Time For Trust. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ quick turn of the ‘boss’s’ hand silenced her jailer.

      ‘We’ll take her with us,’ the ‘boss’ announced chillingly after studying her for several seconds. ‘She can be our insurance.’

      What followed still haunted her in her nightmares. Blindfolded and gagged, she was bundled out of the bank and directly into the kind of armoured vehicle normally used by security companies. Once inside she could sense the presence of other people, even though they remained silent.

      The van was driven away and she heard someone saying, ‘How long do you reckon before anyone can raise the alarm?’

      ‘Bank’s supposed to be open in five minutes. That should give us half an hour or so before anyone realises what’s happened…It will take them a fair time to break into the safe. The only other set of keys are held by the chairman, and he’s out in Kent.’

      ‘By the time they do get hold of them we’ll—’

      A sudden curse obviously reminded the speaker of her presence and he fell silent. She was sitting on the floor of the van, bound, blindfolded and gagged. Her body ached from the pressure of the hard floor and the fear-induced tension. She was sure she was going to die, to become another statistic of violence and greed, and when the van finally stopped and she was bundled out and half dragged, half carried up flight after flight of stairs and then pushed in a dank, foul-smelling room she was even more convinced that this was the end.

      She heard the door close but dared not move, not knowing how many members of the gang were preserving a silent vigil around her. The silence went on and on, a relentless pressure against her stretched eardrums, like a soundless, high-pitched scream, battering at her senses.

      Time lost all meaning. Her arms and hands were numb, but still she dared not move, picturing the armed man perhaps sitting in front of her, watching her. Her throat was dry and sore, but she couldn’t ask for a drink. Her body ached, and cramp ran like a violent wrenching wire from her left calf to her ankle.

      Outwardly motionless and controlled, inwardly she was falling apart, suffering the most appalling imagined fates, wondering if whoever had said those immortal words ‘a brave man dies once, the coward a thousand times over’ had really any awareness of the true terrors created by the imagination—terrors which had nothing whatsoever to do with one’s ability to endure actual physical pain.

      At some point she slipped into a semicomatose state that gave her some relief, a sort of self-induced, drugged miasma of mental agony which separated her from her physical body and its discomforts. She couldn’t move at all…couldn’t do anything other than sit there where she had been left, straining her ears for some other movement in the room.

      Quite when she began to realise she might be on her own she had no idea; perhaps it was when the quality of the silence struck her as being empty. She held her breath, listening anxiously for the sound of other breath, trying not to imagine the grinning faces of the gang while they witnessed her pathetic attempts to use what senses were left to her to work out if they were there.

      If they were there…She was almost sure they weren’t. Which meant…which meant that she was alone.

      She ought to have felt relief, but instead she felt all the blind, frantic panic of a helpless child deserted by its parents. She couldn’t move—her wrists were bound and so were her ankles, and her wrists were tied to some kind of pipe.

      She heard a noise—not a human sound…The hairs on her arms stood up in terror as she felt something run across her bare leg. She wanted desperately to scream, but couldn’t remove the gag nor scream through it.

      Panic engulfed her; she tried desperately to pull herself free, and succeeded only in rubbing her wrists raw on their bonds so that the broken skin bled.

      After panic and terror came dull, destructive acceptance. She was going to die here in this unknown place, and she might as well resign herself to it.

      How long had she been here already? Hours…but how many?

      She tried to think constructively, but it was impossible. All she wanted now was oblivion, escape…

      When the door finally opened, her rescuers were all moved to different degrees of shock and pity by what they saw.

      A telephone call to the bank had announced that any attempt to find her or them during the next five hours would result in her death, but that if no attempt was made to track them down for that period then her father would be informed of where she could be found.

      Since the police had no idea of where to start looking for the thieves, they had had no option other than to comply with their demands, and against all their expectations they had actually received the promised call later in the day giving the address of a slum-clearance flat in a high-rise block where she could be found.

      To Jessica, the debriefing that followed her imprisonment was almost as gruelling as the imprisonment itself, although in a different way.

      The whole nightmare affair had left her perilously close to the edge of a complete mental and physical breakdown, with the result that she had finally told her parents that she could not return to the bank, and that instead she was going to use the small inheritance left to her by her maternal grandparents to train for a career much more suited to her now fierce determination to live as quiet and safe a life as possible.

      Of course her parents had protested, especially when they had learned she intended moving to Avon.

      There was no reason why she couldn’t continue to live at home in London and practise her career from there, they told her, but she refused to be swayed. London was now a place that terrified her. She couldn’t walk down a busy street without being overcome by the feeling that someone was walking behind her, stalking her—without the fear she had known in that small, frightening prison coming back to drag her back down into the pit of self-destructive fear she was only just beginning to leave behind.

      In the end her parents had reluctantly given way on the advice of her doctor, who had told them that she needed to find a way of healing herself and coming to terms with what had happened.

      That healing process was still going on, and now, suddenly and shockingly, she had been dragged back into that remembered horror.

      She saw the gunman coming towards her and started to scream. He lashed out at her with the butt of his gun. She felt a stunning pain like fire in her shoulder, followed by a cold wash of paralysing weakness, and knew that she was going to faint.

      When she came round, the small post office was full of people. She was lying on the floor with something under her head and someone kneeling beside her holding her wrist while he measured her pulse.

      She looked up cold with fear, trembling with the remembered shock of the past, and encountered the warm gold eyes of Daniel Hayward. His look of warmth and compassion was reassuring and comforting. She tried to sit up, conscious of her undignified prone position and the curious glances of the people standing around her.

      As she looked round the shop, Daniel Hayward seemed to know what she was looking for and said quietly, ‘It’s all right. He’s gone.’

      ‘Gone?’

      She looked bewildered, and it was left to Mrs Gillingham to explain excitedly, ‘Mr Hayward was ever so brave. He reached right out and took the gun off him, and told me to open the door and shout for СКАЧАТЬ