Silent Treatment (19 page)

Helen had been reading over Carrie’s shoulder. She looked up at her husband with stricken eyes.

“Oh Jim!
How could you? Why didn’t you give this to her?”

Jim’s shoulders were slumped, his face an odd shade of grey. He had been reading the letter too.

“Okay, I admit it. I was wrong about him.” His face blanched as he re-read parts of the letter. “Completely and utterly wrong. He’s a really nice kid, decent and everything, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just thought he was only after one thing. You were at least.” His tone accused Paul, but then he saw Lisa standing beside her husband in her fabulous designer outfit with a happy, well fed, well dressed Tommy in her arms and he glanced up at Paul, who shot back a look of pure venom. “Well, I thought you were only after one thing. I was obviously wrong about that too. For God’s sake Helen, look at them!” Jim shouted desperately. “They’re like bloody giants. Any father would feel the same! I was scared for her!”

Paul pulled himself up to his tallest, his head narrowly missing the ceiling. He squared his massive shoulders and bunched his fists at his sides as he
loomed over Jim.

“Scared of what Mr. Denton?” The furious look on Paul’s face told Jim that he should be very scared indeed.

He cowered back as Paul advanced on him and he spoke quickly when his back hit the wall.

“Okay. I was swayed by my own
stupid prejudices. I know that being tall doesn’t make you a predator. I was being a complete idiot. I’m really sorry.” Jim’s voice had gone up a couple of octaves.

Paul was still looming.

“How sorry?” He growled menacingly as he took another step forwards. The tips of his massive shoes touched Jim’s much smaller ones.

Jim floundered around in his brain. He looked to Helen for help and met only her steely gaze. Suddenly inspiration came to him. He stood up straight again, a glint in his eye. He slid sideways
along the wall, away from Paul’s overpowering figure.

“Sorry enough to get Carrie a flight out of here right now. Where the hell is my credit card?” He began patting his pockets wildly. Helen turned and pulled his credit card from a drawer in the sideboard while Lisa took a business card from her handbag.

“That’s British Airways first class direct line. Make the call Jim.” Lisa’s tone was like ice.

Helen found the telephone and passed it to her husband. He immediately shoved it back at Helen.

“You make the call Helen. I’ve got a better idea. Got your passport handy Carrie?” He barely waited for her to nod and grab up her handbag from the floor. “Right, Paul, you get on the blower to your mate, make sure that he knows we’re on our way.” He gave Carrie a quick grin. “Come on then girl, let’s see if we can get you there on time. Ring me when you know what flight you’ve booked.” He yelled back at Helen as he ran out of the door towards the car.

Chapter Fifteen

Heathrow Airport

“Shit, shit, shit!” Jim thumped the top of the steering wheel in frustration. “Bloody security! It’s all that bastard Bin Laden’s fault. We’re not allowed up on the ramp. I’m sorry Carrie, love, I’m going to have to drop you here and let you run.” He pulled the car over to the kerb. “You have that flight number? It’s the only one going to Atlanta this afternoon so he must be getting on it. Call us when you get there.” He leaned over to her and kissed her on the cheek.

Carrie had been si
tting silently for the half twenty minute journey. She took one more look at her father, leaned over, gave him a quick forgiving squeeze, and then opened the car door.

“Thanks da
d. If I manage to catch the flight I’ll ring you.” And then she was sprinting away across the front of the terminal building.

Daniel stood restlessly in the first class lounge bar looking up at the bank of television monitors. His flight was apparently going to leave on time, but no gate number had been given yet. He ordered a vodka and tonic and sat on a bar stool. He stood up again as he felt the hard plastic lump in the back pocket of his trousers. He grabbed the phone he had picked up from his old home and flung it on the bar. It looked very old fashioned against his brand new iphone and for a few seconds he wondered why he had even bothered to pick it up.

He had only called into the hous
e after he had dropped Paul off to see the old place one more time. He had bought it two years previously at way over the market value to enable his parents to move into their own separate homes and he had meant to put it on the market to resell.

He didn’t
realize, until he stepped through the door, that his parents had only taken their own belongings. His old room was like a time warp, still full of his teenage junk. His old phone had been lying on the bedside cabinet, exactly where he had left it three years previously.

He tapped at one or two of the fat buttons and then gave it up when he
realized that the battery would have run out years ago.

He finished his vodka and swivelled in his seat to glance up at the departures screen again.
Still nothing for his flight. He turned suddenly as someone spoke behind him.

“You want that charged?” The
barman was speaking to him.

Daniel hesitate
d for a second, unsure of what he was talking about, then he saw the man nod at the old phone. He pushed it towards the barman as he picked up his empty glass. He turned it around in his fingers. Drinking wasn’t really his thing, but he felt the occasion merited it.

He had never felt so hollow in his life. In the three years he’d been away, it had never once occurred to him that Carrie didn’t feel the
same about him or, even worse, that she might have moved on. He nearly threw up the vodka again at the thought of her being with another man.

The barman was fiddling under the counter. He came up with a thin black wire and before Daniel could move, he had picked up the old telephone and plugged it in. He looked back up at Dan
iel.

“Lucky that
one was a popular model Mr. Lewis, we’ve got a jack to fit. And would you like another drink while you’re waiting? These old phones can take a while, even if we do have a super- fast connection.”

Daniel nodded again and looked at the old phone. The screen was lit up with a soft green glow, but nothing showed on the face. He wondered for a mad moment if the left over credit would still be valid. Like the odd twenty quid mattered
to him now that he had millions!

Daniel swallowed. All the millions in the world meant nothing to him right at this moment. He knew instantly that he would have given up every single thing he owned just to have Carrie there at his side.

The barman put his drink in front of him. Daniel sipped at it slowly and looked back up at the departures screen. His flight number was flashing with a gate number adjacent to it. He was about to down his drink in one go when the barman spoke again.

“No need to rush Sir. The gate is called a good forty minutes before takeoff. You might as well sit here and enjoy your drink in peace as go down there with the crowd. Give it ten minutes and your phone will have charged too.” He started to polish
some glasses.

Daniel nodded at the barman and sat back again. He stared to the old phone’s green screen, wondering how he had read Carrie’s body language so wrongly
all that time ago. He had been so sure of her. He had been able to feel her heart beating beneath her ribs as he had helped her with the exercises. It had thundered more than when she came off the dance floor. He frowned as he began to wonder about his sports injury clinics. If he had totally misread a completely open young woman, maybe he wasn’t so good at reading other people’s signs either. He drummed his fingers on the bar as he watched the little yellow battery sign, now showing, fill and then empty again as the phone charged slowly.

Carrie raced to the check in desk and flung her reference number and passport at the clerk.

“Your luggage?”
The young woman asked.

“None.
I didn’t bring any luggage.” Carrie answered breathlessly.

The woman looked at her watch.

“Just as well. I was about to close the check in. You’ll have to hurry to gate seventeen, it’s closing in five minutes. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to take this evening’s flight? It’s only a four hour wait and then you wouldn’t have to run.”

Carrie bobbed up and down
impatiently, wishing the woman would just issue the boarding card, rather than waffling endlessly.

“No, it has
to be this one. Please hurry.” Carrie begged. The woman pulled out the printed boarding card at last and handed it to Carrie.

“You can go straight through to first class. Take the door on your right and you should get there a little quicker.”

Carrie snatched the card from the woman’s hand and dodged other passengers as she made for the first class lounge. The doors opened automatically and she was suddenly surrounded by luxury. She scanned around the lounge and then noticed a flashing light on a monitor, indicating that her gate number was closing. She sprinted towards the opposite exit, along the now deserted corridor and into another flight lounge. There were several gates with people milling about them. She ran onto gate seventeen.

The seating area
was totally deserted.  There was a short piece of twisted rope strung across the gangway to the plane. Carrie took another look up at the monitor. The sign flashed ‘Gate Closed.’ She stared at it for one more second and then pulled the twisted rope from its mooring.

A shrill bleeping immediately started up in the lounge and several people at the other gates looked in her direction. She barely glanced back at them before she was off down the gangway. Two turns later she could see the
aeroplane door up ahead. It looked firmly closed. She began to run as she heard footsteps pounding behind her.

“Dan!” She yelled desperately at the plane door. “Dan
iel wait, I’m coming!” She scrambled a few strides nearer and then she was brought down hard from behind. Someone grabbed her around her waist and rugby tackled her to the ground.

“Ah ha!
Got you!” The burly guard shouted triumphantly.

Carrie kicked out.

“Let me go you idiot. I have a ticket for that plane and I’m getting on it.” She wriggled out of the man’s grasp only to feel more arms on her, this time round her chest. A second guard clamped his arms around her torso and lifted her off the ground, swinging her round to face the direction from which she’d come.

“Not so fast, young lady. The gate closed five minutes ago. This is now a restricted area and that
plane is about to leave. If you don’t stop struggling I am going to have to use greater force and none of us would like that, would we?” He spoke through gritted teeth.

Carrie flung herself against the guards straining arms, kicking out furiously with her legs, and for just a second he lost his grip.

She was off in an instant, but she had only moved two paces when she saw, to her horror, that the plane door was no longer there. She ran to the now open ended corridor and stared out at the tarmac. The giant plane was already twenty meters away.

“Dan!” She screamed at it as she teetered on the edge of the thirty foot drop. “Dan, come back! I love you!” But it was way too late. The huge plane kept moving and Carrie, felt her legs begin to wobble, but she didn’t have time to fall. The next moment she felt a hard metal tube sticking in the side of her head. She was about to turn and face it, when someone spoke to her in a voice that filled her with dread.

“One more move and we shoot. Now very slowly, put your hands behind your head and step back from the edge.” She stepped back quickly. “Get down on the floor…NOW!” The man bellowed as Carrie hesitated for a fraction of a second.

Her knees felt so weak, she didn’t have the strength to kneel slowly. One moment she was
standing and the next her kneecaps hit the floor with a crack. Instantly she was pushed forwards onto her stomach, her hands were pulled behind her back and she felt cold steel encircle her wrists and pull tight.

She tried to lift her head to look forwards, to take a last glimpse of Daniel’s plane but one of the guards put his foot on top of her head and held her down, while the other radioed in for back up.

Daniel stared
in amazement at the screen of his old telephone. He had come to the men’s room to wash his hands and face just before boarding his plane and had only looked at the screen of his old phone because it had bleeped unexpectedly at him. He had dried his hands carefully and looked again as the phone beeped repeatedly. Then he noticed the message on the tiny screen.

How many missed calls
?

Now he was gawping at the sheer volume of them. There were over a thousand, all from the same number. A number he recognised instantly. He backed into a cubicle and sat down hard on the toilet seat, completely dumbfounded. His finger shook as he
dialled up voice mail and listened to the first message.

There was complete silence and then what sounded like a tiny sigh of breath. He moved to the next message, only to hear the same sound. He skipped seven of the messages and listened again. He
nearly dropped the phone when he heard a gentle but familiar voice.

“I miss you Dan.” It whispered.

He smiled for what felt the first time that day. He listened to the next five messages. They were all exactly the same. Carrie’s soft tones filled his ears.

“I miss you Dan.”

He skipped the next ten messages and listened once more. His hand gripped the phone reflexively and his heart thudded wildly as he heard.

“I love you Daniel.” This time the message was followed by a tiny frightened gasp. He looked at the call log and saw that there had been no calls for three days after this. The next message was the same, more confident now. No frightened gasp.

“I love you Daniel.”

He skipped a few more and then the next one had him gulping into the phone.

“I expect you’ve heard the news. I’m going to miss her but I’m really happy for Lisa and Paul. She’ll be with you tomorrow evening…” She hesitated for a moment and then added quietly. “I wish it was me coming to meet you Daniel. I love you.”

By the time he had skipped through to message number three hundred, Carrie was almost shouting.

“Hey Dan! I love you!” Her voice sounded happy and light.

The next one certainly wasn’t. A very cross sounding Carrie said.

“So! Sabotaging my driving test eh! I will be talking to you about that one when you get home and you had better have some damned good excuse for what you have in your hand, and I don’t mean the hand holding the bottle! Never the less,” She had added primly. “I still love you Daniel.”

He grinned wildly, not really understanding what she meant, but realizing that he had put her off her test somehow.

The following message had him raising his eyebrows in surprise.

Danny? What the hell!
His mind boggled at the name. He’d never been called Danny in his life.
Giving up her day job?
and
‘Big arse’? What the hell was that all about?
He shook his head and looked to see when the last message had been left. It had only been left the night before.

He was almost too scared to listen. If she was going to tell him that she wasn’t going to meet him, he didn’t want to hear it.

He looked at the phone, as if he could see the message rather than hear her voice, and then he raised his finger slowly and touched the button.