Men dressed in black plastic rushed in their direction and slammed into them. Four rough arms lifted Jane right off her feet and dragged her towards Verney Road. She heard Lorraine’s imperial tones, ‘Put Me DOWN!’ and a grunt as Lorraine kicked one of the men in the groin. Jane dropped to her knees to slow them down, but still was dragged and finally tossed through the yawning doors of a mud-spattered van.
Lorraine was slung, still shouting, smack on top of Jane. One of the men whipped out a roll of duct tape and wound tight strips around Lorraine’s mouth. Jane’s head was yanked back as tape was wound so tight around her eyes she saw sparkling colours. Their eyes were bound shut by tight cloths.
‘Lorr—!’ she cried before the tape went over her lips. Lorraine’s voice, lucid and cool mumbled, ‘RP, Jane, my assistant.’
Jane was no actress, and this seemed a poor moment to argue accents, as she felt the kick of boots slam into her behind. Who’d seen this? Handler Frederick? Gone. The Action lady? Nearly sightless.
Sherlock Holmes always asked kidnap victims if they had listened to tell-tale noises, counted the stops, smelled landmarks along the route—rotting markets, curry shops, sea air, fertilizers—in order to retrace their abduction. Jane couldn’t keep track of any smell, sound, or time. The racketing swaying of the van, the screech of wheels, and the muttered curses of the men only conjured up a bad Stella Rimmington thriller. Less than three hours ago, Jane had thrown Rimmington into the rubbish heap. She might rethink that decision—if she ever saw a library again.
‘In there.’
They dragged Lorraine out first. Jane was next and after many minutes of rough handling, the men carried them down some steps and bound them, back to back, wired and taped.
Gasping and terrified, they were suddenly abandoned in the pitch darkness.
Jane forced out, ‘All right?’
Lorraine mumbled out, ‘I still need a toilet.’
Jane kicked out her legs and struck something wooden. She kept kicking for ten minutes at least. No one answered. The space was stuffy, humid, and cool, probably a basement. It stank. Jane rubbed her face back and forth on the concrete floor to loosen the tape. Lorraine did the same, and finally Jane could slur to Lorraine: ‘Just tell them they’ve got the wrong princess.’
‘They’re probably going to make demands in exchange for me.’
‘Who would kidnap Princess Alexandra? It’s ridiculous.’
‘I won’t take that personally. Why should I tell them they’ve got an old has-been?’
‘You’re not a has-been. But you’re right. Maybe we’re safer as royal and servant.’
Lorraine harrumped, ‘It was going so well! I deserve a better encore than this. Oooooh, my shoulder’s so cold. Can we sit up again?’ Inching around in a circle, they measured their space—just a small cell.
‘We must keep our heads, darling. Oh, dear, remember what they did to that poor construction worker?’
Horrified, Jane said, ‘I think they only do that in the Middle East.’
‘Not in England,’ Lorraine nodded, forcing Jane’s head to nod as well. ‘Not in the land of Henry the VIII.’
‘You would cite him.’
‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. Beheading made me think of summer stock and Anne of a Thousand Days. But Henry the Eighth wasn’t a terrorist.’
‘Anne Boleyn might differ.’ Jane surmised. ‘Let’s be positive. We might be here for a while. How long is your nose going to stay on?’
Her mother groaned. Jane felt warm pee spreading underneath her hips.
‘Oh, I’m so very sorry, darling.’
‘Could happen to anyone, your Highness.’
They dozed, heads tilted back on the other’s shoulder for as long as they could, leaning against a pile of packing boxes away from the puddles Lorraine’s bladder had contributed to their predicament.
Jane lost track of time. Suppose what felt like hours was only fifteen minutes?
She worked up her solidarity with all the jailed people around the world right now, unable to stretch out, or see, or yell for rescue. It didn’t work very well, and as she was a librarian at heart, she ended up thinking of The Count of Monte Cristo instead.
At what point did people start reciting poems or playing chess in their heads? She certainly hadn’t memorized enough literature to stay the course. Damn, she couldn’t even remember a single e.e. cumming’s line of poetry. She’d taken it for granted there would always be books at hand. Happily, Lorraine’s memory was good for a couple of seasons. There’d be Pinter, Sondheim, Rogers and Hart, Feydeau, Ibsen, Shakespeare and if it ever came to it, Lorraine’s episodes on that daytime soap opera. You could do worse than be locked up with one of the most versatile actresses of her day.
But for now, they sat quietly. Lorraine even dozed for what might have been an hour, maybe two. Jane thought of Sammie and tried to reckon when her daughter would realize mother and grandmother were gone.
A door flew open. The tapes were ripped off their mouths.
‘I need a bathroom. And a gin and tonic,’ Lorraine barked, turning her blindfolded face towards the sound. Perhaps she was channelling Alec Guiness in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
‘Alcohol is bad for your health,’ said an educated man’s voice. His accent caught Jane’s ear.
‘So is freezing in my own urine, young man. How long have we been here?’
‘Four hours. You have eight more. They meet our demand, we let you go at dawn.’
‘Demand?’ Jane asked.
‘Withdrawal of all British troops.’
‘Oh, goodie.’ Lorraine sighed. ‘Home by teatime.’
‘That’s a ludicrous demand. From where?’ Jane asked.
‘Here is your soup,’ Their captor unwired Lorraine’s wrists and guided her fingers to a bowl of cold lentils.
‘Thenk you, my good man,’ Lorraine muttered.
‘You don’t sound like a foreign crackpot,’ Jane said, gulping down her soup. ‘Are you one of those local students with a loose screw?’
‘We’re moving you later tonight.’
More hours crawled by. Jane’s neck was cramped and her wet thighs chilled. Lorraine was worryingly quiet. The door banged open again. Many rough hands again dragged them blindfolded into a quiet night. Jane smelled diesel fumes, rotting leaves, and foul refuse mixed with Lorraine’s stale pee and the smell of old-lady terror. There was no whine of a siren or chop-chop of a helicopter, but the sounds of terrifying normality, just footsteps crunching gravel on either side of her and her mother’s grunts of pain.
Counting on Trollopian storylines to sustain their empty hours had been outlandish optimism. These men might not be misguided liberators—just lovers of violence and death. How Jane regretted reading that last Martin Amis about nihilists. While she read her books, this sort of thing was happening all the time—only to other people.
Their van got caught in a traffic jam. Blindfolded into heightened sensation, Jane felt every metre of asphalt grind past. The two women were riding towards their death surrounded by life—chirpy, indifferent, London life. Loud music came from a car radio crawling ahead of them.
Now Jane realized a new danger—that as a useless palace assistant to a second-eleven princess, she might be cast aside and permanently separated from her more valuable royal companion. Lorraine must have been seized by her own stage fright because lying rough on the jouncing metal, Lorraine muttered, ‘In case they do close our show, darling, I’m sorry. So many things I did. Not something to go into now, as a princess, you understand, but you deserved better.’
‘Nothing to apologize for, Your Highness. Just a bad script. You gave it your best.’
‘Shuddup,’ said a different voice.
‘Yeah, shuddup.’ said a third. They sounded like locals. One kicked Jane in the pelvis for good measure. Who liked kicking her so much? Given her aching spine, this was a bit of overkill—was he imitating rough thugs on telly? Where did criminals get their role
models, anyway, if not from bad writing? If only they’d all been forced to read, then at least the city’s social underbelly might be a fanciful kaleidoscope of Ed McBain hoods, Ian Fleming villains and Conan Doyle nasties.
What did these guys read?
Did these guys read?
It was soon apparent that they read prayers. Quite often. Once Jane and Lorraine had been repackaged with fresh tape and settled on two seedy mattresses in blackness, they heard for the third time now, a handful of male voices in recitation. Chanting shouldn’t sound menacing, but in the end, Jane could only agree with Lorraine’s own personal prayer, a disgusted, ‘Oh Lord, not again,’ through taped jaws.
The two women dozed on and off, but deep sleep was impossible. The sound of fraying tempers in a room somewhere on the same floor roused Jane from a deep doze. Apparently despite the issuing of their ‘demand,’ not so much as a regimental beagle had been withdrawn from combat.
Two of the men argued over when to kill the women. Another asked whether they should be allowed a bathroom visit. Which one first? Somebody yelled over the racket that it wasn’t his turn to cook and who had left his wet towel on the floor?
Tension, anxiety, fear and venality veered between the vicious and the petty.
Outdoors, traffic sounds faded down to an occasional passing car. Was it evening by now? How late? Someone untethered Lorraine’s feet and led her away, still blindfolded, and more tightly gagged for good measure. Jane trembled and waited for screams of murder or triumph or both. Instead, Lorraine returned in better spirits, her hands reeking of cheap soap.
Jane was elated now by the tiniest thing, and not only at the idea of breathing fresh air. Had these boys chickened out, as one day was turning to the next? Would they extend the deadline, at least long enough for Jane and Lorraine to negotiate a trip to the loo together and crawl out a window? Perhaps not during the second full day or the third, but maybe after a week? Or after the first month?
Her turn for the bathroom came. Jane hoped the kidnappers were respectful enough not to watch a woman relieve herself. Taking a chance behind the closed door, she blindly ran her hands all over the tiles, up and down, back and forth, like a cleaning robot crawling in random diagonals across the gummy walls of a swimming pool. At last, her hands discovered the ledge of a window high above the loo. Unfortunately it framed an aperture so small only Bulgakov could have negotiated it, and then, only if he’d cut back on the Friskies for a week.
Defeated, Jane flushed the toilet, washed her face and hands, and half-stumbled out. She heard the placid, professional tones of a newscaster coming from a room nearby, ‘ . . . the Queen and her immediate family assure the British public that the government is doing everything possible to secure the release of an unidentified member of the extended royal household taken hostage. Meanwhile, in other news . . . ’
‘Tosser!’ An empty plastic bottle bounced off the television screen. ‘That’s wot we get? Member of the extended household? Like we got her butler or sumfing? We got ‘er bleeding cousin, that’s all! I told you! We shoulda waited for a chance at the old bag herself. Or one of ‘em wanker princes.’
‘Naw. Too much security. Well maybe we could’ve got that Edward. Send Al Jazeera a photo of’im wearing pink undies on his head, like at Gitmo.’ Four or five of them laughed as Jane eavesdropped.
‘Yeah, well, we got one at any rate. And her knickers are stinking awright.’
Someone slammed an angry hand on a table. ‘They didn’t even report our demands. Probably glad to see the back of this old piss pot.’
‘They did, too,’ said a younger voice. ‘You heard it on Al Jazeera.’
‘Not on the English service,’ someone sneered.
Jane listened again. Not quite all locals. One was American—‘undies’ and ‘Gitmo’ betrayed him. They were now going at each other, tossing blame around as they soured on their crime. The bravado that had carried them this far seemed to be faltering. Jane had dozed longer than she thought. Their dawn deadline was approaching.
She was standing in what she guessed was a narrow corridor. She worried as they wrangled that, faced with frustrated dissension, someone might suggest more desperate action as a purgative.
Then, she smelled a sweetish perfume as someone shifted behind her. Like a mouse frozen by the tread of an unseen cat’s paw, she paused. How long had he watched her from inches away, smiling in malevolence while she—? Euuw, that was too embarrassing to think about.
He wound the wire back around her wrists, cinching them behind her waist, and with an elegance she found more frightening than the rough accents of the others in the room beyond, asked her, ‘More than you bargained for?’
His warm breath brushed the hairs on the nape of her back. ‘Still pretending you work for a princess?’
Should she nod yes or no to a man primed to murder and now humiliated by royal indifference? It was a deadly mix on which to hang your future.
She said nothing.
He pushed her ahead of him, past the doorway giving on to those voices arguing away and then back down a few steps. She stumbled, wishing she could only see and with a shove from behind, found herself back with Lorraine.
‘We’ve got another meal, darling,’ Lorraine muttered. ‘Lentils with a side of lentils, I think, or cat food. Have we got to breakfast yet?’
‘Call it the Last Supper,’ said the velvet voice.
‘Call it inedible,’ she said and tossed her spoon on the floor.
After the ‘meal,’ Jane and Lorraine were left blindfolded, but hands and mouths free. While Lorraine expressed her relief, Jane’s apprehension grew. She heard suspiciously frequent trips to the bathroom, one set of footsteps, a shower, then another and another. Compared to the haphazard execution of their kidnapping so far, this regimental queue for the shower was creepy and ritualistic. They dozed for what Jane reckoned was about two hours, than the prayers started up again.
Suddenly Lorraine was dragged up and away, protesting. Jane grabbed her mother’s ankles and screamed into the fetid air. Someone yanked Jane to her feet and she too was dragged, bumping and kicking, until she was slapped hard across the face.
They forced Jane down on a stool and a young man barked, ‘Stop struggling unless you want to explode.’ They lifted her hands high over her head and pulled two straps past her elbows and down on her shoulders. They tied her into something. A heavy weight now nestled in the small of her back. Then they cinched her stomach and wrapped more canvas straps around her waist. She reached but they pulled her fingers out of the way. They wired up her wrists again.
‘A new fashion in belts,’ said the American voice. ‘You’re going to make another public appearance, you two.’
Jane thought of Joe, Lorraine, Chris, Dan and most of all Sammie. Sammie. Sammie. Then she heard Baldwin’s voice interrupt her thoughts, saying of all things: Lead the Enemy into His Own Trap . . . Turn the Enemy’s Agents Against Him. The strategy of sowing discord.
How far away his cultured voice echoed in her mind. How out of reach.
‘You are such amateurs.’ Jane taunted the darkness beyond her blindfold. ‘You haven’t forced us to beg the Queen to meet your demand.’
‘Shut up,’ said one of the men.
Jane had nothing to lose. ‘That’s what the professionals do. Film us begging. The Queen gets more blame that way.’
She got a sharp slap across her face.
‘I’m sure one of you thought of a video,’ she laughed. ‘You can’t all be nutters.’
‘Shut up, you stupid cow. ‘Course we made a recording. Here, where’s that camera?’
‘No! She’s right. That one should have been in the film, begging her fucking royal guts out,’ said the elegant man.
‘You’re blaming me? Wasn’t he the one who wanted to be the star, and say good-bye to mummy? He posted our only memory card before we could stop’im. Anyhow, who got us all put under surveillance? For all we know, you spilled the beans. We’re prob�
��ly all being watched right now!’
‘Bitch’s right. We should have a statement from her, holding a newspaper in front of the camera, showing the date ‘n’all!’
‘It’s not too late, you clowns,’ Jane said. ‘Once the shops open, you could do it again. Get it right this time.’ She delivered her frostiest librarian tone.
‘Yeah, we’d get more play if we put the old princess in a recording!’
‘YouTube it. It’ll go viral within minutes,’ Jane added.
‘Whose side are you on, you cunt?’
‘I just can’t bear stupidity,’ Jane hissed. ‘And some of you are stupider than others.’
Jane’s reward was to hear the elegant-voiced kidnapper chuckling to himself and then shouting, ‘So who’s going out to the shop is what I want to know? Who buys another memory card?’
Stratagem Thirty-three bought them more minutes. Jane and Lorraine sat in their heavy harnesses while the gang argued long and hard about who would feature standing on either side of Lorraine and what killers wore in kidnap movies—hoods with eye holes cut out, or just scarves wrapped around their noses and mouths under a pair of sunglasses.
They couldn’t find any scarves. Black plastic bin bags didn’t seem quite the thing.
They drew lots to see who would draft the plea and then disputed over the result of the pull.
They rowed over who had misplaced the camera and then lost their tempers completely when the battery wasn’t charged.
For the first time since their abduction, Jane started to think that these boys really were hopeless amateurs after all. Her hopes were dashed when she heard sirens coming into their earshot and the screech of tyres outside.
‘Deadline’s passed. Put on your belts,’ the elegant voice cut off their bickering at last. ‘I got an audience all arranged while you gits were arguing. They’re on their way. Let’em film her live in the street. Let everybody in England see the old bag beg, live and in colour.’
There was a terrible finality to his announcement that caught the whole room in its web.
Love and the Art of War Page 35
