thinks that a good reference will help. I knew that it was common practice for poor employees to be given a flattering reference on condition they looked for a new job.
On this occasion, in each of their three written references, all four of the candidates were described as hard working, reliable, loyal and as honest as the day is long. It was my usual practice to call the third listed referee first as I had found that this would often be the weak link if deceit were afoot. By the end of the day I had discovered that only one of the four candidates was as sound as his references would imply. Even he was not squeaky clean, having had to leave his present employment reluctantly due to a minor assignation of the heart with the wife of a senior colleague. Of the others, one was just about all right while the other two had serious honesty problems. One of these was suspected of theft from other staff but the evidence was circumstantial, and the other had threatened to sue her boss for sexual harassment unless she was given a good reference.
I would write my report and leave the charity to make its own decision.
*
It was almost eight o’clock by the time I printed out the report for the charity and shut down my computer. Typing one-handed, indeed with only one finger, was one of the many annoyances of having a false hand. Not being able to massage the typing-induced ache in my right wrist was another.
I thought about food and decided that as soon as Marina arrived home we’d go out for a local Chinese. Meanwhile, I opened a bottle of red wine and flicked on the television.
I was gently snoozing in front of some magnificent wildlife images of life on the Nile when the buzzer from the front desk woke me.
‘Yes,’ I said, picking up the intercom phone from the wall next to the kitchen door.
‘You had better come down here, Mr Halley, at once,’ said Derek.
There was something about the tone of his voice that made me drop the intercom phone and rush for my door. I charged down the flights of concrete stairs to the lobby and was met there not by a complete disaster but by a pretty scary sight, nevertheless.
A very pale-looking Marina was half-sitting, half-lying on the sofa in the lobby, bleeding. She was wearing the light fawn suede coat I had given her for Christmas and it was never going to be the same again. The front was covered in red splodges.
‘Derek,’ I said, ‘go up to my flat, the door’s open, and fetch me a large bath towel from one of the bathrooms. Wet it first.’
He hesitated for a second.
‘Do it, please, Derek.’ The urgency in my voice cut through his indecision and he went up in the lift.
I sat down beside Marina who was staring at me with wide frightened eyes.
‘Fine mess you’ve got yourself into,’ I said with a smile.
‘Just the usual for a Friday night.’ She smiled back and I knew that she was fine on the inside. She was tough as well as smart. It was her beauty that worried me most. I could see that there were two places on her face from which the blood was flowing, one was a deep cut over her right eye and the other was a nasty split lower lip. Head wounds nearly always look worse than they are due to their profuse bleeding, but I could see that these two were bad enough for stitches and I hoped they wouldn’t leave scars.
Derek returned with not just one towel but with a whole armful.
‘Well done,’ I said. I took one and applied pressure with it to the deep cut in Marina’s eyebrow. It must have hurt like hell but she didn’t flinch or complain one bit. She took another of the towels and held it to her lip, which had already started to swell quite badly.
‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I think you are going to need some stitches in these cuts. We’re going to have to go and find a doctor.’ I had one in mind.
‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’ she mumbled through the towel.
‘You got mugged,’ I said. ‘What did they take?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You were lucky,’ I said.
‘You call this lucky!’ She almost laughed. ‘But I wasn’t being robbed. I was being given a message.’
‘What? What message?’
She removed the towel from her mouth and said, ‘Tell your boyfriend to leave things be. Tell him to leave it well alone. Savvy?’
Wow, I thought, I really must have touched a nerve at Sandown yesterday.
Derek hovered around us and asked if he should telephone for the police or for an ambulance.
‘No ambulance,’ I said. An ambulance meant casualty departments and a long wait to be stitched by the duty nurse who, on a Friday night, would be busy with her needle and thread on the fighting drunks. Speed rather than accuracy would be her tenet. No thanks.
‘Did you see him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He grabbed me from behind. Anyway, he was wearing a scarf or a balaclava.’
Police would mean masses of time and endless interviews with no real chance of catching the non-mugger. He wouldn’t have set this up to get caught.
‘No police,’ I said. ‘Come on, my darling, let’s get you cleaned up and into the car. Time to go and see my doctor.’
‘No, not yet. I want to go upstairs first.’
I picked up the rapidly reddening towels and went to take her left hand to help her up. She pulled it away.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, concerned that she might have other injuries.
‘Fine.’ She smiled rather crookedly at me. ‘You’ll see.’
I thanked Derek who appeared to have taken this fresh incident in his stride. Never a dull moment when you lived with the Halleys.
We went up in the lift. The cuts were now merely oozing rather than gushing and some colour had returned to Marina’s cheeks. Crisis over.
Marina went straight into our bedroom and picked up some nail scissors from her dressing table.
‘Can you fetch me a clean plastic bag from the drawer in the kitchen?’ she asked.
I found some small polythene sandwich bags and took one back to her.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I scratched his neck.’ She smiled at me with her lopsided mouth. ‘Maybe I have some of his skin under my fingernails.’
‘Good girl. Perhaps we should involve the police after all?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want you to get this bugger for Huw’s murder, not just for punching me.’
She used the scissors to cut the elegantly long fingernails on her left hand which she placed carefully in the plastic bag. She then scraped the ends of her fingers and placed the resulting material and the scissors in the bag together with the cut nails.
‘I can extract the DNA at the lab but we should go and do it now before it dries out too much. There might not be anything to find but it’s worth a try.’
‘After the doctor,’ I said.
‘No, before. This won’t take long.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to call the police?’ I said. ‘They could run a check against the National DNA Database?’
‘No police, Sid. I’m sure. We can always give them the DNA results later, if there are any. I really don’t want to spend the next few hours at a police station being poked about by some police doctor. No thank you!’ She picked up the plastic bag. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
In the world of racing, especially amongst jockeys, the need for medical services are frequent and crucial. A jockey with a broken bone needs immediate treatment for the injury, obviously, but he also needs to get back in the saddle in the shortest amount of time. A jockey not riding is a jockey not earning. They are paid by the ride. No ride means no cash. There is no sick pay for self-employed jockeys.
Hospital accident and emergency centres will lavish plaster of paris on the injured and tell them it must stay on for six weeks minimum. A whole industry has grown up that will get jockeys back in the saddle in half that time.
