Taken Chapter 1

Taken
By Holly E Brown

Chapter 1



It was dark and she could feel the damp underneath her feet. Where was she? This was definitely not a nightmare. It was reality. She felt the panic creep up on her and overwhelm her entire body. It was almost like someone had clamped down on her stomach and squeezed with a vice like strength making her whole body ache and throb. The silence only made the tightening worse. She screamed loudly into the abyss and pulled hard against the thick, coarse rope that bound her arms and feet to the chair. Blinking twice in the darkened tomb she desperately hoped her eyes might adjust to the darkness. They didn’t. Trying and failing to slow her now racing heart she breathed in and out very slowly and deeply, then for the first time realized that there was heavy tape covering her mouth. She could smell the rancid scent of her own fear sweating off her skin and realized she was alone.
                   In her head she desperately tried to grapple at her last blurred memory “I love you Anna.” Her boyfriend’s words. But where had they been? More importantly where was she now? Why? She listened hopelessly in the dark trying to listen for the slightest creak in the darkness but could only hear the thudding of her own heartbeat in her ears. She let out another stifled scream and got nothing back except the echo of her own desperation. For the first time in her short 17 years of life Anna was alone and petrified.
         Calm down Anna, she said to herself as she threw her head back to sweep her long golden hair from her eyes. She recalled being with Danny. The two young lovers had been together for two years now. Danny had been taken back and incredibly attracted to this clearly stunning girl with long blonde hair and dazzling blue eyes, she looked better to him than most so called ‘top’ models. He had been intrigued as to why such a beautiful girl would have such little confidence in herself and her appearance always wearing long shirts and trousers. Anna on the other hand was not remotely interested in having a boyfriend, she was so wrapped up in her own life, when Danny showed an interest in her she couldn’t help but fall for his charm and amazing good looks but she was still cautious all the same.
He was a bad boy from the local Herald Estate and part of a local gang and she was the barrister’s daughter from the ‘posh’ side of town. It was like a modern day Romeo and Juliet. God how her heart ached for him to be there now, if nothing else but to sooth her.
         For all her A grades at school Anna could still not see Danny through anything but rose tinted glasses. He was bad news even as young kid. Danny had been in trouble with the police from The Kennel since the young age of seven. Where other kids his age where at school learning to read and write and doing their times tables Danny was out stealing cars and vandalizing peoples homes with the older lads from the estate. Danny only learned to read and write when he was sent to a juvenile detention centre at the age of fourteen. It was by sheer luck he hadn’t met Anna’s father in the court or anywhere else. Anna’s father was completely oblivious to that fact his daughter was having a relationship with anyone, let alone a delinquent from the local estate. However for all his faults Danny loved Anna as much, if not more than she loved him. He would do anything to protect her.
         A sudden deafening burst of noise made Anna jump out of her skin. Was it the sound of a car’s engine?  No maybe a lorry. The noise reverberated off the sides of the room in which she was caged and made the floor vibrate. She arched her head painfully back in the direction of the deafening noise and saw a small hole near the roof where the tiniest amount of sunlight was starting to creep through. Then the noise, an unbelievably loud Bang! And the horrible noise of metal scraping against metal. Her mind suddenly went to her father and she dropped into a daze. As the sunlight slowly but surely illuminated the once darkened tomb in which she sat her mind came into focus and she forced herself to wake up and take in her surroundings.

Anna carefully analyzed every inch of the now partially lit room, from the rust on the walls to the darkened shadows where the light hadn’t yet reached. This couldn’t be real, things like this only happened on the TV or in books and films. She was in what appeared to her to be a storage container.
         Her head began to spin wildly out of control she knew these containers more than she cared to. She recognized instantly the smell of oil, rust and sea. Danny and Anna used to meet at the shipping yard when they had first got together, it was the only place they could be alone together without fear of being seen. No it couldn’t have been him could it? She began to twist her arms against the ropes partly in an effort to loosen them but mainly to force them against the old cuts on her arms. She began to feel the familiar sense of relief wash over her as the blood started to drip on the rusty metal floor beneath her bare feet.
         

On the other side of town Detective Inspector James Bowlenn was just waking up in his one bedroom flat. Having had an exceptionally bad night’s sleep partly due to his neighbors upstairs playing really bad and incredibly loud music for most of the night and the immense heat wave the papers were now referring to as the scorching summer of 08Õ he looked hopelessly at the thread bare curtains in the hope of anything but more the forty degree heat that the radio had promised.           The curtains hung still and lifeless as he rose out of his bed and pulled on his freshly pressed black suit trousers and shirt his head gave way to a very painful headache induced by the bottle of Bell’s he’d drunk last night trying to bring about an alcohol fuelled sleep which he now bitterly regretted. Shuffling through to the kitchen in somewhat of a daze he turned the radio on and flicked the switch on the kettle. Whilst shoveling 4 large spoonfuls of coffee into his cup he vaguely listened to the female presenter bang on about how the police could be doing more to make the public feel safe against knife crime. He stifled a vague and drowsy laugh were these people mad what did the public think he did all day sit around contemplating the meaning of life? He sat down at the table and carefully put 6 sugars into his freshly made coffee. His ex partner Kelly had always moaned about the amount of sugar he got through “It’ll rot your teeth” she used to say in the exact tone his mother had since he was a child.

Kelly had left James after a long 10-year relationship shortly before his 39th birthday a few months ago. As much as he tried to deny it to himself he knew it was no ones fault but his own. Maybe if he’d been around more? Not put the job first. All normal questions any person would ask himself or herself. James knew however that if he had not drunk as much and controlled his temper he would never have hit, no, beat his girlfriend wasn’t he the person in charge of banging people like that up? Why had he done it? Idiot. As much as he hated it James was turning into the man he hated, his father. Over the years Bowlenn had dealt with rapists, murders, pedophiles, and serial killers. People who after interview had made his skin crawl and left a vile taste in his mouth. Despite this he despised none of them more than his father.

Growing up James’ mother had owned a pub in the estate they lived in. The Golden Duke. It was run well and always kept spotless by his mother who ran a tight ship. The worn wooden stool located at the end of the solid oak bar was nearly always occupied by his father, a lean stocky man with long graying hair and tattoos up both of his arms to many he looked like an aging biker. However, to James and his mother he resembled a monster that was to be kept happy at all costs.
         Not many people will ever know or comprehend what its like to hear their mother scream in pain or more often than not fear for her own life. James did. For him it was the soundtrack of his childhood scratched and on repeat almost 24/7.
Right up until his 12th birthday James lived in fear of the man who ruled his life. As much as he had always tried to defend his mother he had learnt from a very young age that it was better to press the pillow that little bit harder over his ears and quite literally mop up the damage of the aftermath. His mother used to joke that at just 11 years of age he was just as qualified if not more so than any doctor in England.
That was his mother after all always trying to keep a smile on her face no matter how tragic things got. When he sat at the table with his one friends and blew out the twelve candles on his Victoria sponge cake which his mother dutifully made every year, he wished as he did every birthday that daddy would stop drinking and be nice to mummy and there would be no more shouting. Little did this small child know that his wish would come partially true in only a few short hours.
         At another pub a short walk from the estate James Bowlenn Senior was avoiding the birthday celebrations of his only child like the plague saying that the kid was a queer that he would never grow to be a real man so why should he care. He had already drunk enough whisky to comatose the average man and was showing no signs of slowing up. As the final bell rang and he rose unsteadily to his feet some 5 hours later, he shuffled towards the pub door shouted his thanks to the bar maid whom much to his disappointment he’d been chatting up all night but with no luck.
He stood on the pavement, a brisk breeze whipping around his face sobered him up slightly but not enough to make any real difference to the anger he was now beginning to feel in the pit of his stomach. Slowly pumping its way round his system first into his feet making him walk slightly faster, then to his arms making him clench his fists and finally to his brain making his already fuzzy mind even more cloudy and disorientated.
As he stumbled his way towards home he started to blame his wife for the state he was in it was her fault he had to drink, her fault he was the way he was, the boys too if he hadn’t have been born he and his wife would be happy and she’d still have the gorgeous figure god had blessed her with.
While these thoughts polluted his hazy mind he failed to notice the group of skinheads following him in the shadows. Just as the man promised himself with a sneer that he was going to teach his disrespectful family a lesson they would remember, a huge heavy thump to the back of his head sent him sprawling on to the concrete floor. The rest was a blur.
         The police turned up at shortly after three in the morning to inform James’ mother of her loss and how it had happened. No matter how hard they both tried neither mother or son could bring themselves to shed a tear over the tyrant that had made their life hell for as long as they could both remember. He was gone and this was a new start for the pair. It was both a happy and sad moment that both mother and son shared that night but most of all it was an overwhelming sense of relief.
         That was the last memory James had of The Golden Duke they had sold up and moved on shortly after his fathers death. Predictably the new estate was worse than the last with no pub for an income the family were struggling to keep their heads above water, his mother was working three jobs now surviving on only a few hours sleep a night. The taxman had taken advantage of his widowed mother as had the estate agent and left her almost penniless.
They now lived in a pokey 2 bed roomed flat on a huge estate. It was full of crime, drugs and anger. You could taste it in the air. It was there at the impressionable age of 13 James had known he wanted to be a police officer.           He saw crime all around him everywhere he looked and instead of buying into it he kept his head down at school, got good grades and when he turned 18 he applied for London’s finest The Metropolitan Police Force or as its now known service.
The job had changed a lot since 1987. Women police officers were given the respect they deserved, technology was now a huge part of the job and forensic science had developed into a reliable source of information and was almost never wrong. However, the job description was still very much the same, good guys catch the bad guys.
         Twenty-one years later in 2008 having lost the love of his life Bowlenn hated looking at himself in the mirror as he saw the same twinkle in his own eyes as he vividly remembered his father having in his. The same twinkle and smirk that came before the first blow to his mother.