Hands down, p.29
Hands Down, page 29
‘You are under arrest on suspicion of offences contrary to the 1968 Firearms Act,’ one of them said formally. ‘You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
Another of them grabbed my hands and roughly bent them round behind my back, securing them one above the other in stiff, painful handcuffs. The pain in my right hand was excruciating.
‘It’s not me you should be arresting,’ I shouted at them angrily. ‘It was he who shot me. Look at my right hand.’
They didn’t seem to take any notice but, in fact, they handcuffed all three of us. Meanwhile, one of the other officers knelt on my back and searched through my pockets, finding first Valance’s mobile phone and then the Webley revolver, which caused much excitement. Both the phone and the gun were placed carefully into an evidence plastic bag and carried away.
But Asquith wasn’t finished yet.
‘There’s a friend of mine still lying somewhere in the castle,’ he shouted. ‘He’s had his skull crushed by this one.’ He jerked his head towards Chico. ‘They are both murderers.’
‘It’s all right, sir,’ one of the policeman said to him. ‘You are now perfectly safe. We have both of them in custody.’
‘Then get me out of these damn handcuffs,’ Asquith demanded loudly. ‘I’m the victim here, not the criminal. I have to tell you that I am a personal friend of the Chief Constable.’
I was lifted to my feet by two large policemen, one holding firmly on to each arm.
‘Please don’t listen to that man,’ I said urgently to the one on my left. ‘I don’t care if he’s a personal friend of the Pope, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop of Canterbury, he’s still lying. Check him for gunshot residue. Whatever he says, he is definitely the baddy here. He shot me. I only had the gun in my pocket because I managed to take it from him.’
I’m not sure if he believed me or not, probably not, but he spoke to the other officers nevertheless, and they didn’t remove Asquith’s handcuffs.
I turned again to the policeman on my left. ‘But he was right about one thing. There is another man in the castle and he desperately needs some medical attention. I have already called for an ambulance.’ I told him where to find Valance but he seemed reluctant to pass on the information.
‘We have to wait here,’ he said. ‘Until we get the all-clear to go in from the chopper.’
‘But why?’ I said. ‘Other than the injured man, there’s no one else in there.’
‘And why should I believe you?’ he replied cynically, taking a firmer grip on my arm.
‘Because I’m telling you the truth.’
He laughed. ‘I’d be a rich man if I had a fiver for every time I’ve been told that by some lying villain.’
But did I really care about Valance? I suppose it might make things easier for us now if he lived, rather than if he died, but I wouldn’t cry about it either way.
Several more police vehicles arrived, plus the ambulance I had called, all with a plethora of more flashing blue lights.
Quite a crowd of locals, alerted by the sound of the hovering helicopter, had turned out to watch the action, although the police were trying to get them to move further back by unrolling blue-and-white tape everywhere.
Standing among the onlookers, I could clearly see Simon Paulson, who’d only had to step outside his front door. Goodness knows what he was thinking as he watched both Harry Asquith and me being frogmarched away with our wrists firmly cuffed behind our backs and a burly policeman holding on to each of our arms.
My pair took me down the sloping path, out through the little gate at the bottom, before escorting me along the road to a police car.
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘I need the ambulance.’
‘Why?’ one of them asked.
‘As I’ve been trying to tell you, I’ve been shot.’
‘Where?’
‘In the right hand.’
Without letting go of my arms, they both leaned round my back to have a close look at my hand.
‘It won’t kill you,’ one of them said unsympathetically. ‘Get in the car. You can see the medic at the police station.’
‘Please,’ I said with a considerable degree of pleading. ‘Please move the handcuffs round in front of my body. My hand really hurts and I really don’t want to have to sit on it.’
For a moment, I thought they weren’t going to, but then one of the policemen unlocked the handcuffs and moved my hands round in front of my body before securing them again with my right hand on top and my left underneath.
‘No funny business, mind,’ he said.
‘No funny business,’ I agreed. ‘Thank you.’
I climbed into the back seat of the car, and in the glow from its interior light, I had my first real look at the damage. The bullet had just caught the fleshy part of my palm beneath my little finger. There was a lot of dried blood around the wound, and some of it was still oozing out, but, overall, I’d been very lucky that the bullet had missed all the bones. Just an inch or two further over and the .455 slug could have easily taken my hand off completely.
I went hot and cold at the thought of it.
As Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell might have said: ‘To lose one hand, Mr Halley, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’
One of the policemen climbed into the back next to me, while the other one drove.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked as we sped past my Discovery, still parked in the town marketplace.
‘North Yorkshire Police HQ. In Northallerton.’
Northallerton.
What had I recently heard about Northallerton?
I remembered. That was where the Friarage Hospital is.
‘Stop the car,’ I suddenly said loudly.
‘Why?’ asked the driver over his shoulder.
‘There’s another victim. Back in Leyburn Road. He also needs to go to hospital.’
The driver didn’t stop but he slowed slightly.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
I told them about Marcus Capes and his broken collarbone, and that he was waiting in his bedsitting room for me to arrange his journey to hospital. I didn’t go into all the details of how his collarbone had become broken. There would be plenty of time for that later.
The car didn’t stop but the policeman next to me used his personal radio to pass on a message that a second ambulance was needed to go to 42 Leyburn Road, Middleham.
Satisfied that I had done everything I could, I leaned my head back against the headrest and watched through the window as the lights went by. Everything would surely get sorted out just as soon as I arrived at the police headquarters.
Wouldn’t it?
* * *
The most frustrating thing about being locked in a police cell is that you have no idea of what is going on elsewhere; no knowledge of what lies are being told by others and no control over if and when you can tell someone what really happened, whether or not they would believe you anyway.
When I arrived at the North Yorkshire Police Headquarters in Northallerton, I was taken into their custody suite still in handcuffs, and made to stand in front of the custody sergeant’s desk.
‘Reason for arrest,’ he asked.
The policeman on my right answered him. ‘Being found in possession of a firearm in contravention of Section 5 of the Firearms Act 1968.’
The custody sergeant tapped the information into his computer and then he looked up at me. ‘I am authorising your detention under Section 37 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Do you have anything to say?’
‘Yes, I do,’ I replied. ‘I only had the gun in my pocket because I had just taken it away from the man who had used it to shoot me.’ I held up my right hand as best I could in the cuffs. ‘It is Harry Asquith you should be charging not me.’
‘You are not being charged,’ the custody sergeant replied cuttingly. ‘You are only being detained for interview. You can explain everything to the interviewing officer in due course. In the meantime, I will arrange for your hand to be seen by the FME.’
‘FME?’ I asked.
‘The Forensic Medical Examiner.’
They emptied my pockets.
My wallet, a tube of mints and my reading glasses, together with my belt and my wristwatch, were placed in a plastic tray for safe keeping. They then gave me a full pat-down search. Only when they were satisfied that I wasn’t concealing any other weapons did they finally remove the handcuffs.
Next, I was photographed and fingerprinted, both my old fingers and the new ones, and then a cotton swab was scraped along the inside of my cheek to obtain a DNA profile. I didn’t bother to explain to them that the DNA of my left hand would be totally different. Finally I had both hands swabbed for gunshot residue, of which I knew there would worryingly be plenty.
When all was complete, I was taken back to the desk.
‘Right, put him in cell seven,’ the custody sergeant said to my escort,
‘Hold on a minute,’ I complained. ‘Don’t I have the right to make a phone call?’
‘No, you don’t,’ said the sergeant, ‘but you do have the right to have one person informed that you are here.’
I asked him to inform Admiral Roland, and I gave him Charles’s number. The sergeant dialled it straight away on the phone on his desk.
‘And please tell him that I won’t be coming back tonight to collect my dog and that, if my wife calls him, just to tell her that I’ve lost my phone.’
The custody sergeant raised his eyebrows a tad at that last comment, but he passed the message on to Charles nevertheless. Then he listened for a moment. ‘The admiral has asked whether you want him to organize a solicitor.’
I didn’t really believe I needed a solicitor because I hadn’t done anything wrong. But, so far, nothing else had quite panned out as I had expected. Better to have and not need, I thought, than to need and not have – just like those pesky nuclear weapons.
‘That would be great,’ I said, and that message was passed on as well.
‘Right,’ said the sergeant, putting down his phone. ‘Cell seven.’
‘Where are the others?’ I asked.
‘Never you mind.’
And so I had been marched off unceremoniously down the corridor to cell number seven, thrust inside, and then the cell door had been slammed shut behind me with a great metallic clang.
It was no wonder that Chico had referred to prison as ‘the slammer’.
If the noise was designed to intimidate the inmate, it was working.
38
After a while, maybe half an hour or so of me staring blankly at the sickly cream cell walls – I had no way of telling the actual duration – the cell door was opened again and a young woman came in. Sadly, she also brought with her one of the burly male constables, who stood on guard by the open door.
‘I’m Dr Grossi,’ the young woman said with a slightly detectable Italian accent. ‘I’ve come to look at your hand.’
And about time too, I thought, but I refrained from saying so. I needed to be on good terms with this medic if she was going to stitch me up.
However, she only had to take one look before telling her chaperone that I needed to go to hospital for treatment. He, in turn, put his head out of the door and shouted some instructions down the corridor. He then returned and resumed his position on guard by the door.
‘I tried to tell the custody sergeant that it was bad,’ I said. ‘But he wouldn’t listen.’
‘The damage is worse than I can repair here. You need to be seen by a plastic surgeon.’
I laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘I used to have a plastic hand.’
She looked somewhat confused so I asked her to roll up my left sleeve, revealing the ugly zigzag join on my forearm.
‘The transplant was three years ago,’ I said.
Dr Grossi became suddenly far more interested in my left hand than in my damaged right.
She asked me all the usual questions about how well it could feel and how strong was the grip, but then she asked something that was far more erudite.
‘Does your soul inhabit your new hand yet?’
I looked at her. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.’
‘Do you think of it as being you? Or is it still somebody else, only attached to you?’
I thought back to what Chico had said just eleven days ago when I’d collected him from Banbury station: You’re walking around with some dead geezer’s hand sewn onto your arm. I’d told him at the time that the hand had become totally a part of me and that I didn’t even think about it as being different, but that wasn’t actually true.
Even when I had been fingerprinted, only an hour previously, I had looked at it as an alien being and wouldn’t have been much surprised to see it wander off on its own, like Thing from the Addams Family movies.
‘That’s a very good question,’ I said. ‘And I’m still working on the answer.’
‘I have been doing some research,’ the doctor said. ‘Asking transplant patients how they view their new organ, and the psychology of accepting that it is now fully part of them. Of course, it’s much easier to accept for those who can’t see what has been transplanted, like those receiving a new kidney or even a replacement heart. And the problems are most profound for those few people who’ve been given a new face. Do they become the person they now see each morning in the bathroom mirror or do they remain the person behind the mask?’
‘And what’s the answer?’
Now she laughed. ‘There is no simple answer. Everyone is different, but I do know that those who accept a transplant as being part of them entirely do much better in the long run, at least psychologically.’
I could have easily chatted to Dr Grossi for very much longer, but she turned towards the door to go.
‘I will arrange for you to go to hospital to have that wound repaired.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Could you also arrange for me to be given some immunosuppressant drugs? I have none of my usual ones with me and I can already feel my transplant beginning to itch.’
She smiled at me. ‘It’s not your transplant, Mr Halley, it’s your hand.’
* * *
It took two hours for a plastic surgeon at the Friarage Hospital to repair the damage to my right hand, all of it done under local anaesthetic with a surgically masked policeman watching every move from the far corner of the operating theatre – probably there to ensure that I didn’t conceal a scalpel about my person.
When it was all over, I ended up with my repaired right hand being strapped to my upper-left chest.
‘It needs to stay like that for at least the next week,’ said the surgeon. ‘Keeping it elevated should prevent any excessive swelling of the tissues.’
So I was, once more, single-handed, albeit, this time, on the other side.
I was then taken from the hospital back to the custody suite at police headquarters and, if I thought everything would have been sorted out by then, I was much mistaken.
‘Cell seven,’ said the custody sergeant to my escort as we arrived.
‘When do I get to be interviewed?’ I asked.
‘All in good time,’ he said. ‘We are authorized to keep you here until nine o’clock tomorrow evening.’
‘But I want to speak to a senior officer now.’
‘All in good time,’ the sergeant said, again unhelpfully. ‘Cell seven.’
And so I ended up staring at the same sickly cream cell walls, wondering what pack of lies Harry Asquith was spinning to his chum the Chief Constable, and fearing that I might never get out of here, and certainly not in time to pick up Marina and Saskia from Heathrow at five to six on Friday afternoon.
* * *
I was finally interviewed at eleven o’clock on Thursday morning after a long, difficult, sleepless night in cell seven.
As the local anaesthetic had gradually worn off, my right hand had started throbbing mercilessly and my left hand had continued to itch because the hospital had been unable to provide my usual cocktail of all six immunosuppressant medications.
To take my mind off the pain, I had spent most of the hours thinking about what Dr Grossi had said.
How could I expect Marina to accept my new hand as a fully integrated part of me if, deep down, I didn’t accept it myself?
In the glow from the ever-on light in the cell ceiling, I had found myself looking closely at this incomer, studying it, and, eventually, I started talking to it.
‘So, do you want to be part of me?’ I asked it. ‘Or would you rather be rotting underground in a box, along with the rest of your former owner?’
Unsurprisingly, the hand didn’t answer me directly, and I felt rather foolish. But the die had been cast.
My left hand and I communicated back and forth together for the rest of the night, me asking it question after question and it, point-blank, refusing to answer any of them out loud. But, in fact, it did answer them all in its own way.
It never shied away from my inquisition, never once hid from reality.
I studied the surface of my new manus in fine detail, noting every blemish, every crease, every wrinkle. I flexed the fingers straight and then curled them into a fist, and I rotated the thumb, marvelling at how the skin so readily stretched and relaxed. I also noticed a tiny white scar at the base of the wrist and wondered how it had come about.
By the time the small, high-up cell window turned from dark to light with the coming of the dawn, my hand and I were far better acquainted than we had ever been, with a much stronger mental bond, at least on my side.
A while later, the door of the cell was opened and a young uniformed policeman brought in a cup of tea and a toasted bacon sandwich for my breakfast.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Seven o’clock,’ he replied.
There seemed no point in asking him anything else. I would simply have to wait.
