Stranger Child (34 page)

She
had
to get on with it.

The room in which box 2909 was situated was the furthest from the door. It was a wide room with larger boxes. To one side were some of the last of the walk-in safes, many unused, some with their doors standing slightly ajar to reveal their gaping emptiness, each one potentially harbouring an unseen threat.

She placed the duffle bag on the floor and bent down to examine the contents. Inside were several hemp sacks, rolled neatly together around something solid: a screwdriver, and underneath that, a drill. David had warned her that the chances of the gang having the
owner’s key to the target box was remote. He had talked her through the process of drilling the second lock, but she had no experience of using a drill, and so little time.

She had forgotten to speak.

‘I’ve got to sodding drill it,’ she whispered, as if talking to herself.

What was that?

She was sure she had heard a noise, coming from behind her, somewhere in the vault. It was a click, as if a button had snagged against one of the metal doors.

Emma spun round, swinging her head to see into the inky shadows behind her. Nothing.

The strange stillness that she had remembered from her earlier visit descended like a blanket, flattening the silence. She looked at the gaping doors of the huge safes on the other side of the room and realised she was going to have to stand with her back to all of them, her ears assaulted by the whirring of the drill, blind and deaf to anything behind her.

Her heart thumping against her thin T-shirt, she turned back to the box and placed the drill bit against the top of the lock cylinder and started to drill. The bit slipped and clattered noisily against the front of the steel box.

‘Shit.’

She put the drill back in position, and started again. Once more it slid off the metal. Emma stifled a sob. She couldn’t do this. It was too hard.

Suddenly, she was still. In the unexpected silence as she had taken her finger off the drill’s trigger, there was a noise again. This time she knew she wasn’t mistaken.

She had her back to the room. If she turned, she would have to spin her head around in circles to reveal all the corners of the wide, black space. Her heart was pumping, but in her second of indecision she heard the rushing sound of soft shoes on the concrete floor, felt the movement of air as a body flew at her and pressed her with force against the wall of steel boxes, a gloved hand snaking round, clamping itself hard over her mouth, stifling the scream that was trying to escape.

*

Tom was standing very still, listening to every sound Emma made. He could hear her fear, taste it even, as his own mouth dried at each hurdle she had to overcome. He had been so tempted to take his phone off mute and yell, ‘Get out!’ to her. Whoever was in the vault with her was already there, though, and she would have to get past him to escape.

She had stopped drilling a few seconds ago and he’d heard a sharp intake of breath, then what sounded like a stifled squeal.

The room had become silent. Paul Green turned to look at Tom. He didn’t speak, knowing this was Tom’s shout.

Tom turned to the silver commander of the firearms team.

‘Emma’s in trouble and we’re going to have to send somebody in to help her. That will blow the whole operation wide open – I know it’s your call, but I would urge you to get that baby out of the McGuinness house as soon as you can.’

Tom picked up his radio.

‘Nic – you’re going to have to follow Emma in. We’ve no idea what’s going on down there, but there’s somebody in the vault with her. I don’t see any way you can do this discreetly, but do your best.’

Paul Green’s hand suddenly shot up.

‘Wait,’ Tom said urgently to Nic.

Through the speakers there was another sound. The sound of drilling.

‘Stop,’ Tom said.

He waited. He would give it two minutes to hear Emma’s voice. If not, Nic would have to go in.

57

David Joseph sat alone in his kitchen, his arms folded on the table, his bowed head, resting against one clenched fist. He couldn’t believe that Tasha had known all this time what he had done. And now Emma knew too. The look on her face had frightened him – a combination of puzzlement and disgust. But they’d had no chance to talk about it before she had to leave – to go down into his vault and do the gang’s bidding to get Ollie back.

Tasha couldn’t even bear to be in the same room as David now; she was closeted upstairs in her bedroom. He understood how hurt she was, but he was going to have to make her understand – Emma too – that at the time everything he had done had seemed like the best solution. When you owed money to people like this gang, you couldn’t just walk away. He would have had to sell the house or the business, and Caroline would have been miserable for months. The abduction would only have given her and Tasha a few difficult hours if everything had gone to plan.

He knew he was making excuses for himself. He had known since the day it happened that he had done something terrible – so awful that there
were
no excuses. All he could hope for was that both Tasha and Emma would understand how sorry he was.

For a moment, he thought about Emma – all alone in the depths of the earth below Manchester. He had grown to love the special silence of the vault, but he could remember going there as a child with his father and hating it. The only sound had been the gentle hum of fluorescent lights, and he had felt disconnected from the world above. Emma would hate it too, but he couldn’t have gone in her place. He would have failed – made a mistake, made everything go wrong. Emma was solid, practical, reliable. Everything that he wasn’t.

Now he felt a different kind of disconnection. The kitchen didn’t have the same sense of suffocating silence – the rain was pattering on the roof, the wind rustling the trees outside – but he felt isolated. He wanted to make things right, but he had no idea how.

Before she left the house, Emma had said that he should barricade himself into a bedroom with Tasha and take the police radio with him – to keep safe. But that wasn’t going to happen. He was perfectly safe in his own kitchen, and Tasha wouldn’t let him into her room anyway. The truth was, he couldn’t bear to see the hatred in her eyes, so it was better if he left her alone for a while, to give her time to understand everything he had told her.

There was no danger from this gang. Emma would do what she had to, take the contents of the safe deposit box to them, and then Ollie could come back. That was all these people were interested in.

A thought was trying to creep into David’s head, and he pushed it away. But it wouldn’t go. They had said that Tasha had to go back, that only then would they tell Emma where to find Ollie. But that wasn’t going to happen. How could he let Tasha go now? Was he supposed to choose between his children? Would Emma expect him to choose Ollie, if it came to it?

Maybe he should try to talk to Tasha again now, convince her that he had no intention of letting her go – whatever she had done. It wasn’t really a question of whether he could forgive Tasha for the agony she had put them through, though. It was more a question of whether she could forgive him for the years of pain that she had been subjected to because of him.

All this introspection was getting him nowhere, and he roused himself, lifting his head from his arms and sitting up.

The awareness of another noise, beyond the ticking of the clock and the sounds of the weather outside, came upon him slowly. It was a rhythmic clunk every couple of seconds. David realised that it was the sound of the side gate, banging in the wind. But they had closed it, he was sure, when Becky was here.

He stood up and walked the length of the room to where the window over the sink looked out over the side garden. The light from the window spilled out onto the path and he could just make out the shadow of the tall side gate, open, swinging to and fro.

He should go out and close it, really – but despite his earlier confidence in their safety, he suddenly felt hesitant.

The decision was taken out of his hands as an explosion of sound shattered the silence of the kitchen – a huge crash as a steel-clad boot smashed through the back door.

David spun round, diving for the police radio on the worktop. But he was too late. Two men burst into his kitchen, dressed head to toe in black, balaclavas pulled down over their
faces. A mountain of a man in a black T-shirt slammed what was left of the door back on its hinges and charged forwards, shouting words that David couldn’t make out, his senses assaulted by sound and vision. The man’s heavily tattooed biceps rippled as he tensed and relaxed fists that were wrapped around an iron bar.

Following at a slower pace was a slimmer man carrying a semi-automatic rifle.

‘Mr Joseph,’ the slimmer man said in a voice that rattled in the back of his throat. ‘I’ve come for the girl. Where is she?’

David didn’t answer. His tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth, and he was gasping for breath.

The man spun the gun round until it was pointing at David.

‘I asked you a question.’

David swallowed. ‘She’s not here. We’ve taken her somewhere safe.’

The man laughed. ‘You’re lying. Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly grown a pair, Joseph?’

He turned to the man with the muscles.

‘Get her.’

The big man headed towards the door to the hall, the iron bar held tightly in his left hand.

‘Wait,’ the man with the gun said.

He walked across the kitchen to the worktop and David felt a rush of blood to the head, grabbing hold of the table for support as the man picked up the police radio.

‘You stupid bastard,’ he said, waving the radio at David, his voice barely more than a hiss. ‘What part of “no police” did you fail to understand? Was it you – or your wife?’

David said nothing, and the man laughed – a deep, nasty, cackle.

‘No, you wouldn’t have had the bottle, would you?’

The man spoke to the guy with the muscles even though his black eyes never left David’s face.

‘Bring me the girl. And don’t be gentle - she’s let us down.’ He pointed at David with the barrel of his gun. ‘Then you can have this piece of shit for five minutes to get everything he knows out of him.’

Even under the balaclava David could tell the big guy was smiling.

He wasn’t having Tasha, though. Whatever he’d done in the past, David couldn’t leave her to these men.

He flew across the kitchen, slammed the door to the hall closed and stood in front of it. ‘You’re not taking her. She’s my daughter, and she’s staying with me.’

The man barked out a laugh. ‘Isn’t it a bit late to think of protecting your girl, Joseph? And she’s not yours now – she’s ours. One of us. She’s let us down, but she’ll take her punishment. Now shift out of the fucking way before you get hurt.’

The big guy watched his boss, waiting for the nod. It wasn’t long coming.

David knew long before the first blow hit him square in the centre of his gut that he couldn’t win this battle. But maybe when Tasha realised how hard he had fought for her, she would finally know how much he loved her.

He lashed out at the big man in front of him with his fist, but it was like hitting a wall. Then he felt the second blow to the side of his head, and he crumpled to his knees. He was hauled back to his feet and propped up against the door. The big man transferred the iron bar to his right hand, and the third strike came – up, under his chin, shattering his jaw. He felt the fourth as his cheekbone disintegrated.

David never felt the fifth.

58

Emma’s heart pounded.
What was happening? Who was this? Why was this man in the vault with her?
Pinpricks of fear rose from every inch of her skin as the man’s body pressed her hard against the wall of cold steel. From the strength of the arms and the wide, solid chest pressed against her back she knew it was a man. His thighs pinned hers in place, and her arms were trapped against her body. She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe.

Maybe some down-and-out had followed her into the building from the street. She had left the doors open as instructed.
He’s going to rape me
. She breathed in through her nose, sniffing the hand covering her mouth. There was no smell of stale body, just the smell of a clean man.

His left hand still clamped tightly over her mouth, he grabbed the drill from her with his right, and pressed the trigger.

He’s going to kill me
.

She couldn’t see what he was doing, she could just hear the drill, so close to her head.

She heard the first pin of the lock break.
What was he doing?

Very gently against her ear she felt, rather than heard his words – they were merely breaths with shape, and she knew no phone anywhere would pick them up.

‘This would be a whole lot easier if I could let you go.’ The words had so little substance or form that she couldn’t be certain that was what he had said.

He gradually relaxed his weight against her so she could move back a little. She turned her head slightly, and he brought his forwards to rest next to hers on the shiny surface of the locked boxes. Her head torch had been knocked upwards as she was pushed against the wall, so it didn’t shine directly at him, but there was enough reflected light to see that the man wore a mask covering his head, his face. There was no more than a gash where the mouth should be, and a slit for the eyes – eyes that were looking straight into hers, a hypnotic electric-blue.

She barely stifled a gasp as the steely expression communicated its message:
I’m here to help
.

Finally, he let her go completely, his eyes never leaving hers, waiting to see her reaction.

She shook her head slowly from side to side, returning his gaze. She wanted to shout, scream, hit this man with the last remnants of strength in her body. But she was here for Ollie.

He looked down at the drill in his hand, and he pointed to the phone in her pocket.

‘Speak,’ he mouthed.

‘Stupid, fucking drill,’ she muttered, noticing a flicker of a smile through the slit in the mask, and imagining for a second the relief Tom would feel at hearing her after the brief silence.