Siege

Seventy-three

22.01

TINA WAS DRIVING round the maze of rain-soaked residential streets where the van she was looking for was supposed to be parked, as she had been for over twenty minutes now, when her phone rang.

‘They sent me a video from Howard’s phone,’ Arley announced breathlessly. ‘My children were alive ten minutes ago.’

‘That’s brilliant news.’ Tina had thought they would be, but she still felt a rush of relief. ‘Were there details in the video that could be of any use to us?’

‘Only that it was shot inside a house.’

‘And a location?’

‘I’ve just emailed it to you. It’s not exact, but it’s down to a twenty- or thirty-metre area around Pride Street, within the same wider location as the van.’

‘I drove down Pride Street two minutes ago and I didn’t see a van, but I’ll have another look now. But listen, Arley, I’m not risking my neck here. I’m unarmed. I’ll see if I can find the house, but that’s it.’

‘If you can find proof that the kids are there, that’s all I need. Then the security forces can deal with it. But I need to know for sure. Please. We’re so close.’ The desperation was clear in her voice.

‘Have the SAS made the decision to go into the hotel yet?’ asked Tina, knowing that if they had, she was going to have to make this thing public.

‘Not yet, but it’s going to come soon.’

‘OK. Leave things with me, and make sure you get the ANPR people to get in touch with you if that van starts moving. I’ll call you the moment I have something.’

Tina ended the call and shook her head. She shouldn’t be doing this. Yet she couldn’t help feeling an excitement she hadn’t experienced in many months. In fact, not since the last time she’d found herself acting totally illegally by teaming up with a wanted killer in order to bring an even worse one to justice. Tina had always attracted trouble. It was in her nature. But she also prided herself on always doing what she thought was the right thing.

Except this time she wasn’t at all sure she was doing the right thing. There were too many other lives at stake. Not just her own.

She pulled over. Her laptop was open on the seat next to her and she picked it up and checked the hotmail account, opening the attachment from Arley’s email of three minutes earlier.

It showed a small-scale street map of the area she was in with an irregular red circle over a section of Pride Street that was about two hundred yards west of her current location. Pride Street backed on to a railway track, and as Tina looked at the map more closely, she could see that there was a track running behind the houses with another house at the end of it, next to the railway line – one she hadn’t seen earlier on the bigger map. The house was just inside the red circle, and it struck Tina that it was isolated enough for the kidnappers to have got the children out of the back of the van without attracting attention.

There was no time to check whether or not it had been rented recently, so she pulled back out again and accelerated towards the railway line.

She almost missed the narrow turning with the dead end sign that, according to the map, led down to the house she was interested in. Slowing up, she caught a glimpse of a high-wire fence about thirty yards distant just as a train passed on the other side of it with a steady rumble.

Straight away she knew that it was too risky to drive down there, in case someone was watching. Instead she continued further down the street, still checking the parked cars just in case she was wrong and the children were being kept somewhere else, but after thirty yards and no sign of any red van, she found a spot and parked.

Taking a deep breath, she grabbed the can of pepper spray she’d bought in France from the glove compartment, as well as an eight-inch piece of lead piping – both totally illegal for a civilian to be in possession of, but small beer in comparison to the crimes she’d already committed that night. She slipped the pepper spray into her coat pocket and the lead piping into the back of her jeans, and then got out and hurried along the street, keeping her head down against the rain and the cold.

The turning down to the house was little more than a muddy track, with overgrown brambles and scrub on either side. There were tyre tracks in the mud but it was difficult to tell whether they were recent or not.

Keeping to the side of the track, Tina followed it as it turned at a narrow angle in front of the barbed-wire fence before ending at the entrance to a small rundown cottage that was almost entirely obscured by high vegetation and an unsteady-looking brick wall. Parked in the narrow carport in front of the cottage, beyond two ancient wrought-iron gates, was the red van they were looking for.

Tina stopped. There were lights on in the ground floor of the cottage and all the curtains, upstairs and downstairs, were drawn. This was the place, she knew it.

She should have got straight back on the phone to Arley and told her that she’d done as much as she could. But she didn’t. Instead she switched her phone to vibrate and climbed over the gates, tiptoeing across the gravel until she was level with the driver’s window of the van. She peered inside. The front was empty, while the rear was hidden by a makeshift curtain, and she couldn’t see or hear anything. Satisfied it was empty, she approached the cottage along the edge of the driveway, keeping close to the undergrowth before stopping outside the first of the ground floor windows. She put her ear to the glass and heard the sound of a TV.

Slowly, carefully, Tina made her way round the back of the cottage. A back door led into an unlit utility room with washing machine and sink, and beyond that Tina could see a narrow hallway with a staircase and the glow of lights at one end. Nothing moved inside, but there was definitely someone in there.

Putting on her gloves, Tina tried the back door and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. It didn’t matter. The lock looked as ancient as everything else about the cottage. She’d been trained in covert entry years before when she was in SOCA, and she’d brought a set of picks with her tonight.

Even so, she paused. The man who’d kidnapped Arley’s children was armed and extremely dangerous. He’d already killed her husband, and Tina knew he wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to her. Far better just to call the police, or better still Arley herself.

Except she hadn’t found the kids. Not yet.

Tina felt her whole body tense. She was going in. It was just the way she was. All her instincts told her to hold back, but in the end it made no difference. She wanted to find those kids and make them safe. If anything happened to them because she hadn’t done all she could … Well, she found it hard enough to live with herself anyway.

Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out the picks and set to work, and in thirty seconds she had the door unlocked. It would have been twenty, but she was out of practice.

Slowly, she turned the handle and crept inside.