Captive
Authors: A. J. Grainger
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © 2015 A. J. Grainger
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of A. J. Grainger to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
PB ISBN: 978-1-47112-292-7
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47112-293-4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Adam
Contents
Paris. The coldest winter in thirty years. The shivering limbs of trees pierce the deadened sky in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Ice clings to the abdomen of the Eiffel Tower.
My father’s blood is a vivid stain on the white-laced pavement outside the hotel. In the distance, the sirens scream, but they are too far away.
Dad is already losing consciousness, his eyes rolling back to milky white, his mouth drooping as the bright red blood spills out across the bright white snow. All around me people are
shouting. Nearby, one of Dad’s bodyguards is yelling into a radio: ‘Request urgent back-up. The prime minister has been shot. Repeat: The prime minister has been shot.’
And someone is screaming.
It is a long time before I realise it is me.
April
My little sister, Addy, is playing with her Baby Betty doll on the stairs of Number 10. Her collection of dolls is pushed up against the wooden panelling of the fourteenth
step, the one that takes the stairs around the first bend. She shouldn’t be here. She should be up in our flat, getting ready to leave. She is so intent on her game that for a while she
doesn’t notice me sit down behind her. When she does look up, her face becomes one big open smile.
‘Byn, cuddle,’ she says, sitting down in my lap.
‘Why aren’t you dressed yet?’ I ask, blowing a raspberry on her baby pot belly. She squeals, slapping me around the head. I let her go and she slides off my lap, taking her
doll with her, its head bumping on the step as she reaches for another of her toys: a fluffy giraffe that the Kenyan president’s wife gave her on a state visit last year. A wisp of
white-blonde hair twists like a curly tail on the nape of my sister’s neck. I tug it gently, watching it straighten and curl, straighten and curl, as a voice rises from the hallway below. I
shift Addy so I can peer through the banister.
‘Thanks for seeing me at such short notice, Stephen. I appreciate it,’ a tall man with round wire-framed glasses is saying. It’s Michael Bell, the head of Bell-Barkov and one
of Dad’s oldest friends. He is ridiculously dressed as usual, a canary-yellow tie matched with a pale pink shirt. If looking like a boiled sweet were in this season, Michael would be right on
trend.
‘Hello, Robyn,’ Michael says, looking up and cutting off my train of thought. Addy appears next to me, waving her doll at him through the banister. ‘How are you, girls?’
he asks. ‘Annabelle was asking after you—’
Dad cuts him short. ‘I’m due at Westminster shortly and I’ve got back-to-backs all day. I can only give you five minutes, tops.’
Michael gives a brief wave and then the two of them disappear from view down one of the corridors.
Shadow, my cat, brushes my arm. He is creeping up the stairs, his eyes on Addy. Addy’s love for Shadow is unconditional and frequently painful, for the cat. She looks up at the wrong
moment (for Shadow) and launches herself at him. With a cry of ‘Hug kitty’, she squeezes him tight and the inevitable happens. Shadow lashes out and catches Addy on her cheek. It is a
minuscule scratch, but baby-howls join cat-yowls. Thankfully Dad and Michael have passed through the interconnecting door into Number 11, so they won’t be disturbed.
I scoop Addy up with one hand and pat Shadow soothingly with the other.
‘Kitty scratch! Bad kitty.’ She thumps Shadow on the back.
‘Hey, hey,’ I say, acting as peace ambassador. ‘Shadow was scared. He didn’t mean to scratch you. You have to be gentle, Ads. Remember, like I showed you.’ I scoot
back to sit against the wall, with Addy curled in on one side and Shadow on the other. Shadow lets out a resentful purr as I tickle him under the ears. His second purr is calmer as the hair on his
haunches settles down.
Addy sniffs again. ‘Stroke kitty?’ she asks, wiping her eyes.
‘Stroke him gently. That’s it.’ Addy runs her hand along Shadow’s back, the wrong way, and her tap on his head has more in common with a punch. Shadow looks at me as if
to say, ‘Yeah right,’ and makes a break for it. Addy’s mouth opens again, but before she can form a yell, Mum calls my name from further down the corridor. She comes out of one of
the offices on this floor, dressed in a neat blue knee-length dress and matching two-inch heels. She looks like she’s going to a wedding or a fashion shoot. When the nation’s press camp
out on your front door with their long-angled camera lenses, even the school run can feel like the runway at Paris Fashion Week. Ever since a hideous moment last year, at the prince’s
christening at Westminster Abbey, when Mum wore a pleated skirt on a windy day and the entire country saw her Spanx, she’s worn tunic dresses in heavy material to the knee that even a tornado
couldn’t blow skywards.
Mum keeps out of Dad’s work as much as possible. In politics, her motto is ‘See no evil, hear no evil’. She thinks you can’t be responsible for what you don’t know.
She’s wrong. Dad says the only way to thrive here, in these cramped and fusty old rooms, full of too many files, boxes, aides, press assistants and researchers, is to either know everything,
or to appear to. Ultimately it is not what you know, or even who you know – it’s what people say you know that is important. People think my dad knows everything. Other people’s
secrets are his currency.
‘Adriana isn’t even dressed, Robyn,’ Mum says, as if I’m the nanny. ‘Where is Karen?’ – the actual nanny – ‘Come here, Addy,
darling.’
I carry my sister up to Mum. Addy cries out for her toys, her legs kicking out. One catches the picture of an ex-prime minister hanging at the top of the stairs, nearly knocking it to the floor.
Mum lunges for Addy and I lunge for the photo.
Addy settles as soon as she’s in Mum’s arms, clamping herself to Mum’s body like a baby koala. Mum scoots her on to one hip. ‘Are you packed? I’d like you to show
me which school books you are planning on bringing with you, Robyn. It’ll be very quiet in Cheshire and you can make a start on some of the reading you have to do for next term.’
Addy is curved into Mum’s body, head on one side, peering up at me. I make a funny face at her and she does her shy thing, pulling Mum’s long brown hair over her face.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Mum asks.
‘Yes. School books. Quiet. Start reading.’
Mum’s face registers hurt and I feel bad and grumpy in equal measure. ‘I’ll do some work, but I’m taking my camera as well.’
‘If you must – but schoolwork first. I know these last few months have been hard, but you can’t afford to let your grades slip. You’ve got exams coming up.’
I tickle Addy under the chin, making her squeal, and then change the subject. ‘Will Dad be all right without us?’
‘I expect so. It’s only for four days.’ Mum’s lips pinch, the way they always do when someone brings up Dad. ‘Although goodness knows when he’ll ever remember
to take his pills. I’ll speak to one of the Garden Room Girls about reminding him.’ The Garden Room Girls are the bank of secretaries that work here round the clock, so called because
they are based in the room off the garden. Super-unoriginal and super-sexist. It’s a hangover from years ago. They’re not even all women these days.
‘He’ll never get full use of his shoulder back, will he?’ I say.
‘I think it’s safe to say he won’t be playing tennis again anytime soon. Mind you, after that humiliating performance against the US president at Chequers last year, it’s
probably no bad thing. Talk about toys out of the pram . . .’ She stops as she sees my eyes mist with tears that have nothing to do with Dad losing six–two to the US president and then
hurling his tennis racket at the net. ‘Oh, Robyn, sweetheart.’ She tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear before I can duck out of reach. ‘We’re safe. No one will hurt you
or your father again.’
People think the British prime minister must live in some really palatial pad, with state-of-the-art everything, but our flat here is actually much smaller than our real home
in West Kensington, and the whole thing would probably fit in the ballroom at Groundings, Granny and Grandpa’s estate in Cheshire. Mum says the PM’s flat is dusty and dirty and needs a
‘jolly good refit’, and she hates not having all our furniture here. Most of it had to go into storage when Dad became PM four years ago. Mum says she can’t remember what half of
it looks like now. To which Dad always replies, ‘How can you miss it, then?’
The garden here is nice, though – an L-shaped stretch of grass and trees. I planted a rose tree when we first moved in. It was from a cutting of one of Granny’s trees. ‘A
little piece of the countryside in that smelly city,’ she said. I used to love going out to the garden, even in winter, but since the shooting in January, it seems too exposed. The walls
don’t seem high enough, and the windows of Numbers 10, 11 and 12 stare down like lidless eyes on three of its sides. Anyone could be hiding inside them with a gun. Logic and the security
services tell me that nothing like that will ever happen again. The man responsible for the shooting has been arrested, and security has been stepped up like crazy over the last three months. Four
more police officers at the gates, two extra armed guards patrol the walls and loads more plain-clothed detectives in the surrounding areas, keeping an eye on things. But sometimes your brain
doesn’t want to listen to logic. It just wants to have a little freak-out anyway.
I turn away from the window in my room. There’s a mass of stuff on my bed, waiting to be packed. T-shirts, jeans, jumpers, thick socks and wellies. It’s cold at Granny and
Grandpa’s, even in spring. On top of the pile of clothes is the digital SLR camera I got for Christmas. I don’t really know why I got into photography. Actually, I do. His name is Ed
Taylor. He’s in the year above me and during lunch breaks last year he taught me how to use a camera. He taught me a couple of other things too, like the fact that just because you have
gorgeous floppy hair, are artistic and know the exact settings on a digital camera to capture the perfect cityscape at night doesn’t mean you aren’t also a massive jerk. Our fledgling
relationship ended when I caught him kissing Cassandra Fulgate at a Christmas party.