To the uninformed passer-by, the small, barrel-roofed building next to the visitor centre might look more like a public toilet than a prison. It was about the right size, and its door was painted the same shade of park-bench green as the conveniences opposite the church. A closer look, however, would reveal a heavy, iron padlock swinging from the door, and bars at the windows, which were small and set too high to see out of.
Inside, there were two cells, both around six feet square and containing a slatted bed frame topped with a thin, plastic mattress. The walls were whitewashed, the floors concrete. A narrow corridor ran the width of the building, and from here the prison guard, one of the many roles performed by Sark’s volunteer police constable, could check in on detainees through the grille in each cell door. Locals called it the ‘drunk tank’ because it was mostly used to accommodate tourists who’d had a few too many and missed the last boat home. Only once, in all his years on the police force, had Michael had to come over and officially arrest someone held here—a man whose drunken night out had ended with him smashing a bottle over somebody’s head.
All in all, then, Sark Prison was more frequently deployed as the butt of an islander’s jokes than as a place of incarceration. Only, now, as Michael lay shivering on the floor, bound and gagged, the wrong side of the locked cell door, it didn’t seem very funny.
It felt as if the blood flowing through his brain were on fire. If he moved his head even an inch, the pain became overwhelming, flashes of light punctured his vision, and a deafening ringing he knew only he could hear filled his ears.
Then there was his side. He was still losing blood. Several times in the last hour, or two, or three, however long he’d been in here, he had passed into a horrifying semi-conscious state in which he had lost his grip on reality, imagined himself on a boat, the floor swaying beneath him, or caught up in an explosion, about to be ricocheted clean off the earth and thrown into the sea. He had forced his eyes to open and his brain to focus. The shifting floor was a product of his dizziness, the noise his exhausted brain’s exaggeration of the thunder outside. But that in itself was enough to cause more panic.
Because the storm had arrived, and Jenny was on a boat, fleeing, from him, from his betrayal, from this godforsaken island. He hoped and prayed that she’d got home hours ago. Before the weather turned. Before the clouds that had been gathering for days, suffocating them all with this stale, unrelenting heat, finally split, unleashing their torrent of rain and thunder and lightning, whipping the waves into an unnavigable nightmare and drowning his stifled screams in their fury.