Stone Cold (7 page)

‘Eat.’

The deep voice brooked no argument and Sheila sensed the food hovering near her mouth. She tore off a chunk of sandwich, chewing gratefully despite her predicament. She swallowed the first mouthful and turned her head toward where she guessed her captor must be standing, even though she could not see them.

‘I have money, if that’s what you want.’

The food was shoved against her lips once more and she took another bite. It crossed her mind that her captor could leave at any moment, abandoning her to the silence and darkness. Sheila slowed her chewing, starting to drag each mouthful out.

‘I’ll be missed,’ she said between chunks of sandwich. ‘People will be looking for me.’

The voice, when it replied, was devoid of emotion.
‘Nobody is looking for you. You are an orphan.’

‘How do you know that?’

More water sloshed against her lips and she drank, more slowly this time. The sandwich returned, and Sheila managed to drag out eating it for several minutes before the last chunk was placed in her mouth.

She considered lunging forward and biting the hand, but something told her that to do so would be useless. She could smell the leather gloves worn by her captor, which would be tough enough to resist any damage she could reasonably inflict.

The last of the water was drained from the plastic bottle, and for a few moments Sheila feared that her captor would leave. The irony of that fear was not lost to her even in her current state, and she realised not for the first time how much she craved companionship, just as she always had.

‘Don’t leave.’

The voice did not reply.

Sheila heard the unmistakeable sound of a nearby chair creaking as it was sat upon. Sheila looked blindly about her and then the voice spoke again.

‘Your money, where is it?’

Sheila swallowed thickly. Think, woman. Keep them talking
.
‘It’s in the business, and in separate accounts too, shared with my husband.’

A long silence before the voice responded again.
‘Does your husband care for you?’

Sheila’s heart froze in her chest. ‘What?’

‘Answer the question.’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘He does.’

‘Are you sure?’

Sheila’s rage fought its way past her fear and burst from within her. ‘What do you want with me?!’

The voice said nothing for a long time, but Sheila could hear the soft hiss of breathing. Her addled mind struggled to focus, to draw some kind of information about her abductor from the meagre clues offered her.

‘Your life,’
the voice said suddenly,
‘depends on your husband following my instructions to the letter. Do you think that he will do that?’

Sheila writhed in frustration within her bonds, but she could not free herself. ‘How the hell should I know? I don’t know what you’ve asked him to do.’

‘You’re a successful woman,’
the voice replied.
‘You know what we want of him.’

‘Money,’ Sheila spat. ‘That’s all you people want, isn’t it? Cash, but you don’t want to work for it. No, you take it from others, like the blood–sucking leeches that you are. Weak, cowardly and lazy!’

Sheila spat in the general direction of where the voice was coming from.

The world beyond the darkness fell silent. Sheila awaited a response, but the longer she waited the more her rage withered and the stronger her fear became. It built up like a poison inside her, cold and clammy until she called out.

Silence reigned, but she could still hear the breathing. When the voice spoke again it was laden with terminal certainty.

‘If your husband does not undertake to pay the ransom on your life, I will be forced to execute you.’

Sheila swallowed thickly as her legs began to tremble, but even through her fear some small part of her rational mind recognised the use of I. One person. One abductor. One killer. Maybe working for somebody else? Her business rivals?

‘Why?’ Sheila uttered. ‘I haven’t harmed you? I don’t know who you are. I can’t do anything to expose you so why would you kill me?’

The figure moved, standing again. Sheila flinched but her abductor merely reached up and yanked her bonds tight against her jaw again.

‘No,’ Sheila gasped. ‘Don’t leave me here! Please don’t leave me to die…’

The gag was pulled tightly into her mouth again, cutting her words off into a stream of strangled cries that degenerated into sobs.

The voice spoke one last time into her ear.

‘It’s not me who wants you dead.’

Then the plugs were shoved back into place, and Sheila McKenzie was left alone in her lonely universe once again.

***

9

Since she had uncovered his lies, Kathryn had found it extremely trying whenever Stephen had returned home from his business trips. Truth was, she now despised the very moment that he walked back into the apartment, struggling as she had for months now to maintain a facade of delight at his homecoming.

Now, it was even harder to sustain the charade. The desire to burst through the door and beat a confession from him in a screaming frenzy was almost overwhelming, but her new job working for the police precluded any such violent confrontation. Getting arrested for battery wasn’t going to do her career any good, despite the no doubt cathartic effect of imprinting Stephen’s duplicitous face onto the back of a frying pan.

She took a breath outside the door to their apartment, her door key in her hand hovering before the lock. Just a little while longer, she told herself. You can do this.

Kathryn shoved the key in the lock and walked inside.

‘Hi!’

Her greeting was answered from the living room, where she could see the flicker of the television glowing and Stephen’s legs resting on the coffee table. The waft of Chinese takeaway filled the apartment, and Kathryn turned into the kitchen and grabbed herself a plate. The food was still hot, so she took her time and dished herself out a helping and grabbed a can of soda before making her way slowly into the lounge.

Stephen was in the recliner chair, his half–eaten lunch resting on a coffee table nearby and a bottle of beer clasped in his hand. She could tell at a glance that he was unhappy. His features were drawn and although he was watching a comedy show his gaze was unfocused.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked as she perched herself alongside him on the sofa.

Stephen drew a hand down his face and sighed. ‘No, not really.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I got a call from HQ a couple of hours ago. The latest deal went south,’ he replied. ‘Company could not afford the premiums after all, once their finances were checked out. Damned near in liquidation, so there’s no way that they could afford us and no way we’d forward cover to them anyway. Whole thing was a waste of time.’

Kathryn looked down at her plate. ‘I’m sorry, I know how hard you worked for that one.’

Stephen nodded slowly, but did not reply.

‘What are you going to do next?’

Stephen looked at his beer for a moment as though considering whether to drink it or hurl it across the room.

‘I’ll head back in the morning. There’s an action meeting, if you can call it that, and I want to be there to find out what went wrong. We should never have been involved with a company in such decline. I’m guessing whoever cleared them without running the proper checks first will get a rocket up their ass come tomorrow.’

‘Don’t you select clients?’ Kathryn asked sweetly as she popped a piece of sweet and sour chicken into her mouth.

Stephen shook his head. ‘I approach potential clients, but head office audits them before I go back in and negotiate the deals and any contracts are drawn up.’

Stephen looked at her, his face half–lit by the glowing television. She could see he had not shaved and his hair was messy, which was unlike him. That he was under pressure she was in no doubt, and although the knowledge sparked an intense delight somewhere deep inside she still felt as though the emotion was somehow unjustified. He was suffering, and the knowledge made her both powerful and uncomfortable.

‘What happens now?’ she asked him.

Stephen sighed, his dark eyes reflecting the television. ‘I won’t make any commission this month again.’

‘Even though it’s not your fault?’

‘Doesn’t matter to corporate,’ Stephen replied. ‘The deal’s not done. I got my first–half commission when the company signed up, but the rest is in the wind now.’

Kathryn looked down at her meal.

‘So you can’t cover the rent again?’ she said.

Stephen shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sorry honey, I know it’s a pain but there’s nothing that I can do. I’ll cover the other bills and the car with what I’ve got left, okay?’

Kathryn popped another morsel of chicken that she didn’t really want into her mouth. It meant that she could avoid speaking for another few moments. Stephen sighed and took a pull from his beer before he got up and headed without another word to the shower.

Kathryn waited until she heard the water running and then made herself comfortable on the sofa and tucked into her takeaway with relish. Thoughts flashed through her mind as she considered what Stephen had said.

His bosses had called two hours ago, and yet he was unshaven? Stephen had driven home in the very early morning, but it was already one in the afternoon. If he’d slept for a full four or five hours it would only have been ten or eleven in the morning, plenty of time left to have a shower, shave and so on like he normally would do. It was one of the things that had first attracted her to Stephen, the fact that he had always been clean–cut, had always looked after himself. She decided that it was
possible
, given everything that had happened recently, that he had simply let himself slip for an hour or two.

So that left the call itself, from his bosses. The company he worked for was headquartered two hundred miles away. Such was the modern world, where conference calls, cell–phones and the Internet meant that a man on the road rarely had to venture into his boss’s office anymore if the work at hand did not require his immediate presence.

Forking noodles into her mouth with one hand, Kathryn foraged with the other across the coffee table until she found Stephen’s cell–phone. She picked it up and tapped in his code to unlock the screen. Learning his lock–code had been one of her first acts of subterfuge after discovering his deception, a crime that she defended to herself by citing an
eye for an eye
mentality: Stephen started the lying first, so he had it coming. She had prided herself on not often using her secret knowledge, but now was the perfect moment.

She scrolled down his received calls list and was both elated and somehow saddened when her fears were confirmed. There were no calls logged from the company he worked for. In fact he had not received a single call since late the previous night. On an impulse, she scrolled through Stephen’s out–going call list and instantly saw a number that she recognised.

Kathryn returned the cell to its home screen and placed it carefully back on the coffee table, at the same angle and location as she had found it. Quietly, she put her plate down and crept through the hallway toward the front door where the apartment phone hung from its cradle. She could hear the hiss of water from the shower and Stephen splashing about inside the stall as she unhooked the phone and scrolled through its menu.

As she suspected, there were no calls recorded as coming in for the past two days. Nothing had changed since the last time she had checked.

Nobody had called Stephen.

Kathryn crept back to her takeaway and sat watching trash television as she considered the new and important pieces of information. Stephen was lying, which was nothing new, but his demeanour was different. Something was putting him under strain and she figured that whatever it was it concerned weighty matters other than herself.

In the past few months she had come to know Stephen far better than she had before she had unveiled his deception and lies. It seemed strange to her, even now, that the man she was not actually supposed to know was the man she now knew best. Stephen, the man she had met four years ago while working in a small diner in the city, who had asked if
he
could leave
her
his number so that
she
could decide whether to call or text
him
, was in fact a stranger to her. A facade. A figment of her imagination, like a phantom slipping from one dream to the next, hoped for but never actually materialising. The man that she now knew was a manipulator, a cheat, a self–serving bastard who calculated his every move, his every response, for all she knew his every breath in order to maintain a relationship that he probably didn’t even want, and all for reasons that she could not fathom.

The only conclusion that she could draw from the whole sorry mess was that the other woman presented a better and brighter future for Stephen than Kathryn herself did, and that he was gradually working his way out of her life. The long absences, the deplorable lack of sexual activity, the disinterest in her life and her achievements.

Simple, really, although tragic none the less.

The man she knew would most likely seek to leave her and hit the road as soon as possible, perhaps on the excuse that if he drove through the night to the other side of the state he would avoid the worst of the rush–hour traffic. It would give him time to think about what had happened, maybe formulate a plan of action when he got there. He’d feel better in the morning, could turn a crisis into an opportunity once again. Except that the crisis never ended, and the only opportunities were those that he presumably took for himself, leaving her to struggle on alone.

‘Are you okay?’

Kathryn startled as she looked up to see Stephen staring down at her from the living room door. She realised that she had been stabbing pieces of chicken with unnecessary force, butchering them one after the other.

‘Sure,’ she replied brightly. ‘Was just figuring out how to pay the rent this month.’