For some time, she struggled furiously, trying to kick out with her bound feet, but quickly running out of air and hope, and falling finally into a bottomless well of black despair.
The vehicle lurched as she heard him open the door and climb into the driver’s seat. He pulled the door shut and started the motor, turning the SUV in three swift movements that threw her from one side of the boot to the other, then accelerating back down the track towards the road, bumping through potholes and over ruts, tossing her around in the back like some rag doll.
She fought hard not to throw up, and it was with some relief finally that she felt them turn on to the smooth tarmac of the road. Drawing breath through her panic was like trying to breathe through straws. She prayed she wouldn’t pass out and vomit into her mouth, for if she did, she would be dead long before they got to wherever it was he was taking her.
Chapter twenty-eight
There is sunlight streaming into the bedroom through the side window I left on the latch. I feel the heat of it on my legs as it falls across the bed, and I am sure that is what has wakened me.
I glance at the bedside clock and realise with a sense of shock that it is almost midday. I must have slept for well over twelve hours. No doubt I needed it, but if anything I feel worse. My head is thick, my nasal tubes stuffed up so that I have to breathe through my mouth. My eyes are gritty and clogged with sleep. My body is stiff and aching, and feels as if I have left it behind in the land of Nod, even though my brain has woken to the new day.
I swing my legs out of bed and stagger into the bathroom to lean against the wall and listen, eyes closed, to the stream of my urine as it splashes into the pan. Then plunge my face into the sink to splash it repeatedly with cold water, before rubbing it briskly dry with a fresh, soft towel.
I pull on jeans and a T-shirt and pad through to the kitchen to make coffee. Both kitchen and sitting room are flooded with the softest September light, and I look from the window at the incoming tide in all its shades of blue, reflecting sunshine in pools and eddies all across the bay. Bran is stretched out at the kitchen door and scrambles hopefully to his feet as I come through. I go into the boot room and open the front door to let him out. He goes haring away across the dunes and I return to the kitchen to sit at the table, sipping strong black coffee. I try to remember the idea that excited me sometime in those brain-fogged moments before sleep took me last night. It had seemed inspirational then. But now, as it comes back to me, it appears to have little merit. It had occurred to me that I hadn’t checked the laptop in the shed.
I look at the other laptop sitting on the table in front of me, and wonder why I thought the computer in the shed might cast any more light on my situation than this one has done.
Still, I am a man who pays attention to detail. I know that now, and so I am aware that I must check the laptop out there, even if the rational part of my brain tells me I will be wasting my time.
In the boot room I slip bare feet into my wellington boots, and take my mug of coffee with me as I go out to the shed. The breeze is fresh and strong in my face as I step outside. I can smell the sea and the heather, and, somewhere on the edge of the wind, the faintest whiff of peat smoke. And I wonder who has lit a fire on a day like this.
The laptop takes some minutes to boot up, so I stand gazing around the shed as I wait for it. When my eyes alight, finally, on the beekeeper’s mask, the gloves that I know make my hands too clumsy to wear, the tools, the smoker, I have a moment when I am so close to remembering everything, I feel that if only I reached out I could almost touch my forgotten past. I lift the beekeeper’s hat and face-net down from its peg, feeling it soft in my hand, like memory itself. But frustratingly, it is all still just beyond recollection.
I realise that the laptop has finished loading its operating system and I turn to examine it, laying my mug to one side. Apart from the software that came by default with the OS, there is nothing on it at all. No applications, no files. Nothing. How is it possible, I wonder, to work with a computer for a year and a half and leave no traces? Which is when I spot the black firewire cable trailing away from the input sockets on the left side of the computer. It is about six inches long, a naked, shiny plug on the other end of it. And it dawns on me that I must have been using an external drive. Something loaded with software, where I stored all my files, leaving no trace of my activities on the computer itself.
But where is it?
I search the shed from top to bottom. Methodically, meticulously. It is not here. And I know it is not in the house. In a drawer, I find a cardboard box containing nearly a dozen USB thumb drives. One by one, I plug them into the laptop, but they contain no data, and never have, as far as I can see. Unused, virgin thumb drives, each with a capacity of 32 gigabytes.
In my frustration, I strike out and punch the wall, only to graze and bruise my knuckles and wave my hand in the air, cursing at the pain and my stupidity.
I grab my coffee and storm back to the cottage, aware, as I stride across the few yards between hut and house, of Mrs Macdonald watching me from her window across the road. Bran has been waiting outside and runs into the house ahead of me. I slam the door shut, kick off my wellies and slump into my chair at the table again. I get absolutely no satisfaction from ticking off another thought from my list.
I hear my own voice reverberate around the kitchen before realising that I have shouted at the facing wall, an unadulterated expression of pent-up anguish. My mug goes flying, and coffee spills across the keyboard of the laptop on the table. I swear, and leap up to grab a cloth from the sink and mop it up before it does any damage. Bran is barking his consternation at the ceiling, wondering what I am shouting at and why I haven’t fed him.
The act of wiping the cloth across the keyboard wakens the laptop from its slumber, and its desktop throws grey light back in my face. I shout at Bran to shut up and am about to slam the lid shut when I notice for the first time, amongst all the software icons on the dock, a familiar white F on a blue background. I know immediately it is a Facebook application, and I wonder two things. Why did I not notice it before, and why would I have a Facebook app?
I find myself staring at it, a seed of excitement burgeoning somewhere deep inside me. Is it possible that I have a Facebook account? No matter how unlikely it seems, I feel a fresh flush of hope. I sit down to face the screen and, with trembling fingers, activate the application. Username and password are automatically entered from the computer’s keychain memory, and the home page fills the screen. It is blank, apart from an open Update Status window, in which there is the silhouette of a white head against a pale grey background. The status is empty, too. On the blue menu bar along the top of the screen, there is a miniature postage stamp of the white head beside the name Michael.
I pause before clicking on it. Michael? Is that me? I steel myself for whatever might come next and click on the name. It brings up the personal page of Michael Fleming. Both profile and cover pic windows are blank. There is not a single entry on the page, no personal details, no education or work history. And only one friend.
Karen Fleming.
I am aware now that my mouth is quite dry, with my tongue in danger of sticking to the roof of it. I reach for my coffee mug but it is empty, and I am not about to get up and make another.
There is a profile pic of Karen. She looks mid-teens, with strangely short hair, shaved at the sides and dyed green on top. There are steel studs in her eyebrows and rings in her lower lip, a tiny sparkling diamond in her nose. She has ice-blue eyes like mine and is staring straight into the camera with a kind of challenging insolence. Nothing about her is familiar to me, except perhaps for the eyes, but maybe then only because they are the same colour as mine. The cover photo on her personal page is of some heavy metal rock band with impossibly long hair and sneering faces. She has twenty-seven friends. Not many for a girl of her age. And her posts and shares are sparse and cryptic. Teenagers, I know, have a language that is all their own.