Bloodline

‘Sam, we need an ambulance,’ the policeman said.

‘It’s already on its way,’ said another voice out of my vision.

‘Oh my God, that’s Mark’s car.’ I could hear Nicholas. ‘Is he all right?’ Nicholas’s face appeared briefly through the car doorway.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the policeman. ‘Now please stand back.’

‘But he’s my brother-in-law,’ Nicholas said, disappearing from the doorway and climbing into the car through the open back door. ‘Are you all right, Mark?’ he asked from somewhere near my left ear.

I started to turn my head round.

‘Keep still,’ ordered the policeman. ‘You can make neck or back injuries worse if you move.’

I kept still.

‘Has he been at this party?’ the policeman asked Nicholas.

‘Yes. It’s my daughter’s party. Mark here made a speech.’

‘Has he been drinking?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I mean. I don’t really know. I wasn’t sitting with him at dinner.’

Oh thanks, Nick, I thought. That’s just what I needed.

‘Can I help?’ Brendan had now climbed into the back alongside Nicholas.

The policeman looked at him. ‘We’re trying to determine if this man has been drinking.’

‘Can’t help you,’ Brendan said with a nervous laugh. ‘I know I have.’

‘I’m not drunk,’ I tried to say but nothing but a croak came out.

‘It’s all right, sir,’ said the policeman, looking back at me. ‘You rest now, the ambulance is on its way.’

I didn’t want to rest. I wanted to tell them that I wasn’t drunk, that someone had tried to kill me, and that I’d been strangled, but my voicebox and my mouth wouldn’t do what my brain was asking of them.

‘He must be drunk to have driven straight across the road into this gatepost at that speed,’ said the other policeman, the one I couldn’t see. ‘Blind drunk I shouldn’t wonder. Is he well enough to do a breath-test?’

I nodded at the policeman in the doorway but he didn’t immediately say anything. He just stared into my eyes. Then he shone a torch right into my face.

‘I don’t like the look of him.’

I thought that was quite personal.

‘In what way?’ asked Nicholas.

‘He’s got red spots on the whites of his eyes.’ I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘And there are some more on his face.’

More flashing lights and another siren signalled the arrival of the ambulance and a paramedic soon joined the policeman in the car doorway.

‘He seems unable to speak,’ the policeman said to the new arrival, ‘and I don’t like the look of his eyes.’

I looked at them both as they looked at me.

‘He may have had a stroke,’ said the paramedic.

I shook my head at them and made a gesture indicating I wanted to write something. The policeman removed a notebook from his pocket and passed it over with a pen.

I’ve been strangled, I wrote. Somebody tried to kill me. I handed the notebook back.

They both looked at what I had written and then up at my face.

I could tell from his expression that the policeman didn’t believe me.

‘They could be petechiae,’ said the paramedic.

‘What could?’ said the policeman.

‘The red spots. They could be petechiae. It’s the bursting of tiny blood vessels just under the skin and in the eyes. It can be brought on by asphyxia. He might well have been strangled.’ He gently tilted my head back and looked at my neck. ‘And there’s definitely some bruising around the larynx. That might be why he can’t speak.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said the policeman. ‘It’s a crime scene. Sam, get everyone back. You two,’ he said, pointing at Nicholas and Brendan over my head, ‘out of the car, now.’

It seemed like at least another half-hour before they lifted me out of the car, by which time some semblance of my voice had returned.

One of the paramedics insisted on going behind me to attach a large plastic brace round my neck in spite of me complaining that it hurt my windpipe at the front. Then they placed a board down my spine and strapped me to it. By this time the fire brigade had also arrived, and they proceeded to remove the whole roof of the car.

Meanwhile, in little more than a croak, I assured them that I was fine apart from my neck, which still hurt like hell.

‘You can’t be too careful,’ said one of the paramedics, although I believed they were being so, a sentiment clearly shared by the police in the shape of a plain-clothes detective who had been summoned to the scene by his uniformed colleagues.

He’d already tried to talk to me twice but had been sent away on both occasions by the ambulance staff as they had fitted me, first, with an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth, and then with a saline drip into a needle on my hand.

‘The extra fluid keeps your blood pressure up,’ the paramedic had explained, ‘and that helps deliver more oxygen to your brain.’

Finally, they were ready and I was lifted from the car and laid flat on a stretcher. I wouldn’t have minded so much if there hadn’t been such a large audience of young scantily clad party-goers, together with most of my family, including my mother and my father, all of them standing on the pavement shivering in the cool of the night.