Pulse(91)

If that was the case then I could be out of the woods.

I’d beaten the bastards.

I giggled uncontrollably.

Cocaine may be nicknamed paradise powder, and perhaps some of my current elation was still related to the drug, but I felt surreal and fantastic, even invincible, with a crystal-clear head.

And with revenge on my mind.

Ten minutes later and my pulse was down to 150 and I considered that I was past the critical stage. I decided I’d live.

I glanced up at the clock. It was only twenty past eight.

It felt like I’d been fighting for my life for several hours but it was only sixty minutes or so since I’d rushed back to the weighing room from tea.

I looked down at the remains of my mobile phone lying in pieces on the floor. Grant had probably been trying to call me on it.

I stood up and went over to the landline phone on the wall and picked up the receiver.

I stared at it.

Maybe I should have used this to call an ambulance for myself, to ask for help. But I was so used to actually being the help that the thought had never crossed my mind. It was no good me dialling 999 and asking for assistance whenever a critically ill patient arrived at A&E.

I was 999.

On this occasion, it had simply been me who had been the critically ill patient, and my ‘you alone have to deal with this emergency’ mode had instinctively kicked in.

Did I call for help now? And how about the police? Should I call them too?

Of course you must, said the sensible half of my brain. Someone has just tried to kill you – again.

The police surely couldn’t not believe me this time? Could they?

But I was the madwoman with the crazy ideas and suicidal tendencies. I had form – at least in their eyes.

‘She’s only making it up,’ they’d say.

‘To justify her delusion that Rahul Kumar was murdered,’ they’d say.

‘Wasting our time again,’ they’d say.

Wouldn’t they?

Perhaps I had to die to convince them. Maybe not even then.

I dialled a number – Grant’s mobile – and he answered at the first ring.

‘Where are you?’ he asked with more than a touch of worry in his voice. ‘I’ve been trying to call you for ages.’

‘I’m still at the racecourse,’ I said. ‘Sorry. I dropped my phone and it broke.’

I wasn’t quite sure why I didn’t tell him the truth. Maybe the influence of the cocaine was still with me more than I appreciated.

‘What are you doing there? I thought you were coming straight to the sports ground.’ He now sounded more angry than worried.

‘I had to deal with another patient,’ I said, without telling him that the patient had been myself. ‘Are the boys all right?’

‘They’re hungry,’ he said.

Nothing new in that, I thought. At least they weren’t kidnapped or run over. But why would they be? They were perfectly safe because Forrester and the others believed I was dead.

‘Are you coming home now?’ Grant asked.

‘Soon,’ I said. ‘Take the boys and get some fish and chips from the chippy in Bishop’s Cleeve.’

‘What about my steak and peppercorn sauce?’ he whined.

‘I’ll do it for you tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

‘How about you?’ he said. ‘Can I get you something?’

‘No. I’ll get myself something when I get home,’ I said. ‘I may be quite a while yet. I have to go into town.’

He wasn’t pleased. ‘That bloody hospital.’

I didn’t enlighten him that I had no intention of going anywhere near that bloody hospital.

I was invincible, right?

I was off to a charity dinner at the Queens Hotel.





34


I found driving my Mini under the influence of cocaine was curiously easy.

Whereas the drug had a profound psychoactive impact on the mind, it left the motor cortex remarkably unaffected.

Getting out of the weighing room had been my first problem. As Rupert Forrester had said to his henchmen, he had locked up. Tight.

In the end I had used the push-bar-to-open fire escape door in the laundry room to make my escape, but not before I’d made a couple more telephone calls and acquired a few supplies from the medical-room drug inventory.

My next obstacle was how to get out to my car with security having by now closed all the exit gates from the racecourse enclosures. And it didn’t help that it was now dark, the evening spring twilight being cut short by the low cloud and the persistent rain.

I suppose I could have gone in search of a roving security detail but then I’d have had to answer questions about why I was still there and where I’d been.

Could I be bothered? In this rain? No way.

Instead, I dragged a large rubbish bin twenty yards across the tarmac to the gate, climbed up on it and swung myself over, making sure not to snag my plastic bag of supplies on the top.

If nothing else, cocaine clearly gave one confidence.

I might need it.

The Queens Hotel in Cheltenham had an elegant and imposing neoclassical porticoed fa?ade overlooking the formal Imperial Gardens. Its style was firmly in keeping with the grandiose reputation of the town as a former upmarket and fashionable spa resort.