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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 bookies 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?