She had thought long and hard about her abductors. Who were they? The only outsiders she could think of who knew about the rose were the American and Tanaka. Could it possibly be one of them? What did it matter, anyway?
She wondered if Alex had called the police. She knew that was very unlikely. Whoever had taken her would have found ways to dissuade Alex from doing so. She preferred not to think about it. She knew only too well that threatening bodily harm to the victim was the method most often used. It was very doubtful now that the police were going to come to her rescue. And, short of his somehow recovering Sapphire, she had come to the inescapable truth that Alex was powerless to help. He had signed the agreement, after all. In any case, he had no way of knowing where she was. Neither did she for that matter. It was impossible to imagine what must be going through his mind.
Thinking back to the blue rose, she recalled the cuttings Vicky had taken, but couldn’t quite figure out their role in the equation. Surely the people trying to get their hands on the rose knew all about horticulture and wouldn’t accept cuttings without the rose itself. She also knew enough about propagation from cuttings to know that the resulting plants ran true to form. Grown on their own roots, they would produce flowers identical to the parent. But this was no ordinary rose. It was a mutant. And who was to say that the cuttings would produce blue roses? In any case, it would be quite some time before the cuttings produced blossoms of any kind.
She had concluded by now that her only hope of escape rested with herself. And up to a couple of days ago, that eventuality had seemed remote. She now knew that these men were not amateurs. They were serious and thorough. They had rendered the farmhouse escape-proof and her room as secure as a prison cell. But two days ago she had discovered something they’d overlooked. It presented a slender chance of escape.
The muted sounds of screeching tyres and gunfire from the television downstairs filtered into the room, disturbing her train of thought. Not that she minded. The noise meant that she could safely get back to the job at hand. Her captors’ reluctance to enter her room worked in her favour. Had they chosen to examine her minuscule bathroom they would undoubtedly have noticed that two-thirds of the wood moulding had been removed from the tiny fixed window above the toilet that served no function other than to provide light. She could only conclude that they’d somehow overlooked the window in their effort to make the room secure – the curtain was, after all, similar in colour to the wallpaper. There was one small problem however – she was not quite sure whether it was big enough for her to wriggle through. It was going to be close.
With just a little more scraping, Kate would be able to pop it out.
In the beamed living room of the farmhouse, her two abductors were in shirtsleeves. Billy, the taller and younger, was stretched out on the overstuffed sofa reading a paperback. His sallow face was pockmarked, suggesting a poor diet and lax habits. Marcus – balding and dressed all in black – stood by the window, talking on a cordless phone. His speech, though American, hinted of European origins.
‘No. She’s fine,’ said Marcus. ‘Sleeps and reads around the clock.’ He looked up to the ceiling, eyeing the network of hairline cracks that spidered across the yellowing plaster like an aerial road map. ‘Of course we’re feeding her.’ He stared out of the window, listening to the caller. ‘Okay, so eleven thirty it is. Right, British Airways. Don’t worry, I’ll be there. I’ll call to check that your flight’s on time.’ Another short pause. ‘Sheppard? No – he hasn’t. Nothing unusual, except that professor guy has been staying with him. Billy’s keeping an eye on them, don’t worry.’ Marcus yawned. ‘Sure, I will. Okay. See you soon. Yes, I’ll tell him.’
He turned the phone off and walked to the small TV set. He switched it on manually – they’d not been able to find a remote. Billy figured the set was so old it never had one in the first place. Marcus settled into the large upholstered armchair, put his feet on the coffee table, and stared blankly at a programme on polar bears.
Billy looked up from his paperback. ‘Wolff’s finally coming over, then,’ he said, in a Texas drawl.
Marcus got up and walked toward the door. ‘Yes, he’s on his way. I’m going pick him up at Heathrow tomorrow morning. Now that the agreement’s signed, Ira wants to see the rose.’
‘I thought Ira told you Sheppard don’t know where the rose is.’
‘He did. But Ira’s convinced that Sheppard’s playing “find the lady”. That it was really him who took it to another hiding place.’
‘What if Sheppard’s not lying?’
‘Damned if I know. Let Ira worry about that. He tells me he’s finished playing footsie with him – now it’s hardball time. He’s sure that Sheppard’s gonna crack any day now. Meantime, Ira wants us to keep up the surveillance on Sheppard and the house. He thinks that sooner or later Sheppard’ll get careless and lead us to the rose.’
‘You know Marcus, this is turning out to be a full-time job. I’d figured it for ten days at the most. I’m dying of boredom in this stinking place. The shitty weather. When are we going get the hell out of here?’
‘Jesus, Billy. You ask the dumbest questions. You couldn’t have heard a goddamned word I’ve been saying. How do I know, for Chrissakes! Ask Wolff tomorrow. Ask him yourself!’
‘All right. All right.’
‘Oh, by the way, Ira said to thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘Doing a clean job of snatching the Sheppards’ file. Made things a lot easier, he said. Filled in a lot of blanks.’
‘Weren’t exactly what I would call challenging,’ Billy drawled. ‘Any punk kid could have walked in there and stole the file.’
Kingston was up again at dawn. Since Kate’s kidnapping he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep and it was beginning to take its toll. He let Asp out into the garden through the back door, then went to retrieve the morning newspaper from the front porch. Back in the house, he made a pot of tea.
He yawned and placed the folded newspaper and his favourite retractable pencil – the one with the pink eraser on the end of it – on the table beside him. He always used a pencil when tackling the Times crossword puzzle. Corrections were all too frequent. Exactly when he had first started doing them – when he first got hooked – he couldn’t say. Spending the start of the day with a cup of tea and the puzzle was a ritual. Rarely, very rarely, was the pattern broken. But for the last several days it had been. And he was becoming increasingly worried. He simply could no longer concentrate.
Every hour of every day he was alone was spent thinking of the suffering that the blue rose had inflicted on so many lives. And the harder he tried to make sense of it all, the more unfathomable the riddles became. In his now frequent dreams they twisted and writhed like slippery serpents, one minute almost in his grasp, the next, morphing into new forms, coiling into grotesque shapes, always disappearing through closed doors.
With Alex’s refusal to involve the police – and he could well understand Alex’s fear of doing so – the burden now fell squarely on him to find a way to secure Kate’s release and put her kidnappers behind bars. Unless he found the rose, none of this would happen. Worse, what would Wolff do to Kate if he didn’t? He’d rather not think about that eventuality.
He glanced up at the kitchen clock. Six forty-five. In a few hours the forty-eight hour deadline would be up and they could expect another call from Wolff ’s accomplice. God knows what horrors that would bring.