Pulse(94)

‘Perfect,’ I said to Doris.

I removed my anorak and waterproof trousers, which Doris took away to the staff changing area. Underneath I had on a black sweater and a pair of black trousers. Doris then gave me a spare white lace-edged apron to tie around my waist. Apart from the hiking boots, I looked every inch a waitress.

‘How about your bag?’ Doris said. ‘Shall I put it with your coat?’

‘No, no,’ I said, clutching the orange plastic tightly to my chest. ‘I’ll keep that with me.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Will you be all right now? I’ve got those water jugs to fill.’ She laughed and went off leaving me there just inside the door feeling very conspicuous. I simply smiled at the other waiting staff as they rushed past me and out to serve the guests with coffee and petits fours.

I looked at my watch. Just gone ten o’clock.

Had DC Filippos arrived? Was he even now in the Regency Suite?

I hoped so.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said a female voice loudly and clearly over the audio system. A hush descended within the suite. ‘We are very fortunate to have our guest speaker with us here tonight. For the last two days he’s been busy ensuring that everything has run smoothly at the racecourse for the April meeting.’

That’s not all he’s been doing, I thought.

‘Please join me in giving a warm Injured Jockeys Fund welcome to the managing director of Cheltenham Racecourse, Rupert Forrester.’

There was loud applause and the overhead crystal chandeliers were dimmed.

I slipped in through the door and stood in the shadows to one side of the stage, which in fact was little more than a raised dais about a foot high with a lectern now lit up by a bank of overhead spotlights.

Rupert Forrester walked to the lectern and raised his hands in thanks.

Just watching him standing there smiling at the assembled guests, lapping up their admiration, made my blood boil. As far as he was aware, I was still lying alone on a bed in the jockeys’ medical room at the racecourse, my life slowly draining away to nothing.

I reached into the orange Sainsbury’s bag.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Forrester began. ‘What a magnificent welcome. Thank you. It is a real joy to be here tonight supporting racing’s favourite charity.’

I’ve heard more than enough of him already, I thought.

I walked briskly over to the dais, stepped up onto it, and stabbed Rupert Forrester in the side of the neck.





35


There was no gushing of blood from a severed artery, no rasping of breath through an open windpipe, indeed not much to show at all.

I had stabbed Rupert Forrester not with a knife, nor even a scalpel, but with a hypodermic needle.

Almost as if in slow motion, he turned his head towards me, recognition, disbelief and realisation blending almost instantaneously into raw panic in his eyes.

I could almost taste the fear in him. It was as if he’d seen a ghost.

And he had.

I was that ghost, resurrected from the dead.

Then I saw in his face that fear of me turn rapidly to fear of what was to come – exposure and disgrace. The loss of not just his liberty, but also everything he had worked so hard to achieve.

It was a delicious moment, one that I relished.

I was both smiling and licking my lips.

Revenge, I thought, really is sweet.

I depressed the plunger of the syringe that was attached to the needle in his neck and injected forty milligrams of morphine straight into his jugular vein.

The effect of my actions was dramatic, to put it mildly, and not just on Rupert Forrester. There was pandemonium in the Regency Suite, with many people shouting and a few even screaming.

Forrester collapsed at my feet as his legs folded beneath him, I suspected from a combination of the morphine and blind terror.

Now he knew what it felt like to have a deadly drug forced into you.

I stood above him, rather pleased with myself, that was until one of the more athletic dinner guests took me down onto my back in a rugby tackle that smacked my head hard against the floor. It also left me gasping for breath.

The lights were turned up and I could hear a familiar voice above the other commotion.

‘Police, police,’ DC Filippos shouted. ‘Make way. Let me through.’

He came quickly into my field of vision and I smiled at him.

‘What did you inject him with?’ he asked, looking like thunder.

I lay there wondering why he didn’t smile back at me.

‘What did you inject him with?’ he asked again, this time shaking me violently by the shoulder.

‘Cocaine,’ I said, but I knew immediately that I’d got that wrong. ‘No. No. Not cocaine. That was me.’

What was it?

‘Morphine,’ I said, recovering some of my senses.

‘How much?’ asked the policeman.

Enough. Morphine gets its name from Morpheus, the mythical god of dreams and sleep. Apart from its pain-relieving properties, a large dose also depresses respiration and lowers blood pressure, sending the victim into a deep sleep. Forrester was better off asleep, I thought, or dead.

‘How much morphine?’ DC Filippos asked again, shaking me once more.

‘Forty milligrams.’

‘Will it kill him?’ he demanded.