Then something thudded into my head. I could feel my consciousness tremble and ripple, and Martin’s receding back vanished into a mist of grey. I dropped like a stone through the ripples, into nothingness.
It didn’t hurt at all.
27
There was something vibrating against my head.
My chin was settled into my chest, and my back ached, especially my neck. The vibration was quick and low, the throb of an engine. Through my half-closed eyes I could see the strands of my hair, falling against my face. My head was muzzy with pain, and each time the little muscles in my face moved it hurt.
I remembered that I was in danger.
I shut my eyes quickly.
I was lying in a moving car, jammed in the gap between the front seats and the back. My shoulders were against the door, my head sunk into my bosom. My hands were tied behind me, and full of furious pins and needles. The car’s interior smelled musty, full of mould, and the seats were stained with it.
I started to wriggle my wrists carefully against my bonds, desperate not to signal that I was awake.
On my side was a wall of vinyl that was the driver’s seat, or rather the back of it. Warm air blew at me from the gap beneath it. I saw all I could without moving my head, or any part of my body. My limbs lay loose, as carelessly as they had when I’d been thrown there, but they were full of secret tension, and I was in terror lest someone should accidentally kick or touch me, and it would be discovered.
There is a state of mind where one ceases to question the whys and wherefores of life, a state where all that can be done is to exist, from minute to minute, with only the physical world and the promptings of millennia-old instincts as guides. This was my state, in which one second followed another and preceded the next, and I thought of and saw nothing but the wall of black vinyl, hearing the growl of the engine and the roaring wind buffet the door.
I fought to lay still and relax, and picked at the tight little nylon knots in my bonds, as I was carried forth into the centre of the labyrinth for the final time.
My neck was aching. I could not take it much longer, I would have to shift position. Whoever was driving would notice me, notice I was awake. As tortures go, it was an elegant device, scrupulously executed.
‘Still fucking snowing,’ said the driver. I froze, but there was something distracted but comfortable in his tone, as though he was someone that spoke to himself more often than others. He had a soft, low voice, which startled me. My hand might have twitched.
My cut shoulder itched abominably.
We were travelling at speed, and it was snowing. Dusk was settling, but there were no streetlights. I had to get out of the car. I had to escape. And when I thought of the word ‘escape’, a wild, fierce longing broke out in me; a bitter hurt. From prison to prison to prison, from cellar to refuge to office to hall of residence – from drugs to sex to marriage to work – an endless cycle of escapes, like a rat in a laboratory maze, or the flight of a magpie from grass to hedgerow to rusted railing.
A twenty-year fox hunt, pursued by hounds both real and imaginary.
Hounds…
… And the magpie.
It alighted in my head again. I could see it rise, its tail spined out against the English sky. Rain had been falling. It had hit my face in little splashes, cool and refreshing after… after what? The rain. The rain had always been there.
My skin remembered the rain, even if I did not.
Back in the car I felt the driver shift against the cheap upholstery.
Like an answered prayer, the knot I was gingerly picking at unravelled beneath the pincers of my nails. The twine slackened and fell off one wrist.
Long nails are always a good thing on a woman. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
Now, I have choices.
I could try to overpower the driver, whoever he is (oh don’t be stupid, you know who he is. He’s Bethan’s – your – abductor, the one who has Katie) or attract the attention of passers-by. But he’s driving at speed and is likely armed, and the dim dusky sky I can see through the opposite passenger window whenever I dare to raise my eyes, which is just showing a few peeping stars, does not inspire confidence. I am not sure we have passed another car the whole time I have been awake.
The third choice is to flee, which presents its own problems.
There is only one way out of a car: through the door. I concentrated my already condensed attention on the hard thrumming I was leaning up against. I would have to open the door and jump. At this angle I would be 90 per cent sure of landing headfirst, then my body would somersault over it – my neck would almost certainly break, if the car was moving at any kind of speed.
This horrific option, however, was the only one I could think of.
My hands lay under me, and very, very slowly I started to move them apart, to my sides.
Through the door at my back I felt the intense chill of the wind, pregnant with snow and the slush driven up by the wheels. A strand of my own hair tickled my cheek, exquisitely.
There was the musical tick-tock of the indicators, and the car engine idled down a few octaves. He was going to turn. I might have tensed imperceptibly, as a voice spoke softly into my ear, It must be now.
Now it would be.
No jerky movements.
My right hand was retreating up the length of my body.
The car was slowing, slowing to turn.
I had my instant – it was upon me. Act now or for ever hold your peace.
I threw myself over, belly down now, and seized the door handle. I had not even depressed it before there was a sudden panicked braking, a shout of, ‘Oh no you fucking don’t!’
His rage was paralysing, molten, and I was filled to the brim with a scrabbling animal terror, as though my senses remembered this too. Anything would be better than being in the car with him. Anything.
The handle clunked down, metal grinding against metal, and I pushed, though my instincts screamed against it.
I kicked wildly, my face full of the freezing wind gushing through the crack in the car door. The snow was deep and still flying away from me at a perilous speed, which was growing greater. The driver was speeding the car up.
I kicked free.
There was a long, flying moment, when everything was suspended, as though the turning world itself had hit some impossible impediment. There was neither sound nor sensation, just whiteness, and the flight of fate out of my hands.
Wheels rushed by, inches from my head. I waited for death or mutilation, as I crunched back into time, cushioned and jarred by the thick snow.
But when I raised my bruised head, one side of my face stinging with the force of a hundred needles, the car was just a black blur, swinging round in the snow, sending a white wave over its bonnet, which thudded on to the metal like a tiny avalanche, glittering in the headlights.
I got up, staggering slightly. The car, some hundred yards down the road, was growing closer, nearer through the darkness and the veil of snow.
There were trees, iced in white, near the road. A tiny stand of woodland, an oasis of Fenland, stretching out under the sunless sky. I ran into them, as though pursued by wolves.
It had stopped snowing, but that was no help.
I had run and run for miles it seemed, through black trees sticking up like spikes through the white carpet, and then scrambled down into the narrow crack of one of the ditches lining a small lane, aware that on the flat Fens I would be visible for miles, even in the dark, and that the snow would hold on to my footprints. I was soaked to the bone, burning hot, scalding the snow into water that dripped over my skin and sifted through my clothing.
I paused. There was something like ground glass in my lungs, cutting me with each breath I took. The lane next to the ditch had come to a crossroads, both literal and otherwise.