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Muddy water in the puddle kept getting up my nose and
the policewoman holding me down was too big for me to shift.
My tinnitus was bad too, although it could have been the cacophony of
the jeweller's alarm, the police siren and all the shouting. I wasn't
shouting. You can't shout when most of your mouth is under water and you
are experiencing compression injuries.
The adrenaline-induced syrupy-slowness of time was supposed to be beneficial,
but it might be better to experience disasters quickly. Get them over
with. On the other hand it gave me time to recollect what had happened.
She liked pigs, I thought, as little silver piglet earrings looked out
from the display card. I was on my way out, £42 poorer and a pig
farm richer when cries of 'Stop him,' and the first rehearsal version
of the 1812 Overture exploded. Nothing to do with me, I mused, as I carried
on until whump, splash, squash and here I was.
My day got better as I passed out.
It was, I supposed, better to wake up with a headache,
dry mouth, cracked ribs and a punctured lung than not wake up at all.
Despite my blurred vision, I could see I was being treated as a VIP. I've
not had a hospital room to myself before, especially with my own policeman
to keep the riffraff out. Touchingly, they were concerned for me. The
evidence for this belief was the exemplary and persistent way in which
the men in grey kept asking me to go over the minutiae of my unpleasant
experience. They were making a huge effort to find out who did this to
me. They even escorted me out of the hospital the very same day, chauffeured
me to their shiny new police station and asked me the same questions all
over again, only this time with a tape recorder going. Thank goodness,
I thought. If they asked the same questions again, all I had to do was
play back the answers I'd already given them.
'Over here, Mr Ricketts,' demanded an officer pointing at a camera.
'I don't have a photogenic face,' I said finding a bent comb in my back-pocket
to scrape through my short sandy hair.
'We might as well use all this equipment now we've got it, sir. Stand
there.'
I was made to present myself in front of a white wall with what looked
appropriately like music staves.
'Officer,' I said, 'I have a gig tonight…'
'Yes, I was told you're a musician. They'll have to manage without you
for a while. Now, sideways.'
With a little stretch I achieved the five feet ten he noted down - but
as for the scales…
'You haven't given it time to settle down. No way am I twelve stone,'
I protested.
'Must've been the hospital food,' he suggested.
'I wasn't offered any. In fact I'm famished.'
'Are those grey eyes?' he asked, looming up far too close and scribbling
on his clipboard near where I spotted he'd already calculated the forty-three
years I'd managed so far.
An open and shut case. Video of me going in the shop.
Assistant goes to fetch a display card for me leaving more valuable items
on the counter. Assistant sells me Animal Farm for ear lobes and I walk
out. No one else on video and most of the precious items missing. Must
be me. How some of them found their way into my coat pocket was something
of a mystery. But not to the jury, particularly when the judge told them
not to take any notice of the misleading way I looked innocent, protested
that I was innocent and all my colleagues and family said I was too gormless
to be anything but innocent. The video was as good as those we see on
Crimewatch TV: you couldn't make out the details that really mattered.
Diamonds glistened on the counter but you couldn't see the black leather
wallet full of jewels beneath it, nor the floored shop assistant whose
life-spark had apparently gone on permanent holiday. The video might not
have found him but the police had. On his head, the pathologist had found
the beginnings of a lovely bruise, which had not been allowed to develop.
Why did the police want to believe the more complicated reason for the
dents in his head - I'd hit him with a blunt object - rather than the
simpler one: he tripped over a ruck in the carpet?
I was in such a daze, convinced justice would prevail, that I sat back
and allowed the barrister to do his best. Not that I had the best legal
representatives. Friends of the family must have used a pin and the yellow
pages. I had the impression trials went on for months but this one was
over in a couple of weeks. The charges were theft and manslaughter. I
would have thought the complexities of deciding whether the manslaughter
issue was voluntary or involuntary would have been enough to keep a case
going for ages but everyone seemed to be remarkably agreeable about definitions,
causes and events. Before I knew it, I was banged up in Stonelodge Prison.
Stonelodge. I was told it was near Hexham in the northern Pennines. My
geography teacher had said I needed to pay attention in her classes, as
knowledge of the British Isles could come in handy sometime. But the career
of a professional musician in a small orchestra in Manchester, specialising
in making background music for TV adverts, I'd had little need for six-figure
grid references. I wondered how many other holiday camps for the incarcerated
I was to enjoy during my ten-year sentence.
'We will appeal, Gerald,' shrieked my now neurotic wife, Patricia.
'On what grounds?'
'Were you read your rights properly when you were arrested?'
'I was doing a tadpole impersonation. Anyway I thought that was cleared
up in the first half-hour of the trial.'
'We'll think of something,' she whimpered as I was led away.
'Get a private investigator,' I shouted as the door of the specially reinforced,
tin-opener-proof mini-bus was closing.
'Couldn't find one to take it,' she said, biting her bottom lip.
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