Cry Darkness

by Hilary Bonner

  She considered what she would do next. She supposed it lurked in the back of her mind that she wanted to pay her respects to Connie and Paul. Although she didn’t quite know how. There weren’t going to be any funerals. Not yet, anyway. There were, after all, no bodies to bury.

  The Man in Black had made no secret of his desire that Jones should not only leave town, but also, preferably, the country.

  Indeed, she would have been more likely to accept that the explosion might well have been a tragic accident were it not for the treatment she’d received at the hands of the Princeton police, and in particular the threatening demeanour of the mysterious Man in Black. Nonetheless that possibility remained, and in any case, what more could she do?

  She switched on her mobile, for the first time that day. A string of messages awaited. She checked them in cursory fashion. Almost all of them were from various colleagues puzzled by her peremptory absence and the brief notes of vague explanation she had emailed to them. They could wait. Clearly neither her sons nor anybody else back home had been contacted by the American police, which was a relief. And if she were to take the obvious sensible course of action, she would be back in the UK the following morning.

  She checked the time. It was three twenty p.m. She should be able to catch the evening’s BA flight to Heathrow easily enough. She called up the phone number for reservations, and then paused.

  She hadn’t slept for the best part of forty-eight hours. She was bone tired. Her right shin was still very sore from the bashing it had received outside the RECAP lab. Her eyes were no longer inflamed, and the worst effects of the capsicum spray had worn off, but none the less her entire face felt sore. Her injured cheek was throbbing. She didn’t feel at all like a seven-hour flight.

  When Jones had been in New York the previous year, giving the Triple A address, she had stayed for the first time at Soho House, the city’s hotel version of the famous London club.

  Stretching her back and shoulders in a vain attempt to ease the tension, Jones found her thoughts focusing on the House’s superior plumbing. Most of the rooms had baths right in the middle of them, so that you could soak yourself while enjoying the state-of-the-art entertainment facilities, including a huge TV screen.

  She shut her eyes and dreamed a little. The very idea of one of those baths was quite seductive. And after all, she thought, what was the hurry? She wasn’t being deported, even though the Man in Black probably wished that she was. She would book into the House, indulge herself thoroughly, and hopefully manage a good night’s sleep, before flying home the following evening. She would still be back in time to fulfil her BBC filming obligations and attend that Oxford dinner engagement.

  She called the House. There was a room available. She confirmed it at once with her credit card.

  The following morning Jones felt considerably better. She had slept like a baby. She felt almost like a human being again, and hoped she looked like one too. There was a mirror on the wall to the right of her big double bed. She turned towards it. Her face had thankfully returned pretty much to normal after the capsicum assault, just as Detective Grant had promised. There was no longer any soreness or swelling. And the injury to her left cheek, although not pretty, had not become as unsightly as she had feared.

  Lazily she stretched her long legs beneath the covers, reached out a languid arm, dialled room service, and ordered tea.

  It was barely six a.m. In spite of her total weariness, jet lag had caused her to wake early again. At least that meant she would have a full day to enjoy her favourite city after London. But first she switched on the TV, and tuned in to CNN to check the latest on the Princeton explosion, which turned out to have been relegated to fourth on the news list. And the item was certainly not revelatory.

  New Jersey Police this morning refused to confirm or deny a report in today’s New York Post that the explosion at Princeton University earlier this week was caused by a gas leak. ‘Our investigations are continuing, and a full statement will be released as soon as possible,’ said a police spokesman.

  So the police were still hedging their bets. Well, they would, wouldn’t they, thought Jones. Room service had brought two newspapers along with the tea she’d ordered. The New York Times and the tabloid New York Post. She unfolded the Post first. The splash headline jumped off the page at her.

  PRINCETON BLAST MYSTERY. WAS IT NEGLIGENCE?

  The deadly explosion at the Ivy League university earlier this week was caused by a gas leak, it was claimed last night. According to an FBI source, New Jersey Police are about to announce they have found no traces of a bomb at the scene of the explosion. Instead, the source has revealed exclusively to the Post, it is believed that a technical malfunction led to a leak which caused the devastating blast, and that routine maintenance on the university’s gas system may have been neglected …

  Was that it then? Jones didn’t know what to think. However, since becoming a media personality she had endured considerable attention from the tabloid press, and had learned that, contrary to a widely held belief, they were more often right than wrong when they splashed on an exclusive story.

  She had promised herself the previous day that she would move on. And that was what she was going to do. She dressed in the jeans she had worn the day before, which along with her black hoodie, she’d sent to be laundered upon arriving at the House. Like her, she hoped, they appeared to have made a good recovery from any damage suffered at the Princeton crime scene.

  It was a pleasantly sunny morning, so she wandered up to the roof terrace for a leisurely breakfast. Afterwards, at around nine a.m., she took the lift to the ground floor and stepped out on to the cobbled street outside the House’s discreet front door on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 13th Street.

  The sun was already surprisingly hot again for mid-September. She squinted into the line of approaching traffic. She had yet to properly work out which cabs were for hire and which weren’t on the streets of New York, and her dilemma was not helped by bright sunshine which made it impossible to tell whether the cabs had their lights on or not.

  She’d learned to do what New Yorkers do – just stand on the pavement with your arm held out high in the air in front of you. She knew from her previous visit that the area right outside the House, in the heart of the Meatpacking District, although it didn’t look promising, was a pretty good place for picking up cabs.

  All the same, she was mildly surprised that morning by the alacrity with which a yellow cab pulled up right alongside, causing her to take a step backwards in order to avoid being knocked over.

  She opened the door of the rear compartment and, having decided to start the day with a little shopping, gave the address of one of her favourite fashion stores.

  The driver made no verbal response but took off with an unnerving squeal of tyres. This was, Jones knew, par for the course in New York. She’d long ago discovered that cabbies in the Big Apple were nothing like their London contemporaries, who were inclined to treat their passengers to their views on the weather, the traffic, the cost of living, the latest sporting event, the state of the country if not the world and indeed all aspects of life, at the drop of a hat. They were also obliged to learn The Knowledge, to know every detail of the layout of their city, in order to gain a licence to operate. In New York no such regulations were enforced. Taxi drivers’ Medallions were bought rather than earned.

  Jones made herself settle back in the seat and try to enjoy the ride. Vaguely she wondered why the driver was taking the route he was. It seemed obtuse even by the standards of New York cabbies.

  She repeated the address of the store.

  There was no response at all. The glass panel between the driver’s compartment and the passenger seat was closed. Jones tapped on it and raised her voice.

  ‘Driver! Hey driver! This isn’t right. We’re going the wrong way.’

  Still no response. Jones tapped even louder and then pushed her fingers against the glass panel in an attempt to make
it slide open. The panel was either locked or jammed. She tapped yet again, more forcefully.

  ‘Hey driver!’

  ‘Just relax, ma’am, I know exactly where I’m taking you.’

  Jones was taken by surprise. The voice, pure New York, deep and resonant, was projected through a speaker just above the back seat. She hadn’t known that New York cabs had that sort of sophistication.

  ‘But we’re going in the wrong direction,’ Jones shouted back.

  ‘You don’t need to shout, ma’am, I can hear you just fine.’

  The glass panel remained closed. Jones glanced around her. There must be a microphone somewhere, she assumed.

  ‘Then for God’s sake listen to what I’m saying,’ she countered irritably, before repeating the address once more, complete with the obligatory cross street.

  ‘We’re heading the other way, surely?’

  ‘I know where I’m taking you, ma’am.’

  Jones opened her mouth to say it damned well didn’t look like it to her. Then closed it again. There was something disconcerting about the way the driver had delivered the last remark. Jones was beginning to suspect that if this man was taking her the wrong way, it was not by mistake.

  The bile rose in her throat. She fought to remain calm. Perhaps the events of the previous day had been too much for her and she was just being paranoid. She decided to have one last attempt at normal behaviour.

  ‘Just pull over,’ she commanded. ‘I’ll get out here.’

  Jones delivered the remark as if it was an order she expected to be obeyed. But she wasn’t at all surprised when the driver ignored her. Stifling a growing sense of panic, she began to formulate a plan. She was sitting on the left of the cab directly behind the driver. She shuffled along the seat to the right until she could see clearly ahead. There was a set of traffic lights just a couple of hundred yards ahead. To her irritation they remained on green. So did the next three sets. In American cities traffic lights often seemed better synchronized than at home. She waited impatiently, her fingers tight around the door handle, until finally a set of lights turned red as the taxi approached.

  The driver braked. And as the cab drew to a halt Jones wrenched at the door, preparing to hit the street at a run. The door didn’t budge. She twisted the handle frantically, pushing and shoving with all her might. It made no difference. The door was locked.

  ‘Driver,’ she yelled. ‘Driver, will you please unlock the doors. I told you, I want to get out.’

  There was again no response. The lights changed. The cab moved forwards, unhurriedly.

  ‘Driver, will you damned well pull over and unlock these fucking doors!’ Jones shouted even louder, aware that her voice had turned into a kind of shriek.

  The driver made no attempt to slow the cab down, but at least he responded.

  ‘Just calm down, ma’am. You’re not going to come to any harm.’

  As he spoke he reached behind his head with one arm, and an enormous black hand adorned with assorted bling appeared directly in Jones’s line of sight. Bracelets around the wrist jangled as ring-laden fingers flicked some kind of switch and slid the glass panel to one side. Then the driver glanced briefly over his shoulder, and Jones was confronted by a smiling face, big and broad-boned. She did not find the smile reassuring. In fact just the opposite.

  The man’s domed head was entirely without hair except for a Mohican stripe along the centre. Earrings dangled from both his ears and more bling hung in layers around his neck. His appearance was surreal. For just a fleeting hopeful moment Jones wondered if she might be dreaming.

  ‘I’m only taking you to someone who wants to spend a little time with you, that’s all.’

  The driver’s voice was loud, clear and resonant. This was no dream.

  ‘My name is Dom, I’m mighty pleased to meet you, Dr Jones, and I want you to know you are absolutely safe with me.’

  Jones couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Dom’ had introduced himself as if he were someone Jones had met socially in a bar rather than the driver of a motor vehicle taking her God knows where against her will. And, chillingly, he knew who she was.

  Jones reckoned she had never felt less safe in her life, not even the previous day when she’d been clamped in irons by New Jersey’s finest. She made no attempt to reply to ‘Dom’. Instead she slumped back into the seat of the cab feeling as if she’d been hit in the face. Again.

  Oh shit, she thought. Oh shit. Oh shit. Not a repeat performance. This really couldn’t be happening. Not for the second time in twenty-four hours. Was she being arrested? Was she being kidnapped? She had absolutely no idea. She just knew that once more she was locked inside a strange vehicle being taken against her will to an unknown destination by someone she’d never seen before in her life. If only she’d flown back to the UK the previous night as she’d originally planned.

  She covered her face with her hands. Ultimately she could not stop herself breaking down. And in the back of that yellow cab wending its relentless way through the streets of New York to an unknown and quite probably highly dangerous destination, Sandy Jones wept tears of fear.

  NINE

  Minutes later the cab turned abruptly off the main drag into what was little more than an alleyway between two tall buildings. They had been driving for almost twenty minutes, but Jones was pretty certain they were still in the Meatpacking District, and had actually travelled in a kind of circle.

  Jones became aware that the driver was talking into his mobile phone. Then the man slowed down and swung the cab sharply left, heading straight for a set of big metal doors, their scant coat of pale blue paint peeling away in strips, which opened as if by magic as they approached. The vehicle coasted into a double garage alongside another already parked there.

  Jones had regained control and was no longer crying. But she remained in shock. It was a good thing she didn’t have a heart condition – as far as she knew anyway – or she would already probably be dead. She asked herself yet again what the hell she had thought she was doing, flying into the US of A to play amateur detective?

  For a few seconds the driver sat unmoving in front of Jones, who was still locked in, and was by then far too afraid to say or do anything. Then she heard a rumbling sound behind the cab, and turned around to see the double doors slowly closing and ultimately shutting with a bang.

  There was another noise to the front of the cab. Jones turned to face forwards and saw that a smaller door at the rear of the garage, the sort that normally leads into a house or an apartment, was opening. A figure stepped through the doorway. The lighting at that end of the garage was not very bright. Jones squinted into the dimness. But it was only when the figure approached the cab, moving into the more brightly lit central part of the garage, that Jones could see that it was a woman. A woman in her late fifties or early sixties, Jones guessed, spreading just a little around the waist. She had pretty pale hair, a pleasant-featured face lightly made-up, and was wearing extremely clean pale-blue jeans with sharp creases down the front, a pink silk shirt, and a multi-coloured silk scarf knotted around her neck.

  Jesus Christ, thought Jones, who and what was this? The woman was the very epitome of Mrs Middle America. She should have been out the back somewhere making apple pie, taking her grandchildren to school in a four-wheel drive, or attending a suburban cocktail party on the arm of a be-suited, be-spectacled and ever-so-respectable husband.

  Jones was completely taken aback. She could not believe that this person was either a terrorist, a police officer, or any kind of security agent. But then, what the hell did she know?

  Mrs Middle America approached the cab, stopped adjacent to the driver’s door, and looked in the back at Jones, studying her carefully. There was something about the woman that was vaguely familiar to Jones. She remembered that she had felt much the same about the Man in Black. Perhaps she was now so knocked off kilter by events that every other person she came in contact with looked familiar in some way.


  ‘Hi,’ said Mrs Middle America, speaking through the glass.

  Jones was dumbfounded. She heard herself say ‘Hi’ back. This is absurd, she thought, truly absurd.

  There was an electronic whirr as Dom lowered the window on the driver’s side. Once it was fully open Mrs Middle America stuck her head through, and took an even longer look at Jones. Dom raised a bling-laden hand and passed her a piece of paper which seemed to be a page torn from a magazine.

  ‘I’m pretty sure I’ve got the right gal, but I can always drop her back off,’ remarked Dom conversationally.

  Mrs Middle America grinned at him, and glanced down at the piece of paper.

  ‘No need, this is her for sure,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Norman.’

  Norman, thought Jones. What about Dom? This great hulking creature, dripping bling, surely could not be called Norman?

  Jones guessed that the piece of paper probably carried a photograph of her. Even in America, where she was not a widely recognized face, she appeared occasionally in specialist science magazines. But who was this woman?

  The front door of the cab opened and out stepped Dom. Or was it Norman? It seemed to take him quite some time to stand up. He appeared to be somewhere around six-and-a-half feet tall, Jones reckoned, and built like a brick shit house, as her father would have said. If he really was called Norman it was possible, she thought, that nobody on earth had ever been more inappropriately named. Norman was a giant. Jones was glad she had not had the opportunity to even attempt to quarrel first hand with her hijacker.

  ‘Any time, Aunt M.’

  Aunt M? Things were becoming increasingly bizarre.

  ‘Just always glad to be of service, Aunt M, honey.’

  The big driver’s voice was pure Willard White.

  ‘Well, you’d better let the lady out then, Norman dear.’

  This really was surreal, thought Jones. And for reasons she couldn’t explain, even though she remained locked in a cab within a locked garage somewhere in the bowels of one of the toughest cities in the world, she did not feel quite as frightened as she had only a few minutes earlier.