
CHAPTER 11
Why was it, I wondered, that I felt like I was being dangled on a string by an unknown hand, being made to dance a jig by some puppet-master hidden from the light. My house, my job, my father and even my friends were somehow under his spell. Sometimes I even began to wonder if my fall at Cheltenham had been his doing, but I knew that was ridiculous.
I sat at my desk and turned the photo of Eleanor over and over in my hands. Even if Julian Trent had seen her call and wave to me at Cheltenham, how did he know where she worked or how to get her photograph?
Photograph, photograph. Why did I keep thinking about the photograph taken from Scot Barlow’s house the day he was murdered? Why not steal the frame as well? If someone had wanted to keep that picture then, surely, wouldn’t they have taken the frame with it? Not, I supposed, if it had been highly individual and easily recognizable. But it hadn’t. It had been a simple silver frame available in any high-street jeweller or department store.
So had the photograph been taken simply to destroy it? Was the image in fact a clue to whoever had been the murderer?
I was pondering these questions when my phone rang.
I picked it up with some trepidation but there was a familiar voice at the other end, one I was beginning to hope might become more familiar still.
‘What did the doctor say?’ Eleanor asked immediately.
‘He told me I can go on living,’ I replied with a smile.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘So he must have told you that you were quite well enough to take me out to dinner tonight?’
‘He said that it was completely out of the question,’ I replied. ‘He insisted that I should eat in at my place, alone. Matter of life or death.’
‘Well, you’ll just have to die then,’ she said laughing. ‘Because you, sunshine, are taking me out to Maximillian’s tonight whether you like it or not.’
I liked it.
‘How’s the conference?’ I asked her. She was attending a two-day international equine-medicine symposium at the London Veterinary School.
‘Boring,’ she said. ‘Look, I must dash. They’re about to start a lecture about the caecum and its role in colic.’
‘Sounds like fun,’ I said.
‘Anything but,’ she said. ‘See you at the restaurant at seven thirty.’ She disconnected before I had time to say goodbye.
I think she had applied to attend the symposium only so that she could spend a night in a London hotel, and spend the evening with me.
I had seen her four or five times since my fall at Cheltenham.
‘Typical,’ she had said when she first came to see me in hospital after I had woken up.
‘What’s typical?’ I’d replied.
‘I sit here beside him trying to wake him up for nearly three whole days and nights and then, when I have to go to work, hey presto, he opens his eyes.’
I had smiled at her. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ I’d said.
‘I didn’t have to,’ she’d said. ‘But I wanted to.’
That was nice, I’d thought.
She had been back to see me a couple more times during the week that they had insisted on keeping me in Cheltenham hospital, and then she had helped me on the day I went back home to Ranelagh Avenue, SW13.
Strangely, for the first two weeks after hospital I had been permitted only to lie flat on my back or to stand upright. Sitting, other than for a few minutes at a time, had been banned by the doctors. It had made life very complicated as it was impossible to travel anywhere by car. An ambulance had been needed to take me home on a stretcher, yet I was able to climb the stairs to my house, albeit on one leg and a pair of crutches, with Eleanor standing behind me so I didn’t topple over backwards and do myself more mischief.
She had stayed that first night I was home, sleeping in the room that, seven and a half years before, Angela and I had so gleefully decorated with teddy bears’ picnic wallpaper as a nursery for our unborn son, and which I hadn’t yet bothered to change. I realized that, since my father had gone home soon after Angela’s funeral, Eleanor was the first person other than me to have slept in my home. It wasn’t that I was particularly averse to having guests, it was
just that I hadn’t yet got round to actually asking anyone to stay. I kept thinking that there was plenty of time, and the last seven years had seemingly passed in a flash.
But I think Eleanor had felt uneasy sleeping at my place, as uneasy as I had at her being there. She had stayed only one night in Barnes before returning to Lambourn, and she hadn’t been back, although we had twice met elsewhere, on neutral territory, as it were, and we had spoken often on the telephone.
I liked her. I liked her a lot. But I still wasn’t sure if I was yet ready for a serious relationship. I had become used to my solitary existence. I had grown accustomed to looking after myself and not having to worry about getting home from work at a reasonable time. Maybe I was set in my ways, and not very sure that I was prepared to change them.
However, I was greatly looking forward to seeing her again for dinner, and I had a spring in my one-footed step as I finally left chambers at seven o’clock and went in search of a taxi.
Julian Trent was standing next to the gate onto Theobald’s Road, leaning on the brick-built gatepost, and I saw him immediately when I walked out of chambers. He was making no attempt at concealment as he had done before, the previous November, when he had hidden between the parked cars before stepping out to hit me with his baseball bat.
I realized there was no point in me trying to run away. The best speed I could manage on one leg and two crutches would have hardly outrun a two-year-old toddler let alone a fit and healthy young man of twenty-four. I turned towards him and he watched me as I carefully and slowly covered the sixty or so yards between us. He stood up straight and stopped leaning on the brickwork as I approached. I hoped he couldn’t actually see my heart beating fast inside my chest.
He took a few steps forward and I was beginning to regret that I hadn’t simply gone back inside my chambers as soon as I had seen him. However, I did gratefully note that he wasn’t accompanied today by his sidekick, the baseball bat, but it might, I thought, have been lurking somewhere nearby.
He seemed about to say something to me but I beat him to it. ‘What the hell do you want?’ I shouted at him.