Loose Ends

by Susan Moody

  He shoved her back against the pillows so hard that her head smashed against the wall. ‘Wanna bet?’

  ‘I thought you fancied me.’

  ‘I used to. Not any more.’ His mouth sneered. ‘Have you looked at yourself recently?’

  ‘How would I do that? You haven’t left me a mirror.’

  ‘If I did, you’d break it into pieces and stab me.’

  ‘Why would I do that, Stefan?’ she said flirtatiously, though the words stuck in her mouth like under-baked bread. She reached under his shirt, trying not to shudder. ‘Oh, man,’ she said. ‘Wow!’

  He looked at her suspiciously. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I hadn’t realized how . . . big you are.’ She leaned back against the pillows, feeling the bruise at the back of her head. ‘Ever done it with the girl on top?’

  ‘Hundreds of times.’

  ‘OK, then I won’t bother showing you how good that can be.’ She turned away from him, let her body sag. ‘Better get on with what you came to do.’

  She felt him hesitate. Then his fingers on her naked shoulder. ‘Let’s try it,’ he said.

  She grinned fiercely before moving to face him. What a stupid conceited self-satisfied moron! ‘Lie down here,’ she said, moving over a little.

  She positioned herself above him, moved seductively a couple of times, let her breasts caress his chest. ‘See,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that good?’ If she absolutely had to, she would take him in her mouth, though the very thought brought nausea jumping to the back of her throat. ‘Isn’t that nice?’

  ‘Mmmm.’ His mouth hung open, drool pooling in his lower lip. He nodded, closing his eyes, groaning softly with pleasure. She circled one arm around him, held him tightly, pressing her body down over his chest. ‘That’s marvellous,’ she whispered. ‘Magnificent. Stefan, you’re fantastic.’

  ‘Mmm,’ he murmured. ‘Oh God, that’s so . . . so . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, moaning. ‘Oh, yes, yes.’ Moving lightly above him, she reached one arm down to the floor, felt for the open plastic bottle she’d put just under the bed then in one movement brought it up, squeezed shampoo deep into his mouth and then, as his eyes flew open with shock and he began gagging, into his eyes as well.

  ‘Bastard!’ she screamed. ‘Filthy disgusting bastard!’ She pulled herself off him, squirted more shampoo into his face, down his throat, slammed both her fists as hard as she could into his groin, sliced at his windpipe with the side of her hand.

  He shrieked, choked, curled into a ball, tears and snot all over his face.

  As she had rehearsed so many times in her mind, she grabbed his shirt and pulled it on, stepped into his trousers (no underpants, yuk!), pulled them up around her waist and quickly buttoned them. Picking up his tie and belt, she went back to the bed where he was still thrashing about, coughing, retching. His eyes streamed, his mouth foamed, one hand cradled his balls as he moaned in pain. She lashed the tie as securely as she could around his wrists, and using the belt, she strapped his feet together. Squeezing the last of the shampoo from the bottle into his streaming eyes, she cleared her throat, gathered saliva into her mouth and spat into his face. ‘Scum!’ she screamed. ‘Insane moronic impotent piece of shit!’

  His jacket held a wallet, heavy with notes and coins, a bunch of keys, which she pushed into the trouser pocket. She picked up his mobile phone and smashed it down into his groin, three or four times, enjoying the sound of his muffled screams. Still carrying the phone, she pulled the key out of the lock, left the room and locked the door behind her so that he was imprisoned, just as she had been. Then she was down the stairs – three flights, passages stretching off to right and left, empty rooms with their doors open, dust lying in corners, no curtains at the windows – and in the front hall. Cautiously she opened the door on to a broad drive curving away from the house between tall trees. For a single delicious moment, she stood outside and let the breeze caress her uplifted face. There was a long-unused marble fountain in front of her, its wide basin caked with dried green algae, a short flight of steps guarded on either side by square plinths, vistas of trees and fields. How could you ever fully appreciate the wonder of breathing fresh air, looking up at the blue sky, watch leaves trembling on newly budding leaves, unless these simple privileges had been denied you? She would never take freedom for granted again.

  In front of the house was a flashy Italian sports car, dark red, with white leather seats and walnut fascia, personalized number plate: SEM 123. Fingers steady, she searched through the keys she’d taken and found one attached to a leather tag, with an enamelled badge matching the one on the bonnet of the car. She got in, started the engine, sailed off down the drive. There were open gates at the end of it, and a small lodge house on one side, with a man working in the garden, pruning dead rose stems. He raised his hand as she passed, and she smiled at him, checked that there was no traffic coming and paused. Behind her were two high stone gateposts with flat tops: Dewsbury was incised into one, Manor on the other. Dewsbury Manor.

  Should she go left or right? What did it matter? Sooner or later she’d find a village, a town, a petrol station from where she could call the police.

  Exhilaration flooded her. She had beaten them at their own game. She was free. And ranging for revenge. Like Caesar’s spirit, she seemed to remember. ‘Cry “Havoc!”’, she screamed, pounding on the steering wheel. ‘And let slip the fucking dogs of war!’

  The countryside was unfamiliar; she drove through green lanes banked high on either side, fields fuzzed with the growth of early summer, ponds where budding willows drooped. What signposts there were said things like Martin’s Well 1? miles, Martin’s Well turning out to be nothing but a couple of houses and a church. Eventually she hit a T-junction where signs pointed left to Harbury, five miles, right to Chennington, three miles. She turned towards Chennington, which proved to be a pleasant country town, catering to the rich middle classes, if the shops were anything to go by: designer clothes, hats, expensive books, speciality cheeses, high-class grocers. She pulled into a parking place and waited for a woman in a pink tweed suit and a Gucci bag to come alongside.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she called. ‘Could you tell me where the nearest police station is?’

  ‘Nice car,’ the woman said. She stroked the finish as though it was an expensive race horse.

  ‘It’s my husband’s,’ Kate said. ‘The police . . .?’

  ‘Mmm, let me think. There isn’t one at Harbury, and there’s certainly not one here, not any more. I think your best bet is to keep going until you hit Barbridge.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘About six miles. Just keep going straight ahead, and you’ll see the signs.’

  ‘Barbridge.’

  ‘That’s right.’ The woman smiled. ‘Really nice car.’ As she drove away, Kate had the feeling that someone was going to be badgered by his wife into upgrading her current car to the same model as Stefan’s. She could picture his annoyance, the G&Ts being poured, his mood mellowing, something soft and enticing on the music centre, seductive with an undertone of sexuality, the negligee flung off in the bedroom, a shag like he hadn’t had for a long time, followed by gentle steely persuasions. You’re selling your soul for a mess of pottage, buddy, she wanted to tell him, waste of time. On the other hand, he could probably afford it. She wished momentarily for a rich husband – or at least a job good enough for her to afford such a car.

  The police at Barbridge were sympathetic. They took her to a small interview room and sat her at a long table. Someone brought her a cup of sweet tea and listened with concern while she told her story and handed over the wallet, the keys and mobile phone. ‘My name’s Kate Fullerton.’ Voice wobbling as she spoke; she found it hard to believe she was finally free, that this room would not suddenly disappear like a shifting mirage and she would find herself back on that vile bed in the shuttered room, her body no longer hers, reduced to a piece of meat.

  A more senior man came in and sat do
wn opposite her while a colleague set up a tape recorder which whirred quietly between them, before taking a chair at the far end of the table.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Edwards,’ the first man said, ‘and this is Detective Constable Hunter.’ Gently he took her through her ordeal once more. ‘We’ve been looking for you,’ he said finally.

  ‘You knew I was missing?’

  ‘You were registered as a missing person about four days ago.’ He looked down at the slim file in front of him. ‘A Ms Janine Taylor and a Mr Jefferson Andrewes have been down at their local police station every day since you disappeared . . .’ He looked away from her, and she knew he didn’t want to think about the ordeal she must have undergone at the hands of the man who had abducted her.

  Jefferson Andrewes . . . how did he get involved? ‘How long ago was that?’ she said faintly. ‘I’ve no idea how long that bastard kept me there.’

  ‘Five days,’ he said.

  Nearly a week of her precious life gone because of Stefan’s twisted notion of revenge. What could he possibly have hoped to gain from what he had done? ‘Five days,’ she echoed, her voice fading.

  ‘Believe me, Mrs Fullerton, I have daughters of my own. If we ever catch up with these people . . .’ He shook his head. ‘And you don’t know where you were imprisoned?’ He was fatherly, kind, compassionate. He had bushy black-and-white eyebrows and grey hair cut very short, though he didn’t look remotely like George Clooney.

  ‘I could show you the way there. It’s a big house, in its own grounds, called Dewsbury Manor.’ She drummed on the table with her fingers: was anybody doing anything to ensure that Stefan didn’t escape? She was coming down from her adrenalin high now, shaking, shuddering, her bruised, misused body feeling as though it was about to shake apart, but she held on.

  ‘Dewsbury Manor? Good Lord. You’ve been right under our noses all this time.’

  ‘Trouble was,’ said DC Hunter, ‘we had so little to go on. Even though we had a probable perp and even a possible name, we couldn’t tie him in to anyone else, find an address for him, nothing. And then the motive . . . was it just . . . um . . . sexual gratification—’

  ‘It wasn’t rape,’ she said. ‘He’s impotent; I was spared that.’

  ‘That’s something to be grateful for, I suppose.’ Edwards tapped a pen on the edge of his notebook. ‘You’re sure the place was called Dewsbury Manor?’

  DC Hunter said, ‘Somebody bought it, end of last year.’

  ‘Do we know who?’

  ‘Far as I know, it was some foreign company, Italian, Spanish, not one of us, at any rate.’

  ‘Italian?’ said Edwards. ‘The rest of the world is taking us over and we just sit back and let them get on with it. Places like Iceland and the Arabs—’

  ‘The French own our electricity,’ said Hunter.

  ‘Now the Italians are buying up the shop. I don’t know . . .’ Edwards turned back to Kate.

  ‘The Manor’s been waiting for planning permission to convert it,’ said Hunter. ‘It’s been empty for over a year.’

  ‘That’s obviously why they took me there,’ said Kate impatiently. Why were they sitting there, gossiping about local property sales? Couldn’t they see she was disintegrating, so many little pieces of her breaking off that she was surprised to see the floor wasn’t littered with them.

  ‘I t-told you, I was in this attic room, but when I . . . um . . . esc . . . when I got away, I could s-see there was no furniture in the . . . um . . . in the rooms.’ Words were falling away from her, even her hair seemed to be trembling. Now that she no longer had to hold on to herself, every part of her hurt.

  Edwards stood up, went to the door of the interview room, and shouted for someone called Tommy.

  ‘Look, I’d hate this bastard to get away,’ Kate said. Her teeth were jittering inside her mouth, the separate parts of her body finally allowed to admit to the abuse she had tried not to acknowledge for five (five!) days: was Stefan going to escape before they could nail him, just because of red-tape, an insistence on doing everything by the book?

  ‘So would we.’ He put his hand over hers. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Fullerton, Kate, there are police cars already at the scene. We’ll get him, and when we do . . .’

  ‘Don’t you need to examine me? DNA or something?’ Her mouth puckered. ‘And I need to get out of these disgusting clothes.’ When this was over, she would run a hot bath, fill it with some hugely expensive bath gel, and lie there for a week, a month, forever.

  ‘It’s being sorted,’ he said.

  There was a knock at the door and a woman officer came in. ‘Tommy,’ Edwards said, ‘this is Mrs Fullerton, and she needs all the help you can give her.’ He nodded and raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve been very, very brave, Kate.’ He got up and came round the table to take both her hands in his. ‘And very clear-headed. I’m sorry to have to put you through this inquisition when you must be exhausted, but the sooner we get the facts, the easier it is to get a successful conclusion. So, thank you: I can promise we’re all doing our best for you.’

  Tommy, large-boned, high-complexioned, took Kate’s arm in one of her hands. ‘Come on, dear, we’ll see you right.’

  The relief was too much for Kate. Her lower lip quivered. The lake of tears which had been rocking inside her ever since Mick and Stefan had snatched her, suddenly overflowed. Apart from tears forced from her by pain, she hadn’t cried during her ordeal, but now she buried her head in her hands, while a cataract of weeping shook her. ‘Oh God,’ she sobbed. ‘It was . . . so unbelievably horrible . . . so, so never-ending.’ The terror she had refused to let herself give in to now swept over her. ‘And the whole time, I knew he’d never let me go, he would have to kill me because I knew who he was.’

  ‘You’re all right now,’ Tommy soothed. She put her beefy arms around Kate and held her close. ‘You’re OK, you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I honestly thought I was going to die.’

  And as she said it, Kate wondered if indeed to a certain extent, she had.

  Magnus

  Seventeen

  Magnus arrived at Heathrow, got into Central London in time to catch a train north and pick up the dogs from their luxurious kennels. He’d been back in his own home no more than half an hour when the bell began to peal, at the same time as someone repeatedly pounded at the door. He put down the cup of coffee he’d just brewed on his newest machine, purchased in Boston during a free afternoon, which he’d spent very pleasantly with an extremely attractive historian from the University of Oklahoma with one of those weird hard-to-remember American names that in any ordinary country would be surnames or small county towns, something like Bristowe or Godstowe or Plaistow, who was planning a book on the Romanov Princesses (‘the ones who got away’) and to whom, in a moment of unusual spontaneity, he had offered the flat at the top of his house when she told him she planned to spend several weeks in England during the summer, researching at the London Library.

  As soon as he had opened the door, a small dark-haired woman hurtled into the house and planted herself in front of him.

  ‘Where on earth have you been?’ she screeched.

  ‘What?’ Magnus stepped backwards, keeping a wary eye on the door, taking note of the nearest exit, as he had conscientiously done on the flight back from the States when requested to do so (‘do not forget that your nearest exit may be behind you’). He had long prepared himself for a contingency plan of action were any one of a number of worst-case scenarios to ‘eventuate’ (a word he particularly disliked and one the historian from the University of Oklahoma had used several times) and what he would do should he find himself confronted by a mad person, possibly armed with a knife (though until now he had always assumed it would be a madman rather than a madwoman) with the possibility of violence being offered – this woman was even now approaching him with clenched fists – maintaining a clear line of escape taking first priority.

  ‘I’ve been coming round every day, knocking
at the door, you’re never in, where the hell have you been?’ she demanded again, in a rising crescendo of anger.

  ‘In the States,’ he said, reasonably enough. ‘Though I can’t really see that it’s any of your business.’ He had a feeling he’d met the woman before somewhere. Was she one of Kate’s close little quartet? Petra, Jenny and um . . . someone else whose name he couldn’t recall, perhaps she was the ‘um’ one.

  ‘Of course it’s my business,’ she shouted. ‘Nobody’s been able to get hold of you, and naturally, typical bloody man, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you to telephone home while you were away, does it? Or to pick up your phone messages via your mobile.’

  ‘I haven’t got a—’

  She glanced at the telephone, which was blinking redly, and the pile of letters which had been pushed to one side when Magnus opened his front door. ‘Don’t you ever listen to your answering machine, for heaven’s sake, or read your mail? Once I found out where you lived, I must have put at least five notes through the door—’

  ‘Just a minute.’ He seized the woman’s arm – she was small enough for him to feel reasonably confident of overpowering her, should the need arise – trying to steer her towards the kitchen. ‘I only got back from the States about thirty minutes ago. I certainly haven’t had time to listen to messages or even get started on the mail.’

  ‘Well, you should have, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Calm down, will you, it’s Lucy, isn’t it? I’ve just made some coffee, want some?’

  She wrenched her arm away. ‘No it is not Lucy and no, I do not want any bloody coffee. Haven’t you any idea what’s been going on while you’ve been away?’

  ‘Well, I caught CNN in my hotel room,’ he began. ‘Recessions all over the place, we lost to the West Indians, I’m afraid I never pay much attention to home news when I’m—’

  ‘Just to bring you up to date,’ the not-Lucy woman said sarcastically, ‘while you were gone, your sister Kate was only kidnapped and imprisoned by a total pervert for nearly a week!’