Siege

Seventy-five

TINA WAS HALFWAY up the staircase when she heard what she was sure was the bleep of a phone coming from beyond the half-open door that led into the living room – the only room downstairs she hadn’t yet checked for signs of the children. A couple of seconds later, it was followed by the sound of someone – a man, from the noise he was making – clearing his throat loudly and moving around.

It was too late to go back downstairs now. She was trapped in no-man’s land, and the weapons she was carrying – a piece of lead piping in one hand, a can of pepper spray in the other – were no use from a distance.

Making a snap decision, she continued up the last few stairs as quickly as she could, gritting her teeth when one of them creaked loudly, and darted behind the wall at the top just as the living room door opened with a loud squeak, and the man cleared his throat again.

There were three doors up here, two on her side of the landing, one on the other. Tiptoeing across the carpet, she opened the nearest one and stepped inside, and was immediately assailed by the smell of urine.

They were both on the floor in the middle of the empty room, lying on their fronts, trussed up from head to foot with duct tape like caterpillar larvae. As she gently closed the door behind her, they both started wriggling and making moaning noises beneath their gags.

‘It’s OK,’ Tina whispered, coming closer and feeling a huge sense of relief. ‘I’m here to help. Your mum sent me. You’ve just got to stay quiet for a second.’

They both fell silent and stopped moving. Tina crouched down beside the girl, whose name she’d forgotten, and, after putting down the weapons, removed the duct tape covering her mouth as gently as she could, before doing the same with the tape covering her eyes. This way the girl could see who she was dealing with. She blinked up at Tina with wide, frightened eyes, and Tina smiled back at her reassuringly, putting a finger to her lips.

‘Do you know how many men are holding you here?’ she whispered.

‘Two came to our house this morning,’ the girl whispered back. ‘They both had guns. I haven’t heard any talking down there, so I don’t know if they’re both still here, but one definitely is. He was up here a little while ago.’

‘OK. Now, I’m going to untie you both and then we’re going to go out of the window as quietly as possible. Understand?’

The girl nodded. She looked incredibly relieved that Tina was there. Next to her, the boy, who Tina remembered was called Oliver, rolled on to his side to face her and made a noise behind his gag.

She immediately leaned over and began to remove the tape round his eyes, at the same time pulling out her phone so she could text Arley the news.

And then she heard it. The stair that had creaked earlier when she’d been coming up had creaked again. Even louder this time. Another stair creaked, and she stopped.

The man was on his way up.