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Now, I don’t want to give you all that Frank Sinatra stuff, but it’s true. I done it my way. You’ll never hear me bleating, Oh, it’s my social background, I was abused as a child and all that old toffee. Everything I done was considered and decided on, and that’s the way it will always be.

I suppose that’s why death still bothers me a bit. ‘Cos you lose control, don’t you? I really hate the thought of losing control, and if anything keeps me awake at night it’s that.

I just cannot bleeding tolerate the thought of losing control.

XLIX

They were never very rough with her, but when she overcame her initial fear and became frantic and garrulous and started bouncing questions off of them (‘How many of you guys are there here? Is this your full-time job, or are you just on a retainer for special events? Is it a good organization to work for, Forcefield? Are there fringe benefits? Do you get overtime for this?’) they taped her mouth.

The bastards taped her freaking mouth!

Using this stuff about two and a half inches wide, so it covered from her chin to her nose, and she guessed she recognized it from someplace deep in the Cotswolds, and when the bile rose again she was convinced she was going to choke to death on it, on her own puke, a sad, disgusting death.

All this time they were using thinner stuff — electrical tape from a roll, ripping it out and biting it off — to secure her hands, wrist to wrist, tight and chafing behind her back.

This was after they’d all come down the stairs, one in front of her, one behind, and, ironically, had turned exactly the way she’d been aiming to go, and the building was dumping whole centuries again, switching from medieval Gothic to dingy early-twentieth-century industrial.

And then they put a bag over her head.

Which was just so disgusting — slimed and smelling of someone else’s sweat and clinging to her face, getting sucked in — that she could hardly breathe and could only make this high-pitched puppy whine in the back of her throat.

All of this happening within a hundred yards of the gentle New Age fiesta, folk discussing the journeys of the soul, to the floating woodwinds of the Andean band. Overlaid in her head by the voice she now knew to be Gary Seward’s, coming at the end of a long, awful, blood-misted silence and flat with cold certainty. You … are dead.

Stumbling, tripping over her own feet, a big hand in the centre of her back, blackness in her eyes. The sounds of doors being opened but no voices; wherever they were headed, people seldom came this way, leastways not people who might be moved to question the sight of a trussed woman dragged along by two big men dressed like para-cops. She tried to bring up a picture of these two men’s faces; one had a beard, this was all she could recall.

And then she knew, by the coldness of her bound-up hands and the sound of the wind through the bag, that they were outside, and she recalled horror stories of IRA executions, the hood over the head, the moment of silence before the bullet through the brain, and she suddenly wanted to pee very badly.

A door creaked. Inside again. A close, flat atmosphere. Another door. ‘Steps,’ one of them said. ‘You take it slowly, luv, or you’ll gerra broken leg.’

Northern accent, a good deal heavier than Bobby Maiden’s, but the same general area, Grayle guessed — Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, someplace … don’t pee, don’t pee

The steps seemed to be wide and short, but she kept tripping and the big hands went up under her arms. So, if they’d come down from the tower to the ground, then this meant … Jesus, just when you thought you weren’t claustrophobic … they were going underground. Lips taped, head bagged and earth all around, Grayle began to puppy whine again.

‘Take it easy. Nearly there.’

Sound of a key struggling in a door. Like the tower room, a big key, a thick door. But an old, resistant lock.

‘Stay back, sunshine,’ the northern guy said, ‘or you’ll get your face kicked in.’

Then nobody was touching Grayle any more and there was the sound of the door shutting, the key grinding in the lock.

And this other northern voice, quiet and sad.

‘It’s OK, Grayle. It’s OK.’

The voice really saying, You’re still alive, but it’s not OK.

Grayle went rapidly all around the walls, like a fly, feeling the rough, damp stone, pat, pat, pat … but it was no good: no more doors, no boarded-up windows. It was a dungeon, in the original sense; you reached up you could even feel the ceiling — stone or concrete, no boards, no plaster.

‘We’re screwed, right? We’re gonna die.’

A small, black, cold cube, like the hole in the middle of a concrete block, and stinking of earth and mould and some kind of decay.

‘They put us down here just until it’s like the middle of the night and everybody’s off the site, and it’s safe to take out the bodies. Our bodies. Like, there’s a hundred acres out there to bury us in.’

The one merciful aspect of absolute darkness was that nobody could see you cry, and she let it come, in floods.

‘Grayle, listen …’

‘Oh, dear God, this is not the way I planned to go out.’

‘Killing people …’ his voice came from the corner from which he hadn’t once moved ‘… Killing people is no big ceremony for these people. They don’t have to wait for midnight, they don’t have to worry about getting rid of bodies, they just-’

‘Wow. Jesus. I’m so comforted by that, Bobby.’

She sniffed. Her tissues were in her raincoat pocket, up in Kurt’s tower; she used the cuff of her sweater.

Bobby said, ‘All I’m saying is if they’d wanted to kill us, we’d be long gone.’

If he came out with much more of this crap, he’d be maybe halfway to convincing himself. The instant of relief at finding she was in here with Bobby had been swiftly cancelled by the knowledge that he was no longer out there and able to resume as a cop, call in other cops and move against these bastards.

She still couldn’t see him. He’d pulled off her bag and stripped off her tape, and they’d rubbed the circulation back into her wrists and she’d told him about Kurt, how really fucking smart she’d been.

‘Where are we?’ She’d thought her eyes would adjust, but no light was no light; it was like being in an immersion tank, most of what you could see was what you imagined, the forms your mind gave to the invisible.

‘I came in bagged like you,’ he said, ‘but I’m assuming we’re under the house. Crole had these cellars built for … I dunno, for his coal, probably.’

‘Oh sure, we all lock up our coal.’ Grayle breathed in deeply through her nose. ‘I’m sorry, Bobby. It’s just people in this situation, in the movies and stuff, they sit down and they say, hey, we gotta be practical here. And that’s when they find the hidden trapdoor. Or they feel around the walls, and these stones suddenly slide out and there’s this secret passage, and, OK, it’s waterlogged and full of snakes, but it’s a way out. And I just went over the walls, feeling and patting, and there is no way out of here except through that door for which we do not have a key. Oh God.’

The pressure that wasn’t going to ease.

Bobby said, ‘Erm, if this is … I mean, obviously I can’t see you or anything.’ His voice was stripped down to the accent you weren’t that much aware of when you could see him. ‘All I, er …. I mean, would it help if I was to put my fingers in my ears?’