Free Second Opinion by Claire Rayner

space in front of the fish fryers was a great pile of broken glass, and she could have wept as she realized that one of the beautifully engraved panes had been shattered. But she had no time to regret the loss of beautiful handi-work;in the middle of the wreckage was a heap of bodies, writhing and bawling in a furious fight.
    The next few minutes were bedlam as the people from the restaurant came crowding out to see what was happening and the women added their own shrieks to those of the waitresses, and the men jumped into the fray to pull the combatants apart. George, from her position at the very edge of the mêlée, saw that one man was bleeding heavily from a wound on his arm; she thought she saw it pumping and all her medical instincts shoved her into action. She hadn’t realized she had joined in until she found herself with the injured man’s arm held firmly in one hand as she tried to twist her table napkin — which had still been in her hand when she left the table — into a tourniquet to apply over the blood pumping from his left wrist.
    ‘Hold still,’ she bawled as the man tried to pull away from her. On his other side one of the fish fryers, a bulky young man with thick arms well covered with freckles and sandy hair, held tightly on to him so that he had to stand still, and she managed to get her tourniquet into place and then lifted the injured arm high above the man’s head, almost like a boxer’s victorious salute.
    ‘Keep it up like that till the ambulance gets here,’ she ordered. ‘That’ll need some careful suturing. Is there anyone else who’s been hurt?’
    By this time the fighting had eased and the heap of bodies had separated into its component parts. Gus was holding a hefty blond boy with a big closely cropped head in a tight one-arm-behind-his-back grip; two of the fish fryers were sitting on another one who looked much the same, dressed, as was Gus’s captive, in jeans and aggressively studded black leather jackets. They seemed almost uniformed and George, looking at them and then round the crowd standing peering down at the miscreants with scared faces, caught sight of another in the same sort of clothes sliding away to the door.
    ‘Hey, stop that one!’ she shouted, and at once a couple of the men customers turned, saw him and grabbed. There was muffled shouting and some very loud swearing as the fish fryer who had been helping George hold her injured man plunged after the escapee.
    They almost got him, but he struggled free just as the police car someone had dialled 999 for arrived, blue lights rotating hysterically and siren whooping, to bring a pair of uniformed policemen into the affray.
    From then on it was a matter of moments before it was all over; an ambulance followed the police car within a couple of minutes and George’s man, looking dazed now, and with his hand still held up in the air and the other holding a handkerchief to a nose that appeared to be bleeding as well, was scooped up by the paramedics and taken to it. He was a tall man, well muscled, and George thought, looking at him more closely now, Indian or Pakistani. He was well dressed in a casual sort of way, and clearly bewildered by what was happening — until he got to the ambulance, at which point he suddenly seemed to become more aware of what was going on.
    He whirled, pulling away from the grip of the paramedics. ‘Get their names,’ he bellowed. ‘Make sure you get them — and every witness you can. I’m going to throw the book at them, I swear to you, I’m going to take them to every court in the land. Unprovoked attack like that, it’s disgusting. Unprovoked, no reason at all … Get their names —’
    ‘It’s all right, sir,’ one of the policemen said soothingly. ‘We’ll get all the information there is, you can be sure of that. We’ll see you at the hospital, get your statement there. Just go along now, they’ll fix you up, Mister —?’
    ‘Doctor,’ the man snapped through his