'Run!' he whispered urgently to Angela. 'Run. Get away from here.' He pointed towards a side-street. 'Down there, as fast as you can.'
Angela glanced behind her, saw the approaching men for the first time and took to her heels.
Bronson span round to face the group, but tried to stand his ground, walking steadily backwards to provide a measure of protection for Angela. He looked behind him, and saw that she had reached the corner of the sidestreet and was starting to run down it. He turned on his heels to follow her, but at that moment the approaching men themselves began to run, and in seconds they had caught up with him.
He felt a sudden tug on his shoulder as somebody grabbed at him, and tried to spin round to face his attackers. Then two blows crashed into the back of his head. He lost his balance and fell forward, his body collapsing limply to the potholed pavement.
The last thing he heard before his consciousness fled was a single distant scream from Angela as she called out his name.
Part Two
England
37
One of the first things Kirsty Philips did when she arrived back in Britain and had finished unpacking was to drive round to her parents' house. While they'd been away in Morocco, she'd been doing that once every couple of days to check the house, make sure the indoor plants were watered, pick up the mail, check their answerphone messages and generally ensure that the place was in good order.
That morning, she parked her Volkswagen Golf in the driveway of the small detached house in a quiet street on the western outskirts of the city, took out her keys and opened the front door. As usual, there was a pile of envelopes lying on the mat, most of them clearly junk mail of various sorts. She picked them up and carried them through to the kitchen, where she placed them with others that had accumulated since her parents had left the house for what she now knew had been the last time. Her eyes misted at that thought, but she pushed her sorrow aside and began her usual walk-round of the property, inspecting all the rooms one after the other. The last thing she did was go into the lounge and check the answerphone, but there were no messages on it.
She pulled open the door to the hall and immediately came face to face with a man she'd never seen before.
He had a dark-brown complexion and was tall and slim, but strongly built. In his right hand he was carrying a long black tool of some kind, perhaps a crowbar. He looked almost as surprised to see her as she was to confront him.
The intruder recovered first. He swung the crowbar round in a short, vicious arc, the tempered steel bar smashing into the left side of Kirsty's face, fracturing her cheekbone and cracking the side of her skull. It was a killing blow. She felt an instant of shocking, numbing pain, then tumbled sideways, knocked unconscious by the force of the impact. She fell limply on to the carpet, blood pouring from the side of her face where the skin had been brutally torn apart. But that wasn't what killed her.
The major damage was internal, half a dozen blood vessels in her brain ripped apart by the splinters of broken bone. Shards of the same fractured bone had been driven deep into her cerebrum, causing irreparable damage. She was still breathing as she lay there, but effectively she was already dead.
The man looked down at her for a long moment, then stepped over her body and continued walking towards the front door. He'd heard no noise from inside the house before he'd forced the side door, and had assumed that the car he'd seen parked on the drive had belonged to the O'Connors – an assumption he now realized had been erroneous.
He glanced round, saw no sign of any mail, and retraced his steps to the kitchen. He'd have to check each room in turn until he found the package.
On the kitchen table, he saw the post stacked neatly on one side and began searching through it. There was no sign of the envelope he was looking for, so perhaps his boss's deduction had been wrong.
For perhaps a minute he stood irresolute, wondering what he should do next. Who the young woman was he had no idea – a neighbour, a cleaner, perhaps – and already he was beginning to regret hitting her quite so hard. Should he try to shift the body, get it out of the house and dump it somewhere? Then he rejected that idea. He didn't know the area very well, and the risk of being seen carrying her out of the house – or being stopped by a police officer with her corpse in the car – was too great.
He opened the door, glanced around him, and walked away.
38
Bronson was aware of a throbbing ache at the back of his skull as consciousness returned slowly. Instinctively he raised his hand to his head. Or rather he tried to, but his arm wouldn't move. He couldn't move either arm, in fact, which puzzled him. Nor his feet. There were stabbing pains in his wrists and ankles, and a dull ache down the left side of his chest. He opened his eyes, but could see nothing in front of him. Everything was completely black. For a few seconds he had no recollection of what had happened to him, and then he slowly started to remember.
'Oh, shit,' he muttered.
'Chris? Thank God.' The voice came from out of the darkness, somewhere over to his left.
'Angela? Where the hell are we? Are you OK?'
'I don't know. Where we are, I mean. And I'm fine, apart from being tied up in this bloody chair, that is.'
'Why can't I see anything?'
'We're in a cellar and the bastards turned the lights out once they'd tied us up.'
'But what happened? All I can remember is something hitting me on the back of the head.'
'I was running down the street and I turned back to see what was happening just as one of the men grabbed you and another swung a cosh or something. You dropped like a stone and for a few seconds I was certain you were dead. I ran back to—'
'You should have run on, Angela. There was nothing you could have done.'
'I know, I know.' Angela sighed. 'And it's my fault we're here. I shouldn't have insisted we go outside. And then when I saw you were hurt, all I wanted to do was try to help.'
'Well, thanks for trying, but it would have been better if you'd got away, because then you could have called the police. Then what did they do?'
'It was very slick. Two of the men grabbed me and stuck a gag over my mouth – I was yelling my head off – and then they bundled me into the back of the white van that had stopped a few yards up the road. They tied my wrists and ankles with some kind of thin plastic device—'
'Probably cable ties,' Bronson interrupted. 'They're virtually unbreakable.'
'Then three more men picked you up and dragged you over to the van and tossed you inside.'
That probably explained the ache in his chest, Bronson thought.
'They all climbed into the back of the van and tied you up the same as me as soon as it started moving. It drove for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, then stopped and reversed. When the doors opened, all I could see was the whitewashed wall of a house, and then I was carried out, through a doorway and down a set of steps into this bloody cellar. There were two upright chairs down here. They tied me to one of them, while another couple of men dragged you down here and repeated the process. Then they turned out the lights and buggered off. I've been sitting here in the dark ever since. It's been hours.' There was a pause. 'I'm so sorry, Chris.'
Bronson wasn't surprised to hear a quaver in her voice. Angela was tough – he knew that only too well – but he could understand how traumatized she must have been by the events of the evening, especially if she was blaming herself for what had happened.