There was an almighty flash in the box beneath me and everything went dark. I had clearly caused a short and a fuse must have blown. The elements went out but, unfortunately, the light fitting on the wall went out too, plunging the sauna into darkness. But that worry was more than offset by the relief of cutting off the heat.
Not that my troubles were over — not by a long way. For a start, my right leg was being burned by something inside the metal box, my core temperature remained extremely high and my heart was beating so fast it felt in danger of bursting out of my chest.
And I was still sweating buckets.
I quickly climbed out of the box, feeling my way back onto the bench and then onto the floor where I lay down on the wooden slats. It was the coolest spot.
Gradually the temperature began to drop.
I noticed it because, unbelievably, I began to shiver.
I searched around in the darkness for my shirt and put it on.
It was now time to get out of this prison.
4
As my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I noticed, in fact, a small amount of light in the sauna.
There was a very small gap around the door and another spot on the far side where the wooden planking of the walls must not be quite in line, allowing through a tiny sliver of illumination.
I held my watch up to the widest gap around the door. It read ten thirty. I reckoned I had been in this sweatbox for about half an hour, much of that time with the temperature well above the boiling point of water, and of blood.
It was a wonder that I was still able to think at all.
But think I did.
Why would Dave Swinton lock me in his sauna with the temperature turned up to maximum and drive away? He must have known my life would have been in grave danger. Even if I’d had my phone in here with me, it would have probably taken the police more than twenty minutes to come to my aid. By that time, without me having disabled the heating elements, I would have been dead.
What did he have to gain in killing me?
True, I wouldn’t then have been able to report him to the BHA Disciplinary Committee for purposely losing a race, but that would surely be the least of his difficulties, with a dead body in his sauna to explain away.
It didn’t make any sense.
Now I had to get out of here — maybe before Dave came back to finish off the job properly.
But how?
I tried again to shove the door open but it didn’t move. I threw all my weight against it but still nothing.
I wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed I was missing.
It was Sunday and the offices of the BHA in London would be closed, not that it would have made any difference. Although I had a permanent desk at HQ, I spent much of my time working away from it and it was hardly unusual for me not to appear there for days, sometimes even for weeks.
A year ago, my absence would have been noted by my then-fiancée, Lydia, but not any more — Lydia was no longer a part of my life.
I suppose it was my own fault.
I had procrastinated and evaded for so long, finding it difficult to commit to marriage, that by the time I had finally got round to it, Lydia was already casting an eye elsewhere.
And I hadn’t seen it coming.
I had believed all was well, apart from the fact that I knew she hadn’t liked my job. It had become a source of increasing friction between us. She thought it was too dangerous and maybe she had a point, especially if one considered my present predicament.
But it was not as if she had given me an ultimatum or anything. There had been no choose between me or the job stipulation.
I had come home from work one day during the previous January to find that she had simply packed up and gone.
She had left me a letter on the mantelpiece to say that she was very sorry but she had met someone else whose job was safer and she was moving in with him — and thanks for a great five years. The envelope had also contained the engagement ring I had bought for her only eight months previously.
I remember having stood there reading the letter over and over in total disbelief. It might have taken me much too long to get round to asking her to marry me but, having done so, I had been fully committed and we had started discussing a venue and a date for the wedding.
At first I’d been angry.
But I was angry more with myself than with Lydia. How had I not realized? I was an investigator, for goodness’ sake, accustomed to piecing together the reality from fragments of evidence, yet I hadn’t spotted what had been happening right under my nose.
I had tried to get her back but what was done was done, the trust between us had been shattered and there was no going back.
I even spent an unhealthy amount of time finding out everything I could about her new man, a commodity trader called Tony Pickering who worked at the London Metal Exchange in Leadenhall Street, at the very heart of the City of London.
I suppose I was fascinated to discover what Lydia thought he had that I didn’t.
Money, for one thing. As a trader, he would probably be earning several times what I was getting from the BHA, and had a family fortune to go with it.
I tried to tell myself that it must have been more than just the money but, if so, I couldn’t see it. I would have found his job deathly boring — buying and then selling derivatives involving thousands of tons of yet-to-be-mined copper for meaninglessly large sums in the hope that the selling price was a tiny fraction above the purchase one in order to make a ‘margin’ and hence a profit.
He never actually saw any copper. The transaction was all on paper or on a computer, and may as well have been for buttons for all it seemed to matter.
How could Lydia have preferred him to me?
My wandering thoughts were brought back to reality by the ringing of my mobile. I could hear it through the wooden walls of the sauna, tantalizingly close, but so far out of reach.
It rang six times, as always, before switching to voicemail.
I wondered who would be calling me.
Faye maybe.
Faye was my big sister, twelve years my senior, who had acted as a mother to me after our real mother had died when I was just eight. She still called me regularly to check that I was eating properly and to make sure I had washed behind my ears in spite of the fact that I was now thirty-two years old and she had more serious problems of her own to worry about.
The phone rang again.
It would be voicemail calling. Great.
The sauna had been well made — far too well made for my liking.
It was a pine cube, each side being about six feet long, set on the concrete floor of the garage.
I tried to lift the whole thing but it wouldn’t move. I couldn’t even shift it sideways across the floor.
Next, I tried to separate the walls in the corners, but to no effect. I even lay on the top bench and tried to lift just the roof off with my feet but it wasn’t budging, even when I kicked at it ferociously.
All I did was expend a lot of energy and aggravate my thirst.
I had been trying to ration the water in the small wooden pail. I took another tiny sip.
The only movable part of the sauna was the set of wooden slats on the floor, three five-foot lengths of pine held together by three shorter crosspieces. I picked them up and used the slats as a battering ram against the door.
Nothing.
Think.
The door was probably the strongest part of the structure with all the extra wood used to form the frame. How about one of the other sides?
I started to batter the opposite wall at the point where the thin sliver of illumination was visible, but the slats were unwieldy and too long to be able to get a decent swing.
I switched to using one of the rocks from the heater, searching through the pile until I found one with a nice sharp corner on it.