This Thing of Darkness (21 page)

30

We drive perhaps half an hour. The last part is quite up and down, which suggests that we’re in the hills. But since everywhere round here is hilly, that narrows the possible range of locations down not at all.

The van stops.

I’m dragged out. Left on a concrete floor.

There’s stuff happening around the van. Boxes being shifted around, something like that.

No one speaks to me. I try asking what the fuck is going on, but no one wants to tell me.

Then it’s my turn to receive some attention. I feel someone removing the laces from my shoes, which are soft canvas trainers, useless for kicking. They check me for a belt, but I’m not wearing one. Pat down my jeans pockets. Remove my phone. Also watch, cards and money. A male hand glides, needlessly, between my thighs but, after one or two pervily intimate strokes, it moves away again. A hand goes up the back of my T-shirt. Finds my bra. Two or three snips with some scissors, then it’s freed and extracted.

Belt, bra, laces. It’s the same as when I was in prison briefly last year, except that these guys aren’t secretly on my side.

I’m patted down one last time. The process is icky, but not extremely so. My breasts and bum are fondled about as much as most male airport security guards would fondle them if they thought they could get away with it.

Then someone cuts the tape on my legs. Loosens, or does something, to the tape on my arms. Then I’m tossed back in the van. The doors are locked and the van reverses a short distance, a few feet maybe. A little jolt as we hit something, but at slow speed. A minor bump.

Someone cuts the ignition.

Then nothing.

No movement. No speech. No sound.

I roll around, loosening my bonds. It’s not hard getting my legs free. I have to thrutch around a little longer to free my arms but get there in the end too. Uncloak my eyes.

My little metal chamber is almost completely dark, but not quite. A bit of light filters through from the front. There’s a partition of some sort in place. Plywood, cut to fit and held in place by screws, whose heads I can feel with my fingertip.

By touch as much as sight, I explore my cell. There’s a six-pack of two-litre water bottles. Three bags of supermarket apples. Two big blocks of cheese. Paper napkins, a big pack of them, maybe a hundred in the pile. A black plastic bucket: my toilet, I assume. All that, plus the blanket. No cushion or pillow.

Unexpectedly, my cards, money and phone are here too. No battery in the phone, of course, but even so it’s nice to have.

I believe that a young woman in my position is generally expected to comport herself by banging on the side of the van and calling for help. That, plus a little sobbing in frustration, followed by a glum acceptance of her lot. Since I can’t see that shouting for help is likely to achieve much, and since sobbing is hardly a strong suit of mine, I leap straight to the end of that sequence and sit discontentedly on the floor, my back to the partition wall.

The doors opposite me are locked. I heard my captors do it. But even if they hadn’t, I’d have very little hope of escape that way. The van was reversed up against something and even if I found a way to force the doors open, I think they’d open two inches onto a blank wall.

The floors, walls and ceiling are metal. I don’t have a microtransmitter in the sole of my shoe. No laser cutter concealed in an ordinary silver earring. I don’t have the kung-fu skills to tear through metal. Can’t punch my way through the plywood behind me.

I assume that this attack follows the theft of my phone and the attack on Buzz. Given the precautions that we so carefully took thereafter, our operational data is now secure from pretty much any external assault. That means that, if there are things about the operation that someone really, really needs to know, it’ll have to come from the brain of one of the Zorro team members.

A brain such as mine.

And, I note, remembering Livesey, that these are not people averse to a little forceful encouragement.

The biggest chink of light round the partition comes from above the front passenger seat. I soak a wodge of napkins in water and squish them into the little gap, above a screw.

I pull my phone apart. Break the casing. The break gives me a moderately sharp edge, but no point, and even the edge I have is plasticky and vulnerable. I think I could probably use it to inflict an injury that would be worse than a paper-cut, not quite as bad as catching your thumb on a staple.

I toss the thing aside.

I can’t think of much more to do, so do nothing. I’m not hungry, so don’t eat. Not thirsty, so don’t drink.

For half an hour, I just lie down, half rolled in my blanket, listening to the van tick as it cools. Thinking everything through. My strategy for battle.

But there’s only so much thinking a girl can handle. Action is better.

I stand up. Inspect my little wodge of wet napkin and the bit of plywood partition.

Plywood is strong when dry, weakens when wet. The cut edge has frayed. Only a very, very little, but little is all I need.

I put a fingernail to the edge of the ply and start to pick. The first small splinter peels splendidly away.

I work hard. Keeping the ply wet, scratching at its torn edge. I think there’s a metal grille behind the ply and my fingernail won’t scratch away the steel, but I don’t care.

Start small, work upwards.

I stand and work in the dim metal light. Wondering what comes next. Wondering how bad this gets.

31

A few hours later, I get to find out.

I was abducted from Llanwrthwl at around two thirty. At this time of year, a few days from the summer solstice, the sun doesn’t set until well after nine o’clock and light burns in the sky a good bit after that. Light is still coming from my chink when I hear steps approach the van. A driver’s door opens. The van moves forwards a yard or two. Then the engine dies.

Steps at the back of the van, then the double doors are opened up.

If I were Lev, I’d probably have a solution to my current conundrum. Some lethally effective krav-maga manoeuvre. A whirlwind kick to the jaw, a jab to the eye. A man disabled, a weapon snatched.

I’m not Lev.

He’s a man. Five foot nine or ten. Normally built. And a former Spetsnaz trainer, whose speciality lay in unarmed combat. A killing machine, with a soft spot for black tea and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich.

I’m me. Five foot two. A shade under fifty kilos. Not particularly fit. I’m not completely unskilled in one-to-one combat. I’ve trained, sporadically, with Lev for years now. But fighters my size depend on surprise and some kind of weaponry, even if it’s only a hard-soled shoe. Short of bombarding my captors with apples, or trusting that one of them is lactose-intolerant enough to be disabled by cheese, I’ve no assault weapons to speak of.

I leave the apples alone. Have cheese, but choose not to use it.

My two captors – black boots, loose trousers, black T-shirts, fleeces, balaclavas – pull back the doors and stand well back. Well-trained. Cautious.

I don’t cause any sort of drama. Do nothing to provoke violence. Just point through the doors and say, ‘Should I come out?’

They nod a yes.

I step out. I’m a bit shaky. Maybe lack of food – I still haven’t eaten – but mostly, I think, fear.

Fear is normally one of my good emotions, I note. One of the ones I can feel without much difficulty. But I’ve been used to moments when fear arrives in a kind of
ka-boom
of adrenalin. A sudden falling away. A freezing wash that laps right up into the fingertips and nerve endings.

This isn’t like that. The whole scenario is too slo-mo, too studiedly ambiguous.

But, I think, what I have now – this shakiness, this clumsiness of movement – this is the same thing. Fear inhabiting me. No abrupt Viking-style invasion. Just this steady leaching of confidence. A slow betrayal.

The van is parked inside a stone barn. There’s a bit of agricultural rubbish around, but nothing much. No animals. No feed or baled straw or farm machinery.

I was right that the van had been backed up against a wall. A thick, old stone affair. My prison looks depressingly complete.

There’s a single overhead bulb. A wooden door in the side of the building looks as though it leads to some little office or other internal space. There are lights on there, anyway. A gleam of painted walls.

The end of the building has a big wooden double-door. The sort which, when fully opened, could admit a tractor. There are glass panes at the top, but so clotted with dirt and cobwebs that I see nothing beyond a vague impression of evening sky. There’s also a small regular-sized door inset in the larger one, for use by people when they don’t want or need to open the big ones.

In the middle of the barn, under the bulb, there’s a chair. Wooden IKEA-type thing. Arms.

The chair sits on a plastic tarpaulin. I don’t know if IKEA sells tarpaulins but, whether they do or not, this wouldn’t be a look they’d offer their home-furnishing clients.

My legs go weak.

Not a feint. Not a ploy. Not a Lev-ian prelude to some stellar bit of lethal improvisation.

My captors support me over to the chair.

I sit, shakily. Unresisting.

The men tape my arms to the chair arms. My legs to the legs.

Duct tape. Too strong for me to tear or stretch.

The men chat quietly between themselves as they work. Not Welsh accents, I think. London probably. But who cares? Not me.

The pair decide that my position directly under the bulb makes it hard to see my face. So one of them simply lifts me up, chair and all, holds me while his mate adjusts the tarpaulin, then settles me down again, ten feet back from where I’d been.

My fear has swollen now. It lurches inside me like a second body. I think I’m trembling, but can’t tell whether that’s only inside or whether it’s visible outside too.

I really, really don’t want to be here.

The men go away.

Stay away.

There’s no tape over my mouth, no attempt to gag me.

I don’t shout. If I’m free to do so, that must mean that there’s no point in it, so I stay quiet. The men are leaving me here to freak me out further, I realise. It helps a bit knowing that but I’m freaked enough anyway. I want to tell them that.
Guys, I’m already freaked enough. Honest. I’m really very, very freaked
.

After perhaps half an hour, one of the guys comes out with some stuff. A table. A laptop. One of those fifty metre reels of electric cable. A couple of speakers, small ones, shit ones. The sort that office stores sell for twenty quid. The guy hooks everything up. Checks it’s all working OK. Twizzles the screen so it’s facing me. The laptop has an inbuilt webcam and the guy fixes me in its little lens.

He leaves.

I sit there looking at myself on screen. A woman tied to a chair in an empty barn.

Nothing happens.

The light outside starts to grow bored waiting, and begins to fade.

Time plays around in the corner, in a little scurf of dirty straw.

I do test my arms and legs against their bindings – when I can, I like to comport myself broadly in line with the generally expected behaviour – but my bindings are plenty, plenty strong enough to keep me where I am.

Time and the light fade and die.

Then, I don’t know how much later, the internal door opens again. One of the goons comes out.

‘Showtime.’

He does something on the keyboard and a voice comes out of the speakers. It says this:

‘Good evening, Fiona. As you’ll have guessed, you’re here because there’s some information I want. I’d have been perfectly happy to acquire it by a simple inspection of your office systems, but your colleagues have rendered that approach a little difficult. So I’m going to ask you some questions. You’re going to give me some answers. I’m going to check that the answers you’re giving me are truthful and complete. If they are, you’ll be free to go. If they are not, the consequences will be extremely unpleasant. Do you understand me?’

I doubt if his final question is anything more than rhetorical in nature, so I just reciprocate with a mumbled ‘Fuck off,’ a humble rhetorical flourish of my own.

There’s something weird about the voice that comes out of the speakers. Partly that’s because they’re crappy little underpowered speakers trying to fill a barn. But it’s something else too. Something not quite human. Not quite fluid.

The voice ignores my swearword. It just says, calmly, ‘We’ll begin simply. You will please give me your name.’

‘You know what it is. I’m Fiona Griffiths and I’m a detective constable with the South Wales Police, working under the command of DI Watkins on Operation Zorro.’

‘Zorro.’ The voice has a kind of snick of contempt.

I say, ‘It’s a stupid name. I didn’t choose it.’

‘No, quite.’

So far, so expected. The theft of my phone and Creamer’s, the attack on Buzz, all indicated that we possess information that the bad guys want. Accessing that knowledge was the only possible motive for my abduction. Data theft handled the good old-fashioned way.

But what information? What data?

Mostly, our inquiry is crowded with stacks of paper and empty dead ends. We have no names, no images, no prints. No DNA or likenesses that we can connect to anything. On the whole, I think I can divulge everything I know with reasonable confidence that I won’t be disclosing anything that will imperil the inquiry. Even our investigation into the Stonemonkey’s identity has little more to it than, ‘We’re looking for a really good climber.’

But it’s not quite so simple.

I have no dangerous information, perhaps, but I do have some suspicions. Suspicions which, I’ve a nasty feeling, lie in the cold dead centre of the things that the Voice is most anxious to know. And how to hide them? To hide them when this setting and these goons and this tarpaulin suggest I’m going to be under extreme pressure to reveal all.

I don’t know the answer to that question – or, to be more precise, I’m going to find out if my answers stand any hope of working.

The Voice starts out simple.

‘When did you join the police?’

‘When did you transfer to CID?’

‘Who do you currently report to?’

‘What is your role on the inquiry team?’

‘If you are not full time on the team, what do your other roles currently involve?’

‘Please list the members of the inquiry team and talk to me about the allocation of work and responsibilities.’

‘Please tell me why you were in North Wales. Who were you seeing? What was the purpose of your enquiries?’

I answer all these questions accurately. When the Voice asks follow-up questions, or demands clarifications, I give them. I try to offer answers the way I would to Watkins when she’s in fire-breathing mode: fast, accurately, concisely. Once or twice, the Voice congratulates me on my responses. Trying to build the sort of relationship that morphs into Stockholm Syndrome.

I don’t think I’m very promising Stockholm material, but I don’t say that.

We get through the generalities and start to move into specifics.

‘A team from your inquiry recently visited the offices of Atlantic Cables in London. Please tell me which officers were present.’

‘And who was present from the company? Please give names and job functions.’

‘What was the specific purpose of your visit?

‘What questions were asked? What answers were given?’

‘You say that a certain quantity of data and documents were removed from the company. Please tell me what documents were removed. Be as complete as you can.’

Curiously, those kind of questions just can’t be asked or answered in a simple tell-me-or-I’ll-hit-you format. I need to sketch out the limits of my knowledge: although I was present in London – and I say as much – I was one of a team of four, and we didn’t each know what precisely the others were doing. The voice has to listen as I explain the way we worked, the way electronic data removal happens, as far as I understand it. Because some of this – the techie part – lies at the outer limits of my knowledge, I’m a bit blurry on many of my details. The Voice also doesn’t seem to understand the nitty-gritty of this sort of thing, so he largely accepts my blurriness and we work collaboratively to try and shape a narrative.

I don’t know how long the Atlantic Cables interrogation lasts, but he’s thorough. Detailed and repetitive. Asking the same questions from different angles, comparing any micro-differences in my answers.

And new questions come all the time.

‘You are treating the death of Ian Livesey as murder?’

‘Correct.’

‘Yet you originally treated it as suicide? Why the change?’

I explain about Plas Du and Moon. The recognition that there was someone out there who could access the inaccessible. The cable linking Moon and Livesey.

‘That’s all? Mere suspicion?’

‘No.’ I go through our investigations of the Bristol apartment. The fingermarks on the girder beneath the balcony. The duct tape adhesive on the chair. The scorch marks on Livesey’s inner thigh.

My voice trembles as I say that. Glues up. I have to ask for water. The goon goes to fetch it. Tips me back in my chair and lets me drink. Most of the water goes down my throat. Some goes on my top. Neither of us say anything, except that I notice I’m cold. I ask for a jumper. The goon just glances at the laptop. The Voice says, ‘Fine.’ The goon goes off to fetch something.

The Voice says, ‘You’re doing well. Do you remember the rules?’

‘The rules?’

‘What I said at the beginning. About how this works.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Please tell me what you remember.’

I say, ‘You interrogate me. I tell you everything. Then you reinterrogate me under torture. If I haven’t fucked up, you release me. If I do fuck up, you kill me.’

The Voice says, ‘You have the general drift, yes.’

You can’t hear a thin smile in theory, except you kind of can. And I realise, all along I’ve been assuming that the Voice belongs to Galton Evans, but I don’t think this
is
Galton Evans. There’s something leering in Evans. Something too nakedly lecherous. His smiles are fleshy, not thin. This whole van ’n’ barn set-up is hellishly scary, but it’s been essentially devoid of sexual threat. Sexual titillation even. I just can’t see Evans not wanting to stage an altogether more porno version of all this.

I decide to check. Say, ‘I’m sorry about your foot.’

‘My
foot
?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry about your foot.’

A short pause. Then, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

I say, ‘Sorry. Not your foot. Galton’s foot. Galton Evans.’

Another short pause. Then, ‘I don’t know who or what you are referring to.’

That last comment was purely formal. The required response in the context. But that earlier response – ‘my
foot
?’ – had real surprise in it.

I’m temporarily non-plussed. Like a thing I thought was certain gives way at my first real touch. A question to put away for later.

The goon comes with an oversize fleece. A zip-up thing, which he arranges over my shoulders and front. I’m still cold, but the fleece helps.

The goon leaves again. Aside from a brief glimpse when I was first abducted, I’ve seen neither man’s face, their balaclavas always down. I don’t even know that there are only two of them. Just assume it.

The questions continue.

About our investigation of the insurance committee.