5. 7 A Shot in the Dark
Well, it wasn’t really a shot in the dark – it was in broad daylight, as the saying goes. I’ve never quite worked out why daylight is described as broad but never mind. As you can hardly fail to be aware, one fateful day in the summer of 2009, DCI Jonah Porter was engaged in a spot of innocent gardening when an unknown gunman shot him in the back of the neck from behind the back fence of his South Oxfordshire home. The result was a lengthy stay in hospital, an even longer period of rehabilitation, and permanent disability.
Everyone who knew Jonah was totally shocked by the incident and its outcome. What made things worse was the contrast between Jonah before and after his injury. Several of his colleagues and ex-colleagues commented to me on the energy with which he used to attack each case and how difficult it was going to be for him to adjust to life in a wheelchair. I think Paul Godwin summed it up very well a few years later when he described Jonah as having been almost indecently energetic*. I certainly remember him striding around a crime scene, poking his nose into everything and expecting everyone to jump to and get things done by yesterday!
The other thing that was very worrying for me and my police colleagues was the idea that there was a maniac out there gunning for police officers. As the days, weeks, and months stretched on, and we were no further forward in discovering the perpetrator it seemed as if we might never know why Jonah had been targeted in this way. At first, it made us all very jumpy, but then, as always happens in this sort of situation, we settled down to the new reality and stopped watching anxiously for signs that there might be a gunman lurking in the bushes out to get us.
Bernie and Lucy heard about it on the radio before I got home with the news, which had spread through the police force like wild fire. Lucy wanted to go and seem him right away, but we persuaded her that she would have to wait until Jonah and his family were ready for visitors. Bernie rang Margaret, who must have been astonished to get a call from someone whom she could only have heard of at all as a very remote acquaintance. At least, that’s how Bernie described it to me at the time, I wonder now exactly what Jonah had told Margaret about his birthday visits to Lucy. He must have had some sort of explanation as to why that day was sacrosanct.
I thought that we ought to keep out of it and let Jonah and his family come to terms with things in private. Bernie agreed up to a point, but she also has Lucy’s repeated questions to contend with. In the end, she went over on her own to see Jonah in hospital to see how the land lay and whether it was feasible for Lucy to visit. Jonah was delighted to see her – I suppose any new visitor must have been welcome – and insisted that she bring Lucy as soon as she could. I wasn’t sure that it was a good idea, but you can’t say no to someone whose just been told he’s likely to remain paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his life, can you?
When Lucy came back from her first visit, I thought at first that I’d been right. She was very subdued and Bernie found her crying in bed that night over the thought that Jonah was never going to get better again. I didn’t want her to go again, but she’d come to an arrangement with one of the nurses on the ward that she was going to help by feeding Jonah and helping him to put back some of the weight he’d lost during the first weeks following his injury. So I was overruled on the grounds that she could not possibly go back on a promise.
Of course, it turned out that I was completely wrong. Lucy thrived in her new role as part of Jonah’s nursing team, and she became much more cheerful now that she felt that she was doing something to help him. Getting him to eat his meals was only part of it. Before long she was accompanying him on walks around the hospital grounds, as he got used to controlling an electric wheelchair. Bernie and Margaret were also getting on like a house on fire and even I started to look forward to visiting the hospital. In my case, it wasn’t so much to see Jonah as to have the chance of talking to one of his nurses who was a Jamaican and loved chatting about her memories of the Caribbean and comparing them with my news of what Eddie was doing over there.
*You can read about Paul and the occasion when he said this in CHANGING SCENES OF LIFE, available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon and on EPUB from the Kobo Store.