CHARLOTTE LAMB - Dying For You

‘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.

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.