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She wasn’t, of course. But he couldn’t know that. Could he? Her nerves jangled. Could he? But what if he was out there, somewhere, near by, watching her?
Her heart almost stopped. If he lived near here, or was down there in the street, he could see her lights on; he would know she was in the flat.
Suddenly a new idea occurred to her. What if it wasn’t the guy who had been ringing her? What if this was Philip or Diana, ringing her from their honeymoon hotel, to check that she was OK? They would be worried if she didn’t answer, at this hour of the night.
She ran out of the kitchen into the sitting-room, snatched up the ringing phone.
‘Hello?’ she breathlessly said.
‘I wondered how long it would be before you answered,’ the smoky voice said, and her heart skipped a beat.
‘Why are you doing this? Stop ringing me; leave me alone—who are you?’ she gabbled, hardly aware what she was saying.
‘Haven’t you remembered yet? Never mind, you will.’
‘Look, it’s very late, and I’m tired; will you get off this line? And don’t ring again!’ Annie shakily said.
‘Are you ready for bed?’ he whispered, and she began to tremble, almost believing he could see her. He knew she was only wearing a robe and was naked underneath it. ‘You must be tired; you’ve had a long day,’ he said, and her eyes stretched wide, in shock. ‘I won’t keep you up; I just wanted to say goodnight,’ he murmured softly. ‘I’ll be seeing you soon, Annie.’
The phone went dead again, and she slammed her own down, panic pouring through her. He was coming here. What else had that meant?
She ran to the front door of the flat to check it was locked, stood in the hallway listening to the usual silence, waiting for the sound of his footsteps, for a ring on the door.
It was minutes before she remembered the security system in the flats. He couldn’t get in; the night porter downstairs on the desk would ring her, wouldn’t admit anyone until she said it was OK.
Yet somehow she wasn’t entirely sure. She waited, her heart in her mouth. The minutes ticked by; nothing happened. No phone rang; nobody came to the door. She shakily retreated to the living-room, sat staring at the silent phone, waiting.
It was two hours before she realised he wasn’t coming; not tonight, at least. She wondered then if she should ring the police, move out, go to a hotel, but she wouldn’t let this crazy person drive her from her home. When Phil and Di got back they would be horrified if they heard about it; they’d feel guilty, think that she couldn’t cope alone.
No, this was some sort of war of nerves. For some reason this man was trying to frighten her, but she wasn’t going to let him. What could the police do if she told them about it? Monitor her phone calls? Maybe she should have her number changed again. But then how had he got this number in the first place, and would he get the new one too?
Who was he? How did he know so much about her?
She went to bed, and managed to sleep after a while. When she woke up next morning she had a confused memory of a dream; phones had been ringing, a voice had haunted her sleep, there had been strange, terrifying flashes of light, and for some reason she had kept hearing the sea.
It must have been the traffic of London in the distance, she decided as she got ready. It sometimes sounded like the sea when you heard it at night, and the flashes of light must have been headlights from passing cars.
She and the band rehearsed hard for eight hours that day. She had no time to think about anything else, but as she drove home that evening she began to wonder what messages she was going to find on the answerphone, and her nerves leapt as she switched on the machine.
There were none. Relief made her feel almost sick, but the next day she rushed to the answerphone as soon as she got back to her flat. This time there was a short message from Philip’s office. No messages from the whispering voice. Perhaps he had got tired of playing cat and mouse with her, had given up the game or turned his attention elsewhere.
She got a card from Philip and Diana a couple of days later: blue skies, palm trees, a ludicrously blue sea and on the other side a message that made her laugh, ending with a reminder that they would meet her and the band in Paris in a week. They would need time to rehearse at the venue itself, and do Press interviews before the tour began, and Annie hoped to get in some sightseeing.
Annie was beginning to get used to living alone by the time she drove to Heathrow to catch the flight to Paris. The equipment was going overland, and then by sea, in large vans, and the band had all elected to go with it. Brick, in particular, had a neurotic fear of something happening to his amazingly expensive drums if they got out of his sight. Annie preferred to fly, though; it was quicker and more comfortable.
There had been no more of the weird phone calls; she was sleeping normally again and looking forward to seeing Di and Phil very soon. She was going to have to get used to the fact that they belonged to each other now, more than they did to her, of course. It would be painful, difficult at times; but Annie was determined to get over this first awkward phase of the new relationship. The other two meant too much to her for her to want to lose them. She would simply have to live with her feelings, as she had for years now, and maybe one day she would meet someone else, and get over Phil at last.
She would be the first to arrive in Paris, since the band would take quite a while to drive across France with all their equipment. They planned to stop en route at a hotel for the night, and they would join Annie at the hotel the following day.
Philip’s secretary had arranged for Annie to be met at the airport by a chauffeur-driven car, and she had an escort on the plane, a couple of security men hired by Phil to make sure she had no problems on the flight. They all sat in first-class, the men on the aisle side, in case someone tried to talk to Annie, who sat by the window.
She was casually dressed in a black and scarlet skiing jacket under which she wore a white silk jersey shirt, and black ski-pants and boots. A few passengers walked past, staring, but she kept her face averted, staring out of the window, and when they landed she was whisked through the VIP channel at Charles de Gaulle and escorted almost immediately out of a side-door. A large black limousine was waiting. The two security men had words with the chauffeur in a dark suit, who got out as they approached. He held the door open for Annie, half bowing, murmured a greeting in French, and Annie climbed into the back and settled down in the luxurious, leather-upholstered interior, while her Gucci luggage was loaded on to the car.
The two security men weren’t coming with her in the car; they were returning to England. A French security team would take over whenever required. The driver closed the door and got behind the wheel, then the limousine purred softly away and from behind smoked glass windows she watched the airport terminal disappear as they followed the unwinding ribbon on the auto-route.
It was some minutes later that she turned her gaze to the front again, and noticed the driver. She hadn’t noticed his face when she got into the car, and now she couldn’t see it, but he had smooth black hair and wide shoulders. She caught a glimpse of his neck, tanned and powerful above a white collar. He hadn’t said a word to her since they set off, for which she was grateful, because now that she was in France she was nervous about practising her French. She had been learning it for years, and could talk quite easily to her teacher, but that was a very different matter from talking to French people in their own country.
She stared curiously out of the window at the boring, ugly environs of Paris, so similar to the outskirts of London and any other major city in the world, the typical urban sprawl of the late twentieth century. There was a lot of traffic, but the driver sped past it all, the effortless power of the car engine making her faintly nervous. She thought of leaning forward and asking him to slow down, but something about the powerful shoulders, the set of that dark head, made her decide against the idea.
She watched the city thicken around them on either side of the wide motorway: roofs, tower blocks, spires of churches. They passed familiar names on road signs: Neuilly, Clichy, St Denis, entry points for the inner city, but the car purred on past, and after a while it began to dawn on Annie that the driver seemed to be heading away from the city, out again into the suburbs on the other side of Paris.
Had he lost his way? Or been given the wrong destination? Or was he taking some route she didn’t know about?
She was about to lean forward to ask him when they approached a toll barrier which stretched right across the motorway. The limousine slowed and joined a queue, and Annie looked up at the huge signs giving directions for the road ahead. Lyon? That was a city right in the centre of France—why were they taking a road that led there?
They reached an automatic ticket machine and the driver leaned out and took a ticket; the barrier rose and the car shot forward with a deep-throated purr.
Annie leaned forward and banged on the glass partition. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked in English, then in French, ‘Monsieur—où allez-vous?’
He still didn’t turn round, but he did glance briefly into his mirror and she saw his eyes, dark, brilliant, with thick black lashes flicking down to hide them a second later.
‘You’re supposed to be taking me into Paris,’ she said in her badly accented, agitated French. ‘Don’t you know the way? You’ll have to turn back. Do you understand, monsieur?’
He nodded his head, without answering, but the car drove onwards along the Peage, so fast that Annie had to cling to the leather strap beside her, her body swaying with the speed at which they moved. He must be doing a hundred miles an hour, she thought dazedly, watching another road sign flash past. Versailles. Wasn’t that about fifteen miles outside Paris? Where were they going? Then the black limousine began to slow down again, took a right-hand turn off the motorway, and joined a queue passing through another toll barrier.
Annie breathed a little more easily. ‘Are you going back on the other side of the motorway?’ It hadn’t taken very long to drive this far past Paris; no doubt it wouldn’t take long for him to drive back into the city, and she didn’t like to tell him what she thought of a limousine driver who didn’t even know the way from the airport to Paris. Or was this roundabout route a trick he often played on unsuspecting foreigners? Was he paid by mileage? Well, when Phil paid the bills he could deal with this man; she would make sure Phil heard about what had happened.
They reached the head of the queue, he leaned out and threw coins into the automatic machine, and the barrier lifted. The black limousine shot forward with a purr of power, like a panther going for the kill.
Annie leaned back in the corner, rather nervously looking out of the window, waiting for him to take the motorway link road to return to Paris on the eastbound road.
He didn’t. Instead he turned on to a local road, narrow and winding, and began speeding along between green fields and woods.
Annie tried not to panic. She sat forward again and banged on the window, more forcefully. ‘Où allez-vous, monsieur? Arretez cette voiture.’ And then, getting angrier, and forgetting her French entirely, ‘What do you think you’re doing? Where are you going? Please stop the car; let me out!’
There was still no reply; he didn’t even look round, but as they approached a roundabout he had to slow, so Annie shot to the door and wrenched the handle.
That was when she discovered that the door was locked, and that she could find no way of unlocking it. The lock must be controlled from a panel in the front of the car. Before the driver could negotiate the roundabout she rushed to the other side of the car, but that door was locked, too.
She sat down suddenly on the edge of the seat. She was a prisoner. Her heart began to race; she was very pale and yet she was sweating. She looked into the driver’s overhead mirror, caught the dark glance reflected there.
Huskily she asked him, ‘What’s this all about? Where are you taking me?’
‘I told you I’d see you soon, Annie,’ he said in that soft, smoky voice, and her heart nearly stopped as she recognised it.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR a moment or two Annie was so shocked that she just sat there, pale and rigid, her mind struggling to cope with her situation, then she whispered, ‘Who are you?’
He didn’t reply, and when she looked into the driving mirror above his head she couldn’t see his eyes, only the olive-skinned curve of his profile turned away from her, the gleam of black hair above that. He had a strong, fleshless nose, powerful cheekbones. It was a tough face; Annie searched what she could see of it, trying to assess the sort of man this was, what he might plan to do to her.
‘Have we met before?’ she asked, but there was still no reply. She pretended to laugh, trying to hide her alarm. ‘I’m sorry not to recognise you, but I meet so many people, it’s hard to remember all their faces. Fans are always waiting after concerts, asking for autographs, talking to me—is that where we met? Are you a fan?’
He didn’t look like a fan, though. She didn’t really believe he was. Her fans were usually in their teens, or early twenties; they wore the same sort of clothes, same hairstyles, immediately recognisable as the latest street trend. Many of the girls dressed like her, actually, even to having black nails and lipstick, although that was something she had only done briefly, a year or so ago, and no longer did. She’d got bored with that.
This man was too old to be one of her fans. He had to be in his thirties and she thought his clothes were old-fashioned: that dark suit, the white shirt, the dark tie. Now that she focused on his clothes she began to realise what good quality they were: the suit looked as if it might have been tailor-made. It was certainly expensive; it hadn’t come off a peg in a shop. The shirt and tie, too, looked classy, from what she had seen of them.
The clothes puzzled her. Clothes usually told you something about the person wearing them, and the message she got from what he wore was that he was respectable, conventional, yet what he was doing was neither of those things.
So he wasn’t a typical kidnapper, either, although who knew what they would look like? This might, in fact, be a clever disguise meant to make him invisible, anonymous, someone police would discount as a possible suspect.
His silence was unnerving. Swallowing nervously, she tried, again, to get him to talk to her.
‘Why won’t you tell me who you are?’
‘Later,’ he said without looking in her direction, his eyes fixed steadily on the road ahead.
She broke out, ‘Well, where are you taking me?’
‘You’ll see, when we get there.’
‘Tell me now.’ She tried to sound cool, calm, unflustered, unafraid, but her throat was dry and her mouth moved stiffly.
He didn’t answer.
She shifted on the seat and could see his hands on the wheel: firm, capable hands, long-fingered, the skin tanned. They had a strength that worried her. Annie looked sideways out of the window at the green French countryside. Spring was only just beginning, a few new leaves appearing on the trees. The sky was blue but the sun wasn’t hot. Where had he been to get that tan?
And then another thought occurred to her. She had noted a faint foreign accent right from that first phone call—was he French? Or some other nationality? Had he just arrived from another country, somewhere hot? Sicily? she wondered. Hadn’t she heard that Sicilian shepherds often kidnapped people and held them to ransom? That it was a family trade? She looked at the driver’s black hair and olive skin. He could be Italian. But she was going to Italy later on the tour; why hadn’t he waited until she got there? Why snatch her in Paris?
‘Are you kidnapping me?’ she asked, and caught the dark flash of his eyes again as he looked at her in his driving mirror.
He still didn’t say anything, though, which in itself was disturbing, because not to answer was a sort of admission. It meant he wasn’t denying it, at the very least.
She burst out huskily, ‘People will soon be looking for me, you know.’
His face stayed averted; he didn’t respond.
‘There are a whole group of us coming to Paris—my agent, the band, the tour manger... If I don’t arrive at my hotel they’ll call the police.’
He shrugged indifferently, but she kept trying to make him see sense.
‘You can’t just snatch someone without anybody noticing! When they check up with the airport they’ll find out that a car collected me. Plenty of people saw me getting into your car, including the security men who flew from London with me. They saw you; they’ll have noticed the number of your car.’
Would they have done, though? They had talked to him, certainly, had looked at his car, but would they have thought of looking at the number of the black limousine? There hadn’t been many other people around, either; if anyone had been watching they would have been looking at her, because she had been escorted out to the car by security men and airport officials eager to avoid any problems with the media.
She wasn’t yet a big name in Europe, though. The Press wouldn’t have been over-excited by her arrival. She was just starting to sell records there, so she wasn’t likely to be big news, but with a concert tour starting a week later there might have been Press interest, so the airport hadn’t taken any chances.
That reminded her of something. ‘There was a limousine booked,’ she said slowly. ‘Was that you? Are you from the limousine firm? Because if you are, the police will track you down at once.’
He laughed.
Annie’s nerves grated. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked him angrily, then something occurred to her and in a sudden pang of hope she asked, ‘This isn’t some elaborate joke, is it? I haven’t been set up? Are you taking me to meet Phil and Di somewhere? Is this one of Phil’s practical jokes?’
Phil was famous for practical jokes; the idea should have occurred to her before if she hadn’t been so unbalanced by recognising the voice that had made all those phone calls.
‘No, it isn’t a joke, Annie,’ he said, and the way he said it made the panic start up again.
She couldn’t breathe; she lay back against the upholstery, fighting to keep calm, fighting to breathe naturally. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out everything else, to stabilise herself.
There was no point in losing control. There was nothing she could do at that moment; she was locked inside this car behind smoky glass windows which would hide her from anyone looking in from outside, so that she couldn’t even attract attention by waving or screaming. She would just have to sit here and wait until they arrived at wherever he was taking her.
Her heart missed a beat. What would happen then? If only she knew what he meant to do to her. He didn’t look like a dangerous lunatic, or a criminal; in fact she had to admit he was strikingly attractive, if you liked Mediterranean colouring: the olive skin and black hair and dark, gleaming eyes. She always had, but then she had French blood, through her father, who had been born in France, of French descent, although he had spent most of his life in England.
Annie had only visited France a couple of times herself. It had been the one country she wanted to visit as soon as she started travelling with the band. She had never been there while her father was alive, and she had promised herself she would one day go in search of the place where he had been born, in the Jura mountains, but there had never been time so far for such a long trip. When you were giving concerts you did the gig and moved on, unfortunately.
Her father had been dark and olive-skinned with dark eyes, like this man. He hadn’t been tall, though; and he had been slightly built, not powerful. Annie’s long black hair had been inherited from him, but she had been born with her mother’s skin colour and green eyes. As a child she had often wished she had inherited her mother’s blonde hair, too, but now she was glad she was a mix of both parents. She wished now that she were even more like her father.
She had adored her father, and his death when she was eleven had darkened her childhood, especially when her mother married again within a year. Annie had never liked her stepfather, and made no effort to hide her hostility; and Bernard Tyler had soon come to dislike her too. So had her mother.
Joyce Tyler knew her daughter condemned her for marrying again so soon after her first husband’s death, and resented Annie’s open contempt. She had twin sons a couple of years later, and became totally engrossed in them. She had always been a man’s woman, never unkind, but largely indifferent to her daughter; now she was only interested in her sons.
When Bernard Tyler began slapping Annie around, Joyce Tyler did nothing to stop him. In fact she bluntly told Annie it served her right. ‘If you were nice to him, he’d be nice to you. You only have yourself to blame.’
By then fourteen, Annie began staying out of the house as much as possible, because she was afraid of Bernard Tyler as well as disliking him. She started living for the day when she would be old enough to leave home for good. When she met Philip and he offered her a career in music she packed a case with everything she valued and left, knowing that her mother wouldn’t even think about her again, and that Bernard and his two sons would be glad to see her go.
When she began to be well-known they had got in touch with her to ask her to lend them some money, offering a long, rambling story about financial hardship as an excuse, but Philip had dealt with that, as he did with all her financial affairs. They had been given tickets for a concert soon afterwards, and Annie had seen them briefly that night, but then they had vanished again, no doubt because Philip made it clear that he wasn’t paying them any more large sums of money; and she had been relieved, yet that reminder of past misery had made her unhappy for days.
Her life would have been so different if her father hadn’t died so young, her mother hadn’t then married Bernard Tyler. Annie’s happy childhood had ended at the age of eleven; until she was seventeen she had been lonely and un-happy. Even to remember those years now was to feel greyness steal over her. She frowned, pushing the memories away.
‘You’re very quiet,’ the driver said, and she started, looking at him again, but all she could see was his profile and the dark sweep of his lashes.
‘I was thinking. My friends are going to be very upset and worried when I don’t arrive. They’ll wonder what on earth has happened to me.’
‘They’ll soon find out.’ His voice was cool, dismissive, and she flinched.
‘What does that mean? Will you ring them?’ Saying what, though? Telling them that she had been kidnapped and they would have to pay a large ransom to get her back?
She wished she could see his face properly instead of merely getting glimpses now and then. People’s eyes usually told you a lot about them, but that wasn’t true about this man. His eyes were like bottomless wells: deep, lustrous, impossible to plumb. And yet she was beginning to feel an odd teasing familiarity...
Had they ever met before? she wondered. Or had he cleverly managed to plant the idea that she knew him in her head subliminally, with his phone calls, and ever since he picked her up at the airport?
The limousine slowed, turned at right angles, and left the road on which they had been travelling. Annie looked out and upwards, seeing that they were driving between deep, sunk green banks from which trees and bushes sprang, over a winding, unmade road.
No! she realised; this wasn’t a road—it was a driveway leading up to a house. A moment later the house itself came into view: not a large house, but detached, with trees and a garden around it, two-storeyed, with mossy pink tiles on the roof, the walls painted white and the closed shutters over every window painted black.
As the car halted outside the front door Annie tried to make out whether there were any other houses in view, and felt her heart sink as she saw that the white house stood on the edge of some sort of wood, which lay behind it, and that there were only fields in front of it. It could hardly have been more isolated. She couldn’t see another house anywhere.
Nerves jumped under her skin. She bit her lip, feeling real fear growing inside her.
