Bertrand managed a smile. ‘If that’s what you want to be.’
‘No, but he’s right. How can we be free if we can’t picture it happening?’ She looked at him. ‘How do I disable him?’
Bertrand shrugged. ‘Fingers in his eyes.’
But she shook her head. ‘He’ll be bucking and fighting against you. No way I can guarantee to get his eyes. Better a swift, hard kick in the balls. I hear that men don’t much care for that.’
Bertrand grinned now. This was more like the old Sophie. ‘Okay. So, I’ll bang on the door and ask to go to the toilet. When they open the door I’ll grab the first guy, back into the wall in the corridor and turn him towards you. You’ll have one chance before the other guy’s on us.’
The full enormity of what they were planning struck her suddenly, and she experienced a sharp, stabbing fear. It was madness. They could never do it. But she made herself close her eyes and visualise the alternative. Do nothing and meekly accept whatever fate these people have in store for them. Not an option. She opened her eyes again and nodded. ‘What happens if only one of us gets away?’
‘If you get away,’ Bertrand said, ‘keep running and don’t look back. I can look after myself. Just bear in mind that these guys are working in shifts. There’s at least four of them, so there’ll probably be others somewhere else in the house.’
Sophie couldn’t imagine a single scenario where she would leave Bertrand here on his own. ‘And if you’re the one who gets away?’
‘I’ll come back for you.’
‘No, you won’t,’ she said, raising her voice. ‘You’ll go and you’ll get help. And then you’ll come back for me.’ Although the very idea of being left here on her own without him was almost unthinkable. It was one more scenario she absolutely wasn’t going to visualise. And the hopelessness of it all descended on her again like a black mist.
‘We should wait till it’s dark,’ Bertrand said. ‘Then, if we get out, we have a better chance of getting away.’
She nodded and they sat down on the floor, backs to the wall below the window, to watch as the last light of the day slowly faded on the wall opposite.
After a long silence Bertrand said, ‘You know we have to do this, right? We have to try. Even if we fail.’
She nodded. ‘I know.’ Though she couldn’t help wishing there was some other way. She turned to look at him. His bloody face and broken nose — and she saw the determination in his eyes. ‘I love you, Bertrand,’ she said. His dark eyes grew moist, even as she looked into them, and she knew that apart from her papa, there was no one else in this world that she would trust with her life like she trusted Bertrand.
He tore his eyes away from her and saw that the shape of the window, made by the outside light on the opposite wall, was gone. The dull burn of the single bulb overhead now filled the room with its sad electric light. And it occurred to him that this room being in darkness would help their cause. He scrambled to his feet. ‘Come on, I’ll give you a punt up. Use your sleeve to protect your hand and unscrew the bulb. If it’s dark in here they’ll not be able to see in.’
‘It’ll make them wary,’ she said, standing up to join him.
‘Yes, but if they can’t see where we are it’ll still give us the advantage.’ He crouched once more, interlacing his fingers to give her a stirrup, then slowly rose, straining to take her full weight as she reached for the bulb, one hand on his head to steady herself. He heard the scrape of metal on metal as it unscrewed, and then darkness as she jumped down clutching the bulb. He heard her smashing it on the wall, and by the last light of the day leaking in through the window above, saw her holding the jagged end of it in her hand, like a weapon.
‘I hope I get the chance to stick this in one of their faces,’ she hissed, and he could feel that the adrenalin was already pumping through her system.
He guided her to the right side of the door and stood her with her back to the wall, then took a deep breath before banging on the door and shouting. ‘Toilet!’ No point in losing the momentum of the moment.
They waited for nearly a minute, but there was no response. He banged again and kept shouting until they heard a door slamming somewhere in the house, and then footsteps in the corridor. Sophie closed her eyes and tried to control her breathing.
The footsteps stopped outside the door and there were several long seconds of silence. Then a voice. ‘What’s happened to the light?’
‘The bulb burned out,’ Bertrand said. ‘Can you hurry, please, I’m desperate.’
‘Stand back against the far wall!’ the voice came from the other side of the door, and then they heard the scrape of the key in the lock. Another moment of silence before the door was kicked in, bursting open in an explosion of dust. Bertrand stood, braced and ready, and saw the owner of the voice standing in hooded silhouette against the lit corridor behind him, a baseball bat dangling from his right hand. The shadow of his companion was cast in elongated distortion across the floor.
Bertrand leaped on him before the man’s eyes had a moment to adjust to the darkness of the room. The two of them crashed out into the corridor, Bertrand’s muscled forearm like a steel rod around his neck. The baseball bat rattled away across the concrete. Bertrand backed into the wall and Sophie stepped into the light, driving her foot hard into the man’s crotch. Bertrand felt the man’s whole body judder, and the pain that exploded from his mouth was almost palpable. Then he went limp, falling to the floor, pulling his knees up to his chest in the foetal position and rolling around, whimpering in agony.
But Bertrand had no time even to move before the second man was on him, his fist smashing into a face already bruised and swollen from the headbutt of the previous day. And the two men fell to the floor. Bertrand was almost blinded by pain. He felt a fist slamming into his gut and forcing all the air from his lungs.
Then the man’s whole body shook and went limp, becoming a dead weight on top of Bertrand. The sound of the baseball bat striking his head had made the oddest hollow sound, like wood on a leather ball. Bertrand looked up to see Sophie standing above them, before a shadow rose up behind her, enveloping her almost like a glove and pulling her down. The first man had recovered sufficiently to rejoin the fight.
Bertrand fought to drag himself out from under the man that Sophie had struck with the bat, but the blow to his head had not been enough to disable him entirely, and he was already pulling himself to his knees as Bertrand rolled free. Bertrand could see the door ahead of him at the end of the corridor. But Sophie was down, and both men were now back in the fight.
‘Run!’ Sophie screamed at him. He hesitated, and she bellowed with all her might, ‘Go! For God’s sake, go!’ And he turned and sprinted down the hall, towards the light at the end of it.
The sounds that followed him turned his blood to ice. Their wounded captors bawling with fury and venom. Sophie’s scream echoing off cold plaster walls and concrete floors. He very nearly stopped and turned back. But he knew she would be furious with him. All this would have been in vain. A painful and pointless exercise.
The door at the end of the hall opened into a room that leaked warmth and cigarette smoke out into the cold of the corridor. In the middle of the room two chairs were pushed back from a table scarred with cigarette burns and scattered with playing cards. There had been a game in progress, and a cigarette still burned in the ashtray. A kettle stood on a unit against the back wall, alongside a tray of food ready prepared to take along to the prisoners.
A door at the other side of the room opened straight on to a narrow staircase that led steeply up into darkness. Bertrand took the stairs two at a time, trying hard not to listen to the bedlam he had left in his wake. At the top, he fumbled in the dark to unlatch a door that opened into the tiled entrance hallway of what must once have been a grand manor house. Soft light burned in art deco uplighters. Wooden panelling, scarred by the years, and cream-painted walls that had seen better days.