This Thing of Darkness (23 page)
After a while, they’ve had enough. I’m cut out of my chair, taken back to the van. Only one escort this time, not two. If I was little threat before, I’m none at all now. The guy who carries me has the picana slapping against his thigh. If I became difficult, even briefly, he’d simply give me another zap.
Back in the van, it’s the same routine, I think. Doors locked. Van reversed against the wall. But I don’t know, not really. I’m asleep before I’m even in the van. Don’t wake, not properly, even as my head hits the floor.
Sleep is instant and total.
I don’t know how long they leave me. They’re being cautious, I think. The defibrillator was proof of that. You take all this trouble to abduct yourself a nice helpful policewoman, the last thing you want is for her to go and die on you before you’re ready. And torturing a big, strong guy like Ian Livesey is one thing. Applying the same techniques to me is new territory for them. I think they’re uncertain how much punishment my little frame can handle.
So they leave me and I sleep.
Sleep – until the music starts. Rock music at massive volume. Speakers, big ones, planted right next to the van’s metal side. Music so loud I can feel the walls and floor leap with the sound.
Music intercut with other things too. A snatch of silence. Then a woman’s scream. A howl of dogs. A witch’s laugh. Back to the music again. A pumping beat that rocks the van.
It’s like Guantanamo would have been had it gone unsoftened by Dick Cheney’s loving mildness.
But I welcome the sound. I’ve been sleeping, when I should have been working.
I drag myself upright.
To the corner with the plywood. Work away. Keeping the wood wet. As wet as I can make it.
I swear and mumble at myself as I work. Swear to the rhythm of the music beating, the woman screaming. There’s no coherence to my swearing. No coherence in me even.
The only thing that holds me together is a dim knowledge that I have to get that plywood gap opened out a little more. The thing I want I can touch, but can’t get a grip on.
So the woman screams. The dogs howl. The music rocks the van. And I tear my fingers to shreds pulling at that damp and fraying plywood.
I’m interrupted by the van moving forward again. I might not even have noticed – I’m still crazed with sleeplessness – but I do notice falling over and hitting my head. When the van doors swing open, I’m lying on the floor, wide-eyed and bloody-fingered. A madwoman halfway, more than halfway, to disintegration.
The goon sees my ragged hands, the torn plywood. Grins at it. You can see it in his face, even. Good luck with
that
, darling. He thinks I don’t know about the metal grille behind the plywood. He sees my staring eyes as a mark of madness, which of course they are.
He supports me as I limp over to the chair. He tapes me into it and we begin again.
Pain. Questions. Pain. Questions.
It doesn’t work really. A waste of everyone’s time. I’m too far gone to answer anything sensibly. At one point there’s a question, I don’t really understand what, but it had to do with what happens next. I realise afterwards that the Voice means ‘What happens next on the inquiry?’, a question he’s already asked a million times. But I don’t understand that. Not straight away. I just point at the goon, and say, ‘Waste him. Escape. Then send you to prison.’ A good answer, in fact. Concise and accurate. But someone starts laughing. Maybe the goon. Maybe me. I’m not sure. Anyway, there’s this hysterical laughter in the barn. A laughter that continues even after the goon holds his picana against my side and gives me another jolt of that old Guantanamo magic.
Things go on for a bit.
I leave them all to it. Float upwards to the roof of the barn looking down. Think,
It’s terrible what they’re doing to that poor girl
. There’s some dim suggestion in my head that that poor girl might be me, but that’s not a thought I can make any sense of and I don’t pursue it. After a while, I get bored watching things down below. Float off into my own world. Dissociated, avoidant, unreachable. My own strange superpower protecting me when most I need it.
At some stage, I don’t know when, I hear the Voice say, ‘This is stupid. She needs more sleep. Give her two hours, no music.’
There’s a bit of discussion. The two hours is extended into three.
The goon helps me out of my chair and I limp back to the van, sagging on his arm.
Just before the doors are closed again, as I’m lying on the floor, twitching at my blanket, the goon’s eyes flash again up to the little hole in the plywood, trying to figure out the angles. There are no angles, he thinks. There’s a glimmer of goonish pity in his eyes.
‘Sleep well,’ he says, as the doors close.
Sleep well: the one thing I can absolutely not afford to do.
Not yet. Not while this whole thing hangs in the balance. I go back to work at the wooden wall.
I wasn’t far off before and it’s not long before I have what I want now. Two fingertips just grazing the beautiful, soft nylon of the passenger side safety belt. Grazing just enough for me to get purchase. I pluck and tweak and draw the belt through to my side of the partition wall. The belt and its buckle. Its lovely metal buckle.
Careful now, I reach around the floor of the van. Find my broken phone. Saw softly at the nylon strap. The phone is a rubbish tool and the strap is built to last.
But I’ve not got this far only to be thwarted now. So I saw away and, thread by silvery thread, the seat belt comes apart.
And, in time, I do it. Cut the final thread. The belt divides. The nylon slithers back into its lair, leaving the buckle in my hand. My own golden apple plucked from the garden of the Hesperides.
I stand astonished at my own giftedness.
I lie down on the van floor. Fool around a bit with paper wadding. Make a mess of the water bottles. Eat some cheese. Try to fix my next steps in my memory. I don’t altogether trust my addled brain to react with the speed and vigour that it will need to.
And sleep. No reason not to now. No ability to resist anyway.
Sleep comes to me with a rush of darkness.
No dogs. No screams. No music. No nothing.
The deepest, blackest, most needed sleep of my life.
Sleep – not long enough.
I only know the van is moving, because something – one of the water bottles, I think – hits my head.
I press myself awake. Force wakefulness on my reluctant body.
The van stops.
The yank of a handbrake.
Footsteps.
The doors opening up.
I’m lying on my front. Sodden. Water everywhere. My blanket soaked. Me sprawled out, limbs a-jangle. I try to keep my breathing minimal. Invisible, if possible.
The goon says, ‘Fuck.’
Grabs my ankles. Pulls me towards him. My legs slop over the edge of the floor. A strong hand rolls me over, wanting to look at my face.
As I want to look at his.
This is now. This is the moment. The occasion for which I have been training with Lev all these years.
Surprise and a weapon. Those precious advantages which balance out my multiple deficiencies. My lack of height, weight, strength and fitness.
I have the belt buckle in my hand. The plastic base against my palm, wadded in a sheaf of paper napkins. Between the fingers of my fist, the steel clasp shines out like a dagger. I take a moment to check my aim, then slam upwards. All my force. All my strength. Every ounce of will.
I aim for the eye, a pale well in the dark ski-mask.
Aim for the eye, and hit it. Part of the buckle hits his eyeball. The upper part, I think, hits the bone of his eye socket. There’s a gush of blood, instant and abrupt. The goon says something too, a kind of groan of shock. He staggers back. Not far. Not too far. He exposes his throat and offers me a second chance.
I take it.
A second blow. Less powerful than the first, but better aimed. His throat this time. The cartilaginous shelf just above his Adam’s apple. Drive the steel buckle hard and deep into his neck.
Jugular. Larynx. Windpipe. Most of what matters passes through that narrow space. It’s one of Lev’s favourite targets.
The goon offers up a little puff of surprise. A small, bewildered
Oh!
, like a six-year-old ballet dancer falling at her very first plié.
He is tottering on his feet, about to fall backwards. I grab his fleece and pull him headfirst next to me on the van floor. The picana bumps against his thigh. I unclip it.
The device is sweetly simple. There’s a trigger. And a dial. When they used the damn thing on me, they had the dial set relatively low. I know that, because when they tried nudging it higher, I fainted and they had to set it low again after reviving me.
I’m not such a wuss. A little goonish fainting won’t worry me. So I ramp the dial up to max. Jam the thing against the man’s throat. Give him a good long jolt of the hard stuff. He convulses once, horribly, then doesn’t move. I check his pockets. There’s some cash and a bunch of keys. I take both.
Pull his balaclava up. Take a look at his face. The guy is definitely not the one that Buzz had a good look at. Could well be the other one, though. Probably is, from what I remember of Buzz’s two e-fits.
But it’s time to go. The man’s legs are hanging from the back of the van and I bundle them inside. Climb out. Lock the doors. I’m shaky, blurry, but OK.
Crouch down where the vehicle body shelters me from view and release air from the tyre.
What next?
Two options really. One is to walk in on the other goon. He’s probably sleeping, or eating yogurt with his fingers, or curled up with a porn movie. He’s off duty now and he’s hardly expecting me to come through the door, picana in my hand and the white flame of avenging fury in my heart. If I could get up close to him before he sees me, I’d back myself to do what’s necessary. And if I did – if I succeeded – there’s a fair old chance that we could crack this case right now. Trace that data connection. Track it right through the telecoms network to the Voice himself. Snare him by the wires of his own evasions.
I’d love to do that. I really would. But it’s a bum option, all the same. I’m too weak, too foggy, to take the risk. It’s all very well to play the avenging angel, but if the angel in question keels over, or is weak as a newborn puppy, or just needs to sit a while to get her strength back, the overall effect might fall a little flat.
So, reluctantly, I play it safe. I walk to the big doors at the end of the barn. Not straight there, even. Because I don’t want to fall, I stick close to the wall, keeping one hand against it as I move. I do nothing in haste. Look well to each step. Rest if I need to, move when I can.
I have the bunch of keys in my hand, but the little door which looked unlocked
is
unlocked. A breath of good Welsh wind even rocks it open a little as I approach. I ease it open and step outside.
The barn stands on its own, by the shelter of a big oak. A rough farm track rises into the hill behind. The same track, unmetalled, descends to a valley where lights twinkle in the soft dusk.
And, sitting beneath the oak, her lovely little nose pointing eagerly downhill, is my Alfa-Romeo.
The sight surprises me, then doesn’t. It makes sense, indeed. If my disappearance had been reported for any reason, my car would have been the first thing my colleagues would have looked for. Leaving it by the side of the road somewhere, or burning it out in a remote field, would have attracted precisely the curiosity they didn’t want. So they just brought the car to a place they had already pre-screened for privacy. Nice, simple, elegant.
I stare down at the bunch of keys in my hand.
See my car key.
The little door bumps gently behind me and I close it properly. Settle it in its wobbly latch. The world lies all before me. Soft blue light, fading to violet and the first wash of a deep, star-scattered indigo blue. Somewhere beyond, in the clotted shadows of a little wood, a night bird calls goodnight to its fellows.
And with wandering steps and slow, I cross the little lane, step into my own dear car, start the engine, and let the clutch down. We purr gently down the hill to freedom.
I’m sensible, of course.
I’m a million hours short of sleep. OK for food and water, but still very shaky. Still echoing with shock.
So I play things safe. Drive for ten miles, maybe more. Little back roads. Lanes twisting through hazel hedges that rise higher than the car. Starlight and moonlight surprising me through the gaps. Farm gateways and whitewashed cottages.
Sleep starts to pull at me in deep, mountainous waves. A sleep I can no longer resist. Don’t want to.
I think I fall asleep at the wheel, in fact. One of those micro-sleeps that’s precursor to something huger. I’m only woken by the car passing over a cattle-grid, bars set into the road to keep sheep from leaving the mountain.
I stop the car. Wind my window down.
A starlit hill. The greeny smell of young bracken. Sheep luminous in the half-light. To my right, the hill margin stretches away. The going firm, the grass close-cropped. I drive off-road, following the contour. Drive far enough that my car can’t be seen from the road, and even so I take the precaution of reversing far enough into a stand of hawthorn that I’m even further camouflaged.
I’m safe, I think.
Safe, safe, safe, safe.
Cut the lights. Shove my chair back.
And sleep.
Wonderful, beautiful, peace-giving sleep.
When I wake, it’s dawn. I’m cold.
I ache a thousand million times more than I knew possible. Like I’ve run a double-marathon carrying a sackful of rocks. Or like my entire nervous system is still screeching from a few too many blasts of industrial-grade voltage.
But I’m in one piece. And the aches will pass.
I scrabble around in the back of my car. My bag – the one I took up to Llanberis – has been taken, but there’s a fleece lying loose in the boot. I put it on. I keep a blanket there too. And chocolate. And the sweet joy of five home-rolled joints of the best Pentwyn marijuana.
Eat the chocolate. Smoke two joints. Curl up in the blanket. Sleep again.
When finally I wake, the skies are the blue of heaven, the air is golden, there are birds singing and sheep grazing, and I am still safe and still free and the bastards who wanted to snap me open and pour me out haven’t snapped me or poured me, and I’m still here, still me.
The same as I was, only angrier.
What now?
Ordinary good sense says: get to a phone. Call Watkins. Call Jackson. Get the whole machinery of a rageful police force to start working for me.
But ordinary good sense doesn’t always work for the very unordinary me. I may be physically intact, but that’s not where the danger lies. The danger for me lies, as it always does, with my fragile and unreliable mind.
My own breakability actually helped me back in the barn. My ability to dissociate – to simply cut off from my body, my feelings, my self – gave me some protection back there. A shelter from the storm.
But now? I can feel the ghosts of those agonies swooshing around me now, plucking at my mental intactness. The one thing I can’t do – the one thing I
mustn’t
do – is touch those memories too closely. A police investigation would require me to make statements, answer questions, identify locations. To do all the things that will most endanger my recovery. Even now, thinking through my next steps, I have a joint in my mouth. I’m only able to think these things through as clearly as this because I’m seeing them through a fog of cannabis smoke.
I drive randomly to the nearest town I can find.
Rhayader.
Try to find a battery for my phone. Can’t. So just buy a new one. A pay-as-you-go cheapie. Say to the guy who sells it to me, ‘Can you tell me what day it is? What day of the week, I mean?’
He says, ‘Monday. It’s Monday.’ Looks at me as though I’m strange.
I’m not strange, I want to tell him. You try spending the weekend under torture. See how you feel.
My hair feels horrible, but there’s not much to be done with it. My jeans and top are sweaty and disgusting. Urine-stained too: at some point, I don’t know when, I must have peed myself.
I find a shop that sells clothes. Buy some. Wear them. Throw my old ones away. Buy shoes too. The old ones were fairly new. They only really needed laces, but I don’t want to keep anything that was there with me in that place.
Buy some food. Eat it.
Buy water. Drink it.
Buy painkillers. Chew up double the recommended dose.
Text Bev in the office. Say,
FEELING REALLY ILL TODAY. CAN YOU LET PEOPLE KNOW? HOPEFULLY IN SOON. FXX
.
Call Lev.
Normally, I only ever text him. That gives him the option of when or whether to respond. But this isn’t normal. He doesn’t pick up, but five minutes later he calls me.
‘Fiona?’
‘Lev, hi.’ I tell him briefly – very briefly – what happened.
‘Person is dead?’ He means the guy I zapped in the throat.
‘I don’t know. Really don’t care.’
‘And the other? You want to get?’
‘No. I don’t care about him either.’
I tell him what I do want: to get clean, not to go home, to feel safe.
Tell him what I don’t want: to talk about it. To remember it, even.
I say, ‘I don’t know what to do. I’ve had three joints in six hours and it’s still too close. If I start to think about it, I begin to fall apart.’
He says, ‘Three joint is not enough. You are where?’
‘Rhayader.’
‘Rhayader?’
‘It’s the gateway to the Elan Valley, Lev,’ I tell him. ‘Across the river from Llansantffraid Cwmdauddwr. Why the fuck does it matter where I am?’
‘This place. Is near Birmingham?’
‘Kind of, yes. A couple of hours maybe.’
‘So. You come to Birmingham.’ He gives me directions. Not to where he’s staying, exactly. He wouldn’t do that, not over the phone. Just tells me roughly where to come – Dudley – and what to do when I get there.
‘OK. Lev, thanks.’
‘Is fine. No problem. And smoke more, yes? Also chocolate.’
I do as he says. Buy more chocolate. Take the road back north again to Llanidloes, before turning off to Newtown and Welshpool. By the time I get to Caersws, I have another joint in my mouth. By the time I cross the border into England, I have my fifth and final joint almost smoked. On the outskirts of Dudley, I see a white van on whose dirty rear someone has finger-written the words, ‘Please clean me,’ and I giggle so much that I have to pull over. I laugh until my sides ache, then eat another bar of chocolate and three more aspirin.
Lev meets me at a crossroads in town. I stop the car when I’ve got to the place he told me to go to. Then, two minutes later, I see Lev – khaki anorak, black T-shirt, jeans – cross the road towards me. He doesn’t say hello particularly, just tells me where to go. I drive another minute or two, then we stop. A street of two-storey houses, mostly modern, mostly run-down. The road ends in a wasteland of lock-up garages and the rear view of some industrial workshops.
I park where Lev tells me to, outside a cream-painted house, with a sheet of graffitied chipboard for a door.
‘Is here,’ says Lev.
The door is held by a crude wooden catch. No lock.
Lev opens the door for me – there are no hinges, so he has to lift it – and I step inside.
I knew that Lev didn’t have a permanent home in Britain or, I think, anywhere. Mostly he sleeps in his car or on the floors of friends’ houses. But when he isn’t doing those things, and isn’t abroad, he uses squats.
But knowing that and being here: two different things.
The downstairs room is lightless. The doors and windows have been boarded up front and rear. There’s a poor quality kitchen in place – white formica doors loose on their hinges, chipboard surfaces bubbling and splitting with damp – but I already know there’s no water in the tap, no power in the sockets.
Lev says nothing. Just points me upstairs.
Upstairs: two bedrooms, one bathroom, nothing else. Bare boards. No furniture. No heating. No bathroom fittings, even. Lev has taken over the larger of the two bedrooms. A military-looking roll of bedding, neatly furled. A ten-litre jerrycan of water. A wash bowl. A primus stove and basic cooking equipment, all clean, all tidy. A black bag, of clothes I presume. A small box of food. The front window was boarded, but Lev has removed the boards and they stand leaning against the wall.
Light enters the room in silence. Leaves again the same way.
I don’t say anything.
Don’t even step into the room, not really. Just stand there in the doorway.
I am not what you would call a girly girl. I don’t have a particular relationship with pink. Don’t revere handbags or hoard shoes. I don’t love to dress up, or bake, or follow faddy diets, or learn new ways to decorate my home. On the other hand, I
have
just spent the weekend being tortured in a barn near Rhayader and I was, I admit it, wanting something a bit homelier than this.
Lev stands behind me seeing the room through my eyes. Perhaps he was secretly expecting me to be thrilled. Perhaps he is thinking dark thoughts about decadent Western girls, our need for luxury.
He says nothing. Not straight away. We just stand there in the pale light. Even the tiniest sounds echo among these hard surfaces, so a single creak of a floorboard rolls around the room, like a pea in a shoebox.
Then Lev says, ‘Is not suitable.’
That was halfway between a question and a statement, but I let it be a statement.
Lev says, ‘We go somewhere else.’
I drive where Lev tells me to go. To a leafy street in Edgbaston this time. Lev says, ‘Wait here,’ and I do, and he goes up to a front door and opens it. He was remarkably fast, but he wasn’t using a key. He goes inside for two or three minutes, then comes out again.
‘Is good,’ he tells me. ‘You will like.’
I do.
It’s a lovely golden palace of a house. A basement kitchen, all pale wood and slinky gadgets and drawers that slide shut with a glossily expensive whisper of satisfaction. And upstairs, a living room with deep cream sofas, and thick carpets, and clocks that tick, and a giant telly, and books, and art, and picture lights. And, one floor up, bedrooms that just ask you to lie down and sleep and a bathroom so crammed with scented luxuries that it could instantly convert me to the very girliest of girly girls.
‘Thank you, Lev,’ I tell him. ‘Thank you.’
‘One disadvantage,’ he warns, holding up a bag of hash. ‘We have to smoke outside.’
The house, I assume, belongs to one of Lev’s women, one of his ladies in lycra. Those women come to krav maga as being more exciting than yoga, but they stick with it – some of them – because sex with an ex-Spetsnaz guy makes for better spa-room bragging than boring old sex with the tennis instructor. I don’t know where the woman of the house is now, but nor do I care. When Lev needs me to leave, he’ll tell me.
We sit in the garden and light up.
I’m stoned already, but soon I’m stonier. I don’t giggle much on pot, not these days, but there’s a rippling of something like laughter beneath the relaxation.
A tree above us is crammed with flowers and it takes me a long time to get there, but eventually I do. Point to the tree and say to Lev, ‘Magnolia. It’s a magnolia.’
I have a bath. Long and hot and with a squidge of every nice-looking smell I can find. There are brown dots on my thighs, belly, arms, breasts, upper chest, neck and sides. More visible than anything we found on Livesey, but I have softer skin and bruise easily. Also, I lived longer.
I don’t look at my dots. They feel tender to the touch, but the tenderness of a mild bruise, nothing worse.
I put on knickers, bra and T-shirt, then a thick towelling robe over the top. Come out of that palace of luxury smelling like the sultan’s favourite concubine.
We smoke another joint, or Lev does. I’m feeling too giddy to smoke much. Lev has been out shopping. He’s got a pile of microwave meals and some DVDs.
We eat macaroni cheese (Lev), chicken tikka masala (me) and watch a chick-flick. I don’t follow the story particularly well, but there are people in wedding dresses and everyone has nice hair.
I fall asleep before I find out what happens to the woman in the wedding dress.
Wake up in the bedroom upstairs. I’m not wearing my robe any more, which means Lev must have taken it off, which means he’s seen the little brown dots, which means they have a reality they were beginning to lose.
I go downstairs – upset, shaky – roll another joint and smoke it. It’s night now, but the magnolia flowers are a cloud of angel wings above my head.
Somewhere, out of view, a raggedy puppet keeps falling off her chair in an almost empty barn. I try to stay away from that thought. Try to stay with the angel wings and the cannabis.
Aspirin. Bed. Sleep.
Lev and I spend the next day smoking, watching romcoms, and eating random food. Lev watches the movies with great intensity. In the middle of one of them, he points a fork at the telly and says, ‘You have been?’
‘To America? Yes.’
‘It is like this?’
We’re watching a scene where a woman in a white skirt and yellow top is running through a wood, while a man who travels through time is talking to a nine-year-old girl in a golden meadow.
I say, ‘Kind of, yes.’
That evening, I travel to Cardiff. See Watkins. Not at the office, but at her home.
Cal opens the door to me. Is ringlety and smiley and rich in food-related offers. I say I just want to speak to Rhiannon.
And do. Cal banishes herself to the kitchen. I sit with Watkins in their lamplit living room.
Say, ‘On the way back from Llanberis, I was abducted. The same men that attacked Brydon, I think. They hadn’t been able to get access to our data systems – you did a good job there, ma’am – and they wanted to know how far our investigation had run.’
‘Jesus, Fiona. You say you were abducted. What did they—’
‘I told them everything. Our work with Atlantic Cables. Our thoughts about the Stonemonkey. Everything.’
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s not like—’
‘I know. I’m not apologising. And as you say, it’s not like we have a single tangible lead. Not one. But there was one area they kept on coming back to. It was, I’m certain, the key issue for them.’