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with you. No police, don’t even think about that, or your little girl goes right here and now, got that? No more messing about.’
    The line went dead.
    ‘What did he say?’ asked Jeanette.
    Annie took the gun back off her before she shot one or both of them by mistake.
    ‘We’re flying back to England tomorrow morning.’
    ‘We can’t! What about Layla?’
    ‘We have to,’ she told Jeanette. ‘They want money, and the money’s there.’
    But if it wasn’t, if she couldn’t raise whatever these people wanted, then what the fuck was she going to do? She told herself it had to be there. It had to be.
    ‘But tonight! We can’t stay here tonight!’
    ‘Yes we can. We’re going to barricade ourselves in here, and ship out in the morning, okay?’
    ‘No,’ said Jeanette, her voice wobbling all over the place. ‘No!’ She made a chopping motion with her hand and then lunged across and grabbed the phone. She started to dial with shaking fingers.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘I’m calling the police,’ said Jeanette. ‘It’s what we should have done in the first place. We can’t cope with all this, we can’t—’
    Annie thought of the phone tinkling as she passed by it after the blast. She grabbed it off Jeanette and smashed it back on to the cradle. ‘No police,’ she said.
    Jeanette had finally flipped. She grabbed the phone again. Annie yanked it off her and Jeanette came at her ready for violence. Annie raised the gun and pointed it at Jeanette.
    ‘Back off,’ she said.
    ‘What the…what the fuck are you doing !’ yelled Jeanette.
    Annie stared at her. The hand on the gun did not waver.
    ‘I’m shooting you dead,’ said Annie, ‘if you touch that fucking phone again. You silly cow! There could be a tap on this line. The man said no police. If you went ahead and phoned them, they could kill Layla.’
    Jeanette stepped back, shaking her head.
    ‘I didn’t think…’ she faltered.
    ‘Well think on this , Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm: if you go near this fucking phone again I swear to you that what little brains you have are going to be decorating this hallway—do you understand me?’
    ‘I understand,’ said Jeanette, going pale under her tan.
    ‘Now here’s what we’re going to do,’ said Annie.
    What they were going to do was this. Phone the airport and book the flights. Make another call, one that Annie thought she would never have to make, one that the kidnappers would find entirely acceptable, so no worries about the line tap there. Then they were going to check out the finca from top to bottom.
    They did all that, and by then it was nearly dark and the shadows were deepening, making them both jumpy.
    ‘What do we do now?’ asked Jeanette, her eyes going in all directions.
    Now Annie explained that they were going to barricade themselves into the bedroom with water and a bucket overnight.
    ‘I don’t want to stay here,’ moaned Jeanette, trailing along behind her like a pathetic baby bird waiting for its mother to feed it. They didn’t have any food. Annie knew this was an oversight. They should have picked some up when they were up at the little gatehouse. There was nothing in the kitchen here. But who the fuck could have thought about food at a time like that?
    ‘We have to stay here,’ said Annie flatly.
    ‘It’s horrible. With Jonjo dying out there in the pool, and the servants just up there rotting…’
    Servants. That was, strictly speaking, what Inez and Rufio had been. But they had also been good friends and helpers, cooks and chauffeurs, life-support almost. And now they were dead. Annie’s guts churned at the thought.
    ‘The dead ain’t going to hurt anyone,’ she said. ‘It’s the living you have to fear.’
    She went on, checking room to room, gun in hand.
    Jeanette followed her, thinking that Annie was fucking scary. The woman’s child had been snatched and her husband killed, and here she was, ice-cold, ready to shoot anyone who came near.
    I’d be