He put a can of something into her hand. She felt for the ring-pull, but her fingers were too numb to lift it. She told him she couldn’t open it and he did the job for her.
“I don’t kid myself,” he confided. “They’re trained for this. Sieges, I mean. They have the latest surveillance techniques. Listening devices. They could be picking up the words I’m speaking to you now.” As if alarmed by his own conclusion, he went silent for a time.
She took some of the drink.
He resumed, “This old building isn’t a fortress. There are ways they can get up here, right up here to the top without using the main stairs. There’s an external fire escape round the back and there are back stairs that link up with the cellars. Or they could climb up the balconies at the front. They could use a crane, or a helicopter.”
Samantha judged it sensible to say nothing while he was talking in this vein. In her mind she was replaying the ending of sieges she’d seen on television, when tear gas was used and special troops went in wearing masks and protective suits.
Mountjoy said with a touch more confidence, “What holds them up is that they don’t know which room we’re in.” He paused, and she was conscious once more of the sharp rise and fall of his breathing. “Do you know where we are right now.”
Of course she knew. The only thing she didn’t know was how to answer a question like that. “Somewhere near the top?”
“Couldn’t get much higher if we tried,” he said. “If you stood down there in the street and looked up at the front, this is the bit at the left-hand end, with the twin gables. Have you ever looked up at the old hotel?”
“Not often,” she said truthfully.
“Because then you’d know where I’m going to take you. It’s at the opposite end. Shaped like a turret, with battlements. That really is the highest point. The only way into it is up a spiral staircase. They can send up anyone they like and I can hold them off with my gun. And in case you were wondering, it doesn’t have a balcony. Get up.”
He switched on a torch and she saw that he had the gun in his other hand. He ordered her to pick up the pieces of flex and wrap the blanket around her shoulders. She asked if she could first put on her T-shirt, which she found she had been using as a pillow, and he gave his consent. She reached for her violin case; she wasn’t going to leave it here. Then she pulled the blanket across her back.
They left the room and crept along a corridor. Thinking that it was a vital opportunity to get her bearings, she looked about her, but with little advantage, because he kept the torch beam directed low, at a spot near her feet. At the end of the corridor he told her to turn right and then immediately left, where the torch picked out the first steps of the spiral staircase.
Climbing the stairs, she was overwhelmed by despair. What he had said was absolutely right. The turret room was going to be impregnable. No one could surprise them. He could command the one doorway with his gun. The siege was certain to end in a deadly shoot-out. What other outcome could there be?
“The door straight ahead.”
On the stairs he had kept close behind her so as not to allow her to aim a kick at him. He gave her a nudge with the gun. She saw a short passageway ahead of her with three doors. The turret was not one room, but divided into three like segments.
“Must have been used by servants,” Mountjoy said as they entered the poky little space. In a strange way, he sounded apologetic about the accommodation.
It was the first faintly civil remark he had expressed in some hours. Samantha made an effort to encourage a conversation. “These days they’d take down one of the internal walls, install a Jacuzzi and call it the penthouse suite.” As the torch flicked across the room she saw that the arched window facing the front was boarded over to well above head height. “If that was taken down, there must be a wonderful view.”
“We’re here precisely because it is boarded up,” he said, hostile again. “We can’t be overlooked from the abbey or anywhere else. Get your wrists behind your back.”
The socializing was over. He started the business of tying her again, efficiently, though not so viciously.
“Do you have to tie my legs?” she asked.
“That’s the whole point, to confine you to this room.” But he didn’t gag her this time. When she was seated against the wall with the flex firmly knotted around her jeans, he spread the blanket over her legs. “I’m going to see what’s going on.” He stepped out of the room and across the passage. She saw how right he was about the turret. He could keep her in this room without any risk that she would be seen from the street. Presumably the window in the next room wasn’t boarded over, so he could use that for observation.
Presently she heard a shout of “Bastards!” from the other room. Her heart rate quickened; anything that upset Mountjoy was putting her in danger. In a moment she understood the cause of the outcry: a strong beam of light penetrated the room through the arched area at the top of the window that had not been boarded over. Down in the street they were using some kind of searchlight.
He came back into the room. “They ought to be trying to negotiate, not harassing us with lights.”
She suggested, “They must be trying to find out which part of the building we’re in. How can they negotiate if they don’t know where we are?”
He was silent.
It seemed a constructive thing to have said. She was emboldened to add, “What you need is a mobile phone.”
“Thanks,” he said bitterly. “Next time I break out of jail I’ll remember to have one in my pocket.”
‘What I meant is probably they’ll get one to you somehow. They’ll see the sense of talking.”
“Oh, yes? I can see them doing that.”
“You talked to that man Diamond face to face.”
“Bugger all use it did me.”
She was in two minds about Mountjoy. She wanted the siege to end, but she understood his situation; after all, she was part of it. Frightened as she was, and angry at being hauled off the street and made hostage over an issue she hadn’t even heard about, she sensed that he might have a genuine grievance. If so, he’d been wrongfully imprisoned for years. She didn’t want him injured or killed for her sake. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life thinking he’d been gunned down so that she could be released.
She could also understand that prison was responsible for his fatalistic moods, but that didn’t make them easier for her to endure.
She tried striking another positive note. “I’m sure Mr. Diamond is doing his best to get to the truth.”
“What’s that?”
“I said I’m sure-”
He cut her off in mid-sentence. “Listen.”
She could hear nothing, but Mount joy crept out of the room and stood at the head of the spiral staircase.
Samantha leaned as far forward as the flex allowed. She thought she heard a faint sound. She wasn’t sure if it came from inside the building.
Mountjoy stepped back into the room, gun in hand. His voice was pitched on a high, hysterical note. “I’m going to gag you again. I can’t trust you to keep quiet. There’s definitely someone inside this place.”
She reacted quickly. “It could be Mr. Diamond.”
“Some chance!” He found the roll of plastic adhesive and clawed at the end with his fingernail.
Samantha said, “If you use that gun, you’re finished, whatever the truth is.”
He ripped off a piece of the plastic, slammed it over her mouth and said, “I’ve got to the point when I’m too tired to care anymore. The buggers will do for me anyway.” He got up and walked to the top of the staircase.
Chapter Twenty-six
The kidnapping was public knowledge now. Once the Empire Hotel had been cordoned off, the news embargo could not be sustained. Channel Four News at seven led with still pictures of Mount joy and his hostage Samantha, followed by live coverage of the scene in front of the hotel and an interview with the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset, Duncan Farr-Jones, who stressed that although the escaped prisoner was a murderer, and known to be armed, the police were taking measures to bring the siege to a quick conclusion-to which he added, “… ensuring the safe release of Miss Tott.” He said nothing about Mount joy’s prospects of survival.