Safe from Harm

by RJ Bailey

  ‘In a few minutes a man is going to take me downstairs and beat me to a pulp. This time, he’ll win. Then he is going to bring me back here. Sometime during the night the air supply to this room will be cut off. Or carbon monoxide pumped in. Then they’ll arrange it like we crept in here for some kinky sex games and suffocated.’

  Another thought occurred to me.

  ‘Oh, and they’ll probably throw in Asma, just to make it kinkier. A transgender threesome. Oh dear. Ten days? We’ll be lucky to have ten hours.’

  Pennies dropped with a clatter. ‘That’s not going to happen.’ He doubled up his search, rifling through the desk. ‘Phone!’ he said, tossing it to me.

  I switched it on. Twenty per cent battery. Signal: nil. Wi-fi: not available. I pocketed it anyway. If I did get out, the first thing I’d do would be to call Nina and Jess.

  ‘Anything else useful? Like a gun?’

  Tom shook his head. He picked up a paperweight shaped like a globe and weighed it in his hand. ‘I’m not going to let them take you.’

  There was something about the set of his jaw that was comical. ‘I think the phrase is: over your dead body. Bojan wants to do this. The last time we fought—’

  ‘Whoa. The last time?’

  ‘That’s generally what a return bout means. A rematch.’ I gave him a quick rundown on what had happened in the gym last time. ‘I hurt him and I hurt his Serbian pride. Obviously part of his price for helping Swincoe in his OTT-plot was another go at me.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘He won’t kill me there and then. At least I don’t think so. He just wants me to beg for mercy.’

  There was something else that had slowly dawned on me. I knew exactly what they were getting ready. Somewhere they could tie up Tom in the gym. Bojan wanted him to watch while he took me apart. I really didn’t want that to happen.

  Tom let rip with some fruity swear words and banged the wall. I put my head in my hands. I couldn’t afford to lose it now. There might be a window, a little opportunity, and if I wasn’t fully alert it might just flash by. I had to stay as sharp as I could, even with a broiling sea of panic threatening to swamp me.

  I felt Tom’s hand on my shoulder and looked up. ‘This is all my fault,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think my naivety and stupidity are down to you.’ He went to speak and I cut him short. ‘Don’t give me that “Trouble will find me” bollocks. Shit happens. People like Bojan and Swincoe happen and whoever wants to screw over the Sharifs happen. There’s nothing you can do, not right now. Don’t think of trying to jump them when they come for me. They will shoot, I am sure.’ I could see a small tic working by his eye. I had to convince him not to be foolish, to quash the male pride that would spur him into action. And maybe get him killed. ‘I have to get through this. For Jess’s sake if nothing else.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I took a breath. It hurt just to say it, to visualise what I had done. ‘I told you I put Freddie on to Matt, my ex?’

  ‘To check he was bona fide, yes.’

  ‘She finally sent through some decent pictures of his girlfriend. Matt and her kissing, walking hand in hand, arm in arm.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The girlfriend in the pictures, Matt’s girlfriend, is Laura. My au pair. Jess’s new best friend.’

  ‘Shit.’ He let the implications of that sink in. ‘Look, we have to fight back. Being passive isn’t an option.’

  ‘OK,’ I said eventually, standing back up. ‘Fill a jug with scalding water from the coffee machine. Put in as much sugar as you can.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The sugar sticks to the skin. Makes the scalding much worse.’

  He winced, whether at the thought of the resulting burn or that I knew such horrible things I couldn’t tell.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Give me the paperweight.’ He handed it over. ‘Come on, we haven’t much time.’

  As Tom turned to go, I hit him as hard as I could.

  FORTY-FOUR

  I sometimes tell people, usually after a few drinks or when I am feeling snarky, that I joined the army so I could learn how to kill my father in unarmed combat. It’s a joke. Mostly. People always assume he must have ‘interfered’ with me in some way. But he was no Fred West. Just a miserable little shit. The man could suck all the life out of a room just by stepping into it. Disapproval was his default mode. He made the Daily Mail look like the Good News Times. His idea of a foreign holiday was the Isle of Man, although he thought the locals a bit too progressive in their politics. Fancy giving up the birch.

  It was the effect he had on my mother that I resented most. Just as he could poison the ambience of any gathering, so he siphoned every bit of joy from my mother’s existence. He was a champion practitioner of negging – using negative comments to undermine women – way before the term was invented.

  What he did want was a child at Oxford. This, it seemed, was prime boasting material down at the quantity surveyors where he worked. I don’t think either me or my friends were Oxbridge material. Russell Group, maybe. And he fancied a daughter who did English literature, history or philosophy. I was always more science based. I favoured medicine. He told me bluntly I had a better chance of being prime minister than a doctor.

  But the more he banged on about my glorious future academic career, the more I was determined to find my own course. I was worried he might like the idea of me joining the army – after all, I’d be helping kill foreigners. But, gratifyingly, it caused a peak in his blood pressure and he went so red I swear he was in danger of stopping traffic. Not while he had breath in his body, he said.

  So the army it was.

  My mother died just before my wedding to Matt. It was only then, looking at her old videos, that I fully realised what he had done to her. Not so much a husband, more a parasite, like ambulatory, anthropomorphic mistletoe, living vicariously on another human being. On the earliest videos, dating back to her teen years, there were family holidays to Spain, surfing in Cornwall, music festivals – music? Who knew? – and plenty of alcohol. Then, in the later ones, when my father had appeared on the scene, even the colours seemed to darken. Within a few years of her marriage there were no more videos. What did she die of? It had said ovarian cancer on the death certificate. I reckon it was an overdose of him, poisoning her slowly, like decaying nuclear waste.

  I told my father not to bother coming to the wedding.

  We honeymooned in Devon. Matt got a deal on a cottage in a small village called Newton Ferrers. It was on an estuary and you could watch the tide ebb and flow, uncovering a little concrete walkway that connected Newton Ferrers to its sibling at Noss Mayo. It meant that at low water you could do a little pub crawl. Not that I was drinking.

  Matt was a considerate lover. Sometimes too considerate. It was as if he had read a manual on ‘How To Satisfy Your Partner In Bed’. He was forever making sure I was going to climax, and sometimes I felt like the organ at the Royal Albert Hall, his hands were all over the place, pulling out all the stops. I had him searching for the G spot, wriggling up my arse, squeezing my tits. Sometimes I tried to count just how many limbs Matt actually had. I reckon he had skipped the chapter headed ‘Sometimes Women Just Want To Be Fucked’.

  It was different later on in the pregnancy. Some libidinous hormone had me in its grip and when Matt said he was worried about putting his weight on my ballooning stomach, I would turn over and present, like a horny baboon. Then he found his Instant Orgasm mode. For himself, that is. That was when I first invested in a vibrator. Not something they sell in Mothercare, but maybe they should.

  And then his best friend Leo organised a week-long stag party in Ibiza. In my mind it happened almost as soon as Jessica squeezed her way out of me (although technically it was me doing the squeezing) into the birthing pool at the maternity suite. In reality, it was a couple of years later, just as we were going into the terrible twos with Jess. Parenthood and domesticity had drained us, I couldn�
�t deny it, but there was plenty of light at the end of the tunnel. Except his light turned out to be a big flashing strobe with a four-to-the-floor soundtrack. Balearic beats and smiley faces were passé, but I couldn’t get through to Matt on that score. I was a killjoy, he said. Like father, like daughter? I wondered. And so, frightened of turning into my dad, I cut him some slack and he ran off and broke the rope.

  And now there was Laura, the cuckoo in my nest. Laura with her excellent references (possibly genuine, of course) and her empathy with Jess. And the boyfriend she met travelling. Who wasn’t in New Zealand at all, but just down the road, planning to win back his daughter. Perhaps she did meet him travelling, that much might be true. Yet she was far too young for him, surely?

  But then, perhaps she just played that up, with her scrubbed face and scrunched-back hair. She could be thirty for all I knew, not even close to Jess’s age.

  Had Jess even self-harmed or was that just a mindfuck for me, created by Laura? Or had Laura encouraged her to do it, so that when social services came into the picture, I would be made to look like an ignorant, bad mother?

  All this and more went through my mind as I trussed up Tom. It is a very thin line between knocking a man unconscious and fracturing his skull. I hoped I hadn’t crossed it. But I knew the alternative was Tom playing Rambo and getting himself wounded or worse. I’d seen macho save-the-little-lady behaviour like that on the battlefield. It never ended well.

  I could hear voices outside in the main office. They were here to take me downstairs. Last time, I had been able to use my anger to fuel my fight. This time, there was too much of it to harness effectively, a cacophony in my head that had to quieten down. I didn’t need to be thinking about my mum, Jess, Matt, Paul, Laura, my dad or Tom, all of whom were demanding my attention.

  No, I had to do this on my own.

  FORTY-FIVE

  ‘The rules are simple. Just like before. You get past me, you can go.’

  Not just like before. Same location – we were back in the gym. But this time there was no audience. Mitval had brought me down at gunpoint and then asked me exactly where Lawrence and his driver were. I told him – there was no point in holding out that information – and he left to call them. The numbrella phone-masking device would probably only reach as far as the perimeter fence.

  He had asked Bojan if he would be all right with me alone and Bojan had laughed, a strange, scary sound. Looking at his pupils, I wondered if he was high. Maybe that was what the short interval had been about, time for the Serb to take something that gave him an edge. That and prepare the straps that had been intended to hold Tom. They hadn’t been too happy that I had cheated them of that. But it was better for me this way. Better for Tom, too. A headache – maybe even concussion – was a small price to pay for missing out on this.

  ‘So, just you and me this time,’ Bojan said.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll let me go, even if I got past you. Would they?’

  Bojan shrugged. ‘Possibly not. But put me down and I won’t try to stop you. That’s one less to worry about.’ He held up his hands. ‘Look, no guns. That would make this meaningless. Like I said, it was round one to you. Round two . . .’

  I looked beyond him to where the lift was located, tucked just out of sight. It seemed so straightforward. He followed my gaze and went into a defensive crouch. I shrugged off my jacket as quickly and as smoothly as I could, not wanting to provoke an attack while I was entangled in my sleeves. I tossed it to one side and it landed on the back of the rack of free weights.

  I pulled my sweater away from my body, a move he misinterpreted.

  ‘The titty trick won’t work this time, so don’t bother. They aren’t that good anyway.’

  Negging, even here.

  He began to circle clockwise, keeping the crouch as if ready to spring forward. If we did the full half-circle, my back would be to the lift. But, as before, I’d have to turn to sprint to it. I had the feeling he wanted me to do that. The circle continued. I let the opportunity pass.

  ‘You can make the first move, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Ladies first? How old-fashioned.’

  He answered that with four fast paces forward and there was a flurry of arms in front of my face. I blocked one, two, three and then a finger hit my eye. Pain exploded around the socket and that side of the room was lost in a squall of tears. Then he had hold of my left hand and, with a squeal of glee, he bent two fingers back.

  I yelled in pain but I managed a wild fist to his cheek and then he backed off.

  He didn’t have to tell me that the eye was for what I did to him last time. But Jesus, it hurt. I had to ignore it, because now he had switched to pacing left and then right, like a caged panther. His glare never left me.

  While I blinked some use back into my left eye, I tried to analyse what he had done. I had previously recognised some of the moves from Krav Maga and they were still there. But he hadn’t shown too much finesse with them last time. Bojan was a street thug and it was likely his repertoire was a grab bag of tricks, which he adapted for the situation.

  I heard Colonel d’Arcy’s voice in my head. ‘Krav Maga is all very well, but there is a key element you should remember. The art of serendipity.’

  I glanced down at my hand. It was swelling along the back, puffing up. The fingers were probably broken. It was certainly throbbing like a big bass drum. I had to work around it. Was that serendipity? Or a fucking nuisance?

  It was the kicks next, and he came in with a balletic grace that belied his body shape. There was a spin, a feint, and then a kick to my upper thigh. That leg immediately collapsed on me and I staggered to one side. A deep thumping ache spread over it. I looked at his boots. Steel toecaps. He could break my arm if he aimed properly and kicked hard enough.

  One eye, one leg down. Not going well.

  I wiped the sweat off my upper lip with the back of my sleeve. That was some sort of signal because he came at me with a flurry of kicks and blows to the upper body. As a toecap caught my hip with a bony crack, I leaned in as close as I dared and, ignoring the thumps to the kidneys, I slid a palm under his chin and punched with as much force as I could muster. His head snapped back and he spun away.

  I’d hurt him. Just a little. I could see it in his eyes. He was breathing hard, but it was deep and controlled. Mine was panting, shallow and ragged. I filled my lungs. Normally I would have done a mental status report on my body, but it was just one big ache, with hotspots of extra intensity.

  I moved around the mat, positioning myself as best I could. The next move relied on my going down. The trick would be not to stay down.

  I positioned myself with my back to where my coat had landed. I feinted, bluffed, and managed a smack to his ear, just enough to make him smile at my audacity. He came at me, in close, one-two to the chest, targeting my breasts, knocking the wind out of me. I let myself fall, grabbing his head as I went back, not trying to do anything fancy, just pulling him on top of me. Despite the cushioning mat, I knew this was going to hurt and sure enough I felt as if my ribs had been squeezed in a nutcracker as I hit the ground with Bojan’s full weight on top of me and his face in my tits.

  I just hoped I had judged the distance correctly.

  One of the doctrines of Krav Maga, so the Colonel told us, is to use anything to hand as a weapon – bottle, broom or baseball bat. None of those were available in the room, but there was a rack of free weights and my right hand scrabbled for one of those before Bojan could break entirely free.

  My instinct told me to go for the heaviest I could lift, but that would be counterproductive. The angle wasn’t good and there wasn’t enough room for me to swing something in the eight, ten or twelve-kilo range. Instead, I chose the smallest and lightest, and brought that round with all the explosive energy I could put into it. The dumbbell was a substitute for what was known as a yawara stick in Japanese martial arts, where they are used to break bones, crack skulls and damage pressure points, depending
on their size. I was aiming behind Bojan’s ear, but a shrug of his shoulder knocked me off target and dissipated some of the force. Even so, I felt a change in the tension in his body and I pushed him to one side. As I rolled free I felt a little tug in my left side.

  I got to my feet and my head swam. He arose more cautiously, a malevolent look in his eye. He rubbed his neck with his left hand. But it was what was in his right that worried me. A knife. My knife. The Eickhorn. Last seen on top of the piano.

  I felt as if I had a stitch in my side and I cautiously reached around to touch the spot. I knew then that he’d stabbed me during the tussle. Not very deeply, but it had penetrated through my sweater and snagged through the ProTex bra. My fingers came away tipped with blood. The reinforced sides of the underwear had saved me from too much damage.

  ‘That’s cheating,’ I said.

  ‘You have a weapon,’ he replied, pointing to the weight in my own right hand.

  ‘Not quite the same.’

  He backed away and I knew what he was expecting me to do. I could think of no alternative, so I moved to my left and scooped up my jacket. As I wrapped it around my left forearm, I tried to position it as carefully as I could. There were two things in there that might deflect a blow. One was the reinforced mesh pocket designed to hold an unsheathed knife, the other the otherwise useless telephone I had picked up in the office. I tried to make sure they were along my forearm, but with limited success. I felt like one of those fiddler crabs with asymmetrical claws as I waved the padding at Bojan. He didn’t seem especially alarmed. The knife changed everything. Advantage: Bojan.

  The first lunge parted the material with a shushing sound. I knew how sharp that bloody knife was. The second was clever, bypassing the jacket and coming within a centimetre of slicing open my face. I felt the wind from the blade brush my skin.

  ‘You know the Cuckold’s Grin?’ Bojan asked.

  ‘No, but I have a horrible feeling you are going to tell me.’ I sounded breathless. I couldn’t inflate my lungs fully without a lightning bolt running down the intercostal muscles. Maybe he’d penetrated deeper than I had initially thought. I decided not to speak any more. It would tell him far too much.