Chapter 13

Marina

It was just light out when Marina awoke and stretched out luxuriantly on Boxing Day, her first day at Underhill Grange as a member of this lovely family, betrothed to the only love of her life Daniel Medcalf, the sweetest man she knew. Daniel had already got up and was no doubt in the kitchen prepping breakfast. She washed and dressed quickly, not wanting to waste a single minute of this day, or any day from now on. In the kitchen, she found Daniel and Sophie holding each other tightly, both crying silent tears. As she approached, they opened their arms and welcomed her into a real family hug.

“Thank you, Marina, for telling Daddy last night about you know what. I wanted to tell him myself but I didn’t even know how to begin.” Sophie’s drying tears threatened to restart.

“Hush, Soph, sweetheart,” Marina assured her, “we all know what happened now and we will cope with whatever comes out of this, and we’ll approach it all together as a family.”

“Yes, sweetheart,” her father confirmed gently, kissing his daughter’s forehead, “we will be with you all the way, so you’ll never have to face any of this alone, with family around you and supporting you. Now, Marina, are you ready for a hot drink?”

“Mmm, a cup of tea would be perfect, morning darling, by the way!”

“Good morning, my love,” Daniel returned as he kissed and hugged her close with his daughter.

Sophie gently started to extricate herself from their arms to fill the kettle, when Giles came in, his hair still tousled, expecting to see Ginny back from her ride.

They were all soon up and active to check the whereabouts of Ginny, possibly still out riding the Downs alone, but she should have been back by now. The first two, father and daughter, slipped their footwear on quicker than Marina, who had slipped her tight trainers off yesterday without undoing the laces, so she was a little way behind Daniel and Sophie, but well ahead of the still sleepy Giles, who had to finish getting dressed and fetch his phone. Just inside the stables Marina saw Daniel lying on the floor and Sophie being held by a thickset young man with his hand over her mouth, before Marina was grabbed from behind and a bony hand jammed over her mouth, so she was unable to warn the approaching Giles. They were tied up by nylon cable ties and gagged with rags before Giles arrived, his noisy progress up the gravel path giving the gang plenty of warning of his arrival.

The three captives were led to the last but one stall, where Ginny and another man Marina didn’t know were already lying on the straw-strewn floor, similarly tied, gagged and blindfolded.

The new prisoners were pushed to the ground and ankles secured. Poor Daniel was dragged in and left lying face down on the ground, with a slightly bleeding head wound. He was still breathing, Marina was relieved to note, from the feint movement of straw near his open mouth, but she couldn’t stop the rising fear for his long-term future.

Then Marina saw Jimmy Johnson walk in leading Lady Barbara and a large grey-haired gentleman, who were not only bound and gagged, but blindfolded as well.

In isolation she would never have recognised Johnson after all this time, if it hadn’t been the reminders of him provided by Daniel and the retired police detective, Kathryn. She hardly knew him at the time they were both working at the hotel, as their paths rarely crossed, and his face had never featured in her dreams or whenever she handled a new baby or was otherwise reminded of her loss. She had quite easily recognised him in the photo supplied by Kathryn, and since then she had recalled a number of tiny memories from all that time ago of someone she had actively avoided at the time. Now she had seen Johnson she realised that this was no simple robbery, this was personal. This was revenge and focussed by Johnson on Daniel certainly and possibly herself too. Marina had only two days earlier put in place measures to bring Johnson’s undeclared crimes to book, but he had preempted her, and both she and Daniel were apparently at his mercy, along with everyone who Daniel and now she considered dear.

She struggled desperately to get out of her bonds, to free her gag, to shout a warning, to even curse her captor, but the bonds were cutting into her wrists and unbreakable, the gag too tight around her mouth to talk and impossible to wrench free.

Johnson saw the signs of her recognition of him and he seemed very surprised to find her here.

“You! Marina!” he snarled. “I searched everywhere for you, Marina, but without knowing your surname I couldn’t track you down. Medcalf was easy, and I hoped he would lead me to you over the years, but had long given up all hope of meeting you again. Having you here is a happy bonus for me.”

Johnson turned to his men and ordered them to blindfolded all the prisoners. But that took time, they didn’t have any material to hand and someone had to root more strips of rags out from a bag. All the time Marina strained against her bonds, while Johnson stared at her as if she were nothing more than a bug. Despite her struggling, they managed to blindfold her and she was dragged from the stall into the last one, the one where they kept spare straw bales, hay bales and animal feed well away from the horses. They threw her down on the floor next to a bale of straw. She knew this from the roughness of the bale she ended up against. The smell of petrol was overpowering. It was obvious that something bad, really bad, was going to happen.

She could hear that someone was dragged around the corner with her, who groaned. Was it Daniel? She tried to work out where she was exactly, from what she remembered from the few times she had been in the stables. Fortunately, she had cleaned them out with Sophie a couple of days ago and she had tidied up this area. There were bags of feed for various animals near the entrance on the left hand side, leaving the right entrance clear to access the back. There were hay bales for feed piled up on the left, all the way down to the corner. In the opposite corner, were piled straw bales, used for bedding material. Marina felt the bale she was resting against. Rough as straw. The straw smelled clean, so she imagined that the petrol had been poured on the hay bales which were staked high on the left side. There were only half a dozen straw bales and they were in the far corner of the stall.

She shuffled around and came against solid wood, with a gap underneath. She knew exactly where she was, in stall 6 up against the right hand side of the stall, probably more than halfway along. Beyond her, under that gap, was a wide corridor next to the short North wall of the old barn.

There was no way out on that side, the only doors were the main double doors on the long side at the front, matching double doors on the opposite side, which “hadn’t been opened in living memory”, Sophie had laughed when they swept the six empty stalls on that side, and a small door on the short side nearest the house on the South side of the barn, which was used regularly, but was too small to take the horses out.

She recalled that all the time she had been held prisoner in the barn she had not heard the horses, which were normally kept in stalls 2, 3 and 4.

The other prisoners were being kept in empty stall 5, which Sophie and Marina had used to temporarily house one or two of the horses while they mucked out their stalls and put in new bedding. Stall 1, closest to the house, was full of stacked firewood and a few bags of rock salt and had not needed any tidying up, she recalled.

While she was still working out her bearings and considering her options, another body was dragged in and pushed down next to her. She knew, both from the smell of her perfume and her agitation, that it was Lady Barbara. She reached out with her tethered hands and pulled Lady Barbara to her, probably by her expensive cashmere coat, trying her hardest through the gag to whisper, “Shush!”

Remarkably, thought Marina, Lady Barbara immediately stopped struggling. She moved her hands to connect with Marina’s hands and whispered back, “Ma’ina?” through her gag.

“Yesh,” Marina managed, “I ‘ab a p’am.”

“P’an?” Lady Barbara managed in reply.

“Yesh, a p’am,” Marina replied, “jush wa’ ‘o my shigmall.”

“OK,” came the reply after only a few moments.

While they were trying to converse, it was clear from the noises from stall 5 that the other prisoners were being dragged to their feet and led away in the opposite direction.

Marina heard Johnson’s voice get louder as he came into their stall and moved down to stand just opposite her, maybe, she thought. Because of the stacked hay bales on the other side, Marina realised that he would be no more than six or eight feet away from her. He was speaking all the time, berating some woman referred to as a “tart” and instructing someone called Andy to “get this place lit up” so they could get out of there, and “I don’t care what the tart says, we’ll drag ‘em all in ‘ere first, includin’ the tart”. On the way through, she thought back, he must’ve kicked the still prone Daniel, who groaned, just a few feet away from the entrance, maybe ten feet from Marina in another direction.

Marina saw red at the point of that kick and, leaning against the wall of the stall behind her, managed to haul herself up to stand on her feet, all the while Johnson spouted what he wanted to do. Although her ankles were still tightly bound, she could flex her knees and thought she could still hop, so she leaned forward and hopped, landed twice, flexing her knees, and bend her body so she was head down and launched herself with every ounce of impetus her small frame could muster at where she thought she last heard Johnson’s voice.

She hit someone, she hoped it was Johnson, in a relatively soft part of his bony body. He was in mid-sentence and she could hear the wind expelled from his body, knowing then that she had hit her intended target. Her adrenaline, running on high octane during her leap of faith, could hear a match being struck, then Johnson falling back against the stacked hay bales and at least one expletive from Andy, standing to her left.

As she rolled down to the floor, to land heavily on her knees and one shoulder, she heard the roar of the resulting explosion and felt the rolling heat of the flash fire on her back.

And the screams of terror and pain from the two, possibly three men who were standing up in that stall when the petrol fumes exploded all around them.

Marina turned and tried to crawl towards the entrance of the stall, to find Daniel, but with her ankles tied and her hands behind her back, she found couldn’t crawl, she could barely move an inch. She cried in frustration, while all around and above her, the air crackled with flames and the voices of several people were screaming in agony as they burned.

She felt a sharp tug on her ankles and she was pulled back to where she had sat with Lady Barbara and, before she realised what happened, she was being rolled under the stall partition into the cool of the corridor at the end of the stables.

“Wha’ ‘bou’ Dani’?” Marina tried to say, lying on her side.

Lady Barbara was next to her pulling at the knots to Marina’s gag and blindfold. In seconds she was free of those obstructions and could see. Stall 6 next to them was completely ablaze top to bottom, there was no way back in there. Nor could they get around to the front of the stall as the explosion had sent flames roaring across the front corridor and were licking up the front wall of the barn. Billows of black smoke were thick all the way up to the thatched roof, with black smoke being driven into their corridor. Already, only about two or three feet high from floor level was still clear, but she knew that smoke was soon going to fill that space. Lady Barbara’s ankles were not tied, Marina could see that by the way she kneeled on one knee, but both women still had their hands tied. Lady Barbara’s in front and Marina’s behind.

“No time to untie your blindfold, Barbara,” Marina said, “just drag me in the direction my head is facing, so we can get out of here.”

Without hesitation, Lady Barbara complied and started dragging her.

“Just to the right a bit, too much, yes, perfect, about another eight feet will do it. Yes. Stop here. Feel around on the floor, find a ring.”

“Yesh, go’ i’!”

“Pull it up.”

Lady Barbara pulled the ring and the cantilevered trapdoor opened easily.

“Walk backwards down the steps Barbara, there’s a thick guide rope to hold onto on the left and pull me down by the ankles, I am just wriggling in a jackknife action to turn around. That’s it! Now reach out and pull me down.”

Lady Barbara scrambled part way down and immediately reached out for Marina, with the other woman guiding he with simple instructions, then started pulling Marina down after her. When they got down the nine or ten steep wooden steps, Marina tucking her head into her chest to avoid banging the back of her head. She guided Barbara to tug the rope which pulled the trapdoor shut. It was pitch black down there with the trapdoor shut, but after some fumbling behind her, Marina found the light switch and soon all the tubes flickered on. Just a little smoke had come down with them, but otherwise it was clear and breathable down there.