He undid the restraints on my arms and my chest, so that only my legs were tied at the ankle. He slid an arm under my neck and lifted me into a sitting position. A new kind of pain pulsed inside my skull. I didn't dare make any movements by myself. I sat passively, and let him put my arms behind my back and tie my wrists together, roughly so that the rope cut into my flesh. Was it rope? It felt harder than that, like washing line or wire.
"Open your mouth," he said in his muffled whisper. I did so. He slid a straw up the hood and between my lips. "Drink."
The water was tepid and left a stale taste in my mouth.
He put a hand on the back of my neck, and started to rub at it. I
sat rigid. I mustn't cry out. I mustn't make a sound. I mustn't be sick. His fingers pressed into my skin.
"Where do you hurt?" he said.
"Nowhere." My voice was a whisper.
"Nowhere? You wouldn't lie to me?"
Anger filled my head like a glorious roaring wind and it was stronger even than the fear. "You piece of shit," I shouted, in a mad, high-pitched voice. "Let me go, let me go, and then I'm going to kill you, you'll see'
The cloth was rammed back into my mouth.
"You're going to kill me. Good. I like that."
For a long time I concentrated on nothing but breathing. I had heard of people feeling claustrophobic in their own bodies, trapped as if in prison. They became tormented by the idea that they would never be able to escape. My life was reduced to the tiny passages of air in my nostrils. If they became blocked, I would die. That happened. People were tied up, gagged, with no intention to kill them. Just a small error in the binding the gag tied too close to the nose and they would choke and die.
I made myself breathe in one-two-three, out one-two-three. In, out. I'd seen a film once, some kind of war film, in which a super-tough soldier hid from the enemy in a river breathing just through a single straw. I was like that and the thought made my chest hurt and made me breathe in spasms. I had to calm myself. Instead of thinking of the soldier and his straw and what would have happened if the straw had become blocked, I tried to think of the water in the river, cool and calm and slow-moving and beautiful, the sun glistening on it in the morning.
In my mind, the water grew slower and slower until it was quite still. I imagined it starting to freeze, solid like glass so that you could see the fish swimming silently underneath. I couldn't stop myself. I saw myself falling through the ice, trapped underneath. I had read or heard or been told that if you fall through ice and can't find the hole, there is a thin layer of air between the ice and the water and you can lie under the ice and breathe the air. And what ii then? It might be better just to have drowned. I had always been terrified of drowning above all things, but I had read or heard or been told that drowning was in fact a pleasant way to die. I could believe it. What was unpleasant and terrifying was trying to avoid drowning. Fear is trying to avoid death. Giving yourself up to death is like falling asleep.
One-two-three, one-two-three, I was becoming calmer. Some people, probably about two per cent of the population at least, would have died already of panic or asphyxiation if they'd had done to them what I was having done to me. So I was already doing better than someone. I was alive. I was breathing.
I was lying down now, with my ankles tied and my wrists tied, my mouth gagged and a hood over my head. I wasn't tied to anything any more. I struggled into a squatting position, then very slowly stood up. Tried to stand up. My head bumped against a roof. It must be just under five foot high. I sat down again, panting with the effort.
At least I could move my body. Wriggle and hump along, like a snake in the dust. But I hardly dared. I had the sense that I was somewhere up high. When he came into the room, he was underneath me. The footsteps and his voice came from down below. He climbed to get at me.
I stretched my feet in one direction and felt only the floor. I swivelled painfully around, my T-shirt riding up and bare skin on my back scraping along the roughness beneath me. I stretched my feet. Floor. I humped forward. Slowly. Feet feeling. Then not feeling not feeling the hardness underneath. Stretched over a space, a blank. Nothing underneath. I lay down and moved forward again, bit by bit. Legs hanging over, bent at the knee. If I sat up now, I'd be sitting over a fall, a cliff. My breath juddered in my chest with panic. I started shifting backwards. My back hurt. My head crashed and banged. I kept wriggling and scraping backwards until I was pressed up against a wall.
I sat up. I pressed my bound hands against the wall. Damp coarse brick against my fingertips.
I shuffled upright along the wall in one direction, until I met the corner. Then in the other direction, my muscles burning with the effort. It must be about ten feet wide. Ten feet wide and four feet deep.
It was hard to think clearly because the pain in my head kept getting in the way. Was it a bang? A scrape? Something in my brain?
I was shivering with cold. I had to keep thinking, keep my mind busy, keep it off things. I had been kidnapped in some way. I was being held against my will. Why did kidnaps happen? To take hostages, for money or for a political reason. My total wealth, once credit card and store card debts were deducted, amounted to about two thousand pounds, half of it bound up in my rusty old car. As for politics, I was a working-environment consultant not an ambassador. But then I didn't remember anything. I could be in South America, now, or Lebanon. Except that the voice was clearly English, southern English as far as I could tell from the soft, thick whisper.
So what other reasons were there? I had argued myself towards an area where everything looked really, really bad. I felt tears bubbling up in my eyes. Calm down. Calm down. I mustn't get all snotty, blocked up.
He hadn't killed me. That was a good sign. Except it wasn't necessarily all that good a sign in the long run it might be a bad sign in a way that made me feel sick even to think about. But it was all I had. I flexed my muscles very gently. I couldn't move. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know where I'd been captured, or when, or how. Or for what reason. I couldn't see anything. I didn't even know anything about the room I was lying in. It felt damp. Maybe it was underground or in a shed. I didn't know anything about the man. Or men. Or people. He was probably close by. I didn't know if I knew him. I didn't know what he looked like.
That might be useful. If I could identify him, he might.. . Well, that might be worse. Professional kidnappers wore hoods so that the hostage never saw them. Putting a hood over my head might be the same thing, the other way round. And he was doing something to his voice, muffling it somehow, so that he didn't sound like a human at all. It might even be that he was planning to hold me for just a little while and let me go. He could dump me in some other part of London and it would be impossible for me ever to find him again. I would know nothing nothing at all. That was the first bit of remotely good news.
I had no idea how long I had been here but at the very outside it couldn't be more than three days, maybe even two. I felt dreadful but I didn't feel especially weak. I felt hungry but not ill with hunger. Maybe two days. Terry would have reported me missing. I wouldn't have turned up at work. They would phone Terry, he would be baffled. He would have tried my mobile phone. Where was that? The police might have been called within hours. By now there would be a huge hunt. Lines of people scouring wasteland. All leave cancelled. Sniffer dogs. Helicopters. Another promising thought. You can't just grab an adult off the street and hide them somewhere without creating some sort of suspicion. They would be out there, knocking at doors, marching into houses, shining torches into dark places. Any time now I'd hear them, see them. All I had to do was stay alive as long as ... Just stay alive. Stay alive.