‘Bloody hell. Look out the window.’
They were impatient, scared, and fed up with each other. Suddenly Jane could smell the intoxication of celebrity suicide suffocating them into action.
‘ . . . Yeah, watch the Queen’s cousin grovel and then we do it.’
‘We’re gonna go anyway, after this.’
Someone opened the front door. A chill drizzle hit Jane’s face and hands. A bird twittered and a set of tyres swished on the wet street past her. A few raindrops dripped their way down her collar. The belt hung like two sacks of flour at the stiffest part of her aching spine.
‘FREEZE,’ came a megaphoned bark from far off in front of her.
Jane wanted to run, but in which direction? She reached out in all directions, hoping to get hold of Lorraine. She put her face to her knees to stop shaking, like an animal hoping to sink into a safe cleft in the field. Even if she could reach Lorraine, a loving embrace might trigger their deaths.
Violent hands pushed her down and her knuckles were ground raw across rough asphalt. Was the person pinning her down also rigged for dismemberment? Or were he and his friends postponing the panting virgins for another day?
Out of an eerie hush, Lorraine screamed and a car braked somewhere to Jane’s right, its rubber wheels screeching like a cornered animal. Had they thrown Lorraine in front of a speeding car? Were they wired to a detonator? Would it be petrol and a lighted match?
Loud shouts came at them from right and left, all from across the street. Blindfolded, Jane couldn’t make out what to do. She didn’t dare jerk herself away from her captor or even turn her head too fast.
Jane thought of praying but just then the kidnappers started up a loud chant in unison which made a mockery of her own appeals to the Divine.
Sammie. Sammie. Joe. Sammie. Joe. Sammie. That was close enough to a prayer and this time, no tactic of Baldwin’s came to interrupt her grief. Now she burst into tears, clogging up the sticky tape pressing on her lids.
Jane trusted Joe. She knew him in and out. If she died in the next few minutes, he’d put Sammie above everything else for the rest of his life. That there was no doubt in her heart on that one point was welcome comfort. Knowing that and loving him for that, at least, gave her some peace.
The ominous chanting ended. Even the official shouts off in the distance fell away, leaving rain spattering Jane’s forehead and a gurgling of innocent water running along gutters somewhere near her knees. She made out the anonymous thrum of early morning traffic, the sound of London’s throbbing lung, set behind the rumbling of diesel engines running low and steady not too far off. But in the immediate empty space around Jane there was only a lethal hush.
A walkie-talkie squawked, then nothing. Lorraine and she must be in some kind of standoff. They were kneeling, dead centre in the deadly eye of a security hurricane. Perhaps no one dared extend a hand for fear of triggering explosives.
‘C’mon!’ a kidnapper jeered from some ten feet behind Jane. ‘C’mon, Princess! Beg for mercy.’
‘Do as they say,’ Jane urged Lorraine. Anything to buy more time.
Lorraine’s voice came from about four or five metres to Jane’s right, filled with sobs, ‘I can’t! I’m a blank! I can’t think!’
Jane turned her face in Lorraine’s direction. ‘Course you can, darling. It’s just a speech.’
‘Not this time. Don’t you realize? They’ll kill us as soon as I finish.’
‘That’s nothing, compared to that critic from The Times,’ Jane soothed her. ‘They just want you to plead for mercy.’
‘I can’t do it, Jane, I can’t go on!’
‘Come on, bitch. Beg the fuckin’ Queen to save you!’ a kidnapper taunted.
‘I’ll prompt you, darling.’
‘My lines, sweetheart,’ Lorraine’s gasp came almost inaudibly through the quickening rain.
‘Remember Manchester? The festival? Your Portia?’
‘Portia? Portia. Yes. Yes.’ Lorraine started, ‘Yes, I’ve got it, now. The quality of mercy is not strained . . . ’ But the old woman faltered.
‘It droppeth . . . ’ Jane prompted.
‘It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven . . . upon the place beneath . . . ’
‘Bloody bitch! You promised to beg! They can’t hear you!’
‘She’s talking about the bleeding rain—?’
‘We should’ve done her in the basement when we had the chance—’
‘Well, she’s begging for mercy!’ countered the American voice, ‘And shit, it is fuckin’ raining!’
‘It is twice blessed,’ Lorraine’s voice swelled. ‘IT BLESSETH HIM THAT GIVES AND HIM THAT TAKES: ‘TIS MIGHTIEST IN THE MIGHTIEST; IT BECOMES THE THRONED MONARCH BETTER THAN HIS CROWN . . . ’
The great actress Lorraine King had found her motivation and hit her stride, declaiming Shakespeare to the rising winds, although Jane detected in Lorraine’s delivery more of Jack King’s failing Lear than anybody’s Portia. If Lorraine’s strength and memory didn’t give out, at least her mother would go out in character. No doubt to the kidnappers it all sounded like the kind of wackiness a stressed-out Windsor might come up with: ‘IT IS AN ATTRIBUTE TO GOD HIMSELF—’
‘List our demands, you cow! Oh, right! That’s great! She’s peeing herself again. That’s it!’ One of the kidnappers sounded seconds from blowing himself up when Jane heard a voice full of authority shout down his megaphone, ‘Good Lord, the bastards sliced her nose!’
There was an ear-splitting shout, a response, shrieking ululation, heavy footsteps racing toward Jane from the humming engines, barks of ‘Watch out! ‘Take cover!’ ‘RUN!’—then a deafening BOOM!
A tidal wave of gravel and loose branches thudded into Jane’s soggy back, flattening her across the asphalt.
Bullets thudded into a wall on Jane’s right and a kerbside to her left. She slowly curled her legs up, a terrified snail about to die on a London side street. She voided into her trousers with terror. Rather than feeling shameful, it merely felt like her life’s guts draining out of her.
Groans floated through the wet breeze. Low grunts and awful animal squeals of pain punctuated a horrible silence.
‘Mum?’ Jane yelled out into the blackness.
‘Take up the bodies, darling girl. Much amiss . . . ’ Lorraine’s voice died away.
Chapter Thirty-four, Ku Rou Ji
(Inflict Injury on One’s Self, Win the Enemy’s Trust)
‘Did she do that on purpose?’
‘What?’ The explosions seemed to have robbed Jane of half her hearing.
‘Pissing herself?’ The Assistant Commissioner in charge of special operations added, ‘Quite normal under the circumstances, but if it was a trick to distract them, it was brilliant.’
Their ambulance wheeled and screeched its way to an emergency ward. In the back of the van, Jane managed a wan smile at the officer’s stream of compliments: ‘The Merchant of Venice certainly wasn’t something those idiots bargained for!’
On a stretcher between their benches, Lorraine lay swaddled in blankets, barely conscious, with her phony nose still dangling by a rubbery string off her lolling head. She resembled an Egyptian mummy coming unwrapped. Her condition was stable but at her age, it was hard to predict her survival of shock. Her mother’s senses had been knocked for six.
‘They didn’t seem to have any plan,’ Jane yelled, clutching her police-issued rain cloak over her soiled trousers.
‘None worth mentioning. Of course, that’s the worst kind of criminal—unpredictable,’ the officer nodded. ‘Once we ID’ed your location and monitored their bickering, we knew they might do anything. Seems one of them had spotted your mother masquerading as Princess Alexandra at the butcher’s shop? He thought nabbing the Princess was the best comeback from the humiliation of a botched bombing. Of course, it all went pear-shaped. They were just stupid kids.’
‘But who was managing them?’
The officer checked her bandaged brow wh
ere a graze from the explosion still seeped faint red. ‘No one. At least no one our informer could nail down. God knows, he waited ‘til too late trying to nail down some evidence.’
‘An informer? With us?’
‘Of course. He’s the only reason your mother’s final appearance wasn’t some grisly item on Newsnight.’
‘I must thank him,’ Jane shouted over the traffic. It must be the man with the velvet voice, the one who brought them food and who had raised her hackles with a whispered warning that she might be unmasked at any moment. He’d known the risks of that to Jane, to Lorraine—and to himself.
The officer’s eyebrows shot up. ‘He died a few minutes ago at hospital.’
At Jane’s startled look, she explained, ‘Oh, we didn’t shoot our own man. He swapped the dummy belt he’d prepared for himself, and put it on you. He had to take the suicide belt along with the others and he managed to defuse Lorraine as best he could when no one was looking. His priority was saving you, the mother of a teen-ager. You kept saying “Sammie,” over and over again. Well, they would certainly trust him now.’
Jane’s hands trembled with guilt. She flashed back to that fierce-faced young man greeting her outside the bookstore. She’d scurried away, nervous, while all along, she’d been gazing at the wrong angel—Joop’s blond windowpane warrior was only a painted reflection of her true protector, the dark-haired guardian chatting on the step.
She shouted back to the AC: ‘I met him before. I was looking up at a painting of St Michael on a window. And he told me Muslims believe in St Michael, too—just like Christians—only they think his body is covered with tiny hairs begging Allah for mercy.’
‘Oh, that was our Gilbert. Always the cultural go-between.’ The officer yelled, ‘All I know is, St Michael’s the patron saint of policemen. Good enough for me.’
Their ambulance whined into the Emergency entrance.
‘Would the government have withdrawn any troops? I mean, if Princess Alexandra really had been nabbed and the Queen had asked?’
‘I rather doubt it somehow. Here we are. Mind your step.’
***
The hospital kept Lorraine for two nights to run tests. It was a blessing for Jane who was too fagged to unwrap bouquets, mix drinks, or otherwise run interference with the inevitable flock of old acting birds who fluttered to the ward to check Lorraine’s pulse in person.
Jane faced a first session at Scotland Yard, so even as wrap-ups of the story ran on the evening news, another version of the events—every rustle, sound, smell and phrase—was extracted from Jane. Dan was permitted only to look in for a hug. The debriefing was the purview of two Englishmen who took nothing Jane said at face value. Perversely, sitting in her own waste in front of two tight-lipped interrogators required almost as much patience as lying gagged and bound with wire on a dirty cement floor.
Finally, she was released, exhausted, and still stinking, despite a shower and change at the police station. Their car delivered her gently around the familiar red, pink and blue facades of Chalkwood Square and pulled up outside her door.
Now Jane wept again, but this time with joy at seeing in the chill light what was almost ripped away from her by violent, illiterate youths. Number 19 waited there—its whitewashed Doric columns, nineteenth-century porticoes and crumbling cornices, Lorraine’s dormer window—all dark. Only the single desk lamp by Joe’s chair blinked its glowing vigil. Sammie was no doubt waiting for her.
She expected Dan would be there too; there was still so much to say to each other once her fog of confusion cleared away like the frost that was just now melting off the glinting grass. Whereas Special Branch had insisted on questioning Jane alone—uncoached and uncomforted—Dan could explain how their hiding places had been traced, who’d given the orders to hold fire or shoot and how and when he’d realized that his bungling bookstore bombers had hatched such a foolish last bid for infamy.
Somewhere between the Bermondsey Factory for the Blind and the brink of death, Jane had mislaid her latchkey. Her police escort knocked.
Jane looked up as Joe answered the front door. He took Jane into his arms without a word. The policewoman followed them into the living room, studded by traces of an Ops Headquarters. Tea mugs and ashtrays stood draining upside down like scrubbed down soldiers at attention next to the sink. Discarded paper plates and empty chips packets told their story of thwarted hours and a helpful child kept busy by strangers doing their terrifying and impersonal duty.
‘Joe, I wasn’t expecting you, to be here, right now. Where’s Sammie?’ Jane’s elation collapsed. She wanted to crawl into a bath and under the duvet. The front door closed behind the departing officer.
Joe nodded in the direction of Sammie’s back room. ‘She kept vigil until you were safe and then, well, I forced her to bed.’ He folded up a blanket into a polite square and laid it on the sofa. He went into the kitchen and started the kettle.
‘Sammie’s all right?’
‘She is now. She was incredibly steady. You remember when she was three and lost her beloved anteater? Remember that brave face?’
‘Wylie the Anteater.’ She accepted the steaming mug of coffee spiked with Grand Marnier from Joe’s hand. The warm liquid ran down her aching gullet. She’d forgotten Wylie. When dusk fell on the square, three-year-old Sammie would clamber up the stairs of Number 19 with Wylie in her arms, their hair and fur stiff with mud and dead leaves. More than once, Jane had thrust her nose into Wylie’s matted coat to drink in the rich sweetness of Sammie mixed with detergent and rich nature.
‘And remember the look on her face when I found him in the boot?’ Joe asked. ‘If you’d seen Sammie these last two days! The bravado—those King genes performing away! The show must go on! And also that practical Gilchrist streak. She must’ve made twenty pots of tea.’
Jane laughed.
‘But I could read her,’ Joe went on. ‘She was in terror of losing everything. It wasn’t Lorraine or Sterling’s expression. I saw her mother’s face, your face, Jane, with that expression you wore all this winter. We were so afraid we’d never see that face again . . . ’ His voice cracked and he turned away.
Jane stared up at him. Suddenly abashed, he looked out at the square and shifted to something easier. ‘You were unbelievably brave.’
‘Oh, it was Lorraine’s show. As usual.’
‘No. I hear you were the brave one. Everyone says so.’ Joe insisted. ‘You kept her going. As usual.’
‘You don’t have to be nice, Joe. It’s enough that I’m alive.’
‘You don’t understand, Jane. You don’t realize you’re at the centre, you’re at the core of this family. You’re not supporting cast. You know what Lorraine once told me when we were strolling up Primrose Hill? That what kept her going during the darkest years was you—you waking her up as soon as you got home from school, you packing her sandwiches, you running her bath, ironing her blouses, and setting her hair . . . and you hiding the booze when the good parts dried up.’
‘She knew I did that?’
‘Jane, you have always been her measure and her judge. She said you were the only critic whose reviews she cared about. All those years, she played to an audience of one—her baby.’
‘But—but—I’ve always felt so dismissed. So sidelined. I could never live up to her billing.’
‘She tries to steal the limelight, but let’s face it, the old girl’s more than ready to go. When I took her to Boots one day for medicines, she looked at the diapers for seniors and joked that one of these days, I should just take her out behind the barn like a worn-out cow and shoot her—her exact words. But you aren’t ready to go. You had everything to lose last night. You were the brave one. And we’re not prepared to lose you. I’ve never had to endure what you’ve just gone through. You have all my admiration and—’ Joe hesitated.
Jane put her hand over his mouth and finished her coffee with a gulp. She tried to get up from the sofa but couldn’t find the strength.
> ‘I mean it. I’ve filmed people in war zones, but I was always nice and safe out of the frame, buffered by the cameraman. I accused you of hiding in books, but actually, you know? I was just as bad, always one remove from danger. You were about to lose your life,’ He laid his hand on hers, ‘with your plans for the future, and all. Funny, I only started to notice you even had plans once we weren’t together every day. I guess I used to try to monopolize your attention by keeping you as my production assistant. Otherwise, you seemed closed off. I didn’t feel so important in your eyes . . . ’
How many years had she watched his brow furrow over drafts of proposals, shooting scripts, and recce schedules? If he had clamoured for her attention by needing her as his sounding board, how many years had she taken him for granted, only to look up over these recent winter months to see nothing but her lonely reflection in the dark kitchen windows? She turned away from her ghastly reflection now. Small wonder Joe fell into the arms of a bosomy housewares goddess, swooning one minute over future broadcast triumphs, seducing him the next with love hot and fresh from the oven?
She pecked him lightly on one cheek. ‘I’ll send Sammie over in a few days and maybe I’ll take a little trip by myself to rest. Visit libraries in Cornwall or Edinburgh for Camille.’
‘Yeah. You don’t need me. You want me to call . . . Dan?’
‘No,’ she waved him off. ‘ I want to be alone with Sammie, just the two of us.’
‘For a minute there, it felt like the three of us.’
Jane held her ground in silence. As the door closed behind Joe, she felt affection both weary and wary, all mangled up with sentiment, stale anger and untethered misgiving. To track back to the origins of this muddle, to launch some kind of emotional archaeological dig, to excavate the skull bones of a rift that led to dishonesty and ultimately disloyalty—it was all too sad and late for that. She was bleeding somewhere, she felt truly injured, but when she checked in the bath an hour later, she couldn’t locate the wound.
Love and the Art of War Page 36
