The right filter light turns green and I accelerate smoothly across the dual carriageway. He’s moved the gun away now, I can’t feel it jabbing through the back of my seat. I run through the possibilities. We’re heading north-west, away from central London. At some point soon we’ll have to stop, to get out again. If there are more people around then, all I have to do is get him to draw the pistol, to show it. One witness calling 999 will bring an immediate armed response from the Met.
Unless he is taking us somewhere remote. Somewhere without witnesses.
I shiver, wondering again if he’s less likely to shoot while we’re moving in traffic, or if he’s deranged enough to do it anyway. It’s better to act sooner, before he can completely control the situation. As if in answer to my prayers, a police car pulls up at the lights opposite us across a box junction. Two officers in front, a man and a woman in high-vis gear. My pulse ticks upwards. I could flash the headlights at them, get their attention. Maybe they would follow us, pull us over. Or I could turn across the junction, right across their path. I could hit the gas and just aim the BMW at them—
‘I know what you’re thinking.’ His deep voice is inches from my ear. ‘And if you so much as give those cops a funny look, the first bullet will blow your spine clean through your chest. Are we clear?’
From behind me comes the unmistakeableclickof the pistol being cocked, the blunt steel barrel pushing again into the small of my back. I tear my eyes away from the police car and look down. Rocked gently by the motion of the car, Mia is dozing again, oblivious, her head resting against my chest.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We’re clear.’
The light turns green and I pull smoothly away.
8
We drive in silence for about fifteen minutes before he directs me off the main road and onto a leafy suburban street. He gets out and opens my door and for a moment I consider running, shouting, trying to get away, but even if I could push past him there’s no way I can outrun him with Mia strapped to my chest. Instead we switch places quickly, as he watches for passers-by with one hand on the butt of the pistol, before pushing me into the back.
‘Now lie down,’ he says. ‘Flat, along the seat. And keep your eyes shut.’
I lie down slowly across the back seat using both hands to cushion Mia’s body against mine. The baby snuffles but doesn’t wake.
‘Where are you taking us?’
‘And stop bloody talking.’
Lying here is uncomfortable, and I have to fold my legs behind the passenger seat, supporting Mia’s head to make sure she isn’t bumped or startled by the sharp turns and hard acceleration of the BMW now that the man is behind the wheel. The baby sleeps on, oblivious. We’re almost face to face, so close I can feel her little warm breaths on my skin. I feel my heart filling again, overflowing with a fierce love, an all-consuming desire to shield her from harm.
This is what Kathryn was trying to protect her baby from. This man. This danger. Dominic.
But he’s found us anyway. And it seems clear to me that his interest is the baby: if he can’t punish his ex, he will take out his anger on what she loves the most. The only reason he’s taken us both is because he couldn’t quickly separate us on St George Street. And now I’m a witness, a loose end, someone who could identify him, his car, his movements.
But the realisation brings no fear with it, only a grim certainty that I have no one else to rely on. I have to get myself – and Mia – out of this situation.Think. I can smell worn black plastic seats. Oil and dirt and fried food. Something else, dark and earthy. I open my eyes a fraction and can make out street lights and trees upright against the grey London sky. The upper floors of office buildings. Moving more quickly than before, but still stopping and starting with traffic and red lights. I can see Dominic’s profile, the angle of his jaw, a trace of dried blood behind his ear. I can’t shake the feeling that there is something else familiar about him, but not from today, not from the train. Something about his face, like someone I had seen or known a long time ago. From an old job? Or had I seen him on the TV or a news story online?
I look in the footwell for anything I can use as a weapon. An empty coke can, a bottle opener, a thick AA map book. Underneath the book is a glimpse of white. Slowly, carefully, I reach down and push the map book out of the way. Beneath it is a white phone charging cable. I stretch out my hand towards it and manage to grasp the end in my fingers. If I could somehow loop that around his headrest, around his neck, and pull tight enough he would have to stop the car and if I can keep the pressure on—
‘Keep your hands where I can see them,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘And keep your eyesshut, like I told you.’
I drop the cable onto the floor and return my hand to the back of the sling.
I count sets of sixty in my head as we drive; I’ve counted fifteen minutes when I feel the car slowing to a stop. I hear Dominic’s door open, the creaking of metal on metal, then the slam as he gets back in. The car moving off, more slowly this time, taking a series of turns close together and then a long slow loop. From my position, flat on the back seat, I can see the top of a roof, a large building, industrial grey, streaked with dirt and green stains reaching down from the roof line.
Finally, Dominic kills the engine and gestures at me to sit up. We’re in a large car park but there isn’t a single other vehicle: hundreds of spaces, all empty, just drifts of leaves and plastic bags and other rubbish stirred gently by the early evening breeze. We’re parked close to the back door of a large high-sided building with no windows, some kind of warehouse, three or four storeys high. It looks abandoned.
‘What is this place?’
As soon as I shuffle out of my seat and climb out of the car, he reaches up and puts some kind of hood over my head. My world goes dark, the cool afternoon air replaced with a reek of dirt and body odour. Something else too, coppery and sharp. His strong grip encircles my upper arm and pulls me forward, Mia’s head still just visible through a gap at the bottom of the hood, glimpses of cracked concrete and paving slabs beneath my shuffling feet. The squeal of rusted hinges as a door opens, closes, a change in the atmosphere. A smell of neglect, of wet carpet and rot, stale air and decay, dark carpet tiles under my feet as we move into the building. Sounds are muffled because of the hood but I can hear the soft padding of our footsteps echoing back to us in the silence. Dominic leads me straight on before pulling me into a left turn, then a right, until I feel him pause.
‘Stairs,’ he says.
I take them slowly, one hand groping for a banister rail and the other around Mia’s back in case I stumble, the echo of our shoes tapping back to us against a roof some way above. We turn left at the top of the stairs, another long corridor that smells strongly of damp and mouldering carpet. The flat tapping sound of dripping water. There is another left turn and then he pulls me through a door and slams it shut, the solidclickof a lock turning.
He pulls me forward again, turns me until my legs are backed up against something.
‘Sit.’
I sit back slowly onto something spongy and uneven. I can hear him moving around, putting things down, the click of a light switch. Through the bottom of the hood I can see Mia’s peaceful face as she dozes, her head lolling against the baby harness. Then, without warning, Dominic rips the hood from my head and I blink in the sudden brightness. I’m on a stained orange sofa in a large room, the opposite wall made up entirely of glass. The place is – or was – a meeting room of some kind, with a long table in the centre surrounded by orange chairs. Orange fabric sofas against three walls. Above us, circling the room, are poster-sized caricatures of men and women, orange tans and shoulder pads and huge exaggerated grins. Some tattered and ripped, others merely faded with time. A few of the faces look vaguely familiar. Actors? Game show hosts? The whole place has a 1980s faded showbiz feel to it, a sense of former glories long past. It’s a mess, strewn with belongings: clothes, plastic bags, sheets of paper. There’s an old sofa in the corner with a sleeping bag on it, a small camping stove on the floor beside it with tins of food. Dominic is clearing a space at the end of the long meeting table.
‘Put the baby on the sofa over there,’ he says without looking at me.
