I Will Keep Her

Georgina Maynard

Description

'I Will Keep Her' is a thrilling adventure with a twist at the end which is not easy to forget. The story is full of action, coupled with insightful and diverse characters, and an unexpected and enthralling plot.When Steve Jackson, army veteran and Fleur Edson, well-known artist, are thrown together in a desperate search for the teenage daughter of surveillance guru, Sir Charles Wells, the sparks start to fly. Armed only with their mutual animosity their hunt for the kidnapper takes them from the English countryside, backstreets, and palaces of Riyadh to a heart-stopping race for survival across the Saudi Desert.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 07 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839785177
• Langue: English

Extrait

I Will Keep Her
Georgina Maynard


I Will Keep Her
Published by The Conrad Press Ltd. in the United Kingdom 2022
Tel: [phone]
www.theconradpress.com
[e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-839785-17-7
Copyright © Georgina Maynard, 2022
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


For Nick


The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him but because he loves what is behind him.
G.K. Chesterton


PROLOGUE
T he two men were sitting in a plain white taxi. The driver was wearing an open-necked shirt and linen jacket. His bald head looked sweaty, and his fingers drummed nervously on the steering wheel.
The guy in the back was older and more relaxed. Both were wearing sunglasses although the midday sun was hidden behind clouds. The car was parked on the Corso di Tintori, just down from the Basilica Di Santa Croce, central Florence.
It was lunchtime. Their engine was running. The air was warm and smelt of diesel. The tourists milled about taking selfies, their eyes flashing from side to side as they tried to capture the sights of the city. A dog ran across the road, dodging between the cars, horns blew, pigeons took to the air. The man in the front seat of the car grunted, pointed, and said something in Arabic. In the back, Hassan tapped his top pocket and nodded.
There was no great hurry. They knew where the two girls were heading. After all, they had been tracking them for several days. Listening to their silly girly conversations. The driver leant forward, his jacket peeling away from the warm plastic of his seat. He slipped the car into gear, inched along the kerb, following them, then accelerating slightly until he was about fifty yards in front. In his rear-view mirror, he could see their laughing faces, short skirts, long brown legs, shopping bags swinging by their sides.
The instructions, a text message, had been precise.
Only take the girl with the long blonde hair. Leave the other one. Be careful do not harm her.
Unusual, Hassan had thought at the time.
As they drew level, Hassan opened the rear door, climbed half-out and grabbed the girl by her arm. He swept her into the back of the car. He heard her fallen sunglasses crunch under his foot as he slammed the door. Then they were away. The Florentine traffic swallowing them up as they headed out towards the autostrada.
The girl stopped struggling and her body slumped against Hassan’s shoulder as soon as the tranquilliser took effect. The car crossed over a bridge, and he threw her phone into the Arno.
Behind them, the other girl stood stationary on the pavement, her mouth wide open, screaming, the carrier bags spilling their contents on to the road.
Cars slowed, people paused for a second, before the shouting, hooting and hand waving started.
A woman ran out of a nearby restaurant heading towards the lone girl.
The whole operation had taken less than a minute.


PART ONE
The birds they sang at the break of day
Start again, I hear them say
Don’t dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be.
Leonard Cohen - Anthem


CHAPTER ONE
T here is a moment, perhaps only a couple of seconds, between sleeping and waking. Like the pressing of the pause button on the television so that the screen freezes, when the conscience mind blinks, then reality floods back into the brain, all the thoughts and memories, good or bad.
Fleur Edson lay very still, the shock of yesterday’s events was such a physical pain that she was afraid even to move her head.
She listened to the thrump, thrump, thrump, of the ceiling fan above her, as it slowly turned, pushing the warm autumn air around the room.
Yesterday morning she had woken to the fast footsteps of the girls running down the stairs, their laughter, and the sound of the radio as they crashed round the kitchen making coffee and plans for their last day in Italy.
Today she should have been stretching and purring like a cat at the prospect of a gloriously indulgent day when she could please herself. Maybe walking with the dog to the market in the village, then tidying her studio. All with the backdrop of the prospect of staying at her Italian bolthole for as long as she liked.
Instead, her heart felt like it was in a vice, being wound tight by some alien force until she could hardly breathe.
Her head fell back on the pillow. She tried to think clearly. The events of yesterday still seemed like a bad dream.
‘Why?’ she asked herself for the hundredth time.
Why would anyone want to abduct Alice? Granted she was young and beautiful, and a bit of research would show that her parents were wealthy. But why only Alice and not her friend, Mollie as well? The same rules applied.
She threw back the sheet, shuddering as she felt a cold chill as her feet hit the terracotta tiles.
Her long suntanned fingers grabbed her dressing gown and wrapped it tight around her thin body.
She sat down at her dressing table covering her face with her hands.
‘Oh, dear God.’
She sighed, staring hard in the mirror. The healthy bronzed glow, acquired from three months in the Tuscan hills outside Florence, seemed to have drained away. Leaving in its wake a drawn and paler look, with dark rings under her green eyes.
She brushed her red hair, the bane of her life, now mercifully bleached to a slightly softer hue. It still hung in a thick unruly mass framing her face. As usual she struggled to rack her tresses into some sort of submission.
Giving up the fight Fleur slammed the brush down and lent back in the chair.
The earlier conversation she had with Alice’s father, her old friend, Charles Wells, still stung.
He had barked at her down the phone.
‘What the hell do you think you were doing? I trusted you, Fleur. You promised me you would look after the girls. You’re always too indulgent. I thought they would be safe with you.’ He was shouting angrily now. ‘I think we’d better fly out straight away. Caroline and I will try to get a flight today and hire a car. I’ll text you.’ He cut the call.
Her fitful sleep last night had been fuelled with dreams of young girls locked in cellars, hurt, and abused. Alice, pale and shaky, holding a newspaper and begging her father to pay a ransom.
‘Coffee, I need coffee,’ she said out loud.
She went over the events of the previous lunchtime.
Was it less than twenty-four hours ago?
She remembered running out of the restaurant and hugging Mollie hard. Someone had called the police. After they arrived it was all a bit of a blur.
At the Via Zara Stazione di Polizia there were interviews, statements taken. A couple of officers brought her car with the girls’ luggage to the station. But she could tell by their expressions that there seemed so little they could do immediately. There were promises of roadblocks and looking at the CCTV footage. But what they said had seemed like a professional abduction, would be just that – professional.
Fleur had phoned Mollie’s parents, then their tearful daughter had spoken to them. Mollie still had time to catch her plane, and to Fleur’s relief, it was decided that it would be best if she did just that and she headed home, in case the kidnappers had planned to take another bite of the cherry. Fleur felt guilty enough already, but also a little relieved. But her main emotion was anger. It was so unfair of Charles to blame her.
Pulling on some jeans, t-shirt, and cardigan, she scraped her hair up on to the top of her head, anchoring it with a blunt pencil.
She smiled at herself ruefully in the mirror. Even after all these years hardly a day went by without her remembering the unkind chants of her classmates. “Carrot top! She’s a vegetable not a flower!” Or the hours she had spent scrubbing her face raw attempting to remove the fine haze of freckles that, even now, still stretched across her nose.
She walked across her farmhouse kitchen. The warm light of the early Italian morning was spilling in through the doors onto the terrace. Her lurcher watched her go outside. He stayed lying under the table. Even the dog knew that Fleur’s temper could erupt quickly, dark, and red, like her long hair, which was already trying to escape from its anchor.
She looked across the vines, towards the row of skyrocket cypress trees silhouetted against the horizon, and behind them the faint outline of Florence’s Duomo in the far distance. However angry or frustrated she was, that view always captivated her and calmed her spirit. Except this morning.
All day she had kept imagining the headlines, if, or when, the press got hold of the story.
‘Only daughter of insurance and surveillance guru, Sir Charles Wells, goes missing in Florence. Alice Wells, aged eighteen, had been staying with her godmother, artist and wild child of the nineties, Fleur Edson.’
The day seemed to drag on relentlessly like quicksand sucking her deeper into the mire. She phoned the police again, but they still had no news. She went to her studio, picked up her brushes, put them down again. Tried to eat, tried to read.
Later she showered and sat down again at her dressing table. She put on her earrings, then took them off again. She undid the top two buttons on her shirt, showing the edges of her brown breasts, changed her mind and did them up again. She stared at her face in the mirror. Despite what she perceived as its many imperfections, the too wide mouth and well-defined cheekbones, most people would have considered that, at fifty-five, she was a good-looking woman, her body firm and tanned after three months of long walks and games of tennis with the girls and their neighbours.
She had not seen Charles an