Passers-by gaze at them. Probably junkies. An odd couple, old man and young woman, but you sometimes see these unlikely pairings when they’re pooling funds, searching for a hit. Someone walking by can’t help but giggle as she sees him almost clawing at the sky with his hand. What are they like, these druggies?!
Moments later, she has keeled over, her head coming to rest on his lap. He is still upright on the bench, but losing consciousness. There are other passers-by now, and they are more worried. Maybe they’ve overdosed? Someone decides to call an ambulance.
Among the first to approach them, checking they are OK, is an army nurse. Another woman comes over, a local doctor. Being professionals they are deferred to by the rest of the little group that has gathered beside the bench, and they are immediately concerned by what they see.
Both of the people on the bench are sweating heavily, and have lost control of their bodily functions. It’s hard to find a pulse because they’re so weak. They are becoming pale, life is draining away because they’re not breathing. It’s just a matter of minutes now until hypoxia, brain damage due to lack of oxygen, starts. It may already have begun.
Minutes, luckily, is all it takes the first ambulance crew to arrive, hot-foot from the Odstock Road station on the southern outskirts of Salisbury. As they hit the road, sirens blaring, a couple of police officers have arrived at the bench. It’s only four minutes after the call to the emergency services. Moments later the paramedics are there also, and get to work, quickly joining the medical passers-by in giving breathing assistance to the two junkies on the bench.
They’ve seen it before, the emergency services, drug users who bed down under the car park just a short walk from the Maltings, scoring there and getting it wrong. Maybe they’ve just bought some bad stuff, maybe taken too much. But these two are in a desperate way. A second ambulance is called, while the crew of the first on scene go through the drills for overdose with an opioid, maybe fentanyl. Pinpoint pupils? Yes. Respiratory arrest? Check. Low blood pressure? Clearly.
The paramedics set about administering some standard treatments for an opioid overdose, they know they need to get these two to hospital as soon as possible. But the police are suspicious, these people aren’t right for junkies. They’re too clean, too well turned out, for rough sleepers, and the age difference is odd too. Someone is looking through the two patients’ pockets for identification. A couple of CID officers, plainclothes people, have come over to the bench, having been nearby on an investigation of local businesses using illegal labour.
It doesn’t take them long to find ID: they are Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The Ops room radios back to the officer on the scene: Sergei Skripal has a ‘Don’t Stop’ flag on the Police National Computer. On screen there is a note beside his listing and a number to ring. It’s a rare thing, that Don’t Stop, and the few officers on duty in Salisbury that afternoon, seven or eight of them, all take notice when they hear it over the radio.
The ambulances meanwhile have loaded up their patients and are racing towards Salisbury District Hospital, turning onto Odstock Road, passing their station, and ploughing up the hill. The vehicles drive up the ramp, execute a 180-degree turn, and disgorge their critically ill patients into the Emergency Department, where they are taken straight to the Resuscitation bay.
One level up, on Radnor Ward, Sister Sarah Clark gets the calclass="underline" two patients are on their way; they’re critical and need ventilation. She’s been at the hospital since 1984, working most of that time in intensive care – there’s not much she hasn’t seen. But these cases will prove quite unlike any they’ve treated before. The unit is already full, they have to shuffle a couple of people into other wards.
Everything that needs to be done is done swiftly on Radnor Ward, and soon Sergei and Yulia are coming up in the lift. Their journey through the Emergency Department has been very fast, around half an hour, and during that time Sister Clark has learned a little more, their names and that they are father and daughter. The patients arrive, and are connected to ventilators and the host of lines that will be needed if they are to have a chance of survival. ‘Our role was supportive,’ Sister Clark told me in a BBC interview, ‘to make sure they are getting enough oxygen in their system and that they had a stable blood pressure.’
The Skripals had been hooked up to the full battery of life-support systems within an hour of the call to the emergency services operator coming – and of course had medical help for most of that time, the so-called ‘golden hour’. They had been given a chance of survival. As a member of the hospital team said to me, ‘Imagine if the timings had been a little different and they’d fallen ill at home, the odds are they would have died very quickly.’
The wires had been buzzing at Wiltshire Police. They had called the number in the police computer and found out that Sergei Skripal was a former Russian spy who had been resettled in Britain. More officers were summoned to Salisbury. The police sent somebody up to the hospital to see what more they could learn. Could the two people have been poisoned? Clearly, that was a possibility.
The two CID officers meanwhile went to Skripal’s house on Christie Miller Road. Approaching the front door, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey extended a gloved hand to grasp the front door handle – always worth a try. It wouldn’t open so he went around to the back of the property, where he managed to gain entry. What was he looking for? Signs that their house had been searched, perhaps, or maybe even the presence of a would-be assassin. Everything seemed to be in order.
That night passed swiftly at the hospital, and at 6am the senior person on duty, one of the directors of the hospital trust, began calling fellow members of the board to tell them what was going on. There was some information about the Skripals’ condition but also that Sergei was a former Russian spy and that poisoning was suspected.
One of the directors wanted more information, so he called Dr Duncan Murray, the senior intensive-care specialist, who in turn rang the ward. ‘I spoke to the nurse who had been on that night,’ recalled Murray, an enormously experienced South African-born anaesthetist, ‘and it was this conversation I could never have imagined in my wildest imagination as having with anyone.’
The Chief Executive, meeting with the rest of her board at the hospital that morning, Monday 5 March, put the necessary measures in place to declare a Major Incident at 10am. This allowed them to mobilize all the people and resources needed to handle the crisis. It also allowed for an attempt at decontamination of the place where the Skripals were brought in. It was done with hoses and scrubbing brushes, since they still thought they were dealing with an opioid. Of course having made this announcement, and briefly closed the Emergency Department, there was bound to be press interest in this poisoning.
News of what was happening was percolating through London also. People at MI5 and MI6, jointly responsible for the team looking after Sergei, had known since the police phone call of the previous evening. They were aware, presumably from Sergei, about Yulia’s impending visit, and immediately started to wonder whether, somehow, inadvertently, she had led assassins to her father’s door or even brought something with her from Moscow that might be poisoned. It was time to alert ministers and the like. For many of those hearing the news, assessing each new fact, trying to understand it all, there was a sort of default setting; the Litvinenko affair.
At the BBC, Home Affairs Correspondent Tom Symonds got on to the story that morning. It didn’t take him and his producer long to extract Sergei Skripal’s name from someone in Salisbury. They recorded a report for the Six O’Clock News that evening, and circulated an article on the BBC computer system that began, ‘A man and a woman are critically ill after apparently being poisoned by an unknown substance in Salisbury’. This copy was shared with others in New Broadcasting House, including staff on my programme, about one hour before that news bulletin, but under an embargo until 6pm.