I can’t believe it was exactly a year ago that we were in Paris. I’ve had a very different sort of start to the year. Grandpa is still really pissed at Dad, but Granny is mostly just “disappointed,” which is worse somehow. Grandpa blusters and curses; Granny is silent and withdrawn, and she has suddenly started looking every minute of her seventy-two years.
After cutting across the front lawn, I trudge around to the side entrance to the house. My camera case bumps against my hip. I haven’t taken any pictures this morning. There wasn’t anything to capture, just endless whiteness. I didn’t even hear any birds. Yesterday I spotted a couple of robins making a nest down by the lake.
I fling my boots off in the pantry, stopping when I’m halfway across the flagstones to go back and line them up properly. I don’t want to add to Granny’s stress and anxiety—mess of any kind makes her crazy. It’s lucky I did, because she’s in the kitchen, stirring porridge on the stove.
“Nice walk?” she asks.
“Cold walk.” I line my mittens up on the radiator to dry. “You look tired. Can’t Marion do that?”
“Marion always burns it. And I can just about manage to make my own porridge. Not in the grave yet.”
I kiss her leathery cheek. “Is Dad up?”
“Blue Room. With your mother. Writing his letters.” Granny sounds like she is sucking on a mouthful of lemons.
“It’s a good thing, Granny.”
“A good thing would have been him not getting us into this mess in the first place. But there, I’m an old woman. No one takes any notice of me.”
I grin at her and go out into the hallway to peek through the open door to the Blue Room, which is the long, narrow living room at the front of the house. Dad is sitting in the large armchair by the window, his head back, his eyes closed, and a blanket over his knees. He looks like an old man. His shoulder hurts more in the cold, and over the last few months, he seems to have increasingly lost the use of his arm. He is in near-constant pain now. The doctors can’t explain it. They’ve suggested that it might be a damaged nerve and have advised all sorts of treatments. Dad resists most of them. “It’s my past sins catching up with me,” he says. “If you go up into Grandpa’s attic, you’ll find a ravaged painting of me. All the evil I’ve done in my life visible on that portrait.”
To which Mum always laughs and says, not unkindly, “The evil you’ve done isn’t hidden in the attic. It’s reported in the press on a daily basis.”
“There’s another letter from the chief medical officer at Bradford General,” Mum says now. She’s perched on the chair beside my dad. “All his patients who received Amabim-F had bad side effects. Shortness of breath and a rash.”
Dad met Talon’s mum a few months back to apologize personally for delaying the truth coming out. Now he and Mum are looking to set up a charity that supports all kidney-disease sufferers and their families. I want them to call it the Jeremy Fletcher Foundation. I wrote to Talon in prison to ask him what he thought, but he never replied. I’ve written him a letter every week since I last saw him. He hasn’t replied to any of them.
Dad leans forward to take the letter from Mum’s hand, wincing in pain as he does so. Mum presses her hand to his forehead. “Do you need more pills?” she asks softly.
Dad shakes his head, and Mum kisses him lightly on the cheek.
I creep quietly away before either of them sees me. Unbelievably, Mum and Dad are closer than I’ve ever seen them. I’m pleased that something positive has come out of all this, but it hurts, too. There’s a distance between me and Dad these days, and I don’t know how to close it. In fact, there’s a distance between me and everyone now. Even me and Poppy. She tries to understand, but she can’t. No one can. No one knows what I went through. No one except Talon, and he won’t reply to any of my letters.
Talon, Feather, and Scar are in prison. Feather and Scar got the longest sentences—fifteen years. Eight for kidnapping and seven for attempted murder. In a bizarre twist, it turns out that my father wasn’t the target in Paris. Feather had been aiming for Michael. Michael’s room had been near our suite in the hotel, and Dad had had Michael’s coat over his head when we ran for the car. It seems that Dad has his friend’s ridiculous taste in clothing to thank for his shoulder injury.
The shooting, or rather the media storm that came after it, was what led to my kidnapping. During her trial, Feather revealed that after seeing the scale of the coverage on the shooting in Paris, she knew that when it came to getting her brother released, she had to switch focus from Michael to my dad. But she didn’t want to kidnap him—it was too problematic, not least from a logistical point of view. I was less well-protected and arguably a better victim anyway. I was an “innocent” and the PM’s daughter. The press would go crazy for the story, not only in the UK but around the world. Plus, my father actually had the power to release Marble, or at least influence the decision.
The judge was lenient with Talon after all. Perhaps something I said registered with someone. He’s serving four years. They reckon he could be out in two for good behavior. Two years still seems like a very long time.
Marble has been released. All charges dropped.
The trials of Michael Bell and Bell-Barkov are due to start in the new year. Michael’s facing charges of gross negligence and manslaughter. Bell-Barkov will probably be fined, along with Glindeson, the company that oversaw the drug’s trial. Amabim-F has been taken off the market.
I’m heading up the stairs to find Addy when my mobile rings. I left it on the table in the hall. I tuck my hair behind my ear—it’s chin-length now—before answering it. “Hello.”
A voice I could never forget says, “Hello, Robyn.”
I slide down on to the floor. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“Hi,” I say again.
“You said that already.” It’s funny how you can hear someone smile. “There’s a robin that sits on the fence when I’m doing outside exercise. It makes me think of you.”
My knuckles are white from gripping the handset.
“Robyn? Are you still there?”
I make a noise that is somewhere between a cry and the word “yes.”
“I got your letters.”
Come on, Robyn. Formulate an actual sentence. “You . . . you didn’t reply.”
“No.”
“But you’re calling me now.”
“Yes.”
I remember the last time I saw him, how I held him as he cried and whispered, Forget me. Forget me.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t what?” he asks.
“Forget you.”
There’s a thumping in my rib cage like something’s trying to escape.
“Me neither,” Talon says.
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I could . . . I mean . . . if you wanted me to . . .”
“We don’t have a future, you know that. I mean, how could we?”
“I know,” I say, thinking of his hands in my hair.
“You should really just move on, even if I can’t.”
“I know.” His breath on my neck.
“Find someone else.”
“Definitely.” His mouth on my lips.
“So . . . you’ll come and see me?”
Dad says that words are a powerful weapon. A single one can change a destiny. Imagine what two could do.
“You bet.”
About the Author
A. J. Grainger lives in London, England, where she works as a children's books editor. She loves writing and editing because it means she gets to talk about books all day. Captive is her first novel. Find her on Twitter (@_AJGrainger).
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by A. J. Grainger
Jacket photograph copyright © 2015 by Mohamad Itani/Trevillion Images
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Simon & Schuster UK, Ltd.
First US edition 2015
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The text for this book is set in Electra LT Std.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grainger, A. J. (Annalie J.)
Captive / A.J. Grainger.—1st edition.
pages cm
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Robyn Knollys-Green struggles to keep faith in her father, the British Prime Minister, while being held hostage by a group of extremist activists that includes an attractive, kind young man called Talon.
ISBN 978-1-4814-2903-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4814-2905-4 (eBook)
[1. Hostages—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Fiction. 3. Terrorism—Fiction.
4. Children of politicians—Fiction. 5. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.
6. Pharmaceutical industry—Fiction. 7. England—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.1.G72Cap 2015
[Fic]--dc23
2014033632
Captive Page 19
