Felix Francis - Guilty Not Guilty

Movement. Down by my feet.

It must be a mouse , I thought, caught under the sheet .

There, it moved again .

‘Excuse me,’ I said loudly, interrupting the medical class. ‘Can you please pull back the bedclothes?’

The teacher smiled broadly. ‘Indeed I can. I was just about to do that anyway.’

He removed the sheet with a bit of a flourish as if he were revealing some great treasure.

There was no mouse.

The movement was caused by the big toe on my right foot waving back and forth like some demented digit with a life of its own. Except that I was making it happen and I could stop and start it at will.

If anything, the poor man looked rather disappointed, as if his prized freak exhibit was now not so much of an anomaly after all.

I, meanwhile, had more tears streaming down my face.

Tears, on this occasion, of joy rather than of sorrow.

It was around this time that I had a visitor in the form of Detective Sergeant Dowdeswell.

‘Hello,’ he said, standing at the foot of my bed. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Badly,’ I replied.

He pulled up the chair and sat down next to me on my right-hand side.

‘You’ll have to sit at the end,’ I said. ‘I can’t move my head to see you.’

‘What, not at all?’

‘Not at all. In fact the only thing I can move is one big toe.’

He shook his head. ‘I knew you were bad but not that bad.’

He moved the chair until he was in my eyeline.

‘You took your time,’ I said.

‘Not from lack of trying, I assure you,’ he said. ‘The medics wouldn’t let us in. Seems you almost died. They placed you into an induced coma at the scene and it took them ten whole days to wake you up again. They were worried you had brain damage. I’m only allowed in here now because I’ve promised to be quick and not to upset you.’

‘You not being here before now has upset me a lot more,’ I said. ‘You know that it wasn’t an accident.’

‘One of the doctors told me you’d said that.’

‘But surely you knew that already.’

He looked rather sheepish.

‘Traffic attended the scene and the assumption by them was that you had tried to take the corner too fast, skidded on some loose gravel, gone through the hedge and hit the tree beyond. Seems the car was a complete write-off, and that was even before the fire brigade had to cut it to pieces to get you out.’

‘What about the other car?’

‘There was no other car.’

‘Yes there was. It struck me violently from behind and sent me flying towards the tree. I didn’t go through the hedge, I went over it.’

He looked horrified.

‘There was no other car there when you were found. But God knows how long it was before someone spotted the wreck.’

‘When was that?’

‘About eight o’clock on Thursday morning. Someone walking their dog saw the car over the hedge and then they noticed that there was a body still inside.’

‘Thursday morning?’ I said with incredulity. ‘That means I’d been there all night.’

I received more horrified looks.

Overall, I was quite grateful that I couldn’t remember anything after flying towards the tree.

As the doctor had said, I was a very lucky man.

‘It also wasn’t very helpful that Traffic didn’t initially identify you.’

‘Why not?’

‘It seems that both the car’s number plates, front and rear, had been shattered in the crash and were unreadable, so the officers on site used your mobile phone number to run a check. But those records indicated that the phone was registered to a man called Henry Jones from Coventry, so they had to contact West Midlands Police. Only when they tried to go there, did they find that the address didn’t exist.’

It was my turn to be embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid that was my fault. I gave a false name to the shop when I bought it.’

The sergeant looked at me in a highly disapproving manner. ‘Only drug dealers do that.’

‘I was fed up with you lot tracking my movements.’

He snorted.

‘But, never mind all that,’ I said, even though I did mind. ‘Tell me about Joe Bradbury. Have you arrested him yet?’

At that point the senior ward nurse burst into the room.

‘That’s enough,’ she said aggressively. ‘Time for you to go now, officer. We can’t have our patient getting over-tired.’

‘No!’ I shouted loudly back, with equal aggression. ‘The sergeant stays right where he is. We’re not finished.’

She stared at me and pursed her lips.

To totally bastardise the speech by the first Queen Elizabeth, I may have had the body of a weak and feeble invalid, but I had the heart and stomach of an Olympic athlete and there was no way I was going to let her send the detective away right now, just in case I became a little tired. And she could see it.

‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘You can have five more minutes.’

‘Ten,’ I said, but she ignored me and stormed out. The old battleaxe clearly didn’t much enjoy having her authority challenged.

‘Go on,’ I said to the DS. ‘Have you arrested Joe?’

‘Indeed we have.’

I sighed in huge relief.

‘He was arrested two weeks ago on suspicion of theft from his mother and for conspiracy to defraud Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.’

‘Not for murder?’

‘In their infinite wisdom, the CPS consider that we have insufficient evidence for a charge of murder.’ He said it in a manner that made it obvious he thought the Crown Prosecution Service to be a bunch of idiots.

And I agreed with him.

‘But at least his arrest has allowed us to have access to his phone and computer. We are processing the information they hold, so all is not lost.’

‘Where’s he being held?’ I asked.

‘He’s not. He’s out on bail.’

My heart skipped a beat.

‘Bail?’

‘Yes, he was charged and appeared before magistrates in Guildford. Sadly, they gave him bail, but that was to be expected for those charges.’

‘Why Guildford?’

‘It’s close to where the offences were said to have occurred.’

‘So it wasn’t you who arrested him?’

‘No. Surrey Police did that. But we have requested all his phone and computer data from them. After all, it was us at Thames Valley that gave Surrey the lead in the first place.’

And Nancy and I had given it to them before that.

‘You know he’ll go straight to his mother and convince her that she agreed all along that he could have the money. You’ll have no case.’

‘Having no contact with his mother is part of the bail conditions. If he goes near her he’ll end up in prison.’

‘That will be very hard on her when she’s dying of cancer.’

‘She doesn’t want to see him anyway.’

‘Why ever not?’ I asked.

‘I’ve spent quite a long time with Mrs Mary Bradbury over the past three weeks. Nice old lady. I showed her some of the emails our man sent to your wife. To say she was horrified was an understatement. She couldn’t believe how she’d been taken in by him for so long.’

‘But are you sure it will stick?’ I said. ‘She probably won’t remember anything about it by next week.’

‘Don’t be so certain. I found her much more lucid than I’d been expecting, especially after the last time I spoke to her over the carving knife incident. She even told me that she hasn’t lost all her marbles, like everyone thinks she has. Seems this confusion thing is all a bit of an act she puts on to make her life easier. No one expects her to be able to make any important decisions, so she doesn’t have to. Saves arguing with her son all the time, apparently. But she thinks he’s gone too far this time.’