a gutter.
And there – a seagull calling.
But otherwise the silence of being alone. At first he thought his arms were tied behind him but as he flexed the muscles he realized they had been starved of blood, folded under him where he’d been dumped on the floor. Slowly they came to life, and when he kicked out he found his feet were free too, and so the dark edge of the panic withdrew. He rolled over quickly and saw that the light was stronger and that he was in a room of whitewashed bricks, with heavy wooden-shuttered windows held fast by iron stays. His face, when he touched it, was cold and despite the addition of a fresh graze where his cheekbone had been broken there was no pain, so he wondered if he’d been drugged again.
And then he saw movement, in the corner where the deepest shadows had fled. Something moved on the floor there in a kind of random way, milling, but completely silently. He pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes to clear them and looked again. This time the fur caught the light and he knew: rats, behind a crude little metal fence, swarming at a water bowl as if they were feasting on the innards of some unseen victim.
DI Shaw had said the animal rights people had a base, an old airfield near Coventry, a few buildings left over from the war. A place to keep their gear, and perhaps some of the animals they’d liberated. He heard the wind again outside and imagined it sweeping over the forgotten runway, buffeting the weeds between the cracks in the concrete. And the sheet in the wind, a windsock perhaps.
Dryden wanted to shout now, but decided to wait. Something about shouting might bring back the panic, so instead he put his head against the wall, brought his knees up under his chin and stood. Pain, like a dead-leg, ran down his right side, an electric current that made his knee give way. He slumped against the wall for support and took the time to breathe deeply and look around. He was in a brick-built hut, perhaps fifty feet by twenty. There was a rich smell of petrol and the concrete floor was stained black by decades of spills and leaks: a fuel store, perhaps. They’d left him a chair and, chillingly, an upturned feeding bottle at head height attached to the wall.
‘I’m an animal now,’ he said, out loud to calm himself. The thirst was desperate so he licked the aluminium tube, trying to get the water to run freely.
When he saw the door, he saw the blanket laid before it. The door was metal and Dryden noticed that the lock caught the light and was new, gold against the dull rust of the original. The blanket was gorse-green and rough and it had been laid carefully over something on the cool concrete floor.
Gently shuffling his feet to dispel the pins and needles in his legs, Dryden made his way forward. The light now was vibrant, almost sunshine despite the rain he could still hear, and it spilled in pools on the floor where it leaked through the high shuttered windows.
He stopped short of the blanket. The rats, unnerved by his movement, squealed in a knot of tails and teeth. There was a note, written neatly in an educated hand on a single piece of writing paper:
FOR YOU
He swung round quickly, thinking a shadow had moved beyond the metal shutters, but the room was still. Turning back he knew two things – that he would regret lifting the blanket aside and that if he delayed any longer he’d never lift it aside.
He took a corner with one hand, bending down, and as he did so caught the merest hint of a smell he could not place but which made his heart contract. Pulling the mat erial back quickly he lost balance and he fell away. But he’d had enough time to see, enough time to understand what they’d planned for him. He felt his heartbeat begin to creak in his chest and a familiar sensation of panic seeped between the joints of his legs and arms, making them suddenly weak and uncertain.
Dogs. Three Alsatians, their eyes still dreamy with the drugs. Dryden, on his knees, watched as a pink tongue flopped out between the sticky teeth of the nearest animal, and a featureless white eyeball fluttered under a black lid. A small two-inch patch on its hind leg had been shaved to show where an injection had been given.
‘Question,’ he said, his eyes searching frantically for a way to climb up to the rafters above. ‘How long have I got before they come round?’
A heartbeat before the panic had taken hold of his reason, he knew there was a hope. With a shaking hand he ran a finger along the dog’s chin until he found a small copper disc, adjusting it in the light until he could read it clearly.
Smiling he said the single word out loud – ‘Sealodes’ – and plunging into his memory retrieved the name of a small village in Alsace.
37
He went back to his chair and tried to think clearly. The sun had broken through and sets of golden stripes inched their way along the rough whitewashed walls. So morning: but what day? If the dart had put him out overnight then it was Saturday.
If he was on the old airfield then the police must be close at hand. Shaw had said they had the area under surveillance, but then Dryden bitterly reflected, they’d had Thieves Bridge under surveillance as well. Could they know Dryden was a prisoner? It was possible, as Humph had dropped him at Wicken Fen and must have raised the alarm by now. But he’d probably been smuggled onto the airfield at night or in the boot of a car. So perhaps his best plan was to devise some sort of signal to say he was a prisoner.
Escape was improbable. His mobile had been taken, the windows were shuttered in iron, the door securely locked. There were no other doors and the roof rafters were too high to reach, even with the help of the chair. Roland, he sensed, was far away. But Dryden suspected someone was keeping watch. Roland had said they wanted to make him understand that he should not give evidence if the case came to court. They wanted simply to scare him, a task they had begun efficiently and would have accomplished triumphantly if his fear of the dogs was not mitigated by the knowledge that a single word
He laughed to himself, trying to drive away the fear. The sudden noise disturbed the dogs and one began whimpering in a tortured half-sleep. The rats, Peyton’s rats he knew now, heaved in their pen. Dryden remained in his chair, hoping that it represented a position of authority. Remembering that dogs can smell fear he willed his nervous system into neutral, concentrating instead on how he could contrive to make a big enough noise to alert a police unit which must be within a few hundred yards of the building he was in.
He needed a tool of some sort, something he could rattle against the metal shutters. He was taking off his shoe when one of the dogs rose up suddenly and double-clamped its jaws with a hollow plastic ‘dolck’. It stood,
