The Beaufort Sisters. Jon Cleary
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coming through the cracks of the boarded-up window and through the half-open door, it was impossible to distinguish his features. He was just a dark body and head with a rough soft voice.
‘Get this into you, honey. Sorry we can’t give you any heat, but we don’t want people coming around asking why smoke’s coming outa the chimney. If your daddy don’t fool around, you oughtn’t to be here too long.’
Nina stood up, took the mug and almost scalded her throat as she gulped down the coffee. The man stood looking at her and she suddenly felt even more afraid: was he going to rape her? She tightened her grip on the mug, ready to hurl it if he moved towards her.
‘I’m just looking at you.’ The man’s voice was most peculiar, as if he had a small bag of sand or gravel in his throat instead of a voice-box. ‘We put a price of half a million bucks on you. You think you’re worth that much?’
She almost said, My father would think I’m worth much more; but she was not so cold and miserable that her mind had stopped working. She suddenly realized how dangerous wealth could be. It was said that kidnapping in America had originated in Kansas City; people must have been abducted in colonial times, but it had been turned into a modern profession by gangsters in her home town. They had even kidnapped the city manager’s daughter; Lucas Beaufort had wanted to broadcast a plea that the kidnappers come back for the city manager, too. The spate of abductions had frightened the wealthy citizens and for a while no children of rich families went anywhere without an escort. When Nina had gone to college her father had wanted a private guard assigned to her, but the Vassar board had been firm that their campus should not be turned into a security camp. From her early teens Nina had been aware that great wealth made her and her sisters different from other children, but, despite her father’s concern, she had never really thought of it as endangering her. Now, chillingly, she knew better.
‘Why are you doing this?’
But even as she asked she knew it was a foolish question, and the man laughed. ‘You ain’t that dumb, Nina. We’re doing it for money. Ain’t that what your old man and his old man worked for, screwed people for? We come over here, us GI’s, to fight for a better world, that’s what they told us. You need money for a better world, if you’re gonna enjoy it properly. My partner and me, we been making a little on the side. But you’re worth more than a truck-load of cigarettes, more than a whole PX.’
‘They might hang you for kidnapping. They wouldn’t do that for selling things on the black market.’
‘The Krauts spent three years trying to shoot my ass off, but I survived. I think my luck’s gonna hold. Nobody’s gonna hang me. You work for UNRRA, but you don’t know nothing about the real world. The real world is made up of people without money, and I don’t mean just Krauts. We gotta take risks, we wanna get anywhere. You’re lucky, you’re never gonna have to take a risk in your whole goddam life!’
He sounded abruptly angry, though his voice didn’t rise. He went out of the room, slamming the door behind him and locking it. Nina put the mug down on the floor, began to walk round the room in an effort to turn the blocks of ice in her shoes back into feet. She heard an engine start up outside and she went to the window and tried to peer out through the thin cracks between the boards. But all she could see was snow, a blank white mockery.
The truck, or whatever it was, drove away. When its sound had faded she stood listening, ears alert for any sound in the house. She could hear nothing; then the house creaked as if to reassure her that she had been left alone. She made up her mind that she was going to escape.
She had always been a resourceful girl, though never as good at practical matters as Margaret and Sally. She hoped she could get herself out of a locked, boarded-up room. One could not be more practical than to know how to escape from kidnappers.
Buoyed up by her own determination, she began at once to seek a way out of the room. Ten minutes later she was as depressed and miserable as when the kidnapper with the husky voice had come in. There was nothing in the room that she could use as a club to bash the boards away from the window; the door was too stout to be broken open and the lock would have defied Jimmy Valentine or any other cracksman. She sank down to the floor beside the fireplace and began to weep.
Then something fell into the grate, a lump of soot, and she heard the flutter of wings in the chimney. She sat up, waited, then crawled into the fireplace and looked up. A film of soot floated down on to her face; but high up in the chimney she could see a small square of light. She withdrew from the fireplace, sat on her haunches and considered. Weighed her strength and size (would the chimney be too narrow and too high?) against the urge to escape. Weighed, too, her determination against her fear that the men would come back, find her trying to escape and vent their anger on her.
She measured the width of the chimney with her hands, decided it was wide enough to take her shoulders and hips. She took off her coat, knowing the bulk of it would handicap her once she began climbing up the narrow space. But she would need it once she was outside the house; she put the belt of it through the loop inside the collar, tied the belt round her waist and let the coat hang down between her legs. She pulled the knitted cap she wore down over her face to just above her eyes, pulled on her gloves. Then she crawled into the fireplace, stretched her arms above her, eased herself upright into the narrow blackness of the chimney and began to climb.
She was glad she was wearing stout winter shoes; she searched for and found tiny crevices in the chimney wall into which she drove her toes. The chimney had not been cleaned in years and she had climbed no more than her own height when she began to feel she was smothering. A bird suddenly fluttered out of the top of the chimney in a panic; soot cascaded down on her and she shut her eyes and turned her face downwards just in time. She lost her grip and went plunging down, scraping against the bricks, taking more soot with her. She hit the floor of the fireplace, feeling the jarring shock go right up through her body to her skull; but she remained upright, unable to fall over because the chimney held her like a brick corset. She held her breath, feeling the soot in a thick cloud about her face, waiting for it to settle, then she opened her eyes and stared into the blackness.
It seemed that every bone and muscle in her body hurt; her knees and ankles felt as if they might be broken. Her arms were trapped above her head; she could feel the pain where her elbows had been scraped as she fell. Her right knee felt as if there was an open wound in it and her right hip as if it had been kicked by a horse. She wanted to gasp for breath, but she was afraid that would mean sucking in a lungful of choking soot. She thought of the baby inside her, wondered if it was already beginning to miscarry. She was frighted, ready to scream, discovering, now, for the first time in her life, that she was claustrophobic.
But she held on to herself, didn’t bend her knees, kept herself upright in the black prison of the chimney. She was on the point of hysteria, but, without recognizing it, something of the iron she had inherited from her parents and grandparents kept her from breaking. She continued to stare into the blackness, smelling the burned wall only an inch or two from her face, willing herself to believe that it was not going to collapse in on her and smother her. She was no longer cold, she could feel sweat running down her face and body. Some instinct told her that all she had to do was survive the next minute or two. If she didn’t, if she gave in and retreated from the chimney, she knew she would never enter it again. And the chance of escape would be gone.
Then the hysteria passed, gone all of a sudden, as if wiped away by her will. She started to climb again, feeling more confident with every foot gained; soot continued to float down, but she ignored it, holding her breath till it had gone past. Her body was just one large ache, but she kept climbing, elbows, knees and ankles scraping against the brickwork. Then, all at once it seemed, the blackness turned to gloom, then there was light and a moment later her head cleared the top of the chimney.
She scrambled out, holding desperately to the chimney so that she would not slide off the snow-covered roof. She was on top of a farmhouse that was more ruin than building; the only rooms left intact were the one in which she had been imprisoned and the room immediately below it. The rest of the house was a shell; charred timbers, a tumble of bricks and a big bomb crater told their own story. All