Pulse

by Felix Francis

  ‘And which way is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Straight down the corridor to the end and then turn right,’ he said. ‘Do you have a ticket? It’s Black Tie.’

  He looked at me in the manner of something he had picked up on his shoe. I clearly wasn’t properly dressed for the occasion in green anorak, blue waterproof trousers and a pair of muddy hiking boots, and I was carrying a bright orange plastic Sainsbury’s carrier as my handbag.

  ‘No.’ I laughed. ‘I just have a message for one of the guests, that’s all. I won’t be staying very long.’

  I could see him waver as if he was deciding whether he should call hotel security to get me thrown out.

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ve been on duty at the racecourse this afternoon and haven’t had time to change.’

  The reception man relaxed a little.

  ‘Can you find your own way, then?’ he asked. ‘I’m afraid I can’t leave the front desk unattended and my colleague is on a break.’

  ‘I’ll be fine on my own, thank you.’

  Better, I thought. Much better.

  I turned to go but then turned back.

  ‘Where is your bar?’ I asked.

  ‘Just to the right, madam,’ the man said, holding out his arm.

  I glanced across towards where he pointed.

  ‘My name is Dr Chris Rankin,’ I said. ‘I’m meant to be meeting someone in your bar at ten o’clock.’

  The man and I both looked at the grand timepiece set high on the wall next to the main door. It read nine-forty.

  ‘Instead of meeting in the bar, could you please ask him to go down to the Regency Suite as soon as he arrives and wait for me there?’

  ‘Certainly, madam,’ the man replied. ‘And the name of your guest?’

  ‘Filippos,’ I said. ‘Detective Constable Filippos.’

  Back in the jockeys’ medical room, I had made two further telephone calls after speaking to Grant. One had been to directory enquiries to find the number of the reception desk at Cheltenham Police Station, and the second had been to the desk itself.

  ‘Cheltenham Police,’ the man who’d answered had said. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘Can you please put me through to DC Filippos?’

  ‘He’s not here at the present time.’

  ‘Do you have his mobile number?’ I had asked in my most charming tone. ‘It’s very important. I did have it in my phone but that’s now broken and I can’t access it.’

  ‘I’m sorry but I can’t give out his number,’ the man had replied.

  ‘Then can you please call him and pass on a message? My name is Dr Chris Rankin. I am an A&E consultant at Cheltenham General Hospital and the matter is one of utmost urgency. It is crucial he gets the message as soon as possible.’

  ‘What’s your message, Dr Rankin?’ the man had asked.

  ‘Tell DC Filippos I have some vital new information concerning the case of Rahul Kumar and he should meet me in the bar at the Queens Hotel at ten o’clock precisely.’

  ‘Rahul Kumar. Bar. Queens Hotel. Ten o’clock.’ He’d repeated it as if he’d been writing it down. ‘Is that tonight?’

  ‘Yes. Tonight.’

  ‘Do you want him to call you back at the hospital?’

  ‘No. Just tell him that he must be at the Queens Hotel tonight at ten o’clock sharp.’

  The man hadn’t questioned why. But he had promised to pass on the message immediately.

  I walked down the corridor towards the Regency Suite with some trepidation.

  Was my confidence now deserting me?

  Had the cocaine stopped working when I most needed it?

  There were 150 guests at the Injured Jockeys Fund dinner on fifteen tables of ten. I could tell because there was a seating plan placed on an easel in the vestibule outside the actual banqueting chamber.

  I studied the guest list closely.

  There were quite a few names on the list that I knew or, at least, knew of, including several racehorse trainers and even a sprinkling of ex-jockeys, not that I could spot any of the current crop. Lavish midweek black-tie dinners were no doubt not ideal for keeping their riding weight down for the weekend.

  I specifically searched for any mention of Mike Sheraton and I don’t know if I was pleased or disappointed that he wasn’t in there.

  Big Biceps could be, but I wouldn’t know it from the list. There was no point looking under the Bs or even the BBs.

  Rupert Forrester was included of course. He was on table five, which was, according to the plan, right in front of a stage set up on the right-hand side of the room.

  ‘Can I help?’ said a voice behind me.

  I turned round.

  A waitress stood there holding two jugs of water. She was not in her first flush of youth, probably nearer seventy than fifty, and she was wearing a small white lace-fringed apron over a black dress. Very traditional.

  ‘How far have they got?’ I asked, nodding towards the door.

  ‘Dessert,’ she said.

  ‘When are the speeches?’ I asked.

  ‘Very soon, I think,’ she said. ‘I heard the guest speaker say he had to leave quite early. The auction is now going to be after his speech rather than before. Are you here to collect him?’

  ‘No,’ I said with a laugh.

  Collecting him was not exactly what I had in mind, not in that sense.

  Forrester probably wanted to leave early so that he could be back at the racecourse good and early in the morning to deal with any problems – like a dead body found in the weighing room.

  ‘I must get on,’ the waitress said. ‘They’re waiting for these.’

  She lifted up the jugs of water.

  I held the door open for her and glanced inside as she went past me. It was very noisy and everyone seemed to be having a good time, with plenty of laughter. But I didn’t linger with the door open. I didn’t want a certain guest to spot me – not yet anyway. And not before DC Filippos was present.

  The door reopened and the same waitress reappeared, this time with two empty jugs.

  ‘That was quick,’ I said. ‘Thirsty, are they?’

  She laughed. ‘These are from different tables.’ Then she looked closely at me. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Doris,’ she said. ‘Doris Meacher. What’s yours?’

  ‘Chris Rankin,’ I said.

  It didn’t seem to help. ‘What do you do?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m a doctor. I work in A&E at the hospital.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Doris said with a big smile of success. ‘You looked after my son when he came off his motorbike. Over a year ago now.’

  ‘How’s he doing?’ I asked, not actually remembering and hoping he hadn’t died as a result.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Almost back to normal. All thanks to you, doctor.’

  While we’d been talking, two women had come out through the door and went off down the corridor chatting and giggling away, presumably off to powder their noses. I really didn’t want Rupert Forrester walking right into me on his way to the Gents.

  ‘Well, Doris,’ I said, ‘I could do with a little assistance from you now.’

  ‘Anything, doctor. How can I help?’

  ‘Is there another way into the Regency Suite apart from this door?’

  ‘Only the staff entrances,’ she said. ‘They’re what the waiters use. I’m only using this door to get water from the bar. It’s easier than fighting past all the rest of them at the servery.’

  ‘Can you show me the staff entrances?’ I asked. ‘I want to listen to the speeches but I’ve been on duty so I couldn’t actually come to the dinner. If I could slip in a staff entrance when the speeches start it would be less noticeable than going in here.’

  I shrugged my shoulders and made a face at her as if it were an amusing conspiracy.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Why not? I’ll even lend you a pinny. No one ever l
ooks at the face of a waitress, least they never did when I was young.’

  She walked me back along the corridor towards the reception but, before we got there, we went through a door into a staff corridor that led into the hotel kitchen.

  ‘Come on,’ Doris said, taking me by the hand and leading me past the lines of stainless-steel chef’s stations.

  There were two staff entrances to the banqueting suite from the kitchen, or rather one entrance and one exit such that the flow of personnel was circular past the kitchen servery and back into the room, and the doors were on either side of the stage.

  ‘Perfect,’ I said to Doris.

  I removed my anorak and waterproof trousers, which Doris took away to the staff changing area. Underneath I had on a black sweater and a pair of black trousers. Doris then gave me a spare white lace-edged apron to tie around my waist. Apart from the hiking boots, I looked every inch a waitress.

  ‘How about your bag?’ Doris said. ‘Shall I put it with your coat?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, clutching the orange plastic tightly to my chest. ‘I’ll keep that with me.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Will you be all right now? I’ve got those water jugs to fill.’ She laughed and went off leaving me there just inside the door feeling very conspicuous. I simply smiled at the other waiting staff as they rushed past me and out to serve the guests with coffee and petits fours.

  I looked at my watch. Just gone ten o’clock.

  Had DC Filippos arrived? Was he even now in the Regency Suite?

  I hoped so.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said a female voice loudly and clearly over the audio system. A hush descended within the suite. ‘We are very fortunate to have our guest speaker with us here tonight. For the last two days he’s been busy ensuring that everything has run smoothly at the racecourse for the April meeting.’

  That’s not all he’s been doing, I thought.

  ‘Please join me in giving a warm Injured Jockeys Fund welcome to the managing director of Cheltenham Racecourse, Rupert Forrester.’

  There was loud applause and the overhead crystal chandeliers were dimmed.

  I slipped in through the door and stood in the shadows to one side of the stage, which in fact was little more than a raised dais about a foot high with a lectern now lit up by a bank of overhead spotlights.

  Rupert Forrester walked to the lectern and raised his hands in thanks.

  Just watching him standing there smiling at the assembled guests, lapping up their admiration, made my blood boil. As far as he was aware, I was still lying alone on a bed in the jockeys’ medical room at the racecourse, my life slowly draining away to nothing.

  I reached into the orange Sainsbury’s bag.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Forrester began. ‘What a magnificent welcome. Thank you. It is a real joy to be here tonight supporting racing’s favourite charity.’

  I’ve heard more than enough of him already, I thought.

  I walked briskly over to the dais, stepped up onto it, and stabbed Rupert Forrester in the side of the neck.

  35

  There was no gushing of blood from a severed artery, no rasping of breath through an open windpipe, indeed not much to show at all.

  I had stabbed Rupert Forrester not with a knife, nor even a scalpel, but with a hypodermic needle.

  Almost as if in slow motion, he turned his head towards me, recognition, disbelief and realisation blending almost instantaneously into raw panic in his eyes.

  I could almost taste the fear in him. It was as if he’d seen a ghost.

  And he had.

  I was that ghost, resurrected from the dead.

  Then I saw in his face that fear of me turn rapidly to fear of what was to come – exposure and disgrace. The loss of not just his liberty, but also everything he had worked so hard to achieve.

  It was a delicious moment, one that I relished.

  I was both smiling and licking my lips.

  Revenge, I thought, really is sweet.

  I depressed the plunger of the syringe that was attached to the needle in his neck and injected forty milligrams of morphine straight into his jugular vein.

  The effect of my actions was dramatic, to put it mildly, and not just on Rupert Forrester. There was pandemonium in the Regency Suite, with many people shouting and a few even screaming.

  Forrester collapsed at my feet as his legs folded beneath him, I suspected from a combination of the morphine and blind terror.

  Now he knew what it felt like to have a deadly drug forced into you.

  I stood above him, rather pleased with myself, that was until one of the more athletic dinner guests took me down onto my back in a rugby tackle that smacked my head hard against the floor. It also left me gasping for breath.

  The lights were turned up and I could hear a familiar voice above the other commotion.

  ‘Police, police,’ DC Filippos shouted. ‘Make way. Let me through.’

  He came quickly into my field of vision and I smiled at him.

  ‘What did you inject him with?’ he asked, looking like thunder.

  I lay there wondering why he didn’t smile back at me.

  ‘What did you inject him with?’ he asked again, this time shaking me violently by the shoulder.

  ‘Cocaine,’ I said, but I knew immediately that I’d got that wrong. ‘No. No. Not cocaine. That was me.’

  What was it?

  ‘Morphine,’ I said, recovering some of my senses.

  ‘How much?’ asked the policeman.

  Enough. Morphine gets its name from Morpheus, the mythical god of dreams and sleep. Apart from its pain-relieving properties, a large dose also depresses respiration and lowers blood pressure, sending the victim into a deep sleep. Forrester was better off asleep, I thought, or dead.

  ‘How much morphine?’ DC Filippos asked again, shaking me once more.

  ‘Forty milligrams.’

  ‘Will it kill him?’ he demanded.

  I wish.

  ‘No,’ I said, but I was only guessing at what was or was not a lethal dose because I’d never actually tried to kill anyone with morphine.

  DC Filippos should have asked Dr Harold Shipman, I mused. As one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, Shipman had used morphine overdoses to kill at least two hundred and fifty people in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and he remains the only doctor in the history of British medicine ever to have been convicted of murdering his own patients.

  ‘There’s more of it in her bag,’ shouted a man. ‘Look!’

  I did look, up from my horizontal position. The man was one of the group standing around me and he was holding up another fully loaded syringe that he’d removed from my orange Sainsbury’s carrier.

  ‘Please leave that alone, sir,’ DC Filippos said, without making any impression on him whatsoever. Instead, the man went on waving the syringe around high above his head so that everyone could see it.

  ‘Naloxone,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ asked the policeman, leaning down close to my face.

  ‘That syringe contains naloxone,’ I repeated. ‘Antidote to morphine. Inject Forrester with it.’

  He seemed to dither, looking back and forth from the syringe in the man’s hand to my face. I had clearly given the young detective a serious dilemma. For the first time since I’d known him, DC Filippos obviously didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Inject the naloxone into Rupert Forrester,’ I said again. ‘It will counteract the effect of the morphine.’

  ‘Inject it where?’ he said.

  Intravenous was best but it could also be administered into a muscle.

  ‘Anywhere will do. Stick it into his arm or his leg.’

  He hesitated.

  But so would I have done in his position. He only knew that the second syringe contained naloxone because I’d told him so, and I was the person who had caused the medical crisis in the first place. He only had my word for it that the second syringe would lessen the impact of the mo
rphine, and not simply reinforce it, maybe even enough to kill.

  Fortunately for the policeman, he didn’t have to make the decision because at that point two ambulance paramedics arrived in their green uniforms.

  I knew them. The same pair had collected me from Cheltenham Police Station the previous November, when my blood sugar had been too low.

  I sat up and watched as the paramedics set to work on Rupert Forrester, removing his bow tie and opening his white shirt wide.

  One of them glanced in my direction.

  ‘Hello, Dr Rankin,’ he said.

  ‘Hi, Derek,’ I replied.

  It all seemed surreal.

  ‘He’s been injected with morphine,’ DC Filippos said.

  ‘Give him naloxone,’ I added.

  They should have some of their own, I thought. Naloxone was also the antidote for a heroin overdose and ambulance crews were all too used to dealing with those.

  ‘How much morphine?’ Derek asked.

  ‘Forty milligrams,’ I said.

  He sucked air in through his teeth in a manner that worried me. Maybe forty milligrams was a lethal dose after all. I hadn’t actually meant to kill Forrester, just make him go to sleep.

  Primum non nocere – Primarily, do no harm.

  Not actually part of the Hippocratic Oath, as some believed but, nevertheless, a maxim to which all doctors were expected to adhere.

  Had I done harm? Permanent harm?

  Derek dug into his large red medical kit and pulled out a sterilised pack containing a syringe and a hypodermic needle. He filled the syringe with naloxone from a small bottle and then injected the drug into a vein on the back of Forrester’s hand.

  The results were remarkable.

  One minute Rupert Forrester had been lying comatose on the dais, the next he was sitting up seemingly fully aware of what was going on around him.

  The big question that no one had asked yet was why.

  Why was I here?

  Why had I stabbed Forrester with the needle?

  Why had I injected him with morphine?

  Why? Why? Why?

  Those questions had been set aside due to concern over his welfare but, with him now seemingly well on the way to recovery, they became the main focus.

  Not that I was yet in a fit state to answer.

  Two more policemen arrived, this time in uniform, and they moved the crowd back from around the dais, asking them to return to their places at the tables so that a list could be made of their names prior to them being sent home.