CHARLOTTE LAMB - Wild Hunger

The dark-haired girl had been listening. ‘I’ll go,’ she said, and was gone, running.

He told the secretary she was coming and rang off. The fax machine was chattering again; he let the latest screed from his editor drop into the tray awaiting it, glanced at it, sighing. It was another refusal to send him abroad on a story. ‘Come into the office. I need to talk to you,’ it ended.

Gerard screwed it up and threw it across the room, then went out into the cobbled mews.

A hundred years ago horses had been stabled in these little gabled buildings which had been built at the back of gardens belonging to the big Victorian houses lining the streets on either side of the alley. After the Second World War the stables had all been converted into dwellings. They were highly sought after; painted in bright colours, each one had a window-box for a garden. Gerard’s house had a scarlet-enamelled front door with a brass lion’s head knocker. The brick walls had been painted cream, and he had planted geraniums in the window-box.

It was a warm afternoon in early summer. The mews was drowsy with heat, the scent of flowers and trees in the gardens behind. Most of the other occupants of the tiny cottages were at work; there were no families here—the houses weren’t suitable. Tenants were either single or couples without children.

Gerard climbed on to the windowsill of the ground-floor front room of the cottage next door and peered in at a pretty sitting-room, furnished in spring-like pale green and white. It was empty, and immaculate.

He hoped he wasn’t being made a fool—Sara Ounissi might have got the whole thing out of proportion…On the other hand, what if she hadn’t? What if the redhead was seriously ill?

Just for once he could actually do something, save someone. He had been helpless when he was covering the civil war; he could observe, report what was happening, but do nothing useful. That was one reason for the nightmares he had had ever since he got back. He was ridden with guilt.

He had barely spoken to the redhead—what had Sara Ounissi called her? Keira, he thought—unusual name; it suited her.

He had noticed her, though; who could help it? That lovely face, the mane of wild red hair, the grace of her body made her unforgettable.

He jumped down, banged on her front door. ‘Keira? Keira, are you there? Open the door.’

There was no reply, just an echoing silence, but he was beginning to have a weird feeling, a gut instinct that there really was something wrong. His instincts had been honed by his job. Constantly being around sudden death made you quicker to pick up on danger.

It didn’t always work, of course. Sometimes you got caught out. The villagers he had been with that last night before he was shot were now either dead or homeless. It had been a pretty, white-walled, redroofed little village with apple blossom on the trees in the gardens when he’d first arrived there. He had been enchanted by it, had thought of it as an oasis of peace in the midst of turmoil.

Perhaps the very arrival of him and his camera team had drawn the enemy’s attention to the village. They had only been there a short time before the first shells had hit. Within days it was just a mass of smoking rubble, a hole in the ground, and there had been nothing he could do to stop the destruction, to help the people, except to tell the world what was happening to them, and to do that he had had to risk his own life, and that of his team, by staying with them.

The others had survived intact—the cameraman, the sound man, the young director with them on his first war coverage. Only Gerard had been wounded. He had been got out finally by some British soldiers serving there with the United Nations force, flown back to London by his newspaper, given the best possible treatment. His head wound was healing well. It had been a scalp injury, nothing serious; a bullet had ploughed a path across his head, a bloody parting in his hair. The wound in his leg had left him with a limp, most noticable when he was tired. He had been assured that it would gradually pass off altogether. The injuries to his mind were longer-lasting and made him sensitive to atmosphere.

He was sure he wasn’t imagining the sense of disaster he was getting now.

‘Keira! Open the door or I’m coming in!’ he shouted. The builders who had converted this small cottage had used pretty flimsy materials; he was sure he could kick this door in without trouble.

But he hesitated—maybe he shouldn’t risk a physical assault on the door in his present condition? His leg wasn’t yet fully recovered. He wouldn’t want to undo the work of his doctors.

He could try a little light burglary, though. He had once interviewed a professional criminal who had cheerfully demonstrated his own skill at opening hotel doors with a credit card. Gerard had never yet got around to testing what he had learnt. Now was his chance to do so.

He got out his credit-card wallet, extracted a card; a photograph fell out and he picked it up, frowning down at the image of himself in diving equipment against a background of blue sea and sky. It had been taken on his first visit to the country which, unknown to him, was about to be dragged down into civil war. He had spent several holidays there before the conflict began. Gerard had loved the place, gone diving, lazed in the sun, visited the beauty spots, admired the archaeological sites, drunk the local wine, eaten peasant food, strongly flavoured garlic sausages, fish caught on the day you ate it. He had made friends with local people, picked up something of the language, as he always did wherever he went. He had felt no warning of what was to come so soon afterwards.

It had been a painful shock to go back and find the countryside he remembered as peaceful and sundrenched being torn apart by civil war, the worst of all wars. He had felt so helpless, so useless, faced with such terrible suffering. He couldn’t get over what he had seen; he had had nightmares ever since he got back—had woken up screaming in the hospital ward, fought with his nurses, been half crazy with rage and horror.

That was why he was still on sick leave, although he had been pestering the news editor to put him back in the game. He had been ordered to rest and recover mentally before they sent him abroad again.

They thought he was off his trolley, of course. Damn them! Didn’t they realise he needed to bury those memories under a heap of others? He needed to be busy, to have things to do to stop himself remembering.

Impatiently Gerard pushed the photo back into his wallet and turned his attention to the front door; he slid his credit card slowly and carefully into position. He heard a click and gently pushed; the door magically slid open.

‘Well, well, aren’t you clever?’ he said to himself, grinning, before he looked around.

The cottage was an exact replica of his own in terms of structure. The front door opened out into a tiny passage at the base of the stairs. Ahead of him he saw a kitchen, to his right the open door of the sitting-room.

‘Keira!’ he called, walking towards the kitchen door. Then he stopped, shaken by what he saw. It had been expensively furnished in high-tech style with every modern gadget and piece of equipment—but at the moment it looked as if it had been raided by vandals. The fridge door hung open, food spilled out on the floor next to it; there was partly eaten food on the table, on the tops of the cabinets, everywhere.

Otherwise, though, the room was empty. The girl must be upstairs. What sort of state was she in? He began to run, taking the stairs two at a time.

She wasn’t in either of the small bedrooms; both were feminine, delicately furnished, immaculate. The excessive neatness of the rooms compared to the disarray in the kitchen sent a shiver down his spine.