The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “You and I still have that unfinished business to attend to, Laura,” he said. He drove fast and determinedly, not fast enough to attract the attention of the law but far too fast for her to make any attempt to interfere with his driving or to try to jump out of the car. Furious with herself she sat back in her seat watching Milford, Eckersley and eventually Arnedale flash past as the hills rose more steeply on either side of the river and wondering whether her impulsiveness had finally led her into complete disaster.

  “Where the hell are we going?” she asked eventually as Blake signalled a left turn and swung the car off the main road and onto a narrower country lane.

  “You’ll see,” he said. He had locked the car doors and even when he slowed infrequently at junctions she knew that trying to get out would be difficult and dangerous. In any case, as the road snaked up onto open moorland where the only signs of life were scattered sheep and an occasional hovering curlew, she knew that there was nowhere to run. She had got away from Blake once, in the dark, more by luck than judgment and at a heavy cost, but she guessed she would not be able to outrun him in daylight, for all the difference in their ages, over rough and boggy terrain where a single false step could lead to a fall. He was tall and strong and, she guessed, California fit. The safest course still seemed to be to humour him until she could be sure what his intentions were. But a small voice at the back of her head told her that by that point she might have left it too late. She thought longingly of Michael Thackeray’s gift of the mobile phone which she had unpacked and thrown irritably back onto her sofa the previous evening.

  She had an idea of their destination a few minutes before they arrived. Avoiding the village where they had shared a pub lunch, Blake had taken a narrow back road, little more than a track, to the empty farm-house they had visited and which he had hoped would provide one of the locations for his film. He drove into the deserted, overgrown farmyard and parked the car in a narrow space between the house and a derelict barn.

  He had helped her out of the car and led her inside, keeping a firm hold on her wrists. Standing looking out of one of the windows down the long deserted stretch of the hillside they had just climbed he had moved behind her and begun to rearrange her hair. So it was to be sex after all, she thought to herself bitterly, wondering how she could ever have even half welcomed the prospect. She pulled her head away and her hair spilled down her back again. Blake let go of her wrists and pulled her round to face him.

  “Why did you lie to me, Laura?” he asked angrily, holding her shoulders.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “Oh, come on, honey,” Blake said. “All this reporter nonsense to gain my confidence and dig up my past. What are you? An undercover cop? Or just doing your boyfriend a favour?”

  “I’m a journalist,” Laura said. “I was commissioned to do a profile.”

  “You’re good, I’ll grant you that,” Blake said. “I thought you were going to go all the way that night in the Merc. That’s devotion beyond the call of duty in my book.” Laura felt her cheeks flame and she looked away.

  “Pity you’re not really my type,” Blake said pulling her back to face him again. “Still, I guess you can call me master before we’re finished. That’s what Jane called Rochester, you know? My dear master. Let’s hear it, Laura.” Laura shook her head angrily and tried to pull away but Blake’s grip was too tight. He ran a finger gently down her cheek and laughed at the revulsion in her eyes.

  “You know, you could turn me on without my having to hurt you at all,” he said. “What a pity we haven’t much time. Come along my dear. Unlike little Jane, you’re not wandering off over the moors without me.” He pulled her into the second of the main rooms of the farm-house, which was still sparsely furnished, sat her down firmly on a wooden chair and tied her hands to the back with thick twine. Laura shook her head in bewilderment.

  “What are you doing?” she asked desperately. “If this gets out, your film plans will be ruined.”

  Blake looked at her coldly.

  “You really don’t get it, do you?” he said. “I suppose you can’t have, or you wouldn’t have fallen for my spiel this morning and come along for the ride. The film’s dead and buried, honey. And so am I unless I can get out of this God damned country. For the moment, just regard yourself as my insurance.”

  “They’ll come looking for me,” Laura said desperately.

  “Oh, I guess they will,” Blake said. “But they’ll have one hell of a job finding this place.”

  “Lorelei knows where it is.”

  “Lorelei’s not telling,” Blake said shortly. “Lorelei turned out like you in the end: a bitch who asked too many questions. Now shut up. I’ve some calls to make.” He pulled a mobile phone from his jacket and went into the other room where she could hear him only indistinctly. Laura sat uncomfortably on her wooden chair, testing her bonds, which did not give a fraction of an inch, and trying to work out the implications of what Blake had said although she was sure she would not like the conclusions she was being driven to. If the film was off and Blake was talking about Lorelei in the past tense, she had an uneasy feeling that what he was evidently running from was not just the wreck of his plans but something far more serious. I am, she thought grimly, a lousy judge of character. Blake came back into the room looking pleased with himself.

  “Right,” he said with satisfaction. “If there’s one thing to be said for the film business, it’s that it harbours more than its share of fools with loads of money and no sense at all. We’ll move on when it gets dark.”

  “My friends will have found us long before that,” Laura said, hoping that she sounded confident rather than simply desperate.

  “I don’t think so,” Blake said comfortably. “And now let’s think what we can do to entertain ourselves for a long afternoon in the country.”

  The assistant chief constable swept into Bradfield police station with his entourage at two o’clock that afternoon to take charge of the investigation. He found an operations room buzzing with determined activity but when he moved on to Superintendent Longley’s office there was little cheer to report. There had been no sightings since early that morning of the silver gray Mercedes in which it was assumed Blake had fled Bradfield with Laura Ackroyd. A news black-out was in force, which was normal in cases of abduction and with which even Ted Grant had reluctantly agreed to comply, even though he seemed to regard access to information about Laura’s disappearance as his personal prerogative. Every police officer in the country had been instructed to look urgently for a car which was by no means unobtrusive.

  “Where’s Thackeray?” the ACC asked Longley brusquely.

  “I tried to get him to go home,” Longley said. “He’s doing no good here. But he refused, of course. He’s in his office as far as I know. I told Mower to keep an eye on him – unofficially, of course.”

  “And the reporter girl’s family?”

  “They’re at the Clarendon. Jack Ackroyd’s ringing up every half hour demanding that we send in the SAS, Special Branch - even the FBI, as Blake’s officially an American. But unless we get a sighting, or some sort of demand from Blake, we’re stymied. As far as I can see, they’ve disappeared off the face of the earth.” Longley normally rubicund face was gray and creased with anxiety.

  “This isn’t the bloody X Files,” the ACC snapped. “If the car’s not been seen the chances are he’s not gone far and he’s under cover somewhere. But why take the girl? What’s the point of a hostage if he’s not trying to bargain with her?”

  Longley shrugged. He had no answers and the longer the silence over Laura’s whereabouts continued the more his conviction grew that she was in serious danger, although that was not what he wanted to admit to himself, to the ACC and least of all to Michael Thackeray.

  One floor below Thackeray stared unseeingly out of his office window. He had already filled the room with a thick haze of smoke as he tried to chain-smoke his way out of the gnawing fear wh
ich had seized him the moment he had been told that Laura had driven away with Blake. Mower watched him anxiously, glancing up every few minutes from the papers on his desk – the random pile of documents which had been removed from Blake’s suite at the Clarendon. He could see Thackeray’s hand shake as he lit another cigarette and knew he was at the end of his tether. He was aware that all had not been well between Thackeray and Laura over the last few days and guessed that made the fierceness of Thackeray’s self-recrimination all the sharper. If she had not been alone at the flat that morning, Laura might not have made the decision she had evidently made.

  “Did you come up with any more ideas, guv?” he asked. “Anywhere else she went with him, apart from these posh restaurants?” Thackeray did not turn round.

  “They went to the country one day, looking at locations for the bloody film,” he said. There was a moment’s silence as both men seemed to find it difficult to absorb what Thackeray had just said. Then Mower picked up a small red book from beneath the jumble of papers on his desk and flicked through it.

  “The fifth,” he said. “It’s in Lorelei’s engagement diary.” Thackeray spun round.

  “Does it say where?” he asked. Mower shook his head.

  “Just ‘Location recce’. Did Laura not say where she’d been?”

  “Somewhere up beyond Arnedale, I think,” he said. “Some farm….” He and Mower looked at each other for a long moment.

  “Do you think..?” Thackeray said.

  “A long shot but worth checking out, guv,” Mower said. “If they got the chopper up there….”

  “Then for Christ’s sake do it, Kevin. Do it now,” Thackeray said.

  “If I’d been Rochester, I’d never have let Jane run off,” John Blake said conversationally. “I’d have kept her there. Locked her up in the attic with the first wife. She’d have come round in the end. Just like you will.”

  He had been striding around the dusty room where he had imprisoned Laura for what seemed like hours now, becoming increasingly irrational and frightening as he did so. The suave mask with which he normally faced the world appeared to be flaking away, aging him even as he spoke, and making his obsession with playing a romantic hero more unimaginable by the minute. The only Victorian hero appropriate now, Laura thought, would be Dorian Gray.

  She could not see her watch but guessed from the slanting light of the sun which filtered in through the grimy window that it was now well into the afternoon. She was hungry and desperately thirsty and her hands and arms had gone numb where the twine had slowed the circulation. It seemed like hours since she had asked Blake for a drink of water.

  “Say ‘Please, Master’”, he had said but she had shaken her head angrily at that and turned away to hide the tears in her eyes.

  “You remind me of a bolshie red-headed woman called Ackroyd I knew once when I was a kid,” Blake said. “Any relation?” She shook her head furiously, realising at last that John Blake was indeed the Roy Parkinson who had played in the street with her own father all those years ago. Guessing just how much he had to hide, she slipped closer to despair, made all the deeper for knowing that Blake would probably close the circle opened by Mariella’s murder with her own.

  What was happening, she thought, had little or nothing to do with her intervention in John Blake’s life. She was no more than an intruder at the end of the Italian girl’s long, interrupted story. She might have felt an affinity with the outsider who had been teased and tormented all those years ago. She might have once been where Mariella had been and uncovered memories of her own childhood which still stung more sharply than she could have believed possible. But those were random ironies she knew she was unlikely to share, if she became, as she was sure she would, the latest victim in a line which must have begun on Coronation Day. Worse, Michael Thackeray would never know how sorry she was for the mistakes she had made in the last few days.

  “What was she?” Blake insisted, breaking in on her thoughts. “Your grandmother? You look like her. She was an interfering bitch too, as I remember.”

  “You killed Mariella,” Laura said. “Your name was Parkinson and you killed the Italian girl.”

  “Wrong, and you don’t collect £200,” Blake snapped back. “I never touched Mariella. She was Keith Smith’s girl friend, not mine.”

  “Then what’s all this about?” Laura cried out in desperation. “What have you been trying to hide all this time? What are you running away from?”

  “That cursed year we spent in Peter Street, and it looks as if it’s caught up with me in the end,” Blake said. “I knew I should never have come back to Yorkshire. Do you know how that bastard O’Meara recognised me? After all those years? With dark hair and all the expensive work I’ve had done? I’ll tell you how. He heard me doing an interview on the radio, that’s how. They say voices never change and he recognised mine. Called me at the Clarendon. Called me Roy and said he remembered I’d wanted to be an actor. Threatened me. Said he’d drag up his snivelling little sister after all that time. Disinter little Bridie, another embarrassing corpse. Under-age Bridie. If anything was guaranteed to kill the film project, that was it. John Blake and an under-age girl. Again! My backers take funds from the Christian Right, for God’s sake…”

  “So you killed him,” Laura said softly. “But they pulled the plug on the film anyway.”

  “I under-estimated Lorelei,” Blake said angrily, his face flushed. “The bitch was off her head with jealousy.”

  “Jealous?” Laura said in surprise.

  “Jealous of you,” Blake said. “Thought I was paying too much attention to my little Jane.” Laura turned away in disgust from Blake who was staring at her with glittering eyes. During the time that John Blake’s overweening ambition had been cutting a destructive swathe through Bradfield, she thought, it seemed that the only people to see him clearly enough not to be deceived by his abundant charm had been the two people moved by jealousy - Lorelei Baum and Michael Thackeray.

  The thought of Michael Thackeray dissolved in her mind into a silent scream and she closed her eyes to blot out Blake’s looming presence. As the afternoon wore on her head gradually sank onto her chest and she felt herself losing touch with reality. At some point she must have moaned or cried out, although she was not aware of it, because the next thing she knew Blake had taken her head in his hands quite gently.

  “Jane,” he said hoarsely. “My little Jane. You know I’d do anything for you if only you’d ask me to be your master.” She shook her head again, and Blake turned on his heel angrily and went out of the room and she heard a car door slam. He came back within minutes holding a bottle of mineral water. He stood in front of her and took a long swig.

  “Bastard,” Laura whispered and was rewarded with a sharp slap across the cheek.

  She let her head sink forward again and closed her eyes. Blake gave a grunt of frustration and she heard him sit down at the other side of the room, taking an occasional gulp from his bottle. But this time Laura was not asleep. She was awake and forcing herself to think hard. Her conclusions were grim. The longer she remained a prisoner, she thought, the less chance there was of being rescued, especially if Blake had made firm plans to get out of the country. She did not imagine that he would take her with him or leave her behind alive. If Michael Thackeray had remembered her mentioning this place the police would have arrived long ago, she thought. So she was on her own.

  So far she had sustained herself by defying Blake but if she continued on that tack much longer what little strength she had remaining would drain away and she would find herself as helpless when he finally released her from her chair as she was now. The only chance of salvation, she concluded, and she was not sure whether the bitter taste in her mouth was real or imaginary, lay in capitulation.

  She half-opened her eyes. Blake was still slumped in a sagging arm-chair against the far wall, his bottle of water, now half empty in one hand, his eyes closed. She moaned faintly and wriggled on her chair, moving it
slightly with a grating sound on the dirty stone-flagged floor. She saw Blake’s eyes open and he sat up, instantly alert, like the predator she now knew he was.

  “Water,” she muttered. He got up and came closer.

  “What did you say?”

  “Water,” she said again. “Please.” Blake’s eyes brightened with excitement.

  “Please, master,” he insisted.

  “Please, master,” Laura croaked.

  “Dear little Jane,” he said, kissing her cheek before holding the water bottle to her mouth and letting her drink. When she had finished, he wiped her lips with a handkerchief and eyed her speculatively.

  “Would you like to be untied?” he asked. She nodded but he frowned and waited, his head on one side.

  “Please, master,” she said again.

  “You promise not to run away, dearest Jane?”

  “Of course not….master.” She hesitated before adding truthfully. “Where would I run to?”

  He cut the twine which held her wrists to the chair, but when she tried to stand she found that impossible and she quickly doubled up in pain as the blood began to pump normally again into her hands and arms. Blake put an arm around her and she willed herself not to pull away.

  “Sweet Jane,” he said. “Such a silly girl to get her hands into such a state.” He took hold of one of her wrists but instead of stroking it, as Laura expected, he gave it a sudden vicious twist which made her cry out in agony. “There are no sweet girls left in America, you know,” Blake went on, oblivious to her distress. “They’re all assertive, manipulative bitches like Lorelei. They go to training classes for it.”

  “What happened to Lorelei?” Laura whispered but Blake did not reply. He seemed to be listening and it was a moment before Laura too heard the faint clatter of a helicopter, coming closer. Blake was on his feet in an instant, hurrying towards the door.