“That’s the other problem with all this wedding malarkey, I just can’t keep up with the name changes.”
The gate opened out onto the rear terrace of the hotel, next to what appeared to be a lean-to glasshouse that stood against the back of the outbuildings and garages, which ran down the side of the hotel and formed one side of the kitchen yard. The terrace had been laid out with a chequerboard of tables and chairs but the noise and the cheering resonated from the large marquee that Rachel Fitzgerald had insisted on being erected to host her wedding reception. Beyond the large tented structure and stood forlornly in the middle of the grassy helipad, was the black shiny helicopter that Donald recognised from his trip to the Black Isle Hotel.
Like ants out foraging for food, there was a steady stream of waiters and waitresses trundling back and forth between the marquee and the large pair of French Doors that opened out from the hotel onto the rear terrace. Each worker carried a platter of food or a tray of drinks from the kitchens, returning moments later with handfuls of empty glasses and canapé plates.
Langford looked around for any familiar or unfriendly faces but guessed that the party hadn’t yet spilt out into the grounds and terraces of the hotel.
“How does the wall look from this side? Recognise anything?” He asked quietly, as one of the waiters stopped and pointed out the pair to one of his colleagues. Langford knew what the two men were saying, he didn’t need to be within earshot to understand that his presence and that of his new accomplice had been spotted… the looks on their faces, together with the knowing nod and finger pointing were as clear as any words they could utter. But Donald, who was still transfixed by the sight of the tent and the helicopter beyond, remained mute.
“Look I don’t want to be the party-pooper Donald, but any minute now security is going to come rushing through those doors and start asking some very awkward questions like how the hell we got in here, so if you have something you need to do… I get on with it.”
“I don’t know if I’ve been here before or not. I was hoping it would be obvious or someone would recognise me. I need to speak with the bride… with Mrs Bouchet. I’ve come too far not to see her. All I want is to understand who I am.”
“Well if that’s what you need to do, why don’t you go down there and talk to her… she’ll be inside the marquee and look there’s an entrance at the side of the tent, just where the canvas is flapping about. You sneak in there and I’ll go and head off the security detail and see if I can’t delay them long enough for you to meet her.” Langford pushed Donald across the terrace in the direction of the shallow flight of stone steps that led down onto the lawn. But just as he was about to leave the man to his own devices, he felt Donald’s body stiffen and resist any further forced movement.
“Why are you helping me? Do I know you? Have we met before… perhaps somewhere in my past that I don’t remember?” Donald asked the stranger, who seemed intent on helping him no matter what the cost.
“No, sorry but I know Mrs Bouchet and Mr Fitzgerald and all my instincts tell me they might know you.” Without waiting for a reply Langford pushed Donald down the steps and walked off towards the pair of double doors at the back of the hotel.
As he set foot inside the building, with his warrant car open in his hand, he was approached by three robust looking men who had only one thing on their mind and it didn’t involve asking the intruder to politely leave the premises.
“Ah there you lot are. I’m DI Peel.” He declared, as he adroitly waved his card under the nearest man’s nose and hoped that the ape of a man didn’t want a closer look or recognise his face. “My God if Patrick knew how slack you’ve been, he’d have your bollocks turned into black puddings and served up at breakfast.”
“But …but the waiter, he said you were gate-crashers.” The more senior doorman said defiantly.
“Do I look like someone that needs to gate-crash a wedding? I’m here to see that you lot don’t fall asleep on the job, so why don’t you go back to the kitchen and finish off that bottle of champagne you’ve no doubt cracked open and after that perhaps you’ll be good enough to start and earn your fat paycheques.” Langford announced sarcastically with all the confidence of someone who was used to giving orders. “Then maybe, when I see Patrick I won’t tell him…. I mean you do know about Clarence Dickens’s mob and the threats, don’t you?” He tried a long shot across their bows.
“Of course, that’s why we’re here. Mr Fitzgerald told us that we were to stop them coming inside the hotel and its grounds, that’s why we thought you and the other chap…” They all looked around and did a quick role call in the heads and used their fingers to count. “Hey where’s the other guy?” The biggest gorilla asked, with a gruff deep voice that Langford imagined he’d been born with.
“Relax, I sent him into the marquee to check out the other guests…” But DI Langford got no further before the sharp crack of an automatic echoed around the grounds, followed immediately by a cacophony of screaming and shouting.
“Oh shit.” He said turning and running outside ahead of the other three men. “What the fuck have I done…?”
~~~~~
Langford stopped the doctor just as he was about to climb aboard the air ambulance.
“DI Langford. How is he?” He asked with more concern than the doctor was normally used to hearing in such cases. Usually it was the medical teams that showed the emotion and the police or firemen that remained impassive in the face of massive trauma and loss of life, but this case had been weird for so many different reasons.
“He’s bloody lucky to be alive inspector, which is more than I can say for either the bride or the groom. What the hell happened in there? Do you know?” The doctor pushed his bag inside the helicopter and climbed up beside his patient.
“Not yet but we will. Where are you taking him?”
“The Royal Cornwall Hospital at Truro… now if you don’t mind, the sooner we get him there the sooner we can assess the damage to his brain.”
Langford walked back to the Marquee, stood by the open flapped entranced and gazed inside at the scene of panic and carnage. The whole area had been cordoned off to enable the forensics teams to search the area with their usual efficiency and muted gusto. Outside on the terrace the guests had been corralled into groups relating to their table seating and were being questioned individually by an army of officers who had descended upon the Atlantic View Hotel en masse.
“Do we know what happened yet Langford?”
The curt question took the inspector by surprise and broke him free of his guilty reverie. He blamed himself for the shooting. If he hadn’t sneaked Donald into the wedding reception perhaps none of it might have happened, but then he’d ameliorated his feelings by telling himself that whatever had sparked the violent reaction to his presence probably would have happened somewhere in the not too distant future.
“No not yet.” He said coldly without taking his eyes from the marquee and the gory tableau of red and white mayhem. Everything had been left exactly where it had fallen or had been knocked over in the rush by the guests to get away from the madness. The carpeted floor was strewn with floral decorations, plates, glasses… all scattered in the stampede and most had been sprayed with speckles of blood that had seemed to rain everywhere.
Ironically the only table which seemed to have survived intact had been the bride and groom’s and like Miss Haversham’s wedding table, it still stood proud at the far end of the tented room, surveying the carnage and like everyone else, wondering what had happened.
“How come you got here so fast anyway?”
“Luck I guess and a copper’s nose for trouble and criminals.” Langford’s mind was still not on the present, all he could really hear were the gunshots, intermingled with the screaming and the shouting. All he’d wanted to do was to shake the tree and see what fell out…nothing more. He’d certainly not wanted a mass shooting to take place but looking back the man had seemed distant, he should have known
he was mentally unstable or sick… at least he should have asked him more about his reasons for being there, although he’d been so vague, Langford wasn’t sure that the man, who’d called himself Donald, knew more than he’d already admitted.
“Word is that it was a lone gunman who sneaked into the reception and then gunned down the bride and her new husband. One of the security team reckon he came in through a side gate with another man… do you know anything about that?”
The question forced Langford to look round and take notice of his inquisitor. Yes he’d let the man in but how was he to know what…
“Burns! What the bloody hell are you doing here?” Langford declared indignantly upon the seeing the Western News’s chief reporter stood with pen and notebook in hand.
“I was invited… what’s your excuse?” Jock Burns replied, as he feigned interest at noting down the policeman’s answer.
“I’m the police, we don’t need an excuse just good cause and for the record Jock, your ‘lone gunman’ wasn’t the one doing the shooting… he was one of the victims. It appears that Mrs Fitzgerald shot both her new husband and the stranger before turning the gun on herself.” Langford called over one of the constables who was stood on the terrace guarding the steps to the marquee.
“Constable, this man is one of the guests and as such is a witness to the crime. If I see him anywhere near this marquee again or speaking to anyone involved in the investigation I will make sure you do the next six months working every night and weekend shift there is… do I make myself clear? Oh and I think he may have information vital to the case written down in his notebook, so I want you to secure it as evidence and give him a receipt, then hand it over to the evidence officer.” Langford couldn’t hide the smirk but neither did he try to.
“Jock, if you’ll kindly follow the constable he’ll make sure you stand in line with all the other witnesses, and may I say we’re lucky to have such a keen eye as yours help us with our enquiries… although how you managed to miss the actual shooting I’ll never know, unless you’d already slipped under the table after drinking too much of the free champagne.”
“Fuck you, you miserable bastard.” The reporter said, as he walked away in disgust, but then suddenly stopped. “Tell me one thing… for old time sakes and I’ll forget to mention how the man got into the wedding… why? Why did she do it?”
“Ask me that after I’ve interviewed the man she shot in the head. After all, he was apparently the target of her violent outburst, so I’m just hoping he remembers enough to fill in all the gaps.”
~~~~~
“Well hello, welcome back. I’m glad you could make it. You’ve been asleep for a wee while now and we were all beginning to get a little concerned.” The doctor’s voice was reassuringly soothing. “If you feel up to it, I’d like to ask you a few questions…” The doctor saw the look of horror cross his patient’s face and smiled. “You can relax, I’m not the police and this isn’t Mastermind. My questions will be much simpler but they will help me to assess your recovery, so let’s start with what hopefully will be a simple one… what’s your name, can you tell me that?”
The man looked to his side and the bank of monitors, which showed various numbers and graphs that meant nothing to him except they looked like a mountain range, but he knew that was better than them taking on the appearance of a flat featureless desert. It was much the same with the man asking the questions. He was obviously a doctor because around his neck he wore the obligatory badge of office… a stethoscope.
“Tom Cox… I think, although some people call me Donald. Can you tell me doctor, I am alive, aren’t I?” The doctor smiled at the question and tried not to appear shocked. He’d seen many similar cases and without exception his patients always wondered if they were alive, dreaming or floating around in some afterlife, when they first came round from their comas. But this case had suddenly become wholly different and so much more interesting from a medical perspective.
The policeman who had visited the patient, had told the doctors all he could about the man. It hadn’t been much but the inspector had told him that the man was in all probability called Tom… Tom Cox. Whereas the man in the bed had just answered his question with a foreign accent, which suggested he was of Dutch or Danish origin.
Of course, he was no language expert, but he’d read of similar cases, where a head trauma had caused a similar condition, which the medical profession had assigned the not so fancy name of… Foreign Accent Syndrome.
“You are very much alive Tom… or would you prefer it if I called you Donald?”
“Either I guess… It was Donald you see and then the others seemed to think that I could be Tom, so Tom I guess… but then Martha has only ever known me as Donald… so maybe Donald… I’m not sure anymore.” The doctor wasn’t surprised to hear the patient rambling, he’d been through so much that it would have been more of a shock had he sounded calm and collected.
“Well let’s stick with Donald for now, if that’s what you prefer. So Donald, can you tell me where you were born?” The doctor tried to redirect his patient away from the torrent of questions that his condition naturally posed, for he knew there would be ample time over the coming weeks to address all his concerns but for the present, if he was to aid that recovery, he needed his patient to be more rational and follow his lead.
“Sorry I don’t understand your question, what do you mean?” Donald asked with a degree of incomprehension and agitation.
“I was just wondering if you could tell me in which country you were born. Consider it a simple memory test. Believe me, we ask everyone the same type of questions.”
“I’m not totally sure because I still feel a little hazy but I’ve been living in Scotland… Well Cromarty actually, it’s a town near Inverness. Have you ever been there doctor? …it’s beautiful you know.” He asked, as his eyes searched the room looking for anything that seemed familiar but especially Martha.
He remembered the shooting and everything that had gone before, right up to the point when he’d first set eyes on Martha… but before that was still a disappointing blank.
He hadn’t recognised anyone at the wedding reception, but the woman certainly seemed to know him and if her reaction had been anything to go by, he could only surmise that he hadn’t been a very nice person before he’d been attacked… It was the look of abject horror that had crossed her face, as he’d approached her in the marquee that made Donald wish he’d never left Cromarty… everywhere he’d gone, innocent people had been hurt.
“No, I never have but one day I hope to.” The doctor’s reassuring smile put his patient as ease. “So Tom… sorry Donald, do you remember living abroad?”
“No… I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
“Oh it doesn’t matter. Now, you try and get as much rest as you can. We’ll talk again very soon but try and sleep, that’s the best medicine I can prescribe right now… rest and sleep.”
He closed his eyes and hoped that in his dreams, he might now remember more than he had before, but that was one of those imponderables that he was beginning to come to terms with … how could he tell if something was a lost memory or simply it had never happened?
As the drugs seduced his brain and made him feel drowsy, he lost interest in who he was and what he did or didn’t remember. At least this time, he knew he’d wake up with some memories… and although not all of them would be good, he knew that if he kept thinking about Martha then sooner or later he’d see her again. Content to drift away into unconsciousness, he slipped onto his side, and saw what had eluded him before… the large get well card. Struggling against the effects of his medication, he tried to stay awake to see who’d sent the card, but his body’s desire to sleep outweighed all else and so instead, he merely slipped into blissful unconsciousness.
~~~~~
There was a note scribbled on the inside of the card, which Martha had posted immediately upon hearing the news about Donald from her father, who had himself bee
n contacted by the Wolvercote Clinic with the news of Donald’s accident.
Fortunately for everyone concerned, Donald had kept his registration card for the clinic with him at times… It had been Dr Atkinson’s idea to give her ex-patient a vital lifeline back to the clinic should he ever lose what few memories he’d had…
“…and if you should find yourself in trouble, all anyone will have to do is call the number and ask to speak to myself. Whatever happens, we’ll be here for you Donald.”
So it had been that Inspector Langford had called the clinic and had spoken to the doctor about her former patient and had informed her that Donald… if indeed that was his name… was now in the ICU at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.
Martha had already packed her bags, by the time her father had returned home from the surgery after being called by his daughter to tell him about Dr Atkinson’s message, which she’d left on the answer phone, whilst she’d been outside in the garden.
“Martha there’s nothing you can do… there’s nothing anyone can do right now but pray. I’ve spoken to the doctor in charge and explained Donald’s history and he’s agreed to call me as soon as there is any change in his condition… but he did warn me that it could be weeks or months or at worst never, before there’s a change.
They think he’s been very lucky, but there’s no way of knowing yet how the damage caused by the bullet will affect him, physically or mentally… however bad it was last time, we both agreed that his previous condition might make the outcome of attack worse this time round.
Stranger at the Wedding Page 45