Stick or Twist

by Diane Janes

  He remembered a fleeting discussion about the possibility that their money had emanated from criminal activities, which would have opened up all kinds of cans of worms, with the kidnap maybe some sort of gang-related episode with a hidden agenda – but none of the evidence had fitted with that, the Thackerays didn’t feature on any criminal database, and so as far as he could remember, the idea hadn’t been seriously pursued.

  In real-life investigations, motives were seldom complex. For all his instincts that there was something odd about Robin Thackeray, Jude must after all have been the victim of a straightforward conman. A dangerous man, he reminded himself, as a heavy shower of rain began to drum on the roof of the car. A man that was still out there. Someone who might be spending that very evening sliming his way into the affections of some other wealthy woman. And Lingo’s team were no nearer to catching him than they had been at the start.

  FORTY-ONE

  Mark lay completely still and quiet until he was sure that Rob must have reached the ground floor and be out of earshot. Adversity makes strange bedfellows. He remembered hearing someone say that once, though the occasion and the context were lost to him. Time to set aside, for the moment, the uncomfortable facts that Jude had tricked him into marrying her and apparently been involved in a conspiracy to murder him. At the moment they were indeed bedfellows in adversity and this made her the nearest thing he had to a friend.

  First he had to get her onside – and although time was short, a bit of sympathy could pay dividends. Turning his head to face her, he whispered, ‘Jude, are you all right? Has he hurt you badly?’

  ‘I’m not great. My mouth is bleeding. He may have broken some ribs.’

  There was something definitely not right with her voice, he noticed. Aloud he said, ‘Did you bring any nail scissors?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nail scissors. We may not have much time. Mine are in a leather case, zip fastener, really awkward to get at.’

  ‘Mine are loose, in the top drawer of the dressing table.’

  ‘Which side?’

  ‘Right.’

  He noted that she didn’t waste any more time asking questions.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ he said. ‘You stay where you are for now and I’ll get them. Then I’ll give them to you and you can cut me free.’

  She didn’t attempt to query this, but merely whispered, ‘Try not to make any noise. The kitchen’s right underneath us.’

  ‘OK.’

  He found that rolling onto his back was surprisingly difficult, with his hands secured behind him, but once he had made it as far as a sitting position, it was easy enough to slide his feet onto the floor and stand up. He moved cautiously towards the dressing table, feeling his way and taking his time. He didn’t want to trip, or knock something over. It was vital that Rob shouldn’t realize that he was on the move. He managed to locate the handle of the drawer without too much difficulty, but found that he had to bend his knees in order to get a grip on it, and the act of sliding the drawer out when he had his back to it proved awkward. Once he had it open, his fingers quested blindly among the contents until he managed to locate the unmistakable shape of a pair of scissors.

  ‘Got them,’ he whispered.

  ‘Well done. As you’ve got the scissors, why don’t you cut me free first?’

  ‘Because I don’t trust you to cut me free second.’

  ‘Who’s to say that if I free you, you’ll free me?’

  ‘I give you my word that I will. We have to trust each other.’

  ‘That contradicts what you just said a minute ago.’

  ‘Look,’ he hissed, ‘are you going to concentrate on getting out of here, or are you going to bicker? Every minute counts if we’re going to have any chance. You have to kneel on the bed, with your back to me, then I’ll put the scissors into your hand and keep my back to you, while you cut me free. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  He could dimly make out the shape of her, a dark shadow struggling on the pale bedcovers, gasping from the effort and emitting periodic whimpers of pain.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘I can’t get onto my knees. It hurts too much.’

  ‘All right. Try rolling onto your back. Then you can slide off the bed and we can stand back to back.’ He managed to keep his voice relatively calm, but his heart was racing. He needed her to be able to do this. Any moment might bring the return of that lunatic from downstairs. He watched and waited while she went through a further process of struggling and moaning, until she had eventually levered herself into a standing position, after which they edged closer to one another, until they were ready to effect the transfer.

  ‘I’m holding the blades,’ he told her. ‘You need to find the scissors, then get your fingers into the holes. Make sure you’ve got your finger and thumb completely into place, then tell me to let go. We can’t afford to mess this up by dropping the scissors.’

  It was like one of those bizarre party games, he thought, were you had to pass oranges, or balloons, or do something faintly risqué which involved fumbling blindfolded around a partner’s backside, while everyone else looked on and hooted with laughter.

  After what seemed like an interminable amount of time she said, ‘Let go, I’ve got them.’

  ‘Right. Now use your other hand to find the tie, position the scissors and cut.’

  He felt her fumbling around, at least twice grazing one of his wrists with the blades until she located the tie and attempted to close the scissors onto it.

  ‘They won’t go through it.’

  ‘They have to.’

  ‘The plastic’s too thick.’

  ‘You need to keep sawing at it. It will go through eventually.’

  He tried to sound more confident of this than he actually felt. He had seen similar feats pulled off in the movies, but presumably the scriptwriters made sure that if Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise was involved, the plastic was thin and the nail scissors extra sharp.

  After a few minutes of desperate work with the scissors, during which he had to stifle at least two cries when the points found his flesh, he detected her fingers exploring near his wrist.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Feeling to see how much I’ve cut. There’s definitely a nick in the edge of the plastic. If you pull your hands as far apart as possible, that will put more strain on it.’

  And more strain on me, he thought, as he did his best to go along with her, forcing himself to maintain a position which made the tie bite into his flesh. A nick in the edge of the plastic? At this rate the scissors would wear out (to say nothing of his wrists) before they managed to chop the bloody thing in half.

  The tie gave without warning, his hands flying apart so suddenly that it knocked him off balance and he almost fell.

  ‘Now do mine.’

  ‘In a minute,’ he whispered. ‘First you tell me how things stand.’

  ‘You promised.’ The anger in her voice was coloured with distress.

  ‘Sure I did. But it’s hard to trust you, after what I’ve found out tonight.’

  ‘You tricked me too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come off it. You married me for money, I married you for money.’

  ‘I didn’t plan to kill you,’ he hissed.

  ‘Cut me lose and I’ll tell you everything.’

  ‘If you don’t tell me everything, I won’t help you. I’ll leave you here.’

  ‘You can’t overpower him on your own. Between us we can take him by surprise.’

  ‘With bashed-in ribs? Anyway, I don’t intend to overpower him. I’m going to unlock the door and slip out.’

  It was remarkable how much derision she could inject into a whisper. ‘Of course you are! The key’s on the other side of the door, drongo.’

  ‘I know how to do it.’

  ‘Paul Daniels are we now? Anyway you won’t get far, because if you don’t take me with you, I’ll scream the place down and bring him running, befo
re you have the chance to get as far as the stairs.’

  ‘Fair point.’ He felt for her hands in the dark. ‘OK. I’m going to take the scissors out of your hands. Hold your wrists still and I’ll find the band and start cutting, but in the meantime, you talk. Is this Stefan likely to turn up?’

  ‘When he can’t get me on the phone, I think he’s sure to.’

  ‘And did you tell Rob the truth about your signal?’

  ‘What signal?’

  ‘The signal that tells Stefan he’s safe to let himself into the house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So the parking space was being left for Stefan?’

  ‘No, for Rob. Stefan is coming by boat.’

  ‘Boat?’

  ‘Yes, boat. He’ll come into the beach, then climb up the cliff path.’

  ‘And what was Stefan supposed to do, when he got here?’

  ‘Are you cutting at all?’

  ‘You know I am. But I’ll stop the minute you start to hold out on me.’

  ‘The idea was that Stefan would be here, hiding in the house. Rob would come and we’d carry out the plan Rob knew about.’

  ‘Which was?’ he prompted.

  ‘Don’t stop cutting.’

  ‘Then don’t stop talking.’

  ‘He might come back any minute.’

  ‘He won’t. He’s waiting in the kitchen, ready to deal with your other boyfriend when he turns up.’

  ‘The other plan,’ she gulped, her voice already muffled by some unseen injury to her mouth dropped even further, so that Mark could barely distinguish her words, ‘was that I would suggest a romantic stroll on the cliffs, first thing in the morning. Rob was going to be concealed, a little way down the path and he was going to push you, so that … so that you went over the edge.’

  ‘Charming.’ He tried to sound calm. He thought that he’d come to terms with the initial shock of discovering that they’d planned to murder him, but hearing it spelled out was chilling.

  ‘Rob thought we’d get away with saying that it was an accident. You know – that we’d gone out for a walk and you just slipped and fell, breaking your neck. But Stefan was going to deal with Rob as well, then put your two bodies into one of the boats he’d brought and use the other to tow it well out to sea, before shoving you both over the side and leaving the boat to drift. I was going to report you missing, saying that you and Rob had gone out together in this boat that Rob had borrowed. They would search and find the boat, and believe that there had been an accident. Stefan reckoned that he knew where to put the bodies over, so that it would be some time before they washed up on shore – if they did at all. That way the bodies would be too far decomposed for anyone to be sure exactly how they’d died. Even if it looked like there had been foul play, we thought they might assume that the two of you had fallen out and had some sort of fight, rather than suspecting that a third party had been involved.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, sarcastically, as a heady sense of hysteria swept through him. ‘Well obviously, that was a much better plan than just pushing me over the top of the cliffs.’

  He continued to work away in silence. In theory, it ought to have been easier to cut her free, because he was able to work facing forward, pinching the tie between the fingers of one hand, while he worked the scissors with the other, but perhaps the scissors had been blunted by their earlier work. ‘These are starting to feel loose,’ he said. ‘I think they might be coming apart. I’m going to try to find mine.’

  He wasted some time at the dressing table, before remembering that he had left the manicure set in his bag.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she hissed. ‘Hurry up, will you. Just use my scissors.’

  ‘I’ve remembered where they are. They’re Sheffield steel. Much quicker in the long run.’

  At that moment his fingers closed around the leather case and he withdrew it from his bag, unzipping it as he did so. Seconds later he was back at work on the plastic tie.

  ‘If Rob isn’t your brother, who is he?’

  ‘His name is Rob McGilligan. I met him while he was on holiday in Florida. That’s where we got married.’

  ‘Then our marriage isn’t legal?’ For some reason, the news that he was not legally shackled to her after all elevated his spirits considerably. ‘So where does Stefan come in?’

  ‘Stefan and I go way back. We met each other when we were both travelling. We started to go around together. Then we tried a few things.’

  ‘Things?’ he prompted.

  ‘Are you ever going to cut me free? Are you even trying?’

  ‘Keep your hands still. Twisting around won’t help. You were saying … about you and Stefan?’

  ‘We were looking after this old lady, in Florida, but after she died, things got heavy with the family and we had to leave.’

  Mark experienced that familiar feeling of bile rising in his throat. He swallowed hard and said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘So we came up with something a bit more inventive. Rob provided the seed money and the muscle. We needed a third party, you see, to help fake the kidnap. If it went wrong, I had a story all prepared …’

  I bet you did, he thought.

  ‘Rob didn’t know anything about Stefan – obviously. He thought it was just him and me, in it together. It was dead easy for him to get documents. He just pretended to be my little brother Robin who’d died. It was just coincidence, him being called Rob, but it made it masses easier, because there was never any chance of me calling him the wrong name.’

  Mark was tempted to remark that when it came to lucky coincidences, the devil evidently looked after his own. He was just wondering how long it had taken her to find a sucker like Rob, who was as keen to embark on a criminal career as she was, when another question thrust itself to the forefront of his mind: why was she suddenly so willing to share all this information with him? The answer raced in behind it, like an express train. She knows it doesn’t matter, because one way or another, I’m never going to make it out of here to tell anyone what I know. If bloody Rob doesn’t do for me, this bastard Stefan will.

  ‘Can’t you hurry it up?’

  ‘It’s not my fault if the bloody scissors are blunt. Are you pulling your hands as far apart as possible?’ He was abruptly seized by a violent urge to follow Rob’s example and kick her skinny backside from here to kingdom come. If it hadn’t been for his fear that she would make good her threat to alert her erstwhile ‘brother’, he would have left her there to fend for herself. As it was he would have to cut her loose and take her along when he made his bid for freedom which, given her murderous intentions toward him and the fact that this Stefan character might turn up at any moment and side with her, put the odds very much against a successful outcome. ‘You do realize,’ he enunciated the words carefully, as if explaining to a child, ‘that you’ve got nothing to gain from killing me now? I haven’t got any money or any insurance …’

  At that moment the plastic tie gave up the unequal battle with the scissors and he had to grab her, before she fell forward.

  ‘Thanks,’ she whispered. ‘Now, how do we get out of here?’

  ‘Do you think we dare put a light on? This would be masses easier if I could see what I was doing.’

  ‘Would one of the bedside lights do? They’re on dimmers and if we put them on really low, I don’t think anyone would be able to notice them, just from looking out of the window downstairs.’

  ‘Good idea. You work your way across to the window and pull the curtains across, while I find the lamp.’

  ‘OK.’

  Each of them worked their way as silently as possible to their appointed place. His fingers encountered the edge of the bedside table, then quested for the lamp. He was terrified that at any moment he might knock some unobtrusive object onto the floor and give the game away, but he encountered nothing until he found the lamp itself. He slid his fingers up until he reached the switch and the bulb blossomed into life. Jude swished the curtains across in the sam
e moment, hiding their activities from anyone who happened to be observing from the blackness beyond the windowpanes.

  ‘Good,’ he said quietly, attempting to sound confident and in control. ‘What I need now is a sheet of card or paper, and a pencil.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Have you got anything like that?’

  ‘This is a bedroom, not an artist’s studio.’

  ‘Then we need to improvise.’ He was looking around as he spoke, trying not to notice the mess Rob had made of her face. Violence of any kind unnerved him, even if she didn’t deserve his sympathy. Besides which, if little brother – no, no, he wasn’t her brother – well anyway, if that thug came back upstairs and caught them trying to get away, Mark had more than a suspicion that the damage Jude had sustained was a mere foretaste of what he could expect himself. ‘Can you think of anything?’ he asked, desperately.

  ‘What are you going to do? Put a message in a bottle?’

  ‘Do you think facetious remarks like that are going to help? I need something thin and flat to slide under the door, and something long and thin, like a pencil, to push into the lock. The key falls out onto the sheet of paper and we slide it back under the door and unlock the door from the inside.’

  ‘How do you know the key will fit under the door?’

  ‘I don’t – but I know there’s a big gap.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because when women look around a bedroom they see how much hanging space there is, and the nice view from the window, whereas men see things like a screw missing from the handle of a drawer, and badly fitting doors. Will you please help look for the things we need?’