Fatal Crossing

by Lone Theils

  It was the bookcase. Something about the bookcase was very wrong.

  ‘I just need ...’ Nora said, and heard how her voice slowed down like an old audiotape just before it tangles up.

  Then everything turned black.

  31

  When she woke up, she didn’t know how much time had passed. For one brief, panicky moment she thought that she had gone blind. Her eyes were wide open, but she could see nothing in the pitch-black darkness.

  She returned to her body in violent jolts. Nora's throat hurt, she had a gag in her mouth, and her hands were tied in front of her body. She could smell earth and mulch, a hint of mouldy clothes and rust.

  Slowly she began to make out contours. Some things were less black than others, dark grey against grey.

  Her feet were tied together, and she had been left on the ground in what she took to be the tool shed outside which she had been chatting to Mr Thompson earlier.

  It was cold. She could feel the chill from the beaten-earth floor, and she guessed that it was night time. She turned on to her side and wiggled until she reached a sitting position, while her calf muscles screamed as cramp set in. She ignored the pain and tried tentatively to stand up. She was yanked back by a rattling iron chain, one end of which was attached to the back of her belt while the other appeared to be fixed to an oversized garden tractor, as far as she could work out.

  How the hell had this happened to her? One moment she was drinking tea with a nice care-home warden, the next she was trussed up in a tool shed like a lamb for the slaughter.

  Mrs Rosen? Nora tried to recall their meeting. Everything swirled together in a confusing mosaic. The angry terrier that was Mrs Fletcher, the trip to Mrs Rosen's office. Tea being poured from a rose-patterned teapot, Mrs Rosen's strained smile, the radio going in the kitchen, the bookcase.

  There was something about that bookcase. Nora knew it — if only she could remember what it was. She closed her eyes again and tried to appeal to the photographic part of her memory.

  First she visualised the top shelf. Two books on jam and chutney. One book about hiking trails in Wales. A china owl figurine. Five leather-bound novels with gold print, probably bought by the yard from a second-hand bookshop to give the office the right cultured air.

  Second shelf: a dog-eared version of Scotland on Foot, its spine badly cracked from years of use. A picture book of Shropshire landscapes. A garland of dried flowers that had seen better days.

  Frustrated, Nora kicked out at the garden tractor in the darkness and rolled on to her side again. That didn’t get her anywhere, and now she was lying pretty much on show, waiting for some psycho to step out of the darkness and attack her.

  She strained and tore at the chain in sheer rage. The garden tractor shifted a few centimetres when she managed to raise two of its wheels from the ground, before they thumped back down with a sigh. Her rage came out as something that would have resembled the roar of a wounded animal, only the gag in her mouth muffled all sound.

  If she stretched the chain as far as it would go, she could just about reach the wooden wall. First she tried bumping her shoulders against the wall to attract attention, but it made no noise at all. In sheer desperation she tried banging her head against the wall, but the noise was limited and the pain severe.

  She could feel the tears well up and with them a deep fear she simply couldn’t afford to indulge. The most important thing was not thinking about all the things that might happen. Who or what might be behind the door when it was opened. If it was ever opened. Those were futile thoughts. Right now it was about finding a way out.

  Nora recalled the many times she had found herself in a tight spot. How she had been in the middle of a war zone and her satellite phone had cut out three minutes before the deadline. How once she had been caught behind a roadblock between Macedonia and Kosovo with three mercenaries, who were trigger-happy and high on cocaine. How her laptop had once deleted five hours of work on an express train to Manchester, and how she had recreated the article in twenty-five minutes, because that was all the time she had.

  Nora Sand solves problems. And she does it cool, calm and collected. Afterwards she might have a total meltdown. That is, if she has any energy left.

  That could be her epitaph one day. But today was not that day.

  Third shelf. More books by the yard. A snow globe paperweight with a plastic model of Il Duomo, the cathedral in Florence financed and built by the Medici family, who presumably had never imagined that their life's work would one day be encapsulated in a plastic globe with artificial snow. A pile of yellowing paper sticking out from a file. The New Testament. The New Testament.

  It was at that very moment when Nora realised what was so very, very wrong — that the door opened.

  The light from a torch searched the room until the beam landed on Nora's face, forcing her to close her eyes. Then she heard Mrs Rosen's voice again. This time it was stripped of false politeness and sympathy.

  ‘Oh, Miss Sand. You’re awake at last. Sleeping on the job is a very bad idea,’ she said sarcastically.

  Nora tried staring back at her, but could see nothing except her outline behind the beam of the flashlight. It wasn’t until Mrs Rosen was very close to her that Nora noticed the filled syringe. She tried protesting, promising anything as long as Mrs Rosen didn’t inject whatever it was at the other end of that needle into her. But the words didn’t get past the gag covering her mouth.

  ‘There, there ...’ Mrs Rosen spoke to her like an adult trying to soothe a restless child.

  Nora tried wriggling out of her reach.

  ‘Miss Sand. I’m going to inject you whatever you do. I’ve had to keep you here for practical reasons. But now I need to move you, hence the injection. It's up to you whether or not it’ll hurt. If you lie still, all you’ll feel is a tiny little scratch.’

  Her voice was calm. Her sentences short and concise. Nora realised that to Mrs Rosen, capturing and drugging a journalist wasn’t something that caused her any kind of agitation, raised her blood pressure or indeed her voice. She might as well have been telling her how to tie her shoelaces or reminding her to buy porridge oats. And that scared Nora more than anything.

  She forced herself to lie still and wait for the right moment. Her muscles tensed and suddenly it happened very quickly. Mrs Rosen was on top of her. Nora kicked out, squirmed and felt the sharp scratch from the needle where her shoulder joined her neck. Then everything turned black again.

  32

  When she regained consciousness, she was tied to a chair in a room that had to be a basement. The gag over her mouth was gone, but the walls looked so thick that no one would hear her scream anyway. Near the ceiling she could see small windows that let in grey daylight. She could smell damp concrete, stored apples and oil. In a corner a chest freezer was humming away. Its glowing, green lamp announced that everything was normal, but nothing was normal. She was trapped in some madwoman's basement, and as she slowly came round, the image of the book came back to her. Few people in the UK had a copy of the New Testament. Most British homes with a Bible used the King James authorised version. The spine of this book had been in Danish.

  If Nora's hands had been free, she would have slapped her forehead. Every clue had led her to this place. What an idiot she had been. How blind.

  The chill crept up around her legs, her bladder was full to bursting, and her mouth was dry. She could feel her mobile digging into her hip and decided that today's best news was that that bitch Mrs Rosen hadn’t had the presence of mind to search her. Nora was only one phone call away from help. One call and a whole universe, she thought, and glanced at her cold, pale hands tied firmly to the armrests.

  As long as her mobile was alive, there was hope.

  She cleared her throat and tried talking into the room. ‘Hello?’ There was no response. ‘Hello, is anyone there?’

  Still no response. Nora thought her voice sounded small and desperate. She took a deep breath and forced hers
elf to calm down.

  ‘Mrs Rosen. Hello?’ she called out.

  Silence.

  She listened out for the tiniest sound that would reveal that she was in a building with life other than the humming chest freezer. She thought she heard a dog bark in the distance.

  Then it came. Faint at first, like creaking. Then louder. Someone was walking around upstairs. Nora could hear footsteps. There was a human being nearby.

  She called out again. The footsteps stopped. Someone had heard her.

  ‘Hello? Help!’ she tried again, louder this time.

  The footsteps came closer. Nora heard a door being opened behind her and felt cool air.

  ‘Shut up,’ the voice ordered her.

  ‘Please may I have some water?’

  If she could get some water, she might be allowed to free her hands to drink it. And that would give her a chance.

  ‘I’m just asking for some water. That's all,’ she tried again.

  The door was slammed shut. Silence. Treacherous sobs forced their way up Nora's throat.

  Was she supposed to just sit here until she died of thirst? Or would something even worse happen to her? She couldn’t allow herself to wonder what Mrs Rosen might want to do to her. She just had to make sure that it never got that far.

  She heard footfall on the steps and the door opened again. This time she sensed that someone was standing behind her.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ a female voice said.

  ‘Who are you?’ Nora said in a voice that was shaking more than she would have liked.

  ‘Shut up and close your eyes.’ The command was hard and sharp like a whiplash.

  Nora did as she was told. The next moment a plastic cup was pressed against her lips. She drank greedily. Some of the water trickled down her chin, and she choked, spluttered and coughed. But then she found a rhythm with the hand and drained the cup.

  ‘Can I have some more?’ she said in an attempt to buy time.

  The voice didn’t reply. Instead she heard the door being closed again and someone walking away.

  ‘Please?’ she called out into the empty space, and hated herself for it. Shortly afterwards the door was opened once more.

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  Nora closed them, almost. Leaving a tiny crack, she saw the outline of a white plastic cup held in a hand at the end of a green sweater.

  The woman let her drink in silence.

  ‘I need the loo,’ Nora said.

  The woman said nothing.

  ‘I mean, I really need the loo,’ Nora insisted. ‘Please?’

  The ritual repeated itself. Silence, cold air, the door being slammed and someone leaving. This time Nora was sure that she had heard a dog bark.

  She was alone again. For how long she didn’t know. She tried calculating the minutes by counting to sixty over and over, like her father had taught her on countless car journeys to archaeological sites, but soon gave up. It didn’t really matter what time it was. Her instinct told her that she had been drugged for about twelve hours.

  She had pins and needles in her fingers due to lack of circulation, and tried moving her arms back and forth under the brown parcel tape keeping her fixed to the armrests. It shifted every time, but only millimetres. After what felt like half an hour's hard work, Nora hadn’t achieved much apart from a sweaty brow and loosening her restraints a useless half-centimetre.

  She started rocking back and forth on the chair. Perhaps she could damage it enough to wrench off one armrest? She looked around desperately for something — anything — that might help her. There was a spade next to the chest freezer. If she could get it into tension under the armrest, she might be able to ...

  Inch by inch Nora rocked the chair towards the spade. It was hard going, and she was scared of moving quickly in case she made too much noise. Finally it was within reach.

  The challenge now was to flip the spade towards the chair so she could place it under the armrest, push it up with her thigh and use it as a kind of lever that could twist off the armrest. She edged the chair closer with great care and nudged the spade. It started sliding towards the chest freezer, hit the lid with a clonk, and settled there like an unstable Mikado stick. Shit! She tried getting closer to it, but the chair was in her way.

  She wanted to scream in rage at herself.

  The door opened again. This time it was Mrs Rosen. Trying to pretend she wasn’t in the middle of an escape attempt was pointless. A furious Nora glared at her blue eyes.

  This seemed to amuse Mrs Rosen. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, Miss Sand. You don’t give up easily, do you?’

  Nora gave her a hard stare. ‘I know who you are,’ she said in Danish.

  Mrs Rosen made no reply, but Nora saw her face twitch in a way that revealed she had heard and understood the sentence.

  Nora repeated: ‘I know who you are.’

  Mrs Rosen shrugged and replied in perfect English: ‘You do? I very much doubt it.’

  She nodded towards the chest freezer. ‘Why were you trying to get into the freezer? Your wish can come true much sooner than you imagine,’ she said calmly. ‘Do you really want to know what's inside the freezer? You wouldn’t be the first. Or indeed the last, for that matter. But you do get to decide if you want to be the most awkward. You’ll only make it worse for yourself.’

  Nora's body throbbed as if to tell her that her earlier panic had never gone away, but merely hung around nearby.

  ‘The loo. I need the loo,’ she squawked.

  Mrs Rosen looked uninterested.

  ‘Listen,’ Nora said, ‘I really need the loo. If you don’t let me use it, I’ll pee right here. On the chair. On the floor. I don’t know what you plan to do with me, but I imagine leaving DNA evidence isn’t a very good idea.’

  Mrs Rosen appeared to consider that point for a moment. ‘If I —’ she had time to say.

  Then Nora's mobile started ringing.

  Nora closed her eyes, as if that could make the sound go away, but Mrs Rosen had already located it and she thrust her hand brutally into Nora's trouser pocket to retrieve the mobile.

  ‘I have to take that call,’ Nora bluffed.

  Mrs Rosen checked the mobile to see who was calling. The number was withheld. Out of the corner of her eye, Nora could see she had fifty-two missed calls.

  ‘It's the magazine. If I don’t answer it, they’ll get worried and move heaven and earth to find me.’

  Mrs Rosen made a quick decision and put it on speaker. ‘Hello. Who is this?’ she said in a measured voice.

  ‘Yes, hello. It's Gareth from Vodafone. I’m calling to tell you about a great new offer for our customers —’

  Mrs Rosen hung up without saying a word and rolled her eyes. Then she turned off the mobile and dropped it into her own pocket.

  Nora played her last card, betting everything that her guess was right. That she had finally got hold of one end of the truth.

  ‘Lisbeth. Is this really what became of you?’

  Mrs Rosen's mouth turned into a narrow line.

  ‘Listen, Lisbeth — it's no use. You can’t hide your true identity for the rest of your life. Keeping me here won’t solve any problems. All my notes are on my laptop. Sooner or later someone will find them.’

  For the first time Mrs Rosen switched to Danish.

  ‘Oh. You mean the Mac in the turquoise bag in the boot of that small, yellow rental car you parked in front of Ladbrokes in the high street? I’m afraid the car was involved in an accident. The driver appears to have driven too close to the crash barrier and gone over the cliffs near Brine. This can happen if you’re a little tipsy or depressed.’

  ‘Is that what happened to Oluf?’

  Lisbeth watched Nora in silence.

  ‘Is that what you have in mind for me?’

  Lisbeth shook her head. ‘No. You’ll be a present. He likes his girls fresh.’

  She let the sentence linger in the air for a moment.

  ‘And you’re welcome, of cou
rse, to take a look inside the freezer. If you have the guts, that is.’

  Then she spun on her heel and slammed the door.

  Nora screamed for help until her voice grew hoarse and her throat was raw. Then she fell into a restless sleep.

  33

  Sometime later the door opened again. It was the woman in the green sweater. This time Nora wasn’t told to close her eyes. By now her bladder was in agony.

  Once again the woman held the cup to Nora's lips and she drank obediently. Then the woman opened a packet of Digestive biscuits, took one and let Nora eat it one bite at a time.

  ‘She says you need feeding for the next two days. I’m not sure what to give you,’ the woman said. Her voice had grown timid and small. ‘It's the first time we’ve had anyone here for a long time.’

  Nora forced herself to stay calm. It's just an interview, she told herself. It's just an article that needs writing and I’m gathering information. I’ve interviewed war criminals, killers and dictators. This is just another job.

  ‘Would you happen to have a banana or some other fruit?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘I could go upstairs and have a look.’

  Nora attempted her most reassuring smile. ‘That would be really nice, Lulu.’

  The woman jumped. ‘You know my name?’

  ‘Yes, I do. There are still people in Denmark looking for you. After all these years.’

  ‘Who?’

  Nora tried to buy time. ‘So, can I have that banana?’

  Lulu got up from the floor and went outside. This time she left the door open. Nora could hear loud barking and something that might be traffic from a main road some distance away.

  A little later she returned with two bananas and a red plastic bucket. Her body language reminded Nora of a cowed dog. She slinked along the walls and kept her gaze fixed on the ground, never looking straight at Nora.

  ‘She says that if you need the loo, you have to go in this,’ Lulu mumbled so quietly that Nora almost missed it.

  Nora tried to catch her eye to establish some sort of contact. ‘Can I have that banana now?’ she asked softly.