Charlie (56 page)

Had this other woman attacked one of the men and run off? Surely they didn’t have other prisoners in this house other than himself?

One thing was certain out of all this, things were escalating upstairs and before long they’d have to come and deal with him. If someone else had managed to get away from them, it was about time he put his mind to how he might escape too.

He had already tried kicking and pummelling at the cellar door many times, but without shoes on his feet it hadn’t even so much as quivered. Now he knew that the door opened outwards, he couldn’t even resort to the old trick on the films of standing behind it and slipping out like that.

‘If only you had some sort of weapon,’ he said aloud.

He gripped the top step, wondering if he could pull off one of the treads and use that, but it was rock solid. He worked his way down trying each one, but they were all the same. It was only as he got to the bottom and looked across at the wine rack that he suddenly saw that as a possibility.

If he could get it off the wall and be waiting in readiness at the top of the stairs with it when the men came back to get him, he might be able to force his way out with it like a battering ram and evade knives or fists.

‘That’s it,’ he whispered to himself, refusing even to contemplate that he had no idea of the layout of the floor above, or where the front door was. ‘It might just work.’

Standing in front of the rack, and catching hold of it firmly, he tugged it fiercely. It didn’t budge.

The light in the cellar was dim, his feet were icy again through standing on the stone floor for so long, but by climbing up the rack, he discovered it was only held in place by four rusting screws along the centre of it.

Bracing himself at one end, he tugged again, and this time he felt a faint movement. He tried again and to his delight saw he’d loosened the first screw. Focusing his strength on each screw separately, slowly he managed to weaken each one.

He was hot and dizzy now with the exertion. He took a rest for a minute or two, then went back to it. Taking up a firm position in the middle, concentrating his mind entirely on the project and possible freedom, he heaved again, summoning up all his last remaining strength. The cracking, crumbling sounds of the screws coming loose from their fixing in the brick was like hearing beautiful music.

Another minute and he had it free. He was exhausted, but jubilant. Turning it sideways, he slowly hauled the heavy iron up the stairs to the door. He wanted to whoop with joy when he saw it in place. It almost filled the doorway from top to bottom, leaving enough space on the hinge side for him to barge through with it.

Chapter Eighteen

Charlie had only been running for a few minutes after escaping from The Manse when she realized she wasn’t being chased any longer. Already severely winded, her first reaction was relief, but that was quickly followed by terror when it occurred to her that it meant the men would soon come in their car.

She couldn’t remember seeing any houses between here and where the farmer picked her up on his tractor, and the lane was narrow, with tall hedges on both sides. If she continued along it she was a sitting target. Seeing a break in a hedge, she quickly scrambled through it, and she had only taken a few steps when a red car came past. It passed too quickly for her to see the occupants, but the speed it was travelling at seemed to confirm it was them.

Still panting, Charlie sat down to get her breath and consider what she should do. But suddenly she found herself crying. Reason told her it was just shock, she had after all just been through a terrifying ordeal and she still wasn’t safe now. Yet it didn’t feel as if it was the fear of imprisonment and maybe even death that was troubling her, but rather that woman’s face.

She may have only caught the most fleeting glimpse, yet she could picture her as clearly as she could her own mother. It was an outstandingly beautiful face. How could a woman look like that, yet be so evil? She could understand now why her father had been tempted into an affair with her, yet that was the only thing she did understand, everything else was still as mysterious as it had been this morning.

‘Not quite,’ she said aloud. ‘You know for certain Andrew is locked up there, or that man Mick would have looked puzzled when you asked to be put in with him.’

That thought focused her mind. She had to phone the police quickly to get Andrew out of there before he was moved. At the same time it was imperative she didn’t get caught herself. It was obvious that the men would soon turn the car around and come back when they’d been as far as they knew she could get on foot. The fields here were very open and if she was out in the middle of one she’d be spotted instantly.

Tentatively she stood up and looked around her. Unfortunately she was on the wrong side of the road to look down the hill towards Borough Green, and on this side the ground sloped upwards, and she could see no houses at all. She hadn’t any idea how far the nearest village was either.

She looked at her watch and was surprised to find it was half past four. She had been up in that dining room for longer than she’d imagined. The smartest thing to do seemed to be to go back towards the house, keeping inside this hedge, as they’d be bound to imagine she’d continue the way she’d started. With luck there might be a house up that way too.

*

Andrew pricked up his ears at the sound of car tyres on the drive again. He had been sitting up by the cellar door with the wine rack for what seemed like hours, afraid to move in case the men came back. He sensed it must be close to dusk now as he’d tried turning off the light again to check and there was only a faint grey shadow rather than the brightness earlier. As the front door opened with a click, he also heard soft footsteps coming from the other direction.

‘Why have you come back without her?’ a woman’s voice asked from somewhere to his left.

‘She weren’t anywhere on the road,’ a man replied.

‘You idiots,’ she hissed back at him. ‘Surely even you two could see she was bright enough to hide in a field? Get out again, on foot this time, checking behind the hedges. You can bet your life she doubled back when she saw you go past.’

‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘But what if –’

‘You
will
find her,’ the woman cut him short. ‘And quickly. You know as well as I do there isn’t another house along there for three miles.’

The front door slammed abruptly. All at once the house was silent again.

Andrew was absolutely certain now that the woman was Martha. That deep husky voice had played on his mind over and over again when he’d woken up to find himself in here. But who could the woman be that they were looking for?

A chill ran down his spine.

‘Not Charlie, surely,’ he exclaimed. He tried to quash the thought, telling himself that if
he
didn’t know where she was living, how could they have found her? Yet he’d told Martha she was coming back from Yorkshire on Friday night. Could they have met the trains and snatched her too?

He began to tremble with fear. It was bad enough to find himself in this predicament, but to think he’d put her life in danger too was unbearable. ‘Please God, don’t let them catch her,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t care what happens to me, but don’t let her be hurt.’

Rita arrived home just after six to find the flat just as she’d left it that morning, her own breakfast things still in the sink, Charlie out and no meal ready. Tired after a long day with Mrs Haagman behaving as though it was her fault they were short-handed, her initial reaction was one of irritation. It was only later as she sat by the fire with a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea that it occurred to her Charlie couldn’t have returned from her early morning walk. The note she’d left was still in the same place, with nothing more added, and she certainly would have tidied up if she’d been here.

Thinking that she might have gone over to Jack Straw’s Castle to check over Andrew’s things again, or even got a message that he had turned up, Rita rang the pub. The landlady said Charlie hadn’t called, and that she had in fact rung her twice during the day to find out if there was any news but got no reply. Rita became worried then, she couldn’t think of anyone else her friend was likely to visit, and someone as desperate for news as she was would stay close to the phone.

She looked out of the window. It was growing dark and cold too. Charlie would know she’d be worried about her, so why hadn’t she telephoned her at work if something unexpected had come up?

It was then that the conversation of the previous night popped into Rita’s head. Had Charlie been quizzing her about that house with the intention of going to find it? It seemed a ridiculous notion – surely no sensible person would go off on such a wild goose chase – but the more Rita thought about Charlie’s desperate state of mind, the more convinced she became that this was exactly what she had done.

Rita sat for some time weighing up the implications of this. Just thinking about what had happened to her in that house brought back all the old terror and although she tried to tell herself that Charlie couldn’t possibly have found it with such a sketchy description and that even if she had, it was unlikely Daphne Dexter would be there, still the thought persisted that her friend was in trouble.

But what should she do about it? If she rang the police and said Charlie was missing they would tell her just to wait and see if she came home later. To get them to investigate down in that area of Kent she would need to tell them everything she knew about Daphne Dexter, and that would be like opening Pandora’s Box.

It wasn’t just a question of finding Andrew and Charlie. To ensure the woman was locked away permanently where she could never hurt anyone again, Rita knew she would have to agree to go into the witness box, and that meant her own past would become public knowledge.

She could perhaps live with her parents cutting her out of their life again, but what of Paul? What would it do to him to discover that his older sister was in fact his mother and that she’d been little better than a prostitute?

She didn’t think she could bear that. Yet if she sat here and did and said nothing, it was possible Andrew and Charlie could be maimed like she was!

Suddenly she saw a vivid picture in her mind. She was lying on that bench, bound and gagged, and Daphne Dexter was looking down at her, the long knife poised in her hand.

‘Maimed!’ she exclaimed aloud. ‘If that woman’s got hold of Andrew because he’s stumbled on something about her, she won’t want to maim him, but kill him. And Charlie too!’

She saw then that she had no choice – even being cast off from her son was preferable to the thought of two young people with their whole lives ahead of them being killed. Snatching up the phone, she dialled the number for Bow Street.

Charlie’s plan hadn’t worked out too well. She should have continued the way she was going originally. She was making her way through a small wood just beyond The Manse when she heard men’s voices coming up behind her, less than forty yards back.

She was hidden from them at that point, but she couldn’t run on or they would have heard her. The only thing she could think of doing was to climb up a tree and hide. Fortunately the one nearest to her was easy enough to scramble up into, and she’d already discovered today that fear gave her strengths she didn’t know she had. But once up in it she felt so vulnerable. The wind had got up, it was very cold, and she wasn’t even sure she was concealed enough. The men walked right beneath the tree, poking into the undergrowth with sticks, and she was so scared she could hardly manage to hang on.

She had no choice but to stay in the tree because she had no idea which direction the men took once they got through the wood. Slowly the light began to fade from the sky, and although she welcomed darkness because it would conceal her once she climbed down, she still had no idea how much farther she had to go to get help. Every minute she delayed gave Daphne Dexter more time to get Andrew out of that house.

Finally she could stand the suspense no longer and she climbed down. Her foot slipped at one point and she cut her hand on a sharp broken branch trying to catch herself. She jumped the last six or seven feet, landed heavily on her knees and hobbled out of the wood.

A faint light in the distance became her goal. She’d lost track of where she was in relation to the road, and the field she went through had just been ploughed, so it was heavy going across furrows she could barely see.

The ploughed field led to one with cows, and she slipped in a cow-pat and gashed her hand again, this time on a stone. Two more barbed wire fences, and finally she came to a five-foot-high stone wall. She followed it along and a few minutes later she was hammering on the front door of a small detached house.

‘Please call the police,’ she blurted out the moment the door was opened by a tall man in spectacles. ‘The house over there,’ she pointed back the way she had come, ‘The Manse it’s called. They’ve got my boyfriend locked up. I’m afraid they’re going to kill him. I’ve just escaped from them.’

She had never been so frustrated in her life as when the wretched man made her repeat what she’d said. Even then, instead of going straight into the house, he came outside and looked over the garden wall in the direction she said she’d come from.

‘Look, please hurry,’ she implored him, catching hold of his arm. ‘Just ring 999, I’ll explain to them. Andrew could be in terrible danger when they find I’ve got out.’

Later that night she was to understand why he didn’t act immediately. He was a retired school teacher and he and his wife had been eating their evening meal when they were interrupted by frantic hammering on their door. It must have been alarming to find a wild-eyed, dirty Chinese girl with blood all over her hands on his doorstep shouting about prisoners in a house across a field. She couldn’t really blame him then for thinking she was an escaped lunatic.

‘The Manse, you say.’ He spoke slowly and deliberately, looking at her with undisguised disbelief. ‘Surely not, the woman who owns it is rarely there.’