‘I’d better make it quick, then,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘That’s a shame. I was planning to take my time and enjoy killing you.’
‘No handy pitchfork for you to use this time,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, still smiling. ‘That is a pity, but this will do instead.’
He swung the baseball bat at my head so fast that he almost caught me unawares.
At the last moment I ducked down and the wooden bat thumped into the wall, right where my head had been only a fraction of a second before. I dived away from him, hopping madly on one leg. I would just have to put the other foot down, I thought, and hope my knee would carry my weight. I tried it as I made my way across the room and without too much of a problem. But I was too slow, and Trent had time to turn and swing the bat again, landing a glancing blow on my left biceps, just above the elbow. It wasn’t a direct hit but it was enough to cause my arm to go completely dead, numb and useless.
I leaned up against the wall by the window, breathing heavily. Two months of inactivity since the races at Cheltenham had left me hopelessly unfit. This battle was going to be over much too soon for my liking.
The feeling and movement in my left arm began to return slightly, but I feared it was too little, too late. Trent advanced towards me, grinning broadly, and he raised the bat for another strike. I stood stock still and stared at him. If he was going to kill me he would have to do it with me watching him. I wasn’t going to cower down and let him hit me over the back of the head, as he had clearly done to my father.
I dived down to my left at the last instant and the bat thumped again into the wall above my right shoulder. I grabbed it with my good right hand, and also with my nearly useless left. I clung on to the bat for dear life. I gripped it so tight that my fingers felt as if they were digging into the wood.
With both hands up above my shoulders, my body was completely unprotected by my arms. Trent took his right hand off the bat and punched me as hard as he could in the stomach.
It was a fatal error on his part.
While, to him, myabdomen may have appeared to be defenceless, he clearly didn’t know, or perhaps he had forgotten, about the hard plastic body shell that I still wore out of sight beneath my starched white shirt.
He screamed. Along, loud, agonizing scream.
It must have been like punching a brick wall. The bones in his hand would have cracked and splintered from the impact.
He dropped the baseball bat from his other hand and went down on his knees in obvious agony, clutching at his right wrist.
But I wasn’t going to let him get off that easily.
I picked up the bat and hit him with it, audibly breaking his jaw and sending him sprawling on to the floor, seemingly unconscious.
I sat down on the arm of the sofa and looked out of the window. There was still no sign of the boys in blue, but now I wasn’t so worried, I was even a little bit pleased.
I leaned down to the telephone, picked up the dangling handset and used it to call for an ambulance. Then I went across to my father. He was definitely alive, but only just. His breathing was perceptible but shallow, and I still couldn’t find a pulse in his neck but there was a faint one in his wrist. I moved him properly into the recovery position and he obligingly groaned again. I stroked his blood-matted hair. I may have been a strange boy, and he was definitely a strange and stubborn father, but I still loved him.
Julian Trent moaned a little, so I went back and sat on the arm of the sofa and looked down at him lying on the carpet in front of me, the young man who had brought so much misery to so many innocent people.
He began to stir, pulling his knees up under him so he was kneeling on the floor facing away from me. He cradled his right hand in his left, and his head was bowed down in front. As I watched him, his head came up a fraction and he tried to slowly reach out with his left hand towards the baseball bat that I had put down on the sofa beside him.
Would he ever give up? I asked myself.
I leaned down quickly and picked up the bat before he could reach it. Instead, he used his left hand to push down on the blue upholstery, as if he were about to try and stand.
No, I suddenly realized. He would never give up, not ever.
Eleanor and I might make our life together but there would always be three of us in the relationship, the spectre of Julian Trent hovering nearby in the darkness, forever waiting for the chance to settle the score in his favour. Even if he was convicted of Scot Barlow’s murder, and past form gave no guarantee of that, I was under no illusion that a lengthy term of imprisonment would reform or rehabilitate him. He would simply spend the time planning the completion of what he thought of as his ‘unfinished business’.
Just like Josef Hughes and George Barnett, we would never be free of the fear. Not for as long as Julian Trent was alive.
In common law, self-defence is called an ‘absolute defence’, that is, it doesn’t just mitigate a crime, it means that no crime exists in the first place. But in order for a justification of self-defence to succeed, certain conditions needed to apply. I knew this because I had recently defended someone accused of causing grievous bodily harm to a would-be mugger.
The conditions were a two-stage test, one of which was subjective and the other objective. First, did the accused genuinely believe that force was necessary to protect himself? And, secondly, if he did have that belief, then was the degree of force reasonable to meet the threat as he saw it?
The degree of force used was always the key. The law demanded that the force used should not have been excessive or, if it had been, then the perpetrator was making an honest, even if over zealous, attempt to uphold the law rather than taking the law into his own hands for the purposes of revenge or retribution.
In a landmark case in 1971 Lord Morris, the Lord of Appeal, stated, ‘If there has been an attack so that self-defence is reasonably necessary, it will be recognized that a person defending himself cannot weigh to a nicety the exact measure of his defensive action. If the jury thought that, in a moment of unexpected anguish, the person attacked had only done what he honestly and instinctively thought was necessary, that would be the most potent evidence that only reasonable defensive action had been taken.’
I glanced briefly out of the window. There was still no sign of the police, nor of the arrival of an ambulance.
Julian Trent drew his left leg forward beneath him and slowly began to rise.
It had to be now or never.
I stood up, lifted my arms high over my head and hit him again, bringing the bat down hard and catching him at the base of the skull where the neck joins the head. I hit him with the very end of the bat in order to gain maximum leverage. There was a terrible crunching noise and he went flat down again onto the carpet, and lay still.
I wasn’t certain whether it had been a lethal blow or not, but it would have to be enough. I felt sick.
All the frustration and fear of the past six months had gone into that strike, together with the anger at losing my possessions, the rage I had for him having torn to shreds the photograph of my Angela, the resentment I bore for having to dance to his tune for so long, and the fury at what he had done to my father.
I sat down again calmly on the arm of the sofa.
It was finally over. I had done only what I honestly and instinctively thought had been necessary to meet the threat as I saw it, and I would have to take my chances in court.
I glanced out of the window once more.
At long last, I could see two policemen coming down the driveway.
But now I needed help of a different kind.
I picked up the telephone and called Arthur.
Dick Francis, Felix Francis
