Page 11

Ten

It was dark, and it was cold.

That was all he was aware of to begin with, and both those realizations came gradually. He was drifting awake, and for a few seconds he found it hard to distinguish between reality and the unconsciousness he was emerging from. Dark and cold. What else? His body was juddering slightly, and a quiet rattling noise filled the air.

Where am I?

All he could tell was that he was horizontal and in motion. When he tried to move his arms and legs, they were held in place. There was something restraining him. He was strapped down on a gurney of some kind, and even his head wouldn’t turn; all he could do was flick his eyes from side to side. The darkness and the shuddering movement of the trolley beneath him made the world hard to make sense of. He caught flashes of what looked like foliage, and there was a dusting of stars above him. The night sky. So he was outside somewhere.

Had there been an accident?

Was he being taken to hospital?

He was moving feetfirst. While he couldn’t tilt his head back to look, he was aware of a presence just behind him, pushing the trolley along. He could hear a ragged breathing sound, as though they were struggling with the effort.

A doctor perhaps.

“Hello?” he tried to say.

And realized there was tape covering his mouth.

Panic flared inside him at that, and he tried to fight against his restraints with more urgency, pushing and pulling with all his strength. But there was no give in them at all. His mumbles from behind the tape became muffled screams, which continued until he felt like he was about to vomit.

If he was sick, he would choke to death.

Whoever was behind him seemed oblivious to his distress. The trolley carried on at the same speed, rattling like a shopping trolley with a broken wheel that wouldn’t stop spinning and stalling.

He forced himself to breathe slowly through his nose, and after what felt like an age the nausea subsided slightly. But his heart was punching hard inside his chest, as if it were trying to find a way out.

Think.

How had he got here?

It was hard to gather his thoughts. Dim recollections drifted through his mind, the way threads of smoke in the air might—but that image brought a sharper jolt of memory. Smoke in the air. He remembered that. He had been in the outside area of a bar with a cigarette, watching the smoke he exhaled swirling in the air beneath the light of a heater and then disappearing away into the night. He remembered thinking that it was kind of beautiful to see the air made real like that.

Marie wouldn’t have approved of him smoking, but he was a couple of drinks down by then, and she wouldn’t have approved of that either. He didn’t care; that was the point of being in the bar in the first place. It was a stupid habit he’d fallen into. A lot of the time when he was at home, it felt like he couldn’t do right for doing wrong, and so a couple of nights a week he’d taken to pretending he was working late, but stopped instead at whatever brightly lit bar happened to call out to him from the side of the road .

Just a little me time.

Marie probably thought he was cheating on her. The thing was, he never had and never would. It was like he used to tell her: even if they weren’t always great together, they were always good. But she was the jealous type, and that had got worse recently. And if he was going to end up doing the time for a crime he hadn’t committed then he figured he might as well commit one of some kind.

The gurney’s spinning wheel caught a snag of undergrowth. Whoever was behind grunted softly and pushed harder to get it moving again, but the moment’s stillness gave Darren Field a chance to glance to either side and see that the world was no longer as dark as it had been.

And then they were moving again.

But that brief moment had been enough for him to see that there were loops of small fairy lights strung between the trees. The sight was so incongruous that, for a few half-delirious seconds, he imagined that the man had taken him out of the real world, and that the two of them were now in a different one entirely.

“Do you think you were abducted from the bar?” John says.

Field nods cautiously.

“I left my drink inside when I went out to smoke,” he says. “Someone could have spiked it then. I don’t remember much after that.”

“Why did you leave your drink?”

“You don’t worry about it as a guy, do you? The place wasn’t all that busy, and I had a table out of the way round a corner that I wanted to keep. I didn’t want to talk to anyone there.”

There’s a helpless expression on his face.

“I just wanted to sit with my phone. That was all I ever did. Catch up on the news a bit; read a few updates on social media. Maybe play a few games of chess if I couldn’t get reception.”

He spreads his hands, the question clear.

Is that too much to ask?

The answer, John thinks, is that it shouldn’t be, but that’s not the way things work. If you let your guard down once, the chances are that you’ll be okay. But if you do it a hundred times, the odds are going to catch up with you eventually. Which to his mind is more than enough reason to keep your guard up the whole time.

“Can you remember the name of the bar?” he says.

“No. I didn’t even look at the sign when I parked.”

“You could drive the route. Check in a few places. You’d recognize it if you were there again.”

Field shakes his head. “No.”

“It could help. There might be security footage.”

“It wasn’t the kind of place with CCTV.”

Which is just a stupid excuse, and John feels frustration rising inside him. The familiar anger is probably only a short distance behind. On one level, he gets it: returning to the place he was taken from would be traumatic for Field, and it’s the last thing he wants to do. But the woman in the woods deserves justice, and he finds it hard to control the urge to grab Field and shake him until he sees sense.

He can’t do that, of course, but how else can he persuade him? Daniel would be so much better at this than he is, John thinks. What would his son suggest?

Keeping calm , probably.

“Even so,” he says. “Someone there might have seen what happened?”

“He’s not the kind of man other people see.”

And John is about to reply—maybe even give into the frustration and reach out the way he knows he shouldn’t—but Field’s choice of words give him pause.

He’s not the kind of man other people see.

A beat of silence in the study.

“Okay,” John says. “Let’s leave that for now.”

Field looks down at the carpet. He knows what’s coming next.

“Tell me about the woman,” John says.

He couldn’t tell how long he was pushed on the trolley for, but eventually it came to a stop. His gaze flicked frantically left and right. The space he was in now was more open than the path through the undergrowth. That had felt like a woodland trail, whereas he could tell this was a clearing of some kind. The fairy lights had been left behind them, and there was a different kind of illumination now.

The man behind him was breathing heavily.

And then he became aware that the man was moving around to the right-hand side of the gurney. Instinctively, he looked in the other direction, blinking quickly, keeping his gaze fixed on a line of trees that were almost lost in the shadows.

Don’t look.

Don’t look at him.

The man began grunting softly. A few seconds later, still restrained, Field felt his body moving. It took him a moment to understand what was happening, and then he understood. The gurney he was lying on juddered as it was rotated slowly upward. While he remained strapped firmly in place, he was being moved from a horizontal position to a vertical one.

The prickling of stars above receded backward in a series of jerks, each one accompanied by a grunt of effort from the man at his side. Field felt delirious. The constellations above him appeared to be swirling. He thought that if he could just get them to settle then perhaps he could remember them and somehow be able to work out where he was.

And then he was upright.

It was easier to make sense of his surroundings now. It was indeed a clearing, somewhere deep in a forest, and it was lit by bright bulbs screwed into the tops of the wooden posts that were dotted around. A swirl of cables was spread out over the ground, and he could hear a generator humming away out of sight. The scene had a dreamlike quality to it. It reminded him of a movie set at night.

Ahead of him, he could see a series of wooden pens, and he had been positioned so as to be facing directly into one of them. When he saw the woman there, his mind suddenly became cold and clear, as though a glass of iced water had been thrown at his face.

She was lying on the ground, curled up on her side, illuminated well enough by the lights for him to see that she was alive and awake and looking back at him. A wooden post had been driven into the ground in the center of the pen. She was chained to it.

The two of them stared at each other for a few seconds.

Even though Field had never been as terrified as he was right then, he still felt a desperate urge to break free and help her somehow. To rescue her. To stop whatever he had been brought here to watch from happening.

And then he became aware that the presence beside him was gone.

“No,” he tried to say.

The man walked over to the pen. Field could see him now. He was dressed entirely in black, apart from his face, which was obscured by a featureless white mask.

He had a knife in one hand. A can of petrol in the other.

Darren Field’s heart started beating even harder— no, no, no —and he strained frantically, impotently, stretching against his bonds as he watched the man approach the woman. And then—

“Stop,” John says.

He holds up a hand. It’s enough.

He remembers what Sarah told him when they sat together at the seafront last week. She’d been hurt before that. There were knife marks on the bones. Maybe if he were still police, it would be important to hear Field’s testimony as to what happened next, but it’s not something he wants or needs to listen to now.

Field is looking down. Focused on the floor. Crying quietly at the memory. It looks like he’s reliving the trauma of what he was forced to see.

“He made you watch him kill this woman?” John asks.

Field shakes his head quickly. “I don’t want to say what he did.”

“You don’t need to.”

“But he was so… angry . In my head, that’s all I can see of him: he’s reds and blacks. He’s fucking screaming . It’s just rage. And he keeps looking at me the whole time, like he wants me to see every second of it.”

A beat of silence.

John tries to think .

“What happened afterward?”

“Everything goes dark,” Field says. “Maybe he gave me an injection of some kind. Or I drank something. I don’t know; I can’t remember. But at some point, I woke up, and I was back in my car. For all the world, it was like I’d just pulled over at the side of the road to take a nap. But my phone was gone. My wallet was missing. I’d lost close to two days.”

John leans back in his chair.

Thinking again—or at least trying to.

He has never been involved in a major investigation, and he is nowhere near as good at this as Daniel would be. But he has decent instincts. He knows when someone is lying to him, and there’s none of that with Darren Field. At the same time, the story is so outlandish that it’s hard to know what to make of it.

He glances at the closed door.

“What did your wife say?”

“She was pissed off with me,” Field says. “I mean, what do you expect? I hadn’t been answering my phone the whole time. I’d worried her sick, she said. Although, honestly, she didn’t seem all that worried. She thought I’d been off with someone, or out on a bender or something. She probably still thinks that.”

“You didn’t try to tell her?”

Field looks at John incredulously.

“You’re joking, right?”

John takes the force of that. He found the woman’s remains, and so he knows there must be some truth to Field’s account, but even he isn’t sure what to make of it. He can imagine the reception the story would receive from someone else. It’s so outlandish that who would believe it?

At the same time, he can’t understand why Field wouldn’t have at least tried to tell someone. How could you carry an experience like that without buckling under the weight of it? And if the story is true then there must be evidence out there to corroborate it. He’s not the kind of man other people see , Field had said, but that was magical thinking. Field’s phone data can be tracked. There will be footage of his vehicle and its movements. If the story is true then the man who did this thing is not invisible. He exists . There will be traces of him everywhere.

“Darren,” John says. “You need to talk to the police.”

Field shakes his head again, more quickly this time.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe I imagined it all. I was out of my mind, and it was all just some terrible dream. That’s probably true, right? And if it wasn’t—”

“Darren—”

“ And if it wasn’t ,” Field interrupts him, “then it matters even more.”

“Why?”

Field stares at him for a few seconds.

Then he takes another deep breath.

“Because of what the man told me would happen next.”