Perhaps Grace had read the books and decided she could ‘borrow’ the idea for a children’s series. Then, if she put an end to Fancy’s crime series, her own might stand a better chance of being published.
And putting an end to the crime series meant putting an end to the author. It became a possible motive.
Officer Richmond’s appetite had not diminished. She put away seconds of everything. Fancy declined the Bakewell tart and orange custard. She fingered a few black grapes. Drank some black coffee. Her mood was black. She didn’t often feel so down. Depression: the writer’s curse after writer’s block.
‘It’s their annual general meeting, right after lunch,’ said Fancy with little enthusiasm. ‘It’s traditional.’
‘Do you have to go?’
‘Not really. But my friends on the shelf said that support for the AGM by visiting lecturers always goes down well.’
‘Goes down well with whom? Then what happens?’
Fancy shrugged shoulders. ‘Collecting books from the book room, paying any bills for the phone, packing and then dressing up for the dregs party on the lawn. In the evening there’s entertainment, whatever they’ve been rehearsing all week. No idea what it will be. Probably a revue. I know someone who has brought bagpipes.’
‘What’s the dregs party?’
‘Any drink that’s left over from the private parties during the week is put out on the lawn. Or you take along anything that you have in your room and don’t want to cart home. A horrible mixture of drinks, I expect. Not good for the stomach. I think that is what they said.’
Fancy had little enthusiasm for this party either. She had been or not been to enough parties this week. It was easy to lose count, especially having lost slices of time. She wanted to go home to her own place, put on some comfortable clothes and lock the door on the world.
She would become a recluse, never go out, order food online, communicate by email. She need never see anyone again. Get a cat. It sounded good.
This would suit her. She would become mysterious and unavailable like Miss Haversham. Except that she would change her clothes, wash and eat healthily. Occasionally dust and vacuum the debris.
The AGM passed in a sort of haze. Fancy sat with her new friends, only half-listening. She was already back in her current book, longing to get her fingers on the keyboard, phrases coming into mind.
Officer Richmond also had a glazed expression. She wasn’t listening to what was going on. Why were they were arguing about the voting rights of new delegates, the quality of the soup in the dining room, or the prospect of higher prices in the future as forecast by the treasurer in his report? Maybe she had to write a report.
Fancy didn’t vote; she wasn’t a member. The procedure was all properly carried out, as far as she could see. No one could complain. But there were murmurs and complaints about whether it should be a cross or a tick. Were all AGMs so tedious? She had attended very few.
‘I’m going to pack,’ said Fancy, as they spilled out onto the lawn for tea. ‘Then change for the party. What are you going to do?’
‘I ought to report back. They need to hear from me regularly.’
‘I’ll be fine. You do what you have to do and I’ll see you later. Nothing can happen now. It’s time to go home.’
It was easier to pack going home. Once the clothes rail was empty, the drawers empty, bathroom cleared of all but essentials, there was nothing else. She left her travelling clothes out and the minimum of cosmetics for the morning. She was looking forward to going home.
But where was Jed? He had disappeared as usual. She was getting used to his double existence. She knew he wasn’t telling her everything. Perhaps he thought she would be frightened or dismayed.
She knew she must get used to not having Jed around. He was not permanent. He was part of the writers’ conference and an element of the disturbing events. Once she got back to London, he would be gone from her life.
She did not believe in love at first sight. She believed that love grew, that a long friendship sometimes tipped over into passionate love. And could be perfect.
The dregs party. Not the most inspiring name to give a party. It gave her mouth the taste of stale wine and unwashed glasses. She barely wanted to go but she knew it would be expected of her. To be seen to be mingling with other, less successful writers, still giving them hope and inspiration.
She put on the same black trousers and her favourite seeded white pearl top. Low slip-on shoes, no more heels. Especially on the lawn. A rope of pearls. A white flower pinned in her hair. Was that party-ish enough? She took a bottle of good red bought from the bar, not left over from anything.
The lawn was crowded. Many of the women had dressed up, black, sequins, gaudy tops, see-through chiffon, long dresses, dangling earrings. A couple of men were in dinner jackets, very smart. Others had ignored the dressing up, still wore the day’s grimy T-shirts and crushed fleeces, stained trainers.
Officer Richmond was close, faintly flushed from her labours over a laptop. ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘Try to get me a drink from the bottle of wine that I brought. Nothing that is already opened and days old. I’ve a long drive tomorrow. I don’t want to be scurrying to the nearest loo every five minutes.’
‘Trust me. I’ll find you something decent.’
‘Thank you.’
Fancy turned to a woman who was talking to her. She had been on Fancy’s course, writing historical crime. An interesting idea because historical crime is about dark deeds that have already been committed. No need to invent or plot anything. Fancy was genuinely interested, especially in the research.
‘One has to juggle true facts with the fictional writing,’ the writer said, twirling a glass of Coke so that it fizzed over her fingers. ‘It’s horrendously difficult at times. Especially these days when readers can check many facts on the internet.’
‘I admire the amount of research that must go into writing historical crime,’ said Fancy. ‘I don’t think I have the stamina.’
Someone gave her a drink. She thought it was Dorothy. It seemed like Dorothy was at her side, but she did not actually look. She was giving her full attention to the historical writer. A nod of thanks. People were talking round her, laughing, drinking, a milling crowd of people having a good time.
One moment she was looking at the sturdy Victorian mansion, the red brick walls, the sloping gables, tall chimneys and the expanse of manicured lawns with their colourful beds of flowers in careful shapes. She could smell cut grass from the gardeners’ labours that afternoon and a hint of rain. She could smell crisps, salt and vinegar, chilli being handed round. In the distance was a haze of Derbyshire fields and woods, dry stone walls meandering like a child’s drawing.
She had become separated from the main partying throng. But she did not know how it happened, turning and talking to someone different, changing the grouping.
Then there was a sharp pain. Somewhere on the back of her head. The sky became washed in complete blackness, only lines of dark branches changing the pattern. She could only register the darkness – if she could see anything at all. She did not remember the glass slipping out of her hand. The glass of a good red.
Even the party voices had disappeared. There was a buzzing in her ears as if a wasp was caught in her hair.
‘Get her in the car,’ someone said.
EIGHTEEN
Evening
She first became aware of the confined space. Barely room to move, and if she could move, knees bent, she knocked into some hard surface. She discovered that her wrists were bound together with figure-of-eight duct tape, and her ankles. This bent over conformation gave her a slight degree of movement, but was more secure than simple round-and-round binding.
There was a strip of duct tape across her mouth. No point in making a noise. There was nothing across her eyes, thank goodness. She stared into the darkness, trying to control her fear. No one knew where she was. Jed didn’t know. Dorothy would think
she was cruising the party.
There was a lot of movement and bumping. From the jolting and the smell of fuel and rust, she guessed she was in the boot of a car being driven somewhere. She was doubled up, her head hard against the outside metal.
It was definitely the boot of a car and she recognized that they were driving over the speed bumps at the entrance to the centre. The friction and hardness of the interior jolted her spine with a series of painful shocks.
It was not Jed’s car, for sure. Which was a relief. Jed’s two-seater did not have a proper boot, only a space for a briefcase and a raincoat. Maybe room for a couple of bulky files. Strange, how she was always suspecting Jed. It was irrational and unfair.
Fancy kicked hard at the lid of the boot with her heels but the noise just echoed back to her. Hopeless. She was wasting precious energy. She would need every ounce of it if she was to survive this kidnapping. She thought of Jack Reacher. He always conserved his energy, measured his breathing. Not easy to do when you were terrified.
That’s what it was. She had been kidnapped. One minute she had been at the dregs party, and the next, she was trussed up like a dummy and folded into the boot of a car.
Her head hurt. It had been a glancing blow, only enough to knock her out for a few moments. A faint glimmer of light lined the edge of the boot lid. It was badly fitting. An old-model car. New cars had power mechanism for closing the lid.
She was being shaken from side to side. She would be black and blue by tomorrow. If there was a tomorrow. This might be the last day of her life.
Fancy felt quite calm about it. The death day came to everyone at some time. Some early, some late. Her life had been productive and happy, apart from an obvious lack of permanent success in the romance department. Something she regretted but it had been out of her control. She had a row of books on library shelves. She would be remembered as long as they stayed there. At some point they would be taken off, pages dog-eared, and sold off at car boot sales for fifty pence each.
Copies would remain in the British Library and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, underground and gathering dust, unread.
She had lost track of where they were driving after the first few turns. She had never been any good at navigating, even in the passenger seat with a map. They turned onto a smoother surface, a main road, leading somewhere, up and down dales. It would be sensible to try to rest, to restore energy. That’s what the Pink Pen Detective would have done.
But first she searched around the interior to see if there was anything that could be of use to her. No knife or handy screwdriver. But she did find some loose screws and a length of wire which she managed to coil and manoeuvre into her trouser pocket. Then she found a crumpled-up plastic supermarket bag, which she pushed around with her nose until it was pressed under her cheek and gave a slight degree of relief from the hardness of the side panel.
She felt a crunching over a driveway, a turn and several parking manoeuvres. Then the engine was switched off and the silence folded down like a blanket. She strained to hear voices but whoever was in the car, one or two people perhaps, neither were speaking.
The boot lid was opened and a rush of air came with the smell of moorland. She was somewhere high, feeling the wind. Hands clamped over her eyes and for a second she thought they were going to blindfold her. But it was something softer. Then she realized that it was her own scarf, twisted and tied. She recognized the Dior Tender Poison perfume.
She was dragged out of the car and dumped onto the ground. There were two people. She heard two sets of footsteps, one lighter than the other, with shorter steps. A man and a woman. She decided not to struggle or try to scream. Not much point. Better to let them think that she was still unconscious. But to stay alert.
The crunched-up plastic bag was in her hand, half-hidden. Might be useful. She might go shopping.
She was being dragged over a rough surface. Her best black jeans would be ruined. Gravel tore at her cheek, rough and smarting. She heard a door being unbolted, heavy rusted bolts drawn back and hinges creaking open. Where were they putting her? In a barn? A shed? Was it some derelict old building, out in the wilds, where she would rot until the foxes found her?
Suddenly the darkness was even darker and an icy blast of cold air hit her skin through her thin clothes. It was like midwinter. This was some weird barn.
She heard an exchange of low muttering. They were trying to find something on the walls.
‘Dammit,’ she heard. ‘It must be somewhere.’
She did not recognize the voice. There was a slurred edge to the words. As if he did not have much time. He had to be somewhere else quick. Was he doing this as a favour, or being paid?
She heard a switch and saw a cross beam of light against an archway. Her scarf was not that thick. She glimpsed a low, arched roof, glistening stone walls. It was not a barn.
They were dragging her across a floor, then there was a bump, down a hard step. Then another bump, down another step. The steps were different heights, different widths. Fancy tried to relax, to minimize the agonizing pain, the bruising to her body as she fell awkwardly, half-rolling, half-sliding.
It was a flight of steps, with a series of little lights on the walls, like islands. She could see the pinpoints of light through the scarf. But they had blown in several places, leaving ragged areas of gloom. Her captors were holding onto a hand rail, pulling her down after them. Even they were gasping for breath.
Fancy tried counting the steps, but lost count after fifty or sixty. The air was getting colder and colder. She would die of pneumonia. She completely lost count. It might be in the hundreds.
They were way, way below ground level by now. Fancy decided that they were in one of the disused mines that had once thrived in Derbyshire. It had been a great mining industry, especially the Blue John mines, which were a tourist attraction even today, and still mining the precious Blue John mineral to sell, fashioned into jewellery, in their craft shops.
But this was no Blue John mine. This was a derelict lead mine. Probably from the Victorian era. Fancy’s heart fell. No hope of rescue. No one would ever find her. It had probably been shut up for years. She may as well think of the women of old who worked down here for a pittance, clearing the rubble, or the children who stood with candles in the alcoves for sixpence a week and worked the bellows.
She was no different to them. Flesh and blood. Slave labour.
There was a series of grunts when she realized that they had reached the end of the long flight of steps. They were out of breath, drawing in deep gulps. She could hear a strange, slapping noise. The air felt fresher. No bad gas.
Fancy then realized that the slapping noise was water. That was how they transported the lead ore in those days. It was heavy stuff. They pulled it along in boats before heaving the ore up those stone steps.
They dumped her onto some sort of wooden platform, towards the edge of which they were pulling a boat. She was bundled into the shallow wooden vessel. They cast off and pushed away from the platform.
It was a kind of bliss. The smooth, painless gliding over the water. It was almost calm, although Fancy was still bound and still blindfolded. She tried to relax into the pain of her aching joints. There were definitely two other people in the boat, guiding it along with their arms and their legs against the mine walls, grunting with the effort, much as it had been guided long ago by the workers.
It was like being in a gondola but without canals and Venetian palaces. No singing, no sunshine, no spaghetti.
They reached some other place and hauled her onto another hard flat expanse. Stone this time. She was left, curled into a foetal position, her head on the stone. She breathed hard air, felt a high roof above, a few vague lights moving. It must be a huge cavern in total blackness.
Then she heard the two people retreat. They were getting back into the boat. Still no talking. They were leaving her. This was her last place of rest. Silence came down into the air. And more blackness. They had taken
their torches, turned off any lights.
It was the loneliest moment. She was completely alone, in darkness, hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth. And no one knew she was there. Except those two. She trembled with cold and fear.
Fancy was not one to give up easily. She might be battered and bruised but her brain was still working. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire, the Pink Pen Detective had been in worse situations. And somehow she had got out of them.
She crawled about on the platform on which they had left her. It had edges, which seemingly dropped away to fathomless bottoms. It was important to keep moving. There was some sort of path leading away from the platform along which she crawled on her elbows, hunching up her knees, her feet dragging, sloughing into the floor.
At a curve, she managed to haul herself up, almost sitting upright. Everything hurt. She was leaning against rock. She found a sharp bit that was level with her wrists and began to saw against the duct tape. Up and down, the jagged rock catching her skin. She felt a lessening of the tension and kept sawing. Then the rock finally bit through and her wrists were free. The relief was immense. She rubbed back the circulation.
She tried to renew circulation in her back and legs. She could not find the end of the tape on her ankles, feeling around. She sharpened one of the screws from the car boot on the rock face and then started cutting through the duct tape that bound her feet. It took longer but eventually worked. She was free, took off the scarf over her eyes. But she was still in total darkness, hundreds of feet down a disused lead mine.
Deep breaths. Sit and think. This is not the end, she told herself.
She felt round the walls till she found an alcove. There was an old stump of candle, barely an inch, left by some child. And a vesper. One strike left. She struck it carefully on the rock. It flared in the night, like an angel flame. She moved it carefully towards the candle wick, praying that it would not go out, but it took hold and in a moment, the pathway was lit with holy light.
Money Never Sleeps Page 18
