Captured by Tina Johansen Read Free Book Online Page B

road. It was a world away from Farringdon, where she had lived for several years now. Working barely a mile away, she hardly ever left its comfortable radius.
    She had been amazed moments later when the poverty gave way to sleek high-rise buildings and upmarket shopping malls. The streets still bustled with activity, but obvious affluence had replaced the stricken poverty. The little food stalls were still dotted along the streets, but they were shaded by luscious green trees now, instead of rusting corrugated iron. The cab spat her out onto a side street, where her hotel nestled between an expensive-looking hair salon and a karaoke bar teeming with Japanese businessmen.
    Grace rolled onto her back and leaned across the bed for her handbag. She fumbled for her phone, hoping that it worked here: she could at least catch up on some work while she waited. There was still nothing from Kirsty. She typed an angry email, toned it down, and hit send. Then she gathered the four huge squishy pillows together and sank into them.

Chapter 8
     
    Kirsty sat in the bus station watching the night bus to Vientiane trundle towards her. She was travelling alone again now. Her latest patchwork group of friends had gone their separate ways in Hanoi. She was feeling lonely for her little group already.
    The bus was a regular coach on the outside. Inside, instead of having several rows of seats running along either side of one aisle, there were three rows of narrow, almost flat, cushioned benches, with two aisles running between them. At the back of the bus, the two aisles ended at a block of five benches, with five more situated above them. Kirsty’s ‘bed’ was the third of the bottom five; a nightmare for even the mildly claustrophobic. Typical , Kirsty thought grumpily. Cram the stupid tourist in the crap seat . She pointed at the end recliner, which was empty, raising her eyebrows to the driver.
    “You sit here,” he said, pointing insistently at the middle bunk.
    Kirsty crawled into the tight space, resigned to a very long, bumpy night. A couple of minutes later, the empty side-bunk was occupied by a newly-arrived Vietnamese man, who quickly removed his t-shirt to reveal a doughy brown chest. Even from two seats away she could smell the acrid stench of body odour and stale cigarette smoke.
    “At least you’re not beside him, mate.”
    Kirsty had been too busy despairing at her new home for the next twenty four hours to notice the guy in the bunk beside her.  Now that her impatient eyes had met his twinkling blue ones, she wasn’t sure how she could have missed him. Perhaps this wouldn’t be such a nightmare journey after all, she thought as she introduced herself.
     
    Grace sat at the bar of the rooftop lounge, the majestic view wasted on her. She had grown bored of waiting in the hotel, and had left the building with no idea of where she was going.  After wandering for what felt like hours, she had stumbled upon this place, and attempted to fool herself into believing that an overpriced cocktail might help her to relax and make the most of her time in Bangkok. A couple of weeks before, she had booked flights to the Andaman coast for her and Kirsty. She presumed the flight had departed that morning as scheduled, only without them aboard.
    The view from the bar was truly spectacular: despite the waist-high green-tinted glass barrier, she had an almost three-hundred-and-sixty degree view of the glinting lights of the entire city from her stool at the bar. She had spent most of the second day sleeping, before working late into the night, still not adjusted to the time different. Today, she forced herself to wake up early, despite only sleeping for a couple of hours the night before.
    Hesitating for a moment, then reassuring herself that three days was beyond even Kirsty’s capacity for oblivious inconsideration, she wrote an email to Kirsty’s parents. She didn’t know them very well: they’d always seemed unapproachable when the