Ransom (18 page)

“Good luck! Wait for me - we mustn’t get separated - “

She had already put on her suit jacket. Her handbag was at her feet; she reached down in the darkness and snatched it up; even at that moment it struck her that she must be one of those women whose handbag was an inseparable part of her. She scrambled through the window, hitting her head on the raised glass, slipped on the sill and fell awkwardly into a pool of water and mud, grabbing at Sylvia as she did so. They both fell, Sylvia letting go of the shutters, which at

once slammed back against the side of the house with a crack like gunfire.

Lisa struggled up to her hands and knees, looked up into the lash of the rain. And instantly the darkness was gone; for a moment she thought she had been blown out of her mind. The whole side of the cottage sprang into sharp relief: the glistening, dripping white boards, the banging dark shutters like disembodied wings, the ragged, frantically-dancing bush at the corner. She saw the line of scrubby trees on the other side of the narrow driveway whipping back and forth in the onslaught of the wind, saw the fence that had been blown down; then the car or truck, she couldn’t see which, was almost on top of her, its horn blowing urgently and its headlights blazing at her like white furnaces. She scrambled to her feet, shouting to Sylvia to follow her, and plunged across the driveway and through the trees. She fell over the blown-down fence, hurting her knee, picked herself up and stumbled down the side of the cottage next door.

She kept going, her mind a blank, running with the instinctive urge to escape of a terrified animal. She had forgotten Sylvia; she was alone in the black tumult of the night. She ran into something, cracking her hip against it; grabbed at it and recognized it as a picket fence. She felt her way along it, came to an opening and stumbled through it. Then the ground gave way beneath her and she fell, her mouth wide open in a scream that was nothing in the fury of the storm. She landed heavily on her side, sank into soft mud, felt it close over her face. Oh God, God, don’t let me die!

She rolled over on her back, clawed the mud from her eyes and mouth, felt the rain washing it away. She got painfully back to her feet, trying now to accustom her eyes to the darkness. She looked around for Sylvia but there was no sign of her; which way had she gone, had she managed to get away at all ? Lisa could no longer see the car’s or truck’s headlights; they must have been switched off. But she caught a glimpse of the dancing firefly of a torch and she turned and stumbled away from it, making her way along the

trench or whatever it was she was in, one hand reaching out to the bank on her left. She was crying with fear and pain and exhaustion, but her legs carried her on of their own volition. She slipped and fell again, falling to her right. There was no bank there and, reaching out as she lay on the ground, she felt the mud give way to a hard surface. She must be on a road.

She stood up, stepped blindly on to the concrete surface of the roadway. Turning her face away from the wind and the rain, she could see a little more clearly now. It was not that the darkness had diminished, there now appeared to be varying degrees of it. She could make out no definite shapes, but there seemed to be houses on both sides of the street, all of them darkened; away in the distance, God knew how many miles away, she could see pin-points of light that came and went like cloud-swept stars. Then she saw the closer light, the flickering yellow eye of the torch as Abel came looking for her.

She turned and began to run again, straight into the wild surf of the storm this time. She came to a bend in the roadway, did not know she had reached it till she ran right off the concrete into a dip, fell again, picked herself up and saw the big dark shape ahead of her that must be a house. She stumbled up a slope towards it, lurching across long grass and up on to a wide porch. She fell against a door, beat on it with her fists, her head turned to look back over her shoulder as the yellow beam of the torch came bouncing down the roadway. She was screaming incoherently, hurling her fists against the door; they had smashed through the wire of the screen-door and were thumping on the timbers of the front door. But there was no answer: her pounding was echoing through an empty house.

She ran along the porch, plunged off the unseen end of it into a thick bush that scratched at her like a clutch of claws. As she picked herself up a sudden, extraordinarily strong gust of wind flung her back against the side of the house, cracking her head against the timbers. Dazed, she fell on

her knees again, ready now to surrender to the rain and the mud. The bush hid her from the roadway; the beam from the torch swept across the front of the house, then was gone. But she had not seen her good fortune. Blind with pain and exhaustion she half-lay, half-sat in the mud while the wind tore at her and the rain drove an army of lances at her.

Then in her clouded mind she remembered she had not been alone: she had to find Sylvia. Like an old crippled woman she forced herself up into the storm; driven by the wind, she almost ran down the slope into the roadway again. There was no sign of the torch; Abel might be as lost as herself in the wild black night. She had no idea which way to turn; help could lie in any direction. She stumbled up the road, trying to keep to the hard surface of it; another furious gust of wind hit her, sending her tumbling off into the mud. She picked herself up, looked up and saw the dim shape of a house and a smaller, darker shape beside it. She struggled up a driveway, the rain lashing against her face as if to drive her back. She fell against the smaller shape: it was a car. A car? She leaned against it, fighting for some memory that eluded her. What did the car mean? Then she remembered: they had come out here in a truck ! This house was someone else’s, someone was there only yards away who could help her!

Crying hysterically, she dragged herself up on to the front porch, stumbled along it, fell against the screen door. Somewhere she could hear a familiar sound, wood slamming against wood, but her mind was too confused for memories. She beat against the wire, breaking it, her frantic fists thudding through to pound against the front door. Then the door itself opened and she saw the dim shape in the opening.

She fell back as the man pushed open the screen door and reached down to take hold of her. “Oh, thank God you’re here! I’m-”

“Welcome back, Mrs Malone.”

“We may not be so lucky next time,” said Carole.

“There isn’t gonna be a fucking next time!” Then Abel swallowed his anger as he saw her stiffen. “Sorry, baby.”

“I’m not blaming you, honey - “

“Jesus! Blaming me?” The anger sprung up in him again. What was she talking about? Blaming him? “You go off, you stay away half the goddam night, you leave me here like I’m some fucking baby-sitter - !”

She hit him across the mouth with her hand. He raised his own hand to retaliate and she stood in front of him, her eyes cold and hard, daring him to hit her. “Hit me, you bastard, and that’s the end! I don’t need you - “

He slowly lowered his hand, shook his head dazedly at what he had almost done: if he had hit her he would have gone on hitting her until she was dead. His head suddenly began to ache and he slumped down in the chair behind him. “I’m sorry, baby. Don’t let’s fight - “

Still unmoving, she stared at him, wondering what to do with him. She was not ungrateful for what he had done so far; she knew she could not have kidnapped Sylvia Forte without him. But she did not need him from now on and the longer he stayed with her the more difficult it would be to get rid of him when the time came. But if she told him to go now … She had seen the look in his eyes, had recognized the danger sign that she had glimpsed before but had told herself was only her imagination. He was not insane, she was sure of that, but his anger would some day break out of him entirely and he would not be able to control it. She had seen the same look in the eyes of the policeman who had clubbed Roy to death.

She turned away from him, went out to the kitchen and began to make coffee. She took down a cup and saucer, hesitated, then took down three more cups and saucers. It

would be a simple means of letting him know that all four of them in this cottage were bound together, whether he liked it or not.

She felt rather than heard him come to the doorway, but she did not turn. “I’m making coffee.”

“For them, too?” She didn’t answer and after a moment he said, “Carole - I was worried, baby-Jesus, anything could’ve happened to you, you know?”

Without looking at him she said, “What would you have done with those women if something had happened to me?”

“I dunno.” Slightly reassured by her response, he came into the kitchen, slid on to one of the stools at the breakfast bar. He had changed out of his wet clothes, but his hair was not yet dry; sleeked back and down into his collar, it made him look a stranger. “Just left ‘em, I guess.”

“Left them here - not told anyone?”

“They’d have got away eventually. They just got away now, didn’t they?”

She turned round, sat on one of the stools opposite him. She and Mark used to sit here in the early hours of the morning, when each of them had come back from a party; the memory was too sudden and too sharp, she felt a catch in her throat. She could see the hurt look in Abel’s face, but she resisted the urge to be sympathetic. Mark was the important man in her life now, even if he could never be a real replacement for Roy.

“Abel, you’ve got to understand - nothing is absolutely cut and dried for us. I thought it was - I thought I had planned every little detail - but things have come up that I just could not anticipate. That, for instance.” She nodded at the curtained window; the rain beat like grapeshot against the shutters outside. “I heard on the car radio that they’ve closed all the airports between Washington and Boston.”

Concerned only with their own relationship, it took him a moment to realize the implication of what she had said. “What are we gonna do then- I mean if they can’t take those guys to Cuba?”

“I’ll - we’ll have to think about it.” She made a concession, let him think he might help in the decisions. The coffee had begun to percolate and she got up and turned down the burner. “There’s something else - someone named Frank Padua.”

“Who the f- ” He held back his tongue; he was still on edge. “Who the hell’s Frank Padua?”

“I don’t really know. He’s someone in politics, but what he is, I don’t know.” She looked for something to eat with the coffee; suddenly she was very hungry. She had hardly eaten all day, consumed as she had been by nervous excitement, but now she was ravenous. She saw the dirty dishes in the sink and the empty cans on the draining board. “I wish you’d clean up after yourself.”

“Baby, we’re gonna be gone from here tomorrow. Who cares?”

“/ do!” She rattled through the cans of food in the cupboards, her fingers thick and awkward with anger and nerves. Since the death of Roy she had not been able to handle close relationships, her capacity for tolerance and sympathy eroded by the bitter grief that was still part of her. It had taken her weeks to commit herself to Abel and she had only done so when she had finally decided he was necessary to the success of her scheme. A crisis in their relationship was something else she had not anticipated, but she knew now that, given the circumstances, it was one of the first things she should have planned for. She grabbed a can of chili con carne, fumbled with it at the can-opener mounted on the wall, swore savagely.

“Baby- ” He took the can from her, opened it expertly as he looked at her and shook his head reproachfully. “You wanna watch your language, you know?”

She took the can from him, emptied the contents into a saucepan. She said nothing till she had steadied herself, determined not to let him score any more points off her. “Have you fed the women?”

“No. Let them go hungry.”

She found two more cans of chili, opened them herself this time, and added the contents to that already in the saucepan. He watched her, then abruptly he wheeled round and went back into the living-room. She turned down the burner under the coffee as low as possible, began to stir the chili in the saucepan. She felt weak and exhausted and, suddenly for the first time, hopeless. Was it really worthwhile going through with the operation?

When she had driven up the driveway beside the cottage and seen the two women in the glare of the car’s headlights, it had been as if the night were gradually climbing to a climax of disaster. The journey back from Manhattan had been a nightmare, even on the almost deserted expressways and roads; and riding with her had been the nagging wonder at who Frank Padua really was and how he had become involved in the kidnapping. She had not planned against the interference of outsiders, but she should have known that nothing in life was ever self-contained. Her four years of isolation since Roy’s death had proved that. It had been one long struggle to remain alone: people offering friendship, asking for sympathy, some asserting authority. She had been stupidly naive to think outsiders would not interfere in such an affair as the kidnapping. The world was full of meddlers, all with their own excuses or motives.

She had switched on the car radio and heard the repeated news that all airports between Washington and Boston had been closed; depressed all of a sudden, she would not have been surprised if a car had appeared out of the driving rain and run into her. But she had reached home safely; only to find the culmination of the night’s misadventures right there in the rain-silvered beam of the headlights. She had been fortunate to catch Sylvia Forte before the latter could escape past her, flinging open the door of the car and knocking the Mayor’s wife to the ground. Abel, responding to her urgent blowing of the car horn, had come out of the cottage on the run, but too late to catch the Australian woman before she had disappeared into the darkness. When he had returned

to the cottage without Lisa Malone she was waiting for him, ready to leave the house and find somewhere else to hide. They had been arguing about where they should go when there had come the hammering at the front door.