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.
‘Blues and twos,’ the paramedic shouted at his colleague who was driving. ‘Blood pressure’s dropping and his O saturation has fallen below ninety.’
I heard the ambulance’s siren start up. It couldn’t go quick enough as far as I was concerned.
The medic put an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth, which made me feel marginally better, but I was so tired — I could hardly keep my eyes open.
‘Stay with us,’ the paramedic said loudly into my ear. ‘Stay with us.’
He briefly disconnected the drip from the needle in the back of my hand and replaced it with a full syringe. ‘Adrenalin,’ he said, pushing the plunger, but I was barely listening. I was drifting off.
‘Don’t go to sleep,’ said the paramedic leaning over me and putting his face close to mine. ‘Come on, Mr Hinkley, you must stay awake.’
I forced my eyes open and was not greatly heartened by the worry lines on his forehead as he listened to my chest with a stethoscope.
‘I need you to sit up some more,’ he said, placing his arm around my shoulders and pulling me forward. The move helped a little but my breathing was becoming more and more laboured as I gasped for air, and still I felt so extraordinarily fatigued.
I was going to sleep and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
In my last conscious moment before oblivion, I thought with despair: this is it — I’m dying.
I woke up lying on a hospital bed with all my senses switching back on at once.
I stared at the light fitting on the ceiling, could hear a beep-beep somewhere over my head of what I took to be a heart monitor, and I could smell the typical sweet aroma of hospital disinfectant.
My sensory nerves were fully operational as well, with my chest feeling like someone was driving nails into it. My abdomen was on fire and my throat felt like it had been rebored with a wire brush.
And I was thirsty.
I tried to speak, but my tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of my mouth. All that I could manage was a groan.
‘Ah, you’re awake,’ said a voice.
I swivelled my eyes away from the ceiling and looked at a pretty young woman standing at the foot of the bed dressed in a blue nurse’s tunic.
‘Water,’ I tried to say through the oxygen mask that covered my nose and mouth. I’m not sure it came out quite right but she seemed to understand because she nodded and disappeared, returning with a cup and a straw. Nothing ever tasted better.
For a few moments when I’d first awakened, I had wondered where I was, then I remembered everything up to and including the hopeless feeling of impending death that I’d experienced in the ambulance.
I wasn’t dead — I was alive and in hospital.
Unless, of course, this was the afterlife.
I reckoned that it wasn’t, not unless this pain constituted Hell itself. I did consider that seriously for a few seconds but came to the conclusion that Lucifer was unlikely to have pretty nurses on hand to fetch water for the inmates.
I was still alive, and I was glad of it.
‘Do you know your name?’ asked the nurse, holding the oxygen mask away from my face.
‘Jeff Hinkley,’ I said, my voice still coming out as a croak.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I hurt.’
‘I’ll fetch you something for that.’
She replaced the mask and disappeared from view, returning in a few moments with a small plastic cup containing some clear liquid.
‘Morphine,’ she said. ‘This will help.’
She held the mask away from my face again and helped me raise my head slightly to drink it down. Only then did I realize that I had a multitude of wires and tubes coming out of the side of my neck below my right ear.
A man came into sight. He was wearing surgeon’s scrubs.
‘So, Mr Hinkley, you’re still with us?’ I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement. ‘I’m Doctor Shwan. It’s Egyptian, like a swan only with an h. I’m the doctor that operated on you. You’re a very lucky boy. Very lucky indeed. I thought we’d lost you but we managed to bring you back.’ He smiled.
He’d called me a boy yet he was hardly older than I.
‘I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck,’ I said. ‘I’m so sore.’
‘I’m not surprised. I had to open both your chest and your abdomen.’
‘And my throat?’ I asked. ‘That hurts as well.’
‘We had to insert a tube down your throat in order to ventilate your lungs with oxygen during surgery. Normal breathing isn’t possible with the chest wall open. The tube tends to cause some minor discomfort for a while afterwards.’
It didn’t feel minor to me.
‘You rest,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll tell you everything later.’
‘Tell me now,’ I said. I was never one for waiting.
‘You have thirteen separate stab wounds, most of which are superficial. Two of them, however, are deep. One penetrated the abdominal muscle wall and punctured your bowel, while the other, the most serious, passed between your second and third ribs on the left side, causing a laceration of the aortic arch just above your heart.’