Pulse Page 10

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ I said. ‘I was just asking him about the unidentified man.’

  ‘What unidentified man?’ Adrian asked.

  I held out the photo. ‘This man was found unconscious in a toilet at the Open meeting and never woke up. I was the receiving consultant at Cheltenham General when he was brought in.’

  ‘But what has it got to do with Dick McGee?’

  By now we had been joined by all the other doctors, who were listening intently to the exchange. And I could feel myself getting anxious.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I just thought he might know who the man was, but I was wrong.’

  ‘Don’t the police know who he is?’ asked one of the others.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nobody does.’

  ‘So why then would Dick McGee?’ asked another.

  ‘Because he recognised him as someone he’d seen before,’ I said.

  I was getting very uncomfortable at being questioned like this. I could feel the panic beginning to rise in my chest. I tried breathing deeply. I was clearly not as well as I thought. But my fellow medics were now intrigued by the mystery and weren’t about to let things go.

  ‘What was the cause of his death?’ one asked.

  ‘Cocaine overdose.’

  I could feel a sudden drop of interest in the room. As with all medical personnel, we’d each had our share of dealing with drug-related suffering and death, most of which was self-inflicted and preventable. While doctors were not paid to comment on other people’s behaviour – their job was simply to treat whatever condition appeared before them – one couldn’t help feeling that some individuals were more deserving of our care than others.

  But was I really any different from a street druggie?

  I had always been partial to a cigarette or two, especially recently when they had helped to calm my frayed nerves. I’d also dabbled with illegal drugs in an attempt to alleviate the persistent heavy ache of depression. As a doctor, I knew better than most that I shouldn’t have – they were not good for my health – but I’d done it nevertheless.

  So who was I to pass judgement on some cokehead or heroin junkie who had journeyed once too far into total oblivion, either by chance or by design? But there was something about the unnamed man that made me convinced that his death had been more than an accident or suicide.

  ‘Jockeys, five minutes,’ came the call. Five minutes before they were due out in the parade ring for the next race. Time for me to get out onto the course once more.

  With relief, I picked up my red doctor’s bag and walked out.

  The last two races on the first day of the Festival were always busy ones for the medical team. Each were steeplechases, one over four miles and the other over two and a half, and both were for novice horses, that is those that hadn’t won a race prior to the start of the jump season the previous April. In addition, the longer race was for amateur riders only, many of whom were novices themselves.

  Inexperienced horses with inexperienced jockeys on board was all too often the ideal combination for fallers and especially for the unseated.

  Jockeys are very particular about the difference between the two. A ‘faller’ is when the horse falls over and the jockey goes down with the ship, while an ‘unseated’ is where the jockey falls off but the horse remains on its feet. There is an important distinction but the result is pretty similar as far as the rider is concerned – hitting the ground hard, and at speed.

  Thankfully not one of the seven discarded riders in the amateur race was seriously injured but that didn’t stop me having to run back and forth across the turf several times to check on them.

  ‘What a great fun way to spend a Tuesday,’ one of them said, laughing and rubbing mud from his face with the sleeve of his silks. ‘Certainly beats being stuck in the office. And I got almost halfway round before coming off!’

  The amateurs were clearly as mad as the pros.

  Once the last fallen rider had been patched up and sent on his way, the medical team had a short debrief in the medical room after six o’clock.

  ‘Well done, everybody,’ Adrian Kings said to us. ‘I’m sure the racecourse managing director will be happy with us. A good day’s work. One broken collarbone, some cracked ribs, a few bruises, one suspected concussion and not a hint of controversy. Not bad for the first day of the Festival.’ He sounded slightly disappointed, as if he had hoped for something more serious. ‘And today’s “Doctor of the Day Award” goes to Chris Rankin, for providing us with some innovative and unusual alternatives to the Turner concussion questions.’

  He slapped me on the shoulder while the others applauded politely. I was sure I blushed a little but, rather than being congratulated for some worthy deed, I felt that I was actually being slightly reprimanded for not following the approved procedure.

  ‘OK,’ Adrian said, clapping his hands together. ‘This is the official stand-down for today. Let’s go and have tea.’

  I placed my red treatment bag on the shelf provided for the purpose and hung up my green doctor’s coat on the appropriate peg, ready for the following day.

  ‘I think I’ll skip tea,’ I said to Adrian. ‘If that’s all right with you?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied.

  Going to tea may not have been an official part of the day but it was expected. It was when the team discussed ways in which our performance might improve. But I was eager to get off home to fix supper for Grant and the twins.

  However, I never made it.

  12

  The doctors’ allocated parking spaces were in a corner of the jockeys’ car park, close to the north entrance to the racecourse, alongside those reserved for holders of blue disabled badges and conveniently close to the weighing room.

  For the Festival meeting, though, I tended not to use them.

  The roads around the racecourse were pretty busy for many hours after the last race but the main problem was actually getting to the car-park exits in the first place. The doctors’ parking was about as far from the exits as it was possible to be and, in the past, it had taken me an hour or more simply to get to the racecourse gates. So I now regularly parked in a farmyard just across the Evesham Road, from where it was much easier to drive away. The twins had been to junior school with the farmer’s son and we had been friends ever since.

  I walked alongside the long queues of cars that were inching very slowly towards the exits and smiled to myself. It had been a good day and, tomorrow, I would get here early to talk to the jockeys Jason Conway and Mike Sheraton, and to find out what they had been arguing about with the unnamed man.

  According to a note in the racecard, the sun set at eleven minutes past six but, on such an overcast day, it was almost pitch-black by the time I arrived at the Evesham Road only ten minutes later.

  I remembered standing waiting for a break in the traffic, then the next thing I recall was being in the middle of the road with a huge bus bearing down on me. For some reason my legs and feet simply wouldn’t work. I was rooted to the spot and transfixed by the vehicle’s bright headlights as they rushed ever closer.

  I heard the screech of the tyres on the wet road surface as the driver stamped on his brakes but it was too late – the bus hit me, smacking my head against its windscreen and throwing me forward into a crumpled heap on the ground.

  It had all happened so fast. One second I’d been happy and content, the next I was unsure of where I was, when it was, or even who I was.

  I’d have had no chance answering the Turner Questions, or of passing the Tandem Stance Test. I found I couldn’t even lift my head off the tarmac without losing my balance. So I laid it back down again and shut my eyes, hoping that the whole world would go away.

  In truth, I was never completely unconscious even if I did purposely keep my eyes closed. Everything around me swayed less that way.

  ‘She stepped right out in front of me,’ I could hear the bus driver imploring to anyone who would listen. ‘I had no chance.’


  ‘Doctor coming through,’ I heard a man’s voice say loudly. ‘Please stand back and give me some room.’

  Amazingly it was Adrian Kings. He must have decided to skip the tea as well.

  ‘Oh my God, Chris,’ he said, crouching down beside me. ‘What happened?’

  There was nothing wrong with my hearing but, when I tried to reply, nothing came out. My tongue seemed to belong to someone else, moving on its own accord and not obeying my brain’s instructions.

  ‘She stepped right out in front of me,’ the bus driver said again.

  Adrian ignored him. ‘Has anyone called an ambulance?’ he shouted at the gathering throng.

  It seemed that someone had, and the police too.

  Adrian removed his coat and gently slid it under my head, while someone else put another one over me.

  As always, I tried to say that I was ‘fine’, but I clearly wasn’t, and it came out as little more than a croak.

  ‘Just lie still,’ Adrian said. ‘Help is on the way.’

  Help arrived with multiple sirens and blue flashing lights and I found myself, for the second time within a few months, arriving at Cheltenham General Hospital as a patient, this time on a scoop stretcher wearing a neck collar.

  Even though the surroundings were familiar, everything appeared in a bit of a haze, as if blurry round the edges.

  It was good experience, I kept telling myself, but then I would forget what the experience was like. It felt like I was fighting my way through a fog, round and round on the same piece of road, getting nowhere.

  As chance would have it, Jeremy Cook was again on duty and I could see him speaking to a policeman. But I could hear only snippets of what he was saying: ‘. . . mental health issues . . . psychiatric hospital . . . suicidal . . .’

  ‘No,’ I tried to say, ‘I am not suicidal.’ But it came out all confused and unintelligible.

  But I knew.

  I hadn’t been trying to kill myself by stepping in front of a bus.

  I’d been pushed.

  Predictably, no one would believe me.

  I spent the night in hospital with suspected concussion even though a CT scan had indicated no visible damage to my brain, nor to any other part of my body.

  Concussion is the most common brain injury but one the medical profession perhaps knows least about. It is often referred to as a bruise to the brain, but bruising implies bleeding into the tissues and most concussed brains do not bleed, indeed, they appear identical on scans to healthy ones. Concussion is more of a temporary disruption of normal function but no one is quite sure why it affects sufferers in so many diverse ways. Some have difficulty sleeping while others struggle to stay awake, many have headaches while others do not, and it can change emotions across a wide spectrum from high elation to deep depression. It all depends on how different areas of the person’s brain react to the trauma.

  In my case, the concussion seemed to have disrupted my ability to talk, while leaving many of my other cognitive faculties unchanged. That may have been due to my head colliding with the bus close to what was known as Broca’s area on the left side of the frontal lobe, that part of the brain responsible for speech production.

  Gradually, overnight, my ability to communicate returned and with it came the questions from the police.

  At about nine o’clock I woke from a snooze to find a uniformed officer sitting by my bed.

  ‘Good morning, Dr Rankin,’ he said in a friendly manner. ‘How are you feeling today?’

  I focused my eyes on the policeman’s face. It was PC Filippos.

  I must have looked surprised to see him.

  ‘I volunteered to come,’ he said, ‘when I heard it was you who’d been knocked down. I thought a familiar face might help.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said croakily. ‘Very thoughtful of you. Thank you.’ I suddenly became rather panicky. ‘I’m meant to be on duty at the racecourse in two hours.’

  ‘You are not going anywhere,’ PC Filippos said. ‘I know the racecourse management are aware you won’t be coming today. The doctors here have said that you must have complete rest for at least twenty-four hours.’ He smiled. ‘You were very lucky not to have sustained greater injury in the accident.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I said, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice.

  If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

  But I then realised why. He already thought it wasn’t an accident because he assumed that I’d walked out in front of the bus intentionally.

  ‘I did not try to kill myself,’ I said firmly. ‘I was pushed out into the road.’

  I could tell from his expression that he didn’t believe me.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Someone gave me a big shove forward just as the bus was approaching.’

  ‘Who?’ he asked, the doubt clearly audible in just the one word.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, getting quite agitated. ‘That’s surely your job to find out. But, I’m telling you, someone last night tried to kill me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To stop me asking questions.’

  ‘Questions about what?’

  ‘The unnamed man,’ I said. ‘Our friend Rahul.’

  I could tell from his demeanour that he now thought I’d completely lost my marbles.

  ‘I found someone who recognised him,’ I said quickly. ‘He says he saw the man at the racecourse in November.’

  There was a tiny spark of interest. ‘Does this person know his name?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But he does know the names of two people he saw arguing with him.’

  I told PC Filippos about Dick McGee and what he had said to me about the unnamed man arguing in the jockeys’ car park with Jason Conway and Mike Sheraton. The policeman wrote it down in his notebook.

  ‘But why on earth would anyone want to kill you for knowing that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It sounded bizarre even to me.

  We were interrupted by the arrival of Grant and he had the psychiatrist Stephen Butler with him. That didn’t bode well, I thought.

  ‘Hello, Chris,’ Stephen said. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said automatically, and Grant shook his head in obvious frustration. He too must think I had stepped in front of the bus on purpose.

  ‘I’ll be on my way,’ PC Filippos said, standing up. ‘I’ll be in touch, Dr Rankin. I’ll check up on those things we discussed.’

  He walked out and I wondered if he would even bother. His body language told me he believed I was as nutty as a fruitcake.

  But I wasn’t.

  The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that someone had pushed me in front of a speeding bus in order to stop me asking questions about the unnamed man.

  Indeed, Rahul had now become my full-blown obsession.

  However, I managed to prevent a rapid return to Wotton Lawn, but only just, and not by continuing to insist that someone had tried to kill me. I worked out pretty quickly that no one would believe me and to persist in maintaining that I’d been pushed would have only resulted in a one-way ticket to the funny farm.

  After a considerable amount of persuasion on my part, Grant and the doctors accepted my claim that I’d been just careless rather than suicidal. I promised to be more vigilant in the future and to allow myself to be chaperoned whenever possible, which would not be often during the week as Grant was at work and the boys at school.

  But I knew the truth.

  Someone had definitely tried to murder me and I intended finding out why.

  13

  Grant took me home with strict instructions that I should continue to rest for another twenty-four hours, and he had taken yet another day of his annual leave in order to ensure I did.

  As he drove us out of the town past the racecourse, I wondered if Adrian Kings had managed to rustle up a replacement doctor at such short notice. Not that it would have been critical. The five of us plus the Irish d
octor of yesterday had been a luxury when the horseracing authority regulations stipulated a minimum of only three. But at Cheltenham in general, and at its Festival in particular, jump racing was shown in the full glare of a TV spotlight and minimum requirements would never have been enough if anything had gone drastically wrong. That was why the managing director and the racecourse executive always paid for more. Public perception was a very strong incentive.

  ‘What about my car?’ I asked as we passed the farm where I’d parked it. I seemed recently to have made quite a habit of abandoning it.

  ‘Tom and Julie brought it back early this morning,’ Grant said. ‘They were worried last night when you didn’t turn up to collect it.’ Tom and Julie were the farmer and his wife. I’d left the car’s keys with them, just in case they’d had to move it.

  Grant insisted that I went straight to bed but I equally insisted that I be allowed to watch the racing on the television.

  ‘The doctor told me that rest meant both physical and mental rest,’ he said. ‘No television and no computer.’

  ‘But I need to see the racing,’ I replied. ‘It’s part of my job.’

  In the end we compromised that I could watch it for a short while with me lying under a blanket on the sofa in the sitting room, propped up with pillows, but Grant still fussed around me like a mother hen on heat.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said at one point as he yet again asked me if I was all right. ‘Will you please just sit down and watch the Queen Mother Champion Chase?’

  Grant was not interested in horseracing. ‘Silly sport, really,’ he would often say, ‘just running round a track, getting nowhere.’

  I, in turn, would point out that his preferred sport, golf, was an equally silly sport – hitting a little white ball with long sticks around the countryside into holes in the ground. Indeed, almost any sport, if analysed sufficiently, could be thought of as silly and without value. And so might many other pursuits in the entertainment business such as acting, singing and writing. My tutor at medical school had proclaimed that medicine was the only true worthy profession as it was the one thing that, in the long run, made a difference. But that hadn’t stopped him being an ardent Manchester United fan.