Pulse

by Felix Francis

  Forrester half turned towards the sound.

  ‘Go back into your room and stay there,’ I shouted back.

  Forrester continued to turn.

  ‘No. No!’ I screamed at him. ‘It’s me you want, not my boys.’

  I rushed him, grabbing his arm and pulling hard.

  He turned back and threw me off him with such force that I ended up sprawled on the kitchen floor.

  ‘I’ll kill them too when I’m done with you,’ Forrester said, sending an icy chill down my spine.

  Oh God.

  I started to cry, not so much for my own death but for theirs.

  He raised the gun and pointed it straight at me so that I could clearly see down the barrels. At least I wouldn’t feel anything. The shot at this range would probably take my head clean off.

  I stared straight up at him. If he expected me to cower away or to beg for mercy, he would be disappointed.

  He closed one eye to aim, looking right down the length of the gun.

  This is it, I thought.

  Goodbye, world.

  There was suddenly a primeval shriek from behind him.

  ‘Noooooooo!’ screamed Grant as he charged through the open front door and down the hallway with one of his golf clubs held high above his head.

  Rupert Forrester started to turn to meet this new threat but he was too slow, much too slow. The long barrels of the shotgun made it unwieldy and they got stuck in the doorway as he turned. And so intent was he on keeping hold of the weapon that he didn’t even raise his arms in self-defence.

  The toe end of the golf club caught him just behind his right ear and Grant had put all his considerable strength into that one shot. The cracking noise of the impact was impressive. Indeed, I was surprised that the metal hadn’t gone right through the skull and embedded itself deep into Forrester’s brain.

  Now who thought golf was a silly sport?

  Not me.

  For the second time in only three hours Forrester’s legs folded beneath him and he went down onto the kitchen floor like a rag doll.

  Grant stood over him hyperventilating, the golf club ready in his hands in case a second swing was needed.

  It wasn’t.

  Rupert Forrester was totally unconscious and he had blood coming from his right ear – a sure sign of major problems inside.

  I stood up and carefully removed the gun from his senseless hands, breaking it open and removing the cartridges. I amazed myself with my calmness and control, not just now that it was over, but also when I’d been convinced I was about to die.

  Where was a panic attack when you expected one?

  I went back down on my knees next to him and felt gently around the point of impact. The bone moved under my fingers.

  ‘His skull is fractured,’ I said. ‘And the blood from his ear indicates a likely brain injury beneath. He will probably die without immediate hospital treatment. Call an ambulance.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Grant shouted at me. ‘The man just tried to kill you. Let him die.’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m a doctor. Saving lives is what I do.’

  PART 4

  October

  37

  Horseracing at Cheltenham returned for what was known as the Showcase meeting in late October but the talk of the town did not concern the horses.

  The revelations, currently appearing on a daily basis from the trial of one Fred Harris, known on the streets of east London as Crusher Harris and by me as Big Biceps, were making all the headlines in the Gloucestershire Echo.

  Harris’s defence strategy was simply to blame everything on Rupert Forrester, a tactic almost guaranteed not to be questioned by the man himself.

  Forrester had survived the brain injury caused by the golf club, due to the prompt arrival of an ambulance and his immediate transfer to hospital.

  If survival was the right word.

  An initial CT scan of his head had shown severe bruising to the right side of his brain and a critical swelling within the cranium cavity.

  Emergency surgery had removed a section of his skull in order to relieve the pressure in his head but not before it appeared to have caused major damage to the part of the brain that juts down through the foramen magnum, the hole in the base of the skull where it joins the spine.

  Forrester had remained completely unconscious in an induced coma for almost two weeks before the swelling had subsided and the neurosurgeons had decided to try to wake him up.

  And he had woken up, after a fashion, insofar that his eyes had opened and he was able to move them up and down.

  But he had, so far, not regained any other movement whatsoever and, after six months, the neurologists thought it unlikely that he ever would.

  So this particular Geronimo would never again be leaping from great heights.

  ‘Locked-in syndrome,’ one of the brain surgeons had said to me. ‘Cognitively awake but unable to move or speak. In fact, unable to do anything other than flicker the eyes. Very sad.’

  It wasn’t the tiniest bit sad as far as I was concerned. Indeed, it was nothing less than he deserved.

  I’d looked up locked-in syndrome in my medical textbooks.

  It was a rare condition, caused by damage to a part of the brainstem known as the pons, a sort of neurological junction box between the brain above and the spinal cord below, through which all motor-nerve messages pass. When the pons was damaged, none of the signals could get through, leaving patients completely paralysed except for the eyes, the motor nerves to which branched off the stem higher up.

  Most sufferers were fully aware, seeing and hearing perfectly normally, and they even retained full sensations throughout their body as the sensory nerves were left mostly unaffected.

  So Forrester got itches that he couldn’t scratch.

  ‘He’ll probably never stand trial,’ DS Merryweather had informed me confidently some time after the diagnosis. ‘Not in that state. He needs twenty-four-hour care and no prison could cope with him anyway.’

  But he was in prison already, I thought, a prison created by his own body, and serving a full-life sentence with no hope of parole.

  Big Biceps, however, did stand trial, at Gloucester Crown Court, charged both with the murder of Rahul Kumar in the racecourse gentlemen’s toilet and the attempted murder of me in the jockeys’ medical room. The police had decided that there was insufficient evidence to prove that he had also tried to push me under a bus but I knew – I was sure of it.

  Mike Sheraton and Jason Conway acted as key witnesses for the prosecution – along with myself, of course – and both jockeys had seemingly done deals with the Crown Prosecution Service, even though everyone denied it.

  Sheraton had pleaded guilty at a previous court appearance to the lesser charge of ABH, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, claiming that he hadn’t known that Forrester and Harris had intended to kill me. In my opinion, however, he must have had a pretty good idea because of what had happened to Rahul Kumar, but his plea had been accepted by the court and he’d been given only a suspended sentence, presumably on the condition that he testified against Fred ‘Crusher’ Harris.

  Which he had done with great gusto, telling the jury exactly how Kumar had been lured by Rupert Forrester to the gentlemen’s lavatory, where Harris had been waiting. Sheraton swore that he didn’t know Kumar had been killed until he saw the photos of him posted up as a dead man at the racing festival in March. Forrester had then assured him that the death had been an accident, something he now believed was untrue due to the attempt to murder me in the same manner.

  Jason Conway, meanwhile, had seemingly got away scot-free as far as the full force of the law was concerned.

  Both jockeys had admitted their part in the spot-fixing of races, but it was clearly part of their deal that no legal proceedings would follow. The police claimed that proving any corruption would be impossible without knowing who had placed the bets, with which bookmakers, and whether it was the bettors or the bo
okies who were the beneficiaries. And that information was ‘locked in’ elsewhere.

  The racing authorities, however, had not been quite so compassionate and forgiving, their burden of proof being somewhat lower than the required ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ of criminal proceedings. They were satisfied that there was ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that spot-fixing had occurred, namely the jockeys’ own admissions, and had banned both of them from riding in races for two years, a punishment that many, including me, believed was far too lenient.

  The trial was now in its second week and, for the past two days, it had been my turn in the witness box.

  Grant had been there throughout, providing moral support from the public gallery.

  Since that fateful night in April, he and I had undoubtedly moved back closer together. Maybe it was the realisation that what we had was so precious – and the knowledge that we had come so close to losing it made it even more so.

  We were lucky. Most people don’t appreciate what they have until it has gone for ever. In our case, just the threat of that loss was enough and we were able to build new bonds in our relationship, sat firm on strong foundations.

  But our boys had been seriously traumatised by the events. They had heard the shots and later seen the damage to the front door and in the kitchen. And they’d watched from the upstairs windows as both Rupert Forrester and his shotgun had been carried out of the house.

  Their young minds were sharp and they had quickly worked out how much danger their mother had been in, not to mention themselves as well.

  We had not hidden things from them, spending time talking through what had happened while also doing our best to play down the worst horrors. It had been a living nightmare and one that I did not want to recur for them throughout their lives in bad dreams.

  I’d told them that Grant was not just their father but also their hero, a true white knight, and he had saved us all by slipping out the back door to fetch a five iron from his golf bag in the garage to ward off the evil, just as Saint George had slain the dragon with his sword. What more could they ask for?

  It had made them laugh but, even so, there remained a vacant blankness in their eyes as if the mental image of their dead mother, her head blown clean away, was still large in their imagination.

  As it was in mine.

  Only time would be the healer.

  Much to Grant’s irritation, the police had also taken away his prized five iron. It was his favourite club, and mine too now – I would never again complain when he spent his Saturday mornings at the local golf course.

  My eating had improved, not yet back to what others might refer to as ‘normal’, but definitely improved. And that too, I was sure, was down to the events of that traumatic night.

  To have had my mortality so manifestly paraded in front of my eyes, only to have the gift of life miraculously restored, provided me with a totally new perspective on relative values. I had finally reached a place of serenity and peace when I was more comfortable in my own body – a place where I no longer always needed to be the thinnest person around.

  And the fact that Grant had risked his own life to save mine gave me a trust in him that had been absent previously: a trust in his love, a trust in his faithfulness, and a trust in his intentions.

  I no longer lied to him, and I stopped breaking my promises.

  Instead, I started believing that Grant really did want me to get well and I became determined not to disappoint him. I’d even put on seven pounds without yearning to lose it all again, and sex between us was back on the agenda, albeit occasional and tentative.

  I had cut down on my medications but there was still quite a long way to go in that regard.

  Perhaps you never really recover from depression or an eating disorder, you only learn to live with them, keeping them under wraps like badly behaved dogs, hoping that they won’t escape and bite you, your friends or your family.

  Except that the dogs are within you and can’t simply be muzzled or sent off to a rehoming centre. The trick is controlling them rather than letting them control you.

  I came out of the courtroom after another particularly gruelling session of cross-examination to find Detective Constable Filippos waiting in the lobby.

  ‘How do you think it’s going?’ I asked him.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, smiling. ‘The defence counsel made a huge error there in attacking your credibility over your depression. I was watching the jury. They were obviously sympathetic and believed your every word. Harris is going down, no doubt about it.’

  I admired the policeman’s confidence, and shared it – even I couldn’t see how Big Biceps was going to beat this rap.

  Mike Sheraton came out of the court and, for a second, we stood facing one other, only a couple of feet apart. The last time I’d been this close to him, he’d been holding my legs down on a bed while Fred ‘Crusher’ Harris and Rupert Forrester forced cocaine into my mouth.

  He said nothing, just nodded at me once and turned away.

  I stood silently staring at his back as he walked towards the exit, without so much as the slightest tingle appearing in my fingers.

  ‘Dr Rankin,’ said DC Filippos with concern, ‘are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  I really was.

  Also by Felix Francis

  GAMBLE

  BLOODLINE

  REFUSAL

  DAMAGE

  FRONT RUNNER

  TRIPLE CROWN

  Books by Dick Francis and Felix Francis

  DEAD HEAT

  SILKS

  EVEN MONEY

  CROSSFIRE

  Books by Dick Francis

  THE SPORT OF QUEENS

  (Autobiography)

  DEAD CERT

  NERVE

  FOR KICKS

  ODDS AGAINST

  FLYING FINISH

  BLOOD SPORT

  FORFEIT

  ENQUIRY

  RAT RACE

  BONECRACK

  SMOKESCREEN

  SLAY-RIDE

  KNOCK DOWN

  HIGH STAKES

  IN THE FRAME

  RISK

  TRAIL RUN

  WHIP HAND

  REFLEX

  TWICE SHY

  BANKER

  THE DANGER

  PROOF

  BREAK IN

  LESTER: The Official

  Biography

  BOLT

  HOT MONEY

  THE EDGE

  STRAIGHT

  LONGSHOT

  COMEBACK

  DRIVING FORCE

  DECIDER

  WILD HORSES

  COME TO GRIEF

  TO THE HILT

  10-LB PENALTY

  FIELD OF 13

  SECOND WIND

  SHATTERED

  UNDER ORDERS

  Felix Francis

  Triple Crown

  The richest prize in racing.

  The perfect motive to commit a crime . . .

  Jeff Hinkley, a British Horseracing Authority investigator, has been seconded to the US Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency (FACSA) where he has been asked to find a mole in their organisation, an informant who is passing on confidential information to fix races.

  Jeff goes in search of answers, taking on an undercover role as a groom on the backstretch at Belmont Park racetrack in New York. But he discovers far more than he was bargaining for, finding himself as the meat in the sandwich between FACSA and corrupt individuals who will stop at nothing, including murder, to capture the most elusive and lucrative prize in the world – the Triple Crown.

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2017

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Felix Francis, 2017

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Felix Francis t
o be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-5551-2

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-5552-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-5554-3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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