The blast of acrid smoke from the gunshot still filled the air as Bliss picked himself off the floor, stared in horror for a fraction of a second at the crumpled rag-doll figure, then, without any deliberation as to the consequences, lunged at the hooded villain. Snatching the gun out of the startled man’s hand he set about him, slamming the barrels into his ribs, doubling him over, then pounding him repeatedly over the head until an assistant manager vaulted the counter, staid his arm, and brought him to his senses.
The gunman, a professional mobster in a comical Maggie Thatcher mask, slumped motionless into a corner with tendrils of blood dribbling out from under the mask and creeping down his T-shirt and Bliss stood back, his elation quickly turning to horror as he realised what he’d done. It had been the mask, he reasoned later when he’d had a chance to cool down. He couldn’t have beaten an unarmed man senseless, whatever the provocation, but, dehumanised by the mask, the robber had brought the attack on himself.
What else could I have done? What else could I have done? he kept asking himself as both customers and staff cringed fearfully away from him. And he was stunned by the look of revulsion on the face of the woman clutching the wet child. Who was the villain here?
“Police!” he shouted to the stunned bystanders as if justifying his actions. “Get an ambulance!” he continued, screaming at no-one in particular, rushing across the blood-slickened marble floor to tend to the young woman who had taken the blast intended for him.
“Oh my God,” he sighed, seeing her pulverised chest, mentally tearing through the Red Cross first-aid manual, desperately searching for guidance on gunshot wounds – but his mental page was blank. O.K. Don’t panic, he said to himself, think about the general rules. The three “B’s” of first-aid flashed instantly to mind and he easily recalled the first two. “Breathing, Bleeding, and ...” but then his mind froze, unable to remember the third. He gave up and went with the first two, deciding the ambulancemen would arrive within seconds and take over before he had need of the third.
Picking up one of the girl’s limp wrists he dug in his fingers desperately searching for the rhythmic beat of a pulse – nothing. He gripped harder, so hard that he felt the beat of his own heart pulsing through his fingertips and, with rising optimism, stuck his ear to her mouth. She wasn’t breathing. She had nothing to breath with. A couple of hundred lead pellets had turned her lungs into pin cushions. But he wouldn’t give up – he couldn’t give up. It was his fault. If he hadn’t been so stupid. “Armed police,” he had shouted at the robber. Armed with what? A blank cheque and a ballpoint Biro.
“Get a fucking ambulance!” he screamed again as he knelt over her, still searching his memory for a meaning to accompany the third “B.”
“Stop the bleeding,” he ordered himself, but she wasn’t bleeding, the blood pump that had been her heart was as decimated as her lungs. “Put her in the recovery position then.” Recover – from this?
With his mind racing, desperately searching for a way to resurrect the dead girl until a doctor or ambulanceman could arrive with a defibrillator and oxygen mask, he set about tidying up her dishevelled chest. One breast ripped aside by the blast, still clinging to her body with a flap of skin, had flopped loosely to one side and he tenderly positioned the bloodied mound of flesh back in place but, beyond that, could think of little to do other than search for a pulse again, and again, and again.
Over the years, images of that displaced breast had sprung to mind whenever he thought of Mandy. It was her pulped lungs and pulverised heart that had ceased to keep her alive but, deep in his psyche, it was her mutilated breast that symbolised her demise.
“Where’s the ambulance?” he cried, convinced that someone with the right training could work a miracle.
“Where’s the police,” echoed one of the survivors huddling in a corner well away from the bandit and the dead woman.
“I am the police,” he screeched, stung by the implied criticism.
It had only been a couple of minutes since the gun’s blast had fractured the air and filled the young woman’s chest with lead-shot, yet those minutes had the mind-concentrating intensity of a hand grenade with the pin pulled. Do something! Do something! Bliss was screaming inside. Then he had a revelation, breathed “cardiac massage” in relief, and was convinced he had solved the first-aid riddle.
His elation wilted almost immediately as he realised that Mandy’s chest offered absolutely nothing solid to palpitate. Her sternum and half a dozen ribs had been blown into shards. His heart sank and, with an impatient eye on the door, he was reduced to carefully arranging her body ready for a stretcher. Ignoring the hole in her chest, inwardly praying that it might somehow heal itself, he stretched out her legs, smoothed the creases out of her skirt which had ruckled under her bottom.
“Put her in the recovery position,” suggested someone in the huddle of terrified customers.
Recover! From this? He said to himself and sat back, downhearted, to wait for the ambulance.
A close call with a speeding Rolls startled him from the nightmarish spectacle in the bank and forced him to check the mirror. The Volvo was still there. He shrugged it off as simply a coincidence, concluding that the driver just happened to be travelling to London, the same as him. However, a mile or so further on he felt himself soaring with relief as the other driver signalled his intention of leaving the motorway and swooped into the deceleration lane. Thank God, Bliss thought, switching his eyes and attention back to the road ahead. Behind him the trailing car took the exit lane and slowed to a crawl. Then, at the last moment, the Volvo swung back onto the motorway, tucked swiftly in behind a large pantechnicon and resumed the chase.
Bliss had just got his mind away from Mandy’s breasts and back on the Dauntsey mystery when fast approaching road works forced him to a crawl amongst bunching traffic. Slowing, he checked his mirror and caught a familiar flash of blue. “Shit!” he shouted, although he still couldn’t shift the underlying notion that a killer wouldn’t be seen dead in a Volvo.
O.K., I’ve had enough, he said to himself, pulled into the slow lane without indication, slammed on the brakes and steered for the hard shoulder.
“Let’s see what you do now,” he said, telepathically addressing the pursuer.
The Volvo shot past in a blur, tangled up in a knot of cars vans and trucks, but the glimpse of the driver’s profile was sufficient to tell him that the man was certainly of the right age and colour.
Skidding to a stop in a cloud of loose gravel, Bliss found himself next to an emergency phone and was already out of the car and picking it up before he stopped himself. What’s the point – what’s the emergency? I think I’m being followed! He dropped the phone with the realisation that he would have the motorway control officer in stitches.
“Some clown at Junction 129 reckons he’s being followed,” he imagined him laughing to his colleagues with his hand over the mouthpiece. “Can you give me a description?” the officer would ask with a barely concealed smirk.
“A blue Volvo.”
“And the registration number ...?”
“I don’t know ... S registration. I think.”
“You think?”
“I couldn’t see properly.”
The hand would slide back over the mouthpiece, “He says he couldn’t see.”
“What about the driver, Sir? Could you see him?” he imagined the next question might be.
“Male, white,” he would say and cringe while the control officer repeated the description sarcastically before saying, “I guess there’s not more than a quarter of a million Volvo drivers in the country fitting that description, Sir. It shouldn’t be too difficult working out which one was following you.”
“You don’t understand,” he would say in frustration, “this man’s a killer.”