I thanked Derek who appeared to have taken this fresh incident in his stride. Never a dull moment when you lived with the Halleys.
We went up in the lift. The cuts were now merely oozing rather than gushing and some colour had returned to Marina’s cheeks. Crisis over.
Marina went straight into our bedroom and picked up some nail scissors from her dressing table.
‘Can you fetch me a clean plastic bag from the drawer in the kitchen?’ she asked.
I found some small polythene sandwich bags and took one back to her.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I scratched his neck.’ She smiled at me with her lopsided mouth. ‘Maybe I have some of his skin under my fingernails.’
‘Good girl. Perhaps we should involve the police after all?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want you to get this bugger for Huw’s murder, not just for punching me.’
She used the scissors to cut the elegantly long fingernails on her left hand which she placed carefully in the plastic bag. She then scraped the ends of her fingers and placed the resulting material and the scissors in the bag together with the cut nails.
‘I can extract the DNA at the lab but we should go and do it now before it dries out too much. There might not be anything to find but it’s worth a try.’
‘After the doctor,’ I said.
‘No, before. This won’t take long.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to call the police?’ I said. ‘They could run a check against the National DNA Database?’
‘No police, Sid. I’m sure. We can always give them the DNA results later, if there are any. I really don’t want to spend the next few hours at a police station being poked about by some police doctor. No thank you!’ She picked up the plastic bag. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
In the world of racing, especially amongst jockeys, the need for medical services are frequent and crucial. A jockey with a broken bone needs immediate treatment for the injury, obviously, but he also needs to get back in the saddle in the shortest amount of time. A jockey not riding is a jockey not earning. They are paid by the ride. No ride means no cash. There is no sick pay for self-employed jockeys.
Hospital accident and emergency centres will lavish plaster of paris on the injured and tell them it must stay on for six weeks minimum. A whole industry has grown up that will get jockeys back in the saddle in half that time. Ballet dancers, footballers and all types of athletes have the same needs.
In the good old days, before jockeys had to ‘pass the doctor’ after every fall, many a race had been ridden with a broken collar-bone, or a fractured wrist. Losing a ride in one race may then result in losing the rides on that horse for good, especially if it had won.
My doctor, Geoffrey Kennedy, had managed to get me back in the saddle after injury in record time on many occasions. He knew not only how my body worked but my mind, too. He seemed to sense how much pain I could stand and how much I had been willing to endure in order to get back to racing. He had initially trained as a GP but had become a sports injury specialist after his brother, an international rugby player, had continuously complained to him about the lack of understanding of sports injuries at the local hospital. Geoffrey had opened a specialist clinic in north London and soon a line of A-list sportsmen and women were queuing up at his door. He was now semi-retired and the Kennedy Sports Clinic was thriving in the hands of a younger man, but we old lags still preferred to deal with the master.
Since my riding days had ended, Geoffrey had continued to patch up the damage caused by two-legged rather than four-legged opponents, sometimes willing to turn a blind eye where others might have called in the police.
I rang him while Marina changed out of her bloody clothes. Sure, he’d said, no problem. He would pack his sewing kit and meet us at the Cancer Research UK London Institute in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He wasn’t doing anything except watching the television and it was a while since he had practised his sewing on a beautiful face. All you bloody jockeys are so ugly, he’d said, it’ll be nice to work on a face without a broken nose. His skills would be appreciated, at last.
As I drove, Marina told me what had happened.
‘I was almost home,’ her voice sounded a little strange due to the swollen lip. ‘I was passing those bushes outside Belgravia Court when I was grabbed from behind. He dragged me into that path between the bushes and I thought I was going to be raped.’ She paused. ‘I was quite calm but very frightened. It was like everything was happening in slow motion. He held me from behind and spoke into my ear. I think he might have let me go if I hadn’t scratched him. I reached over my head and felt the wool on his face. So I pulled it up from his neck and dug my nails in.’ She laughed in the dark. ‘He groaned. Serves him right. But he spun me round, called me something unprintable and hit me very hard in the face. I think it was his fists. He had gloves on with shiny bits on them.’
Gloved fists with brass knuckle-dusters, I thought. That fitted; there was too much damage for fists alone.
‘I went down on my knees and he ran off. It was quite a while before I could stand up and make it the twenty yards home.’
If I’d had a spare hand, I would have held hers.
Geoffrey beat us to the Cancer Research Institute from his home in Highgate but Marina kept him waiting as she electronically signed in to the building.
‘Some experiments need constant monitoring,’ she said, ‘so the labs are always open. Some of the staff almost live here at times.’
‘My, my,’ Geoffrey said, seeing Marina in the light. ‘That’s quite a face. Is this a police job, Sid?’
‘No,’ both Marina and I said together.
‘Walked into a door, did you?’ Geoffrey said sarcastically. ‘Correction. Two doors. Very careless.’
We went up in the lift with Geoffrey tut-tutting under his breath.
We walked down endless corridors with cream walls and blue vinyl flooring. Half of the corridor floor space was taken up with rows of grey filing cabinets interspersed by three-foot high cylinders with yellow triangular warning labels stuck on them: ‘Liquid nitrogen — Danger of asphyxiation’. Marina punched numbers into another electronic lock that agreed with a beep to give us entry to her domain.
She flicked on the stark overhead fluorescent lamps and went to sit at one of the laboratory benches where she carefully removed the plastic bag from her pocket and put it in a fridge.
‘That will keep it fresh for a while,’ she said. ‘OK, Doc, do your worst.’
Geoffrey worked for nearly half an hour, cleaning and tidying up the wounds, injecting some local anaesthetic, and finally closing the gaps with two rows of minute blue stitches. I had brought my camera up from the car and, much to Marina’s annoyance, I took a series of shots as her wounds were transformed from an ugly bleeding mess to two neat lines, one horizontal in her eyebrow and the other vertical through her lower lip. With a rapidly blackening eye, she looked like one of those advertisements for wearing seat belts.
‘There,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll have to take them out again in about five or six days but you won’t be able to spot the scars in a few weeks.’
‘I thought stitches dissolved these days,’ Marina said.
‘Those are mostly used for internal stitching,’ he replied, ‘and staples are ugly and tend to leave scars. Nothing like good old-fashioned catgut stitches if you want to leave no trace, or this blue nylon as we tend to use these days And don’t tie them too tight or they pull. These should be fine.’
‘Thank you,’ said Marina. ‘Can I get back to work now?’
‘Sure,’ said the doctor, ‘but those might be a bit sore when the anaesthetic wears off. And I should give you a tetanus shot, unless you’ve had one within the last ten years.’