Captive

by A. J. Grainger

  For a second my legs turn to water as fear pushes all the energy out of me like air from a punctured balloon. Then I think of Addy trapped here somewhere. I can’t give up so easily. I will not let these people win. Move, Robyn. Move now! I need somewhere to hide. The dust sheets, of course. I press myself close to what feels like a sofa and let the sheet drop around me.

  Footsteps smack along the corridor, getting more distant. I sigh in relief. He’s gone the other way. Perhaps he won’t find me here. Maybe if he goes upstairs, I can sneak out and try to find another way out. More footsteps, lighter this time. Talon maybe? He’s much smaller than Scar. Then I hear someone moving around overhead. Have they both gone upstairs? Or is there someone else here? I’m so busy listening to the noise above me that it takes a second to realize the light in the room has shifted. Someone must have turned on the light in the corridor.

  “Here, kitty kitty. Here, puss, puss.” It’s Scar.

  I can hear him moving around. And I can smell him. Then the outline of him comes into view. He is crouching down and lifting up the sheet opposite me. I am not even breathing now, and I’m pressed as tightly as I can be against the sofa, wishing I could disappear into it. He lets the dust sheet drop back into place and disappears out of my sight line. The idea of him grabbing me from behind makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. His smell is all around me now, choking me. He must be right above me. I imagine every second that he is lifting the sheet. Is that air I can feel at my back? Has he lifted my sheet? Is he about to find me? Any moment now his big fat hand will be reaching for me—

  “Scar!” The sound of Talon’s voice comes from upstairs. Then again, more urgently. “Scar!”

  Scar grunts. He is leaving the room. The door slams shut behind him.

  I let my breath go a capillary at a time, imagining the tiny air particles bubbling up from my lungs and out through my mouth. Still I don’t move. I wait and I wait and I wait under that sheet until my legs are cramped and my left foot is completely numb. The world grows darker and darker. The house is silent now. I know that they can’t have stopped looking for me, but I have to move. I am beginning to shake with cold. I can’t stay here forever. I have to try to get away. I slowly straighten out my legs, one after the other. The house remains quiet, so, with the help of the sofa, I stand up. Then I move slowly in the dark to avoid knocking anything over. After sidestepping along the wall until I feel the metal sheeting at my back, I put my hand out in front of me. I can’t see anything. My fingers brush against something. It is not a sofa or a table. It is silky smooth. Like . . . like hair.

  A lamp is switched on and reveals a woman sitting on the other sofa. She is staring at me with dark eyes. A mask covers her face but stops at her neck. My hand is looped in the long dark hair that falls below it.

  I scream.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “My name is Feather,” the woman says. Her voice is as soft as water lapping over pebbles, and in my mind I see the beach near my grandparents’ house and remember how suddenly the gentle tide can turn, cutting you off from the shore.

  We are in my cell. She’s crouching, her back against the locked door. She led me here alone, a gun pushed into the base of my spine. We passed Scar coming out of one of the rooms farther along the corridor. He made a move, to grab my arm or lift me up, but after a glance at Feather, his hands fell back to his sides.

  She is small, barely five feet tall. Unlike the others, her balaclava also covers her mouth and nose, meaning only her eyes are visible. They are huge and dark with long, thick eyelashes. They should be beautiful, but there is something in them, like a hidden current in a still river, that makes me think people have been fooled by her gender and her height in the past and have regretted it. My fear grips me more firmly as I remember how she had managed to enter that room and sit there in the dark so silently that I had no idea she was even there. She must have come in after Scar left.

  The gun rests on her lap, its barrel still pointed at me. She strokes it absently as she continues, “It is under my instruction that you were brought here.”

  I am too afraid to speak. Her eyes look ready to swallow me up.

  “You are here to help us. Your father has something we want, and you are going to get it for us. As long as you’re obedient and your father cooperates quickly, you will not be hurt. But you will do what I say, and you will not try to escape again.”

  “You’re part of the group that shot my dad.” I sound small and young and scared.

  “You don’t get to ask questions. You are not in Number Ten now with your servants and your mummy and your daddy,” she says. “You are here, under my rule. I am your route out of here, Princess. Do not piss me off.” She lunges forward and clouts me around the ear with the base of the gun. The pain is a firework exploding in my head. “That is for attacking my comrades.” She cuffs the other ear—“That is for running”—and my vision clouds. The sizzling in my ears has become a single high-pitched note, like the sound a heart machine makes when someone dies.

  • • •

  I’m tied to the bed again. My arms are aching from being forced over my head. I spent a long time trying to squeeze my hands though the cable ties, but they are too tight, so all I’ve ended up doing is hurting my wrists more. I am lying still, trying to listen for any sound that might give me a clue as to where I am. It’s late now, and a thin orange glow filters through the high window. There must be a light outside. A streetlamp, maybe, or just a security light? Should I shout? Someone might hear me. Gordon once told me that if I was ever in trouble, I should shout “FIRE!” “Help” is too vague, but people know what to do about a fire, so they aren’t afraid to get involved. I don’t want to shout now, though. The wrong person might come. I can’t get the image out of my head of Scar holding me down on the bed.

  There’s a shriek from outside, and I jump, yanking painfully against my cable ties. Just a fox. I hear them in the garden at Number 10 sometimes. Can Addy and Mum hear this fox? Where are they? Why couldn’t these arseholes have kept us together? Addy will be so terrified and tired. It must be way past her bedtime. She’ll be crying, and Mum won’t be able to calm her down. It’s always Karen who puts Addy to bed, and she always, always has her toy lamb to cuddle. She can’t sleep without it. She’s only three years old. It’s not fair. Why couldn’t they have left her alone? Why couldn’t they have left me alone?

  The light outside goes off suddenly, and the room is plunged into an impenetrable blackness, extinguishing everything. There’s a sound from the corridor like a boot scraping against wood. Who is that? Out of all of them, I hope it’s Talon. He seems the most sane.

  There’s another sound of a footfall. I imagine the door handle turning, even though I can’t see it in the dark. I am beginning to feel panicky. I need to calm down. I try to focus on a nice memory. Of last Christmas at Granny and Grandpa’s, opening our presents in the hall under the big tree and Mum telling Addy that she should be grateful for what she’d gotten this year. “Some little girls don’t have any presents.” Addy hugged her new teddy bear to her chest, eyes wide, like she was afraid one of those little girls might try to take it from her.

  The memory doesn’t last. How could the attack have happened this afternoon? Everyone kept telling me we were safe, but we weren’t, and I knew it. Why didn’t anyone listen to me? I’ve been afraid since January, and now it feels like it was all leading to this. I am angry and scared, but I have to keep faith in Dad. I know that he will be doing everything he can to bring us home. We won’t be here long. Dad will be raising hell at Downing Street to get us out of here. We just have to hold on.

  Hold on. Keep calm.

  The darkness wraps itself around me until I can no longer remember what it is like to see, and it just seems to go on and on and on and on until I begin to lose all sense of everything. I keep opening my eyes without realizing I’ve closed them and feeling ba
d because I’ve fallen asleep for a few minutes, when I should be awake and plotting how to get out of here and how to rescue Addy and Mum.

  I open my eyes suddenly, not even sure when I shut them. Was I sleeping? What woke me? A scream. Addy screaming. Her short, sharp cries were reverberating off the walls of my cell. I try to sit up, remembering too late that I am still tied to the bed. I fall backward, flopping about like a fish. Addy’s cries have died down now, and everything is quiet again; even the ringing in my ears has dropped to a low hum. I yell, an incoherent string of noises that definitely has the words “help,” “sister,” and “bastards” mixed in, along with a few other swear words.

  As the locks on the door pull back, I realize how stupid I’ve been. What if it’s Scar?

  “Where is my sister? What have you done to her?” I say with more bravado than I feel. The glare of the flashlight is blinding and I look away, green and orange and blue circles dancing before my eyes. When I look back, Talon is beside the bed.

  “She isn’t here.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Because I’m telling the truth.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “There’s no ‘we.’ There’s just you.”

  “I want to see my sister.” The lightbulb swings gently above our heads, blown by an invisible breeze, casting ­s­hadows on the wall in the fierce glare of the flashlight.

  “She isn’t here.”

  My throat burns with the effort of not crying. “Please,” I murmur, “please let me go.”

  I notice that he is favoring his left hand. His right arm must be sore from where I stabbed him earlier. Good. I’m glad I hurt him. I would do it again. He swings the flashlight, and I imagine my eyes glowing red in its beam like a woodland animal caught in a car’s headlights. He lowers the light so that it is no longer blinding me and says, “I get that you’re scared, but we’re not going to hurt you. We just need your help. Then you can go home.”

  “And if I don’t help you?”

  He shrugs, making his shadow huge and shapeless like a bear. “Then we can’t let you go.”

  • • •

  There is a media blackout surrounding our trip to Paris, so there weren’t the usual hordes of press outside Downing Street and at Northolt airfield. We boarded the Royal Squadron plane quickly and quietly, and it took off almost immediately. We are now somewhere over the Channel. I peer out of the window at the white clouds and try to imagine the strip of sea somewhere far below.

  “How are you doing, Robyn?” Gordon, part of the special protection branch of the police and the person in charge of most of Dad’s security, is standing in the aisle, an arm the size of both my legs resting on the back of the seat in front of me. I smile, and he sits down. “Your dad wanted me to swing by and have a chat with you about security plans for Paris. That okay?”

  I nod.

  “Right, all standard procedure, but it doesn’t hurt to go over it again. So a car will be meeting us off the plane. The French media are also under blackout.”

  I already know this stuff. Right now one of Gordon’s team will be inspecting the cars that will travel in convoy with us from the airport to the hotel. When Dad starts the official part of the tour on Thursday, he’ll move to the Hôtel de Marigny, which is right opposite the Élysée Palace. Yesterday, and then again this morning, another team member will have ­traveled the route from the airport, looking out for any unusual changes, detours, road maintenance—anything suspicious. There will be at least two different routes planned, and not even the driver will know which one we are taking until he gets the instruction from Gordon just as we are getting in the car.

  When we arrive at the hotel, we won’t enter through the front door. You can’t guarantee that some celebrity won’t be staying there too, and there are always a couple of paps who wait outside these places in the hope of a scoop. Catching sight of the British PM arriving in secret, days before an international meeting, is a definite scoop. So we will be driven to the back door and will probably enter through the kitchen, or maybe the staff entrance. The hotel staff will already have been briefed not to react, not to look up, not to speak. Mum once said that blind mutes would make the best hoteliers.

  Mine and Dad’s plans have been scrutinized and categorized into low- to high-risk events. Dinner in the hotel restaurant: low risk. Night out at the opera: medium risk. Visiting the Musée d’Orsay or the Eiffel Tower: high risk. Each venue will have been inspected and areas of potential danger highlighted. How many exits are there in each room? Do any of the rooms exit onto back alleyways? Has the staff been vetted? Nothing can be left to chance.

  “Any questions?” Gordon asks in conclusion.

  I open my mouth to say no just as Dad’s face appears over the seat in front of mine, and he tells me, with a grin, to try to stay awake during the highly important security briefing. He thanks Gordon and asks him to go and have a word with Harold, Dad’s chief of staff, who is worried about something. “Then I promise you can sit down somewhere quietly with the newspaper and a nice cup of tea,” he finishes.

  “No time for that, Prime Minister,” Gordon replies. “Robyn, if you have any questions, you know where to find me.”

  Dad sits down in the seat Gordon has vacated. “Aucun regret?”

  I shake my head. “Non, je voulais à venir.” I wanted to come.

  “Je voulais venir,” he corrects. “No ‘à.’”

  I brush an imaginary fleck of dirt from my jeans. “Dad . . . I’m not going to be in the way, am I?”

  “No, darling. Of course not. I’m excited. Three days in Paris with my girl.”

  “But if you need to prepare or . . . have meetings or whatever, I don’t want to . . .”

  “Robyn, you could never be in the way. I can’t wait to show you Paris. You know, this is where I first met your mother.”

  “Yes, at the opera house. It was pouring and her umbrella was broken, and you found her a taxi. Only you found out later that Mum hates opera. She hadn’t been to a show at all. She’d just been sheltering from the rain.”

  “Ah, so I’ve told you that story before.”

  “About a thousand times.” Then, to change the subject: “I hope Addy’s okay.”

  “She’ll be fine. We’ll get her a present. A plastic Eiffel Tower or something. I’m glad to spend this time with you, Bobikins. I don’t see enough of you these days.”

  As if to prove Dad’s words, Gordon is back. He coughs politely. “Prime Minister. I’m sorry to interrupt, sir, but we need to go over the security arrangements one more time.”

  “Haven’t we just done that?”

  “Yes, sir, but there has been a last-minute amendment. If you could just come to the front of the plane.” As they walk away, I definitely hear Gordon mutter something about “security breach” and “illegal protest” and “angry.”

  Not good words to hear in the same sentence. There’s been a lot of stuff on TV recently about Dad and Michael’s friendship. The police still haven’t caught those responsible for the arson at Bell-Barkov last October, and people are saying that Dad could be their next target. Apparently, the AFC believe the company gets some sort of special treatment because of Michael’s relationship with my dad. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I don’t take too much notice. I know the security services are on it, but even so, I am worried. I don’t want anything to happen to Dad. I look out of the window, feeling nervous. Far below, the sea winks at me through a thick armor of cloud, like the eye of a crocodile.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Eventually dawn leaks into the room, scraping back the darkness with her long, thin fingers to the trill of morning birdsong. I didn’t hear Addy crying again in the night, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t here somewhere. I don’t believe Talon. I don’t have tons of experience with kidnappers, but they aren’t known for their open and fr
ank exchanges with prisoners. I’d say they pretty much tell you whatever it is they want you to know.

  A little while after sunrise, Talon brings me breakfast. He is more cautious today, untying only one of my wrists, so I’m still fastened to the bed but can sit up to eat. I couldn’t attack him now anyway. After last night’s restlessness, my muscles feel drained, and my legs and arms are as heavy and inanimate as a wooden puppet’s.

  His face is still masked, only those vivid green eyes—the color of verdigris on copper—are visible. They never look at me directly. Even as he unties me, he keeps his focus somewhere around my chin level, like maybe he’s ashamed or something. As though he thinks that by not looking at me, this might not be happening. It reminds me of Addy’s invisibility game, where she walks around my room, eyes half closed, stealing my lip gloss or earrings or other shiny things. When I ask her what she’s doing, she says, “I not here. You can’t see me. I invisibubble.” Thinking about my sister hurts.

  Talon left the tray on the chair while he undid the cable ties, but now he puts it next to me on the bed. I notice that he is still favoring his left arm. “Breakfast,” he says, like I might be a bit stupid. A newspaper is folded up next to it. I catch sight of the headline as he pushes the tray toward me: PM’S DAUGHTER TAKEN HOSTAGE.

  I hesitate, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of having brought me something I actually want, and then the need to know overwhelms me and I snatch it up ­greedily. There is a grainy photo of me taken at Mum’s birthday last year. I wish they had chosen another picture. I am not even smiling in this one. I look stuck up and smug. My long hair is pulled back in a ponytail; my bangs are in my eyes as usual.

  Robyn Knollys-Green, the prime minister’s sixteen-year-old daughter, was kidnapped shortly after one p.m. yesterday, when the car she was traveling in was ambushed following a roadside bomb just outside Northampton. Security forces have refused to comment on whether there is any link between the kidnapping and the shooting of the prime minister in January, the crime for which Kyle Jefferies is awaiting trial.