The Summons

by Peter Lovesey

  “Nobody goes there,” Humphrey tried to reason with him. “There’s nothing out there.”

  “There will be presently,” Diamond told him. “There’ll be Inspector Hargreaves and me with our flashlight and anyone willing to join us. You’ll need a torch if you’re coming. In fact, two torches would be even better.”

  At a loss to understand why these people had come to torment him, Humphrey capitulated. He led them back to the security control room near the entrance to pick up the torches. “What exactly are you hoping to find?”

  “The Lost City of the Incas,” Diamond muttered.

  “Out there? There’s nothing there, I promise you.”

  “How do you know, if nobody goes there?”

  “Well ...”

  “Anything hidden six years ago is going to be well covered by now.” He led them around the building waving the flashlight until they reached the place where the bushes came within a few yards of the car park. Distances can be deceptive in the dark, but he estimated that the studio was sited in an area the size of half a football pitch, and most of the spare ground lay behind the buildings.

  The undergrowth was a prickly, formidable barrier. Diamond picked up a stick and beat a space between two bushes. He plunged in, swore a little, and returned with two stout sticks that he handed to Julie and Humphrey. But before the expedition started, more people came from inside the studios wanting to know what was going on. The pop performers had decided that this was a “good laugh” and opted to join the fun. So did some technicians. Resourcefully Diamoned requisitioned three cars and positioned them with their headlamps lighting up the wood. It took on the character of a police search, with Diamond marshaling a line of helpers to make a sweep of the grounds.

  The rustle of feet through scrub took over, punctuated by hacking and the occasional shout as someone discovered some piece of rubbish. It was cold, uncomfortable but good-humored work; the novelty of the exercise kept everyone going until there was a shout from one of the pop group on the far left side: “What do I do now?”

  “What’s the problem?” Diamond called across.

  “I’m stuck. Can’t go no further.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s some kind of shed here.”

  “I’ll come over.”

  By the time he got there, others had converged on the place. It was indeed a brick-built shed with a corrugated iron roof, abundantly overgrown, quite impossible to have been seen from the recording studio or the perimeter fence. They had to rip away masses of ivy and convolvulus to get at the door. A heavily corroded padlock came away more easily than some of the creepers and the door split into two pieces as they tugged it open.

  The torches probed the dark interior. Someone asked, “Is this what we’re looking for?”

  The light was picking out a curved surface that enclosed the dented chrome rim of a car headlamp. The glass had been removed except for a few shards. Diamond stooped to wipe the center of the bonnet. The color was red and the octagonal MG badge was mounted over a black polyurethane bumper. His pulse beat faster. He bent lower and cleared a layer of muck and moss off the registration plate. The number was the one he’d banked on finding: VPL 294S. This was Britt Strand’s car, off the road since 1988.

  “Give me more light, someone,” he demanded, squeezing between the wall and the side of the car, brushing away leaf mold and dust that must have been falling through holes in the garage roof for years. Julie’s flashlight gave him a better view.

  “There’s damage to the nearside wing, you see?” he said. “It’s badly dented here. Is the other side okay?”

  Someone shone a torch over it and said, “There’s nothing wrong with this side.”

  “Well, this headlamp is smashed and the bumper is out of alignment,” Diamond went on. “The car definitely hit something.” He looked up at Julie. “That’s it, then. How long have we got?”

  She glanced at her watch. “To midnight? Just under four hours.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Emerging from sleep, Samantha felt warm air against her face. It was a pleasant sensation considering how cold the rest of her body had become—pleasant until she began to suspect that the warmth she could feel was human breath. She could actually hear the sharp intake of air and the slow exhaling. Horrified, she opened her eyes and saw nothing. The place was steeped in darkness. Impossible to see who the breather was, or how close. But she wasn’t mistaken. The quiet, rhythmical rasp of air continued.

  She tried turning away and found that she couldn’t. She was tied, hand and foot. She remembered why, and where she was. After she had tried to attract attention on the hotel balcony and Mountjoy had wrestled her to the floor, he had dragged her inside and trussed her even more tightly. Enraged, he had turned savage, grunting with the effort of tightening each knot in the flex. This time he’d used a strip of adhesive to gag her. Then he’d left her on the floor, and she’d lain there expecting to be kicked or beaten. She was still naked from the waist up.

  But having restrained her, he’d gone away. Some time afterward, he must have slung a blanket over her.

  Now, this silent approach. This was the first time he had crept up on her like this. Up to now he had respected her— if being kept a prisoner could be termed respect. He’d made no sexual advance, never deliberately laid hands on the no-go parts of her body.

  The breathing quickened.

  She tensed.

  She felt his hand on her shoulder.

  He spoke: “You awake?”

  She couldn’t answer through the gag and wouldn’t have known what to say anyway.

  “Nod your head.”

  She obeyed. Could he have come as close as this just to check that she was still breathing?

  He started to peel the adhesive from her mouth, one hand against her cheek to hold her face steady. He warned her, “You scream and you get no food.”

  Her face stung. She took a huge gulp of air. The taste in her mouth was foul.

  He untied her hands and she felt something being put into them: a banana. She unpeeled it. She was ravenous.

  He said, “I’ve been watching them down there. Yes, they know we’re here, thanks to your antics. They’ve stopped the traffic from coming through and they’ve got people on the roofs of all the buildings.”

  Secretly she rejoiced. Someone must have seen her waving the T-shirt. She gulped the banana in three pieces. Her lips were numb where the gag had been. Dabbing at them gently with the tips of her fingers, she said as inoffensively as she was able, “What’s going to happen, then?”

  He said, “How would I know?”

  “What do you expect?”

  “I’ll tell you what I expect,” he said with bitterness. “I expect that fatso detective to get me the justice he owes me. Where is he? I don’t see him down in the street.”

  The frenzied note in his voice alarmed her. All she could do was try and humor him, praying that nothing the police did would tip him over the edge into panic. Somewhere he still had a gun.

  She thought of her father and sent up a prayer that he would not be directing the police operation. Daddy wasn’t capable of being calm and dispassionate. He wouldn’t know how to bring a siege to a peaceful end.

  Mountjoy said, “We’re going to have to move.”

  “Again?”

  He must have heard the despair in her voice because he told her, “Not to another place. Just inside the building. Keep them guessing.”

  “Where can we go, then?”

  “Somewhere more secure, where they can’t surprise us. While you were sleeping I was looking around. Want a drink?”

  She murmured a positive response. She would have done so even if she had not been thirsty. Any offer of food or drink had to be encouraged.

  He put a can of something into her hand. She felt for the ring-pull, but her fingers were too numb to lift it. She told him she couldn’t open it and he did the job for her.

  “I don’t kid myself,�
� he confided. “They’re trained for this. Sieges, I mean. They have the latest surveillance techniques. Listening devices. They could be picking up the words I’m speaking to you now.” As if alarmed by his own conclusion, he went silent for a time.

  She took some of the drink.

  He resumed, “This old building isn’t a fortress. There are ways they can get up here, right up here to the top without using the main stairs. There’s an external fire escape round the back and there are back stairs that link up with the cellars. Or they could climb up the balconies at the front. They could use a crane, or a helicopter.”

  Samantha judged it sensible to say nothing while he was talking in this vein. In her mind she was replaying the ending of sieges she’d seen on television, when tear gas was used and special troops went in wearing masks and protective suits.

  Mountjoy said with a touch more confidence, “What holds them up is that they don’t know which room we’re in.” He paused, and she was conscious once more of the sharp rise and fall of his breathing. “Do you know where we are right now.”

  Of course she knew. The only thing she didn’t know was how to answer a question like that. “Somewhere near the top?”

  “Couldn’t get much higher if we tried,” he said. “If you stood down there in the street and looked up at the front, this is the bit at the left-hand end, with the twin gables. Have you ever looked up at the old hotel?”

  “Not often,” she said truthfully.

  “Because then you’d know where I’m going to take you. It’s at the opposite end. Shaped like a turret, with battlements. That really is the highest point. The only way into it is up a spiral staircase. They can send up anyone they like and I can hold them off with my gun. And in case you were wondering, it doesn’t have a balcony. Get up.”

  He switched on a torch and she saw that he had the gun in his other hand. He ordered her to pick up the pieces of flex and wrap the blanket around her shoulders. She asked if she could first put on her T-shirt, which she found she had been using as a pillow, and he gave his consent. She reached for her violin case; she wasn’t going to leave it here. Then she pulled the blanket across her back.

  They left the room and crept along a corridor. Thinking that it was a vital opportunity to get her bearings, she looked about her, but with little advantage, because he kept the torch beam directed low, at a spot near her feet. At the end of the corridor he told her to turn right and then immediately left, where the torch picked out the first steps of the spiral staircase.

  Climbing the stairs, she was overwhelmed by despair. What he had said was absolutely right. The turret room was going to be impregnable. No one could surprise them. He could command the one doorway with his gun. The siege was certain to end in a deadly shoot-out. What other outcome could there be?

  “The door straight ahead.”

  On the stairs he had kept close behind her so as not to allow her to aim a kick at him. He gave her a nudge with the gun. She saw a short passageway ahead of her with three doors. The turret was not one room, but divided into three like segments.

  “Must have been used by servants,” Mountjoy said as they entered the poky little space. In a strange way, he sounded apologetic about the accommodation.

  It was the first faintly civil remark he had expressed in some hours. Samantha made an effort to encourage a conversation. “These days they’d take down one of the internal walls, install a Jacuzzi and call it the penthouse suite.” As the torch flicked across the room she saw that the arched window facing the front was boarded over to well above head height. “If that was taken down, there must be a wonderful view.”

  “We’re here precisely because it is boarded up,” he said, hostile again. “We can’t be overlooked from the abbey or anywhere else. Get your wrists behind your back.”

  The socializing was over. He started the business of tying her again, efficiently, though not so viciously.

  “Do you have to tie my legs?” she asked.

  “That’s the whole point, to confine you to this room.” But he didn’t gag her this time. When she was seated against the wall with the flex firmly knotted around her jeans, he spread the blanket over her legs. “I’m going to see what’s going on.” He stepped out of the room and across the passage. She saw how right he was about the turret. He could keep her in this room without any risk that she would be seen from the street. Presumably the window in the next room wasn’t boarded over, so he could use that for observation.

  Presently she heard a shout of “Bastards!” from the other room. Her heart rate quickened; anything that upset Mountjoy was putting her in danger. In a moment she understood the cause of the outcry: a strong beam of light penetrated the room through the arched area at the top of the window that had not been boarded over. Down in the street they were using some kind of searchlight.

  He came back into the room. “They ought to be trying to negotiate, not harassing us with lights.”

  She suggested, “They must be trying to find out which part of the building we’re in. How can they negotiate if they don’t know where we are?”

  He was silent.

  It seemed a constructive thing to have said. She was emboldened to add, “What you need is a mobile phone.”

  “Thanks,” he said bitterly. “Next time I break out of jail I’ll remember to have one in my pocket.”

  ‘What I meant is probably they’ll get one to you somehow. They’ll see the sense of talking.”

  “Oh, yes? I can see them doing that.”

  “You talked to that man Diamond face to face.”

  “Bugger all use it did me.”

  She was in two minds about Mountjoy. She wanted the siege to end, but she understood his situation; after all, she was part of it. Frightened as she was, and angry at being hauled off the street and made hostage over an issue she hadn’t even heard about, she sensed that he might have a genuine grievance. If so, he’d been wrongfully imprisoned for years. She didn’t want him injured or killed for her sake. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life thinking he’d been gunned down so that she could be released.

  She could also understand that prison was responsible for his fatalistic moods, but that didn’t make them easier for her to endure.

  She tried striking another positive note. “I’m sure Mr. Diamond is doing his best to get to the truth.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said I’m sure—”

  He cut her off in mid-sentence. “Listen.”

  She could hear nothing, but Mount joy crept out of the room and stood at the head of the spiral staircase.

  Samantha leaned as far forward as the flex allowed. She thought she heard a faint sound. She wasn’t sure if it came from inside the building.

  Mountjoy stepped back into the room, gun in hand. His voice was pitched on a high, hysterical note. “I’m going to gag you again. I can’t trust you to keep quiet. There’s definitely someone inside this place.”

  She reacted quickly. “It could be Mr. Diamond.”

  “Some chance!” He found the roll of plastic adhesive and clawed at the end with his fingernail.

  Samantha said, “If you use that gun, you’re finished, whatever the truth is.”

  He ripped off a piece of the plastic, slammed it over her mouth and said, “I’ve got to the point when I’m too tired to care anymore. The buggers will do for me anyway.” He got up and walked to the top of the staircase.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The kidnapping was public knowledge now. Once the Empire Hotel had been cordoned off, the news embargo could not be sustained. Channel Four News at seven led with still pictures of Mount joy and his hostage Samantha, followed by live coverage of the scene in front of the hotel and an interview with the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset, Duncan Farr-Jones, who stressed that although the escaped prisoner was a murderer, and known to be armed, the police were taking measures to bring the siege to a quick conclusion—to which he added, “... ensuring the safe releas
e of Miss Tott.” He said nothing about Mount joy’s prospects of survival.

  Several hundred Bathonians had left their living rooms for a sight of some action. Peter Diamond arrived at Orange Grove soon after eight to find police lines where that afternoon there had only been checkered tape. The yellow jackets with reflective stripes were visible stopping the public at every point of access to the open space in front of the hotel facade. The number of police minibuses and coaches parked beside Bog Island testified to the reinforcements brought in from all over the county.

  Julie dropped him at the north end of Pierrepont Street and reverse-turned and drove away. At this critical stage of the operation it was necessary to divide forces. Crucial things still had to be checked and Diamond would be checking the most crucial—the state of Mount joy’s nerves. Too many hours had passed without communication. The man was trapped; he would be exhausted and afraid. If he panicked and used the gun, all the good work of the past hours would be undermined. He had to be informed as soon as possible that the new evidence proved him innocent of murder. It was up to Diamond to give him that reassurance, man to man. This wasn’t an occasion for loud-hailers or mobile phones.

  Meanwhile Julie was given the essential task of following up on the discovery in Conkwell Wood.

  At Bog Island, ominously, two ambulances were waiting, their crews outside watching the play of the searchlight across the hotel front. The Chief Constable, dapper in a flak jacket and Tyrolean hat, was briefing some of the press outside the police caravan that was being used as the headquarters of the rescue operation. Spotting Diamond’s approach, he cut short the interview and they went inside the van and it wasn’t for a cozy chat. “Where the devil have you been all afternoon? You should have been in touch.” This was said in the presence of a civilian radio operator, Keith Halliwell and Mr. Tott, who got up as if to welcome Diamond and sat down smartly when he heard the rebuke.

  Diamond was surprised by the hostility. From long experience of dealing with evasion he decided it had to be a cover for some shabby decision. Sidestepping the Chief Constable’s question, which he considered superfluous at this stage, he asked, “What’s the state of play? Are we in communication with Mountjoy?”