her from her physical body and its discomforts. She couldn’t move at all…couldn’t do anything other than sit there where she had been left, straining her ears for some other movement in the room.
Quite when she began to realise she might be on her own she had no idea; perhaps it was when the quality of the silence struck her as being empty. She held her breath, listening anxiously for the sound of other breath, trying not to imagine the grinning faces of the gang while they witnessed her pathetic attempts to use what senses were left to her to work out if they were there.
If they were there…She was almost sure they weren’t. Which meant…which meant that she was alone.
She ought to have felt relief, but instead she felt all the blind, frantic panic of a helpless child deserted by its parents. She couldn’t move—her wrists were bound and so were her ankles, and her wrists were tied to some kind of pipe.
She heard a noise—not a human sound…The hairs on her arms stood up in terror as she felt something run across her bare leg. She wanted desperately to scream, but couldn’t remove the gag nor scream through it.
Panic engulfed her; she tried desperately to pull herself free, and succeeded only in rubbing her wrists raw on their bonds so that the broken skin bled.
After panic and terror came dull, destructive acceptance. She was going to die here in this unknown place, and she might as well resign herself to it.
How long had she been here already? Hours…but how many?
She tried to think constructively, but it was impossible. All she wanted now was oblivion, escape…
When the door finally opened, her rescuers were all moved to different degrees of shock and pity by what they saw.
A telephone call to the bank had announced that any attempt to find her or them during the next five hours would result in her death, but that if no attempt was made to track them down for that period then her father would be informed of where she could be found.
Since the police had no idea of where to start looking for the thieves, they had had no option other than to comply with their demands, and against all their expectations they had actually received the promised call later in the day giving the address of a slum-clearance flat in a high-rise block where she could be found.
To Jessica, the debriefing that followed her imprisonment was almost as gruelling as the imprisonment itself, although in a different way.
The whole nightmare affair had left her perilously close to the edge of a complete mental and physical breakdown, with the result that she had finally told her parents that she could not return to the bank, and that instead she was going to use the small inheritance left to her by her maternal grandparents to train for a career much more suited to her now fierce determination to live as quiet and safe a life as possible.
Of course her parents had protested, especially when they had learned she intended moving to Avon.
There was no reason why she couldn’t continue to live at home in London and practise her career from there, they told her, but she refused to be swayed. London was now a place that terrified her. She couldn’t walk down a busy street without being overcome by the feeling that someone was walking behind her, stalking her—without the fear she had known in that small, frightening prison coming back to drag her back down into the pit of self-destructive fear she was only just beginning to leave behind.
In the end her parents had reluctantly given way on the advice of her doctor, who had told them that she needed to find a way of healing herself and coming to terms with what had happened.
That healing process was still going on, and now, suddenly and shockingly, she had been dragged back into that remembered horror.
She saw the gunman coming towards her and started to scream. He lashed out at her with the butt of his gun. She felt a stunning pain like fire in her shoulder, followed by a cold wash of paralysing weakness, and knew that she was going to faint.
When she came round, the small post office was full of people. She was lying on the floor with something under her head and someone kneeling beside her holding her wrist while he measured her pulse.
She looked up cold with fear, trembling with the remembered shock of the past, and encountered the warm gold eyes of Daniel Hayward. His look of warmth and compassion was reassuring and comforting. She tried to sit up, conscious of her undignified prone position and the curious glances of the people standing around her.
As she looked round the shop, Daniel Hayward seemed to know what she was looking for and said quietly, ‘It’s all right. He’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
She looked bewildered, and it was left to Mrs Gillingham to explain excitedly, ‘Mr Hayward was ever so brave. He reached right out and took the gun off him, and told me to open the door and shout for help.’
While Jessica looked uncomprehendingly at him, he said humorously, ‘Not brave, really. I simply made use of the excellent distraction you provided by drawing our friend’s fire, although such a course of action is not really to be recommended. You’ll be lucky if your arm isn’t out of action for a good few days, I’m afraid.’
Her arm…Jessica tried to lift it and gasped as the pain coursed like fire though the bruised muscles.
‘It’s all right…nothing’s actually broken,’ Daniel Hayward was telling her reassuringly. ‘But that was a nasty blow you took, and there’s bound to be some very considerable bruising. Look,’ he offered quietly, ‘why don’t you let me take you home? I’ve got my car outside. Mrs Gillingham has sent someone to fetch the doctor, but I think you’ll feel much more comfortable lying on your own bed than lying here…’
He was so understanding, so concerned, so gentle in the way that he touched her, gently helping her to her feet. She couldn’t ever remember a man treating her like this before, nor herself wanting one to. Almost instinctively she leaned against him, letting him take her slender weight as he guided her towards the door, politely refusing the offers of help showered on them both.
‘I suspect the police will probably want to interview you later,’ he told her gently as he settled her in the passenger seat of an immaculate and brand new Daimler saloon. Her father always drove a Daimler, and she was aware of a certain, unexpected nostalgic yearning for her parents’ presence as he set the car in motion.
The last time she had seen them had been Christmas, when she had paid a reluctant duty visit to her old home. She had been on edge and nervous the whole time she was there—not so much because of her old fear of London’s crowds and anonymity, she had recognised in some surprise, but because of her deep-rooted guilt, and fear that somehow or other her parents would succeed in gently pressuring her into returning to her old life…a life she knew she could no longer tolerate because of the restrictions it placed upon her.
Although the gulf between them saddened her, although she was still consumed with guilt in knowing that she had let them down, she still found her new life immensely fulfilling—immensely satisfying and pleasing in an entirely personal and difficult-to-explain way, other than to say it was as though she had now found a piece of herself which had previously been missing, and that in doing so she had completed her personality, making it whole.
‘Which house is it?’ Daniel Hayward asked her. ‘Mrs G said it was along here somewhere…’
She gathered her thoughts and indicated which house was hers, conscious of the discreet twitching of curtains as he stopped the Daimler outside and then got out.
Her neighbours were elderly and very kind, and would doubtless be all agog with curiosity and shock once they heard what had happened.
It had been idiotic of her to react like that. The man had obviously not been much of a threat after all, but she had panicked remembering…
‘I think I’d better carry you inside,’ Daniel told her easily. ‘You still look pretty groggy.’
She wanted to protest, but she