Where the hell was I?
The bedroom had an en suite with a power shower. It was all very clean. I took a leak and examined myself in the mirror. I looked how I felt. Washed out and exhausted. The dressing that had been applied to my right cheek by the doctor back at the prison was no longer there. Instead, the wound now had two old-fashioned, but effective-looking, string stitches. It was the same, I discovered, on my belly and forearm wounds, which had six and ten new stitches respectively.
This was strange. I’d assumed my kidnappers, or the people they were working for, would only keep me alive if they wanted to torture me, which meant they wouldn’t be bothering to stitch my wounds or let me sleep in a comfortable bed. I’d be in some kind of basement cell somewhere chained to the wall.
So who had abducted me? And more importantly, why had they done so?
I was intrigued, but whatever the answer it could wait until after I’d had a decent shower. Showering in prison is no fun. Firstly, you can’t do it alone. In our wing, more than a hundred prisoners shared the same small shower block, and there were only certain times of the day you could use it, so it was always busy. Second, you were rationed only three tiny sachets of shower gel a week, and it was expensive to buy more, so a lot of the time you were just rinsing yourself.
But this place was different. Inside the shower unit was a full, unused bottle of some nice-looking stuff on a tray. Whoever had taken me had clearly prepared for my visit, and stitches or no stitches, I was going to take full advantage of their generosity.
Ten minutes later, warm, refreshed and a lot less groggy, I emerged into the bedroom, towelling myself, just as a voice came over an unseen intercom:
‘There are clothes in the wardrobe. Put them on.’
The voice belonged to a well-educated woman, middle-aged, with a soft Scottish burr.
Feeling suddenly self-conscious, I wrapped the towel round my waist and checked the wardrobe. There were a number of tops and jeans hanging up, and in the drawers were clean underwear and socks. There was even a pair of new trainers at the bottom. Everything fitted me too. My captor seemed to know a lot about me.
I’d barely got the last of the clothes on when there was a knock on the door. I told whoever it was to come in, but it had already opened, and in walked a man of medium height and build, dressed in casual clothes, but wearing a similar balaclava to the gunmen the previous night. Unlike them, however, he was carrying a tray containing bacon, fried eggs and beans on toast, along with cutlery and a mini-cafetière of coffee. He also didn’t appear to be armed but, even though the door was open, I didn’t contemplate making a break for it. I was too interested in the food for that. I suddenly realized I was starving, having missed the previous night’s meal, and not eaten a thing since the crap we’d been fed at lunchtime the day before. Prison food, as you’d imagine, is uniformly awful. I’d had bacon only twice in the whole time I’d been inside. The meat had been a weird grey colour, and had tasted like rubber. This stuff looked like it had been carved off the pig that very morning.
The guy put the tray down on the bed.
‘I’m assuming that means you don’t want to kill me,’ I said, unable to resist picking up a rasher with my fingers and shoving it straight in my mouth. Believe it or not, before I ended up in prison, I had good table manners.
‘Miss Lane will tell you everything,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes to take you to her.’
‘Who’s Miss Lane?’
‘The woman you work for now.’
Miss Lane was sitting at the end of the table in a dining room on the ground floor of what was a fairly spacious older house of character, the kind that costs a lot of money, when I walked in. She was dressed somewhat incongruously in a suit and not quite matching balaclava, and black leather gloves, and she had a cup of something on a saucer in front of her.
‘Miss Lane, I presume,’ I said as the guy who’d shown me in slipped back out, shutting the door behind him.
‘That’s right,’ she said in the same Scottish burr as the voice on the intercom, gesturing for me to take a seat.
I sat down at the opposite end of the table and looked round the room. It was sparsely but expensively furnished, and the dining table was a beautiful mahogany. ‘Well, you’ve gone to considerable effort and risk to get me out of prison, Miss Lane, and it doesn’t look like you want to kill me, so what is it you do want?’
‘You know who Alastair Sheridan is, don’t you?’
Alastair Sheridan was a murderer, and one I’d been hunting, and getting close to, when I was arrested. Now just turned fifty, he’d been killing young women for close to thirty years. But Sheridan was a clever man and he’d been so good at covering his tracks that he’d remained undetected. Few people in the world who weren’t involved in his crimes knew his secret. One of them had been a friend who’d worked as his lawyer, and also witnessed one of his killings, called Hugh Manning. I’d arranged for Manning to be handed over to the police after he’d gone on the run, and he’d subsequently been murdered along with four police officers at a supposedly secure location, before he could tell the world what he knew.
‘You know I know who he is,’ I said.
‘Alastair Sheridan is a threat to national security,’ said Lane.
‘I could have told you that. In fact, I tried
