Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

‘Where?’ one of the medics shouted at me urgently.

‘Where what?’ I asked.

‘Where’s the cardiac arrest?’ he shouted again.

In my chest, I thought.

‘What cardiac arrest?’ I asked blankly.

‘You pushed the cardiac arrest alarm,’ he said accusingly.

‘I did that,’ said the ward duty night nurse, coming out from behind the nurses’ station desk where she’d taken refuge. ‘We needed help fast. It was the best I could think of.’

Good girl, I thought.

I sat down on the floor. I wasn’t feeling at all well.

Oh God, not again.

I ended up back where I’d started, in A & E, for repairs.

Doctor Shwan wasn’t on duty so it fell to one of the other doctors to tut-tut about not exerting oneself so soon after open-heart surgery when one is only held together with silk thread and catgut.

‘And stainless-steel wire,’ I added helpfully.

I was sent for an X-ray on my breastbone but nothing seemed to have moved in that department. It was the incision made to repair my bowel that had split open. The underlying muscle wall, thankfully, had remained intact.

‘You nearly gave yourself a massive hernia,’ the doctor said sternly by way of reprimand. ‘If you had split the internal sutures as well as the external ones, you could easily have had your guts out all over the floor.’

‘But I didn’t,’ I said, smiling at him.

My guts had nearly been all over the floor for another reason, I thought, courtesy of my friend with the carving knife.

A uniformed policeman came to see me as soon as the doctor had finished his stitching, even though I was still feeling absolutely lousy and utterly exhausted.

‘Call Detective Inspector Galvin,’ I said.

‘Why?’ asked the policeman.

‘Because I’m not well enough and too tired to tell the story twice.’

I closed my eyes.

Why was someone trying so hard to kill me? Three times now, in rapid succession, I’d escaped an untimely death.

I had been assuming that all three attempts were connected. But were they?

Clearly, the second and third had been, but shutting me into a sauna didn’t follow the pattern of the other two. Had I simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time at Dave Swinton’s house?

The two most recent attempts by the same two men had shown a certain determination to succeed on their part.

It had only been good fortune that I’d been awake and out of my room when they had appeared in the hospital, and I could hardly rely on my luck holding every time they came looking for me.

What was it I knew or had done that was so important it was worth killing me over?

DI Galvin came to see me at nine thirty on Friday morning as I was snoozing, back in bed in my room on the ninth floor of the hospital.

‘I told you I needed a guard,’ I said to him before he even had a chance to speak.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I agree. You were right.’

‘So can I have one now? Those two guys have tried at least twice to kill me. In my book, that demonstrates an undeniable degree of persistence. I reckon they may well come back for a third try.’

‘I’ll see what I can arrange,’ DI Galvin said. ‘Can you add anything to your description of the man with the knife?’

‘He now has a scalded face,’ I said. ‘I threw boiling milk at him.’

I told the detective everything that had happened from the moment the door buzzer was pushed until the time the knifeman ran for the stairs.

‘It seems you gave rather better than you got,’ he said.

‘I had some catching up to do.’

‘We are trying to establish how the men got in. There’s night-time security in A & E that’s meant to prevent members of the public wandering through to the rest of the hospital.’

‘Surely this place has closed-circuit TV?’ I asked.

‘All over. It’s being looked at even as we speak. Any luck with the mugshots?’

‘Not so far, but I’m only about halfway through and there’s one or two I now want to go back and look at again. I had a much better look at the knifeman last night than I did at my flat. I have a vague feeling I’ve seen his face before.’

‘I’ll leave the iPad with you, then. Give me a call if you spot anyone familiar.’

‘Talking about giving people a call, is there any chance someone could fetch my phone? I dropped it during the struggle in my flat hallway, and I feel totally lost without it.’

‘Ah yes, that reminds me,’ said DI Galvin. ‘I have your front-door key.’ He dug in his pocket and placed the key on the bedside locker.

‘Did you hear what I said? Could someone please fetch my phone?’

‘We’re finished there now,’ the inspector replied, not properly answering the question. ‘Is there no one else who could go for you?’

‘I suppose I could ask my sister to go.’

‘Good,’ he said, standing up. ‘You will need to make a formal statement about the incident here last night. Can you write it yourself?’

I nodded. Another bloody statement. And I still had to do the one for DS Jagger. ‘I’ll do it later,’ I said wearily.

‘OK. But, in the meantime, keep looking at the mugshots. I’ll be back later for the statement.’

‘How about my bodyguard?’ I said.

‘I’ll arrange for a uniformed officer to be present in the ward reception area. The nursing staff are demanding it anyway.’

Good for them, I thought.

The detective went away and I went back to my snoozing. But about an hour later I came face-to-face once more with my would-be assassin.

He was younger and had a moustache, but I was certain it was the same man — my friend with the carving knife.

Mugshot number 282.

He was indeed one of those I’d gone back to have another look at, having passed over him before. It was the dark unfeeling eyes that gave him away, the same eyes I’d stared deeply into when I’d been convinced he was about to kill me. They were not eyes I would forget in a hurry.

Just the picture of him sent shivers of fear down my spine.

‘Two-eight-two,’ I said to DI Galvin when I called him using the hospital phone.

‘Are you sure?’

‘A hundred per cent.’

‘Two-eight-two, you say?’ I could hear him tapping it in on a computer keyboard. ‘Right, got him.’

‘What’s his name?’ I asked.

‘Lawrence. Darryl Gareth Lawrence. Ever heard of him?’

‘No,’ I said with certainty.

‘He was born sixteenth July 1978. Originally from Port Talbot in Wales, his last known address was in Streatham, south London. He’s got previous — lots — mostly for violence, including wounding with intent.’

‘With intent to do what?’

‘Cause grievous bodily harm. Sentenced to seven years for that at Southwark Crown Court in 2008. He was released on licence in November 2012 having served two-thirds of his sentence. According to his record, he’s been out of trouble since then but that only means he hasn’t been arrested for anything.’

‘Well, you can arrest him now for wounding with intent to commit murder.’

‘I’ll get on to it straight away.’

He hung up.

In some strange way, I felt slightly safer knowing who was trying to kill me. All I needed to know now was why .

After speaking with DI Galvin, I called Faye and asked her if she could fetch my mobile phone from my flat. She came to the hospital at noon to collect the key.

‘The phone should be on the floor in the hallway,’ I said. ‘And the charger as well, if you can find it. That’ll be on the worktop in the kitchen next to the microwave.’

‘Nothing else? How about some clothes?’

‘No. I’m fine. I have clothes.’