Private London - James Patterson [16]
She finally made it to the entrance and closed the door firmly behind her. The noise thankfully muted as she walked up the steps leading to the quad above. The cool night air clearing her head a little. Her friends’ raucous singing, some distance ahead of her now, was echoing loudly around the quad. No doubt setting the ghost of the Cardinal spinning in his grave.
‘Hang on. Wait for me,’ Chloe called out, but her voice was hoarse now from all the shouting she’d done in the bar and her friends showed no sign of having heard her. She shook her head a little to clear the vodka cobwebs from her brain and quickened her pace as she climbed the stone steps. She was glad at least that she didn’t have high heels on. At five foot ten she didn’t need them. In the main men didn’t like her towering over them – she had found that out at fifteen years old when she was the same height as she was now.
Out on the quad she could see her two friends turning right into one of the passages that linked the warren of buildings. Chloe stumbled a little as she started to run to catch up with them and had to take a moment to steady herself. But she soon came up to the turning and moved quickly round the corner. It was darker as the lights from the quad fell behind her. The lane dog-legged after a few yards and cut off the lights from the college quad entirely. One of the Victorian street lamps that dotted the lanes in seemingly random fashion was out at the elbow of the bend. Chloe looked up at it unhappily. The university had a duty to keep the area lit. The tall buildings on either side of the narrow street made it darker than it would otherwise have been. A muffled scream ahead snapped Chloe out of her thoughts, sobering her in an instant. She charged round the next corner, breathing quickly to pump some oxygen into her blood.
Ahead of her was a group of five hooded and dark-clothed men, three of whom had grabbed her friends. Two had hold of Laura and one had a chokehold on Hannah. The remaining two were leaning against a black van.
‘Let them go, you bastards,’ Chloe tried to scream, but her voice came out in a hoarse, painful croak again. Adrenalin kicked in. She ran towards them. One of the men turned to face her. A disdainful sneer on his lips, although she couldn’t see his eyes that were shaded by the hood he was wearing. She kicked him hard in the groin and the sneer vanished as he crumpled, groaning, to to the ground.
She felt an arm pulling her back and she spun round, knocking the arm away, spearing a hard fist into her assailant’s sternum and then uppercutting him as he doubled forward. But she was sluggish, far more sluggish than she should have been. The uppercut was off target, and the man moved aside so that her punch only grazed the side of his head. He snapped a blow straight back at her. But Chloe had anticipated it – she stepped inside his swing, grabbing his arm and using the momentum of the missed punch to pull him forward towards her. She lowered her head as she did so and smashed her forehead into the bridge of his nose. There was a satisfying crunch of cartilage. The man squealed like a stuck pig and dropped to his knees, hands cradling his wrecked nose that was now spilling blood.
Chloe breathed deeply and turned towards the van. Two of the remaining three men moved towards her – more cautiously than their colleagues had. One of them holding Laura tight to his body with a muscular arm wrapped around her. She saw the flash of steel as that man pulled a long-bladed knife from his jacket, watched Hannah stumble, heard a scream. Laura fell down and was yanked rudely up.
‘What do you want?’ Chloe shouted at the men, holding her hands forward ready to strike.
‘Just leave now and you