MY CAREFULLY CONSTRUCTED plan was unravelling, and doing so very quickly.
I had fully expected the four youngsters to admit to their collective foolishness, to be full of remorse, and then for Patrick Hogg, KC, to explain how they could try and prevent themselves being sent to prison for fraud.
But I had not accounted for Gary’s explosive temper, or his knife, and we had suddenly gone way beyond that.
Holding the knife in his right hand, he went behind Amanda, wrapped his left arm around her from behind, and lifted her over the back of the sofa into a standing position. And he had the blade of his knife against her throat.
James stood up.
“Sit down,” Gary screamed at him.
“Come on, Gary,” James said, still standing. “Stop it. Let Amanda go.”
But Gary took no notice of his friend. And he was now looking somewhat manic, with the whites of his eyes showing large. I was worried that he had lost all reason and was about to do something really reckless.
Amanda whimpered, her eyes also wide, but in her case from terror.
“It’s all right, darling,” I said, looking straight at her in the hope that she might even believe me. “Just stay calm and do what he says. Make no sudden moves.”
She stared back at me, but with a mixture of understanding and sorrow.
I wondered why she had become mixed up in all of this.
Georgina, meanwhile, was moaning and hyperventilating, by now almost lying horizontally across the sofa.
Patrick Hogg, who had so far said nothing, seemed the calmest of us all.
“The maximum sentence for wounding with intent is life imprisonment,” he said slowly. “And under English law, wounding means simply to break the skin, even with the slightest of cuts.”
The prospect of a long prison sentence didn’t seem to have any deterrent effect on Gary, who went on holding Amanda, and his knife remained precariously close to her neck.
“I’m leaving now,” he said, backing towards the door. “And I’m taking Amanda with me. So don’t try and stop me.”
“The maximum sentence for false imprisonment is also life,” Patrick said, almost matter-of-factly.
“Shut up!” Gary shouted at him.
“I’m only telling you what will happen to you if you leave this room. Where would you go? Do you think your parents might help you? I doubt it. If my son had kidnapped someone at knifepoint, I’d immediately turn him into the police. What do you think that would do to your parents? And to any future relationship for you with them?”
“Shut up!” Gary yelled at him again.
But Patrick went on talking to him, slowly and distinctly and without emotion, as I imagine he often did to a jury.
“The law is very unforgiving,” he said. “Trust me—I know. I’ve been working in the courts for almost thirty years. If you walk out of here now, the police will find you, and because you are armed, they will come hunting for you with guns. And they won’t stop looking until they either arrest you or kill you. So put the knife down, Gary, and let Amanda go.”
It sounded like very reasonable advice to me, but Gary was having none of it. He was clearly no longer in a fit state to process any logical thoughts. Instead, he continued to back up towards the door to the hall, pulling Amanda along with him.
“Leave my girl alone,” Darren said suddenly, standing up and moving purposefully towards them.
“Get back!” Gary shouted at him. “Or I’ll kill her.” He moved the knife over her throat.
Darren took another step forward.
“I mean it,” Gary shouted, his manic eyes now wider than ever.
At that precise moment, none of us doubted him.
Darren stopped moving and stood still, about three feet away.
Gary inched backwards towards the closed door. He glanced down behind him, as if looking for the door handle.
As he moved his hand holding the knife down and backwards, away from Amanda’s neck, in order to open the door, Amanda abruptly sat down onto the floor, slipping out of Gary’s grasp.
As Gary bent down to grab her again, Darren leapt at him.
“I told you to leave my girl alone,” he shouted as he aimed a punch at Gary’s jaw.
But even as the blow landed, Gary’s right arm was already swinging round in an arc, and he stabbed Darren in the upper left abdomen, angling the knife up under his ribcage.
The whole thing had seemed to occur almost in slow motion, but there was nothing slow about the way blood started pouring out of the wound in Darren’s body.
Within seconds, the front of his white T-shirt was saturated bright red, and a steady stream was already cascading from it, down onto the wooden sitting-room floor.
Amanda screamed.
For a couple of seconds, Gary seemed transfixed by what he had done, staring down at the ever-increasing pool of scarlet liquid on the floor, but then he turned and ran, first out into the hall, then on out through the front door, leaving it wide open.
I rushed forward to where Darren had now sunk to his knees, with Amanda supporting him.
“Lie him down,” I ordered. “We need to apply pressure.”
I pulled off my own polo shirt, made it into a ball, and then held it very tightly against the wound. Darren moaned as I did so, from the pain.
“Sorry,” I said to him, pushing hard against him. “It needs to be done to stop the bleeding. Otherwise you’ll bleed to death.”
Amanda and I laid him down, and I used my weight to push down even harder. He stared up at me with wide, frightened eyes, and with good reason.
The initial rate of bleeding suggested that the knife had punctured something critical, perhaps his liver or one of the blood vessels connected to it. Without the pressure, he would bleed out in a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds. But what he also needed now, and urgently, was proper medical help.
“James,” I shouted, turning my head towards him. “Call an ambulance. And the police.”
He hesitated, instead looking out the sitting room window towards the gateway onto the road through which his friend was driving away at high speed.
“James, do it now!”
“I’ve already called them,” Patrick said. “They’re on their way.”
He still held his phone, and I suddenly realised that he had been filming everything that had been going on. He saw me looking at him and shrugged.
“Evidence,” he said. “Sorry. Force of habit.”
Amanda kneeled down beside Darren and stroked his forehead.
“You’re my hero,” she said to him.
He tried to smile at her, but he was clearly in great pain and in shock. His face was very pale.
“But he will be all right, won’t he?” Amanda asked, looking across at me, searching for some reassurance.
I didn’t like to tell her that it depended on how long the ambulance took to arrive, but she could probably read that in my face.
I knew that, in spite of the external pressure, Darren would still be bleeding internally, and much would depend on how much blood he was losing into his abdominal cavity. If it was too much and it couldn’t be replaced in time, it might result in not enough oxygen getting to his organs, and his body would begin to shut down.
I looked down at him.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m cold,” he said. “Yet I’m sweating.”
I thought sweating was not a good sign.
Keeping the pressure on Darren’s abdomen with one hand, I reached for his wrist with the other. His pulse seemed strong enough, but it was very rapid, and I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. I was just thankful that there was a pulse at all.
“Where’s the bloody ambulance?” I asked of no one in particular.
It had probably only been two or three minutes since Darren had been stabbed, but it felt more like half an hour.
Indeed, time in that room seemed to have almost stopped altogether.
James went on staring out the window, perhaps contemplating the disastrous mess that he was now part of, while Amanda remained kneeling on the floor next to Darren, stroking his forehead and constantly telling him how sorry she was.
And Georgina had recovered her composure.
“I think I’ll put the kettle on,” she said, standing up from the sofa as if nothing had happened and there wasn’t a young man quite likely bleeding to death on her sitting-room floor. It was as if she had blocked out everything.
She didn’t quite have to step over Darren’s prostrate body to reach the door on her way to the kitchen, but it was a close-run thing.
Meanwhile, Patrick continued filming.
We all heard the ambulance’s siren long before it arrived.
“James,” I said, “go out and meet them. To make sure they get the right house.”
He didn’t move but went on looking out the window.
“James!”
He slowly turned his head to face me, but there was a rather disturbing blankness in his eyes, as if he didn’t care about anything anymore.
“Go outside and meet the ambulance,” I said. “Show them where to come.”
With clear reluctance, he dragged himself off the back of the armchair on which he’d been perching, and walked out of the house, hardly giving Darren a second glance.
I looked down.
If anything, Darren had gone even paler, and I felt we were getting close to losing him.
“Stay with us, Darren,” I said urgently. “Keep awake. Don’t go to sleep.”
Amanda looked up at me with increasing dread, and perhaps for the first time, I realised how much she cared for him.
The siren came much closer, filling the house with noise. Then it stopped.
Two ambulance men in green uniforms came running in, each carrying a large red backpack. They went down on their knees, one on each side of the patient, while Amanda stood up. I remained where I was, still pushing down on Darren with my ball of polo shirt.
“He’s been stabbed in the abdomen,” I said. “Initially there was a lot of blood, but I’ve been applying pressure now for about ten minutes.”
“Is the knife still in him?” one of them asked as he started removing equipment from his backpack.
“No,” I replied.
“Do you know if he has any other injuries? Was he hit with something, or was there anything else done to him that could have broken any bones? Or did he hit his head on the floor when going down.”
I shook my own head. “No. Nothing like that. Just the single stab wound.”
“Right. You keep up the pressure on that while we assess him.”
He slipped a blood-pressure cuff over Darren’s right arm and placed a large clip on his index finger while his colleague put a cannula into the back of his other hand.
“How much blood did he lose?” asked the other one.
“What you can see.”
But Darren was lying in most of it.
“More or less than if you’d broken a bottle of red wine on the floor?”
“About the same, maybe a bit more. But that’s only externally. There’s probably quite a lot more inside him.”
“Eighty over forty-seven,” one of them said, reading it off the blood-pressure monitor. “Too low. And oxygen saturation is less than ninety per cent. He urgently needs some intravenous fluid.”
I watched as he reached into his bag and pulled out a large transparent bag of liquid, with a plastic tube attached.
“Saline,” he said, connecting the tube to the cannula in Darren’s hand. “Not as good as whole blood, but it’s all we’ve got.”
He held the bag up and squeezed it to speed up the transfer of the liquid into Darren.
“Now it’s time to blue-light this chap to hospital. He’ll need immediate surgery to stop the internal bleeding.”
His colleague went out and returned with a stretcher, a high-tech black and yellow contraption on wheels, which he positioned alongside Darren. The two ambulance men then moved so that one was at his head, the other at his feet.
“All right, ease the pressure slightly as we lift him. One, two, three—lift.”
Grabbing his shoulders and his ankles, they lifted Darren easily onto the stretcher.
“Thank you,” said one paramedic to me. “I’ll take over the pressure now.”
I lifted my saturated polo shirt off Darren. Blood immediately started to leak out of the wound, but not as fast as before. The paramedic replaced my shirt with a large sterile pad, to which he applied pressure with a blue-gloved hand.
Far more hygienic.
The other one hung the saline drip on a pole attached to the stretcher, before placing a bright red cellular blanket across Darren’s legs and feet. I wondered if ambulance blankets were coloured red so that you couldn’t see the blood.
Together the two men wheeled the stretcher quickly out of the house, and then up the ramp into the ambulance, while Amanda and I followed with the rest of their equipment.
“Where are you taking him?” I asked the one who slammed shut the back doors of the ambulance and ran forward to drive.
“The nearest emergency department is at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading.”
I knew it well.
“Will he live?” I asked him quietly so Amanda wouldn’t hear.
“I don’t know,” he said, shooting me a forlorn glance. “But we’ll do our best.”
He gunned the engine and they were away, the siren again blaring loudly.
And at that point, to further complicate matters, the police finally arrived.