Captive (21 page)

I bunch my hands into fists.

‘Robyn,’ Talon calls as I stalk past his cell. ‘Don’t! She isn’t worth it.’

Feather comes out smiling. ‘All right, Princess.’

I punch her in the face, my knuckles connecting with her jaw. Her head slams back against the bars of her cell and blood sprays out. She laughs. ‘That all you got?’

She may be small but she’s fast. Her hands come up and seize my throat, pushing me into the wall behind me. No matter how hard I bat at her arms and face, she doesn’t let go. Her
hands tighten around my neck. This is it: this is how I’m going to die. A thousand memories swim in my head.
Addy, Dad, Mum . . . Talon’s hand in mine.

The inside of my lids is red and warm like a fire. I leap into its brightness. It wraps itself around me, like a warm hand.
I am lying under the bush in the wood. The branches make a corset
for a sky of clear blue. Nearby, a bird cries to its mate as it builds a nest. Talon smiles down at me. ‘Hello, you. Did you miss me?’

I. Am. Not. Ready. To
die
.

With my last ounce of strength, I kick her hard in the shin. She gasps in pain and I headbutt her. My forehead smashes against her nose. Her hands fly to her face and I gasp air. Feather
recovers quickly and starts to slap me around the head. I collapse under her blows and she takes the opportunity to run down the corridor. She’s opened the doors to all the cells before
I’m on my feet.

Talon comes out first. Scar is right behind him. He stretches, a carnal grin spreading across his face as he walks slowly towards me. Talon goes to punch him, but Scar knocks him to the ground.
He kicks him in the gut, in the chest and finally in the head. Talon lies still. From down the corridor, Feather laughs.

No!

I have no weapon and Scar is at least twice my size, but I fling myself at him anyway, fists flying and legs kicking. He swipes me away as easily as if I were a fly. I land heavily against the
bars of one of the cells, winding myself. Scar crouches over me, catching my hands and holding them above my head. I scream as he begins to run his hands over me, but he is just looking for the
map. He pulls it free of my back pocket and stands up. ‘Be seeing you, Princess.’ He walks over to Feather, who grins and takes the map from him.

What have I done? By coming here, I have helped two violent criminals escape and got Talon badly hurt.

I try to stand, but my legs have forgotten what they are for. All I can do is watch as Feather and Scar head for the exit. Then there is a sound of cracking and the police woman finally breaks
out of the kitchen. ‘Stop right there,’ she yells at Scar and Feather.

‘Chill out, lady,’ Scar says. ‘There’s no problem here.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ The police officer is at the bank of computers now and she picks up a radio. ‘This is the holding area. Request immediate
assis—’

Feather hits her once on the side of the head and then again and again until the woman falls to the floor.
Move, Robyn. Move.
It is as much as I can do to crawl over to Talon; my fingers
snag in his hair. I close my eyes, trying to gather my strength.

I open them again as I hear shouting. Six figures in black gear pour in to surround Feather and Scar. There are more yells: ‘Hands up or we will shoot!’ Then comes the rapid fire of
a gun, followed by a whooshing noise, and the room begins to fill up with smoke.

There are human shapes in the haze. Someone bends over me. I hear the snicker-suck of breath through a mask. Something is passed over my head and secured. My eyes clear, as do my lungs, and I
can breathe again.

Then Talon is dragged away from me. I scream into the mask and lash out. The masked figure falls back, startled. I get my arms more securely around Talon, and pull him up into my lap, clamping
my arms and legs around him. No one is taking him away from me. Not this time. I brush his hair back gently from his face. The fog – tear gas, I guess – is still filling up the room.
After taking a deep gulp of air, I take the mask off and put it over Talon’s face.
Breathe, Talon. Breathe. Breathe.

I hold on for as long as I can, but finally I have to take a breath. The gas immediately fills my lungs again. I keep stroking Talon’s hair. A man is walking towards me. There is something
shiny on his feet. Something polished. Shoes. He crouches before me and murmurs something. I lean forward. What? My name. He is saying my name.

As my last wisp of oxygen is swallowed up by the gas, I look up into his face. My own eyes stare back at me. Eyes that are sometimes brown and sometimes green and sometimes gold.

‘
Dad
,’ I whisper. ‘
Dad
.’

I wake up tucked under a duvet in a long narrow room. Late-afternoon sunshine pours through a large window to the left, its panels making lines like the bars of a cage across
the bed. Dad is seated beside me, a newspaper in his hands. He folds it when he sees I’m awake. ‘You slept for a long time. Over fourteen hours. How do you feel?’

Like I’ve been microwaved.

‘Water,’ I gasp.

He guides the straw from a plastic beaker to my mouth. ‘They released tear gas into the cells yesterday. We had no idea you were in there. Idiots. The whole thing was badly managed.’
He replaces the cup on the bedside table. ‘We’ve missed you so much. You have no idea—’

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘At home. I wanted to make sure you were in an acceptable state before she saw you. She’s been very worried. We both have . . . And your hair. Oh, Robyn, what have they done to you .
. .?’ He tails off. ‘Can I get you something? More water? Something to eat?’

I shake my head and gingerly push myself up to sitting. My body is made of porcelain; the smallest bump and I’ll shatter.

‘Careful, careful,’ Dad says, trying to help me, until I put my hand up for him to back off. He sits back down in the chair. ‘You are rather bashed up. It is going to take a
long time for all of this to heal.’ He isn’t just talking about my bruises.

I want more water, but this time I reach for it myself and take a long, long gulp. My head is clearing and, with the warm sun on my face, I start to feel less like something that belongs in a
rubbish bin.

‘Where am I? They wouldn’t tell me.’

‘I’m sorry about that. When you ran during the rescue on Saturday afternoon, it confused everything. There was some panic and some ludicrous notion that you may have become a
terrorist.’ He gives a humourless snort. I don’t even smile. ‘You’re in a detention centre. You’ve been here since yesterday.’

Everything comes back to me in a rush. Talon in that cell. Scar. The police officers bursting in. And the gas.

The clock on the wall ticks through the seconds. Dad is looking at me, his hands steepled like he’s praying.

‘You lied to me. In Paris, after the shooting, you said that Jez – Jeremy Fletcher – wasn’t killed by Michael’s drug. That wasn’t true, was it?’

‘No.’ His sigh seems to hold the whole world.

‘You promised me.’ But I’m not talking about Jez any more. ‘You promised after you got shot that everything was okay. You said nothing bad would ever happen again, but it
did. They took me and you didn’t do anything to stop it. Ten days I was there.
Ten days
– and where were you?’

‘I did everything I could. Robyn, darling, please . . .’

I shove his hands away. ‘Not enough.’

‘I can explain. Everything. Truthfully this time.’

‘I don’t believe you. All you do is lie.’ I push the duvet cover off and stand up. ‘I want to go home. I want my mum and my sister. You don’t give a shit about
me.’

‘I do. I do. Robyn, calm down, please. You need to rest.’

‘I’ve been so scared. You don’t know what they
did
.’ My voice breaks and my shoulders heave as the tears come and my legs give way beneath me. I fall back against
the bed. He sits down beside me. He smells of aftershave and brandy and the cigars that he isn’t supposed to smoke.

‘Will you let me explain? Will you listen to me?’ he asks.

‘I should have trusted you with the truth in January,’ Dad says. We are sitting – I’m wrapped in about three hundred blankets – in a miniature
courtyard somewhere in the bowels of the centre. It is surrounded on all sides by high brick walls with a green gate.

Dad hadn’t wanted to come outside. He’d been worried I wasn’t up to it, but I have been stuck inside for too long. I want to feel the sun on my face and have the air ruffle my
short hair. Sunshine breaks through the heavy cloud, making everything golden. Talon would love it here. Suddenly I am back in that smoke-filled room, coughing and spluttering on the gas and
fighting with everything I have to hang on to Talon. I wasn’t strong enough. They took him away again and I haven’t seen him since.

Beside me, Dad draws a long deep breath. ‘It’s peaceful, isn’t it? When all this is over, I’d like to build a garden just like this one.’

I sense him trying to catch my eye, but I stare resolutely ahead. I agreed to listen to him. I didn’t agree to believe him, or to speak to him.

Dad starts to talk. ‘The day you were born was one of the best of my life. You were a tiny scrunched-up creature, lying on your mother’s chest as she slept. I picked you up and I
took you over to the window and I held you up so you could see out across the city. And you smiled. People have told me a hundred times since that newborns can’t smile. I don’t care.
They weren’t there. It was only you and me, and you smiled at me.’

I break my silence. ‘Dad, did Michael know that the drug Jeremy Fletcher took was dangerous?’

‘The regulatory authority had granted approval for it to be used on patients. We’re talking about a tragic death . . .’

I sigh. Dad is still trying to spin the truth. ‘Did Michael know that there was a problem with the drug or not? Dad, come on. You promised the truth this time.’

He rubs his temples. ‘Yes. As I understand it, Bell-Barkov took some shortcuts during earlier testing phases.’

‘To save money.’

‘To expedite the drug’s release on the market. Some side-effects of Amabim-F emerged with trial patients, but only when the drug was given at higher dosages. Swelling and the like. A
monkey had also died, apparently, but who knows if that was related.’

‘But a guy died too,’ I say, remembering what Talon told me.

‘Did he? I don’t know about that.’

‘So what happened about Jez, I mean, Jeremy?’

‘Michael left the voicemail I told you about in Paris very early one morning and it was a while before I was able to call him back. When I did get hold of him, he was hysterical. He said
that the situation was much worse than first suspected. The company commissioned to carry out the drug trial on the boy had reported inadequate staffing levels. The consultant on duty had called in
sick the previous night, leaving only a skeletal and inexperienced staff to carry out the trial. It should have been cancelled the moment the senior doctor was unable to attend, but it
wasn’t.’

‘What are you saying? I don’t understand.’

‘There is a very real possibility that if the proper medical care had been given, the boy might not have died. This company, Glindeson, was solely to blame on that front.’

‘He has a name, you know,’ I say. ‘He’s not just “the boy”.’

‘You are very angry, Robyn.’

‘I have every right to be. I was kidnapped because of what you did.’

‘The AFC are terrorists. There is no justification for what they’ve done.’

Talon wasn’t a terrorist. He was just desperate to be heard.

Dad is still talking. ‘Michael genuinely believed that these little issues had been resolved. They had delayed stage two of the clinical trials, where patients with the disease are
treated, for more than six months while they worked to identify what was causing these adverse reactions. “They were fixed,” Michael kept saying. “I swear to you, Stephen, that
they were all fixed. We haven’t had a single problem with the drug since then.”’

Until Jez.

‘With one thing and another, I didn’t speak to Michael for the rest of that day,’ Dad continues. ‘When I called the following morning, he was chirpier. It now seemed
likely that the child . . .’ He catches my eye and corrects himself. ‘That
Jeremy
died of some underlying health issues. Michael said he’d found a pathologist willing to
write a report clearing Amabim-F. The words “willing to” should have rung alarm bells, but they didn’t. I was busy and I’d heard what I wanted: Michael’s company
wasn’t to blame. I didn’t ask any questions. I told him it was great news and I moved on with my day.’

Dad pauses. The garden is very still. The only sound is a bird building a nest in the tree beside us and occasionally tweeting at its mate.

‘I have gone over that conversation in my mind so very many times in the last week or so. If only I had listened more carefully! “How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what
evil comes from judging wrongly.” I swear to you on my life and all the lives I hold even dearer to me, I did not know that Michael’s drug caused that boy’s death.’

Do I believe him? I don’t know.

‘So when did you find out?’ I ask.

‘A few weeks after the fire at Bell-Barkov last October. You may remember that your mother and I went up to stay with the Bells. We wanted to show our support for them. Michael behaved
very strangely the whole time. He was drinking heavily and clearly very agitated about something. Finally on the Sunday, over a round of golf, I got it out of him. He confessed that the problems
with Amabim-F had not been fixed prior to Jeremy’s death. He also told me that he had paid someone to set fire to the company headquarters.’

‘
What?
’

‘Yes, it’s true. He’d grown increasingly paranoid. The boy’s father was sending letters, a journalist was on to him, and the AFC were issuing death threats. “There
was evidence,” he kept saying. “I didn’t want them to find it.” He didn’t specify who
they
were.’

‘You knew all of this and you said
nothing
?’