Without letting go of my arms, they both leaned round my back to have a close look at my hand.

‘It won’t kill you,’ one of them said unsympathetically. ‘Get in the car. You can see the medic at the police station.’

‘Please,’ I said with a considerable degree of pleading. ‘Please move the handcuffs round in front of my body. My hand really hurts and I really don’t want to have to sit on it.’

For a moment, I thought they weren’t going to, but then one of the policemen unlocked the handcuffs and moved my hands round in front of my body before securing them again with my right hand on top and my left underneath.

‘No funny business, mind,’ he said.

‘No funny business,’ I agreed. ‘Thank you.’

I climbed into the back seat of the car and, in the glow from its interior light, I had my first real look at the damage. The bullet had just caught the fleshy part of my palm beneath my little finger. There was a lot of dried blood around the wound, and some of it was still oozing out, but, overall, I’d been very lucky that the bullet had missed all the bones. Just an inch or two further over and the .455 slug could have easily taken my hand off completely.

I went hot and cold at the thought of it.

As Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell might have said: To lose one hand, Mr Halley, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

One of the policemen climbed into the back next to me, while the other one drove.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked as we sped past my Discovery, still parked in the town marketplace.

‘North Yorkshire Police HQ. In Northallerton.’

Northallerton.

What had I recently heard about Northallerton?

I remembered. That was where the Friarage Hospital is.

‘Stop the car,’ I suddenly said loudly.

‘Why?’ asked the driver over his shoulder.

‘There’s another victim. Back in Leyburn Road. He also needs to go to hospital.’

The driver didn’t stop but he slowed slightly.

‘Who is it?’ he asked.

I told them about Marcus Capes and his broken collarbone, and that he was waiting in his bed-sitting room for me to arrange his journey to hospital. I didn’t go into all the details of how his collarbone had become broken. There would be plenty of time for that later.

The car didn’t stop, but the policeman next to me used his personal radio to pass on a message that a second ambulance was needed, to go to 42 Leyburn Road, Middleham.

Satisfied that I had done everything I could, I leaned my head back against the headrest and watched through the window as the lights went by. Everything would surely get sorted out just as soon as I arrived at the police headquarters.

Wouldn’t it?