I wasn’t sure exactly how much I’d consumed, but probably more than the single teaspoonful required for a fatal dose.
‘How long?’ I heard Rupert Forrester ask. ‘I have to go. I’m speaking at a charity dinner at the Queens Hotel in town. I’ve got to change yet and I’m late already.’
‘Not very long,’ Big Biceps replied. ‘She had it in her mouth for ages. That will speed things up. She’ll be unconscious soon and dead in an hour.’
‘Dead?’ Sheraton said with some alarm. ‘I thought we were just frightening her.’
‘Shut up,’ Forrester said. ‘You’re in this as much as we are. We need to silence her permanently. And there’ll be no damn cleaner to find her alive this time. This place won’t be cleaned now until tomorrow and I’ll be in by then anyway. But I want us to get out. Security will be locking the gates soon.’
Good old security, I thought. Where were they when you needed them?
I closed my eyes but that didn’t stop the bright lights exploding in my brain like fireworks on New Year’s Eve.
But I could still think.
Play dead, I told myself. They have to get out before the gates are locked. The sooner they think I’m unconscious, the quicker they will go.
I forced all my muscles to relax and Sheraton must have felt the change in my legs.
‘She’s going,’ he said.
‘Untie her hands,’ said Forrester, releasing his grip on my head and hair.
They rolled me over and I sensed the tape being removed from my wrists. Then I felt Big Biceps take my fingers and wrap them round the empty bottle.
Fingerprints, I thought.
‘Right,’ said Forrester. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Are you sure you really want to kill her?’ Sheraton asked. He was clearly in this way over his head.
‘I told you to shut up,’ Forrester said sharply. ‘It’s too late now anyway. There’s enough cocaine in her system to kill a horse. She’s already dead.’
Someone lifted my right eyelid.
It was as much as I could do not to look at him. I had rolled my eyes up in the fraction beforehand and I concentrated on keeping them there, only seeing him peripherally. It was Big Biceps.
‘Definitely unconscious,’ he said. ‘Dead soon.’
‘OK,’ Forrester said. ‘Let’s go.’
I heard the door open and their footsteps receding but I continued to lie as still as I could. However, if I didn’t move soon, I really would be unconscious and dead soon after.
I opened my eyes and swivelled my head.
They had gone.
I was euphoric. It felt like a victory. But I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t realise that the euphoria was more to do with the drug rather than any sense that I was now safe.
I wasn’t. Far from it.
I was in mortal danger and I could already feel a quickening of my heart and a rise in my body temperature. If I didn’t do something very soon, I would be dead for sure when the cleaners arrived to find me in the morning.
33
Perhaps there was nothing I could actually do to save myself but I wasn’t going to die without trying.
My first instinct was to rid my body of the toxin.
Everyone knows the old wives’ tale that a concentrated salt solution is an emetic, that is it makes you vomit. But, not only is excess salt an extremely dangerous poison in itself, any emetic effect due to surplus sodium takes far too long to occur – up to thirty minutes rather than the immediate response as depicted in a James Bond movie.
I would probably be dead in thirty minutes.
As every sufferer of bulimia knows, the only sure-fire method of making oneself instantly sick on demand is to use the gag reflex.
I inserted my forefinger into my mouth and, stretching it in as far as I could, I pressed down hard on the back of my tongue.
I retched and threw up the meagre contents of my stomach into the washbasin in the corner.
Then I washed my mouth out, drank some water from the tap and repeated the whole process twice more until I was sure nothing remained in me.
But had I been in time? Had too much of the drug already passed through the intestinal membrane into my bloodstream?
The physical effects were certainly becoming more noticeable.
I was sweating profusely, my heart was racing and I was experiencing slight chest pain as a result.
I had been here before.
What had Rahul Kumar taught me that I could use to save myself, whereas I’d been unable to save him?
Cocaine is a short-acting SNDRI, a serotonin–norepinephrine–dopamine reuptake inhibitor. Hence, a cocaine overdose is a double whammy. Not only is the drug a powerful stimulant but it also restricts the body’s natural ability to regulate its metabolic rate. So my body had gone into overdrive and, with the brakes also removed, it was running downhill out of control. Whether my heart would give up the struggle first or my other organs would fail due to increased body temperature was anyone’s guess.
Either way, I’d be dead. And soon.
There is no specific pharmacological antidote to cocaine poisoning but what I needed was a sedative, something to counteract the drug’s stimulating properties.
And fast.
I shook my head as if to clear it.
‘Think,’ I said out loud. ‘Think!’
I went over to the medicine store cupboard and looked in.
In spite of my body going into top gear, my brain seemed to be stuck in neutral. I knew what I was after but I couldn’t find it – a benzodiazepine called diazepam, known almost universally as Valium.
I dug through the basket of drugs. I knew there was some in here; I’d checked it myself earlier today. Diazepam was an injectable sedative and we had it available in case a jockey had a severe case of muscle spasm, or a seizure.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Do you want to live or to die?’
Maybe six months ago I wouldn’t have cared either way, but now I did.
I finally found what I was looking for, a small glass ampoule of milky-white liquid containing thirty milligrams of diazepam in solution.
‘I want to live,’ I said excitedly, but getting the drug from the ampoule into my veins was another problem because my hands had started to shake.
I managed to attach a hypodermic needle to a syringe and carefully broke off the glass top of the ampoule. How much? Ten milligrams was the recommended dose for acute muscle spasm.
But this was more of a crisis than that.
I decided on an initial twenty. That would leave another ten if I needed it later. Overdosing on diazepam was not a worry, no one ever successfully committed suicide by swallowing all their Valium pills at once, not unless they mixed them with other drugs or very large amounts of alcohol.
‘Be careful,’ I kept telling myself as I inserted the needle into the ampoule. ‘You cannot afford to drop this on the floor.’
I drew the diazepam up into the syringe.
It could be injected into muscle but, to be effective quickly, it needed to go straight into the bloodstream, into a vein.
Using my right hand and my teeth I applied a rubber tourniquet to my upper left arm and tapped the inside of my elbow. One of my veins stood up nicely and, with ultra-care and by stressing both my arms against the table, I managed to insert the needle and slowly depress the plunger.
Initially I could feel nothing and I panicked that I’d gone straight through the vein and injected the drug uselessly into the joint cavity.
But then I remembered the tourniquet.
I released it, allowing the diazepam to progress up my arm towards my heart and beyond. Within a minute or two I could detect a soothing sensation, not that it seemed to do anything to reduce my rapid pulse.
And I had a worrying pain in my chest.
Not a bloody heart attack now, I thought.
‘Come on, body, give me a break,’ I said out loud.
I laughed. Fancy talking t
o myself. I must be mad. Or high. Both, in fact.
‘Get a grip,’ I said. ‘This is the cocaine talking. Concentrate!’ I slapped my thigh with my hand. ‘Concentrate and you live. Waver and you die. Think of your boys. Live for them.’
Also in the medicine store we had a glyceryl trinitrate spray in a small red bottle with a white top. Glyceryl trinitrate was simply the medical name for nitroglycerin, the high explosive that Alfred Nobel mixed with crushed sedimentary rock and washing soda to produce dynamite.
Apart from its explosive properties, nitroglycerin reduces blood pressure by causing the blood vessels to dilate. The effect was discovered by accident when those making dynamite found that it gave them headaches and also that their blood pressure dropped alarmingly at work. Nowadays, it was widely used by angina sufferers to alleviate pain and tightness in the chest by spraying it under the tongue.
I picked up the bottle and removed the top, but then I hesitated.
One of the other actions of nitroglycerin was to increase heart rate and mine was quite high enough already. But the pain in my chest implied that my racing heart was getting insufficient oxygen and, if Rahul Kumar was anything to go by, my blood pressure was probably too high as well.
Would it do more harm than good?
To spray or not to spray? That was the question.
The pain in my chest was definitely getting worse.
Maybe I would die whatever I did or didn’t do. But surely action had to be better than inaction? At least I would then die knowing I had tried, and whoever found me would know that I had wanted to survive.
I squirted a single shot of the nitroglycerin under my tongue and instantly felt a reaction. The pain in my chest subsided but I became very dizzy and I sat down quickly on a chair.
Now what?
My heartbeat was still up in the stratosphere but, even if I’d had any adenosine, I knew from past experience that it wouldn’t work.
How about more diazepam? Or perhaps some oxygen?
We had an oxygen cylinder and I attached a mask to it, turned it on and breathed deeply. Next I drew half of the remaining diazepam into a fresh syringe and injected that into the same vein as before.
I sat on a chair, took more deep breaths of the oxygen and measured my pulse using the second hand of the clock on the wall. It was still very high at 180 beats per minute but I sensed that it was down a little from its maximum.
Was I over the worst?
Was there anything else I could do?
Just sit still and let nature take its course.
I knew from a study I’d read at medical school that ingesting cocaine orally didn’t produce its maximum result for an hour or more after consumption, but I rather hoped that the reactions I had experienced were more due to the relatively small amount of the drug I’d absorbed through my mouth lining, and that I had expelled most of what had actually made it down to my stomach.
If that was the case then I could be out of the woods.
I’d beaten the bastards.
I giggled uncontrollably.
Cocaine may be nicknamed paradise powder, and perhaps some of my current elation was still related to the drug, but I felt surreal and fantastic, even invincible, with a crystal-clear head.
And with revenge on my mind.
Ten minutes later and my pulse was down to 150 and I considered that I was past the critical stage. I decided I’d live.
I glanced up at the clock. It was only twenty past eight.
It felt like I’d been fighting for my life for several hours but it was only sixty minutes or so since I’d rushed back to the weighing room from tea.
I looked down at the remains of my mobile phone lying in pieces on the floor. Grant had probably been trying to call me on it.
I stood up and went over to the landline phone on the wall and picked up the receiver.
I stared at it.
Maybe I should have used this to call an ambulance for myself, to ask for help. But I was so used to actually being the help that the thought had never crossed my mind. It was no good me dialling 999 and asking for assistance whenever a critically ill patient arrived at A&E.
I was 999.
On this occasion, it had simply been me who had been the critically ill patient, and my ‘you alone have to deal with this emergency’ mode had instinctively kicked in.
Did I call for help now? And how about the police? Should I call them too?
Of course you must, said the sensible half of my brain. Someone has just tried to kill you – again.
The police surely couldn’t not believe me this time? Could they?
But I was the madwoman with the crazy ideas and suicidal tendencies. I had form – at least in their eyes.
‘She’s only making it up,’ they’d say.
‘To justify her delusion that Rahul Kumar was murdered,’ they’d say.
‘Wasting our time again,’ they’d say.
Wouldn’t they?
Perhaps I had to die to convince them. Maybe not even then.
I dialled a number – Grant’s mobile – and he answered at the first ring.
‘Where are you?’ he asked with more than a touch of worry in his voice. ‘I’ve been trying to call you for ages.’
‘I’m still at the racecourse,’ I said. ‘Sorry. I dropped my phone and it broke.’
I wasn’t quite sure why I didn’t tell him the truth. Maybe the influence of the cocaine was still with me more than I appreciated.
‘What are you doing there? I thought you were coming straight to the sports ground.’ He now sounded more angry than worried.
‘I had to deal with another patient,’ I said, without telling him that the patient had been myself. ‘Are the boys all right?’
‘They’re hungry,’ he said.
Nothing new in that, I thought. At least they weren’t kidnapped or run over. But why would they be? They were perfectly safe because Forrester and the others believed I was dead.
‘Are you coming home now?’ Grant asked.
‘Soon,’ I said. ‘Take the boys and get some fish and chips from the chippy in Bishop’s Cleeve.’
‘What about my steak and peppercorn sauce?’ he whined.
‘I’ll do it for you tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I promise.’
‘How about you?’ he said. ‘Can I get you something?’
‘No. I’ll get myself something when I get home,’ I said. ‘I may be quite a while yet. I have to go into town.’
He wasn’t pleased. ‘That bloody hospital.’
I didn’t enlighten him that I had no intention of going anywhere near that bloody hospital.
I was invincible, right?
I was off to a charity dinner at the Queens Hotel.
34
I found driving my Mini under the influence of cocaine was curiously easy.
Whereas the drug had a profound psychoactive impact on the mind, it left the motor cortex remarkably unaffected.
Getting out of the weighing room had been my first problem. As Rupert Forrester had said to his henchmen, he had locked up. Tight.
In the end I had used the push-bar-to-open fire escape door in the laundry room to make my escape, but not before I’d made a couple more telephone calls and acquired a few supplies from the medical-room drug inventory.
My next obstacle was how to get out to my car with security having by now closed all the exit gates from the racecourse enclosures. And it didn’t help that it was now dark, the evening spring twilight being cut short by the low cloud and the persistent rain.
I suppose I could have gone in search of a roving security detail but then I’d have had to answer questions about why I was still there and where I’d been.
Could I be bothered? In this rain? No way.
Instead, I dragged a large rubbish bin twenty yards across the tarmac to the gate, climbed up on it and swung myself over, making sure not to snag my plastic bag of supplies on the top.
If nothing else, cocaine clearly gave o
ne confidence.
I might need it.
The Queens Hotel in Cheltenham had an elegant and imposing neoclassical porticoed façade overlooking the formal Imperial Gardens. Its style was firmly in keeping with the grandiose reputation of the town as a former upmarket and fashionable spa resort.
The mineral springs were first tapped during the reign of George III and the King reportedly spent five weeks in the town drinking the foul-tasting medicinal waters in an attempt to cure his madness.
Perhaps I should try some.
The hotel itself dated from the time of Queen Victoria, after whom it was named, first opening in the year of her coronation in 1838.
But I wasn’t interested in the aesthetics or history of the place. Not tonight. All I wanted to know was where in the hotel the charity dinner was being held.
I may have been confident, bold even, but I wasn’t reckless.
The last thing I wanted to do was to park my Mini alongside a black Mercedes only to discover that Big Biceps was sitting in it.
Hence I stopped some distance away on Bath Road and covered the last few hundred yards on foot, pulling the hood of my anorak up over my head not only as protection from the rain but also so that I couldn’t be recognised by any lurking large-muscled chauffeur.
Maybe the cocaine wasn’t going to kill me but it was still clearly affecting my system. The lights around the Town Hall, reflecting off the wet pavement, appeared to shimmer and dance delightfully with multicoloured tails as I went by, and my feet seemed to be somehow disconnected from my legs.
I couldn’t feel them on the ground.
Were they, in fact, someone else’s feet?
I giggled. Of course not, you fool. Who else would have lent me their feet at this time of night?
I walked in through the rotating front door of the hotel and across the black-and-white-checked lobby floor to the reception desk.
‘Where is the charity dinner?’ I asked the young man standing there.
‘Is that the one in aid of the Injured Jockeys Fund?’
‘I want the one where Rupert Forrester is speaking,’ I said.
He looked down at some papers.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the one. It’s in the Regency Suite, our banqueting room.’
Pulse Page 27
