‘Can’t help you,’ Brendan said with a nervous laugh. ‘I know I have.’
‘I’m not drunk,’ I tried to say but nothing but a croak came out.
‘It’s all right, sir,’ said the policeman, looking back at me. ‘You rest now, the ambulance is on its way.’
I didn’t want to rest. I wanted to tell them that I wasn’t drunk, that someone had tried to kill me, and that I’d been strangled, but my voicebox and my mouth wouldn’t do what my brain was asking of them.
‘He must be drunk to have driven straight across the road into this gatepost at that speed,’ said the other policeman, the one I couldn’t see. ‘Blind drunk I shouldn’t wonder. Is he well enough to do a breath-test?’
I nodded at the policeman in the doorway but he didn’t immediately say anything. He just stared into my eyes. Then he shone a torch right into my face.
‘I don’t like the look of him.’
I thought that was quite personal.
‘In what way?’ asked Nicholas.
‘He’s got red spots on the whites of his eyes.’ I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘And there are some more on his face.’
More flashing lights and another siren signalled the arrival of the ambulance and a paramedic soon joined the policeman in the car doorway.
‘He seems unable to speak,’ the policeman said to the new arrival, ‘and I don’t like the look of his eyes.’
I looked at them both as they looked at me.
‘He may have had a stroke,’ said the paramedic.
I shook my head at them and made a gesture indicating I wanted to write something. The policeman removed a notebook from his pocket and passed it over with a pen.
I’ve been strangled, I wrote. Somebody tried to kill me. I handed the notebook back.
They both looked at what I had written and then up at my face.
I could tell from his expression that the policeman didn’t believe me.
‘They could be petechiae,’ said the paramedic.
‘What could?’ said the policeman.
‘The red spots. They could be petechiae. It’s the bursting of tiny blood vessels just under the skin and in the eyes. It can be brought on by asphyxia. He might well have been strangled.’ He gently tilted my head back and looked at my neck. ‘And there’s definitely some bruising around the larynx. That might be why he can’t speak.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said the policeman. ‘It’s a crime scene. Sam, get everyone back. You two,’ he said, pointing at Nicholas and Brendan over my head, ‘out of the car, now.’
It seemed like at least another half-hour before they lifted me out of the car, by which time some semblance of my voice had returned.
One of the paramedics insisted on going behind me to attach a large plastic brace round my neck in spite of me complaining that it hurt my windpipe at the front. Then they placed a board down my spine and strapped me to it. By this time the fire brigade had also arrived, and they proceeded to remove the whole roof of the car.
Meanwhile, in little more than a croak, I assured them that I was fine apart from my neck, which still hurt like hell.
‘You can’t be too careful,’ said one of the paramedics, although I believed they were being so, a sentiment clearly shared by the police in the shape of a plain-clothes detective who had been summoned to the scene by his uniformed colleagues.
He’d already tried to talk to me twice but had been sent away on both occasions by the ambulance staff as they had fitted me, first, with an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth, and then with a saline drip into a needle on my hand.
‘The extra fluid keeps your blood pressure up,’ the paramedic had explained, ‘and that helps deliver more oxygen to your brain.’
Finally, they were ready and I was lifted from the car and laid flat on a stretcher. I wouldn’t have minded so much if there hadn’t been such a large audience of young scantily clad party-goers, together with most of my family, including my mother and my father, all of them standing on the pavement shivering in the cool of the night.
I waved at them with my non-needled hand, much to the disapproval of the paramedic, who told me in no uncertain terms to lie perfectly still.
‘I’m all right,’ I said very croakily through the mask. ‘I really think I could walk.’
‘No chance,’ he replied. ‘Asphyxia patients can die hours later even if they seem wide awake and well. You stay put.’
I stayed put.
I was carried into the ambulance and the detective tried to climb in with me, but the medics were having none of it.
‘You can speak to him at the hospital,’ they said. ‘Once he’s stable.’
‘Which hospital?’
‘Addenbrooke’s, in Cambridge.’
One of the paramedics drove, while the other one connected me to blood pressure and heart monitors.
‘I feel fine now,’ I said. ‘It’s only my throat that hurts.’
‘Nevertheless, it’s better to get you checked out,’ he said, clipping wires to sticky pads on my chest. ‘Don’t want you dropping down dead on us now, do we?’
No, I thought, we did not.
‘You just relax and let us do the worrying.’
I wasn’t particularly worried, not about my health anyway. I was far more worried about who would want to kill me, and why.
‘So did you see who attacked you?’ asked the plain-clothes policeman, who had introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Perry.
‘No,’ I replied in my now familiar croak.
We were in a curtained-off cubicle of the accident and emergency department at Addenbrooke’s hospital, me lying on an examination couch and him sitting next to it on a chair.
‘Was the car locked when you arrived at it?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But I suppose I don’t really know. I remember the car’s indicator lights flashing when I pushed the unlock button on the key, but it’s an old car, and it does that whether it’s locked or not. I know because I’ve left it unlocked outside my flat before now.’
‘But you definitely had the keys with you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They were in my coat pocket.’
‘And was the person already in the car before you got in?’
I tried to think back.
‘I would say so, yes. I don’t remember hearing any of the other doors open.’ But, in truth, my memory of the incident was hazy in places. The hospital doctor had said it might be. Oxygen starvation, it seemed, caused funny effects in the brain. It was why he wouldn’t let me go home yet.
So much for my relatively early night.
I was wide awake at two o’clock in the morning, still dressed in my party gear minus jacket and tie, answering endless questions.
‘Why do you think someone would want to kill you?’
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I replied. It was the question I had been asking myself for the past three hours, and I hadn’t yet come up with any sensible answers. Was it something to do with Clare’s suicide, or Toby Woodley’s murder? Or had it merely been a botched attempt to steal my car?
Somehow, I doubted that.
For a start, my Ford was very old and hardly worth stealing and strangling the driver just to steal a car seemed rather excessive.
‘Did you find a rope?’ I asked.
‘So it was a rope?’ he said.
‘I’m not sure.’ I felt my neck. ‘It may have been some sort of material. Did you find anything?’
‘My men are searching the area. I haven’t heard yet what they found.’ He wrote something in his notebook. ‘Do you have any enemies?’ he asked, looking up at me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’
But I thought of Mitchell Stacey. He was an enemy. And he knew my car.
The policeman must have read something in my face.