by Henry Porter
Those three days and four nights in Venice changed Samson for ever. As they went about holding hands – something he’d never done before – and were stopped in their tracks one morning by the sun coming through the mist over the Grand Canal and poked about deserted churches with her elegant friend, Gianni, he wrongly assumed their time would have the same effect on Anastasia. But it was in one of the more obscure churches, to which Gianni had gained access by ringing a bell in the priest’s house, that Samson saw her take what, in retrospect, seemed to be a firm decision about him.
They were in front of an elaborate baroque stone monument when Gianni called over to the priest hovering in the aisle and asked if he could play some music he believed his friends should hear in a church that had a slight association with the composer Antonio Vivaldi. The priest nodded and wandered over to them good-naturedly, saying that the place needed to be stirred from its slumber. Gianni translated then took out his phone and searched through his playlist. ‘This little piece is known by very few people, and yet it is the best musical description of love that has ever been composed.’ He raised a finger. ‘Only in this recording by I Solisti Veneti is the piece executed correctly by the violinist Piero Toso.’ He repeated the title so they wouldn’t forget it – Andante from the Concerto in B-flat major for violin and double orchestra. Then he played it through the phone’s speaker, holding the phone up so that the music sounded in the cold, still air of the church. Samson, who didn’t have a particularly developed musical taste, was deeply moved by the two themes circling each other, parting, meeting again and, after a heart-piercing solo by the man Toso, rushing together in triumphant climax. The old priest nodded wistfully, while Samson put his hands together in a single clap. But Anastasia, avoiding his eyes, threw her head back and let out a little mocking laugh then turned on her heels and walked from the church.
He asked what she thought of the piece that evening. Oh yes, it was fine, but wasn’t that church freezing and didn’t the priest look sad and weren’t those paintings gloomy? What she was doing was ruling out the possibility of a serious relationship. She knew he was annoyed and a little hurt and, later, he was rougher with her in bed than before and she seemed to like it when he held her down with all his strength. It was the sex she was there for, not, it turned out, love, or even romance.
About eighteen months later, after she had told him about Hisami and said their relationship was over, he reluctantly opened his heart to Macy Harp, his racing companion and the owner of Hendricks Harp, the firm that had sent him into Syria to find Hisami’s sister, Aysel. Macy looked pityingly at him and said, quoting Wodehouse, his favourite author, that Samson had an ‘air of crushed gloom which would have caused comment in Siberia’. Samson should have known better than to damn well fall in love in Venice, which was, to put it bluntly, such a bloody cliché, because it had no more meaning than a carnal fortnight in Majorca. After that, Samson pulled himself together, tried to forget his ‘overbeating heart’ and grimly applied himself to the business of earning a living, which, after a disaster on the racecourse and his mother’s sudden death, was an urgent priority.
CHAPTER 4
Anastasia woke up in complete darkness. She remembered she’d been dragged into the van and that one of the Italians had held her with his hand clamped over her mouth while the other stabbed her viciously in the thigh with a needle, but nothing after that. How long she’d been unconscious, she had no idea. She was aware of a headache and a raging thirst, and her body ached all over. Her hands were tied behind her back and her legs were bound. She wriggled and found she was lying on a wooden pallet. She could feel the slats by brushing her cheek back and forth.
The space was cool and echoed like the inside of a tank, and she thought she sensed some kind of motion, though she wasn’t sure because she couldn’t see anything and there was no point of reference. But the nausea in her stomach told her she was moving. She held her breath to listen. There was a faint rhythmic hum, like an engine, and inside this space she was in she could smell fuel or engine oil, which might explain why she was feeling sick.
She yelled out, but the sound of her voice just echoed in the tank. She shouted again and again and, because no one came, it made her feel even more desperate and alone.
She needed to calm herself and bring order to her mind. Yes, she had stopped for the two migrants and they had been part of the plan to abduct her, yet they had both been gunned down. But the two Italians hadn’t killed her, which they easily could have, and that meant she was probably not in immediate danger, though this was little consolation and did nothing to ease the horror that kept sweeping through her. She had to think. She’d told Denis and George Ciccone where she was and they would act immediately to inform the Italian police. And the registration plate of the Mercedes – had she read it out to Denis’s voicemail or merely filmed it with the phone she dropped into Louis’s pocket which had gone over the side of the road when they shot him? She couldn’t remember. But if she hadn’t read the number out – and thinking about it now, she was sure she hadn’t – they’d find Louis’s body soon enough and they would have a complete record of the car and images of the two men who had kidnapped her. She worried that they wouldn’t be able to unlock the phone because Denis didn’t know her passcode. She hadn’t altered it since changing it in Venice to Samson’s damned birthday – 09/10. She told him she was never likely to forget it that way, but of course she had ignored his birthday for the last couple of years and that code was now the only part of Samson in her life.
Those calls to Denis and George at the village were vital. Her kidnappers didn’t know that she’d used her phone, so she had that one tiny advantage. The police would be on to it much sooner than they were expecting and Denis would put everything he had into finding her. But what was this about? Money! It could only be money. They knew how rich Denis was. Her husband would pay up quickly and she’d be released very soon – that was the only thing that made sense.
She waited and listened for a long time, wishing she hadn’t taken off the hooded jumper she’d been wearing that morning. She shouted out a few times more – but nothing came back except the sound of her voice in a ringing reverberation from the metal walls that surrounded her. No one answered. She had no clue where she was.
She breathed slowly, making her body relax, which was difficult because she was hurting all over, particularly on the right side of her pelvis, where she must have landed when they threw her into the tank. And the binding cut into the skin above her ankles. She worked her toes inside her trainers – thank God they hadn’t taken those – and fluttered her fingers to keep her circulation going. She told herself she must take control in some way, however small. She felt her watch biting into her back. Yes, the watch! She must find out the time and date; she desperately wanted to see its luminous face in the dark. Now all she had to do was free her hands. That was going to take time, but she was sure they were bound by rope, and rope, however thick, could eventually be worn away by friction. She began to rub her wrists against the wood of the pallet, changing angles so that the rope did not blister the skin on the underside of her wrists. She worked at this for an hour or more and, by curling her fingers into her palms, began to feel the frayed edges of the rope. In the end, she didn’t need to get through it all because the action loosened the knots and she was able to pull her right hand free, then her left. She rubbed her wrists, pushed up to a sitting position and worked her shoulders. It was 5 a.m., the day after her abduction, which meant she had been unconscious for over twelve hours. She swept the bindings on her legs with the tiny light from the watch. She could see almost nothing but determined that there were two lengths of thin cord. She started to pick at the knots with her thumb and fingernails and at last one succumbed, but her legs remained bound together until she wrenched up a slat and sawed at the rope with the rough end of the wood, driving splinters into her fingers and ankle in the process.
After rubbing her calves and stretching, she f
elt her way along the wooden slats until she reached a metal wall. There were horizontal ridges in the structure and a very small vertical crack through which came a draught. Not only was this fresh air but it smelled of the ocean, and in an instant she understood she was in a sea container on board a vessel that was steaming through the night. That explained the slight motion in her stomach and the distant thrum of the ship’s engine. She sank to her knees, appalled. Where was she being taken, and why? If the kidnappers wanted money, it would have been far simpler to hold her in a location in Italy and exchange her for the ransom. But now she was on a boat going hell knows where. She got up, inhaled slowly and moved to her right, feeling for any mechanism to open the door from the inside. Her foot encountered something on the floor of the container and she stopped. She crouched down, reached out and felt a head of hair and before she had time to withdraw her hand she was touching the stubble and cold, dead skin of a man’s face. She recoiled with a scream and for several minutes sat hunched and shivering, the wildest thoughts flooding her mind. For some reason she remembered those containers and lorries packed with dead migrants that were discovered across Europe by customs officials, but that couldn’t be the case here. No matter how hard she thought, she couldn’t work out what was going on.
Her need to survive overcame her revulsion. Was this Louis? Had they retrieved his body? If so, he might still have her phone in his pocket. She moved forward and began to frisk the body, her hands working efficiently while she stared up into the dark, trying desperately to detach her actions from her mind. She quickly determined that it wasn’t Louis – the individual was too big and, as far as she could tell, his clothes were different. She moved from the trousers to a light jacket and found nothing, but then her hands encountered some hard objects in the top pocket of his shirt, which had been wrenched round to the man’s side – a packet of cigarettes, a lighter. She flicked the lighter on and looked around. Another body was sprawled on the floor and she now recognised them instantly as the Italians who had abducted her. They had been summarily executed, just like the two migrants, probably just after they had dumped her unconscious into the container. But still the thought was there: whoever was behind this wanted to keep her alive.
She frisked the other man, the taller of the two, who had seemed to be in charge on the road, but found nothing except a chunky silver bracelet and his belt, which she tore from the loops of his trousers and fastened around her own waist under her shirt. She didn’t know what use she would put the belt to and no idea why she now took the laces from one of the man’s trainers and stuffed them in her pocket. It was too much to remove their clothes, although by now she was very cold. Maybe later, when she could bear it no more, she would pull off the man’s leather jacket and wrap it around her shoulders, ignoring the caked blood on the collar. It was clear that a bullet to the back of the head had ended their lives. The tops of their heads had been blown off and there was a lot of blood congealed on the floor and splattered on the side of the container. But their faces were intact, their expressions impassive, which suggested that they hadn’t had the slightest clue about their imminent death.
She examined the door of the container, using the lighter, and saw there was no way to open it, then crawled back to the spot where she had been left. If they wanted her alive, they would have to feed her, and that meant someone would come. She replaced the ropes as best she could on her ankles and waited, blowing on her hands in the dark.
At around six the first sliver of light came from the crack in the door, and very soon after that she heard voices on the other side of it. She lay down, whipped her hands into position behind her back and shut her eyes. The door was wrenched open with a bang and, through closed eyes, she was aware of a very bright torch-light. There were three, maybe four, individuals and they were speaking a Slavic language, which could have been Russian, though she thought it might be Bulgarian. One of them came to the far end, where she lay in the dark, shone the light directly into her face, muttered then went back to the others. She cracked open an eye and saw that there were only three men and two were preparing to lift one of the bodies out of the container. They seemed worried about getting blood on their clothes. They hoisted the first body, grunting in disgust, and began to shift it out of the container. The third man moved back to let them pass and threw the beam of the torch on to the deck so they could see. Through the open door she caught sight of the beginnings of a pink sky, a green, corrugated deck, lines of containers and a mast at the bow that was festooned with lights.
She couldn’t see what they were doing but she suspected they were going to dispose of the bodies over the side. She knew that, once they’d got rid of the second body, the container would be locked and there might not be another chance to escape. She crouched, her ears straining, then slipped to the door. She knew what Denis would do in these circumstances and, for that matter, Samson. Both would seize this opportunity. The ship seemed large. There must be hundreds of places to hide. She would run and take her chances.
Through the crack between the door and the side panel of the container she saw them hoist the body to the railing. One held it while the others lifted some kind of weight attached to a chain. She moved further back into the container, pulled the leather jacket from the second victim, took another look through the gap and satisfied herself that the men were still struggling to weight the body. She took a deep breath and decided it was now or never. She edged out of the darkness of the container, darted to her right and found herself in a narrow, windy canyon between two rows of containers that ran right up to the bow. She needed to get as far away as possible and quickly find a place to hide. There was nowhere forward, except a hatch that could be opened by turning four enormous levers. One attempt, heaving with all her strength, was enough to persuade her that her efforts would be useless. She glanced back. The ship was by no means fully loaded and at the centre of the vessel there were several gaps in the aisles of containers. The men were on the starboard side, so she moved over to port and weaved her way towards the bridge, glancing to her left every time the other side of the boat came into view. She saw and heard nothing. Not even when she sneaked to the point opposite where she thought they would still be dealing with the second body. She put on the dead man’s jacket and waited. There were no signs of a search, no alarm or loudspeakers sounding, no floodlights switched on to pick her out in the half-light of the dawn – just the sound of the wind tearing through the containers and the superstructure of the vessel as it ploughed through the Mediterranean, heading to the rising sun and the east.
CHAPTER 5
Paul Samson sat in the office above the restaurant where his mother had been found dead of a stroke by her loyal maître d’, Ivan. He shifted his attention from a stack of papers on the partner desk that his mother and father had at one time shared and picked up the internal phone to tell Ivan to give Peter Nyman a drink and keep him downstairs for ten minutes. He turned off his two screens, cleared away a folder containing the documents he had been working on and made a call to Macy Harp’s office a few minutes away. Macy rarely used a mobile phone, so Samson had to go through his assistant, who answered immediately in a crisp upper-class English accent. Harp came on the line.
‘I’m being bloody haunted by Peter Nyman again. Any idea what he wants?’
‘No. Why don’t you ask him and call me back?’
‘Yes, just wanted to know if he’s been snooping around your end.’
‘He hasn’t. Any news on Crane? Our client is very keen to hear of any more developments.’
‘Nothing more than that he has an expensive penthouse in a new block in the centre of London under the name of Ray Shepherd. Haven’t been there yet but I’ve got an email account for him, which is intermittently still in use. But I’m not going any further on this until you tell me a bit more about the client on this one. You know I don’t work blind. I wouldn’t be happy to give his location unless I was assured that no harm was going to come to him.’
‘Rest assured, that won’t happen,’ replied Macy impatiently. ‘I know the client and they’re not going to do anything like that. Speak later.’
Samson sat back in his father’s old chair and glanced at the wall of photographs from his parents’ life, most of them meaningless, now that both were gone. When he had sorted out the debts accumulated in the last three years as his mother struggled to keep the Cedar restaurant afloat he’d do something about the photographs – maybe put them in an album and give it to his sister, Leila. She was better on the family history and their Lebanese heritage than he was, and she was still grieving deeply for their mother, so he thought it might help. He missed their mother too. They’d had good times when Anastasia was with him and his mother became convinced she would eventually marry him – the thing she desired most for her son. Under Anastasia’s gentle cross-examination she had talked about her time as a young girl in post-war Beirut, about meeting the dashing young trader who would become her husband. She relaxed with Anastasia and opened up in a way that he’d never seen before, not even with Leila. And when Anastasia married Hisami, she had been dreadfully disappointed and of course blamed Samson for failing to give her the sense that she could build a life with him and so letting her go.
