Bloodline

I waved at them with my non-needled hand, much to the disapproval of the paramedic, who told me in no uncertain terms to lie perfectly still.

‘I’m all right,’ I said very croakily through the mask. ‘I really think I could walk.’

‘No chance,’ he replied. ‘Asphyxia patients can die hours later even if they seem wide awake and well. You stay put.’

I stayed put.

I was carried into the ambulance and the detective tried to climb in with me, but the medics were having none of it.

‘You can speak to him at the hospital,’ they said. ‘Once he’s stable.’

‘Which hospital?’

‘Addenbrooke’s, in Cambridge.’

One of the paramedics drove, while the other one connected me to blood pressure and heart monitors.

‘I feel fine now,’ I said. ‘It’s only my throat that hurts.’

‘Nevertheless, it’s better to get you checked out,’ he said, clipping wires to sticky pads on my chest. ‘Don’t want you dropping down dead on us now, do we?’

No, I thought, we did not.

‘You just relax and let us do the worrying.’

I wasn’t particularly worried, not about my health anyway. I was far more worried about who would want to kill me, and why.

‘So did you see who attacked you?’ asked the plain-clothes policeman, who had introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Perry.

‘No,’ I replied in my now familiar croak.

We were in a curtained-off cubicle of the accident and emergency department at Addenbrooke’s hospital, me lying on an examination couch and him sitting next to it on a chair.

‘Was the car locked when you arrived at it?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But I suppose I don’t really know. I remember the car’s indicator lights flashing when I pushed the unlock button on the key, but it’s an old car, and it does that whether it’s locked or not. I know because I’ve left it unlocked outside my flat before now.’

‘But you definitely had the keys with you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They were in my coat pocket.’

‘And was the person already in the car before you got in?’

I tried to think back.

‘I would say so, yes. I don’t remember hearing any of the other doors open.’ But, in truth, my memory of the incident was hazy in places. The hospital doctor had said it might be. Oxygen starvation, it seemed, caused funny effects in the brain. It was why he wouldn’t let me go home yet.

So much for my relatively early night.

I was wide awake at two o’clock in the morning, still dressed in my party gear minus jacket and tie, answering endless questions.

‘Why do you think someone would want to kill you?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I replied. It was the question I had been asking myself for the past three hours, and I hadn’t yet come up with any sensible answers. Was it something to do with Clare’s suicide, or Toby Woodley’s murder? Or had it merely been a botched attempt to steal my car?

Somehow, I doubted that.

For a start, my Ford was very old and hardly worth stealing and strangling the driver just to steal a car seemed rather excessive.

‘Did you find a rope?’ I asked.

‘So it was a rope?’ he said.

‘I’m not sure.’ I felt my neck. ‘It may have been some sort of material. Did you find anything?’

‘My men are searching the area. I haven’t heard yet what they found.’ He wrote something in his notebook. ‘Do you have any enemies?’ he asked, looking up at me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

But I thought of Mitchell Stacey. He was an enemy. And he knew my car.

The policeman must have read something in my face.

‘Yes?’ he asked. ‘Who is it?’

‘Someone did threaten me, that’s all.’

‘In what way?’

‘He told me that if I didn’t stay away from his wife, he’d kill me. But I don’t really believe that he meant he would actually kill me. It was just a figure of speech.’

‘And when was this?’

I worked it out. ‘Eight days ago, at Newmarket.’

‘And have you stayed away from his wife since then?’ asked the policeman in a deadpan voice.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well... I bumped into her on Tuesday but it was an accident. We didn’t do anything, if that’s what you mean. We hardly even spoke.’

‘And does the lady’s husband know you saw her on Tuesday?’

I thought back to my encounter with Mitchell in the Stratford races car park. ‘Yes. He knows all right. He was there.’

‘I’ll need his name, sir.’

‘I’m sure he wouldn’t have done it,’ I said. But someone had. My throat still had the bruises to prove it.

‘His name?’ The chief inspector persisted.

‘Mitchell Stacey,’ I said. ‘He’s a racehorse trainer. He and his wife live in East Ilsley, near Newbury.’

I gave him the full address and he wrote it down in his notebook.

‘And is he the only irate husband who has threatened you recently?’

‘There’s no need for irony, Chief Inspector,’ I said. ‘And, yes, he’s the only one.’

‘I also need your full name and address. For the record.’

‘Mark Joseph Shillingford,’ I said, and I gave him the address of my flat in Edenbridge. He wrote it down.

‘Shillingford?’ he said. ‘Unusual name. Not related to that girl that killed herself, are you?’

‘She was my sister,’ I said. ‘My twin sister.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Do you follow horse racing at all, Chief Inspector?’