Hidden Depths

Chapter 14 - Captured

The room Rich was sitting in did not have a large two-way mirror.  He was not handcuffed to the table and no policemen were standing guard behind his back.   After working out that there was no escape, he'd accepted the inevitable and given up without a fight.  It had been tempting, but he had made no attempt to resist the officers that pounced on him when Nikolai and Layla abandoned him to his fate. 

The policeman who had eventually caught him had been slightly overweight, so he was further back in the chase and had avoided the fright from the stuffed dogs, the frustration of Nikolai's trip hazards and the pain of his granny's enthusiastic caning.  So when Rich calmly sat down with his hands in the air, the officer arrested him swiftly, but without the violent release of anger that his fleeter of foot colleagues would have vented.

Had he been in this much trouble eight months ago, he would have undoubtedly gone down fighting.  But, as he was helped into a riot van, Rich reflected that his hard training regime must have finally taught him how to manage his anger. Deep down though, he knew he was kidding himself.  As furious as he was with Layla, he had to admit that it was spending time with her that had taught him how to behave himself like a grown-up.  He was far from perfecting the smooth sophistication that Layla and the other hosts portrayed so effortlessly, but he had come a long way from the rough scrapper he had been when he first arrived in Paris.  For the first time, Rich was relying on his charm rather than his fists to get him out of the trouble he was in.

So when he found himself in the interview room, he started channelling his friends' cool detachment and cooperated with his captors with host-like serenity.  He openly admitted to being a bare-knuckle boxer and told the story of how he had been recruited at thirteen to become a prize-fighter at the Wonderlust Club.

Rich was more than a little upset with Layla but, despite his ill feelings towards her, he couldn't bring himself to drop her in it.  After all, it wasn't her who had been driving - it was that ungrateful git Nikolai who had left him in the lurch. Since any of his remaining loyalty had blown away with the dust from those screeching tyres, Rich told the police everything he knew about the crazy Russian. 

Yet he grew increasingly frustrated as he realised that he really didn't know that much about Nikolai.   Considering the man had been his employer for the last eight months, Rich was a bit embarrassed that all he really knew for sure was his name, the address where his granny lived and the colour of his sports car.  However, he relieved his annoyance by stretching the truth in any way that made his old boss look more like a slave master than the charismatic leader he really was.

As the police learned Rich's age and discovered that he had been taking drugs given to him by Nikolai, they began to treat him more like a victim than a criminal.  Picking up on their sympathies, Rich spun more and more elaborate yarns.   He lied to them so convincingly that he found himself becoming genuinely emotional as he told a story of how his parents had been murdered for their political beliefs while on holiday in Paris. 

He based the story on their real life emigration, but made up a surprising amount of detail about how they had fled Iraq, only to be hunted down years later by state-sponsored hit men.  Rich pretended he had been too scared to seek help from the French authorities, so he had sought to live as best he could on the streets of Paris, before Nikolai had ruthlessly exploited his natural fighting abilities and forced him to go into the ring to defend himself against increasingly vicious opponents.

Rich described all the men that he had fought in the ring and when he mentioned Ratko, the enormous wrestler, one of the police officers interviewing him almost fell off her chair.  Word of the Russian beast, who had fought off a whole squad of police, had spread quickly through the force and despite the fact that it was common knowledge that he claimed to have been beaten up by a boy, none of them really believed it. 

But although Rich wasn't yet fully grown and still had the face of a boy, he had the body of a man who had undergone years of hard training.  The police had no reason to believe he wasn't the virtuoso fighter they had heard all those rumours about.  By the end of the interview they had Rich up on his feet showing off some of the skills he had learned from Layla.  As word that they had the kid who had taken down Ratko spread through the station, other officers crowded into the interview room.  Rich couldn't help but smile as his parkour backflip into a handstand drew out almost Wonderlust Club levels of applause.