Trust Me - T.M. Logan Page 0,27

The muslin cloth, half wrapped around her body. I take a corner of it and touch it to Mia’s lips.

Please be quiet. Please, Mia.

She instantly latches onto it, falling silent as she begins to suck on the cloth again.

The footsteps slow to a stop and then he’s there, maybe fifteen feet away from my hiding place. A shaft of moonlight glinting off steel. The knife. He is turning his head from side to side, listening for the slightest sound. As soon as Mia makes another noise she’ll give us away.

The beam of his torchlight probes the darkness a few feet from our hiding place.

I reach into the pockets of my jeans for a coin, a key, anything. All I have is a tube of lip balm. I ease it out and throw it as hard as I can, launching it in a long arc down the corridor. The little plastic tube skitters and clacks in the darkness and immediately the torch beam shifts that way, towards the noise.

‘Stay where you are!’ Dominic shouts into the dark. ‘Stay exactly where you are!’

He runs past, just a few feet away from us.

I can feel the pistol digging into the small of my back, ridged metal against my skin. But even unloaded it’s better than nothing, better than bare hands. I count to three in my head and then move away from the corner.

I run headlong into the dark, Mia clutched tightly to my chest, turning through corridors, left and right, purely on instinct, lungs screaming, heart thudding, my foot a symphony of agony with every step. Going as far as possible away from the man with the knife.

A long glass window. There. A solitary car in an empty car park. The BMW.

Finally, the door. As I push my way through it another shout of rage echoes down the corridor. I turn right and run towards the distant street lights. Clutching Mia with one arm, I draw the pistol. The night air is cold and sharp, only a full moon and the weak light of a neighbouring warehouse throwing any illumination onto the car park. I’m on some kind of industrial estate, windowless blocky buildings looming up on both sides. No flats or houses.

‘Help!’ I shout. ‘Help me!’

My own voice echoes back to me on the night air.

I run on, cold air burning in my lungs, through the car park, towards a boarded-up security post with barriers lowered on both sides. Running, running, expecting a rough hand on my shoulder at any second. Barefoot, half-dressed, half-blinded from the blood running into my eye, one arm clutching Mia to my chest and the pistol in my other hand.

I dodge around the security barrier and run out into the road.

A pair of headlights approaches, twin halogens dazzlingly bright after the darkness of our escape.

I stop in the middle of the road and raise the pistol.

WEDNESDAY

13

Leon

So close. Close enough to touch. Close enough to reach out and grab her, if he needed to.

To be that close to her – for the first time – gave him a shiver of excitement, of expectation. But not there, not then; there were too many people around, too much potential for disturbance. Of course he had established certain facts already, facts that pointed strongly in this direction. But to have it confirmed gave him a glow of satisfaction. The switch on the train was a surprise, something he wouldn’t have predicted, but it didn’t change what needed to be done. If anything it made it easier, gave him more options. New options. And it added another twist, another layer of fascination. They would talk about this one for years.

Leon didn’t grab her. Instead he had watched her walk out of the station and onto Melcombe Place, only half-aware of the tedious security man holding up a hand to him, ‘Sorry to trouble you sir but I’ve had a complaint about your behaviour,’ giving his little pidgin-English lecture on respect for other passengers and allowing people the personal space they need and ‘the lady says you were taking pictures without her consent’. Leon had stopped walking and studied the security guard, a small, thickset man with big hands and a heavy forehead that gave him the look of one of the cave-dwelling Morlocks from The Time Machine. He pasted on a concerned expression.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he’d said, putting on his best faux-Oxbridge accent. ‘Just a bit of a misunderstanding, I think.’

Little people – like this officious security guard, given a tiny