He had a dark-brown complexion and was tall and slim, but strongly built. In his right hand he was carrying a long black tool of some kind, perhaps a crowbar. He looked almost as surprised to see her as she was to confront him.
The intruder recovered first. He swung the crowbar round in a short, vicious arc, the tempered steel bar smashing into the left side of Kirsty's face, fracturing her cheekbone and cracking the side of her skull. It was a killing blow. She felt an instant of shocking, numbing pain, then tumbled sideways, knocked unconscious by the force of the impact. She fell limply on to the carpet, blood pouring from the side of her face where the skin had been brutally torn apart. But that wasn't what killed her.
The major damage was internal, half a dozen blood vessels in her brain ripped apart by the splinters of broken bone. Shards of the same fractured bone had been driven deep into her cerebrum, causing irreparable damage. She was still breathing as she lay there, but effectively she was already dead.
The man looked down at her for a long moment, then stepped over her body and continued walking towards the front door. He'd heard no noise from inside the house before he'd forced the side door, and had assumed that the car he'd seen parked on the drive had belonged to the O'Connors – an assumption he now realized had been erroneous.
He glanced round, saw no sign of any mail, and retraced his steps to the kitchen. He'd have to check each room in turn until he found the package.
On the kitchen table, he saw the post stacked neatly on one side and began searching through it. There was no sign of the envelope he was looking for, so perhaps his boss's deduction had been wrong.
For perhaps a minute he stood irresolute, wondering what he should do next. Who the young woman was he had no idea – a neighbour, a cleaner, perhaps – and already he was beginning to regret hitting her quite so hard. Should he try to shift the body, get it out of the house and dump it somewhere? Then he rejected that idea. He didn't know the area very well, and the risk of being seen carrying her out of the house – or being stopped by a police officer with her corpse in the car – was too great.
He opened the door, glanced around him, and walked away.
38
Bronson was aware of a throbbing ache at the back of his skull as consciousness returned slowly. Instinctively he raised his hand to his head. Or rather he tried to, but his arm wouldn't move. He couldn't move either arm, in fact, which puzzled him. Nor his feet. There were stabbing pains in his wrists and ankles, and a dull ache down the left side of his chest. He opened his eyes, but could see nothing in front of him. Everything was completely black. For a few seconds he had no recollection of what had happened to him, and then he slowly started to remember.
'Oh, shit,' he muttered.
'Chris? Thank God.' The voice came from out of the darkness, somewhere over to his left.
'Angela? Where the hell are we? Are you OK?'
'I don't know. Where we are, I mean. And I'm fine, apart from being tied up in this bloody chair, that is.'
'Why can't I see anything?'
'We're in a cellar and the bastards turned the lights out once they'd tied us up.'
'But what happened? All I can remember is something hitting me on the back of the head.'
'I was running down the street and I turned back to see what was happening just as one of the men grabbed you and another swung a cosh or something. You dropped like a stone and for a few seconds I was certain you were dead. I ran back to—'
'You should have run on, Angela. There was nothing you could have done.'
'I know, I know.' Angela sighed. 'And it's my fault we're here. I shouldn't have insisted we go outside. And then when I saw you were hurt, all I wanted to do was try to help.'
'Well, thanks for trying, but it would have been better if you'd got away, because then you could have called the police. Then what did they do?'
'It was very slick. Two of the men grabbed me and stuck a gag over my mouth – I was yelling my head off – and then they bundled me into the back of the white van that had stopped a few yards up the road. They tied my wrists and ankles with some kind of thin plastic device—'
'Probably cable ties,' Bronson interrupted. 'They're virtually unbreakable.'
'Then three more men picked you up and dragged you over to the van and tossed you inside.'
That probably explained the ache in his chest, Bronson thought.
'They all climbed into the back of the van and tied you up the same as me as soon as it started moving. It drove for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, then stopped and reversed. When the doors opened, all I could see was the whitewashed wall of a house, and then I was carried out, through a doorway and down a set of steps into this bloody cellar. There were two upright chairs down here. They tied me to one of them, while another couple of men dragged you down here and repeated the process. Then they turned out the lights and buggered off. I've been sitting here in the dark ever since. It's been hours.' There was a pause. 'I'm so sorry, Chris.'
Bronson wasn't surprised to hear a quaver in her voice. Angela was tough – he knew that only too well – but he could understand how traumatized she must have been by the events of the evening, especially if she was blaming herself for what had happened.
'It wasn't your fault,' he said, his voice gentle.
'Yes, it was. And do you know what I found most unnerving about all this?'
'What?'
'During the whole process – the kidnapping, the drive in the van and when they tied us up down here in this cellar – none of the men said a single word. Nobody issued any orders: none of them asked any questions, or even made a comment. They all knew exactly what they were doing.
That worries me, Chris. We weren't just snatched off the street at random by some gang of thugs. Whoever was responsible for this took us for a reason, and it was a really well-planned operation.'
That worried Bronson as well, but he wasn't going to admit it.
'Well, I don't think we should stick around to find out what they want. We've got to find a way to get out of here.'
But as he tugged ineffectually at the plastic ties securing his wrists and ankles, Bronson knew that wasn't going to be easy. With a blade of some kind, it would have been the work of a few seconds to free himself, but nothing he did had any effect.
Still, he tried, and it was only when he felt blood running down his hands from the cuts he'd opened on his wrists that he gave up and accepted the reality of the situation. He was held fast, and there was nothing he could do about it.
It was several hours before the cellar lights finally flared into life. Bronson closed his eyes tight against the glare, then cautiously opened them, squinting as he took in their surroundings.
Angela was sitting about ten feet away from him in an upright wooden chair, her wrists and ankles lashed to the frame with plastic cable ties. Her clothes were in disarray, but her expression was defiant.
The cellar was a small, more or less square concrete box with white-painted but grubby walls and ceiling, and a flagstoned floor. It was almost empty apart from the two chairs they were sitting on. A short flight of steps led from the cellar up to a solid wooden door directly opposite where they were sitting.
Bronson looked back at Angela, whose eyes were now fixed on that door. It had just creaked open to reveal a whitewashed passageway on the level above them. They heard a faint murmur of voices, then the sound of approaching footsteps.
Moments later, two dark-skinned men wearing
He looked up at them, committing their faces to memory. One was unremarkable – dark skin, black hair, brown eyes, with regular features – but the other man had a face Bronson knew he'd never forget. A full head taller than his companion, his right cheek drooped slightly, giving his wide mouth a lopsided twist, almost turning it into an S-shape, and his right eye was sightless, a milkywhite abomination in his dark-brown skin. But he had an air of confidence, of suppressed power, about him, and Bronson knew instinctively that this man had to be the leader of
