Pulse(38)

I knew they were both due to ride as I’d looked it up on the Racing Post website but there was still nearly two hours before the first race so they may have not arrived yet, or perhaps they were lurking in the sauna trying to shed a pound or two before racing started.

I walked out onto the weighing-room terrace and sat in the sun on one of the wooden benches. I couldn’t remember ever having been to the races before when I didn’t have anything to do.

I felt lost and miserable.

Part of me wanted to stand up and go back into the medical room, to tell Adrian Kings not to be so damned stupid, and to carry on doing what I did best. I even briefly thought about threatening to make public his hand-washing problems of the past if he didn’t reinstate me but . . . what good would it do? He was the most senior racecourse medical officer here at Cheltenham and he would simply not choose me again anyway. And the way my health was going at the moment, I could do with every doctor being more of a friend than an enemy.

I sat on the bench for the next half-hour watching the comings and goings, jockeys arriving to change, trainers collecting saddles to take over to the saddling boxes for the first race, owners hovering nervously more in hope than expectation. And then there were the TV and radio crews hoping for an exclusive interview to reveal some golden nugget of information about a horse’s chances in the big race. In fact, all the regular hustle and bustle around the weighing room on a Festival morning.

But I was now out of it, present here only in body.

I thought about going home.

My home had always been my castle, my safe retreat from the horrors of emergency medicine, but it had recently become my prison, the place from which I gazed out through the glass at the world beyond, wondering if I would ever be able to rejoin it.

Whereas going home had once been a pleasure, it was now a torment.

So I went on sitting on the bench; that was until I saw Jason Conway walking across the parade ring. I pulled the photo of the unnamed man from my coat pocket and went forward to intercept.

‘Excuse me, Jason,’ I said, standing right in front of him. ‘Do you know this man?’

I thrust the photo almost up to his nose so he couldn’t avoid looking at it.

Jason glanced at the picture then at me. ‘I’ve already told the police that I don’t know him,’ he said.

‘Why did he die?’ I asked.

No reply.

‘What are you involved in?’

‘Leave me alone,’ he said, pushing past me and disappearing up the steps and into the sanctuary of the weighing room.

Two things struck me. The first was that, contrary to what I’d believed, PC Filippos must have actually taken note of what I’d said to him in the hospital, and the second was that Jason Conway was lying.

As the mother of identical twins, who as children had seemed to communicate as much by telepathy as by the spoken word, I had become quite adept at reading body language and detecting vibes. And there had been vibes aplenty radiating from Jason Conway. He was a deeply worried man and that could only be because, not only had he seen the unnamed man but he probably knew his full name and why he’d died.

I went back to the bench to wait for Mike Sheraton.

Adrian Kings appeared on the terrace to my left, took one look at me, pursed his lips and retreated back inside where I saw him speaking to Rupert Forrester, the managing director. Presently, another member of the racecourse executive came over and asked me what reasons I had for being in a restricted zone.

Kick me when I’m down, why don’t you?

‘No reason,’ I said.

So he asked me to leave the weighing-room area. At least he didn’t tell me to leave the racecourse entirely.

I walked across the parade ring and on towards the Princess Royal Grandstand. In spite of the sunshine, I was desperately chilly and I dug my hands deep into my coat pockets. Always being cold was one of the unfortunate consequences of having lost so much weight and a fresh gust of icy wind made me shiver. I went in search of the nearest warm shelter – the Vestey Bar in the base of the grandstand.

I hadn’t had a single alcoholic drink for many months – far too many calories – but now I found myself standing at the bar swiftly gulping down a double Whisky Mac to ward off both the cold and the awful feeling of helplessness that had gripped me by the throat.

Living my life over those months had been like walking a tightrope. I’d had to concentrate intensely for every single second in order not to fall off – one way into full-blown anorexia, starvation and death, the other into a hedonistic self-indulgence of drink, drugs and excess leading to massive weight gain and a return to crippling depression. Just being me, and staying as I was now, had become a full-time occupation.

Yet here I was in a bar at barely eleven in the morning, knocking back the whisky and loving the warm glow that enveloped me as a result.

‘Another double, please,’ I said to the barman, pushing a fresh banknote across the counter towards him.

Part of me wanted him to say, No, no, you’ve already had enough, but instead he took my money and measured two more shots of Dewar’s Finest Scotch Whisky into a fresh tumbler, before splashing in an equal quantity of Stone’s Original Green Ginger Wine.

‘Bugger Adrian Kings,’ I said to myself, lifting the glass in a silent toast before downing its contents in three great gulps.

‘And again,’ I said, sliding the empty glass across the bar top.