Dick Francis: Even Money

Three of the vested revelers, still clutching their champagne glasses, had arrived.

“Are you all right?” asked one. “That’s quite a cut on your face.”

I could still feel the blood, now running down my neck.

“I think I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thanks to you. We were mugged, but he didn’t get away with anything.” I took a couple of steps over to my father. “Are you OK… Dad?” I asked him. The sound of the word, Dad, was strange to my ears.

He looked up at me with frightened eyes.

“What is it?” I asked urgently, taking another couple of steps towards him.

He was clutching his abdomen, and now he moved his hand away. The cream linen jacket was rapidly turning bright red. My father hadn’t been punched in the stomach by the young man, he’d been stabbed.

The ambulance took an age to arrive. I tried to dial 999 on my mobile phone, but, in my panic, my fingers, feeling more like sausages, kept pressing the wrong keys. Eventually, one of the champagne revelers took the phone from my hand and made the call while I knelt down on the grass next to my father.

The blood had spread alarmingly right across his abdomen, and his face had turned ashen gray.

“Lay him down,” someone said. “Put his head lower than his heart.”

Quite a crowd had drifted over from the various parking lot parties. Somehow it seemed absurd for people to be standing around sipping champagne whilst my father was fighting for breath at their feet.

“It’s OK,” I said to my father. “Help is on the way.”

He nodded very slightly and then tried to say something.

“Keep still,” I instructed. “Save your energy.” But he continued to try to speak.

“Be very careful.” He said it softly but quite distinctly.

“Of what?” I replied.

“Of everyone,” he said in a whisper.

He coughed, and blood appeared on his lips.

“Where is that damn ambulance?” I shouted at no one in particular.

But it was the police who arrived first. Two officers appeared on foot. They were probably more used to dealing with race-day traffic than a violent stabbing in broad daylight, and one of them was immediately on his personal radio calling for reinforcements. The other one knelt down next to me and tended to my father by placing his large, traffic-stopping right hand on the wound and pushing down.

My father groaned.

“Sorry, mate,” said the policeman. “Pressure is the best thing.”

Eventually, the ambulance arrived, with the driver apologizing for the time taken. “Going against the race traffic,” he explained. “Jams everywhere, and half the roads made one-way-the wrong way.”

My father was rapidly assessed and given oxygen through a face mask and intravenous fluids via a needle in his forearm. He was lifted carefully onto a stretcher and loaded into the vehicle, the pressure on his stomach being maintained throughout.

I tried to climb in with him, but was stopped by one of the policemen.

“You wait here with us, sir,” he said.

“But that’s my father,” I said.

“We will get you to the hospital shortly,” he said. “It looks like you need a stitch or two in that head anyway.”

The paramedics closed the ambulance doors and bore my father away just as the police backup arrived in two blue-flashing cars.

I spent much of the evening in a hospital, but not the one where I had planned to be.

I knew my father had been alive when they had placed him in the ambulance at the racetrack-I’d heard him coughing-and, according to one of the nurses, he’d still been alive when he’d arrived at the hospital. But he didn’t make it to the operating room. The combination of massive shock and drowning in his own blood had killed him in the accident-and-emergency department reception area. So sorry, they said, there was nothing they could have done.

I sat on a gray-plastic-and-tubular-steel chair in a curtained-off cubicle next to the body of my dead parent, a parent I hadn’t known existed until three hours previously, and wondered how the world could be so cruel.

I was numb. I had grieved for my father when I was about eight, when I was just old enough to begin to realize what I was missing. I could still remember it clearly. I had seen my school friends with their young mums and dads and, for the first time, realized that my aged grandparents were different. I could remember the tears I had shed longing for my parents to be alive and with me.

I had wanted so much for my father to be there and to be like the other dads, shouting encouragement from the touchline during my school soccer matches, carrying me high on his shoulders when we won, consoling and wiping away the tears when we lost.

I had amused my teammates with made-up stories about how my father had died bravely saving me from drowning, or from enemies, or from monsters. Now I discovered that even the story I had been told, and had believed unquestionably, had itself been a lie.

I looked at the figure lying silently on his back in front of me, covered by a crisp white sheet. I folded the sheet down to his chest so I could see his face. He looked as if he was just asleep, peaceful, with his eyes closed, as if he could be wakened by my touch. I placed my hand on his shoulder. His flesh was already cooling, and there would be no awakening here ever again. I stroked his suntanned forehead for the first and last time in my life and considered what might have been.

I should be angry with him, I thought. Angry for going away and leaving me all those years ago. Angry that he had then taken so long to come back. Angry that I’d had sisters for nearly thirty years whom I’d never met. And angry that he’d come back at all and added complications to my already complex existence.

But I have always believed that anger is an emotion that needs to be expressed, to be vocalized with passion, towards someone who can respond or be hurt. Somehow, directing anger towards my dead father’s corpse seemed pointless and wasteful of my energy.

I would save my anger, I decided, for the young man who had so abruptly taken away any chance I might have had to make up for time lost in the past. I grieved not so much for the death of my father but for the loss of the opportunity that had come so close.

I stood up and pulled the sheet back over his face.

A man in a light brown suit came into the secluded cubicle behind me.

“Mr. Talbot?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, turning around.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Murray,” he said, showing me his warrant card. “Thames Valley Police.” He paused, looking down at the inert form beneath the sheet.“I’m very sorry about your father,” he said, “but we really need to ask you some questions.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Shall we go and find somewhere more suitable?”

He seemed relieved. “Yes, good idea.”

One of the nurses showed the two of us into a small room provided for families-grieving families, no doubt-and a second plainclothes policeman came in to join us. We sat down on more of the gray-plastic-and-tubular-steel chairs.

“This is DC Walton,” said Detective Sergeant Murray, introducing his colleague. “Now, what can you tell us about the incident in the parking lot at Ascot?”

“I’d call it more than just an incident,” I said. “I was attacked and my father was fatally stabbed.”

“We will have to wait for the post-mortem to determine the actual cause of death, sir,” said the detective sergeant rather formally.

“But I saw my father being stabbed,” I said.

“So you did see your attacker?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know that I’d recognize him again. His face was covered. All I could see were his eyes, and that was only for a split second.”