by Penny Jordan
Mrs Gillingham, eyeing them with satisfaction, went on enlighteningly. ‘Jessica makes tapestries, Mr Hayward. You’ll have to go and look at her work,’she added archly. ‘It’s just the sort of thing you’re going to need for that house of yours.’
Jessica gritted her teeth at this piece of arch manipulation and hoped that Daniel Hayward would realise that this arrant piece of salesmanship was not at her instigation.
It seemed he did, because he gave her a warm, reassuring smile and then said ruefully, ‘Unfortunately, before I can hang any tapestries on them I’m going to have to have some walls. This…’ he touched his hair gingerly ‘…is the result of an unsafe ceiling collapsing on me this morning.’ His face suddenly went grim and Jessica shivered, recognising that here was the real man, the pure male essence of him in the hard, flat determination she could read in his eyes.
‘I’ve sacked the builder I was using for negligence, and I was hoping you might be able to give me the names of some others from whom I might get estimates…’
Mrs Gillingham pursed her mouth, trying not to look flattered by this appeal. ‘Well, there’s Ron Todd. He does a lot of work hereabouts…and then there’s that man you had to do your kitchen, Jessica. What’s his name?’
‘Alan Pierce,’ Jessica informed her, helplessly being drawn into the conversation, wanting to stay and bask in the warm admiration she could read so clearly in Daniel Hayward’s lion-gold eyes, and at the same time wanting desperately to escape before she became helplessly involved in something she sensed instinctively was dangerous.
‘Oh, yes, that’s it…Well, he’s very good. Made a fine job of Jessica’s kitchen. You ought to see it…’
Numbly Jessica recognised that she was being given a very firm push in the direction Mrs Gillingham had decided she was going to take.
No need to enquire if Daniel Hayward was married or otherwise attached. Mrs Gillingham was a strict moralist, and if she was playing matchmaker then it could only be in the knowledge that he was single.
Helplessly, torn between anger and a strange, sweet stirring of excited pleasure, she found herself stumblingly inviting Daniel to call round and see how Alan Pierce had transformed her two small, dark rooms into her large, comfortable living kitchen.
‘But, of course…you must be busy…and…’
He started to say that he wasn’t, when suddenly the post office door banged open.
A man came in, masked and holding a gun. He motioned to them all with it and said gutturally, ‘Over there, all of you!’
Mrs Gillingham was protesting shrilly. At her side, Jessica was dimly conscious of Daniel Hayward’s protective bulk coming between her and the man, but he couldn’t protect her! Nothing could. It was her worst nightmare come back to haunt her. She started to tremble, dragged back into that time in the past—that awful, unforgettable day that had changed the whole course of her life…
CHAPTER TWO
JESSICA had left for work at eight o’clock as she always did. She liked to arrive at the bank at the same time as the other staff. Her father arrived later, his chauffeur dropping him off outside the bank’s premises at about nine-thirty.
There was nothing remarkable about the day. It was late March, cold and blustery still, with no real hint of spring. She was wrapped up against the cold wind in the navy wool coat which seemed to be the uniform of ambitious, career-minded young women, her hair styled sleekly in the expensive bob that her parents liked so much, its colour subtly enlivened by monthly visits to an expensive Knightsbridge hairdresser.
Beneath her coat she was wearing a navy businesslike suit and a striped cotton blouse which more resembled a man’s shirt than a woman’s.
On her feet she had good quality, low-heeled leather pumps, and when she got on the tube she mingled anonymously into the crowd of similarly dressed young women.
The bank, like others of its kind, was situated inside that part of London known as the ‘City’, several streets off Threadneedle Street, taking up a prominent corner position in a small square.
The commissionaire greeted Jessica with a smile that held just that hint of knowing deference. She was acutely conscious of the fact that, while she was supposed to be treated just as any other junior member of the staff, she was in fact being handled cautiously with kid gloves not just by her fellow workers, but also by her superiors, all of whom were very conscious of the fact that she was the chairman’s daughter.
It wasn’t an enviable position, despite what some of her contemporaries thought—she had overheard one of the other girls making catty remarks about her in the cloakroom. She felt set apart from the other girls, alien to them, all too aware of their muted hostility.
Not that being her father’s daughter actually afforded her the type of privileges they seemed to think. In the evening, when they were out discoing and enjoying themselves, she was at home being catechised by her father as to what she had learned. Her degree did not exempt her from sitting all her Institute exams, and she was all too conscious that he was expecting her to do well.
The pressure on her, well-meant and proud though it was, kept her weight a little under what it ought to be for her height. Even now, early in her working day, she was conscious of an unhealthy tension across her shoulder-blades.
Tonight was the night she went to advanced evening classes for embroidery; the one bright shining pleasure in her otherwise tension-filled week.
She knew that, no matter how much she strove, working in the bank was never going to be anything other than a duty, and a reluctant one at that, but she just couldn’t bring herself to disappoint her parents—especially her father—by telling them that she could not fulfil their ambitions for her.
This particular morning there was no commissionaire on duty, but when she turned the handle on the door of the back entrance to the bank, which the staff used on arriving and leaving, she found that the door was unlocked.
She walked into the familiar Stygian darkness of the narrow Victorian passage that led to the offices and cubby-holes at the back of the banking hall proper.
The first thing that struck her as she emerged into the general office was the silence…the second was the group of masked, armed men, one of whom was advancing grimly towards her, the rest holding the other members of the staff in a silent, threatened group.
‘Get over there and keep your mouth closed.’
Her body trembling with shock, she did as she was instructed. It took several seconds for it to fully dawn on her that this was that most dreaded of all events within the banking community—an armed bank raid.
In such events, all bank staff were instructed not to try to do anything that might risk either their lives or those of others.
As she joined the silent group, Jessica saw that her father’s second in command was among them, his normally highly coloured fleshy features a shade of old tallow. As her father’s second in command he was in charge of one set of vault keys, while the bank accountant held the other. Together every morning they would unlock the vault so that the cashiers could collect cash for their tills.
Whenever necessary, and never normally on a regular basis, fresh supplies of cash were delivered from the nearby Bank of England. Only yesterday, late in the afternoon after close of banking hours, they had received an exceptionally large consignment of cash, and Jessica realised in sick fear that somehow the thieves must have known of this.
In retrospect, the ordeal of waiting while each member of staff arrived and was duly imprisoned with his or her colleagues seemed to be dragged out over a lifetime of unimaginable terror and shock.
None of them had any way of knowing what was to happen to them…whether they would all emerge unharmed from their ordeal.
On this particular day, Jessica knew that her father was not due into the bank until after lunch, having a morning appointment with an important customer. It seemed the thieves knew it as well, because just as soon as they were sure that all the staff had arrived they took them
all at gunpoint to one of the large safes beneath the branch and shut them in it under armed guard.
Still forbidden to speak, and under the silent, masked threat of the gunmen facing them, they felt tension fill the room like a sour taste in the air.
All of them were close to breaking-point, but still it came as something of a shock when one of the other girls, the one who had been so catty about her working in the bank, suddenly called out frantically to their guard, ‘She’s the one you ought to be concentrating on. She’s the chairman’s daughter. She’s far more use to you than we are.’
Jessica held her breath, her chest painfully tight with anxiety and fear as the gunman turned slowly in her direction. Through the slits in his mask, she could see the icy glitter of his eyes. He motioned to her to step forward. When she hesitated, John Knowles, the accountant, bravely stepped in front of her, saying quickly, ‘She’s just a girl. Let her be.’
When the gunman hit him on the side of his head with the butt of his gun, a massed audible breath of shock rippled through them all.
Shaking with tension, Jessica obeyed the gunman’s instruction to step forward. He walked slowly round her, the sensation of him standing behind her making the hairs rise in the nape of her neck.
So this was terror, this thick, cold sensation that bordered on paralysis, freezing the body and yet leaving the mind sharply clear to assimilate the vulnerabilities of her position.
The sound of the safe door opening took the gunman from behind her to join his fellow members of the gang. In the low-toned conversation they exchanged Jessica caught her own name, but not much else, and then to her horror she was being told to walk towards them. Flanked on either side by a gunman, she was escorted from the safe.
Hearing the safe door clang closed behind her was the very worst sound she had ever heard. Behind that closed door were her colleagues, safe now, surely, while she…
‘Better take her upstairs to the boss,’ the second gunman instructed the first.
The ‘boss’ was a powerfully built man with the coldest, shrewdest eyes she had ever seen.
‘Chairman’s daughter, is she?’ he repeated when informed of her status.
‘Yeah. I thought we could get a good ransom.’
A quick turn of the ‘boss’s’ hand silenced her jailer.
‘We’ll take her with us,’ the ‘boss’ announced chillingly after studying her for several seconds. ‘She can be our insurance.’
What followed still haunted her in her nightmares. Blindfolded and gagged, she was bundled out of the bank and directly into the kind of armoured vehicle normally used by security companies. Once inside she could sense the presence of other people, even though they remained silent.
The van was driven away and she heard someone saying, ‘How long do you reckon before anyone can raise the alarm?’
‘Bank’s supposed to be open in five minutes. That should give us half an hour or so before anyone realises what’s happened…It will take them a fair time to break into the safe. The only other set of keys are held by the chairman, and he’s out in Kent.’
‘By the time they do get hold of them we’ll—’
A sudden curse obviously reminded the speaker of her presence and he fell silent. She was sitting on the floor of the van, bound, blindfolded and gagged. Her body ached from the pressure of the hard floor and the fear-induced tension. She was sure she was going to die, to become another statistic of violence and greed, and when the van finally stopped and she was bundled out and half dragged, half carried up flight after flight of stairs and then pushed in a dank, foul-smelling room she was even more convinced that this was the end.
She heard the door close but dared not move, not knowing how many members of the gang were preserving a silent vigil around her. The silence went on and on, a relentless pressure against her stretched eardrums, like a soundless, high-pitched scream, battering at her senses.
Time lost all meaning. Her arms and hands were numb, but still she dared not move, picturing the armed man perhaps sitting in front of her, watching her. Her throat was dry and sore, but she couldn’t ask for a drink. Her body ached, and cramp ran like a violent wrenching wire from her left calf to her ankle.
Outwardly motionless and controlled, inwardly she was falling apart, suffering the most appalling imagined fates, wondering if whoever had said those immortal words ‘a brave man dies once, the coward a thousand times over’ had really any awareness of the true terrors created by the imagination—terrors which had nothing whatsoever to do with one’s ability to endure actual physical pain.
At some point she slipped into a semicomatose state that gave her some relief, a sort of self-induced, drugged miasma of mental agony which separated her from her physical body and its discomforts. She couldn’t move at all…couldn’t do anything other than sit there where she had been left, straining her ears for some other movement in the room.
Quite when she began to realise she might be on her own she had no idea; perhaps it was when the quality of the silence struck her as being empty. She held her breath, listening anxiously for the sound of other breath, trying not to imagine the grinning faces of the gang while they witnessed her pathetic attempts to use what senses were left to her to work out if they were there.
If they were there…She was almost sure they weren’t. Which meant…which meant that she was alone.
She ought to have felt relief, but instead she felt all the blind, frantic panic of a helpless child deserted by its parents. She couldn’t move—her wrists were bound and so were her ankles, and her wrists were tied to some kind of pipe.
She heard a noise—not a human sound…The hairs on her arms stood up in terror as she felt something run across her bare leg. She wanted desperately to scream, but couldn’t remove the gag nor scream through it.
Panic engulfed her; she tried desperately to pull herself free, and succeeded only in rubbing her wrists raw on their bonds so that the broken skin bled.
After panic and terror came dull, destructive acceptance. She was going to die here in this unknown place, and she might as well resign herself to it.
How long had she been here already? Hours…but how many?
She tried to think constructively, but it was impossible. All she wanted now was oblivion, escape…
When the door finally opened, her rescuers were all moved to different degrees of shock and pity by what they saw.
A telephone call to the bank had announced that any attempt to find her or them during the next five hours would result in her death, but that if no attempt was made to track them down for that period then her father would be informed of where she could be found.
Since the police had no idea of where to start looking for the thieves, they had had no option other than to comply with their demands, and against all their expectations they had actually received the promised call later in the day giving the address of a slum-clearance flat in a high-rise block where she could be found.
To Jessica, the debriefing that followed her imprisonment was almost as gruelling as the imprisonment itself, although in a different way.
The whole nightmare affair had left her perilously close to the edge of a complete mental and physical breakdown, with the result that she had finally told her parents that she could not return to the bank, and that instead she was going to use the small inheritance left to her by her maternal grandparents to train for a career much more suited to her now fierce determination to live as quiet and safe a life as possible.
Of course her parents had protested, especially when they had learned she intended moving to Avon.
There was no reason why she couldn’t continue to live at home in London and practise her career from there, they told her, but she refused to be swayed. London was now a place that terrified her. She couldn’t walk down a busy street without being overcome by the feeling that someone was walking behind her, stalking her—without the fear she had known in that small, frightening prison coming back to drag her bac
k down into the pit of self-destructive fear she was only just beginning to leave behind.
In the end her parents had reluctantly given way on the advice of her doctor, who had told them that she needed to find a way of healing herself and coming to terms with what had happened.
* * *
That healing process was still going on, and now, suddenly and shockingly, she had been dragged back into that remembered horror.
She saw the gunman coming towards her and started to scream. He lashed out at her with the butt of his gun. She felt a stunning pain like fire in her shoulder, followed by a cold wash of paralysing weakness, and knew that she was going to faint.
When she came round, the small post office was full of people. She was lying on the floor with something under her head and someone kneeling beside her holding her wrist while he measured her pulse.
She looked up cold with fear, trembling with the remembered shock of the past, and encountered the warm gold eyes of Daniel Hayward. His look of warmth and compassion was reassuring and comforting. She tried to sit up, conscious of her undignified prone position and the curious glances of the people standing around her.
As she looked round the shop, Daniel Hayward seemed to know what she was looking for and said quietly, ‘It’s all right. He’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
She looked bewildered, and it was left to Mrs Gillingham to explain excitedly, ‘Mr Hayward was ever so brave. He reached right out and took the gun off him, and told me to open the door and shout for help.’
While Jessica looked uncomprehendingly at him, he said humorously, ‘Not brave, really. I simply made use of the excellent distraction you provided by drawing our friend’s fire, although such a course of action is not really to be recommended. You’ll be lucky if your arm isn’t out of action for a good few days, I’m afraid.’
Her arm…Jessica tried to lift it and gasped as the pain coursed like fire though the bruised muscles.