Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

I let myself out into the cold night and walked to Richmond town centre across the green. Only when I started down Brewers Lane did I remember about not walking down dark alleyways on my own.

I spun round. No one was following me. Why should there be?

I turned up my coat collar and dug my hands deep into the pockets against the icy northerly wind and made it safely to the station to catch the train to Willesden Junction. Once there, I decided against taking the shortcut home along the gloomy trackside path, rather keeping to the longer but well-lit streets. I did it not out of any worry that it would be me in particular that might be targeted, but because there had been reports of several recent muggings on the path during the dark winter evenings and I had no real wish to be added to those statistics.

I checked the deep shadows around the bushes outside my front door for lurking rogues and villains and, of course, there were none, so I let myself in.

The rogues and villains were already inside.

There were two of them and they were not making a social call.

It was their haste that saved me.

They were waiting for me just inside the front door. One of the men grabbed my arm as soon as I stepped through and slammed me up against the wall, sending my mobile phone spinning out of my hand, while the other one tried to make mincemeat of my insides with a thin, sharp carving knife, stabbing repeatedly at my abdomen and chest.

If they had just waited until I’d removed my overcoat, I would have been far more vulnerable. As it was, the thick woollen folds and the twin rows of large bone buttons of my double-breasted, military-style greatcoat, together with my tweed jacket underneath, dampened or deflected the lethal thrusts to the extent that the blade seemed to barely make it through to my skin.

And I fought back with all the strength of the condemned and terrified.

I kicked out at the knifeman, catching him hard in the crotch. Then I flung his accomplice off my arm across the hallway, where he tripped over one of the still-packed cardboard boxes, falling halfway through my bedroom door.

I don’t think they had expected such resistance. They must have hoped to catch me by surprise and deliver a mortal wound before I had a chance to respond.

I may not be that big in either height or bulk, but I was once a serving officer in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and I had enjoyed, more than most, the gruelling physical regime of my year at Sandhurst. I had tried to sustain a fairly high level of basic fitness ever since. Even during the recent dark months of my life I had still managed to maintain a daily routine of fifty press-ups and a hundred crunches before bed every night.

So I was strong and agile. And I was angry — bloody angry.

Who did they think they were, breaking into my home and attacking me?

However, in the face of superior numbers, I decided that retreat was probably the best policy, so I ran for my still-open front door. But my two would-be murderers were not giving up that easily and I could both hear and feel them right behind me as I ran out into the street.

I ran down the centre of the road, shouting for assistance.

‘Help! Help!’ I screamed at the top of my voice. ‘Murder! Murder! Somebody help me.’

Not one of my neighbours came to my aid. Not even a curtain twitched. Perhaps I would have had more response if I’d shouted, ‘Money! Money! Get some free money.’

A car turned into the road at the far end and came towards me, its lights shining brightly. I ran straight down the middle of the road towards it, waving my arms wildly above my head until it slowed and finally stopped with my legs up against the bonnet.

The assassins wavered in their pursuit and then took off in the other direction, disappearing into the shadows.

‘Call the police,’ I called breathlessly to the driver of the car.

‘Call them yourself,’ he replied bad-temperedly through his open window. ‘And get out of the bleeding way, will you? I could have knocked you down, easy. Running down the middle of the road in a dark coat is asking for trouble.’

‘Someone is trying to kill me,’ I said.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said in obvious disbelief, ‘and I’m the Queen of Sheba.’

I stepped back a pace then unbuttoned and opened the front of both my coat and jacket. The white shirt beneath was blood red and glistening wet in the light from the car’s headlights.

‘Fuck me,’ he said.

‘ Now will you call the police?’

A police car and an ambulance turned up together, both with multiple bright blue flashing lights that lit up the street and hurt my eyes.

It became clear that a stabbing in a London street was not sufficiently unusual for either the police officers or the ambulance crew to get too excited. In fact, I found the perceived indifference to apprehending my assailants to be frustrating.

‘Can’t you get the helicopter up?’ I urged the police as soon as they arrived.

‘Helicopters cost money,’ one of them replied, shaking his head. ‘Especially on Sunday evenings.’

I was carried on a stretcher, half sitting, half lying, into the back of the ambulance and we set off with one of the policemen sitting on a chair near my head, just as I had done the previous day with Bill McKenzie.

‘My front door is wide open,’ I said. ‘The key is still in the lock.’

‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said the policeman. ‘My colleague will look after your house.’

The paramedic cut my shirt away and raised his eyebrows in surprise.

‘You have at least a dozen stab wounds on your torso,’ he said. ‘How come you’re still alive?’

The policeman suddenly took a slightly greater interest.

‘I don’t think they’re very deep,’ I said. ‘My overcoat saved me.’

The paramedic placed several electrodes on the bits of my chest with no knife punctures and wired them up to a metal box above my head. Next, he slipped a blood-pressure cuff over my arm. He also attached a sort of bulldog clip to my finger, and then inserted a needle into a vein on the back of my hand to set up a drip.

‘To stop dehydration,’ he said when I looked at him quizzically. ‘You’ve lost a fair amount of blood.’

‘So who stabbed you?’ the policeman asked.

‘There were two of them,’ I said. ‘They were waiting for me in my flat.’

‘Associates, were they?’ he asked in a tone that implied he didn’t care much. It dawned on me why.

‘No,’ I said to him. ‘They were not associates, and I am not a drug dealer. I am a senior investigator for the Integrity Service of the British Horseracing Authority. I am the horseracing police and two men have just tried to kill me. I would like, please, to speak to a higher-ranking officer.’

The policeman swiftly changed his tune, asking me for a description of the men so he could put out a call.

A description?

‘I spent most of the time with my eyes glued to the knife,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really look at their faces.’

‘But you saw them well enough to know they were not associates,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Funny how the mind works. I couldn’t remember seeing their faces yet I must have done. Enough, anyway, to realize I didn’t know them.

‘White or black?’ he asked.

‘White,’ I said with certainty. The overhead light in my hallway had been off but there had been enough illumination from the one in the open porch.

‘Masks and gloves?’

‘Gloves, yes,’ I said. ‘Leather gloves. But no masks.’

‘They obviously didn’t expect you to survive long enough to provide us with a description.’

I was beginning to feel seriously unwell and I was having great difficulty breathing. I leaned my head back on the pillow.