What does a person do when they see an injustice but decide not to become involved?
I’ve often thought about that elderly woman, sitting in her front garden.
She saw what happened. She knew the lorry cut across the road and struck me. Yet after the police interviewed her, she refused to give a statement.
Why?
Was she frightened of becoming involved? Did she simply not want the inconvenience? Perhaps she had her own reasons for not wanting to upset the driver.
There was a rumour that the driver paid her to keep quiet.
I never discovered if that was true, and after all these years I still don’t know.
What makes someone witness an injustice and then choose not to speak?
I was fourteen. I couldn’t understand it. Perhaps I still don’t.
The lorry came out of nowhere. I don’t remember the impact, only waking up, dazed, bandaged, and unable to move. I felt disorientated, my throat drier than I thought possible.
I was in a bed, in a room with bare white walls. My mother was sitting in a chair. For a moment, I thought we were in Italy again, with her Italian family.
She became agitated. I don’t know why. I asked only for a drink. Then I noticed the bandages on my hands, strapping my thumbs so tight, I couldn’t move them.
Something was wrong.
A nurse rushed in to examine me, asking questions I couldn’t answer. She checked my pulse, shone a bright light into my eyes. I yawned, feeling tired. Not a drowsy feeling, but a deep sense of complete exhaustion.
Later, I found out how a lorry had struck my bicycle while I was doing my paper round.
The driver claimed I’d ridden into the side of his lorry.
I couldn’t remember. My thoughts focused on the bike I’d built from second-hand and begged parts. What condition was it in? Could I repair it?
All I wanted to do was get back home to fix it. Only I couldn’t, as the police had the bike.
To make matters worse, the headphones that allowed me to listen to hospital radio were faulty. The earpiece on the left-hand side anyway. I swapped them over to see if this would resolve the problem, but it didn’t.
I’d lost the hearing in my left ear.
The nurse said it was quite normal for hearing to be affected after a serious head injury. My hearing would soon return to normal.
But ‘normal’ didn’t return. Not for my hearing, and not for how I saw the world.
My thoughts turned to the serious head injury.
“You needed 9 stitches in your head wound,” the nurse said. “It looks like the collision sent you over the top of your handlebars. You put out your hands to break the fall, but ended up breaking your thumbs.”
That explained the strapping. “My head hit the road?”
She nodded. “You were in a coma for 4 days.”
That was the moment the world stopped feeling safe.
It took me a while to take it all in. It took months and many hospital visits and tests to learn that my hearing loss was permanent.
There were some advantages.
If people stood to my left, I couldn’t hear them. If I wasn’t keen on someone, I made sure they stood to my left.
The physical damage healed, but the psychological effect didn’t. Especially when the police told me they couldn’t prosecute the driver of the lorry, even though they knew his lorry had struck me. The elderly lady who saw the incident refused to give a written statement or get involved.
I’d already experienced unfairness when my father died when I was eight.
But this was the first time I’d suffered injustice.
Looking back, I’m sure this influenced my career choice. I became an environmental health officer and spent forty years enforcing rules and trying to make things fair for everyone.
Without my career in environmental health, I could never have created my sleuth Kent Fisher, an ordinary person who solves the most complex murders I can create.
Like me, he’s an environmental health officer.
But he gets away with far more than I ever could.
Unfairness and injustice feature in all the Downland Murder Mysteries.
My killers don’t see themselves as villains. They believe they’ve been wronged, that the system has failed them. In their minds, they’re victims of injustice.
I often have sympathy with the killers I create, understanding their frustration and anger with a system that lets them down.
Injustice helped to shape my career. It gave me a voice and a reason to write.
I’ve always been curious about people, fascinated by what drives them to break rules because they’ve been wronged.
But we rarely know the complete story, do we?
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