The Danger Within

Ten

It was just after two thirty in the morning when Lilian made her move. She had once read that we are all at our lowest ebb at around that time. She hoped that was true of those who were watching her.

Curiously perhaps, Lilian had felt much calmer once she’d so violently disposed of Kurt’s flowers. Maybe it was because she had vented some of her inner fury.

She’d also realized that her ankle was throbbing less. All that bed-rest had probably helped her injuries, if nothing else. She took one of Kurt’s collection of ornate walking sticks from the stand in the hall and experimented with putting more weight on her plaster-cast leg.

She’d decided there could be no trial run, no rehearsal. If her car wasn’t in the car park then that would be the end of her immediate plan of escape. But she couldn’t risk destroying any element of surprise.

She hoisted a rucksack, packed with as many of her things as she could carry, over her shoulders. It left her arms free, and she still needed at least the support of a walking stick.

Even without crutches her progress seemed to her to be both clumsy and excessively noisy. She clumped her way across the polished floor towards the front door. In the hallway she hesitated. The little Hockney she’d always admired, with its trademark swimming pool, adorned the far wall above the consul table in solitary splendour. What would it be worth? Fifty thousand pounds? One hundred thousand pounds? More? Lilian wasn’t sure, but whatever the figure was, Kurt St John owed her one heck of a lot more.

Impulsively she took the Hockney off the wall and tucked it into the front pocket of her rucksack, wrapping a sweater around it to keep it safe.

She opened the door as quietly as possible and made her way to the lift, grateful that the communal areas of Penbourne Villas were thickly carpeted. There was no sign of the goons. Or of William. She pushed the button for the basement car park. It was brightly lit down there as usual. She could see at once that her car was still parked in the place where she’d left it.

She was relieved and mildly surprised. Had Kurt overlooked the car? She doubted that. Or did he just trust his brother and the goons — not to mention the basketball player who she was quite sure was on the St John payroll — to keep her under surveillance.

It made no difference. The customized top-of-the range BMW, white with red leather upholstery, represented the only hope of escape that she could think of. Kurt had presented it to her soon after their wedding, gift-wrapped and encircled with an enormous golden ribbon tied in a bow. At the time she had thought it incredibly romantic. Now the mere sight of the car sickened her. The BMW was a talisman of all that had happened. Top of the list of expensive gifts her husband had used to try to buy her body and soul, and perhaps to salve his own conscience. If he had one.

She bleeped the key. The car blinked its lights at her. She climbed in and turned on the ignition, grateful both that the vehicle was an automatic and that it was her left ankle which had been broken. She switched on and glanced at the petrol gauge. Almost half a tank. Enough fuel to take her a fair distance away. Could have been better, but it also could have been worse.

Once at the top of the ramp, she put her foot down, shooting along Berkeley Street and swinging an illegal right onto Piccadilly. She smacked the car round Hyde Park Corner, roaring up Park Lane, round Marble Arch and along the Edgware Road. Even in central London there was not much traffic at that hour in the morning. Traffic lights and road junctions she more or less ignored, keeping an eye out for traffic police, who seemed in any case to have been more or less taken over by CCTV cameras nowadays. And she really didn’t care a jot about those.

She was vaguely aware once or twice of lights in her rear mirror, perhaps a suspiciously steady distance behind, and of at least one vehicle following her through at least one set of red lights. But she had a plan to shake off anyone who might be tailing her.

Once she hit the M1 Lilian let rip. She pushed the car as fast as it would go, exceeding a hundred and twenty miles per hour at one point. At the first turning after the M25 she swung abruptly off the motorway, then round the roundabout and on to the bridge over the M1 where she slowed almost to a stop. There seemed to be nothing following her. At a more restrained speed she pulled back onto the London-bound stretch then turned right onto the M25 and ultimately the M4.

Lilian was heading west. She was going to Bristol. Apart from her long-gone little flat in Chiswick, Bristol, where she’d been brought up by her single-parent mother, was the only place she’d ever thought of as home.

Lilian’s mother had died the year before she met Kurt, one of the many reasons, perhaps, why Lilian had been so catastrophically eager to create a family for herself. But Bristol remained her first thought as a place of refuge.

There was certainly nowhere else.