Читать книгу Fighting For Your Life - Lysa Walder - Страница 17

The call is male, 33, head injury. Suspended? That means he’s in cardiac arrest. We tear through the streets, sirens screaming. At a terrace house we’re met by a frantic young woman in her 20s. She’s beside herself, distraught, barely coherent.

‘He’s upstairs, I think … he’s … dead!’ she wails at us as we dive up the stairs.

Two ambulances are normally dispatched to a ‘suspended’, but we’re first to arrive and there is the man, lying on his back on the bathroom floor. Bathrooms are usually the place where most 999 fatalities occur, particularly when someone’s had a heart attack. The first thing I notice is that the man has two black eyes. Blood is trickling from his nose and ear. This is all a bit odd.

‘D’you know what happened?’ I ask the girl. She’s slim, with dark, curly hair. Naturally she’s in a state – but she now seems incredibly nervous, holding her hand to her mouth like she doesn’t want the words to come out.

‘No, I just came home and found him like that. He must’ve been beaten up.’

We start to work on him, knowing it’s probably useless, attempting to get him back to life with cardiac resus, pushing his chest, trying to get a needle into his arm to give him drugs and to pass a tube down his throat to get oxygen into his lungs.

‘Doesn’t look like he’s been beaten up,’ comments Dave, who’s working with me. And he’s right: everything around the man’s body is in its place, nothing knocked off the shelves, no mess. And no blood anywhere other than the trickle. The girl stands there, silently willing us to end the nightmare. Does she think it might have been a break-in?

‘Yeah, the front door was open when I came in. Must be. Will he be all right?’

No, love, he’s never gonna be all right again, goes the voice in my head. The funny thing is, relatives or families always say this to you – even when it’s glaringly obvious that the very opposite is true. Maybe they just want to reassure themselves – or perhaps they just don’t know what else to say, human nature being the way it is.

But we go through the motions. ‘He’s pretty poorly at the moment,’ I tell the girl, trying to let her know what she hasn’t yet accepted. ‘Essentially he’s dead and we’re trying to get his brain oxygenated until we get him to hospital – so if he recovers, there’s less chance of brain damage. But we really don’t know why he’s like this, no idea at all.’

It’s all very mysterious. What she’s telling us and what we see don’t really add up. Dave goes back to the ambulance for some equipment. And when he comes back he confirms: there’s no sign of disturbance anywhere in the house, which is easy to see because it’s a pretty small place.

‘It just doesn’t look like someone’s broken into this place, Lysa,’ he says, shaking his head. Now the police, automatically alerted by the girl’s 999 call, have turned up and are taking care of her. They’ll take her with them to the hospital. But our job now is to get into the ambulance, speed up, race the man to hospital and carry out resus all the way in. Which is what we do. But by the time we get there it looks like it’s all over. As we’re clearing out the ambulance and doing our paperwork before we get the next job, one of the nurses comes out to us.

‘Don’t go,’ she says. ‘We’ve been talking to the police. That man’s been shot.’

Shot? I’m flummoxed. The police will now need statements from us, what we saw when we got there, that sort of thing. But where was he shot? We would have seen it, wouldn’t we? We didn’t. What happened was the man shot himself in the temple and the wound was covered by his hair. And because the girl talked about him being beaten up, we didn’t even look for a shotgun wound. We didn’t suspect it – and so we didn’t spot it. You hear a lot about gun crime nowadays but this is still pretty unusual. We don’t get a lot of calls to people who have shot themselves. Yes, we go to a lot of armed incidents – which usually come to nothing. But this is strange. And there’s no sign of a gun.

Later we get the full story from the police at the station where we go for statements and fingerprints. The man shot himself in the head with a small handgun. The swelling and bruising around his eyes were caused by the location of the bullet that killed him. But once they talked to her, the police weren’t convinced by the girl’s story, and when they grilled her further, the truth came tumbling out.

She came home and found him lying there in the bathroom with the gun, a lady’s handgun, in his hand. And she panicked. She explained to police that she’d remembered that if you commit suicide you don’t collect any life insurance. So she took the gun, hid it and when she rang 999 made up her story about him being beaten up by strangers.

Once she spilled the beans to the police they let her go. It was all about money. It turned out they’d had lots of debt. He’d obviously made up his mind that the gun was his only option. What made it worse for me was when the family turned up at the hospital before we went down to the police station, I recognised one of the men from my school days. I didn’t talk to him – it was clearly a terrible time for all of them – but I remembered that as a teenager I’d known them both by sight.

So the man whose life we’d have tried to save, if we could, wasn’t really a stranger. I just didn’t recognise the corpse on the floor as one of the boys I’d discussed with my friends as a teenager. You know how you do this as a kid: even if you don’t talk to certain boys, you eye them up endlessly as they do you, and you all have an opinion on the way they look or behave. We’d sat in the same classrooms with the same teachers. But things had gone very wrong for him, and he obviously couldn’t see any other way out of the mess.