She said nothing.
‘Because you spent the evening sitting in a corner of the saloon bar of the Railway Tavern, in Didcot, waiting for a telephone call to tell you when you could walk home. The landlord remembers you very well because you only bought one soft drink the whole evening and didn’t talk to anyone. He told me that he’d felt sorry for you and thought you might have been there to get away from an abusive partner, so he didn’t ask you to leave.
‘And then, just before closing time, he answered an incoming call for you on his landline. That was because you had left your own mobile phone behind at the flat, so that it couldn’t be used to trace where you were, just as you had done on the night of the party. The pub landlord said you called yourself Elizabeth, but he recognised you all right from this picture.’
I held up my mobile phone with Amanda’s smiling face showing on the screen — a photo I’d taken the previous Christmas Day.
‘You even told me that the van smelled of dogs, just to try and confuse the issue. I bet you and Darren had a good laugh about that.’
‘I knew nothing about it,’ Darren said.
I didn’t believe him.
Amanda was now openly crying and hanging her head in shame, as well she might, considering the terror and distress she had caused her mother and me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said between sobs.
‘So who rang you at the Railway Tavern?’ I asked. ‘Was it Darren?’
She shook her head without looking up. ‘It was Gary. The whole thing was his idea.’
‘Shut up!’ Gary shouted at her. ‘You stupid little bitch!’
He leapt up from his seat and tried to hit her, but I took a step forward to stop him, grabbing his raised wrist before he could bring his hand down on her.
‘Don’t you dare touch my daughter, you little shit.’
He wrenched himself free from my grasp and then reached into his jacket pocket. When he pulled his hand out again, there was a flash of reflected light — the hand now held a knife.
‘Don’t be stupid, Gary,’ I said, shocked at this sudden escalation. ‘Put the knife away.’
But from his angry demeanour, it was quite clear that he had no intention of putting the knife away.
Anger plus a knife.
Together they made for a very dangerous combination.
Chapter 34
My carefully constructed plan was unravelling, and doing so very quickly.
I had fully expected the four youngsters to admit to their collective foolishness, to be full of remorse, and then for Patrick Hogg, KC, to explain how they could try and prevent themselves being sent to prison for fraud.
But I had not accounted for Gary’s explosive temper, or his knife, and we had suddenly gone way beyond that.
Holding the knife in his right hand, he went behind Amanda, wrapped his left arm around her from behind, and lifted her over the back of the sofa into a standing position. And he had the blade of his knife against her throat.
James stood up.
‘Sit down,’ Gary screamed at him.
‘Come on, Gary,’ James said, still standing. ‘Stop it. Let Amanda go.’
But Gary took no notice of his friend. And he was now looking somewhat manic, with the whites of his eyes showing large. I was worried that he had lost all reason and was about to do something really reckless.
Amanda whimpered, her eyes also wide, but in her case from terror.
‘It’s all right, darling,’ I said, looking straight at her in the hope that she might even believe me. ‘Just stay calm and do what he says. Make no sudden moves.’
She stared back at me, but with a mixture of understanding and sorrow.
I wondered why she had become mixed up in all of this.
Georgina, meanwhile, was moaning and hyperventilating, by now almost lying horizontally across the sofa.
Patrick Hogg, who had so far said nothing, seemed the calmest of us all.
‘The maximum sentence for wounding with intent is life imprisonment,’ he said slowly. ‘And under English law, wounding means simply to break the skin, even with the slightest of cuts.’
The prospect of a long prison sentence didn’t seem to have any deterrent effect on Gary, who went on holding Amanda, and his knife remained precariously close to her neck.
‘I’m leaving now,’ he said, backing towards the door. ‘And I’m taking Amanda with me. So don’t try and stop me.’
‘The maximum sentence for false imprisonment is also life,’ Patrick said, almost matter-of-factly.
‘Shut up!’ Gary shouted at him.
‘I’m only telling you what will happen to you if you leave this room. Where would you go? Do you think your parents might help you? I doubt it. If my son had kidnapped someone at knifepoint, I’d immediately turn him into the police. What do you think that would do to your parents? And to any future relationship for you with them?’
‘Shut up!’ Gary yelled at him again.
But Patrick went on talking to him, slowly and distinctly and without emotion, as I imagine he often did to a jury.
‘The law is very unforgiving,’ he said. ‘Trust me — I know. I’ve been working in the courts for almost thirty years. If you walk out of here now, the police will find you, and because you are armed, they will come hunting for you with guns. And they won’t stop looking until they either arrest you or kill you. So put the knife down, Gary, and let Amanda go.’
It sounded like very reasonable advice to me, but Gary was having none of it. He was clearly no longer in a fit state to process any logical thoughts. Instead, he continued to back up towards the door to the hall, pulling Amanda along with him.
‘Leave my girl alone,’ Darren said suddenly, standing up and moving purposefully towards them.
‘Get back!’ Gary shouted at him. ‘Or I’ll kill her.’ He moved the knife over her throat.
Darren took another step forward.
‘I mean it,’ Gary shouted, his manic eyes now wider than ever.
At that precise moment, none of us doubted him.
Darren stopped moving and stood still, about three feet away.
Gary inched backwards towards the closed door. He glanced down behind him, as if looking for the door handle.
As he moved his hand holding the knife down and backwards, away from Amanda’s neck, in order to open the door, Amanda abruptly sat down onto the floor, slipping out of Gary’s grasp.
As Gary bent down to grab her again, Darren leapt at him.
‘I told you to leave my girl alone,’ he shouted as he aimed a punch at Gary’s jaw.
But even as the blow landed, Gary’s right arm was already swinging round in an arc, and he stabbed Darren in the upper left abdomen, angling the knife up under his ribcage.
The whole thing had seemed to occur almost in slow motion, but there was nothing slow about the way blood started pouring out of the wound in Darren’s body.
Within seconds, the front of his white T-shirt was saturated bright red, and a steady stream was already cascading from it, down onto the wooden sitting-room floor.
Amanda screamed.
For a couple of seconds, Gary seemed transfixed by what he had done, staring down at the ever-increasing pool of scarlet liquid on the floor, but then he turned and ran, first out into the hall, then on out through the front door, leaving it wide open.
I rushed forward to where Darren had now sunk to his knees, with Amanda supporting him.