‘Nothing yet,’ said the voice of the thinner man. I cocked an eye up and sideways and saw that he was nursing a transistor radio. Ian had been right. They were monitoring the police frequencies. If no more messages had been passed, then it seemed to follow that only the one car was in place.
We had turned off the road in the direction of the castle. So we must have been on one of the estate roads. Were they using a short cut through the estate to bypass a roadblock? Or were we heading for the castle itself? If Mr Farquharson was not in residence, it was possible that they had the use of some building from whomever had let them into the house. On the other hand, I remembered that guests had only recently left the castle. And Ian had been doubtful about telling the whole story to Mr Taylor. Logic led me onward.
I tried looking at it from a different viewpoint. The police had been searching for one or more confederates who had been Sir Humphrey Peace’s secret partner in what I thought was called ‘insider trading’. But the two had not met until my wedding. I had introduced them.
That little scene was clear in my mind. They had certainly denied knowing each other. Mr Farquharson had taken the supercilious line that he usually reserved for his social inferiors. ‘I think that you once shot a friend of mine . . .’ Despite all the distractions of the wedding reception I had been surprised. Even if true, it was not the sort of thing that one landowner says to another on first acquaintance. The words were the deadliest insult. Yet Sir Humphrey Peace, a fastidiously careful man, had seemed amused. At the time, I put it down to consideration for my feelings. In retrospect, it seemed more like genuine amusement at a clever way of ramming home the message that the two had never previously met.
If Nigel Farquharson had been a major purchaser of shares during the run-up to the takeover, the finger of suspicion might already have been pointed in his direction if not actually inserted into a sensitive part of his anatomy. Much would depend on whether any point of contact between the two men had been uncovered. But no. If Mr Farquharson had already been a prime suspect, observation would surely have been kept on the castle and its vicinity. The presence of potential kidnappers would hardly have gone unnoticed.
Next question – had Mr Taylor betrayed us to his boss? On the whole, I thought not. But Mrs Taylor had been on her way up to the castle. Did she know that I had married a policeman? Probably. It had been in the local papers. An innocent mention of a visit from Miss Deborah and her policeman husband might have set alarm bells ringing.
Delia was grizzling quietly. I patted her hand and tried to ignore her.
What would Ian do when he found the deserted jeep? Without knowing how complete was the net which he had been drawing around the house, it was impossible to guess. Would he think that we had been whisked out of the area and waste his energies sending messages far and wide? That might depend on the route and timing of the second roadblock car. I realised suddenly that Sam was still in the jeep. Would Sam be able to follow the van up by scent? I thought not. He had a good nose but he was no bloodhound.
I had no time for any more ineffectual pondering. The van crunched on to gravel, swung round a last curve and reversed abruptly. The thickset man opened the van’s back doors and both men jumped down. The driver had never even turned his head.
‘Out you come.’
The van had been backed up to the open doorway of what seemed to be an empty lock-up garage. I followed the men out and helped Delia down.
‘You can’t just shut us in here like animals,’ I said.
But it seemed that they could. The van pulled forward the length of one long stride and the up-and-over garage door was pulled down, slammed and locked. I had no more than a glimpse of the outside world but I had seen the skyline and recognised the towering shape of Boyes Castle.
As soon as the door was down, Delia gave way to her tears. At the same time, she started an outpouring of incoherent questions. Those that I could distinguish between her sobs were much the questions I had been asking myself. Why had we been moved? Did anybody know that we were here? What was going to happen to us?
I gave her the comfort of a hug. She seemed to expect to be nursed but, remembering Dad’s advice, I decided against wasting time in useless chatter.
‘Be brave,’ I said firmly but without much hope. ‘Be a big girl, the way your Daddy would want.’
To my surprise, the weeping stopped. ‘When are we going home?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Keep your voice down. They may have left somebody on guard. We’ve got to get out of here.’
The thought of escape seemed to be new to her. ‘But why?’ she whispered. ‘We’re hostages, aren’t we? They’ve been telling me that I’d have nothing to worry about as long as Daddy did nothing to spoil things for them.’
I could have pointed out that the prospects of hostages, who were also witnesses, were less than good once their usefulness was over, but that might have pushed her over the edge. ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen,’ I said, ‘and we’d be better out of the way. We don’t want to be hostages when the police start closing in. That might make it difficult for them to rescue us.’ I bit off the word ‘alive’ before it could slip out.
‘If that’s what you think,’ she said doubtfully.
‘Of course it’s what I think. Do you want a pistol at your head when they come?’
I had been looking around our prison by what little light came in through a small, barred window that faced onto a blank wall about a foot away. There was a light fitting on the ceiling but the conduit for its wiring disappeared through the angle of roof and wall, evidently to a switch outside.
Every similar garage that I had ever seen had been like Ian’s, containing many years’ accumulation of discarded items that might be wanted again some day, but this one had been cleared and swept clean.
‘Look around,’ I said. ‘Or if it’s too dark, feel. See if you can find anything we could use as a tool. Anything at all. And be quick. The light will be gone soon.’
‘All right.’
The nuts and bolts joining the concrete units seemed to be rusted together. Unless Delia found a discarded spanner, our chance of dismantling the garage from within were negligible. Even without the bars, the window seemed impossible as an escape route. The garage itself was built of concrete units bolted together and the door was of sheet steel.
‘Aren’t you going to look?’ Delia asked me.
‘I’m looking for something different,’ I said. ‘Somewhere there has to be a weakest point. It may not be very weak, but wherever it is, we’ll try there. You’re smaller than I am. If we got the window out, could you squeeze through between the garage and the wall?’
She examined the window and then put her face against the glass to study the space outside. ‘I’d get stuck,’ she said.
The door seemed to offer us our only chance. It was strong, but it had been designed to be secure from the outside, not from within.
I felt in the pockets of Dad’s coat, in the faint hope of finding a screwdriver or a pair of pliers; but they were empty except for a handkerchief.
I explored more by touch than by sight. The bolts holding the lock to the door were too tight for my fingers to turn. On the interior side of the lock a bar formed a double lever which pushed a pair of solid metal bars outwards to engage with the doorposts. If the bars would bend, they might disengage. I tried with all my might. They wouldn’t.
Daylight was fading but the sun must have broken through for one last look at the land. There was a brightness on the wall facing the small window. It only lasted for a few seconds and then it was gone, but by its light I had seen what I had nearly missed – the weakest point. The bars fitted over pins on the lock-lever and were retained there only by split-pins and washers.
My fingers were already bruised and sore from my futile efforts to remove nuts from rusty bolts, but I sacrificed some more skin on those split-pins. Pain isn’t there if you don’t think about it, I told myse
lf, but I knew that I was lying. The pins were thick and they resisted every effort to straighten them enough to withdraw from their holes. With the proper tools – pliers, a knife, even a nail file – it would have been the work of a second or two. Without them it was impossible.
Delia was tapping my arm. ‘This is all I could find,’ she said. The place had looked so bare that I had set her to searching the corners mostly to keep her out of my hair. I nearly waved her away. But when I looked down, she was offering me an old and rusted washer, a thing of no account, discarded, long past its useful life – except that it was the very thing I needed.
The bent ends of the split-pins kept turning away from my pressure but I perservered, trying at the same time to work in silence in case there was a guard outside the door or one of the men chose the wrong moment to pass by. When I had the split-pins as straight as I could get them, they still refused to come out through their holes.
It took me five minutes of pushing with the washer and wiggling and sheer bloody-minded willpower to get one of those damned pins out. I was just about to begin work on the other when I heard several sets of footsteps approaching. I tried to put the split-pin back, but of course the ends had sprung apart again and refused to enter. A key scratched in the lock. I left the pin hanging in the mouth of the hole and jumped back. The light overhead came on and the door went up and slid back above our heads.
We blinked in the sudden brilliance. When my eyes recovered, I saw that four men stood ranked across the doorway, studying us dispassionately. As the door went up they moved forward and we retreated. Delia moved closer and took my hand. We gripped. For once, I was glad of the contact.
I had only set eyes on Nigel Farquharson, the laird of Boyes Castle, three or four times before, and one of those times had been at my wedding when, in proper morning suit, he had seemed arrogant but harmless. Now, with the big-bellied figure enlarged by thick tweeds and the eyes, half buried in the puffed flesh, further hidden under the shadow of a tweed hat from which his hooked nose protruded like a predatory beak, he was a figure from a monster video. He looked at me hard and then spoke to the man on his right, whose face I had never seen before. From the shape of his ears I guessed that he had been the driver of the van. He looked ordinary enough to have been Elaine Anderton’s assailant.
‘You were right,’ Farquharson said. ‘That’s the Calder girl. She married a policeman and she’d hardly be shooting with some other man. They were keeping watch.’ His accent was faintly American and I remembered somebody saying that he had spent years in the States.
The split-pin fell out of the door and tinkled on the floor behind him. The noise sounded like the clang of a gong to me, but nobody else noticed it.
On Farquharson’s other side was the man who had snatched me out of the jeep. ‘Ask her how they got on to us,’ he said.
‘That hardly matters now.’
‘So what do we do?’
Farquharson shrugged. ‘The jig’s up. I guess it’s always been up, ever since that damn-fool accountant chose the wrong moment to get horny. Well, the money’s in Barbados and I’d rather roam the world rich than stay here trying to keep up style in a mouldering great house with about twopence a year coming in.’ He raised his eyes in disgust. ‘How would you like to buy a dozen ships off me cheap, all old and every damned one of them laid up, rusting away and costing the earth in mooring fees?’
‘How much?’ I said, in the hope of pulling his eyes down from the overhead door. The washer had dropped onto the brim of his tweed hat.
He looked at me with dislike but otherwise ignored me. ‘And the sugar’s gone out of farming,’ he said. ‘We’ve got an hour or two in hand. He wouldn’t have had his wife with him if he’d been sure of his facts. He was just sniffing around but he found the scent he was looking for. The police are spread thin in country districts and it takes time to set up a cordon and get a search-warrant. After that, it’ll be against their instincts to rush up to a castle and kick the door in. They’ll come to the front door and knock.’
‘So what do we do?’ my captor asked again.
Farquharson looked at his watch. ‘We don’t get into a shooting war with the police. It’ll be dark within the hour and the moon will come up soon after. Then we’ll go. He’ll have roadblocks at the junctions by then, but there are two Land Rovers in the bigger garage and we can go out across the fields. The Venturer’s still on charter to me and she’s lying at Dunbar. I’ll pay you the rest of your money there.’
The thin man said, ‘What about these tarts?’
I felt Delia jump and I gave her hand an extra squeeze, hoping that she would take it as a signal to keep silent. Nothing that either of us could say would change his answer and Nigel Farquharson had been talking so freely that it was clear he had no intention of ever letting us go. But the bar which was now above his head had slipped. It was almost off the pin. If only they would finish and go, leaving us in the garage for a little longer . . .
‘They come with us as far as Dunbar,’ the big man said. ‘We may have need of hostages again; and what better hostage than a copper’s wife? After that . . .’
‘We could dispose of them for you,’ said the man with hot eyes. His tone did not suggest anything quick and merciful. For the first time I felt a shiver of something beyond fear, crawling sluglike up my backbone to leave a trail of slime on my mind.
‘For a fee,’ the driver added quickly.
The man with hot eyes hesitated and then nodded. However much he might enjoy his work, it was against his principles to work for nothing.
‘After I’ve paid you what you’re due,’ Farquharson said slowly, ‘I’ll have very little sterling left—’
He had their full attention. They had even closed in on him, leaving a gap at the side of the doorway. Delia suddenly let go of my hand and shot through the gap. With a shout, the thin man took off after her.
I had already discounted the idea of trying to escape by means of sheer speed. The dusk was not yet deep enough to give us quick cover and, as Ian said once, ‘If the average man couldn’t run faster than the average woman, the human race would have died out long ago.’ But Ian was only talking averages and Delia seemed to be going like a greyhound. It seemed only fair to gain her a sporting chance by causing a distraction. I dived for the now wider gap and the dusk beyond.
I nearly made it, but my earlier captor shot out an arm and caught the hood of Dad’s coat. He swung me round, smiled pleasantly into my eyes and then gave me a slap on the side of my face that sent me spinning back into the garage and against the wall. I slid down into a crouching position and lowered my ringing head onto my arms. There was no room for thought in my head, the space was too taken up with shock and pain; but after some seconds I found the courage to touch my face with my fingertips. A swelling was already evident, but I thought that my cheekbone was not after all broken. If a few teeth were loose, no doubt the dentist could put me back together again. I had got off lightly.
As if from a great distance, I heard the thin man returning. Delia’s feet dragged on the gravel behind him and then I heard her stumble as she was pushed inside. She came straight to me and put her arms around me. I let her comfort me while I wondered whether she had blown our last chance.
‘I was about to say that I could dispose of them myself,’ Farquharson said. ‘Nothing easier, from a yacht. But there’s a paid crewman aboard and I don’t know what his reaction would be. So here’s a proposition. I can’t take the two Land Rovers with me. Neither of them’s more than three years old. Keep them both for a fee. How’s that?’
‘Sounds good to me,’ said the driver. ‘I know a man who sends them abroad. The Arabs pay good money and no questions asked.’
‘That’s settled then,’ Farquharson said. ‘There are still some valuables in the house. Help me into the Land Rovers with them. Then we’ll torch the place before we leave. That should keep the constabulary hands full, looking for hostages to rescue.’
; ‘Jeepers!’ said one of the men.
‘Why not?’ Farquharson said carelessly. ‘I never liked the place. Now it’s full of dry rot and woodworm and mortgaged three times over and it would take a Carnegie to keep it even halfway warm. Best use for it. Come along.’
Not one word had been addressed to us. We were no longer people.
I heard the door start to go down. I opened my eyes. They refused to focus together, but I was sure that the bar was slipping off its pin. I pulled myself loose from Delia’s clutch and, scuttling forward on hands and knees, got a hand under it before it could clatter on the concrete, just as the door finished its descent. The light went out and suddenly the darkness was almost total. Footsteps receded, hurrying. The sun had gone down while they discussed our disposal.
I stayed where I was and covered my face. The sudden movement had set my head ringing again and I thought that I was probably going to throw up.
Delia put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘Please don’t cry.’
‘I’m not crying,’ I said huskily. ‘Really I’m not. Or if I am, it’s more anger than hurt.’ I gave myself a small shake and my head didn’t quite fall off. ‘Now you see why we’ve got to get out of here,’ I told her. ‘If we hold ourselves together, we’ll be all right. Can you do that?’
‘I’ll try.’ She was about to cork herself again with her thumb but she jerked her hand away.
I went back to work on the other split-pin, working by touch and memory. At least the task kept my mind off my other troubles. Suddenly the pin came free. I pulled both the steel bars right out of their sockets. They were heavy but manageable. I gave one to Delia.
‘You carry this,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘If somebody tries to grab you again, swat him. Not just a prod but a good hard whack.’ I looked her over. My one working eye was recovering after the brightness. Her school uniform was a grey skirt and blouse and a navy blazer, none of which would show up in the twilight. In the dim light, I could only make out her face and hands and, less clearly, her hair. ‘When we go,’ I said, ‘move slowly. It’s movement that catches the eye. Above all, don’t turn your head for a look. Stick close to me unless we’re seen. If we are, then run like hell.’
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