A Cast of Vultures (16 page)

He didn’t let go of my arm. ‘There are lifts over there.’

Now they tell me. I could have taken a lift up. Or I could have left with Jake. Or I could have stayed at home, found a packet of chocolate digestives and had a pleasant day reading on the sofa.

Life is filled with roads not taken. ‘Lean on me.’

He lifted his arm to put it round my shoulder. And the lights went out.

I was curled in a ball, my knees pressed tight against my chest, my hands tucked under my chin. It wasn’t comfortable. I had the headache from hell, and I was – I tried to straighten my legs – I was jammed in somehow, and couldn’t move. I opened my eyes, although my head was begging me not to do that. A pair of legs was in front of me, dressed in black jeans. The feet were facing away from me. I lifted my head and a starburst of pain exploded behind my ear. I closed my eyes again and concentrated on not vomiting. If I couldn’t move, vomiting wouldn’t be pretty. When the bile receded, I looked up again. The legs were attached to the man with the sprained ankle. His head was down. He was – listening? I heard voices, and footsteps. Sprained Ankle moved back towards me as they went past.

By the time my half-functioning brain had worked out he was hiding from whoever the voices were, they had passed. It was probably better to figure out what was happening
before I drew attention to myself, anyway. Sprained Ankle didn’t move, so I looked around as much as I could without lifting my head. I was in an enforced foetal curl, with my bum and feet pressed against the railings I’d looked over earlier: we were still on the treetop walkway. At the other end, my head and shoulders were propped up against a wall of some sort. I couldn’t move my hands or my head to check it out without Sprained Ankle discovering I was awake. Working out as much as I could while he thought I was unconscious felt like the way to go.

I reconstructed what I could remember, and was forced to conclude that the man had coshed me. Even if I had sprained his ankle by knocking into him, that seemed an overreaction. Furthermore, most people don’t carry coshes – they are not part of the dress code at Kew – so it was unlikely he had been a passing victim of my clumsiness and had responded in a fit of pique.

I had got that far when he moved. I could feel it coming – the tenseness left his body – which gave me time to close my eyes. I heard him walk a few steps away. And then I could more than hear his nearness as he turned and his foot thudded into my ribs. ‘Stupid bitch,’ he said. Sprained ankle my arse, I thought. Indignation at being fooled kept both my mouth and my eyes shut. I grunted, but didn’t move. I don’t know if unconscious people grunt when they’re kicked. Either they do, or he didn’t know either. At any rate, it didn’t faze him. He kicked me again, then I felt my handbag pulled out from underneath me. If I’d realised it was there, I might have risked moving to get at my phone. Too late.

‘Stupid bitch,’ he repeated.
If we’re discussing stupidity
,
I thought,
can we begin with yours? All this, to steal a handbag with only twenty quid in it?
He didn’t have to knock me out. I would have given it to him. I carry a lot of stuff in my bag – a phone, an iPad, a book, as well as wallet, credit cards, make-up and odds and ends that sift down to the bottom and get forgotten. Even good electronics and an almost new lipstick, which I rarely remembered to wear but which I loved because the colour was called ‘Venom’, couldn’t make my bag a worthwhile haul. Besides, he didn’t look like a Venom type of guy. Then again, he hadn’t asked my views.

I heard a thump, and allowed my eyes to slit open. I could see him through the railings. He was standing, back to me, going through my bag. He dropped my phone and my iPad onto the walkway and casually stamped on them. Then he bent, shovelling the pieces of electronics back into the bag, before leaning out and tossing the whole thing over the railing. He never looked in my wallet, didn’t check anything else. Not a mugging. I thought back to the footsteps I’d heard on the pagoda viewing platform, and they took on a more ominous cast.

He sank down against the railing. He checked his watch, then put his head back and just sat. And sat. He was waiting. For someone, or to make sure everyone had left the grounds? Neither felt like it was going to have a happy ending for me. I stared at him, trying to memorise everything I could, but there wasn’t much to remember. He looked like any twenty-something you’d see in the pub or on the Tube.

I looked around as far as I could without making a sound by moving my body. He was too close for that. The
layout said we were in one of the nodules off the walkway, while the wall I was propped up against told me it wasn’t a viewing platform. Maybe it was the staircase, although I didn’t remember them having solid walls. We’d been heading to the lifts. They might have a similar layout: a circular nodule with lifts in the centre instead of stairs.

I slid a glance over to Sprained Ankle again. His head was leaning against the railing, and if he wasn’t asleep, he also wasn’t paying attention to me. I risked lifting my head a few inches. I could see a viewing platform a few metres away. It was held up by a single support that rose from the ground and then, under the platform, split into three struts designed to look like tree branches that arced out around the railings. Apart from the platform’s single entrance onto the walkway, there was no way down. If I was right, and I was wedged in beside the lift shaft, my platform had another exit, but I didn’t imagine that Sprained Ankle would hang about peacefully while I pressed the call button and waited for a lift to come. If, of course, it even ran after visitor hours.

I turned my wrist and looked down. Just after six o’clock. I wasn’t sure what time it had been when I’d heard the announcement that the walkway would close in ten minutes. Kew itself closed at six, so it had probably been about five-thirtyish. Which would mean I’d been unconscious for fifteen minutes or so. I tried to work out how knowing this helped me. I couldn’t see that it did.

I attempted to flex my legs. I was in two minds. I could get up and run and scream. If I was going to do that, I needed to do it now. The later it got, the less likely there would be anyone in the grounds to hear me. Or I could
keep playing possum, and hope that whenever whatever it was that was going to happen, happened, I could come up with something other than screaming and shouting.

The strangest thing was how calm I was. I’d been attacked, and my attacker was waiting, either for someone to help him do something nasty to me, or for dark, when he would do something nasty to me. Neither was going to be good. And yet I was lying there with no sense of panic. Maybe I needed to be hit over the head more often.

I do have some advice now for would-be attackers. If you are waiting for reinforcements who will arrive in a lift, don’t prop your attackee up against said lift-shaft wall. If you do, she will know before you do that they are on their way. This important life lesson was borne home when I felt the wall behind me vibrate. The lift was on the move.

The first, and most hopeful, possibility was that it was someone who worked for Kew, coming to check that all the visitors had left. Then I remembered the voices I’d heard when Sprained Ankle had been standing beside me, and I realised that that check had already been made, and Sprained Ankle had been hiding from the staff. It was therefore more likely that the lift was transporting Sprained Ankle’s friends. The stairs and the lift were now both blocked by people who were not happy with me, one of whom had already demonstrated his unhappiness by hitting me on the head.

Before I had reached the end of this thought, I was on the move. I would like to be able to say that I had a plan, that I’d gone over my situation, and was responding to the circumstances in a logical and premeditated fashion. Perhaps sometime soon that is the way I’ll tell this story. In reality,
however, everything that followed was driven by adrenaline and instinct, and more than a drop or two of panic.

Sprained Ankle had heard the lift and was getting up, his head bent over his phone, texting as he did. Before he was fully upright, I was on my feet. One of my legs slid out from under me. It was dead from having been bent for so long. It didn’t matter, though, because I wasn’t running. There was nowhere to run to. I went in the only direction I could. Over the railing.

It took me longer than it should have – the railing was designed specifically to prevent people doing what I was doing – and Sprained Ankle’s hand was on my own ankle as I finally slid over. But he was that fraction of a second too late. I grabbed at the supporting strut below that mirrored the one I had seen on the next viewing platform, and let my body fall.

I’m female, and not a very athletic female at that. I have no upper-body strength. I make Jake lift anything that weighs more than a teacup. So I didn’t have much hope that I’d be able to hang on, much less be able to move and hide. But I didn’t have any hope at all if I’d stayed where I was.

The fall was – terrifying is the only word. I wrapped both my arms around the metal strut and kicked at Sprained Ankle’s hand even as my brain was screaming that if I kicked him away, I would fall to my death. But my mind and my body paid no more attention to each other than they usually did. I kicked and kicked, and momentum, and my body weight, carried me away from him, and from the railing. It took a second, two at the most, but as I arced out into the air, it felt like it lasted a year.

And then I hung, that same body weight that had taken me away from the immediate threat now pulling me down
into a void. I’d wrapped both arms around the strut as I dived over the railing, but I had a minute or so at most. I wouldn’t be able to hold on for longer. Every second increased the chances that my arms would weaken, slip. I was going to have to use my non-existent stomach muscles to pull myself up and get my legs on the strut too. I pressed my face closer to my hands and lifted my body. My legs came nowhere near the strut. I tried again. And again. This time, when my body fell back, my grip loosened. I tensed up, pulling my face in closer to the strut, scraping it along the metal. I welcomed the abrasion against my skin. It meant I was still hanging on.

The adrenaline surged with the slip. I rocked my body, and this time my left leg hooked briefly over the strut. Not enough, and I fell back. Again. I was getting weaker. Again. And I was there. One leg hooked over the support was enough to give me the purchase I needed, at least until I could catch my breath. Then I could try and get the other leg around too. I gave a count of five, and there I was, wrapped around the strut, arms and legs grasping tight like a baby koala around a eucalyptus.

I risked a quick look around. The viewing platform I had seen from above had three struts branching off from the upright support. This one had only two, because of the lift shaft in the centre, beside the upright. If I slid down to the point where the two struts met the support, I’d be able to lean against the wall of the lift too. First I would have to turn over and get on top of the strut I was hanging onto from underneath. Inch by inch I manoeuvred, until finally I lay on top, panting. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, trying to quell the hysteria that was bubbling up now that I was thinking rather than reacting.

I hadn’t panicked in those first minutes. I hadn’t had time. Now black spots appeared in front of my eyes, and one hand slipped, slick with sweat. That brought me back. I counted breaths, in and out, in and out. The spots receded, and the rushing noise in my ears quietened.

In that quiet, I could hear the two men. I’d almost forgotten about them. I’d been so focused on keeping my grip, on not falling to my death, that the reason I was there, the reason I was acting like a female Indiana Jones – if Indiana Jones had ever had an adventure in a botanical garden – had been pushed to the back of my mind.

Their voices brought it back to the forefront. My dive over the side had taken seconds, not the years it had felt like. The two men were almost directly above me. I could see their shadows on the ground, two heads bobbing above the railing. I risked a look up. The wooden floorboards showed me nothing. I couldn’t see them, or what they were doing. With luck, that meant they couldn’t see me either.

Then I heard the lift. One, or both, was going down. I had planned to move down to the top of the main support pole carefully, but like my header over the rails, I moved instead on instinct, sliding down in seconds until my feet reached the place where the two struts met the lift. I withdrew into the shadows of the wall as the light spilt out below when the lift door opened. A man emerged.

He was bald, or had a shaven head, and was heavier, stockier, than Sprained Ankle. I only saw him for a moment before he moved away from the light of the lift, and into the shadow cast by the walkway, and then he was an outline. He could see better: he had a torch, which he began to use. He was searching the ground, looking for me down there,
quartering the area under the platform systematically.

My stomach churned. He was right. That was where logic said I should have been, under the platform, mangled, probably dead. When he didn’t find me, he was going to look up. Directly under the walkway, in this densely wooded part of the gardens, it was dark. But the sun hadn’t set, it would be light for hours still, and even without a torch it wouldn’t be that difficult to spot me. With the torch I might as well have a sparkler lit on top of my head, topped by a flashing neon arrow:
Here she is!

I looked around. The strut I’d slid down led up to the viewing platform, and nowhere else. The second strut also led up to the viewing platform, and nowhere else. Even if I crawled back to where I’d been, I wouldn’t be able to return to the viewing platform. Momentum and gravity had taken me down; it would need far more strength than I possessed to take me back in the opposite direction, even if my attackers were to give me the time, and it seemed like a good idea. I was sure they wouldn’t, and it didn’t.

The torch beam broke into this entirely futile train of thought. Baldy had given up on the ground and was waving it in the air to get Sprained Ankle’s attention.