Bloodline

Another couple came out of the pub and started to walk towards us.

‘Help!’ I croaked at them. ‘Please help me.’

They stopped.

‘Call an ambulance,’ I said, tears streaming down my face.

I again ended up in Addenbrooke’s accident and emergency department, just as I had the previous Friday. But, this time, I wasn’t left alone in a cubicle to recover. I was rushed into a treatment room where I was worked on by a whole team of medics, and they seemed to be getting more concerned as time went on.

I was placed on my left side with my head and shoulders slightly raised, and I was wearing what the doctors had referred to as a positive flow oxygen mask strapped over my face.

But the mask didn’t seem to be doing much good. My breathing was now so laboured and shallow that I was hardly taking in any air at all with each breath and I felt light-headed, and close to unconsciousness.

Was this how I would die?

One of the medical staff came up towards my head and into my view.

‘Can you hear me?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘You’ve broken a couple of ribs,’ he said. ‘One of them has punctured your left lung and it has collapsed. We’re trying to remove the air from inside your chest cavity so that your lung can re-inflate on its own.’

I tried to speak but I didn’t seem to have enough breath.

‘Don’t talk,’ he said. ‘Concentrate on your breathing. I don’t particularly want to have to put a tube down your throat as it may cause more problems. Our main concern is a rapid build-up of fluid in and around your right lung as well, but we are doing our best to remove it.’ He smiled a wry smile. I wasn’t sure if that was encouraging or not.

One lung collapsed and a build-up of fluid in the other. No wonder it felt like I was drowning.

I desperately wanted to ask him about Emily. When I’d been lifted into the ambulance she had still been on the ground being attended to by some paramedics and I was dreadfully worried because I hadn’t seen her move since I’d first found her.

The doctor resumed his attempts to remove the fluid from my lungs and I went on breathing, albeit with increasingly rapid and shallow breaths.

I tried to take my mind off my immediate medical troubles by thinking back to what had happened in the pub car park.

There was no doubt in my mind that it had been a deliberate attempt to run us down. The driver of the car had made no effort to stop. In fact, quite the reverse. He had accelerated across the car park with his engine roaring, and had driven off at speed.

He must have been waiting for Emily and me to come out from dinner. He hadn’t put on his headlamps but there would have been enough ambient light for him to see us walking through the pub’s garden and across the car park.

How had he known we were there?

All I could think was that he must have followed us from the races.

But who knew I was at Huntingdon racecourse?

Anyone, I suppose, who’d listened to me either at the track or at home on the RacingTV channel, which had covered the meeting using my commentaries.

And Mitchell Stacey had definitely known.

His car had already gone from the space in the car park when Emily and I had come out to her Mercedes, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been waiting somewhere near the exit in order to follow us to the pub.

The doctor reappeared in my field of vision.

‘Right. Now we need you to sit up,’ he said. ‘To help the fluid drain.’

I hardly had the breath to move a single muscle and I needed the help of two burly male nurses just to swing my legs off the couch.

I was leaned forward onto a high table while the doctor inserted a tube into my back.

‘There,’ he said. ‘The fluid is now draining out of your chest and you’ll soon be feeling a lot better.’

As if by magic, my breathing improved dramatically over the next couple of minutes as three large bottlefuls of pinkish fluid were drained from my body.

Suddenly I began to believe that I might actually survive.

‘Is that better?’ asked the doctor from behind me.

I nodded. ‘Much,’ I gasped back through the oxygen mask.

‘Good. You were breathing for a time there with only about a tenth of one lung operational. If you’d arrived here just a couple of minutes later, you’d have been a goner.’

‘How about Emily?’ I asked quietly, almost as if I didn’t want to know.

‘Eh?’

‘How about Emily?’ I asked him again, this time more loudly. ‘The lady I was with.’

There was no answer.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

The doctor came round to face me.

‘I’m afraid she didn’t make it.’

20

I lay in the semi-darkness of a hospital room in utter despair.

It was my fault.

I should never have placed Emily in such danger.

It was true that I’d known her for only two days, and maybe there had been something of the ‘rebound’ about our coming together after my break-up from Sarah, but, even so soon, I truly felt that I’d finally met someone I would have been happy to live with, someone with whom to share the rest of my life.

And now she was gone. Snatched away in an instant.

Why?

It was me who should be dead, not her.