Pulse(54)

How could I explain to my fourteen-year-old son that there were more important things in life than winning or losing a football match?

If there was only one thing that being an emergency doctor taught you very quickly, it was that acute illness and life-threatening injury put everything else into proper perspective.

When I’d first started working in emergency medicine, I’d found it difficult to tear myself away from patients at the end of my shift, even when I’d been so tired that I’d almost been unable to keep my eyes open. How could my mundane existence outside of work – shopping, eating, socialising, even sleeping – be more pressing than caring for the critically unwell? One had to become immune to the number of people in the queue and the length of time they’d been waiting for treatment. It would never be that working a little longer would significantly decrease the backlog, as new patients would always arrive just as fast as others were seen, and an overtired doctor was a dangerous doctor.

But, thankfully, Toby hadn’t yet had experience of any of that. For him, the match result was the most important thing in his life at present and the longer I could shield him and Oliver from the nastier things the better.

We went back home as a family, the four of us arm in arm, three in coats with hats and scarves, and one still in his football kit with muddy knees.

Such moments were so precious. The boys were quickly changing into young men and, all too soon, the time would come when they would fly the nest forever. They were my motivation to carry on living. How would I cope when they were gone? I was determined to relish every second while I still had them.

There was a black Mercedes parked outside the village post office and my heart missed a beat or two before I realised this one was shorter and had a different registration to that I’d seen in the racecourse car park.

‘Can you find out who owns a car from the number plate?’ I asked.

‘Sure you can,’ Oliver said. ‘The police do it all the time. I’ve seen it on those traffic-cop programmes on TV. When they stop cars, they always check who the owners are, and whether they’re taxed and insured.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know the police can do it, but could I? Would the licensing agency give me the details if I asked them?’

‘I doubt it,’ Grant said. ‘Data protection and all that stuff. You would have to ask the police, and then they probably wouldn’t tell you. Why? Which car do you want to know the owners of?’

‘None really,’ I lied. ‘I was just wondering, that’s all.’

We walked on through the village and turned into our road.

‘I suppose, like, I did at least score our two goals,’ Toby said as we reached the driveway.

On his way to recovery, I thought.

Much as I felt on days like these, like.

On Monday morning the boys went to school and Grant went off to work, leaving me alone in the house.

I was bored.

It had now been some four months since I’d been placed on sick leave by the Medical Director and, even though I was technically still employed, and being paid, by Cheltenham General Hospital, I wondered if it was time for me to look for a new job elsewhere. Not that finding one would be easy – my clinical references would hardly be likely to be encouraging for a prospective employer.

I’d had two medical assessments since being discharged from Wotton Lawn just before Christmas.

The first, in early January, had been a complete waste of time. I’d been at my lowest ebb and had been so dosed up with anti-anxiety medication that I’d hardly been able to stay awake or follow what was happening.

The second had been six weeks later, in late February, and I’d been wide-eyed and eager, putting my case for an immediate return to duty. I was fed up with doing nothing and I wanted to be back doing my job, not least because I believed that working was the best therapy for my depression.

However, a panel of two distinguished physicians and one psychiatrist had concluded that my recovery was not yet sufficiently advanced for me to be trusted with the lives of others, and had signed me off sick for another month.

My third and final assessment was due in another ten days. Either I would then be invited back to work or I would be designated as permanently unfit for my role as an emergency consultant, and fired. Then I would be forced to look for employment elsewhere, and maybe not even as a doctor.

So far, amazingly, I had managed to keep my professional record intact on the General Medical Council’s List of Registered Medical Practitioners, but that would surely change if I lost my job.

I sighed.

I would have to cross that bridge if and when I came to it but, in the meantime, I would use my spare time to try and get to the bottom of whatever was going on with respect to the death of the unnamed man.

It gave me a goal and a sense of purpose.

So I sat at the dining room table with my laptop and searched through the Racing UK website.

As the bookmaker Bill Tucker had suspected, I needed to purchase a subscription in order to view all past races, even though quite a few were available free. Next I tried the At The Races website and found that their videos were all viewable without charge but they had the rights to less than half of British racecourses. The others were covered by Racing UK, including Cheltenham.

But what did I need to look at?

I was certainly interested in horses ridden by Jason Conway, but how did I find out which ones those were? I could hardly ring him up and ask him.