Her freedom could be minutes away.
Or maybe it is nothing and she is going nowhere. It is unbearable to contemplate.
The phone ceases, leaving a ringing stillness in its wake.
There is nothing more, but she cannot bear to stop listening.
But now it’s the doorbell again, and because she is tuned in, focused, it seems much louder than earlier. And someone is banging on the door at the same time, with their fist. They must have been calling on a mobile, from outside.
They really want to get in.
After an age, while the world and Katie hold their breath, she hears his clumpy tread, the creak of heavy wood opening, murmured voices. She can’t hear words, not at first, but after a few moments of pressing her ears against the pipes, she realizes that whoever they are, they are coming inside, into the living room with its blue rug and square stone fireplace.
‘Yes,’ says the stranger’s voice. ‘You’ve been quite difficult to get hold of.’ The newcomer is male, and his accent has a cross, posh edge. Not a local.
‘If you had made an appointment-’
‘I don’t have to make appointments to see you.’ The newcomer sounds annoyed. ‘You report to me now, as I explained. I told you I was coming up from London today. As a courtesy you were offered the chance to set a date and time at your convenience, and you’ve done nothing but put me off.’
Katie holds her breath. Is this another member of the gang he keeps talking about?
‘I’ve been busy here,’ snaps back her kidnapper.
‘I’m sure you have,’ says the newcomer, and she senses a mixture of impatience and pity in his tone. The floor creaks beneath his feet. ‘But I’m afraid that now Mr Broeder has died there will have to be changes. The family feel that his assets aren’t being managed as proactively as they would like. As their management company, we agree with them. It’s absurd that this huge house should sit empty in the current financial climate, as I’m sure you realize.’
‘I don’t-’
‘The surveyors are coming a week on Friday, sometime in the morning. If you could be on hand to let them in, please.’
‘But I have work to do on the garden…’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Mr Meeks. We expect the structural work to start very soon.’ There is a closing briskness in his tone. ‘In terms of your role, of course, there should be news later this week. Now, would you mind showing me round?’
With a little blast of shock, Katie realizes that whoever this person is, they are not part of what has happened to her.
Before the decision is consciously made, the handcuff tightens around her right wrist and she bangs it against the pipe, again and again, helplessly, and though she is gagged she screams anyway, through the wet sweaty barrier of the duct tape. She doesn’t stop; she doesn’t dare stop and listen to see if it’s having any effect, or think what will become of her if this attempt fails. She bangs on the pipes until her bruised wrist is cut and bleeding against the ring of steel, but it becomes apparent that nobody is coming, and when she finally lets her head rest against the pipes again, she hears the muffled sound of the giant front door closing.
Her exhaustion and despair are almost instantly replaced by freezing terror. What if Chris (‘Mr Meeks’) had heard her making this noise? His rage was terrible to contemplate.
She waits, in the darkness, but he does not come. She crushes down her disappointment and fear and allows herself to relax a little and think on what she has learned. Surveyors a week on Friday, whenever that was. She cannot tell the days apart, except that there is one day a week when the house is awash with classical music, and he sometimes lets her out, into the room above. She thinks this might be a Sunday. A day like that happened… Oh God, she can’t remember. It wasn’t yesterday, or the day before…
He seems to take a long time to turn up with her daily offering of food. Tonight it is soup, tomato, and microwaved to a blistering, volcanic heat.
He comes down the steps, carrying the bowl carefully in his hands, and her mouth waters at the smell despite herself. He switches the light on, and she blinks helplessly under the glare of the single light bulb swinging from the ceiling.
‘Hungry, are we?’
She nods.
He smiles, and then, just as carefully as he carried it down, pours the soup into the drain near the door, it leaving a sad little plume of steam as it vanishes.
‘Do you think I didn’t hear that racket you made earlier?’
Within moments her hair is gathered into his fist, yanking her forward, and the first blow lands.
10
I picked nervously at the lapels of the olive green suit I’d bought the night before from a tiny but very expensive boutique on Rose Crescent. My eyes had watered as I’d handed over my card – with Eddy gone, such purchases were on an emergency-only basis from now on.
And yet there was a tiny part of me that was almost, I don’t know, relieved. I would be my own mistress again. I would see a way through to becoming Margot once more, Margot before she was abandoned, before she was humiliated. Margot might not have the money for many suits, but what she did have was at least all hers.
I’d dressed for this meeting, and Martin gave me a sideways glance and raised eyebrow as he jumped down from his brown Range Rover and opened the door for me. A hank of his long dark hair had fallen out of the band at the back, brushing his face, and I wondered for a long moment what it would feel like to reach out and tuck it back behind his ear.
‘You look well, Margot,’ he said, and treated me to a vast, wolfish grin while I climbed up into the leather seat. I felt a variety of competing and co-mingling emotions – nervousness, pleasure and, in the midst of these, a vague, hot little flicker of desire, out of place and inappropriate but not unwelcome. Martin himself wore a Ted Baker T-shirt and jeans, and I could surreptitiously admire his fine, well-muscled arms while he drove off.
‘Is the suit too much?’ I asked, with a stab of self-consciousness. Easy on the eye or no, his casual wear alarmed me.
‘No, not at all.’ He glanced into the rear-view mirror. ‘You look… it’s very nice.’
‘I felt I’d better make an effort to look respectable.’
He shook his head, pulling away down Huntingdon Road, carefully avoiding the wobbling arcs of cyclists. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. But I need to warn you, there’s a change of plan. It’ll be the psychologist, Greta, and O’Neill might join us later. Greta is going to give you some copy for your column, and you just need to get the paper to publish it under your name.’
Something about his speech felt a little stilted, as if there were something he wasn’t telling me.
‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said, settling into the seat.
He turned down Storey’s Way, and we drove in silence past the newer colleges – Fitzwilliam, Murray Edwards (it was New Hall in my day) and Churchill, with their Sixties architecture and modern sculptures.
‘So Bethan Avery is writing the letters,’ I said after a few moments.
There was a pause. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘She is.’
‘What does it mean?’ I asked.
His intense green gaze flicked away from me, out of the window, through the trees shielding the lane to the Astronomy Institute. ‘I don’t know.’
Silence fell between us again.
‘Gerry seemed a little freaked out,’ I ventured after a while. Gerry was the Examiner’s managing editor, a very grand title indeed considering only ten people worked there, including me. He had regarded me with polite amazement and just a hint of reproach as I explained what had been going on, as though I had been engaged in some unsavoury activity behind his back.