When Pete juddered back into consciousness, he couldn’t at first work out where he was or what was going on. It felt like he was in a spindryer in the dark, until he realised that was just because his head was swimming so badly. Then he had a weird flying, falling sensation, as if he was plummeting off a dream cliff – no hands, no idea how far below him the water was or how hard he’d hit it, just a freakish sensation of free-falling through his own pain.
And he was in pain. Bad pain. His whole skull throbbed, his eyeballs pressing painfully against their sockets, huge and swollen, like his teeth, ears, nose. Everything ached, worse than the most severe hangover he’d ever had. He tried to lift his hands to stop himself belly flopping into the water; but there was no water. And he could not move his arms from where they were lifted behind him. He tugged, feeling the pull in the sockets of his shoulders. Nothing.
Gradually, he became aware that he was in a dark place, moving, but in a strange, immobile position. Kneeling, arms pinned by his sides, forehead resting on a thin metal edge as if he was about to be executed.
Was he about to be executed?
He tried to call out but he couldn’t open his mouth – couldn’t part his lips at all. Tape across his face. He lifted his head with difficulty, but the pain was too great and bile rose in his throat.
No, man. Fuck no. You can’t be sick, he thought in panic. If he was sick he could choke and die.
He brought his head gently back down to feel the metal edge again, but at that moment the moving floor beneath him jumped, hard, and the metal edge smacked against his brow, making his head hurt even more.
A bump, he thought. That was like a bump, in a road. I’m in a van, being taken somewhere.
Meredith had been taken somewhere in a van, all those years ago.
He tried to push away the thought of her poor ruined hand, the constant reminder of the torture she’d endured that night, forcing himself instead to stay calm, work out what was happening.
He wasn’t on the van floor. He realised he was in some kind of open container, which in turn was in the van. The container was small, just large enough to accommodate his kneeling form, and cold against his bare knees and shins. Metal, he thought, puzzled. It feels like metal. He slumped over to his left and then, with difficulty, to his right, to see where the sides were. It seemed wider at the front than the back. Could he be in a wheelbarrow? The sides were about that height. He tried to unfold his legs and climb out, but then became aware that his hands and ankles were bound together too.
This must be how Meredith had felt, he thought, and had to swallow back down the vomit in his throat. The thought of her feeling half as terrified as he did now made tears of horror spring thickly into his eyes. How had he never properly understood before? He’d been a terrible brother. They hadn’t even been talking at that stage. She’d gone through all that – all this – on her own.
Stop it, Pete. Focus.
His kidnapper must have used the wheelbarrow to transport him from the barge into the van. Perhaps he put a plank across to wheel it ashore. Couldn’t have been easy. Pete was skinny, but six feet tall. He must have been forced into the kneeling position first, taped together like a Christmas turkey, then lifted into the wheelbarrow. Jesus. There must be at least two of them; surely that would be too hard on your own? He strained his ears to hear if there was any conversation going on in the van’s cabin, but he heard nothing apart from his own panting breaths and the van’s engine. He couldn’t tell what sort of vehicle it was. He didn’t think the engine was throaty enough to be a lorry, and although he couldn’t see anything, the space felt bigger than a micro van.
He needed to get out of this wheelbarrow.
He rocked himself from side to side, as vigorously as he could, trying to ignore the howling pain in his head. If it was a twin-wheeled one, he was screwed, but if it was a traditional one-wheeler, he might just be able to tip himself…
Crash. He’d done it! He lay gasping on his side on the van floor, his heart hammering as he waited for the van’s driver to slam on the brakes and come round to see what the noise was. But nothing. The vehicle continued to bounce along. They hadn’t noticed.
But what good had it done him? He was still immobilised.
The van seemed to be going uphill. Pete could hear the strain of the engine, and feel the tilt of gravity as it made him slide backwards a little way. They’d been driving for at least twenty minutes, he guessed – but it could’ve been much longer, depending on how long he was unconscious for. Twenty minutes or so since he came round.
With the long fingernails of his right hand, the ones he’d cultivated to be able to play the guitar without a plectrum, he scratched away at the tape around his ankles. But it felt like that thick black electrical tape, and it wasn’t giving an inch. Straining against it did no good at all, of course, but he found himself repeatedly doing so anyway, making his wrists cramp and throb in tandem with his head.
It was hopeless. He’d just have to take his chances when the van finally stopped.
His heart thudded with fear. Meredith had once – just once – told him about what happened when the van she was in had stopped.
As if prompted by his terror, the van’s gears changed down with a crunch, and Pete felt it slow to a halt.
This was it.
Van door opening. Heavy footsteps, no voices. The click of a lighter. A pause. Pete couldn’t hear the inhalation, but imagined his kidnapper sucking on a cigarette, leaning contemplatively against the van side just inches away from him, perhaps keeping it alight to burn him with…
Then a few more footsteps, the crunch of the door opening. The glare of a torch in his eyes, and the sweet scent of country night air. A familiar, comforting smell: sheep and grass and sleepy, droopy-headed flowers after dark.
‘Rolled out, you bastard, did ya?’
A strange growly voice; Pete honestly couldn’t tell if it was high or low.
At least there only seemed to be one person out there. He could take him on. Kick him, hard, even though his feet were bare; his flip-flops having vanished at some point. Maybe kicking wouldn’t be so effective. He decided to think of him as Rolli, as the word ‘rolled’ had snagged in his head. Better to give him a name; made him feel less monstrous. Rolli was small, cute and cuddly. He, Pete, could take a Rolli.
He’d just have to bide his time.
‘Rolli’ hauled himself into the van, making it creak and rock. Silhouetted against the black night, he was barrel-shaped, solid. Wearing a balaclava. Not remotely small, cuddly or cute.
Pete’s heart sank. It was the same guy who’d taken Meredith, it had to be. Van, tape, balaclava. When would the knife be brandished? Pete could already see it glinting in the moonlight; imagine its flash through the air and the slice – or stab. Perhaps he’d be branded in the same place that Meredith was; they could have twin injuries. There was something faintly reassuring about that, even while the skin on his hands twitched with fearful anticipation at how much it would hurt to be impaled by a knife. But what could this guy want? What could they have ever done to deserve this?
He watched Rolli’s shape pull the wheelbarrow out and place it with a bang on the ground beneath the ledge of the van. Rolli heaved himself back inside the vehicle and now it was Pete he was coming for. He got behind him and, grunting with effort, shoved him towards the edge, as if Pete was a rock. Pete felt his shins scrape and protest on the van’s metal floor. Then he was unceremoniously rolled off the edge, back into the barrow. He landed painfully, face upwards, which spared his poor head from more trauma, but meant his tied feet and arms took the impact. He feared he’d broken something in one of his arms – he couldn’t even tell which – so intense was the pain.
Rolli loomed forwards over him, into his eyeline, and Pete’s heart almost seized up in his chest. He was panting with fear. His assailant wore a woolly beanie hat pulled low over his forehead, and a scarf tied tightly around the lower half of his face, so that only his eyes were on display. Not the balaclava Pete had at first assumed it was. If he survived this, he thought, he’d recognise those eyes again anywhere. Even in the dark, he could see how pale they were, washed-out looking, with light, stubby lashes.
But instead of the knife Pete expected, when Rolli’s hands shot forwards they were holding a long, thin piece of fabric, like a strip ripped from a curtain. Was he going to be throttled? His windpipe shrank and recoiled in his throat. But instead, Rolli tied the fabric around his eyes, wrapping it around Pete’s head twice and securing it at the front, squeezing the bridge of Pete’s nose.
Then he felt himself being wheeled off, which jarred his arm further. On his back in a haze of agony and confusion, Pete had the weird sensation of being a baby again, wheeled along in a pram in the dark, but instead of his loving mother’s face peering in at him with clucks and smiles, there was just blackness where her face should be. Silence, apart from the squeak of the barrow’s wheel and the man’s breathing, still laboured from the effort of moving him.
He remembered again the missing piece of Andrea’s jigsaw, the one that she had obsessed about. The face of the baby in the pram. She and Meredith had discussed it that night on his boat.
He was that missing baby. Andrea had been right to obsess about it, and he hadn’t listened. If he had, perhaps they could’ve saved her.
He wanted his mother.
The silence became like a blanket of fear pressing down on him. They must be in deep countryside. Why was he being moved? And to where?
They proceeded at a slow, bumpy pace for what seemed like miles, up and down inclines, mostly over grass but once or twice across what must have been gravel paths. There was a level of unreality that Pete was vaguely aware of – he was in a wheelbarrow, for fuck’s sake. His legs were hanging over the handles and his neck bent uncomfortably backwards, perilously close to the wheel when the barrow was tipped up and pushed.
What a way to die.
He thought of all the things he’d never done: been a husband, a dad. Never even owned a dog. If he got out of this, he’d bite the bullet and do online dating. He would enter his furniture into design competitions like Meredith was always telling him to. Maybe he could persuade her to go travelling with him. Backpacking around South-East Asia. Was that weird, to want to go travelling with your sister?
It didn’t really matter, whether it was or not.
The barrow slid down a small slope, and his head banged painfully against a hard surface at the bottom. A door creaked open. Pete thought of deserted beaches at sunset, cold beers, fine, pale sand between his toes.
The temperature and humidity changed. He was inside, somewhere damp and cool. A sudden inversion and he was tipped out onto a chilly stone floor, like a pile of horseshit being dumped into the corner of a stable.
It felt a bit like a stable, in fact, although it didn’t smell of horses. Pete struggled to roll over and right himself, his head and arm still hurting more than anything he’d ever injured before; even more so when Rolli grabbed him by the elbow of his bad arm, getting him into a sitting position.
The cloth was ripped off his eyes but it wasn’t any lighter. For a moment Pete wondered if the blow to his head had knocked out his sight, but then a dim blue light appeared – a phone screen – followed by the bright white glare of the phone’s torch function, shining right into his face.
‘Home sweet home,’ Rolli said in his strange, high-low voice, putting the phone down. Torchlight shimmered like a laser beam across a rough tiled floor and Pete could see walls, which might once have been whitewashed, and lighter areas that looked like boarded-up windows. He was in some sort of big shed, maybe. But there was a bench seat running around the walls, about a foot from the ground. Pegs attached, higher up. An old changing room? Was he in an abandoned school or something? It wasn’t big enough to be a public baths.
Rolli approached him again, this time holding a length of rope, which he looped through something behind him and then attached it to whatever had restrained his wrists.
Oh God, Pete thought. Please don’t leave me here with my arms tied this tightly behind me. I’ll die. The pain was unbelievable, pulsing in waves up his arms and into his neck and head.
‘Right. We’ll be back tomorrow…’
Back? We?
Those words were chilling enough, redolent with threat, but what Rolli said next was what made Pete howl through his gag, struggling futilely against all his restraints, not even caring that it made everything hurt even more.
He’d failed. Failed Andrea, failed Ralph, failed himself…
‘…with your sister. And that’s when the fun starts. Sweet dreams, Pete.’
The phone was picked up. The door opened and closed again, the barrow wheel squeaking as it was wheeled away. The man was gone.
Sobbing and choking, Pete slumped forwards to try and relieve the pressure on his arms. Most of all, he’d failed Meredith.