The Cilla Rose Affair (21 page)

“There’s that man again. The one you were speaking with earlier.”

Robin looked.

And it was while he was looking that Sara was jostled from the side.

No—not jostled—bumped into.

Deliberately.

So that she lost her balance and fell off the curb. And in that split second of distraction, as she was tumbling to the pavement, her ankle twisted, a young man in a denim jacket hurtled past her, hooking his arm through the strap of her bag, yanking it off her shoulder.

“Hey!” she shouted, stupidly, but it was too late, he was gone. She landed with a thud, jamming first her wrist, and then her elbow, into the sidewalk. Her take-away dinner flew into the road, and was squashed by the wheels of a car that had squealed to a stop, too late to be of any practical help.

Sara looked up, bewildered, in momentary shock. She thought of Paris, and the gangs of filthy street urchins who roamed the Moulin Rouge with newspapers draped over their arms, bumping into the unsuspecting tourists from the buses, distracting them while they slipped their agile fingers into their pockets and purses. And by the time it was clear what had happened, they’d melted into the alleyways, their stolen loot already in the hands of somebody else.

Sara looked up from the pavement, bewildered, and saw only the faces of curious strangers.

Where was Robin?

She struggled to her feet, thinking he’d gone after the thief.

“Robin?” she said, holding her elbow, which had begun to bleed.

And then she saw him.

He was with two men, and they were bundling him into the back seat of a car.

“
Robin
!” she screamed, but her alarm only forged the determination of the two louts who’d got hold of his arms and one of his legs, and one of them—the wilder-looking of the pair—kicked him in the stomach to make him stop struggling.

Sara saw Robin writhe and she heard him cry out in pain and then he went limp, absolutely limp. He was pitched into the car, and the car screeched away, up Charing Cross Road, in a cloud of dirty exhaust.

She stood alone on the sidewalk, hugging Robin’s knapsack, which he’d dropped in the midst of the struggle. Two women had witnessed the kidnapping as they’d come out of a nearby restaurant, and one of them had begun to shriek, hysterically. She was all in black, with witch’s hair and white makeup and ghoulish lips. Her tongue was a brilliant, startling red against her monochrome face.

Someone from the crowd led Sara inside and sat her down and gave her a drink of water.

And there was Anthony, shouldering his way through the onlookers. “Could I use your phone, please?” he asked, his voice calm, no panic apparent.

“What’s happened, Anthony?” Sara whispered, the tears starting to come now, because the numbness and the first shock of the assault were wearing off.

He put his finger to his lips, and then, his arm around her shoulders, as he sat beside her with the restaurant’s telephone in his lap.

Ten minutes later, the computer repairman appeared in a grey Toyota, and Anthony led Sara out of the restaurant. He climbed into the back, and made Sara sit in the front. The computer repairman shut the passenger door, and walked around to the driver’s side. He got in. He reached across, and pulled her seatbelt over, and clicked it in place.

He’d been wearing a suit on Monday. He’d been a respectable representative of Agency Automation.

He wasn’t wearing a suit now. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and jeans.

His name was Ian, and he was Robin and Anthony’s oldest brother.

“We owe you an explanation, Sara,” he said, as he drove her away from Cambridge Circus.

The flat was on the third floor of a block of red brick mansions in Bloomsbury, within sight of the Telecom Tower. The sitting room was high-ceilinged and gloomy, with heavy velvet curtains that dampened the noise, and walls lined with glass cases full of books.
A professor must live here
, Sara thought, as she was taken down the hallway to a dark, chintz-covered chesterfield.

There were two other men in the flat.

“Hello, Sara,” the first said. “I’m Evan.” He knelt down, so that his eyes were level with hers.

“Robin’s father,” Sara said, vaguely. She’d seen him on television. She’d seen his picture in the
TV Times
. He looked older, and smaller.

He brought her a cup of tea from the kitchen while Anthony sat on a chair, staring at the floor, and Ian dabbed at her elbow with a cotton ball and warm water that smelled of Dettol. He applied a sticky fabric bandage.

“All right?” he asked.

“Yes…thanks.”

Ian took the bowl of water back to the bathroom and Sara tested her wrist. It was stiff.

The second individual was an extremely serious gentleman with a beard and a briefcase.

“Sara,” Robin’s father said, “this is George Simpson. He’s a lawyer.”

Sara sat on the chintz-covered chesterfield with her cup and saucer in her lap and Robin’s knapsack at her side. George Simpson flipped open his briefcase.

“Tell me, Miss Woodford,” he said. “Have you ever been required to sign this country’s Official Secrets Act?”

Wednesday, 04 September 1991

A thundering had worried its way into Robin’s mind—a gradual roar, growing, soaring into a rolling boom, until everything inside him shook. It died away quickly, and became nothing more than a distant echo.

He opened his eyes and saw the wall—a curving, ribbed, iron and cement wall, painted white. He looked up, and saw the ceiling, which was flat and which, when he turned his head to the right, he could see stretched off for some distance, like the ribbed wall, and disappeared into darkness.

Between himself and this darkness a cage had been imposed—part of a cage, anyway, a gate of grillwork, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, a snug fit.

Robin shivered.

The floor was concrete, and it was cold.

He was lying on a heap of sacks—overcoats, he had thought, when he’d first woken up, because they smelled like old clothing that had spent the winter in a cupboard with a box of mothballs.

He rolled onto his back and made a small noise, involuntarily. With full consciousness had come pain. He closed his eyes and pressed his hands against the places where it hurt.

They’d drugged him with something. They’d jabbed him in the shoulder, and as its effects were coursing through his bloodstream, he’d fought them.

One of them was wearing hiking boots. Robin was certain about that, and about the narrow plastic strip fasteners they’d clamped around his wrists and ankles after he was suitably subdued, and about the blindfold they’d tied over his eyes.

It must have given them a great deal of pleasure, he thought, to cause him such grievous bodily harm. There were two of them: the driver in a shabby suit, and a clever lad in leather and chains.

As they’d hurtled through the London night, Sid Vicious had sent his fist straight into Robin’s solar plexus, causing him to twist with agony in the back seat, the breath exploding from his lungs. Another blow, two-handed, had landed him on the floor.

He’d huddled there for 15 minutes, hanging onto consciousness.

The car had screeched to a stop. They dragged him out onto the pavement, cut the plastic around his ankles, made him walk.

They pushed him through a doorway, and he felt cold and damp surrounding him, and smelled disturbed earth and jackhammered concrete, the rubble of recent demolition.

Down, they went, down and down, wordlessly, pushing him, and at the bottom of the circular staircase they’d hit him again—attempted to, anyway, because this time he was fighting back, a burst of adrenalin shrieking through his body, and he got one good kick in before a knee crushed his chest and his head cracked against the concrete, and he saw rockets and stars bursting in a blood red sky.

Battling the queasy feeling in his stomach, he made himself sit up. He made himself stand, and walk, as far as the cage would allow.

It was not a room, but a short tunnel, about 40 feet long, and he was at one end of it. There were lights studding the ceiling. Some were on. Most were not.

He judged the diameter of the tunnel to be about 12 feet: it was small and empty, and it was cold. He shivered again.

Beyond the grilling he could see that the tunnel met a wider passage at a right angle. He listened, his head against the cage, but there was nothing to hear.

He was alone.

He went back to his sanctuary of light.

At the opposite end of his small tunnel was a little room which contained a toilet, rusty water pooling in its cracked porcelain bowl. There was a sink with taps—cold working, no hot. There was a packet of something that more resembled bleached airmail paper than toilet paper.

All of the creature comforts
, he thought, running cold water in the sink, and saturating a wad of the airmail paper, which he pressed over his face.

He took his shirt off and examined the places where the boots and the fists had hit home—spreading black and purple stains on his stomach and side, speckled with pinpoints of red.

He put his shirt on again and limped back to the sacks, and slid down the wall.

The sound came once more, hollow, like the rumble of a giant drain…a rolling roar over his head—

A train.

He listened to the pounding of wheels against railbed and ballast. He listened to its dying clatter.

And he heard something else—faint noises: the slamming of a door, footsteps on stairs, descending, growing louder. Voices: one male, one female, echoing.

He listened as they negotiated the long, wide passage beyond his tunnel, and he saw the light from their torches before he saw them: Sid Vicious, and a tall woman with black hair, wearing red.

“Well,” Nora Darrow said, cheerfully, producing a key which Sid Vicious used to unlock the door of the cage. “Good morning. Christopher Robin Harris, isn’t it? Somewhat worse for wear, I might add. There was no need to resort to violence, Kevin.”

“Violence, mother?” Sid Vicious replied, innocently. “Not me, mother. You must have me confused with Tommy, mother. I haven’t got a violent bone in my body.”

He opened the gate, and locked it again, carefully, behind them.

“We’ve brought you breakfast. It’s hardly haute cuisine, but Kevin informs me it’s entirely edible.” Nora placed the paper bag containing a fast-food egg-and-sausage muffin, and a plastic tub of orange juice, on the floor beside the sacks.

“Where am I?” Robin said, glaring at her.

“I don’t believe it would be in my best interests to tell you that, Christopher Robin. I’m quite attached to this little hideaway—spacious as it is—rather too much so, for my particular needs at this moment. Circumstances, however, do change. I’d prefer to keep it our secret for the time being—if you don’t mind.”

“All right,” Robin said, looking at her. “Who are you? And why did you bring me here?”

“Yes, I thought those might be your next questions. My name is Nora Darrow. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”

“No,” Robin said. “I haven’t.”

Nora was surprised. “I’m not sure whether I ought to be delighted or insulted. You’ve heard of my lately departed husband, I’m quite certain. Simon Darrow?”

“The radio announcer.”

“Public broadcaster and all-round housewives’ choice for chummy breakfast radio chat—yes, that was my beloved. You may not be acquainted with me, but your father certainly is.”

Robin shut his eyes, and backed his head against the wall. “I knew, somehow, this was going to have something to do with him.”

“Oh, come now—it’s not that bad. Let’s just refer to you, for now, as…incentive, shall we? Your father and I share a common interest. He wishes to purchase a diary which I would rather he not have. Perhaps you and I together will be able to persuade him otherwise.”

Robin opened his eyes. “And what do you plan on doing with me if he doesn’t come around to your way of thinking?”

“Oh dear, I don’t believe it’ll come to that—do you? Not that I can’t force myself to become extremely unpleasant, should the situation change to warrant that sort of behaviour. But I shouldn’t like to have to start sending snippets of poor Christopher Robin Harris back to his father in a jewellery box.” She took a polaroid camera and a newspaper from her son. “I’m sure he’ll be able to see it from my point of view—and yours—don’t you?”

Just behind the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus, occupying a triangular promontory, was a restaurant—Fazzoul’s. Inside there were Mediterranean waiters and stuccoed walls, and sheer white curtains and wheeled carts laden with squares of Turkish Delight dusted with icing sugar.

Nora Darrow sat down, and was presented with a leather-bound menu by a dark waiter in a velvet vest.

“This establishment,” she said, “is either Lebanese or Moroccan in purpose—I’ve never quite been able to determine which. Their Chicken Couscous is quite extraordinary.”

Evan looked at her. “There was no need to involve my son.”

“Wasn’t there?” She took a polaroid photograph out of her handbag as the dark-skinned waiter slipped a china dish of olives, marinated carrots and long, thin slivers of pickle onto the table, and filled their water glasses. The picture was of Robin, head and shoulders, holding up a copy of that morning’s
Sun
. “I discovered his presence in London quite by accident. While I was engaged in a totally innocent conversation with Maureen—you know who Maureen is—she works in the travel agency—while I was chatting on the telephone with her, catching up on all the gossip—as I often do—we’re terribly good chums—what should I be told but young Sara has a new boyfriend! The son of somebody famous, in fact. I could hardly believe my good fortune. What luck.”

Evan was unimpressed. He considered the picture of his son. “He looks like one of those POW’s Saddam Hussein paraded in front of the cameras during the Gulf War,” he stated, flatly. “I hope you haven’t been resorting to Iraqi techniques of coercion.”

“Now really, Evan.” She took her picture back, and looked at it. “I think he looks quite handsome. A bit dazed, perhaps—because of the light. He’d only just woken up.”