Prologue

This is the story of how I, Wesley Bell, became a serial killer. And I know that sounds bad — you hear “serial killer” and immediately you think: “bad egg”. But bear with me. I’m the exception that proves the rule. I’m a good guy, and the nicest multiple murderer in history. You’ll see.

It was my therapist’s idea to write it all down. Not the killing of course. My therapist knows nothing of the killing. Heaven forfend. Rather, she hoped a written account of recent events might help put the kibosh on the weeping jags in Lidl. I figure it’s worth a shot, and it seems only fair to give an honest account of what I did and why I did it. Fair to me, that is.

This then is my warts and all confessional — how I went from committed pacifist to defensible, some would say righteous serial murderer within the space of five months. What my therapist cannot hear, for legal reasons, you will hear, for judicial ones. And I know I don’t have to hold back with you because, well … you don’t exist. Not yet at least. And if ever you do exist, I can only assume I’m being held accountable in law and you, dear reader, are my jury. My future, therefore, is very likely in your hands. Let’s hope you’re up to the job.

Either way, this is my truth. It’s also the truth. Having said that, I may have played fast and loose with language and time here and there — just to keep things fizzing along, you understand. I’m tempted to say you can always count on a begrudging serial killer for a fancy prose style, but in actual fact, I’m still just a hack.

So, shall we begin with all that David Copperfield kind of crap? Or shall we crack on with the chaos and death? I know, right? As if there’s ever any choice…

I 

August 2019

1 

“I want you to die,” said the old woman in the seventeenth century church courtyard. I laughed because I thought she was joking. Not that women hadn’t wished death upon me in the past; they had, once or twice, but those women knew me well. All this woman knew about me — gleaned from the purple name-badge round my neck — was that I was a tour guide, and quite clearly, she did not care for tour guides.

“I want you to drop down dead right here and now.”

I gasped.

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Well, yeah, that goes without s-”

“You’re disgusting.”

I recoiled from her watery blue eyes and the venom they so adeptly conveyed. Most of my group were now standing awkwardly around, staring at the old lady as if she herself were a tourist attraction. One young Israeli was filming.

“You are destroying this city!” she cried, visibly upset.

I felt bad for her, but at the same time, I had to disagree. Partially. Disgusting I could accept. I am after all a human male. Ashamed too. Certainly. Shame is pretty much my go-to emotion, my comfort zone. But destroying Amsterdam? No. Not possible. I absolutely adore Amsterdam.

“How would you like it,” demanded the old woman, “if I came to your home town with gangs of foreigners and did what you’re doing to Amsterdam?”

“I would like that very much,” I replied, instinctively visualising this sour-mouthed harridan trailing a handful of dismayed American tourists through the streets of Sunderland, waxing lyrical about the city’s nineteen branches of the world-famous Greggs bakery chain.

She scowled.

“Look, I’m not sure what you want from me,” I said.

“I want you to die.”

“Oh yeah. You did say.”

At this point, unable to hold his tongue any longer, a tall, well-dressed Sikh to my left said, “That’s very rude, madam.”

In response, the old woman actually hissed at the Sikh before turning abruptly and shuffling off in the direction of the church, muttering, most probably something about foreigners.

“Well, that was weird,” said an Australian woman from somewhere within my flock. Some of the others, evidently gobsmacked, exchanged bemused sniggers and whispers.

“Yet another example,” I said, “of that world-famous Amsterdam tolerance.”

But of course, the Australian was right. It was weird. And, though I didn’t know it yet, this was just the beginning of what would turn out to be — hands down — the third weirdest day of the weirdest year of my life.

1.2

Ordinarily, my working day consisted of two tours: history in the afternoon; Red Light District in the evening. Today, however, having received a panicky dawn text from Monica, I’d swapped my Red Light for her 11am.

The previous day had been Monica’s 28th birthday and she claimed her visiting sister had been hit by a bicycle and needed her attention. I say ‘claimed’ because I knew she’d been clubbing. Therefore it seemed much more likely she’d been up all night dancing with lanky, proud-chinned Dutchmen, and doubtlessly snogging a fair few. Much as it pained me to imagine such a thing — on account of me being in love with Monica — I imagined it anyway. So, in truth, I agreed to take her morning tour not just because I'm a thoroughly good egg, but also because somewhere in the back of my mind lurked the distant fantasy that if I continued to cover her shifts and just be generally wonderful, then one day — just maybe — she’d let me kiss her too. But I always knew it was just a fantasy. I always knew that in reality, pale chinless gingers like me never get to kiss women like Monica Gandolfo. Ever.

One of my closest friends, Monica was also, indisputably, a goddess, plagued with supernatural beauty but blessed with the wit and confidence to survive it. That being said, nothing could escape the fact that this morning’s death wish should really have been hers. What happened in the afternoon, however, was all mine.

It was a hot afternoon on the first of August, and as per usual, I turned up at Dam Square at 1.15. In the shadow of the National Monument, a 22-metre travertine memorial for the fallen of World War Two, I hugged hello with Henk, the 24-year-old Dutch-Mexican Meeting Point Manager (henceforth MPM). Two more guides then arrived and with varying degrees of efficaciousness, we all helped organise and fraternise with the tourists as they began to amass. At 1:30, we escorted all 57 of them off the square and across the street, where we split them into three groups of 19.

With such a relatively small group, I always took a few moments at the start to find out where everyone was from. So I hopped onto a concrete bench by two giant immovable heads, gathered my tourists and began.

To my immediate right was a trio of people with rather singular physical characteristics. They appeared to be two middle-aged identical twin males and one slightly younger woman, either a sister, a cousin, or potentially an unrelated lover and sex dungeon captive, but one with eerily similar features. They all had large, unusually bovine faces, with heavy brows and prominent chins. They reminded me of something specific, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. No matter. I focused on the first of these large-faced, frowning creatures and said, “And where are you from, Sir?”

“Nowhere,” mumbled the man.

“Nowhere?!” I repeated, both amused and genuinely confused.

I glanced at the rest of the group, a few of whom were also laughing, but not for the same reason. “Norway!” a couple of them cried, correcting my genuine and to my mind genuinely hilarious misunderstanding.

“Oh, Norway!” I must admit, I found this deeply, deeply amusing. The Norwegians, however, did not. The female forced a brief half-smile that was really more of a grimace, but the males gave me nothing. They just stared, emotionless, like something in the wild. “I really thought you said nowhere!” I continued, trying to tease them out. “No?” No.

I moved on. I returned to the Norwegians frequently, however, throughout the tour. Partly I was trying to crack them, to squeeze something from them — a laugh, a smile, a genial roll of the eye — anything; but partly it was pure fascination. I’d never seen such otherworldly humans before and I wanted to study them, to learn from them.

Appearance aside, the most unusual thing about the Norwegians was their overwhelming apathy. They never laughed, they never spoke, they never nodded their huge heads in appreciation or affirmation. They gave me nothing, despite my desperate, brazen hankering for a connection. “Can I just check,” I asked, between the first couple of stops, “do you speak English? Do you understand what I’m saying?” They nodded. “Really?” They nodded again. “Oh.”

I tried not to show how defeated I felt, but the fact was, I needed their laughter. Making people happy, at least superficially, was the thing I loved most about being a tour guide, about being alive maybe. Other people’s laughter gave meaning to my life, and when it failed to materialise, I felt like I’d failed. Of course in reality I know, you can’t please all the people, ever. Some people are an entirely different species.

In the break, I remembered — they reminded me of trolls. I’d seen a Swedish film about real live trolls and these Norwegians had the same abundant foreheads and dour, brutish expressions. This made me feel slightly better about the lack of connection. It wasn’t me; it was them.

Sadly, they weren’t the only inhuman participants on the tour. Neither, as it transpired, were they the only trolls.

1.3

“And you, Sir, where are you from?”

“Yorkshire, England,” came the proud reply. My suspicions thus confirmed, a tiny smile flashed across my lips.

The Yorkshireman was large, blotchy and massively white. He looked 55-ish, but there was a deep-rooted bitterness in his steadfast scowl that could easily have added a decade. He wore an England football shirt — the white home strip — but I doubted he’d kicked a ball himself in decades. A giant belly stretched out the shirt, exposing the lower curve and giving him the profile of a heavily pregnant woman. On his legs were shorts with too many pockets. On his feet were sandals and knee-length white socks. On his head an elaborate combover. A large red drinker’s nose sat atop the permascowl like a distended testicle. He looked like a cartoon caricature of an English Northerner.

“Where in Yorkshire?” I asked.

“You won’t have heard of it.”

“Try me.”

“What’s the point? You won’t have heard of it.”

Appearances are not always deceptive. This guy was precisely as contemptible as he appeared. “Humour me.”

He relented with an angry sigh. “Osmotherley.”

“Never heard of it.” A couple of people tittered.

“What’d I tell you?”

“You were right. I should have listened.”

I offered my most winning smile. He scowled and shook his head.

The first interruption came very early on, halfway through the preliminary overview. Generally, I welcome questions. A curious group is always preferable to a mute, apathetic one, but tourists who ask questions fall into three distinct categories, and not all are as welcome as others. 

Some raise their hands like well-behaved schoolchildren. Not wishing to butt in or spoil the flow of the tour, they wait to be invited to speak. They consider the feelings of others before barging in with their own concerns. I adore these people. For me, if human beings are ever to survive as a species, it will be thanks primarily to people like these. Seriously, whenever anyone raises their hand and waits, it’s all I can do not to wrap my arms around them and never let go.

Others wait for a suitable pause in the tour before speaking. This is the most common method and again, I’m always grateful for the thoughtfulness.

Then there are those who just interrupt whenever anything occurs to them, regardless of what the guide is talking about. Could be the weather, could be the war.

“During their occupation of Amsterdam, the Nazis killed almost 80% of the Jewish people living here — 58,000 of the 80,000-strong population, including of course modern history’s most famous teenage girl, A-”

“It was actually more than a hundred thousand.”

For a couple of seconds I just stared, like an abandoned ventriloquist’s dummy. Then I said, “That was in the Netherlands as a whole. I’m talking about just Amsterdam.”

“Hmm,” said Osmotherley Man. “Maybe.”

“No, no,” I insisted. “Definitely.”

He lifted his chins in a peremptory micro-nod, begrudgingly permitting me to continue. I swallowed hard and sighed. We had another two-and-a-half hours to get through.

When we moved on to the Dutch penal system — how they favour rehabilitation over incarceration; how this frees up the prisons, some of which have been populated by criminals from Norway and Belgium — Osmotherley Man said, “That can’t be right.”

“That is right,” I said, refusing to stop. I looked instinctively to the Norwegians for support but then, remembering, gave up.

I should point out at this juncture that generally speaking, I am an enormous fan of people who participate in walking tours. For me, they exhibit a curiosity and a willingness to discover new things about the world that is absolutely something to be admired in a human. There are those, of course, though very, very few, who join such a tour primarily because it’s potentially free and they have no intention of tipping at the end. Then there are those with no particular interest in the tour — they’re just killing time. Then, of course, there are the sociopaths…

1.4

Aaaaaah, the sociopaths.

I always fancied myself a canny judge of character, even before my fifteen years as a journalist had honed my people skills to a pinhole. After journalism, however — five years in local news, five in national and five in glossy lifestyle magazines — I think it’s fair to say that my razor-sharp powers of deduction and prognosis, alongside my knowledge of Shoreditch pop-ups and refreshing summer cocktails, were world class. I was particularly proud of my ability to weed out a sociopath.

I honestly believe I can pinpoint sociopathic tendencies within the space of a ten-minute conversation. I can sniff them out, like a spaniel homing in on a tumour. (I also recognise that this could be nonsense. I know I’m not the sanest brick in the sanatorium wall, but I’m not so mad that I don’t doubt myself constantly.)

Sometimes I feel like I’m catnip for sociopaths, like I attract them, but I know that’s silly. I’m just very conscious of them, and undeniably fascinated. Meeting Rupert Murdoch when I worked for Sky News added to this fascination, and I’ve since read an awful lot about how they function. As a result, it could be argued that I’m just a touch obsessed.

Consequently, I do have a tendency to tar perfectly ordinary scoundrels with the sociopath brush, without necessarily knowing all the facts. But then when it comes to sociopaths — who are after all, driving our species towards extinction — it is better to be on the safe side.

All of which is to say that, within fifteen minutes of meeting Osmotherley Man, I was pretty sure he was the latest socio to cross my path. There was a silent but palpable glee in his interruptions. Even later in the tour, when the other tourists began to turn on him, I could still see him enjoying the turmoil, thriving on it. Nothing made him happier than the unhappiness of others.

At the second stop, I talked about how, back in the day, before getting back on their ships, sailors in the Red Light District would cross the street, from prostitute to priest, to confess their sins. “Now — and this will surprise many of you, but I swear to God it’s true — in those days, the Catholic Church was actually quite corrupt. I know, I know.”

This always did well, but today it killed. Lots of hearty laughter and fake amazement. It also prompted Osmotherley Man to say: “You’re being sarcastic. You’re implying that the Catholic Church are corrupt today, am I right?”

I stared, unable, indeed, no longer even willing, to hide my frustration. “I am implying that, yes.”

“How so?”

“How so what?”

“How are the Catholic Church corrupt? You can’t just make these accusations and not expect to have to back them up.”

Some groans from the rest of the group.

I rolled my eyes. “You mean apart from the child abuse?”

“You can’t blame the whole church for that. That’s just a few bad apples.”

“Alright, what about stockpiling wealth while many of their congregation are languishing in poverty?” I was very pleased with languishing. “Or what about charging for services for dead people?”

“Doesn’t happen,” said Osmotherley Man. “You’re misinformed.”

“OK.” I forced a smile. “Then let’s agree to disagree, shall we?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t have to agree with anything you say.”

“No, no. You can disagree. We can both disagree. Do you see?”

“I do disagree,” he said, with wilful belligerence. “Because you’re talking rubbish.”

I sighed. I knew that for the sake of the other tourists, I had to stop rising to his bait. I also knew from bitter experience that arguing with a sociopath was pointless.

“You’re right,” I said. “I am talking rubbish, and I apologise. So….” I glanced back at the Norwegian trolls and raised my eyebrows. Unmoved, they stared like termite mounds. “...if you wanted to stay out of hell, you basically had to pay the Catholic Church for the privilege. So the sailors would go to the priest, and the priest would take a note of their sins, basically to see how much they were worth to God.”

Osmotherley Man sputtered. I ignored him and moved on to the confession money, which the church would use to pay for everything from stained glass windows to jewellery for the Pope. “I have also heard,” I continued, “that on occasion, the priests in the Old Church might use some of that confession money themselves, and go back across the street, to visit the ladies of the night.”

Another derisive sputter, expertly ignored.

“Now obviously, in reality, I can’t say for sure whether that happened or not, but it definitely, definitely happened.” Usually this killed, but today, thanks to the constant interruptions, my flow was off and there wasn’t much reaction. This peeved me enormously.

Ten minutes later, I’d reached the Dutch East India Company, the second wave of Amsterdam expansion in the 1600s, and the Golden Age. “You have to remember, the Dutch were going pretty much all over the world and just about everything that was being manufactured or grown anywhere in the world, they snapped it up and brought it back to this tiny little country, where it had to be stored before it was sold. Much of it they stored in the upper fl-”

“Actually, they weren’t going all over the world.”

“Lord have mercy.” I lost my patience. “They went to Asia, Africa, Australia. They went to North America, South America, the Caribbean. They went to India. They did go pretty much everywhere.”

“They didn’t go to Europe,” he said. “They didn’t go to the Arctic.”

“Jesus Christ.” This was another tourist, an English guy who’d also had enough. “Can you maybe give it a rest? We’re not here to listen to you.”

“It’s an interactive tour,” replied the Yorkshireman. “He said so himself at start. So I’m interacting.”

“But they are not helpful interactions.” This was a woman from Germany. “You are spoiling the tour.”

This was an exciting first for me — the rest of the group turning on the disruptor. Maybe they’d lynch him.

“He said they went all over the world,” insisted the Yorkshireman. “I’m just pointing out that they didn’t.”

“I said they went pretty much all over the world,” I pointed out. “And I stand by it.”

“Oh don’t be such a petty bugger,” snapped Osmotherley Man. “Come on. Get on with it.”

I gasped, shook my head at the rest of the group and continued.

When the next interruption came, I said: “You are welcome to leave, you know. I mean, you’re clearly not enjoying the tour. Maybe you’d have a better time elsewhere, doing something else.”

“No, I’ll stay, thanks. Someone’s got to keep an eye on your lies.”

A couple of the others laughed at the man’s audacity, and we soldiered on to the break, when two couples left. One gave me a tenner and said they had an appointment at the Van Gogh Museum. The other couple gave me twenty and said they simply couldn’t stomach any more bullshit from that jackass. They’d also bought tickets for the next day’s Red Light tour, so they said they’d see me then. “I don’t know where you get the patience,” said the man before they left. “If I were you, I swear, I’d wanna kill the guy.”

The next day, when I told him what had happened in the second half of the tour, he would remember his words, and he would cross himself.

1.5 

In the second half of the tour, the Yorkshireman became a touch less belligerent. He’d had a pint of lager in the break and it seemed to make him drowsy. So instead of verbal interruptions, he focused all his spite on messing around with his phone (beeps on) and yawning.

Indeed, every time we stopped in the second half, Osmotherley Man would yawn, loudly and rowdily, at least once. No nervous novice nun yawns, stifled in a sleeve, these were loud, voiced yawns with an almost burlesque quality. They were also, if not entirely fake, wildly exaggerated, deliberately fabricated to irritate me and ruin the tour.

But I stopped biting. Yawns and beeps were much easier to ignore than idiotic interruptions and I knew it would all be over soon enough.

At the penultimate stop, on the intersection of Hartenstraat and the Keizersgracht, I hopped up and perched on the railing, as I always did when a railing was available. The fifteen tourists that remained gathered around me in a fairly loose conglomeration. Osmotherley Man was to my immediate right, leaning sleepily on a green electrical box, just close enough to be heard, yawning and beeping.

It didn’t matter. He no longer mattered. Everyone was ignoring him and I’d actually started to enjoy the tour again. I was talking about the canals, and the thousands of bicycles beneath the surface of the water, when a wasp joined the group. It was wasp season. They were everywhere, annoying everyone. Wasps were the trolls of the insect kingdom. Every glass of wine or beer on every table outside every cafe in the city was awash with them. They were a nuisance at the best of times and they could easily derail a tour if you happened to have a spheksophobe in the group. And in my experience, almost every group had at least one spheksophobe.

Unfortunately, the instinct of the spheksophobe was always to panic. In a worst case scenario, they would scream and run around in aimless circles, pointlessly flapping their hands. In this group, the spheksophobe was a Frenchwoman standing directly in front of me, maybe a metre away. As soon as the wasp descended and began to loiter between me and the Frenchwoman, I could see that a situation may be about to develop. The wasp was doing its thing. As they seem really quite brilliantly able to do, it had already identified and focused its attentions on the spheksophobe, and was now flying back and forth repeatedly above and around her face and head. Back and forth it flew, over and over, maybe thirty centimetres in each direction, with only a soupçon of variation in its trajectory. Then it would suddenly dive or dart in a surprising direction, and repeat the whole routine.

I could see quite clearly in the eyes of the Frenchwoman that she was on the verge of panic. I assumed she had history, some wasp trauma from her childhood maybe, so I decided to step in and counsel her before her anxiety got the better of her.

“OK, I’m just gonna stop for a second,” I told the group, “because it appears we may have a wasp situation developing here. Now the key is not to panic. Ideally, ignore the wasp. It will get bored eventually, and fly away.” I overcame an urge to fire an accusatory glance at the Yorkshireman and instead made eye contact with the Frenchwoman.

“You OK?” She nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Isabelle.”

“OK Isabelle. It’s gonna be fine, I promise.”

I resumed the tour, still monitoring the situation.

Eventually, the wasp settled on the sleeve of Isabelle’s yellow coat.

“It’s OK,” I said. “Honestly, ignore it. I have much experience with wasps. Seriously. I’m a wasp whisperer.” She did not look convinced.

I’d already chatted with Isabelle earlier in the tour. She was from Lyons, but she lived in Berlin. She was in her thirties, travelling alone and transfixed, in that moment, by the hateful creature making its way up her arm. “Don’t even look at it,” I said. She laughed and lifted her head. I gave her another reassuring smile. Then I continued with the tour.

As I talked, I watched the wasp crawl slowly up Isabelle’s sleeve. I had just reached the point in the tour where I apologise for the behaviour of English football fans throughout the world. “And if there’s anything any of you would like to apologise for,” I said, “now would be the perfect moment.”

Osmotherley Man was immersed in his phone and appeared not to be listening. One guy from LA at the back of the group raised his hand and apologised for Trump. A few people laughed. I nodded. “Apology accepted.”

Meanwhile, with the wasp having made its way past her elbow, Isabelle was visibly trembling with the effort not to react.

“One more thing that ends up in the canals of Amsterdam,” I said. “Between ten and twenty of this particular thing are brought out of the water every year. Something quite important. What are we talking about here? Any ideas?”

“Dead bodies!”

Isabelle screamed. It was a short scream, but surprisingly powerful. As she screamed, she threw up her arms and stepped backwards, treading on the foot of an Indian lady, who also cried out.

Isabelle’s scream had been an involuntary reaction to the confluence of two distinct, relatively complex events taking place simultaneously. Either one of these events, had they occurred individually, might have caused her to scream, but the fact that they happened in concert goes some way to explaining the intensity of her reaction.

Firstly, one of the Norwegians had broken their silence. Standing right next to Isabelle and as quiet as a grave thus far in the tour, the female had yelled her response to my question in a high-pitched voice with a peculiar accent: “Dead bodies!”

Secondly, the wasp situation had progressed. Having previously crawled a little way past Isabelle’s elbow, the wasp had taken flight, darted about a bit and landed once more on her upper arm. Isabelle was terrified but trying hard not to react. I got the feeling she felt sorry for me, having witnessed how much I’d had to put up with on the tour. The last thing she wanted to do was exactly what she wanted to do, which was to start running around in small circles, flapping her arms and screaming. So she stayed still and suffered in silence. It was all going to be over soon. If she could just … hang on.... And then, in the exact same moment that the Norwegian cried out, the wasp left Isabelle’s arm and attacked her.

As far as I could see, her instincts had been absolutely right. The wasp had indeed been heading directly for her face when her hands shot up to defend herself. Making contact with the wasp, one of the fingers of her right hand then batted it with considerable force towards my face.

At which point, my instincts also kicked in. I raised my right hand and in a wholly defensive move, volleyed the wasp with the closed fan of my fingers, making perfect full contact with its malevolent little body. Immediately the wasp changed direction and was sent hurtling eastwards, where, as it so happened, giving free rein to another unfettered, sociopathic, fake-looking yawn, stood the Yorkshireman, his mouth fully agape.

1.6

The moment the wasp hit the back of his throat, a gasp went up from the group and Osmotherley Man immediately, instinctively, clamped his mouth shut. I leapt down from the railing and, equally instinctively, stepped towards him to help.

He began making choking noises and clawing at his throat, not quite coughing, not quite retching. I took out my phone and dialled 112 as a man from Canada began to slap Osmotherley Man on the back. I honestly couldn’t tell if he was trying to help him or was just using the moment to vent some accumulated frustration. If it was the former, he failed. Indeed, for a short while, with face red and eyes bulging wide and watering, no breath seemed to emerge from Osmotherley Man’s body.

Through to the emergency services, I cried out in English, “A man is choking on a wasp!”

“Try to clear the airways,” they told me. “Keep him breathing.”

They’d send an ambulance from Spuistraat, just around the corner. It would be no more than a few minutes.

Osmotherley Man went down on one knee, one hand on the ground to balance himself, one still wrapped around his throat.

His breath came in strained, wheezing bursts, like his throat was only partially opened.

“How do I keep him breathing?” I cried, scanning the group for the medic that must surely be lurking inside one of them. No help was forthcoming. Nobody had even the first idea how to deal with the situation. Instead they all just watched in horror, almost all of them cradling their own throats empathetically.

Osmotherley Man continued to claw at his neck.

The wasp had not emerged.

“We need to get the wasp out!”

I tried to open Osmotherley Man’s mouth a little wider with my fingers but he still found the strength to push me away quite forcefully.

His fading breath was now a staggered, half-hearted inhalation and I was convinced that if I didn’t act, he was going to die. Which was when I remembered a trick I’d seen in a film. If I had a pen, I could use it to burrow into Osmotherley Man’s trachea and let him breathe through that. I did have a pen. I located it in the side pocket of my rucksack and pulled out the ink chamber and the plastic stopper.

Osmotherley Man slumped forward onto all fours. Then he slumped further forward onto one side and rolled gracelessly over onto his back.

“What are you doing?” someone asked.

“I’m giving him an emergency tracheotomy,” I replied, stepping forward with the plastic pen-tube like a knife in my fist. Although I couldn’t quite believe the sentence I’d just spoken, this was definitely happening. If I didn’t push my pen through his neck, Osmotherley Man was going to die. Then, for a second, it occurred to me. Would that be a bad thing? I paused, maybe even less than a second. Of course it would be a bad thing. He’s a human being, for God’s sake.

So I took Osmotherley Man’s neck in my left hand and started pushing the dirty plastic barrel into his windpipe. Salvador! That was the film with the emergency tracheotomy, performed by James Woods, of all people. Woods may also have had a knife, however, because my pen wasn’t going anywhere. Also, Osmotherley Man was still putting up a fight. At my request, the Canadian and the guy from LA took hold of his arms.

“I need to really … pop it in there,” I explained, “through the walls of the windpipe. It’s like gristle.”

I tried to wipe away the red marks I’d left on his fat neck. His breathing was getting thinner all the time, with longer pauses between intakes as his throat swelled up and choked him. The ambulance was nowhere in sight, or sound, and it was up to me to save him.

“I hope this works.”

Supporting his neck from one side, I stabbed the pen into his windpipe from a distance of ten centimetres. It didn’t work. I was going to have to just push it in using brute force with the palm of my hand. I took a deep breath, put the pen back in position and started pushing.

Then, like a last-second reprieve at a public execution, came the mangled squeal of an approaching ambulance.

“Oh thank fuck for that.”

I stopped pushing.

Seconds later, the ambulance screeched to a halt and the medics leapt out and took charge. Quickly and incredibly efficiently, while re-establishing with me exactly what had happened — a wasp, completely unaided, flew directly into this poor man’s mouth — two paramedics injected him with adrenaline, attached an oxygen mask to his face, strapped him to a gurney and took him away in their ambulance, leaving me alone with fourteen tourists, all of whom, in a stupefied silence, now turned to face me…