Another burst of wind and cold rain pushed itself under her umbrella as she surveyed the street and she dropped it back down against the oncoming bluster and picked up her pace.
Soon she had turned off this road and into more residential one; fewer lights here, more shadows. The wind barrelled down at her along the high narrow channel created by the terraced houses on each side and she dropped the umbrella lower again and kept on, pushing against the wind.
From behind, a car slid past and the horn sounded a short sharp blast and three young men whooped and wolf-whistled at her through the window. She ignored them and breathed deeply trying to settle the surge of adrenaline in her chest that the shock had brought. Wankers, she thought as the car rounded the corner at the end of the street ahead of her.
She didn’t really hear the sound of a car door opening then. The footsteps she heard were just footsteps and though on edge she wasn’t about to jump at every sound she heard and start imagining rapists and killers out of the shadows.
She definitely felt the thick arm wrap around her chest though and the big hand close solidly over her mouth before any sound could escape. And she certainly felt the ground disappear from beneath her feet as she was plucked from the pavement and stuffed into the black back seat of the car.
Her face was pressed into the stale smelling fabric of the seat and the crushing weight of the body on top of her pinned her utterly motionless where she lay. The adrenaline already in her veins served only to heighten the rising, suffocating panic she felt as the engine tone rose and the car began to move.
Somewhere, less than a mile away through the rain, a phone would soon ring in George Gresham’s home. He would be told, as he tried to blink away the sleep from his eyes, that his debt would be paid and that to make sure he was adequately motivated he would not be hearing from his only daughter for some time since she would be unable to speak properly through the rag in her mouth.
40
Thursday. 11.30pm.
The fire was dying now and there were only two small logs in the basket, hot orange embers glowing in the grate. The two of them shared a sofa, Campbell sunk low in the corner against the arm with his legs thrust out across the rug toward the hearth. Sarah sat at the other end with her legs curled up beneath her and a glass in her hand. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail and she wore jeans and a white scoop-necked t-shirt.
Outside, the blustery afternoon had worsened into a stormy evening. They had listened as the wind picked up and the rain went from a pattering on the windows to a rattle against the glass to a full-blown hammering on the roof tiles above them. The wind whistled loudly and the windows and doors rumbled every so often as they shook in their frames.
The wine and the food had relaxed them both immensely and Campbell drew himself up to place the last logs onto the fire. He arranged the wood on the embers and shifted them with the poker to let air in underneath until the flames were jumping up beneath the logs. He stood, slowly and stiffly and moved back to the sofa where Sarah sat staring into space.
‘How the hell are you going to pull this off then? I mean, how are you going to get hold of a senior member of HM government? You don’t just pop in to the office in Whitehall and ask if he can spare five minutes.’
Campbell looked back at her for a long moment. ‘I realise that,’ he said.
‘And what are you going to say? How on earth are you going to make him listen to you or even believe you?’
‘I know Sarah,’ he said running a hand through his short hair and shaking his head. ‘I know. Its impossible. I don’t even have any proof really, just a lot of connections. Some of them pretty tenuous at that. I just have no idea. Need to think this through.’
‘You need to be sure.’
‘That too,’ he said but looked her in the eye. ‘Do you…?’
‘What?’
‘Believe me? Are you sure?’
‘It’s the most preposterous thing I’ve heard in my life,’ she replied, holding his gaze. ‘But I do believe you. How can I not? It’s too preposterous not to be true.’
Campbell plopped himself back down on the sofa next to her and smiled wearily. ‘I think the phrase is ‘damned with faint praise.’
‘I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with your conclusions and certainly not your methods,’ she said taking a sip of wine. ‘I just mean that the whole idea is crazy and seems even more insane because we’re involved in it. A few days ago I was up to my eyeballs in filing bloody paperwork. And now…’
Her words trailed off and Campbell noted the expression on her face.
‘I’ve just remembered something.’
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Well, like I said, a few days ago I was sorting paperwork. Griffin asked me to go and sort through the paper archive to see if anything had been taken from there in the break in but it hadn’t been touched. Anyway, it’s a boring job you know, just making sure paperwork is all still there and in order. Especially when its all years old and you don’t recognise the names and the information and so on. So your eyes wander.’
Campbell nodded.
‘Well I saw a few things that probably tie in with what you were saying earlier.’
‘Really?’ Campbell felt both relieved and excited at the same time to hear some corroboration of his theory.
Sarah was staring up at the ceiling, her hand over her mouth. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. What you were saying about things getting shifted around before final delivery in Liberia? Well I saw records relating to goods shipments being delivered to Tunisia. Then right next to it there was some contract note for a different carrier, moving the same stuff from Tunisia on to Guinea. We didn’t actually ship it ourselves but we sub-contracted someone to do it for us. It didn’t seem strange at the time I saw it; that’s not unusual for us. Sometimes it’s easier to use established local firms. We’d done the main job of getting it onto the continent so after that we sometimes use other companies to do the next bit.’
‘Where does Guinea come in?’ asked Campbell eagerly.
She grabbed a map from the papers on the table and showed him. ‘Guinea is right next door to Sierra Leone. It shares a border with Liberia too.’
‘You sure? You saw all this in the records there?’
‘Yep! That’s straight from the bloody horse’s mouth Daniel.’
Campbell nodded but said nothing. If he felt vindicated by what Sarah had said, he certainly didn’t feel all that pleased about it. In fact, Campbell realised, despite all the evidence he had uncovered, he was still wishing that he was wrong.
Another hard gust of wind banged against the walls and rattled the panes. And then there came a distant but unmistakable sound of glass breaking from somewhere outside.
Campbell was upright in an instant, the wine almost spilling from his hand.
‘What the hell?’ Sarah mumbled and the two of them stared in the direction of the door and the yard beyond. ‘Probably a fox in the rubbish bins or something,’ she offered uncertainly.
‘Mmmn. Probably,’ he replied but stood up instead of sitting again. ‘I’ll just check it out. Breaking glass makes me nervous.’
She made to speak but remained silent and he was moving quickly across to the door, stepping into his shoes and shrugging his shoulders into his jacket.
Cold, wet air swept into the room and Sarah padded across to the door as Campbell stepped out into the gloom, her hands drawn up around her against the chill. Pushing the door closed until there was only a crack a few inches wide she peered into the night after him but he was out of sight quickly amid the darkness and the swirling rain. As she strained her eyes there was a sudden bright strobe-flash of lightning almost instantly followed by a sharp, loud crack of thunder. For a moment she thought she caught sight of a leg trailing around the corner of the cottage but the flash was startling and the image was gone as quickly as she had seen it.