Free Ransom by Jon Cleary Page B

up your mind what you gonna do?”
    “I can’t release them at once - there’s a legal procedure we have to go through.” Hungerford, listening on an extension, gestured to him to keep talking. In the outer office police technicians were taping the conversation and trying to trace the call. Forte tried to keep talking, to keep the kidnapper on the line: “You gave us till nine o’clock tomorrow morning. How is my wife - can I speak to her?”
    “No, man, you can’t.” There was a note of grating satisfaction in the man’s voice. He’s already chewing on small triumphs, Forte thought: how is he going to celebrate if this thing goes through to the climax he wants? The question, unanswerable, had its own terror. “Is that guy Malone there with you? Let me talk to him.”
    Forte motioned to the Australian, handed him the phone.
    “Malone here.”
    “Your wife says you’re a cop. Right? I’d sooner deal with someone else, but this time I’m not gonna hold it against you. You’re just lucky, man, you ain’t American - but pigs are the same all over. Listen - you tell the Mayor he’s not gonna see his wife again and you’re not gonna see yours, unless he lets those guys outa The Tombs. Right? That’s all for now. There’ll be just one more call from us.”
    “What time? Where - here?”
    There was a chuckle, a gritty sound Malone did not like. “We’ll find you. Nobody’s gonna be more available than you and the Mayor. You just expect to hear from us. And pass on that message to the Mayor. We don’t want to hurt your missus, but we got her and she’s in the same boat now as Mrs Forte. It could get awful rough for her.”

Chapter Three
    The room was small but comfortably furnished; Lisa knew, from what Scobie had told her, that prison cells were a good deal less comfortable than this. Yet this was her and Sylvia Forte’s cell. There was a white carpet square on the polished floorboards, two Colonial-style single beds, a chest of drawers and a dressing-table in the same style, a built-in wardrobe with louvred doors, two easy chairs with blue denim covers and an electric convector heater that stood against one wall. It was a room that Lisa guessed was similar to thousands of others all over America. Except for two things: the window was boarded up from the inside and three pictures had been removed from the walls, leaving oblong shapes that were slightly cleaner than the rest of the white wallpaper.
    “We’re in a cottage of some sort, I think,” said Sylvia Forte. “I used to have a room very much like this in a house we had on Fishers Island.”
    “I wonder why the pictures were taken off the walls?” “I don’t know. Unless they were pictures that would have identified those two outside.”
    They had been in the room an hour and they had become accustomed to their surroundings. At first, recovering from delayed shock at what had happened to them, they had hardly spoken. After their initial words to each other in the back of the delivery truck, they had fallen silent as they had slowly begun to appreciate the frightening potential of their predicament. Their growing apprehension had not been slowed by the sullenness of the girl in the back of the truck with them. As she had stared at them it seemed to Lisa that behind and below the dark glasses the girl’s face had hardened into a mask that showed no hint of mercy for them.

    After three-quarters of an hour’s travelling the truck had slowed, turned and pulled up. Lisa and Sylvia heard the driver get down, then a few moments later he came back, got into the truck and drove it into a garage or large shed. Lisa had found herself listening for sounds of identification that she had never taken notice of before: the amplification of the noise of the engine as the truck drove up a narrow driveway between two houses, the opening and then the shutting of garage doors, the sudden silence in the garage as the engine was shut off, and then the shouts of