1989, page 23
The apartment was dark and frowsty, smelling of dust and lavender polish. ‘My great-aunt Lisl has lived here since 1928,’ Fredi said, following them into the living room, a dim cave with thin shafts of light peeping round the edges of the shutters. She flicked a switch and the room sprang into focus.
‘Where is she now?’ Genevieve asked, prowling round and taking in the framed family photographs and the dusty leather-bound books crammed into tall shelves.
‘With her daughter in Kassel. She had a fall back before Christmas, broke her hip. They spirited her away to live with them till she recovers.’ Fredi scoffed. ‘As if she will ever manage this place again. But she has a long lease and the rent is low so they don’t want to give the place up. This will be your safe house, I think?’
Genevieve frowned. ‘But it’s connected to you.’
Fredi shook her head. ‘I never visited here. I used to have kaffee und kuchen with Lisl once a month in the Teehaus in the Tiergarten, she loved to get out and about in the city. We don’t share a family name, she is a maternal relative. Trust me, Genny, you will be safe here. Take a look around, go on.’
Genevieve left the room and Fredi settled in a wing-backed chair by the stove. She heard the sound of doors opening and closing, water running, a toilet flushing. At last, Genevieve returned, frowning. ‘Everything is dusty,’ she complained.
Fredi grinned. ‘You’ll have time enough to learn how to do housework,’ she teased. ‘But the plumbing works and if I know Lisl, the bed will be comfortable.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite so many pillows on one bed,’ Genevieve said. ‘I suppose I can manage here for a few days. There’s a radio and a tiny TV in the kitchen. But what am I supposed to do about food?’
‘Hans will come after dark.’ Fredi jumped up and went through to the kitchen. She opened a tall door that led into a pantry. The shelves were crammed with jars of sauerkraut, pickled vegetables and assorted sausages – Bratwurst, Currywurst, Frankfurters, Nürnberger Rostbratwurst and Knackwurst. On the floor, under the bottom shelf, were bottles of Weissbier. Fredi laughed. ‘Come and see, Genny, you’re not going to starve.’
She turned and pointed to the kitchen counter. ‘The phone is still connected. Tante Lisl refuses to believe she’s not coming home.’ Fredi turned to Genevieve and pulled her by the hand, pouting. ‘Come on, this was your idea. This place is perfect. Just so long as you don’t decide to throw any wild parties with Lisl’s beer.’ She drew her closer, an arm round her shoulders, hugging her. ‘You’re not getting cold feet?’ Fredi said softly, her voice almost a caress.
‘It’s all been a bit mad, the last couple of days, making plans, working out arrangements. Almost like a game, you know? But now we’re here, now this is it . . .’ A catch in her voice. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’ve not got second thoughts. I’m not changing my mind. It’s just . . . we’ve totally got to make this work. If it goes wrong, my father will never forgive me. I’ll be out of the business, he’ll disinherit me. Hell, he’ll probably hand me over to the cops.’ She buried her face in Fredi’s shoulder.
Fredi looked into the middle distance, her expression set and unreadable. ‘Then we’ll just have to make sure everything goes like clockwork.’ She stepped free of Genevieve and gave her the full beam of her charisma in a gentle smile. ‘Let’s run through it one more time.’ She drew her back to the living room, still holding her hand.
They sat opposite each other. ‘You have to stay here from now on.’
‘But I haven’t got a change of clothes or any toiletries,’ Genevieve protested.
‘I know. But everything must remain in your hotel room. It must look as if you have been taken, not as if you have gone away for the weekend. Give me a list of what bathroom things you need. And make-up. Also, your clothes sizes. I will shop for these.’
Genevieve raked in her bag and came up with her wallet. She took out a wedge of Deutschmarks. ‘OK, but nothing cheap and nasty. This should cover the essentials.’
‘Thank you. I will be kind to your body,’ Fredi teased.
‘I’d expect nothing less.’
‘So, Hans will come tonight with some bread and milk and coffee and fruit. He’ll bring the Polaroid camera and he will take some pictures of you bound and gagged.’ That engaging smile again. ‘Not painfully, of course. We will send the pictures special delivery to Glasgow. They should arrive on Monday or Tuesday. What I did not tell you earlier, we have a friend in Scotland, he is working to start a Scottish Green Party, and he will deliver them to your father at Voil House, explaining that we are holding you prisoner in Berlin. The letter will say the Red Army Faction’s death has been a lie, that it is still alive, that it is acting in the memory of Andreas Bader and Ulrike Meinhof.’
‘That’s guaranteed to shake him. It really unsettled him when they were on the rampage. I was in my teens back when they were full tilt and it mortified me that I had to turn up everywhere with a bodyguard. What a blight on my teenage social life! Like Ace is important enough to be a target for international terrorists.’
Fredi raised her eyebrows. ‘So it’s the perfect trigger. Our man in Glasgow will tell him when to expect a phone call, and I will call him from a secure phone and tell him the ransom demand. We will send more photos, make it look like you’re having a really shit time. And if you’re right about his reaction, he’ll do what he’s told.’
‘You’re still planning to send him to his island?’
‘Of course. From everything you have told us, it’s so isolated, we can be sure we’ll be able to control the handover. It’s all going to be perfectly fine, Genny. I promise you. It will be like clockwork. And we will finally have what we need to make the change that matters.’
It was only after Fredi had left that Genevieve realised she’d been locked in.
39
Allie tossed the Saturday style supplement aside and stretched. ‘We should get up,’ she said, snuggling into Rona, who had returned to bed after a trip to the newsagent’s for a bundle of papers. They’d drunk coffee, filleted and shared the news and features, and caught up with each other after Allie’s German trip. But now it was after noon and the April sunshine was beckoning. ‘We need to tidy up the garden,’ Allie groaned.
‘You also need to call Lockhart,’ Rona said. ‘You can’t keep ignoring him forever.’ Their proprietor had called three times the previous evening and four times that morning, according to the answering machine; Allie had studiously ignored each message.
‘I’ll do it on Monday,’ Allie said. ‘I’m technically working today. I can’t be tying up the line listening to Ace Lockhart ranting at me. Besides, I called the London newsdesk back when they paged me to check I was available in the event of the end of the world.’
‘The longer you leave it, the more incandescent he’ll be.’
Allie shrugged and snuggled into Rona’s side. ‘What’s the worst he can do? He can’t fire me, I’m already working out my notice.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I know. But I’ll grovel. I’ll tell him I was so traumatised after what happened to me that I couldn’t face reliving it. I’ll lay on my gratitude with a trowel.’
‘You know that’s not going to be enough. He’ll want the story.’
Allie sighed. ‘It’s not a Clarion story, neither the daily nor the Sunday. It would be wasted there. They’ll just sensationalise it and everyone will have forgotten it in a week. This needs to be taken seriously, so Zabre can’t exploit the sick and dying.’
Rona put her arm round Allie and found a seductive tone. ‘Maybe you could give them the daring escape story? How Sunday Clarion northern news editor selflessly risked her life for the cause of true love. You don’t even have to mention the drug trial scandal.’
Allie thought about it. Not for the first time, Rona might have found a way through a thicket of thorns to a solution that could keep everyone if not happy, then at least grumpily satisfied. It made her main package a little light on human interest, but she thought she could use some of the interviews she’d done for the AIDS exodus story to give it a tilt in that direction. ‘That might work,’ she said slowly. ‘And it means I can paint him as the white knight riding to my rescue.’
‘And that’ll be catnip to him.’
Allie kissed her. ‘You’re a genius.’
Rona returned the embrace. ‘I was so afraid I’d never see you again.’
‘I had my moments too. When they said they were going to put me on trial the very next day . . .’
‘Don’t. And please, Allie, don’t ever put me through anything like that again. I don’t ever want to feel that sick with fear for you.’
Allie pulled her into a tight embrace. ‘I know. I can’t promise I’ll stay out of trouble, but I’ll never stick my neck out that far again.’
‘Not if you love me.’
‘Oh, I love you. Never doubt that.’ Allie let her hand stray down Rona’s back, following the curve of her spine.
‘Stop that, or we’ll never get the bloody pruning done.’ Rona pretended to be affronted, but pulled away nevertheless. ‘I’ll have the first shower.’
‘What’s the point? We’re just going to get dirty and sweaty.’
Rona’s chuckle carried a freight of double entendres. ‘You wish.’
By three o’clock, they’d dealt with the big herbaceous borders that surrounded the hard standing at the front of the house and they’d moved on to the raised beds at the rear of the house. ‘Bloody globe artichokes haven’t made it,’ Rona complained, hoicking out the blackened stems of what had been her pride and joy the previous summer.
‘We got caught out by the late frosts,’ Allie said. ‘And I forgot to wrap them up. Sorry. Are we going out tonight? I could really use a rampage around the dance floor.’
Before Rona could respond, Allie’s pager beeped. Moaning, she unclipped it from her belt and scrolled through the message. ‘Call Tim Stannage. DOUBLE URGENT.’ She frowned. Tim Stannage was the Sunday Globe’s chief football writer, based in London. She didn’t even have his number programmed into her mobile phone. ‘What now?’ she sighed, heading for the house, dropping her secateurs on the way.
Months later, she’d trip over them, immobilised and blunted with rust, and be transported back to that afternoon.
Allie kicked off her wellies at the back door and padded through to her workspace. Her office directory was in the top drawer of her desk, and she flicked through to Tim’s entry. Home number and mobile phone. She presumed he wasn’t at home at ten past three on a Saturday afternoon. He’d be covering some football match or other. Why he needed her, she had no idea. Some trouble at a northern ground, or fighting outside? She keyed in the number and it was answered as soon as it connected. ‘Tim, it’s Allie Burns. I just got your message.’
‘Thank fuck,’ he panted. ‘There’s a bloody mess happening here. I’m at the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough, Liverpool v Notts Forest, and there’s some sort of crush going on at the Leppings Lane end. People are trying to climb the fence to get on to the pitch, it’s complete chaos.’
‘Is it not just the usual over-enthusiastic pitch invasion? I mean, did somebody score?’
‘Peter Beardsley hit the bar, but that’s not what’s going on. They’re falling on to the pitch behind the Liverpool goal, we could see the crowd getting squeezed before the kick-off, but this . . . I’ve never seen anything like this. People are going to be seriously hurt here. There’s people collapsing in front of our eyes. This is more than a football story, Allie. You need to get your arse over here and check out what the fuck’s happening.’
‘I’m about forty minutes away, if the traffic’s with me.’
‘Just get here. Oh God, the crush barriers are collapsing. The ref’s stopped the game. The players are going off. Allie, this is a big one.’
‘I’m on my way, Tim. Hold the fort for now.’
Stunned, Allie ran to the bedroom, stripped off her gardening clothes, ran her hands under the tap and pulled on chinos and a jumper. She stuffed her feet into a pair of boots and grabbed a jacket and her work bag. On her way down the hall, she picked up wallet and car keys and ran out the back door. Startled, Rona looked up. ‘Where’s the fire?’ she called, only half joking.
‘Something really bad going off at the football in Sheffield.’ Allie kept running, making for her car.
‘Wait!’ Rona shouted.
But Allie couldn’t. She didn’t really know Tim Stannage but from what she’d seen of him, he wasn’t one of the blowhards who flagged up a scoop round every corner. Solid, that’s how she’d have described him. But he’d sounded on the edge of hysteria. This was no false alarm.
She’d manoeuvred round Rona’s car and reached the gateway when the passenger door was yanked open and Rona dived in. ‘I can help,’ she panted. ‘I can dial the phone for you at least.’
Allie nodded and turned out of the drive, mentally mapping the quickest route to the Hillsborough football ground in Sheffield. Round the motorway, the usual bottleneck at Mottram on to the Snake Pass, twisting its way through beautiful Pennine scenery in a blur of oblivion. Allie saw none of it as she focused on the road, throwing the car round bends faster than she ought and overtaking inadvisedly. Rona had seen enough of Allie driving under pressure not to gasp audibly but her jaw was clamped tight and the hand that wasn’t gripping the phone was clenched on the grab handle above the door. She tuned the radio to BBC Radio 2, where the news that something was happening at Hillsborough was filtering into their regular football coverage. Too many fans in too small an area; what had looked like a pitch invasion had actually been people struggling to breathe in a press of bodies.
And there were the phone calls. The London newsdesk now knew something serious was happening, and Rona was acting as conduit between them and Allie. Tim Stannage was talking London through events as they unfolded, and office-based London reporters were hammering the phones, trying to get a sense of what was going on. ‘They’re sending up a team from London,’ Rona relayed.
‘Sounds like we’ll need it. Can you call the top two freelances on my contacts list? I need them on site soon as.’
The radio was reporting a swiftly unfolding disaster. Fans crushed against barricades, dead and broken bodies littering the pitch, the slow reaction of the emergency services and almost immediately, the blaming of the supporters. Before half an hour had passed, police were already explaining that fans had broken down an exit gate, allowing thousands who didn’t have tickets to pour into crowded areas.
Allie slowed at the junction with the main road north, waiting for the lumbering bulk of the police Major Incident Vehicle to pass. Incredibly, she’d crossed the Pennines from Manchester in the same time it had taken South Yorkshire Police to get their MIV to the site of what was clearly a major incident.
She turned on to the road that ran alongside the park. Usually quiet, now it was crowded with clots of people, mostly men, moving slowly or milling around with an air of shocked bewilderment. Some were wrapped in their friends’ arms, apparently in tears. Now they were driving alongside the stadium, separated by the River Don. ‘We need to park up,’ Allie said. There was surprisingly little traffic; a couple of buses and a sudden ambulance, shrieking past them and swinging right into Leppings Lane, which was closed off by police as soon as it had passed.
Allie pulled over at the junction. ‘Find somewhere to park the car then talk to anybody who can tell you what happened,’ she said, getting out.
Rona scrambled across and handed her the phone. ‘I’ll call you before the first edition deadline,’ she promised, swinging the car round and heading back towards the park. Allie keyed Tim Stannage’s number into her phone, praying for a decent signal. He answered right away, his voice crackling but decipherable. ‘It’s Allie,’ she said. ‘I’m outside the stadium, near Leppings Lane. Where should I go?’
‘You won’t get in at that end. It’s a fucking disaster, Allie. Bodies on the pitch, half the cops are just standing around, it’s the fans that are trying to save people’s lives out there. Go round the back of the North Stand, that’s where they’re taking the dead and the dying. There’s a gymnasium there, that’s what I’m being told. Allie, there are dozens of fans dead here.’ His voice broke. ‘Never seen anything like it.’
‘Tell the desk I’m on the patch,’ she said. ‘I’ve got freelances coming too.’ As she took off at a run, the ambulance that she’d seen turn into Leppings Lane reversed out and headed down towards the other end of the stadium. By the time she made it to the back of the North Stand, amazed there was nobody there to stop her, it looked like an ambulance park. Emergency vehicles left at haphazard angles, some doors closed, some doors open. Police and ambulance crew milled around. And in the midst, the injured. Some walking wounded, clearly with broken bones; others on stretchers, unconscious. The eerie thing was the lack of blood. Allie was accustomed to road crashes or violent clashes where the blood flowed freely. Not here.
She headed for the entrance to the gymnasium, following a pair of ambulance crew. Nobody stopped her, and she realised that in her casual clothes, she didn’t look like a journalist. But in her head, she was in journalist mode. She walked into a scene of terrible disorganisation. No plan had swung into action. Panicked faces. Bodies on stretchers, on advertising hoardings, on the bare floor. The frantic living, trying to rescue the dying. She walked through the dead, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
