by Janet Kelly
‘What are you doing?’ I hissed at her, keeping my voice as low as possible so as not to alert anyone to our discussion.
‘I’ve seen this done on the telly. If I wiggle it about it might move the lock,’ she said.
By the time John returned with our tea, she’d got nowhere.
‘Chike made these,’ said John, as he offered a plate of biscuits round. ‘He’s quite a cook. He loves The Great British Bake Off.’
I couldn’t understand why he was being so casual. He’d brought us back to this prison and must have had some idea of the danger in which he’d placed us.
‘Who are you?’ Tracey asked. ‘Why won’t you let us go? You’re a Brit. You should be one of us, after all.’
John scowled. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, my dear. I’m not one of you at all. I came to Nigeria so many years ago I have lived here longer than I did in the UK. I’ve seen the poverty, the corruption and the lack of justice. I consider myself to be African.’
‘Are you part of the gang?’ I asked.
He laughed and then stopped suddenly.
‘We are not a gang. We have a viable business,’ he said. ‘We don’t harm anyone. Or at least we haven’t yet.’
His attitude chilled me. John was clear that he considered his part in the kidnap to be legitimate and that he had every right to conduct himself accordingly. He had no empathy with our fear and didn’t seem to care that innocent people’s lives were being put in danger.
He wouldn’t speak any more of who he was or his part in the operation, and so we made small talk in a bid to keep him happy, until he finally left, telling us we would have visitors later that evening.
We distracted ourselves from increasing levels of fear by playing the games that had kept us occupied before our escape. But the appeal of piercing celebrities’ bodies with sharp implements had gone, so we talked about what we thought had happened to the guards when the bosses found out we’d escaped.
‘I don’t envy them,’ I said. ‘They could be in even more danger than we are. At least we have a value all the time they think they will get a ransom. They don’t have any value if they can’t be trusted.’
Tracey said she thought the guards might have been killed but was relieved to know they were still alive.
‘Maybe the gang isn’t as nasty as we think. They’re just trying to frighten us.’
And doing a good job, I thought.
We weren’t too surprised when Gowon and Chiddy where both thrown into our shack, almost unconscious and wearing only pink pyjama bottoms and blindfolds. Their hands and feet were both bound so they were unable to move.
‘Do not touch them or help them in any way,’ shouted Chike as he closed the door behind them and fixed the padlock. ‘They are stupid scum with the intelligence of fish in a fryer, toads in your holes and peanuts in your butter. Brains mushed to mash.’
We were sorry to see them in such a state, not least because we’d probably given them more drugs than we needed to, but also because pink didn’t suit either of them. They looked terrified. Chiddy was crying and Gowon was biting his bottom lip repeatedly. Every now and then their heads would drop with the effort of staying awake.
The guards probably knew more than we did about the lengths the gang would go to. I thought about helping them, but it wasn’t worth the risk, although we did steer them over to an area where they could sleep, though neither Tracey nor I were keen on giving up the mattress that had been our bed.
‘What happened to you?’ I asked Gowon. ‘Chike doesn’t look too pleased.’
He spoke quietly when he answered. He was obviously scared of doing anything else that would upset his masters.
‘We were asleep when they came back and found you’d gone. You got us into very bad trouble, Cynthia. We will be punished for doing nothing wrong.’
‘Now you know how we feel, locked up here for no reason,’ said Tracey. ‘You deserve to be punished for getting involved with them in the first place.’
‘You don’t know how bad these men are,’ said Chiddy. ‘They just want money and will do what they have to do to get it. Even keeping old ladies locked up.’
I hoped the reference to old ladies didn’t include me, and asked him who John was. Neither of them really knew, other than they’d been told an Englishman was one of the big bosses who’d set up many of the scams by getting hold of British people’s bank details. He’d also supplied the technology used to send emails and set up false bank accounts. Chiddy said we were part of a major scam targeting the south of England, where the kidnappers thought the most money would be.
‘English are the ones who give us the most money. The English and the Americans, particularly women,’ he added.
‘What do you get out of it, though?’ I asked.
‘We get money for our families. The children can go to school and our parents can eat. We get enough for cars, and one day maybe enough for our own home,’ said Gowon. ‘We can’t get that any other way,’ he added, sounding apologetic.
It wasn’t difficult to understand their position, even if the morality was a little dubious. They were motivated by poverty and hunger and a desire for education; to be part of a competitive and savage world. Compared to the greed-driven bankers we have in our so-called ‘civilised’ Western culture, they are icons of integrity.
‘We’re in grave danger,’ said Gowon. ‘We have displeased our bosses and, if we live, it will be to regret it.’
Tracey showed no interest in their plight. We both probably thought the same thing, that our own escape was paramount and what happened to them was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. She walked over to the door to work on the padlock again, squeezing her fingers through the gap to get hold of it and just managing to do so, using one of her last remaining false nails to keep the lock in place.
‘I reckon I could do this, given enough time,’ she said.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Gowon. ‘Don’t get us into any more trouble or we could be badly hurt. Please be careful if you think anything of me, Cynthia.’
Tracey looked round at me and shrugged, suggesting that whatever we thought of our guards we were much more interested in our own fate.
‘We won’t implicate you in anything,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to be implicated,’ said Chiddy, through intermittent sobs. ‘It sounds unpleasant.’
We weren’t given any more of the herbal drink. No doubt we could no longer be trusted, having used it as a weapon to ensure our escape. This meant I found it difficult to sleep, and it must have been the same for Tracey as she spent hours fiddling with her needle, probing the padlock with varying degrees of patience, but without any let-up.
Gowon and Chiddy snored throughout the night, having finally found a comfortable position on top of a pile of newspapers. Once Gowon had gone to sleep I lay down next to him. The proximity of his body offered warmth and some human comfort – a surprising element of solace in what had become nothing short of a nightmare.
My life didn’t so much flash before me, as we are told it does when facing death, but sauntered past at a leisurely pace. I’d been thinking about Colin, family life and how easy we’d had it. How slow, calm and calculated everything was. We could afford to have integrity as we had all the opportunity we needed to keep body and soul together. We didn’t struggle for food or schooling for our children. Our problems centred around whether the beef needed to be pink or brown, or whether the children should be watching television rather than doing their homework.
There were always jobs when we were first married, although I chose to stay at home after one unsuccessful attempt at full-time employment. We took in a Bulgarian au pair to look after the children, but after she mistook my instruction to feed the children and do the ironing for ‘please invite all your friends round and eat the contents of our freezer’, I decided it wasn’t going to work. I was disciplined by the boss I was working for at the time on the three occasions I was late; once after r
ushing Annika to the doctor for the morning-after pill, and on the other two occasions because she hadn’t returned from her boyfriend’s house by the time I needed to leave. She had pleaded to be allowed to stay in England as she was in love with the tattooed father of three, a man known locally as ‘Slasher’, who was ‘such a nice man that he helps everybody in the community’. After explaining community service was his punishment for stealing cars and attacking a petrol station attendant with a plastic hammer, we packed her off with a one-way plane ticket back to Sofia and the promise we would keep in touch. We didn’t.
I was just about to drop off when Tracey crept over and shook my arm.
‘I think I’ve done it,’ she said. ‘The lock’s open.’
Incredulous, I went to check, and she was right. It hadn’t completely unlocked, but with a bit of brute force the bottom fell from the heavy, arched pin holding it in place.
‘Now what do we do?’ she said.
‘Get the bloody hell out of here,’ I answered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We crept out of the shack, safe in the knowledge Gowon and Chiddy were asleep. Their snoring had covered any noise we made pulling the lock apart and opening the door. We could hear faint mutterings coming from the main shack and guessed John, Chike and Fasina were discussing what to do with their errant guards.
‘We need to get out of here quick, before they realise we’ve gone,’ I said, as I secured the padlock back into position so they wouldn’t immediately know anything was wrong.
‘I could hot-wire John’s car. It’s not an automatic, so I’d know how to do that,’ said Tracey.
I was taken aback. First she’d managed to pick her way out of our shack without any real difficulty and now was telling me she had skills with cars I didn’t even understand.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said. ‘I know people think I’m really stupid, but a few turns in the nick soon show yer a few things, yer know. I could have done computers, but did mechanics instead.’
‘Prison? What for?’ I asked, reeling from this information. I’d been held hostage with a criminal.
‘This and that,’ she replied. ‘Mostly minor charges, theft and that when I was a kid, and once for pissing in a public place, but that was because I was on a suspended so anything would have put me down.’
My knowledge of the justice system was sufficient to know her offences would be more than minor to justify a prison sentence, but I was hugely grateful she’d picked up something worthwhile during her time at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
‘We could give it a go, I suppose,’ I said, wondering if Tracey had been hiding, if not a light under a bushel, certainly a flickering flame.
We walked past the main shack silently, listening at all times to make sure the men were still talking, and headed towards the pathway next to the water. As we passed Chike’s shack, we saw our bags had been left open on his bed. Next to the bags lay the guns they’d used during our previous escape. We took it in turns to keep watch while, firstly Tracey picked up our bags, then I grabbed the guns. I could hardly breathe with anxiety and hoped my palpitations wouldn’t turn into a full-blown panic attack. When we got to the water’s edge, John’s car had been left unlocked and we were surprised but thrilled to see he’d left the keys in the ignition. I threw the guns into an oil drum propped up at the back of the shack.
‘I s’pose he wouldn’t expect anyone to nick his car from here!’ Tracey said, as she chucked her bag on the back seat before grabbing mine and placing it on her lap.
I jumped into the driver’s seat and turned the key. Nothing. I tried again and it revved over a couple of times but stuttered to a halt. I looked at the petrol gauge and could see it was empty.
‘No fuel,’ I said. ‘It looks like we’re going to have to think of something else.’
We got out and looked around, as much as we could in the darkness. It would be at least three or four hours before it got light so we had to make do with the moon’s illumination and a faint glow from the poor levels of lighting over the settlement. Once my eyes had adjusted, I could see what looked like a small boat bobbing around on the water’s edge, tied close to our pathway. It might even have been the one used to bring us from the airport.
‘What are you like at rowing?’ I asked Tracey. She shrugged, and I guessed she’d never done it before. Come to think of it, neither had I.
We clambered into the boat with our bags and untied it from the mooring. The rope was heavy and difficult to unknot with shaking hands and the knowledge we had to get away as quickly as we could. We didn’t know how long it would be before our absence would be noticed. I picked up the oars and managed to get us from the edge of the water, pushing and pulling on the oars until we were in the middle of the stream.
As much as I attempted to get us to go in a straight line, we kept going round in circles. I tried using one paddle only but that made things worse. Then I tried going forward, then backwards and both directions using both paddles, but I just rocked us about until I thought we were going to capsize.
I was exhausted, and wished I’d gone on that team-building weekend with the magistrates three years ago. They’d all learned to canoe, apart from Caroline Sharp who had to be airlifted to hospital after capsizing and getting her hair caught in some weeds. She was under the water for over three minutes before the rest of them worked out she wasn’t showing off.
‘Where are you going, you bloody women?!’
It was Chike and John, running along the pathway. I supposed they must have been alerted to our escape when I’d tried the car engine. I froze. I had no energy left to do anything, and felt as helpless as a rabbit in a trap. My life was going to come to an end without any chance to choose my funeral song.
‘Give me the bleedin’ oars,’ shouted Tracey. ‘We won’t get far with you faffing about like a blue-arsed fly.’
She grabbed the oars and set off at a good pace, and soon we were heading down the water. Chike and John ran along the bank, shouting things we couldn’t make out but guessed weren’t too polite. I thought I heard the word ‘guns’, and was pleased we’d managed to get rid of them. I wasn’t sure we’d escape so easily a second time.
Tracey’s bat wings flapped vigorously with the effort, and her bust heaved up and down as her pectoral muscles worked tirelessly to move us along. I admitted privately to being impressed.
‘I wish you’d told me you had such skills,’ I said. ‘It would have made me feel so much better.’
‘Wha?’ said Tracey, as she puffed heavily. ‘I really must give up fags, for good this time. I can hardly breathe.’
Another shout came from the waterside and I saw a bicycle bumping along the pathway after us. John was riding it, while Chike sat on the handlebars, thankfully hindering progress since his attention to his body mass index was somewhat slack.
‘Keep going, Tracey, you’re doing brilliantly,’ I said, encouraging her as best I could. ‘I think we’re losing them.’
There wasn’t much light – only that coming from the few settlements along the way – so it was easy to keep to the shadows. The water stretched for some distance but we could see a shoreline with lights and buildings up ahead. Every time we thought we would be able to see where we were going the darkness came over us, but we could still keep tabs on the men, who were struggling to keep up. Judging by the coughing I heard, John’s lungs were in a worse state than Tracey’s.
Tracey was flagging, but I could just make out the bike, which was further away than before. John’s legs were sticking out at right angles, as the bike bumped along what was obviously very rocky ground. Next we heard a thud as the bike hit something, followed by a cry and a loud splash. Chike had flown off the handlebars and into the water. John lay on the ground clutching his leg.
‘Come here, you bloody English whores!’ John shouted, clambering into a crouching position. ‘We’ll find you, you’ll see.’
The shouting diminished in volume as Tracey rowed
further away from the camp and towards the light. She certainly put some power behind her efforts, and it was only a few minutes before I looked back and could see the opposite edge of the lake and a jetty. Chike and Fasina’s outlines could be seen, and I imagined them scratching their heads in frustration as they saw us making our getaway. I thought I saw Chike smack Fasina round the head, and could swear I heard him whimper.
I resisted the urge to breathe a sigh of relief until I knew we were far enough away not to be caught again. Even if they got in a car to follow us it would take them some time.
Tracey relaxed and let the oars drop for a while, as she rubbed her upper arms and stretched out her back. ‘I wonder what they would do if they caught up with us?’ she said, pulling her hair about in an attempt to get the sweaty bits out of her eyes.
‘I dread to think, but I don’t suppose either of us would like it very much,’ I answered.
It took just over half an hour to reach the main road where we’d first come from the day we were picked up by Fasina, and I was relieved there was an obvious mooring place and signs of activity, despite it being the early hours of the morning.
‘Let’s park up,’ said Tracey, and I didn’t bother to correct her. I couldn’t care less about her vocabulary, as I’d decided she was something of a heroine. Left to me, we’d be spinning ourselves back into the hands of our captors.
We climbed out of the boat, up the muddy and overgrown bank and onto a concrete square that doubled as a mooring and a car park. We could see a number of vehicles and instinctively tried them all until we found a very old Vauxhall Chevette that had been left unlocked.
‘Well, it ain’t automatic,’ said Tracey, smiling. She bent down into the driver’s footwell and found a handle, which she pulled firmly. The bonnet flew open and she made her way to the engine. Within a couple of minutes the car was running and we were clambering in.
‘It won’t have a steering lock, being so old,’ Tracey added. ‘Otherwise we’d have to go in a straight line everywhere!’