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. Ballet dancers, footballers and all types of athletes have the same needs.
In the good old days, before jockeys had to ‘pass the doctor’ after every fall, many a race had been ridden with a broken collar-bone, or a fractured wrist. Losing a ride in one race may then result in losing the rides on that horse for good, especially if it had won.
My doctor, Geoffrey Kennedy, had managed to get me back in the saddle after injury in record time on many occasions. He knew not only how my body worked but my mind, too. He seemed to sense how much pain I could stand and how much I had been willing to endure in order to get back to racing. He had initially trained as a GP but had become a sports injury specialist after his brother, an international rugby player, had continuously complained to him about the lack of understanding of sports injuries at the local hospital. Geoffrey had opened a specialist clinic in north London and soon a line of A-list sportsmen and women were queuing up at his door. He was now semi- retired and the Kennedy Sports Clinic was thriving in the hands of a younger man, but we old lags still preferred to deal with the master.
Since my riding days had ended, Geoffrey had continued to patch up the damage caused by two-legged rather than four-legged opponents, sometimes willing to turn a blind eye where others might have called in the police.
I rang him while Marina changed out of her bloody clothes. Sure, he’d said, no problem. He would pack his sewing kit and meet us at the Cancer Research UK London Institute in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He wasn’t doing anything except watching the television and it was a while since he had practised his sewing on a beautiful face. All you bloody jockeys are so ugly, he’d said, it’ll be nice to work on a face without a broken nose. His skills would be appreciated, at last.
As I drove, Marina told me what had happened.
‘I was almost home,’ her voice sounded a little strange due to the swollen lip. ‘I was passing those bushes outside Belgravia Court when I was grabbed from behind. He dragged me into that path between the bushes and I thought I was going to be raped.’ She paused. ‘I was quite calm but very frightened. It was like everything was happening in slow motion. He held me from behind and spoke into my ear. I think he might have let me go if I hadn’t scratched him. I reached over my head and felt the wool on his face. So I pulled it up from his neck and dug my nails in.’ She laughed in the dark. ‘He groaned. Serves him right. But he spun me round, called me something unprintable and hit me very hard in the face. I think it was his fists. He had gloves on with shiny bits on them.’
Gloved fists with brass knuckle-dusters, I thought. That fitted; there was too much damage for fists alone.
‘I went down on my knees and he ran off. It was quite a while before I could stand up and make it the twenty yards home.’
If I’d had a spare hand, I would have held hers.
Geoffrey beat us to the Cancer Research Institute from his home in Highgate but Marina kept him waiting as
