Blood in the Cotswolds Read Online Free Page B

bad in the morning, we can get you to a doctor.’
    He stared at her wildly. ‘In a car? Down those stairs? I can’t possibly. I’m paralysed , I tell you.’
    ‘No, you’re not. You’ve pulled a muscle, or slipped a disc, and I can see it hurts. But the only other option is an ambulance, and that’s going too far. Imagine the drama if we called one now and all the locals saw the flashing blue light. They’d think there’d been a murder.’
    Phil managed a tight grimace in place of a smile. ‘And we don’t want that, do we?’ he said.
        
    Thea’s plan prevailed, and Phil endured a long tortured night in which he managed to doze fromaround two to four a.m., lying flat on his agonised back, and snoring loudly. At seven, Thea got up and went down to make two mugs of tea. On her return, she insisted he roll onto his side, and from there to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. ‘You’ll have to go to the bathroom,’ she ordered. ‘It’ll be a trial run.’
    He got himself vertical, with several cries of anguish, and shuffled pathetically to the lavatory. Then Thea forced him into some clothes, the effort of pulling trousers up almost too much for either of them. ‘Can’t I just wear a dressing gown?’ he pleaded, tears in his eyes. ‘This is killing me.’
    He could see that even Thea was losing her nerve. She chewed her lower lip, and repeated several times a belief that nothing too desperately serious could have happened. ‘You can’t have broken anything,’ she insisted. ‘How could you? It’s not as if you fell off a horse.’
    The next apparently insurmountable obstacle was the stairs. They were narrow, with a twist halfway down, and were made of stone. Thea had been especially taken with them on her first inspection of the house, realising that they formed the sturdy core of the whole building, and hadnot been modified or moved in three hundred years. She tried to distract Phil from his anguish by fantasising over all the human crises the stairway must have seen. ‘Women in labour, dead bodies taken out by the undertaker’s men, visiting boyfriends tiptoeing down in the early morning.’
    ‘Not to mention crippled policemen crawling down backwards,’ he puffed.
    And it was true that this had turned out to be the only possible mode of descent. One foot would be lowered gingerly to the next step, sharing the weight of the semi-prostrate body with his forearms, without any jarring or pressure to his back.
    ‘Try to see the funny side,’ Thea suggested incautiously. The snarl that met these words was more than a little alarming. Even Hepzie retreated from her concerned position at the foot of the stairs.
        
    Because Thea was obviously going to have to drive, Phil assumed that they would use her car. But then he noticed how small it was, how little legroom it could offer, and thought again. ‘We’ll have to take mine,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ll be covered by the insurance.’
    ‘Who cares?’ she said. ‘Just let’s get you in.’
    The passenger seat was adjustable in all planes, and they eventually got him into a position that he could tolerate without constant groans and screams. It seemed to him that Thea’s driving was unbearably jerky as she mastered the unfamiliar clutch, and bumped them up the uneven drive to the road at the top. Pain tore at him like a mad dog, making him feel sick and tearful.
    They arrived, finally, at the hospital in Cirencester, where they were met by helpful paramedics and Phil was gently stretchered into a cubicle in a department that appeared to have nothing else to do that day. Nobody took his agony lightly, or made ominous comments about the impossibility of backs. He was probed and questioned and X-rayed, given analgesia and generally reassured. Thea hovered, waited, smiled and sighed. Phil began to look less drawn and terrified. By ten he was hungry and impatient for something more to happen.
    A little while later, a man in a