A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [132]
‘Don’t go yet,’ she pleaded with them, going up to the bars and holding on to them because her legs felt as if they would give way. ‘Just tell me why. What have I done?’ she asked, and tears ran down her cheeks.
She saw no sympathy in Del’s face, just the desire to get back in the car and go. But Martin looked uncomfortable.
‘There’s some water and a blanket.’ He pointed to the corner of the cage.
‘Don’t do this,’ she cried out. ‘My parents will lean on the police once they know I’m missing. I work for a solicitor, I’m not someone that can just vanish without anyone worrying!’
‘You talk too much,’ Del replied, looking at her dispassionately. ‘Come on, Mart. Let’s go.’
She screamed then, so loud she felt she could be heard for miles around. But it made no difference to them. They walked off, slamming the barn door behind them, and she heard the clank of the chain as they locked the padlock.
A few seconds later she heard the car drive off.
She didn’t scream any more, she knew only too well there was no one to hear, and if she kept quiet, if someone did come by she’d hear them. But she couldn’t stop herself crying, or cursing herself for the stupidity of getting into a car with people she didn’t know.
By ten o’clock Fifi had gone right round the cage inspecting it, but found no weak spot in the bars or any implement which might help to free her. She thought the cage had been made for securing valuable merchandise, perhaps spirits, in a warehouse. It was constructed of steel, with a slightly raised wooden floor, and far too tough to break or bend. It was some ten feet square, and there were track marks to it from the barn door, which suggested a forklift had been used to place it here. It couldn’t have been here long either, for there were no spider’s webs or dust on it.
She had nothing remotely useful in her handbag; she’d already tried to pick the padlock with her nail file and the end had broken off. She didn’t even have a book or a newspaper to pass the time with.
The barn was very big, taller than a double-decker bus, and gloomy because the only light came from horizontal narrow windows right up by the roof. There was enough space for dozens of tractors or other farm machinery, but the absence of anything, even rubbish, suggested it had been cleared out fairly recently and hadn’t been used for anything since.
The mattress and the blanket on it were in good condition, dry to the touch and clean-smelling, as if they had only recently been brought here from someone’s home. That at least suggested that whoever was behind her abduction wasn’t entirely inhuman, but it might also mean he was intending to keep her here for some time.
Fifi sat down on the mattress and tried to think how long it would be before someone got anxious about her. At the office they wouldn’t do anything. They couldn’t phone her home, and as they didn’t know Dan had left her, there was no reason why they’d find her absence anything more than irritating. Frank would wonder where she was when she didn’t come home tonight, but it would be a couple of days before he found it worrying. Miss Diamond would be the same.
All Fifi could hope for was that Dan would get the letter she sent and go round to the flat. But he’d most likely think that she’d gone out straight from work with one of the girls from the office. Would he wait for her to come home? And if he did, might he think she was spending the night with another man?
Frank might tell him about the men calling this morning! He’d smell a rat at that, surely?
She sighed deeply as she realized they had almost certainly lied about that. If they meant her harm they wouldn’t have presented themselves to a neighbour who could later identify them. They’d probably just waited in their car at the end of the road until they saw her.
However she looked at it, no one was going to be worried about her for at least two days, possibly longer. And even then, how would