Siege

Fifty

20.02

TINA BOYD DROVE HER car past the Dale family home as slowly as she could. There were no lights on inside, but that was to be expected. If the kidnappers were holding the family there, they wouldn’t want to advertise their presence, although Tina didn’t think they’d risk staying put with three hostages. It would be far easier to move them to an undisclosed location, just in case Arley didn’t choose to cooperate, or came here looking for them herself. She also noticed something else. None of the curtains at the front of the house had been drawn, which was the first thing you’d do if you were a kidnapper and didn’t want anyone seeing inside.

An Audi estate, which Tina presumed belonged to Arley’s husband Howard, was the only car parked in the driveway. She continued driving, checking to see if any of the cars parked on either side of the road were occupied. She didn’t think the kidnappers had the necessary resources to be keeping a watch on the house, but it paid to be thorough.

When Tina was satisfied that the street was clear, she found a parking space about thirty yards further on and got out, shivering in the cold night air. She walked back towards the Dales’ house, trying to look as natural as possible – just another commuter coming home after a late night at the office – but instead of turning into their drive, she turned into the one next door. She crept by the side of the house, ignoring the lights in the window, and tried the side gate, which was locked. Hoping there wasn’t a dog on the other side, she clambered over it and into the back garden, thankfully without the accompaniment of angry barking.

A high evergreen hedge separated the two properties, and Tina had to force her way through it like some kind of rainforest explorer, before emerging on the other side at the back of the Dales’ house. There were no curtains closed on this side either. She stayed in the shadows of the hedge for a full minute, watching for any signs of life.

Nothing and no one moved. There were no lights coming from inside to signify someone watching the TV. No sounds either. Just the distant hum of traffic and the occasional plane rumbling through the clouds overhead. Tina had been on enough surveillance jobs in her life to know when a place was empty. Human beings can’t stay still for long, even when they’re trying to.

She gave it another thirty seconds, then slowly approached the nearest window, which looked straight into an expansive kitchen diner.

Straight away she saw the body lying there. Or, more accurately, she saw a pair of legs, a pair of forearms, and half a torso lying across the chequered floor, the remainder hidden by the kitchen sink unit. A dark pool of blood had formed round the upper part of the body and the hands were dipped in it, the fingers outstretched. Tina had never seen a photo of Howard but she was certain it was him. And it was clear from the amount of blood that he’d been lying there some time.

She took a step back. This was the time to call the police. If she went inside, she’d be contaminating a crime scene, and giving herself a whole lot of trouble. It was also possible that the kids were still in the house – and if they were, they were almost certainly dead too. She could feel her mobile in her pocket, and she almost took it out to make the call, but stopped herself.

With a long sigh, she put on her gloves and retrieved the spare keys from the potting shed, where Arley had said they’d be, trying them one after the other in the kitchen door until it finally opened. As she stepped inside, she was greeted by an empty, all-pervading silence and the telltale sour smell of death – something she’d experienced too many times before, and which she’d never managed to get used to. Holding her breath, she crouched down beside the body, avoiding stepping in the blood, and felt for a pulse as a simple formality. She wasn’t surprised when there was no sign of one.

To make absolutely sure this was Arley’s husband, Tina crept into the hallway looking for family photos, which was when she saw the second body, propped up against the wall. This would be Magda, the Dale family au pair. Arley had told Tina that she’d been killed by the kidnappers, although she hadn’t mentioned that her body had been left here.

There was a professional family portrait on the opposite wall. Arley, her two teenage children, and Howard, a big bluff smiling man standing a good head taller than the others, and without doubt the corpse she’d just seen in the kitchen.

‘Jesus,’ whispered Tina in the gloom, wondering what the hell she was getting involved with here, but also feeling the kind of intense righteous anger she hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. She wanted to get the people responsible for this. She wanted to make them pay.

With a renewed sense of purpose, she searched the rest of the house, but there was no sign of the two children. Both they and the kidnappers were gone, just as she’d expected. She checked for anything that might give her some clue as to the kidnappers’ identity, or their final destination, but nothing sprang out at her.

All of which left Tina with a stark choice. The chances of her finding Arley’s children were slim in the extreme. The best course of action was to persuade Arley to tell her colleagues what was going on. But she wasn’t at all sure that Arley would. And Tina knew she was almost certainly right not to. Neither the Met nor the government would put her two children before the lives of the hostages in the Stanhope.

Tina let herself out of the house, pulling from the pocket of her jeans a fake warrant card she used sometimes for PI work.

She’d made her decision.