‘Help!’ I shouted as loudly as I could. ‘Help! Somebody call an ambulance.’
I turned Toby onto his back and looked into his face as I struggled to remove my telephone from my pocket. His eyes had an air of mild surprise in them. I thought he was trying to say something but it was just the sound of his rasping breath. There were flecks of bright scarlet blood in a froth in his mouth.
‘Help!’ I shouted again. ‘Get an ambulance.’
A man came running over towards me as I finally managed to extract my phone. ‘Call an ambulance,’ I said, tossing my phone to him.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ the man asked.
‘I think he’s been stabbed,’ I said. ‘There’s lots of blood.’
The man glanced at the side of the van and pushed 999 on my phone.
I looked back at Toby’s face. The air of surprise seemed to have gone. Now he was just staring, but his eyes didn’t see. The rasping breath was no more.
‘I think he’s dead,’ I said to the man. ‘He’s stopped breathing.’
‘Has he got a pulse?’
I tried to feel his wrist but the only beat I could detect was from my own heart thumping away.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Give him mouth to mouth,’ said the man. ‘The ambulance is on its way.’
Unsurprisingly, kissing Toby Woodley had not been on my planned agenda for the day but, nevertheless, I tilted back his head, put my lips over his, and breathed into him. There was no noticeable movement of his chest so I tilted his head back further and repeated the process.
‘Keep going,’ said the man. ‘I’ll do chest compressions.’
The man knelt down next to me and started pumping his hands up and down vigorously on Toby’s breastbone as I breathed into him.
We went on like that for a good five minutes.
‘Bloody hell,’ said the man, pausing for a moment. ‘This is hard work.’
‘Do you want to swap?’ I said.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Keep going as we are.’
‘Does he have a pulse now?’ I asked between breaths.
‘Just keep going,’ said the man, resuming his chest compressions.
So we did, for what seemed like at least another five minutes until an array of bright blue flashing lights announced the arrival of an ambulance, and two green-clad paramedics came running over towards us followed by a sizable group of onlookers, some of them with camera phones held high.
One of the paramedics bared Toby’s chest and attached some sticky patches to his skin while the other connected leads to the patches and also to a yellow box with a small screen on the front. Even I could tell that the trace on the screen was flat and lifeless.
One of the paramedics pulled another box from his large green bag and soon had two metal plates placed either side of Toby’s chest.
‘All clear,’ he called, making sure no one was touching Toby. ‘Shocking!’
Toby’s body convulsed for a moment then lay motionless again. The trace on the screen, meanwhile, stayed completely flat.
‘All clear again,’ called the paramedic. ‘Shocking!’
He repeated the process another three times while his colleague injected something into Toby’s arm. That wouldn’t do much good, I thought, not without any circulation. For all their effort, the trace on the screen never even flickered.
The paramedics took over the mouth to mouth and chest compressions and went on for far longer than I would have expected but, each time they stopped, the line on the screen remained stubbornly flat. They shocked him again and shone a torch into Toby’s eyes.
‘No pressure,’ said one. ‘No vital signs. CPR terminated at...’ He looked at his watch. ‘Twenty-one forty-five.’ He began to pack up his equipment.
‘What happened?’ the other paramedic asked me, all urgency having suddenly evaporated.
‘He’s been stabbed,’ I said.
‘What with?’ he asked while pulling Toby’s shirt wider and looking down his abdomen. ‘And where?’
‘There’s blood on his back,’ I said. And, I realized, I was kneeling in the stuff. A great pool of it surrounded Toby’s body. All those chest compressions, I thought, had done nothing more than pump the blood out of him.
The police arrived in force and suddenly the atmosphere changed again. It was no longer just a racecourse car park, it had become a murder scene.
11
‘Now, Mr Shillingford, are you absolutely sure that Mr Woodley was alive when you first saw him in the car park?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Quite sure. He was leaning against the white van and he moved his head round to look at me when I spoke to him.’
I was sitting in a cubicle of a mobile police incident room that had been parked in a corner of the Kempton Park racecourse car park, well away from where a square white tent now stood over the spot where Toby Woodley had died.
And I was cold.
‘Can’t you get me something warmer?’ I asked the detective who was asking the questions. ‘I’m freezing in this.’ I fingered the white nylon coverall I had been given to put on when my clothes had been removed and bagged for forensic purposes. I had also been made to stand ignominiously shivering in my underpants as a masked forensic officer, also dressed from head to foot in white nylon, had examined my skin, hair, fingernails and mouth for any clues.
‘There’s a tracksuit on its way from the station,’ said the detective, ‘and a pair of trainers.’ He gesticulated at another policeman who had been sitting quietly listening to our conversation. The second policeman stood up and went out of the cubicle, closing the door behind him.
If the rest of me was cold, my feet were like ice blocks, resting as they were on the freezing metal floor of the glorified caravan.
‘Did Mr Woodley say anything to you?’ the detective asked once again.
‘No,’ I repeated. ‘I told you, he just slid down the side of the van and died.’
‘So why did you tell the paramedic that Mr Woodley had been stabbed?’
‘Because of the blood on the van,’ I said patiently. ‘I just presumed he’d been stabbed.’
‘I see,’ he said, making a note.
‘And was he?’ I asked.
‘Was he what?’
‘Stabbed?’
‘The post mortem examination will determine that, sir,’ the detective said formally.
The second policeman came back into the cubicle and sat down again on the same upright chair as before. He shook his head and I took that to mean the tracksuit and trainers were not yet here. I went on shivering.
‘When can I go home?’ I asked the detective.
‘That will be up to my superintendent,’ he replied unhelpfully.
I looked at my watch. It was well past eleven o’clock and nearly two hours since Toby Woodley’s life had expired.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Could you please tell your superintendent that I need to go home now. I’ve got to be up tomorrow in time to go to work.’
‘And what is your work, sir?’ the detective asked.
‘I’ve already told you.’ My patience was beginning to run rather thin. ‘I’m a race commentator and TV presenter. I was commentating here tonight and I found Mr Woodley in the car park as I was leaving. I tried to help him but I couldn’t. He died in spite of another man and me giving him artificial respiration. That’s all I can tell you. And now,’ I said, standing up, ‘I’d like to go home.’
The detective remained sitting in his chair and looked up at me.
‘Mr Shillingford,’ he said, ‘have you read today’s Daily Gazette?’
I sat and looked back at him. ‘Am I under arrest?’ I asked.
‘No, of course not,’ the detective said, smiling. ‘We just need you to remain here a while longer, to help us with our enquiries.’