The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [10]
Police have issued a description of the driver. “The car was hijacked minutes before it collected Connie from her hotel,” said Dan Fry. He confirmed that Reuters have issued tougher guidelines to their correspondents. “In future, no one should assume a vehicle is safe,” he warned. “It’s easy to become complacent when you’ve been a passenger in the same car several times.”
He refused to give further details of Connie Burns’s captivity. “At the moment her primary concern is for Adelina Bianca. Connie is determined to say and do nothing that might jeopardize Adelina’s release.”
The armed group holding Ms. Bianca issued the following statement. “The fate of Adelina Bianca will be decided by the Prime Minister of Italy. While he gives sustenance to American soldiers to occupy the sacred land of Iraq, the mothers of his country will receive only coffins from us. The dignity of Muslim men and women is not redeemed except by blood and souls.”
It is now over a week since Adelina was taken hostage, but the passing of Monday’s deadline for her execution offers a glimmer of hope. There is considerable concern among moderate Iraqi religious leaders that the escalating brutality of hostage-takers is further damaging Islam in the eyes of the world. “Islam does not wage war on innocent women and children,” said one. “In face of these atrocities, the shocking abuse at Abu Ghraib prison is being forgotten. These groups are handing the moral victory to America.”
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3
I WATCHED ADELINA’S release on the television in my parents’ flat after the crowd of reporters and photographers who’d thronged their road finally departed. By that time, a week after I’d left Baghdad, my own story was dead. I’d eluded the Reuters welcoming committee at Heathrow, failed to show up for a press conference and buried myself in an anonymous hotel in London as Marianne Curran—an agoraphobic woman with no appetite and frequent nosebleeds, who never left her room, and whose stay was paid for in cash by the sugar daddy who visited her every evening.
God knows what the hotel made of me. The only request I made of them was the address and telephone number of the nearest STD clinic. Otherwise, I wouldn’t let the chambermaids into the room, smoked like a chimney, spent hours in the bath and ate only when my father ordered sandwiches on room service. I put on a good show for him whenever he appeared, but I could see it concerned him that I only ate crumbs.
The story I gave him for my refusal to meet the press was the same as Dan had offered in Baghdad: I didn’t want to speak publicly about my captivity for fear of jeopardizing Adelina’s chances. For his private peace of mind, I told him I’d been blindfolded throughout and had never seen my captors, but had been treated reasonably despite being terrified.
I don’t know if he believed me. My mother certainly didn’t when he smuggled me into the flat at three o’clock one morning. She was shocked at how much weight I’d lost, worried by my preference for darkened rooms and deeply suspicious of my refusal to talk to anyone, particularly Dan Fry in Baghdad and Reuters in London. However, as I locked myself in the spare bedroom every time she tried to question me, my father put pressure on her to let me deal with things in my own way.
Adelina Bianca was my single excuse. As long as she remained in captivity I had a reason for keeping quiet, so it was with mixed emotions that I watched her uncertain steps on television as she emerged from a mosque in Baghdad, dressed in a heavy black chador. Beside her was the imam who had negotiated her freedom. She was so hidden beneath the veil that I couldn’t read anything from her face, but her voice was strong as she thanked everyone who’d helped her. She denied that the