Paul shook with barely contained anger.
“Concrete proof, my arse! I knew I was right as soon as I heard the bastard. Do they really think I would forget the pig that took my sight? I had to listen to him goading me and laughing at me for two fucking days while he dripped acid in my eyes. I’ll never forget the sound of his voice as long as I live,” he almost choked on his words. He took a deep, calming breath and regained some control over his emotions. “Joe, get hold of Jean-Paul and discover what you can about those two new workmen and see where they are tonight. We’ll go on to the château and see if the girls are there or if there’s anything that might lead us to them. Even if she has left me, if that bastard has been there and so much as touched even a single hair of Amy’s head I’ll strangle him with my bare hands.”
David grunted from behind him.
“You won’t get the chance mate, because I will have done it right before you. Come on, let’s go.”
Ellen ran behind them.
“I’m coming too. Just give me two secs to pick up some sheets from the laundry.” She dashed off into the scullery and reappeared moments later with a pile of clean linen.
David threw up his hands in exasperation again.
“What on earth are you doing? We aren’t going to need any dust sheets right now.”
Ellen rolled her eyes at him and then shoved him around to follow the other men.
“You blithering idiot!” She hissed as she followed him up the stairs. “Your wife is about to have a baby. If she’s at the château and has had any type of shock or has been hurt at all then she may go into labour. We’re going to need something clean for both her and your child. There’s nothing at that building site that’s good enough for either of them.”
David gulped noisily and felt the blood drain from his face as he began taking the stairs two at a time.
Chapter Sixteen
Joe swung the car wildly through the château gates narrowly missing the stone gateposts in his haste to arrive at the château . Gravel spat from the wheels as he raced the car up the long drive and round to the front of the huge building.
David leapt out and careered up the steps with Patrick close behind him before the car had even stopped. They charged through the huge doors and stopped suddenly as silence greeted them.
“Geraldine!” David yelled at the top of his voice.
There was no answer and he spun around as Joe and Paul came in through the doors.
“There’s no car outside. I just took a quick look around the back too. It’s almost dark but as far as I can see there’s nothing to show that they’ve been here today.” Joe stared around the high hall.
Paul made his way towards the stairs.
“Am I all clear?” He asked as he moved with more than his normal caution.
David came up to his side.
“There are some bags of plaster just at the bottom of the stairs but if you keep to the right you’ll be fine. We’ll check this floor while you go up to the top floor. We’ll meet you somewhere in the middle.”
Paul nodded and strode confidently across the floor. He mounted the stairs and ran up four flights.
“Amy! Can you hear us?” His voice echoed back at him as he walked quickly along the corridor and into each room. There was nothing but the sound of silence.
Joe followed him calling the women’s names as he worked his way through the château . Paul leaned over the wooden banisters and shouted down into the hall.
“Nothing up here. Just building stuff and dust everywhere from the plastering but that’s it,” he coughed as Joe kicked up even more plaster particles as he passed behind him. “Someone check the cellar.”
David was already on his way down the stairs. He turned into the huge room and marched over to the plastic garden chairs. One of them lay sideways on the floor. Patrick frowned as he noticed the boxes of golden tiles stacked against the side of the pallet.
“Well they were here for sure, but there’s no way they would have brought this lot down. The boxes are way too heavy for a start. Someone was here to help them.” He picked up one of the boxes and hefted it in his hands as if to check the weight. He put it down again on top of the stack of blue tiles and picked up one of the dirty mugs that sat there. There was a smear of pale lipstick around the rim. “And they had tea too. I wonder who made it for them? The electricity isn’t turned on anywhere down here and they would have to know how to work the generator to boil water.” He turned around slowly in the room as footsteps clattered down the stairs behind him.
Ellen came running in panting. She held up her phone as she spoke quickly.
“I just drove to where I could pick up a signal. Alex has spotted Geraldine’s car on a motorway traffic camera about an hour away from Paris. Mick and the men are going to check but they are going to be a while catching up. Alex has called in the gendarme to help stop them.”
Paul and Joe joined the group.
“What the hell would they be doing near Paris? That’s one hell of a shopping trip they are on if it’s them.”
Ellen breathed out slowly.
“It’s not them. Alex pulled up the picture and enlarged it. He sent it through to my phone. It’s not the guy that kept staring at Amy either, I’d recognize him anywhere. This is the other worker and he looks petrified.” She held up her mobile phone for them all to see.
David grabbed the phone and passed his fingers over the screen to enlarge the picture even more.
“He’s on his own. There’s no one in the passenger seat or the back of the car. Where’s the other guy and what the hell has he done with my wife!” He bellowed in outrage.
Paul began to pace up and down the room.
“If this man has Geraldine’s car he must have been here when Amy and Geraldine arrived and the other one would be about somewhere too. It was hard to stop those guys working at all. They knew that Amy was picking up those gold tiles today and maybe they guessed she would come straight here with them. If he was after her because he thought she recognized him then that bloody strike would have given him the perfect opening to grab her. The rest of the workforce packed up at lunchtime so he only had to sit and wait here for the women to arrive with the tiles. Geraldine has been caught up in the mess just because she was with Amy.”
Patrick looked at the used mug again.
“But why make a cup of tea for them if he was going to get rid of them? And where and how has he got rid of them? Even pregnant Geraldine wouldn’t have gone down without a fight and Amy’s no pushover either. Unless the man with the car wasn’t part of it.” He looked down at the picture on the phone again. “You’re right Ellen, he does look scared. What if he’s just making a getaway because he scared he’s going to be implicated.” He looked around the empty room carefully. Apart for the stack of tiles and a few tools there was nothing else there. The freshly cemented hole dug for the therapy pool was empty too. “There’s no one here. Samadi must have had his own transport and taken them somewhere else. Come on, we’ll go and see how far Mick and the men have got. We can catch them up if we put our foot down.” He began walking out of the basement when he noticed drag marks in the dust. He was about to mention them when there was a great noise behind him as Paul crashed straight into the wall at the end of the room.
Paul swore loudly and Joe rushed forwards to help him back to his feet.
“Under normal circumstances I would have killed myself laughing at you doing that but I suspect that you are too stressed to appreciate my humour at the moment.” Joe lugged Paul up from the floor and began brushing him down. He stopped and looked down at his hands as the plaster dust stuck to them. Paul wiped his hand over his face and picked a piece of damp plaster from his forehead. He rolled the pale pink substance between his fingers and felt it crumble into lumps.
“That’s odd. It’s still damp. It should have dried hours ago if they had worked on this before the strike.” He reached out with his fingertips and touched the cold surface in fr
ont of him. It was definitely still damp.
He suddenly turned in the opposite direction and began pacing out the room. The others stared at him as he crashed into the wall at the other end of the basement but Paul just turned and aimed a finger down the room.
“Who has moved that wall?” He pointed back to his original crash site.
David looked at him as if he were a lunatic.
“Nobody has moved a wall you great idiot. You’ve just miscounted. Calm down and come here. We need to think rationally if we are going to catch this guy up.”
Paul ignored his friend and strode furiously back down the room. He reached out in front of him as he neared the wall and touched the surface gently. He ran his fingertips down the surface and then dug his nails into the soft plaster. It was way newer than it should have been.
He set his jaw in grim determination as he turned to his friends.
“I don’t miscount Dave. I can’t afford to. I’d end up with a constantly broken nose. Someone has moved this wall inwards by about two meters. Find me a sledgehammer,” his tone brooked no argument and Joe scanned around the room quickly. There was no sledgehammer but there were two shovels left from where they had dug the original hole for the pool. Joe picked them up and passed one to Paul.
They both attacked the wall at the same time. Wet plaster fell in clumps revealing damp plasterboard beneath. David rushed forwards and grabbed the edge of a now damaged board. He pulled with all his might and tore the top layer away.
“This is only hours old. Geraldine!” He bellowed as the hole became wider. He dragged insulation away from the boarding and pressed his palm to the inside wall. He held his finger up for Paul and Joe to stop pounding the wall.
There was a short silence and then there was some sudden thumping on the inside wall and Amy’s voice sounded faintly back at them.
“David is that you? Can you hurry,” there was a panicked desperation to her tone.
Paul pressed his hands to the wall as though he could feel Amy through it. His face was a picture of horror.
“My God! He sealed them up in there. I’m going to kill him!” He lifted the shovel again and aimed it at the wall.
A few minutes later they had widened the hole in the first wall and were through to the rest of the insulation. Patrick grabbed Joe’s arm.
“Slow down. We need to check that they are well back. We don’t want to hit either one of them.”
Paul stopped slamming the wall.
“Amy? Get as far back from this side as you can,” he waited for an answer but an almighty scream of pain drowned out Amy’s response.
Ellen grabbed a chair and shoved it behind a horrified David as his knees gave way while Joe, Paul and Patrick tore furiously into the plasterboard on the other side of the opening. Studwork splintered and suddenly a small gap appeared. Paul was about to shove his head through when Amy’s face appeared. She was flushed and sweating but instead of bursting into tears as anyone of them might have expected, she immediately began shouting orders.
“I need towels and some clean cloths. Now!” She yelled to the men and Ellen rushed forwards with the bundle of clean linen that she had brought in from the car. She shoved past the men forced the sheets through the tiny hole at Amy’s outstretched hands and Amy disappeared back into the darkness.
The men immediately began attacking the hole again, widening it until they could all reach inside and wrench the plasterboard back together. A great lump suddenly gave way and all three men fell back on the floor just as another scream rent the air. Patrick scrambled backwards as David launched himself towards the now man sized gap and attempted to thrust his body through.
“Geraldine!” His frantic yell was drowned out by the loud cries of a new-born baby and a semi naked Amy, clad only in her bra and jeans suddenly turned around to face him. She gave him a huge, if relieved smile as she passed him the yelling bundle wrapped in a wad of white sheets.
“Congratulations!” She cried as she wiped the sweat from her brow. “Can you just keep a hold of this little scrap while I finish helping your wife? She’s had a bit of a time of it and I need to see that everything is okay so if all you men wouldn’t mind standing back…” She flapped her hands at them all while David gazed down in wonder at the squalling baby in his arms.
The next few minutes were pandemonium as Geraldine called for her husband and Joe ran outside to phone for an ambulance. Although Amy was sure everything had gone well the trauma of the situation and the quality of the surroundings left a lot to be desired and she insisted that Geraldine was checked over by a doctor.
David sat on the floor and held his wife in his arms as she cuddled their baby and when the paramedics arrived only a few minutes later they were all whisked off with speedy efficiency.
Ellen stood beside Amy and looked at her with concern.
“Are you sure that you don’t need to see a doctor too?”
Amy shook her head.
“No, I’m fine. No injuries or anything. I’m not sure what was in the tea he gave us but the drugs seem to have worn off okay. I’m just relieved to be out of that hole,” she took a shuddering breath. “I thought we were going to be stuck in there forever at one point. I can’t tell you the relief I felt when I heard the men tearing down the wall.”
Joe frowned down at her.
“I just don’t understand how he could have done all that work in a few hours. I mean, he built the studwork, covered it with plasterboard, soundproofed it and plastered it all within a few hours.”
Patrick picked up a piece of the broken wood at his feet.
“The framework for the wall was already up. Jean-Paul’s crew managed that before the strike. This area is going to be the sauna room but he just filled in the doorway. No one else knew how far the workers had progressed with the wall before the strike was called as we were all at home. Screwing in a few sheets of plasterboard doesn’t take a moment when you have all the right tools and equipment. Paul has been telling me for the last three weeks how much more efficient than the French guys these two were. They haven’t been sticking to the proper working hours or lunchtimes so they probably just carried on when they heard about the strike today.”
Ellen stared back at the tiny room and shuddered visibly.
“They must have just taken the opportunity to get rid of Amy when the situation arose. There’s no way they could have planned it but you can see the sense in what they did. They didn’t harm the women because that might have left evidence but they knew no one would bother looking for a false wall in a basement. We wouldn’t have known how far they had progressed. If Paul hadn’t crashed into it we would have just built the new wall further into the room. None of us would have been any the wiser. Even if we had thought something was awry we would have just assumed the measurements were wrong in the first place.”
Paul lifted his head to Ellen.
“We have to find Samadi. Has anyone heard any more from Mick? Did they catch up with them in the end?”
Patrick began walking towards the basement steps and Joe followed.
“We can find out soon but I really want to get back home. Lucy will be worried to death and we need to inform the services about the men. We have to get hold of Jean-Paul too. I don’t suspect him of any wrong doing but he may be able to supply us with a better picture of the man. I think they would have had to leave some kind of picture identification for him to apply for their tax status for their wages.”
Ellen gave a small snort of derision.
“Knowing Jean-Paul, until they were established in his team he would be paying them cash. You know how it works over here. The tax he would have had to pay for them to work here legally would have been a fortune until he knew that they were going to be worth it. I doubt he has anything useful.” She clasped Amy about the waist and walked with her to the stairs.
Amy held back and stared up at Paul, wondering why he hadn’t taken her in his arms or even spoken to her yet but Paul didn’t even tur
n in her direction. He lifted his chin and straightened his shoulders resolutely as he followed Patrick and Joe up the stairs, never even giving her a moment’s notice.
Chapter Seven teen
He still hadn’t come to her. Amy sat on the terrace breathing in the fresh night air. She had complained of a headache not long after arriving back at the château and had slunk away as the frantic search for the workmen continued.
Paul hadn’t acknowledged her existence during all the excitement downstairs. Robbie followed Amy out onto the terrace. He was desperate to see his parents and was more than a little upset that nobody had bothered to find out if the baby was a boy or horror of horrors, another girl. He frowned furiously at Amy when she replied to his question that she hadn’t actually thought to look.
“What do you mean, you didn’t look? Everyone looks. It’s the first thing everyone asks too. Didn’t you just see, I mean, they come out naked. Or don’t you know the difference Amy?” His quizzical brows shot up suddenly as he leaned forwards and whispered to her. “Girls have two bottoms but the front one is flatter than the one at the back. I’ve seen Rose’s and Fran’s and Anne’s when they get their nappies changed,” he gave her a conspiratorial nod in Amy’s direction as though he was the only person in the world who knew this very important snippet of information.
Amy stifled a laugh.
“Sorry Robbie, it was dark in the room and I didn’t see. I wrapped the tiny thing in the sheets and gave the baby to your papa. There was a bit of a commotion and I don’t think he thought to look either. We were all just so relieved that your mama was okay and out of that place.” She didn’t want to scare the boy with details of their ordeal but she wasn’t going to tell him that it hadn’t happened.
Robbie pursed his lips.
“Well, I hope they come home soon. I want to know now. I have to make plans for what to play with it. I want to play boy games. I want to show the baby the frogs in the pond.”
Scarred Horizon (Scarred Series Book 4) Page 18