The car, if it was a car, swerved round a corner, throwing me sideways against a pair of legs. Once the subsiding pain allowed me to think half clearly I decided I had to be in the back of a car, rather than in a van, and hard down on the car’s floor where I was wedged between the front and back seats. The sound of the transmission told me the car was an automatic. I knew one person was on the seat to my right, so now I edged to my left to discover whether a second person hedged me in, but as soon as I moved a hand slapped me hard round the head. They wanted me to be still and they wanted me to be quiet, and the pain already inflicted on me persuaded me that their wishes were best respected. I stayed very still and very quiet.
I was also very scared, if that word could do justice to the bowel-loosening terror that trembled in me. Whoever these people were, they were experts. They had taken me with a skill and efficiency that spoke of long practice. I had suspected nothing, but had simply walked into their ambush like a child. They had immobilized me in seconds and now they were carrying me away and I was helpless. If I moved, I was hurt. If I made a noise, I was hurt. They were training me like a dog, making me subject to their control, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Not one thing. And if these people decided to kill me, then I would die like a dog, because these people were good.
The car pulled off the road. I felt the vehicle sway as it crossed a curb-cut, then I heard the tires scrunch on gravel. I had no idea how long we had been driving. I had no idea if we were even on the Cape still.
The car seemed to drive into an enclosed space. I could hear its exhaust echoing loud, then the engine was switched off and I heard the doors open. Four doors.
A hand reached down, grabbed one of the ropes that pinioned me, and yanked me with extraordinary force out of the car and on to a cold hard floor.
I sensed someone kneeling beside me. Something cold touched my ankle, a knife blade I imagined, and I whimpered with fear, but the blade merely cut the bonds that trussed my legs.
A hand yanked me upright. I swayed, but managed to stand. My wrists were still bound and the thick sack was still over my head, but otherwise I had been freed of the ropes.
A hand pushed me forward. I stumbled, hardly able to walk. My feet were bare on the concrete floor. I had been wearing boots and socks when I had been ambushed, but they, like my oilskin jacket, had been stripped off me and, as far as I could tell, I was dressed only in jeans, underwear, a shirt and a sweater. My gun was gone, everything but those few items of clothing was gone. I was pushed again and I dutifully tried to hurry, but succeeded only in stubbing my bare toe against a stone step. I cried out, fell, then scrambled up before they could hit me again. I seemed to have entered a thickly carpeted passageway. It was warm suddenly.
A hand checked me. I heard a door open. The hand turned me to the right, pushed me slowly forward, very slowly, and I sensed I must use caution, and sure enough I found my foot stepping into thin air, and I gasped, thinking I was going to pitch forward into a terrible void, but a hand steadied me, and I realized they had simply steered me on to a flight of wooden steps.
I went down the steps into what had to be a cellar. The footsteps of my captors were loud on the wooden stairs, then echoed from the bare concrete floor. At the foot of the steps I was pushed a few paces forward, then checked again. They wanted me to stand still.
I obeyed. I was shivering. The cellar was cold. I could hear nothing.
Then, suddenly, a knife sawed at my wrists and the ropes fell away. I gasped, half expecting the knife to swing up at my belly, but nothing happened. I rubbed my wrists, then raised my hands toward the bag tied around my head.
A club or cosh hit my kidneys.
I screamed and half fell, but hands held me upright. I wanted to be sick again. The pain swelled in me, receded, swelled again; a pain that came in red waves. The pain reminded me that they wanted me to stand still.
So I stood still.
Hands gripped my sweater and jerked it upward. Without thinking I stepped back and immediately the pain whipped at me as I was hit again, expertly hit so that the agony slammed up my back. I half crouched to escape the pain, but the hands on my sweater pulled me upright.
They wanted my sweater off. Weeping, unable to resist, I raised my arms and they tugged the woollen sea- jersey off. The bag over my head had been tied at my throat and so stayed in place.
Fingers touched my throat. The touch of the fingers was warm, light and fluttering. The very lightness of the touch terrified me, then I realized that the fingers were merely undoing the buttons of my shirt. I was shaking with fear as the fingers slid down my chest and belly, then as they tugged the shirt-tails clear of my jeans and pulled the flannel sleeves off my arms.
I gasped as the fingers caressed my belly. Only it was not a caress, but rather the touch as the belt of my jeans was unbuckled, then the jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped. Hands pulled my jeans down, then my underpants. Obediently, eager to help, wanting these remorseless captors to like me and to stop hurting me, I stepped out of the clothes.
I was naked and I was cold. I was hurting and I was frightened.
Hands touched my throat again. I whimpered softly, then realized that the warm fingers were merely untying the lacing of the bag that shrouded my head. I sensed the person take a backward step, then the bag was whipped off and, though I was instantly dazzled and though my sight was still smeared and my eyes smarting from the ammonia. I could at last see where I was and who was with me.
Facing me was Sarah Sing Tennyson. She was holding my clothes. Standing beside her was a tall and well- built man wearing a black balaclava helmet like those which the IRA favor when they are photographed by journalists. The knitted cap hid all but his eyes and his mouth. I could see he had a moustache, and that his eyes were blue, but otherwise the man’s face was utterly masked. He also wore black leather gloves, a black sweater, black shoes, and black trousers. I sensed that there was at least one other person behind me, but I dared not turn round in case they hit me.
The cellar was stone-walled and completely bare of any furnishings except a coiled garden hose that had been attached to a tap which served a metal sink fixed to one wall. The ceiling was big, suggesting a large house, while its bareness spoke of an abandoned one. The wooden stairs were to my left, climbing steeply to a closed door. The cellar was lit by a single light bulb which, though dim, had been sufficient to dazzle me in those first seconds after the hood had been removed from my eyes. The cellar floor was a screed of bare cement with a single drain in its very center, a feature which, in these circumstances, was as menacing as the garden hose.
Sarah Sing Tennyson had my clothes draped over one arm. She was also holding a pair of shears. They were tailor’s shears with black handles and steel blades a foot long.
She said nothing, but, when she was certain that the sight of the shears had captured my attention, she began to slice my clothes into shreds. She first cut the shirt, then the jersey, then my underpants, then the jeans. She worked slowly, as if to emphasise the destruction, and looked up frequently as though to make sure that I was aware of what she was doing. One by one she reduced my clothes into a pile of frayed patchwork at her feet. The sound of the shear-blades sliding against each other made a sinister metallic sibilance in the echoing cellar. The message of that hiss, and of the dumb show that ruined my clothes, was to emphasize my vulnerability. I was naked, and I had no hope of escaping without the help of my captors. They had reduced me to a shivering, frightened, naked dependant. Each slice of the blades reminded me that I was totally at the questionable mercy of Sarah Tennyson and her companions and, as if to stress that dependence, when she was done with my clothes and the last cut scrap had fluttered down to her feet, she dropped her gaze to my shrunken groin and opened the shear-blades wide so that the light slashed off the steel in a glittering angle. I felt myself shrivel even further. She smiled, my humiliation assured and complete.
“You’re going to answer some questions,” the masked man beside Sarah Sing Tennyson said suddenly, and his voice gave me the first clue as to who my abductors were for he spoke in the sour accent of Northern Ireland, so harsh and ugly compared to the seductive cadence of the southern Irish voice. “Where’s the boat?”
I had to prevaricate. Christ, but I could not just give in! “What boat?” I asked, and then I screamed, because there was not one man behind me, but two, both of them masked like the first man, and both of them had hit me at once. I fell, and this time no one tried to hold me up, but instead the man who had asked the question kicked me, then all three were working me over, using short, sharp blows that pierced and shook and terrorized me with pain. I could control neither my bowels nor my bladder and, when they had finished, I was both weeping and filthy.
Sarah Sing Tennyson had not joined in the beating, but just watched with a half-smile on her face. The three
