Time For Trust

The bank, like others of its kind, was situated inside that part of London known as the ‘City’, several streets off Threadneedle Street, taking up a prominent corner position in a small square.

The commissionaire greeted Jessica with a smile that held just that hint of knowing deference. She was acutely conscious of the fact that, while she was supposed to be treated just as any other junior member of the staff, she was in fact being handled cautiously with kid gloves not just by her fellow workers, but also by her superiors, all of whom were very conscious of the fact that she was the chairman’s daughter.

It wasn’t an enviable position, despite what some of her contemporaries thought—she had overheard one of the other girls making catty remarks about her in the cloakroom. She felt set apart from the other girls, alien to them, all too aware of their muted hostility.

Not that being her father’s daughter actually afforded her the type of privileges they seemed to think. In the evening, when they were out discoing and enjoying themselves, she was at home being catechised by her father as to what she had learned. Her degree did not exempt her from sitting all her Institute exams, and she was all too conscious that he was expecting her to do well.

The pressure on her, well-meant and proud though it was, kept her weight a little under what it ought to be for her height. Even now, early in her working day, she was conscious of an unhealthy tension across her shoulder-blades.

Tonight was the night she went to advanced evening classes for embroidery; the one bright shining pleasure in her otherwise tension-filled week.

She knew that, no matter how much she strove, working in the bank was never going to be anything other than a duty, and a reluctant one at that, but she just couldn’t bring herself to disappoint her parents—especially her father—by telling them that she could not fulfil their ambitions for her.

This particular morning there was no commissionaire on duty, but when she turned the handle on the door of the back entrance to the bank, which the staff used on arriving and leaving, she found that the door was unlocked.

She walked into the familiar Stygian darkness of the narrow Victorian passage that led to the offices and cubby-holes at the back of the banking hall proper.

The first thing that struck her as she emerged into the general office was the silence…the second was the group of masked, armed men, one of whom was advancing grimly towards her, the rest holding the other members of the staff in a silent, threatened group.

‘Get over there and keep your mouth closed.’

Her body trembling with shock, she did as she was instructed. It took several seconds for it to fully dawn on her that this was that most dreaded of all events within the banking community—an armed bank raid.

In such events, all bank staff were instructed not to try to do anything that might risk either their lives or those of others.

As she joined the silent group, Jessica saw that her father’s second in command was among them, his normally highly coloured fleshy features a shade of old tallow. As her father’s second in command he was in charge of one set of vault keys, while the bank accountant held the other. Together every morning they would unlock the vault so that the cashiers could collect cash for their tills.

Whenever necessary, and never normally on a regular basis, fresh supplies of cash were delivered from the nearby Bank of England. Only yesterday, late in the afternoon after close of banking hours, they had received an exceptionally large consignment of cash, and Jessica realised in sick fear that somehow the thieves must have known of this.

In retrospect, the ordeal of waiting while each member of staff arrived and was duly imprisoned with his or her colleagues seemed to be dragged out over a lifetime of unimaginable terror and shock.

None of them had any way of knowing what was to happen to them…whether they would all emerge unharmed from their ordeal.

On this particular day, Jessica knew that her father was not due into the bank until after lunch, having a morning appointment with an important customer. It seemed the thieves knew it as well, because just as soon as they were sure that all the staff had arrived they took them all at gunpoint to one of the large safes beneath the branch and shut them in it under armed guard.

Still forbidden to speak, and under the silent, masked threat of the gunmen facing them, they felt tension fill the room like a sour taste in the air.

All of them were close to breaking-point, but still it came as something of a shock when one of the other girls, the one who had been so catty about her working in the bank, suddenly called out frantically to their guard, ‘She’s the one you ought to be concentrating on. She’s the chairman’s daughter. She’s far more use to you than we are.’

Jessica held her breath, her chest painfully tight with anxiety and fear as the gunman turned slowly in her direction. Through the slits in his mask, she could see the icy glitter of his eyes. He motioned to her to step forward. When she hesitated, John Knowles, the accountant, bravely stepped in front of her, saying quickly, ‘She’s just a girl. Let her be.’

When the gunman hit him on the side of his head with the butt of his gun, a massed audible breath of shock rippled through them all.

Shaking with tension, Jessica obeyed the gunman’s instruction to step forward. He walked slowly round her, the sensation of him standing behind her making the hairs rise in the nape of her neck.

So this was terror, this thick, cold sensation that bordered on paralysis, freezing the body and yet leaving the mind sharply clear to assimilate the vulnerabilities of her position.

The sound of the safe door opening took the gunman from behind her to join his fellow members of the gang. In the low-toned conversation they exchanged Jessica caught her own name, but not much else, and then to her horror she was being told to walk towards them. Flanked on either side by a gunman, she was escorted from the safe.

Hearing the safe door clang closed behind her was the very worst sound she had ever heard. Behind that closed door were her colleagues, safe now, surely, while she…

‘Better take her upstairs to the boss,’ the second gunman instructed the first.

The ‘boss’ was a powerfully built man with the coldest, shrewdest eyes she had ever seen.

‘Chairman’s daughter, is she?’ he repeated when informed of her status.

‘Yeah. I thought we could get a good ransom.’

A quick turn of the ‘boss’s’ hand silenced her jailer.

‘We’ll take her with us,’ the ‘boss’ announced chillingly after studying her for several seconds. ‘She can be our insurance.’

What followed still haunted her in her nightmares. Blindfolded and gagged, she was bundled out of the bank and directly into the kind of armoured vehicle normally used by security companies. Once inside she could sense the presence of other people, even though they remained silent.

The van was driven away and she heard someone saying, ‘How long do you reckon before anyone can raise the alarm?’

‘Bank’s supposed to be open in five minutes. That should give us half an hour or so before anyone realises what’s happened…It will take them a fair time to break into the safe. The only other set of keys are held by the chairman, and he’s out in Kent.’

‘By the time they do get hold of them we’ll—’

A sudden curse obviously reminded the speaker of her presence and he fell silent. She was sitting on the floor of the van, bound, blindfolded and gagged. Her body ached from the pressure of the hard floor and the fear-induced tension. She was sure she was going to die, to become another statistic of violence and greed, and when the van finally stopped and she was bundled out and half dragged, half carried up flight after flight of stairs and then pushed in a dank, foul-smelling room she was even more convinced that this was the end.

She heard the door close but dared not move, not knowing how many members of the gang were preserving a silent vigil around her. The silence went on and on, a relentless pressure against her stretched eardrums, like a soundless, high-pitched scream, battering at her senses.

Time lost all meaning. Her arms and hands were numb, but still she dared not move, picturing the armed man perhaps sitting in front of her, watching her. Her throat was dry and sore, but she couldn’t ask for a drink. Her body ached, and cramp ran like a violent wrenching wire from her left calf to her ankle.

Outwardly motionless and controlled, inwardly she was falling apart, suffering the most appalling imagined fates, wondering if whoever had said those immortal words ‘a brave man dies once, the coward a thousand times over’ had really any awareness of the true terrors created by the imagination—terrors which had nothing whatsoever to do with one’s ability to endure actual physical pain.

At some point she slipped into a semicomatose state that gave her some relief, a sort of self-induced, drugged miasma of mental agony which separated her from her physical body and its discomforts. She couldn’t move at all…couldn’t do anything other than sit there where she had been left, straining her ears for some other movement in the room.

Quite when she began to realise she might be on her own she had no idea; perhaps it was when the quality of the silence struck her as being empty. She held her breath, listening anxiously for the sound of other breath, trying not to imagine the grinning faces of the gang while they witnessed her pathetic attempts to use what senses were left to her to work out if they were there.

If they were there…She was almost sure they weren’t. Which meant…which meant that she was alone.

She ought to have felt relief, but instead she felt all the blind, frantic panic of a helpless child deserted by its parents. She couldn’t move—her wrists were bound and so were her ankles, and her wrists were tied to some kind of pipe.

She heard a noise—not a human sound…The hairs on her arms stood up in terror as she felt something run across her bare leg. She wanted desperately to scream, but couldn’t remove the gag nor scream through it.

Panic engulfed her; she tried desperately to pull herself free, and succeeded only in rubbing her wrists raw on their bonds so that the broken skin bled.

After panic and terror came dull, destructive acceptance. She was going to die here in this unknown place, and she might as well resign herself to it.

How long had she been here already? Hours…but how many?

She tried to think constructively, but it was impossible. All she wanted now was oblivion, escape…

When the door finally opened, her rescuers were all moved to different degrees of shock and pity by what they saw.

A telephone call to the bank had announced that any attempt to find her or them during the next five hours would result in her death, but that if no attempt was made to track them down for that period then her father would be informed of where she could be found.

Since the police had no idea of where to start looking for the thieves, they had had no option other than to comply with their demands, and against all their expectations they had actually received the promised call later in the day giving the address of a slum-clearance flat in a high-rise block where she could be found.

To Jessica, the debriefing that followed her imprisonment was almost as gruelling as the imprisonment itself, although in a different way.

The whole nightmare affair had left her perilously close to the edge of a complete mental and physical breakdown, with the result that she had finally told her parents that she could not return to the bank, and that instead she was going to use the small inheritance left to her by her maternal grandparents to train for a career much more suited to her now fierce determination to live as quiet and safe a life as possible.

Of course her parents had protested, especially when they had learned she intended moving to Avon.

There was no reason why she couldn’t continue to live at home in London and practise her career from there, they told her, but she refused to be swayed. London was now a place that terrified her. She couldn’t walk down a busy street without being overcome by the feeling that someone was walking behind her, stalking her—without the fear she had known in that small, frightening prison coming back to drag her back down into the pit of self-destructive fear she was only just beginning to leave behind.

In the end her parents had reluctantly given way on the advice of her doctor, who had told them that she needed to find a way of healing herself and coming to terms with what had happened.

That healing process was still going on, and now, suddenly and shockingly, she had been dragged back into that remembered horror.

She saw the gunman coming towards her and started to scream. He lashed out at her with the butt of his gun. She felt a stunning pain like fire in her shoulder, followed by a cold wash of paralysing weakness, and knew that she was going to faint.

When she came round, the small post office was full of people. She was lying on the floor with something under her head and someone kneeling beside her holding her wrist while he measured her pulse.

She looked up cold with fear, trembling with the remembered shock of the past, and encountered the warm gold eyes of Daniel Hayward. His look of warmth and compassion was reassuring and comforting. She tried to sit up, conscious of her undignified prone position and the curious glances of the people standing around her.

As she looked round the shop, Daniel Hayward seemed to know what she was looking for and said quietly, ‘It’s all right. He’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

She looked bewildered, and it was left to Mrs Gillingham to explain excitedly, ‘Mr Hayward was ever so brave. He reached right out and took the gun off him, and told me to open the door and shout for help.’

While Jessica looked uncomprehendingly at him, he said humorously, ‘Not brave, really. I simply made use of the excellent distraction you provided by drawing our friend’s fire, although such a course of action is not really to be recommended. You’ll be lucky if your arm isn’t out of action for a good few days, I’m afraid.’

Her arm…Jessica tried to lift it and gasped as the pain coursed like fire though the bruised muscles.

‘It’s all right…nothing’s actually broken,’ Daniel Hayward was telling her reassuringly. ‘But that was a nasty blow you took, and there’s bound to be some very considerable bruising. Look,’ he offered quietly, ‘why don’t you let me take you home? I’ve got my car outside. Mrs Gillingham has sent someone to fetch the doctor, but I think you’ll feel much more comfortable lying on your own bed than lying here…’

He was so understanding, so concerned, so gentle in the way that he touched her, gently helping her to her feet. She couldn’t ever remember a man treating her like this before, nor herself wanting one to. Almost instinctively she leaned against him, letting him take her slender weight as he guided her towards the door, politely refusing the offers of help showered on them both.

‘I suspect the police will probably want to interview you later,’ he told her gently as he settled her in the passenger seat of an immaculate and brand new Daimler saloon. Her father always drove a Daimler, and she was aware of a certain, unexpected nostalgic yearning for her parents’ presence as he set the car in motion.

The last time she had seen them had been Christmas, when she had paid a reluctant duty visit to her old home. She had been on edge and nervous the whole time she was there—not so much because of her old fear of London’s crowds and anonymity, she had recognised in some surprise, but because of her deep-rooted guilt, and fear that somehow or other her parents would succeed in gently pressuring her into returning to her old life…a life she knew she could no longer tolerate because of the restrictions it placed upon her.

Although the gulf between them saddened her, although she was still consumed with guilt in knowing that she had let them down, she still found her new life immensely fulfilling—immensely satisfying and pleasing in an entirely personal and difficult-to-explain way, other than to say it was as though she had now found a piece of herself which had previously been missing, and that in doing so she had completed her personality, making it whole.

‘Which house is it?’ Daniel Hayward asked her. ‘Mrs G said it was along here somewhere…’

She gathered her thoughts and indicated which house was hers, conscious of the discreet twitching of curtains as he stopped the Daimler outside and then got out.

Her neighbours were elderly and very kind, and would doubtless be all agog with curiosity and shock once they heard what had happened.

It had been idiotic of her to react like that. The man had obviously not been much of a threat after all, but she had panicked remembering…

‘I think I’d better carry you inside,’ Daniel told her easily. ‘You still look pretty groggy.’

She wanted to protest, but she felt too weak, her body fluid and amorphous as he swung her up into his arms. It was only a short distance to her front door, but long enough for her to feel the measured beat of his heart and to register the strength in the arms which held her.

Such intimacy with another human being was alien and unfamiliar to her, and yet beneath the rapid thudding of her pulse, beneath the dregs of fear induced by the attempted robbery, and beneath even the instinctive, defensive coiling of her muscles as they locked in protest against the sensation of being so completely within the physical power of someone else, ran another feeling, slow, golden, like a full and lazy river warmed by a summer’s heat, its flow so deceptively slow that one wasn’t aware of the relentlessness of its strength until it was too late to swim against it.

Her heart seemed to miss a beat and then another; her fingers curled into the roughness of his sweater, and, as though he sensed what was running through her mind and the enormity of her struggle to comprehend the bewildering range of the conflicting emotions she was suffering, he looked at her, the golden eyes calm and gentle, almost as though he knew her fear and was reassuring her.

As he unlocked the door to her house and carried her inside she had the crazy feeling that an intimacy had been born between them that cut through the normal barriers of convention and defensiveness which held the sexes apart. It was as though at some very deep level they had reached out and communicated wordlessly with one another, and that that communication held a silent promise for both their futures. What futures? She was alone, independent, by preference, by choice.

It was odd to hear him ask her quite mundanely, ‘Shall I help you upstairs, or…?’

She shook her head.

‘No…The sofa in the kitchen will be just as comfortable as my bed,’ she told him quickly. ‘It’s through that door.’

He put her down and then announced that he intended to stay with her until the doctor arrived to check her over, softening his statement with a warm smile. In repose his face possessed a hard purposefulness which in other circumstances would have repelled her. It made him look too much like the fiercely competitive and power-hungry men who moved in her parents’ social circle.

The thought disconcerted her, and as he released her he frowned and asked curtly, ‘What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?’

The words seemed to echo warningly inside her, making her shiver with the knowledge of how easily this man could hurt her, and then she looked up at him and saw only the concern softening the harshness of his face, and the anxiety shadowing the clear golden warmth of his eyes.

She shook her head, half marvelling at how at ease she felt with him, almost as though he were an old and valued friend.

But he was a stranger—outwardly at least—and she was perhaps reading more into his kindness than she ought, taking up more of his time than she ought, allowing him far more into her life than she ought.

As she struggled to thank him and offer him an opportunity to leave, he stunned her by taking hold of her hands and holding them firmly within the grip of his own.

‘I’m staying,’ he told her evenly.

His palms were slightly calloused, the strength in his grip reminding her of his maleness. Comforting her. In reality the last thing she wanted was to be left alone to relive the horror of that other time…to remember the choking, destructive horror of the fear she had experienced then. That must be why she felt almost like clinging to him, why she wanted to be with him.

While they were waiting for the doctor he made them both a cup of tea, nodding approvingly when he saw the squat canisters with their differing blends of leaves so much more flavorsome than the dull uniformity of mass-produced tea-bags.

The one he chose, Russian Caravan, was one of her own favourites, drunk piping hot, its taste sharpened with a slice of lemon.

He let her sip hers in silence and then said, complimenting her, ‘I like this room. It’s comfortable…lived in. It has the kind of ambiance I want for my own place.’

Jessica laughed, amused that this obviously wealthy man whose house, even in its present state of dereliction, was far grander than her own small cottage should admire her simple décor.

‘I should have thought for a house like yours you’d have wanted to get in interior designers,’ she commented.

To her surprise he shook his head.

‘No. The house is going to be my home, not a set piece that looks like a photograph out of a glossy magazine. Mind you, I’m a long way from the decorating and furnishing stage as yet. As I discovered this morning, there’s some pretty bad damp damage, and an awful lot of restoration work to be done, simply to bring the fabric of the building up to scratch. At the moment I’m virtually camped out in a couple of rooms.’ He grimaced wryly. ‘I was hoping to get the worst of the repairs over before Christmas, that’s why I’m so damned annoyed with this builder.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to stay in London at least until the house is habitable?’ Jessica asked him, curiosity about him overcoming the dull ache in her arm.

‘Sensible, perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘But there comes a time when living and working at the hectic pace demanded by city life begins to pall. My business necessitates my working in the City, but I don’t have to live there. Once I’d made the choice to move out…’ He shrugged meaningfully, and Jessica guessed that he was a man who, once he had made a decision, seldom changed his mind.

‘Your business…?’ she asked and then hesitated, wondering if her questions were too intrusive. She had never felt anything to match the fierce need she was now experiencing to know everything there was to know about this man. He filled her senses, absorbing her attention to the exclusion of everything else, and these sensations were a phenomenon to her. She found it hard to understand how she, normally so cautious in her dealings with others, could feel so at ease with this stranger, and yet at the same time so keyed up, so buoyed up by his presence that everything in her life now seemed to be coloured by her reactions to him.

She sensed his hesitation in answering her question and flushed uncomfortably. Was she being too pushy, too inquisitive? After all, she had no previous experience to go on—no past relationships in her life to show her how to deal with the sensations he was arousing inside her.

But at last he answered her, his voice oddly sombre as he told her almost reluctantly, ‘I’m an economist. I work in the City.’

An economist. She guessed vaguely that he was probably involved in some way with the stock market, and, knowing how secretive people involved in the sales of stocks and shares sometimes had to be, she felt she could understand his reticence and quickly changed the subject.