Although I could neither speak nor see I could still hear, and the muffled voices that came through to me sounded vaguely familiar. I could have sworn that the man who said: “Why didn’t we shove him in the boot?” was Mr Phillips from number 35, and the woman who replied: “Because we put all the shopping in there, didn’t we?” was Mrs Phillips, also from number 35. It turned that there was a very good reason for my thinking what I thought, this being that my kidnappers were indeed Mr and Mrs Phillips from number 35.
Naturally enough I began wondering why these two otherwise perfectly normal near-neighbours of ours, who regularly partnered my parents at contract bridge, had suddenly discovered a criminal tendency that had led them to seize a 30-year-old male off a suburban street and roar off into the sunset with him.
Actually, “roar off” was a bit of an exaggeration. Mr Phillips never drove at more than 25 miles an hour at the best of times, and he was not inclined to break the habit of a lifetime on this occasion.
My ordeal in the back of the car was not a long one, even at Mr Phillips’s gentle pace. We could only have been a couple of streets away from where we started, when the car pulled into a driveway. The doors opened and I was encouraged to get to my feet, but with the hood still over my head. A doorbell was rung, and when the house door opened a young man’s voice was heard, clearly in some alarm.
“Bloody Hell, Dad, what have you got there?”
“Sshh, David, keep your voice down, we don’t want all the neighbours to hear. We’re involved in a kidnap and we need you to be our safe house.”
The young man was obviously as astonished by the proceedings as I was, but he assisted his parents in bundling me inside the house. He was about to take the hood off my head when he was stopped by Mrs Phillips.
“No, David, wait until we’ve gone. He might recognise us, and it’s important that he doesn’t know who any of us are. Wait until we’re out of sight before you release him or take the hood off.”
“And then,” said Mr Philips, “You must let him use your spare room, at least until Susan and the kids get back from Auntie Margaret’s next week. “Further instructions will then be given”.
“Just what is going on?” David asked. “Have you two been overdosing on John Le Carré novels or something?”
But no further explanation was forthcoming. The senior Phillips’s left, after which David did the decent thing and released me from my bonds.
If Mr and Mrs Phillips had imagined for one second that their dastardly plot would work, on the basis that I would not have a clue as to who they were, or who my new jailer was, they were sadly mistaken. It had clearly slipped their minds that I had known David Phillips ever since we had been at school together. Not only that, but I had been David’s best man when he married Susan some ten years previously, and Mr and Mrs Phillips had pretended to laugh at all my terrible jokes when I made my speech at the reception.
As I stood there in David’s front room, shaking my head to get my eyes into focus, I even recognised the IKEA furniture that I had helped David and Susan put together when they had moved into this house on Waterpark Road only three years previously.
David was every bit as astonished as I was when he recognised who his parents’ kidnap victim was.
“John!” he exclaimed. “What the hell is going on?”
“I wish I knew”, I replied. “I can only imagine that your parents and mine have been playing some silly little game that they dreamed up at their last bridge evening. I’d better be getting off home.”
And so I did, after David had kindly offered me a stiff whisky to get my brain back into gear, an offer that I was pleased to accept.
But when I turned the corner of Laburnum Avenue, I could see that maybe going home would not be so easy. You remember I began by saying that my parents had leapt into action as soon as I had been kidnapped? The action they had taken was to order a man and a van to take all my belongings to a storage depot so they could rent out my room to a lodger, and the man was busy packing the van as I watched.
All those hints about “didn’t I think it was about time I found a place of my own” and “all my friends got married and settled down long before they reached my age” suddenly made perfect sense.
With better planning, and somewhat less hopeless accomplices than the Phillips’s, their plan might have worked. Actually, I had to admit that it did work, because I had now had no choice but to go back to David’s place for the night before working out a permanent arrangement.
On the other hand, a large enough bribe would have done the trick just as well.
© John Welford
Intriguing story! Loved it.
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