HUSH - Book - Page 54
HUSH – Breaking the Silence | Victim Support Scotland
I was standing in my living room, when I got a phone call
from my brother in a panic. He said something had happened to dad. I said, “put Dad on the phone”. He put the
phone up to dad's ear and Dad told me what happened. I
then reassured my brother that help was on the way and we
would be there shortly.
My sister and I arrived at the house and walked into the
kitchen, and we just stood there in shock. We didn't know
what we were walking into, it was like something out of a
horror movie. Because dad had spoken to me, it just didn't
click that he was in any kind of danger. I thought he was
okay; he had just been roughed up a little bit.
It was so unbelievably surreal, and we didn't expect the
magnitude of it. There were bloody handprints on the walls
and a large pool of blood on the floor with a clean patch
where Dad had been lying. The blood was everywhere, it
even dripped off the ceiling into my hair and rolled down my
face. It was in that moment I realised the severity and
urgency of the situation.
At the hospital we were rushed by the nurses into this
little side room. They were all panicking. It was really frightening to see that these professional people were so distressed. These people are supposed to be nice and calm
and tell us that everything is going to be okay, but they
didn't…
They managed to put dad on a life support machine in
the Intensive Care Unit. They said they have got him as
stable as they could just now, but he was in critical condition, and they didn't expect him to survive. We stayed at his
bedside hoping and praying that he will make it. Our lives
were halted. We stopped working, we weren't eating, we
weren't sleeping. We weren't doing anything except taking
it in turns to go home and get showered and changed.
The CID came and spoke to us at the hospital. They said
they were treating it as an attempted murder case and they
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questioned us individually to find out what had happened.
It was very surreal, like it wasn't happening to us. The
police also said we had to do something with the dogs
because they had them in the garage overnight. Dad had
three little Lhasa Apsos, Tikka, Skye and Gizmo. Mum used
to tie their hair up in bows and little pigtails, so that they
could see where they were going. The dogs were covered in
blood so, I brought them up to my house and I showered
them all down, cleaned them all up and blow-dried them,
because that's what my mum would have done.
After 10 days we were told that they were switching the
machines off. Everything just went dark. We almost had to
be physically dragged from his bedside. But when we did
eventually go, we were walking down the corridor and we
were all quiet, nobody said a word, it was like a walk into the
abyss. There were people at the cafeteria, around the hospital and even at the ambulance bay outside A&E, yet there
was no sound- not a thing. There were no birds in the sky,
there was no wind either, there was nothing. Everything
went dull and bleak as the numbness set in. That was the
moment that the wall came down.
The Family Liaison O cer phoned and said it had
turned to a murder investigation and we needed to identify
Dad's body. We couldn't quite understand that, because
we'd been with him in the hospital the whole time - why did
we have to identify him?
‘We stayed at his bedside hoping
and praying that he will make it.
Our lives were halted.’