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.
I wish.
‘No,’ I said, but I was only guessing at what was or was not a lethal dose because I’d never actually tried to kill anyone with morphine.
DC Filippos should have asked Dr Harold Shipman, I mused. As one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, Shipman had used morphine overdoses to kill at least two hundred and fifty people in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and he remains the only doctor in the history of British medicine ever to have been convicted of murdering his own patients.
‘There’s more of it in her bag,’ shouted a man. ‘Look!’
I did look, up from my horizontal position. The man was one of the group standing around me and he was holding up another fully loaded syringe that he’d removed from my orange Sainsbury’s carrier.
‘Please leave that alone, sir,’ DC Filippos said, without making any impression on him whatsoever. Instead, the man went on waving the syringe around high above his head so that everyone could see it.
‘Naloxone,’ I said.
‘What?’ asked the policeman, leaning down close to my face.
‘That syringe contains naloxone,’ I repeated. ‘Antidote to morphine. Inject Forrester with it.’
He seemed to dither, looking back and forth from the syringe in the man’s hand to my face. I had clearly given the young detective a serious dilemma. For the first time since I’d known him, DC Filippos obviously didn’t know what to do.
‘Inject the naloxone into Rupert Forrester,’ I said again. ‘It will counteract the effect of the morphine.’
‘Inject it where?’ he said.
Intravenous was best but it could also be administered into a muscle.
‘Anywhere will do. Stick it into his arm or his leg.’
He hesitated.
But so would I have done in his position. He only knew that the second syringe contained naloxone because I’d told him so, and I was the person who had caused the medical crisis in the first place. He only had my word for it that the second syringe would lessen the impact of the morphine, and not simply reinforce it, maybe even enough to kill.
Fortunately for the policeman, he didn’t have to make the decision because at that point two ambulance paramedics arrived in their green uniforms.
I knew them. The same pair had collected me from Cheltenham Police Station the previous November, when my blood sugar had been too low.
I sat up and watched as the paramedics set to work on Rupert Forrester, removing his bow tie and opening his white shirt wide.
One of them glanced in my direction.
‘Hello, Dr Rankin,’ he said.
‘Hi, Derek,’ I replied.
It all seemed surreal.
‘He’s been injected with morphine,’ DC Filippos said.
‘Give him naloxone,’ I added.
They should have some of their own, I thought. Naloxone was also the antidote for a heroin overdose and ambulance crews were all too used to dealing with those.
‘How much morphine?’ Derek asked.
‘Forty milligrams,’ I said.
He sucked air in through his teeth in a manner that worried me. Maybe forty milligrams was a lethal dose after all. I hadn’t actually meant to kill Forrester, just make him go to sleep.
Primum non nocere – Primarily, do no harm.
Not actually part of the Hippocratic Oath, as some believed but, nevertheless, a maxim to which all doctors were expected to adhere.
Had I done harm? Permanent harm?
Derek dug into his large red medical kit and pulled out a sterilised pack containing a syringe and a hypodermic needle. He filled the syringe with naloxone from a small bottle and then injected the drug into a vein on the back of Forrester’s hand.
The results were remarkable.
One minute Rupert Forrester had been lying comatose on the dais, the next he was sitting up seemingly fully aware of what was going on around him.
The big question that no one had asked yet was why.
Why was I here?
Why had I stabbed Forrester with the needle?
Why had I injected him with morphine?
Why? Why? Why?
Those questions had been set aside due to concern over his welfare but, with him now seemingly well on the way to recovery, they became the main focus.
Not that I was yet in a fit state to answer.
Two more policemen arrived, this time in uniform, and they moved the crowd back from around the dais, asking them to return to their places at the tables so that a list could be made of their names prior to them being sent home.
There was anger too, with all of it directed firmly in my direction.
‘Inconsiderate bitch,’ I heard someone say.
I suppose I should be sorry for ruining their evening – the Injured Jockeys Fund was close to my heart too – but the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.
One of the major effects of cocaine was that the world outside one’s ‘self’ became irrelevant. Me, me, me was the mantra of the cocaine addict, and to hell with everyone else.
Both Rupert Forrester and I were still sitting on the dais together with the paramedics and DC Filippos, while the other two policemen went to the tables to start taking down details of the guests.
And into this bizarre scene walked Big Biceps, no doubt arriving to drive his boss home.
I happened to be looking at the main door as he came through it.
Even the sight of him made the hairs on the back of my hands stand up in fear. But he hadn’t seen me because DC Filippos was still crouched between us.
I watched as he asked something of a man sitting on the table nearest to the door. Then he looked over towards Rupert Forrester, who was now being helped up onto a chair by the paramedics. Big Biceps clearly hadn’t seen the two uniformed policemen who had made their way to the back of the room.
He walked over towards the dais and now the hairs all over my body were standing up as the adrenalin teemed into my veins. My caveman flight-or-fight reflex was running at full power.
‘That man tried to kill me earlier this evening,’ I said clearly and quietly to DC Filippos, hardly able to contain an urge to stand up and run.
The detective turned and looked, and only at that point did Big Biceps notice me sitting there.
The colour drained out of his face like sand out of an egg timer, from top to bottom, only faster, and he stumbled.
He looked quickly from me to Forrester and back again, and then he saw the two uniformed policemen.
He turned for the door and ran.
‘Stop that man!’ shouted DC Filippos loudly, leaping to his feet.
The two uniformed officers were too far away but still Big Biceps didn’t make it. Three men from the table near the door stood up and blocked his way. Their evening had already been ruined and they were in no mood for forgiveness.
The man turned round and round twice, looking for an alternative escape route, and then aimed for the nearest door to the kitchen but he was too late, far too late.
DC Filippos caught him from behind when he was still several yards away from it, dragging him down to the floor.
But he wasn’t giving up that easily.
Big Biceps punched the young detective full in the face and threw him off as if he were a child, before starting again for the door to the kitchen.
By now the other two officers had responded and, between them, they managed to manhandle Big Biceps back to the floor.
It took all three policemen to cuff Big Biceps’s hands behind his back but he was still not giving up, kicking out at them as they dragged him over to one of the robust-looking central-heating radiators to which they shackled him using a second set of handcuffs. Even then, he tried to escape by attempting unsuccessfully to pull the radiator off the wall.
When the officers eventually stood up they received a rousing round of applause from all the guests in the room who had witnessed it all. More entertaining, I thought, than listening to the racecourse managing director.
I, meanwhile, had been watching Rupert Forrester’s face, searching for some reaction to the fact that his muscular sidekick was captured, but there was only hopelessness and despair written into his features.
‘Now,’ said DC Filippos, dabbing with a handkerchief at a trickle of blood coming from his nose. ‘What the hell is this all about?’