Front Runner (11 page)

“No,” I said. “Not unless he's risen from the dead.”

I told them all about being shut in the sauna, my escape and the subsequent discovery of Dave Swinton's body in the burning car. They'd heard about that.

“You can speak to Detective Sergeant Jagger from the Thames Valley Police, if you need to. He's the investigating officer.”

D.S. Gibb wrote it down.

“How did the men get into my apartment?” I asked.

“They forced open a window in your kitchen,” said the sergeant. “It's now been nailed shut.”

They must have come down the lane that ran along the back of the garden.

“Was anything stolen?” I asked.

“You'll have to answer that yourself, Mr. Hinkley, when you go home. There certainly wasn't the usual mess we find when villains have been searching for valuables. No drawers pulled out or anything.”

That seemed to confirm that it had definitely been me they were after, not my meager worldly goods.

I leaned back on the pillow and closed my eyes. I was getting tired.

“We will leave you now to rest,” said the inspector, standing up, “but we'll be back with some mug shots for you to look at when you're a little better. Is there anything you need?”

“You could contact my sister for me,” I said. “She'll be wondering why I didn't call when I got home on Sunday, as I usually do.”

I gave them Faye's phone number.

“No problem,” said the inspector. “I'll call her as soon as I'm outside.”

“Please don't worry her,” I said. “Ask her to come in tomorrow.”

They started to leave.

“Hold on a moment,” I said, opening my eyes again. “There were some telephone calls.”

“What calls?”

“On Saturday night and Sunday morning, I received four calls on my landline but no one spoke. I am sure there was someone on the line because I could hear noises in the background, but they didn't say anything, they just listened for a few seconds and then hung up. I now wonder if the calls were made simply to find out if I was there.”

“Are you in the phone directory?” the inspector asked.

“I don't really know,” I said. “I hardly ever use the landline. It was my former girlfriend who liked it. I just transferred the number to my new apartment when we sold the old one. I need the broadband that comes with it.”

“We'll check your phone records,” D.I. Galvin said.

“I dialed 1471 each time to get the numbers. I tried to call back, but none of them would receive incoming calls.”

“Pay phones, I shouldn't wonder,” said the inspector. “Those don't accept incoming calls anymore.”

“I wrote down the numbers,” I said. “They're on the back of the envelope that my gas bill came in. I left it on the counter in my kitchen.”

“We'll look into it,” the inspector assured me.

Fine, I thought. Let someone else do the work. I was too tired.

D
octor Shwan came back to see me the following morning. The forty-eight hours was up and I hadn't developed a fever. No infection.

“What day is it?” I asked him.

“Wednesday.”

“Where, exactly, am I?”

“Critical Care Unit, University College Hospital, Euston Road.”

“When can I go home?”

“Soon.” He smiled. “Good.”

“What's good?” I asked.

“You,” he said. “You didn't ask me questions like that on Monday because you were only interested in your body. Now you are well enough to think outside that. I think it's time to remove all the monitors and tubes and send you to a regular ward.”

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Not just yet,” replied the doctor. “We still need to keep an eye on you for a while longer. Your body has suffered a considerable trauma and your breastbone needs to heal some more before you go running around, undoing all my handiwork.”

“My breastbone?”

“I had to saw it in half to get to your heart. I joined it back together with stainless steel wire, but the bone needs time to begin to bind naturally before you can put any stress on it.”

Too much information, I thought. No wonder it hurt so much.

“So when can I go home?” I asked.

“The earliest would be the weekend.”

“Friday?” I said.

He laughed. “Saturday, maybe, but only if you continue to make good progress. And you must promise not to do anything strenuous for at least another three or four weeks. And no lifting anything heavier than a cup of tea. Your abdominal wall needs to heal as well.”

The doctor went away, still chuckling to himself, and presently a couple of nurses arrived to disconnect the mass of tubes and wires that sprouted out of various points on my body.

“What are they all for?” I asked.

“Those in your neck include a monitor for measuring the blood pressure actually in your heart and lungs, a tube for taking antibiotics direct to the heart and some pacemaker wires just in case your heart needed an electrical stimulus to make it pump. Then there are three separate tubes in your chest to drain away any excess fluid, a line in each elbow for intravenous infusions, a nasogastric tube that goes through your nose and down your throat to feed you and a catheter in your bladder to assist urination.”

Perhaps I shouldn't have asked.

“Plus, of course, the ECG electrodes that are stuck on your torso.”

Of course.

Everything was removed other than the single IV in my right arm. According to the nurses, that was so I could receive any fluids and medication without the need for separate injections. I was all in favor of that.

“Now it's time to get you up and walking,” said one of them.

They helped me first sit on the edge of the bed and to stand up, hovering on each side of me in case I keeled over. I didn't, and I was soon walking around without any real problems other than the continuous throbbing that went all the way down my front where both the doctor and the knifeman had made their various incisions.

—

I
WAS
MOVED
from the Critical Care Unit to a regular surgical ward on the ninth floor, where I was allocated a single room close to the nurses' station.

“For better security,” I was told.

Security.

Thankfully, murder on a London street has not yet become so commonplace as to be unworthy of reporting. Therefore, with nothing in the media, I had to assume that my two assailants must be aware by now that they had failed to deliver the fatal blow.

They knew they had failed, and, furthermore, they must believe I had seen their faces. So would they try again to complete the job and dispose of the witness?

I wasn't at all sure that being in a single room was the most secure arrangement, especially as the door had no lock. I asked the nurses to leave the door open so I could see them at their desk—and, more important, they could see me.

I also asked them to ensure that any visitors were announced and then accompanied unless I agreed otherwise, although, in fact, the nurses were all so busy that anyone could wander into my room unseen if one was careful to wait for the desk to be unattended, as it was at least half of the time.

Indeed, my first visitor waltzed into my room, unannounced and unaccompanied, about an hour after I'd moved in.

“It's normally
you
visiting
me
in the hospital,” she said. “Not the other way round.”

“Hello, my darling big sister,” I said, smiling at her.

“I told you to move away from Harlesden. It's dangerous up there. Too many robberies. Can't you live somewhere safer, like Richmond?”

“Apartments in Richmond cost more than twice those in Harlesden,” I said.

“There can be no price placed on one's safety,” she said with gravitas.

How true.

I decided against telling her that I wasn't actually robbed of my wallet and watch and that my attackers would have likely followed me all the way to Timbuktu if I'd lived there.

“Nice room,” Faye said, standing by the window and looking out at the spectacular view over London. She turned. “So what happened, exactly? The policeman who called just said you'd been mugged.”

“I was attacked by two men,” I said in a deadpan voice, trying to play down the drama. “One of them held me while the other one stabbed.”

“How many times?” she asked.

I would have preferred not to tell her any of the grisly details,
as it would only make her worry, but I knew she wouldn't stop asking until she got the answers she was after and they would be better coming from me than from the doctors or the police.

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen! Good God, Jeff, that's unbelievable.”

“You should see my chest and stomach. There are more stitches than in a fisherman's sweater.” I laughed.

“It's no laughing matter,” Faye said sternly.

“Yes it is,” I said. “Be happy that I'm still here to laugh at all.”

She didn't look very happy.

“Have the police caught the men?”

“Not that I'm aware of,” I said. “I hope they're still looking for them.”

I wondered just how hard they were looking. After all, it was only an
attempted
murder, not the real thing. But my attackers had done their best to send me on a journey that would end six feet under and weren't to know that Dr. Shwan would be on hand to open my chest in the nick of time to prevent it.

Surely they were equally culpable whether I had lived or died.

According to the law, as Quentin had said, the maximum term of imprisonment for attempted murder was life, the same as for succeeding, but, in reality, both the effort expended to apprehend and the sentences passed down on the guilty were usually much less.

“How long are you going to be in here?” Faye asked.

“I should be out at the weekend. As long as I don't develop an infection.”

“Come and stay with us.”

“Thank you, Faye, dear, but I'll be fine at my own place.”

She tilted her head sideways and looked at me. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “If this affair has taught me anything, it's that life is more precious than I'd realized. When I thought I was dying, I was in total despair, and now that I've survived I have every intention of living my life to the full. The moment has arrived to move on from Lydia.”

“Hallelujah!” she said, lifting her hands and eyes to the heavens. “And about time too.”

“Has it been that bad?” I asked with a smile.

“Worse,” she said. “Since she left, you've been about as cheerful as a fatted calf at a slaugherhouse.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“It's true,” she said. “Do you realize that you sigh all the time?”

“No.”

“Well, you do. It's like being around a penitent monk, but less fun.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Henceforth, I will be happy and jolly. I promise.”

“There's no need to go that far. Just be your normal self.”

We laughed out loud, and we hadn't done that together for a long time.

—

F
AYE
DEPARTED
just as D.I. Galvin arrived, this time without his sergeant sidekick.

“Any news?” I asked. “Any arrests?”

“Sadly, no,” replied the inspector. “But we have done a check on those telephone calls and, as I suspected, they were all made from public telephones. The first was made from Waterloo Station at eight twenty-seven p.m. on the evening before you were
attacked. The second was from a phone at the corner of Parliament Square at eleven thirty-two p.m. the same evening. The other two, on the Sunday morning, were made from the only remaining pay phone in High Street Harlesden.”

“But that's only round the corner from my apartment.”

“Indeed,” he said. “And I suspect you are right in thinking they were checking up to see if you were in. Three more calls were made to your line from that number, one at eleven-fifty a.m., another at twelve noon and the third some ten minutes after that.”

“I'd gone out by then.”

“As they would have known.”

“Is there any CCTV coverage of those public phones?”

“We're looking into that, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Waterloo Station or Parliament Square are our best bet—at least we can assume that the cameras will work there. Even if there are any cameras in High Street Harlesden, they will probably have been vandalized.”

Maybe Faye had a point.

“So what else?” I asked.

“Have you remembered anything new about the assailants?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Was the one that stabbed you the bigger or the smaller of the two?”

“The smaller.”

I stared at him. “How did I know that?”

“The subconscious mind often knows lots of things that the conscious mind doesn't register until it receives a trigger. How much smaller was he?”

“At least a couple of inches, but he was stocky and made up for his lack of height with width. The other guy was taller but leaner.”

“Taller than you?”

“About the same. The knifeman was shorter, but he was also crouching. I remember looking down at his face.”

“Glasses? Beard? Mustache?”

“No,” I said. “He did have some stubble, as if he hadn't shaved for a couple of days. He was also wearing a dark woolen hat, like a beanie, that covered his head and the top half of his ears.”

“Wide face or narrow?”

“Neither one,” I said. “Just normal.”

I was stunned that I could now remember so much after all those hours of nothing.

“How about the other one?”

I thought hard. “I didn't get to see his face properly.”

“Did he also have a hat?”

I tried to picture in my mind the image of him tripping over the boxes in my hallway as I threw him off me.

“I don't know, but he was wearing sneakers—you know, the ones with high ankles and lots of laces.”

“Basketball shoes?”

“Yes. Exactly. With white laces.”

“What color were the shoes?”

“There was not enough light. I think they were a fairly dark color, maybe red, with white soles. I remember seeing them as he was lying over the boxes.”

“How about coats?” he asked.

I tried to recall. “Sorry,” I said. “It all happened so fast.”

“And the knife? Can you describe that? We didn't find it at the scene.”

“It was like a carving knife, with a long, thin blade. I'll not forget that in a hurry. It was very frightening.”

“Overhand or underhand?”

“Eh?”

“When he was holding the knife, did it point up or down?”

“Up to start with, but then he shifted it to stab at my chest above my coat.”

“Can you remember anything else?”

I tried going over everything once again in my head. “No. Sorry.”

“Here,” he said, pulling an iPad from his bag. “There are literally thousands of mug shots stored on this. I'll leave it with you. Go through them and see if any of them are your friend with the knife. I'll come back and get it on Friday, but call me sooner if you find him.” He gave me a business card with his number on it. “Otherwise, we'll try and get a videofit sorted.”

He stood up to go.

“Can I do anything for you?”

“How are things at my apartment?” I said. “It is OK?”

“As far as I'm aware. We have forensics in there today doing a crime scene search for dabs and DNA, although I'm not expecting much. These guys obviously came prepared, but, you never know, perhaps the one you threw over the boxes spat out some saliva or maybe a spot of phlegm was coughed up by one of them while they were waiting for you to get home.”

Nice, but at least the police were trying. Perhaps I had been a bit unfair in thinking they wouldn't bother.

“What about my apartment key?” I said. “I left it in the lock.”

“We have that. The forensic boys took it this morning to get in and they'll lock up again afterward. I'll bring it with me on Friday.”

“Thanks.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. I don't feel particularly safe in here. I've asked the nurses to try and vet my visitors, yet you were able to walk straight in unannounced. How about if my friend with the knife comes back to finish off what he started? If those two thugs were prepared to wait all afternoon in my apartment for me to get home before trying to kill me, don't you think it's quite likely they might just wander into this hospital to have another go? Especially at night when it's quiet. I'd be happier with a twenty-four-hour police guard.”

I'd be even happier still with a whole posse of guards and a stab-proof vest.