Captive (5 page)

For a second my legs turn to water as fear pushes all the energy out of me like air from a punctured balloon. Then I think of Addy trapped here somewhere. I can’t give up so easily. I will
not let these people win.
Move, Robyn. Move now!
I need somewhere to hide. The dust sheets, of course. I press myself close to what feels like a sofa and let the sheet drop around me.

Footsteps smack along the corridor, getting more distant. I sigh in relief. He’s gone the other way. Perhaps he won’t find me here. Maybe if he goes upstairs, I can sneak out and try
to find another way out. More footsteps, lighter this time. Talon maybe? He’s much smaller than Scar. Then I hear someone moving around overhead. Have they both gone upstairs? Or is there
someone else here? I’m so busy listening to the noise above me that it takes a second to realise the light in the room has shifted. Someone must have turned on the light in the corridor.

‘Here, kitty kitty. Here, puss, puss.’ It’s Scar.

I can hear him moving around. And I can smell him. Then the outline of him comes into view. He is crouching down and lifting up the sheet opposite me. I am not even breathing now and I’m
pressed as tightly as I can be against the sofa, wishing I could disappear into it. He lets the dust sheet drop back into place and disappears out of my sight line. The idea of him grabbing me from
behind makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. His smell is all around me now, choking me. He must be right above me. I imagine every second that he is lifting the sheet. Is that air I
can feel at my back? Has he lifted my sheet? Is he about to find me? Any moment now his big fat hand will be reaching for me—

‘Scar!’ The sound of Talon’s voice comes from upstairs. Then again, more urgently. ‘Scar!’

Scar grunts. He is leaving the room. The door slams shut behind him.

I let my breath go a capillary at a time, imagining the tiny air particles bubbling up from my lungs and out through my mouth. Still I don’t move. I wait and I wait and I wait under that
sheet until my legs are cramped and my left foot is completely numb. The world grows darker and darker. The house is silent now. I know that they can’t have stopped looking for me, but I have
to move. I am beginning to shake with cold. I can’t stay here forever. I have to try and get away.

I slowly straighten out my legs, one after the other. The house remains quiet, so, with the help of the sofa, I stand up. Then I move slowly in the dark to avoid knocking anything over. After
sidestepping along the wall until I feel the metal sheeting at my back, I put my hand out in front of me. I can’t see anything. My fingers brush against something. It is not a sofa or a
table. It is silky smooth. Like . . . like hair.

A lamp is switched on and reveals a woman sitting on the other sofa. She is staring at me with dark black eyes. A mask covers her face but stops at her neck. My hand is looped in the long dark
hair that falls below it.

I scream.

‘My name is Feather,’ the woman says. Her voice is as soft as water lapping over pebbles, and in my mind I see the beach near my grandparents’ house and
remember how suddenly the gentle tide can turn, cutting you off from the shore.

We are in my cell. She’s crouching, her back against the locked door. She led me here alone, a gun pushed into the base of my spine. We passed Scar coming out of one of the rooms further
along the corridor. He made a move, to grab my arm or lift me up, but after a glance at Feather, his hands fell back to his sides.

She is small, barely five feet tall. Unlike the others, her balaclava also covers her mouth and nose, meaning only her eyes are visible. They are huge and dark with long thick eyelashes. They
should be beautiful, but there is something in them, like a hidden current in a still river, that makes me think people have been fooled by her gender and her height in the past and have regretted
it. My fear grips me more firmly as I remember how she managed to enter that room and sit there in the dark so silently that I had no idea she was even there.

The gun rests on her lap, its barrel still pointed at me. She strokes it absently as she continues, ‘It is under my instruction that you were brought here.’

I am too afraid to speak. Her eyes look ready to swallow me up.

‘You are here to help us. Your father has something we want and you are going to get it for us. As long as you’re obedient and your father cooperates quickly, you will not be hurt.
But you will do what I say and you will not try to escape again.’

‘You’re part of the group that shot my dad.’ I sound small and young and scared.

‘You don’t get to ask questions. You are not in Number 10 now with your servants and your mummy and your daddy,’ she says. ‘You are here, under my rule. I am your route
out of here, Princess. Do not piss me off.’ She lunges forward and clouts me around the ear with the base of the gun. The pain is a firework exploding in my head. ‘That is for attacking
my comrades.’ She cuffs the other ear – ‘That is for running’ – and my vision clouds. The sizzling in my ears has become a single high-pitched note like the sound a
heart machine makes when someone dies.

I’m tied to the bed again. My arms are aching from being forced over my head. I spent a long time trying to squeeze my hands through the flexes but they are too tight, so
all I’ve ended up doing is hurting my wrists more. I am lying still, trying to listen for any sound that might give me a clue as to where I am. It’s late now and a thin orange glow
filters through the high window. There must be a light outside. A street lamp maybe or just a security light? Should I shout? Someone might hear me. Gordon once told me that if I was ever in
trouble, I should shout ‘FIRE!’ ‘Help’ is too vague, but people know what to do about a fire, so they aren’t afraid to get involved. I don’t want to shout now,
though. The wrong person might come. I can’t get the image of Scar holding me down on the bed out of my head.

There’s a shriek from outside and I jump, yanking painfully against my flexes. Just a fox. I hear them in the garden at Number 10 sometimes. Can Addy and Mum hear this fox? Where are they?
Why couldn’t these arseholes have kept us together? Addy will be so terrified and tired. It must be way past her bedtime. She’ll be crying and Mum won’t be able to calm her down.
It’s always Karen who puts Addy to bed and she always, always has her toy lamb to cuddle. She can’t sleep without it. She’s only three years old. It’s not fair. Why
couldn’t they have left her alone? Why couldn’t they have left me alone?

The light outside goes off suddenly and the room is plunged into an impenetrable blackness, extinguishing everything. There’s a sound from the corridor like a boot scraping against wood.
Who is that? Out of all of them, I hope it’s Talon. He seems the most sane.

There’s another sound of a footfall. I imagine the door handle turning, even though I can’t see it in the dark. I am beginning to feel panicky. I need to calm down. I try to focus on
a nice memory. Of last Christmas at Granny and Grandpa’s, opening our presents in the hall under the big tree and Mum telling Addy that she should be grateful for what she’d got this
year. ‘Some little girls don’t have any presents.’ Addy hugged her new teddy bear to her chest, eyes wide, like she was afraid one of those little girls might try to take it from
her.

The memory doesn’t last. How could the attack have happened this afternoon? Everyone kept telling me we were safe, but we weren’t, and I
knew
it. Why didn’t anyone
listen to me? I’ve been afraid since January, and now it feels like it was all leading to this. I am angry and scared, but I have to keep faith in Dad. I know that he will be doing everything
he can to bring us home. We won’t be here long. Dad will be raising hell at Downing Street to get us out of here. We just have to hold on.

Hold on. Keep calm.

The darkness wraps itself around me until I can no longer remember what it is like to see, and it just seems to go on and on and on and on until I begin to lose all sense of everything. I keep
opening my eyes without realising I’ve closed them and feeling bad because I’ve fallen asleep for a few minutes, when I should be awake and plotting how to get out of here and how to
rescue Addy and Mum.

I open my eyes suddenly, not even sure when I shut them. Was I sleeping? What woke me? A scream. Addy screaming. Her short sharp cries were reverberating off the walls of my cell. I try to sit
up, remembering too late that I am still tied to the bed. I fall backwards, flopping about like a fish. Addy’s cries have died down now and everything is quiet again; even the ringing in my
ears has dropped to a low hum. I yell, an incoherent string of noises that definitely has the words ‘help’, ‘sister’ and ‘bastards’ mixed in, along with a few
other swear words.

As the locks on the door pull back, I realise how stupid I’ve been. What if it’s Scar?

‘Where is my sister? What have you done to her?’ I say with more bravado than I feel. The glare of the torch is blinding and I look away, green and orange and blue circles dancing
before my eyes. When I look back, Talon is beside the bed.

‘She isn’t here.’

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘Because I’m telling the truth.’

‘Why are we here?’

‘There’s no “we”. There’s just you.’

‘I want to see my sister.’ The light bulb swings gently above our heads, blown by an invisible breeze, casting shadows on the wall in the fierce light of the torch.

‘She isn’t here.’

My throat burns with the effort of not crying. ‘Please,’ I murmur, ‘please let me go.’

I notice that he is favouring his left hand. His right arm must be sore from where I stabbed him earlier. Good. I’m glad I hurt him. I would do it again. He swings the torch and I imagine
my eyes glowing red in its beam like a woodland animal caught in a car’s headlights. He lowers the light so that it is no longer blinding me and says, ‘I get that you’re scared,
but we’re not going to hurt you. We just need your help. Then you can go home.’

‘And if I don’t help you?’

He shrugs, making his shadow huge and shapeless like a bear. ‘Then we can’t let you go.’

There is a media blackout surrounding our trip to Paris, so there weren’t the usual hordes of press outside Downing Street and at Northolt airfield. We boarded the
Royal Squadron quickly and quietly, and it took off almost immediately. We are now somewhere over the Channel. I peer out of the window at the white clouds and try to imagine the strip of sea
somewhere far below.

‘How are you doing, Robyn?’ Gordon, part of the special protection branch of the police and in charge of most of Dad’s security, is standing in the aisle, an arm the size of
both my legs resting on the back of the seat in front of me. I smile and he sits down. ‘Your dad wanted me to swing by and have a chat with you about security plans for Paris. That
okay?’

I nod.

‘Right, all standard procedure, but it doesn’t hurt to go over it again. So a car will be meeting us off the plane. The French media are also under blackout.’

I already know this stuff. Right now, one of Gordon’s team will be inspecting the cars that will travel in convoy with us from the airport to the hotel. When Dad starts the official
part of the tour on Thursday, he’ll move to the Hôtel de Marigny, which is right opposite the Elysée Palace. Yesterday, and then again this morning, another team member will have
travelled the route from the airport, looking out for any unusual changes, diversions, road maintenance – anything suspicious. There will be at least two different routes planned and not even
the driver will know which one we are taking until he gets the instruction from Gordon just as we are getting in the car.

When we arrive at the hotel, we won’t enter through the front door. You can’t guarantee that some celebrity won’t be staying there too and there are always a couple of paps
who wait outside these places in the hope of a scoop. Catching sight of the British PM arriving in secret, days before an international meeting, is a definite scoop. So we will be driven to the
back door and will probably enter through the kitchen, or maybe the staff entrance. The hotel staff will already have been briefed not to react, not to look up, not to speak. Mum once said that
blind mutes would make the best hoteliers.

Mine and Dad’s plans have been scrutinised and categorised into low- to high-risk events. Dinner in the hotel restaurant: low risk. Night out at the opera: medium risk. Visiting the
Musée d’Orsay or the Eiffel Tower: high risk. Each venue will have been inspected and areas of potential danger highlighted. How many exits are there in each room? Do any of the rooms
exit on to back alleyways? Has the staff been vetted? Nothing can be left to chance.

‘Any questions?’ Gordon asks in conclusion.

I open my mouth to say no just as Dad’s face appears over the seat in front of mine and tells me, with a grin, to try and stay awake during the highly important security briefing. He
thanks Gordon and asks him to go and have a word with Harold, Dad’s chief of staff, who is worried about something. ‘Then I promise you can sit down somewhere quietly with the newspaper
and a nice cup of tea,’ he finishes.

‘No time for that, Prime Minister,’ Gordon replies. ‘Robyn, if you have any questions, you know where to find me.’

Dad sits down in the seat Gordon has vacated.
‘Aucun regret?’

I shake my head.
‘Non, je voulais à venir.’
I wanted to come
.

‘Je voulais venir,’
he corrects
. ‘
No
, “à”.’

I brush an imaginary fleck of dirt from my jeans. ‘Dad . . . I’m not going to be in the way, am I?’

‘No, darling. Of course not. I’m excited. Three days in Paris with my girl.’

‘But if you need to prepare or . . . have meetings or whatever, I don’t want to—’

‘Robyn, you could never be in the way. I can’t wait to show you Paris. You know, this is where I first met your mother.’