The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [53]
8. Your mobile and laptop were stolen during your abduction. Therefore, any information stored on them—contact details of family and friends, notes/emails re the murders in Freetown and Baghdad—is available to your abductor(s).
9. You are now terrified that MacKenzie is looking for you.
At the risk of repeating myself, Connie, you know how to contact me if there’s anything you wish to add. I cannot force you to say anything. If I could, I would have done it when you returned to England.
I won’t pretend I can guarantee a positive result on a crime/crimes committed abroad but, if MacKenzie is as dangerous as you claim, there’s everything to be gained by trying. Not least for your sake. Fear of retribution is a powerful disincentive to speak out, but I hope you know by now that anything you say to me will be treated in confidence.
Kind regards as ever,
Alan
DI Alan Collins, Greater Manchester Police
10
IT WAS FRIGHTENING how quickly panic re-entered my life. My mother had thought I was angry when she asked if Jess might be her silent listener, but it was fear that made me shout at her, and asphyxia that made me slam the phone down. I knew exactly who her nuisance caller was. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so certain if Dan hadn’t told me that MacKenzie had left Iraq, but I doubt it. I’d bolstered my courage through foolish mantras, and the hope that Bill Fraser would find MacKenzie before MacKenzie found me. But I’d been deluding myself.
Looking back, I’m shocked at how Pavlovian my responses had become. How could three days in a cellar override behaviour patterns that had taken thirty-six years to develop, or negate my careful planning of the last few weeks? Why bother to locate every light switch, oil the door locks, arm myself with torches and devise exit strategies if my conditioned response to terror was to curl into a ball in the corner with my eyes closed? Just as the mutilated victims had done in Freetown.
In the end, even petrified animals move when they find themselves still alive, so I did, too. But only as far as the kitchen, where I could lock the door to the corridor as well as the one to the scullery. For some reason, I decided that sitting in the dark would be safer, even though every other light in the house was ablaze. Perhaps the blindfold had habituated me to it—I’d come to like the fact that I couldn’t see who or what was in front of me—but it did at least jolt my brain into some sort of limited reasoning.
I adopted the same siege mentality that I’d used in my car when I first arrived. As long as I stayed where I was, I was fine. If I tried to leave, I’d be in danger. I had access to food and water. I could barricade the window by laying the kitchen table over the sink, and I could use carving knives to defend myself. At no point did I think of calling for help. Peter says I’d trained myself to believe there was none available, but that doesn’t explain why, when the dawn broke and I saw the phone on the kitchen wall, I remembered there was a world beyond me and my fear of MacKenzie.
Of course it was Jess I called. Like Lily, I’d come to rely on her. She was a trusted man Friday who didn’t expect, or want, to be wined, dined and rewarded with trivial conversation. It was curiously restful once I accepted her way of doing things. If she was in a talkative mood, we talked. If she wasn’t, we didn’t. I hadn’t appreciated how conventional I was until I learnt to sit through Jess’s silences. I was the type who rushed to speak for fear of seeming boorish, and changing that habit did not come easily.
I gave up trying to work out what made Jess tick after she resumed her visits. She turned up at inconvenient times of the day, as she’d done before, but I found it less irritating the second time around because she didn’t take offence if I said I was busy. As often as not, she’d go outside to mow the semi-circle of formal lawn at the back of the house then leave without saying goodbye, but when I pointed out that I