gun away in his belt.
‘He here yet?’ he asked.
Another voice behind me said, ‘No. What’ll we do with him?’
‘How long?’
‘Morning, probably, early.’
‘Shit.’
I looked around as best I could with my face half in the dirt. I could see white painted fences, trees and the dark shapes of buildings, one very large. I spat out the dirt and sniffed the clean country air. I groaned, thinking that they might put me on a bed if they thought I was hurt. The car door slammed and I saw the feet and legs of the car driver come into view.
‘What’s the trouble, Rex?’ he asked. He had a soft American accent, southern or something. It wasn’t the voice of a humanitarian; more a ‘kick him in the head’ voice than a ‘lay him gently on the bed’ one.
‘No trouble,’ Rex said. He was the gunman and the weapon in his belt looked like a nine-millimetre Browning, which is a lot of gun when your target is tied up like corned silverside. He pulled me up to my feet and I tried to grin at him.
‘Think you’ll need the gun, Rex?’
For an answer he hooked my feet out from under me and I fell heavily. It had been a dry winter and the ground was hard; now my shoulder hurt as well as my shin. I decided that I didn’t like Rex.
‘We’ll put him in the squash court,’ he said. He kicked me lightly in the ribs.
‘Crawl, smartarse. Over there.’
I lay still, so he kicked me again harder and I crawled. It’s hard to crawl when you’re tied up like that; things stick into you and hurt. I got a cramp in the calf after a few yards and stopped. I felt his shoe again and moved on. It wasn’t far, maybe less than a hundred yards, but my clothes were badly ripped and there was a lot of skin missing from me when I got there.
The driver and Rex had followed my progress, chatting chummily. At one point, at a pause for breath and to respond to a boot-delivered change in direction, I got a look at the driver. He wore white overalls and sported a heavy, dark beard. He was built strong and wide and looked like he could do a few useful things besides drive cars. At the end of the crawl the driver pulled out a bunch of keys and unlocked a door. Rex got hold of some shirt and flesh and pulled and pushed me over a low step; then he gave me one of those funny little kicks he was so good at and I pitched over onto a hard wooden floor.
They closed the door and it was very dark. I propped myself up against the wall and checked for serious injuries a limb at a time. I seemed to be in working order, although a lot of the normal movements hurt like hell. There were no windows in the room and I edged my way around the walls, feeling for a light switch with my head and shoulders. I found it and turned it on with my chin, but no light resulted. That was a disappointment. I squatted down again and told myself that a big house like this, and that shape had been really big, would have a master switch to turn off the light in the outbuildings. It was only natural; it wasn’t a direct strike at Hardy.
The squash court was like a coffin. The floor was made of sanded, tightly-packed boards and the walls were smooth. I tried to remember what a court looked like in the light and couldn’t. I’d never played the game, which seemed to me like a barbarity designed solely to make people sweat. I assumed there were lines painted on the floor, but there were no cupboards, no fittings, no racquets left lying about. I was wearing jeans and a denim shirt, desert boots and socks; it wasn’t cold but it felt as if it could get cold, and that’s nearly as bad. However I positioned myself it was impossible to sleep-I lost consciousness a few times, that’s all.
I watched the light seep in around the edges of the door as the morning broke. I’d been wrong about the lack of windows; there was a skylight shaded by a tree. Enough light came in to show me the lines on the floor and wall; somehow, in that grey light, the room felt even more menacing than it had in the dark. I’d said a lot of unkind things about squash in my time, and I had the nasty feeling that squash was fighting back.
Just to show some spirit and get the blood flowing, I started battering the door with my shoulders and shouting. The driver came to the door and rapped on it.
‘Shut up!’ His intonation made it worse-he didn’t really care whether I shut up or not. He said it contemptuously, and I slumped back down on the floor.
I panicked a bit then. I’d heard about a man who took two sleeping pills and some scotch when he got on a plane to London and who slept most of the way with his arm in the same poor circulation position. His arm was paralysed for a month as a result. My arms were stiff and sore behind me and I thought I was losing feeling in my hands. I battered and shouted some more, louder.
Rex opened the door. He was freshly showered and shaved; he smelled of after-shave and coffee. I hated him as much as I have ever hated anyone, which is a lot. He gestured with the gun for me to move back.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘I think my arms are paralysed. Pinched nerve or something.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I’ve lost feeling in my hands.’
I could see him thinking it over. Does it matter? he was wondering. I wondered too; if it didn’t matter that meant that my feeling things in my hands or anywhere else, wasn’t part of the plan. I tried to keep my voice calm.
‘I don’t know what you want with me. Information, I suppose. If I’m paralysed I’d just as soon be dead and I won’t tell anyone a fucking thing, whatever you do.’
‘How’re your legs?’ He was just the hired help and now he had to make decisions. Life is so unfair.
‘Sore and stiff. You put in a good boot. But it’s the arms I’m worried about.’
He looked around the room carefully. Then he nodded and took a Swiss army knife out of his pocket, the kind that has a shifting spanner and a cross-cut saw on it.
‘Lie down on your belly.’
I did and he put the muzzle of the gun in my ear while he sawed away with the knife. I screamed when my arms came free. At first I thought he’d cut me, but it was just the blood moving and a cramp gripping a muscle. But by the time I’d sat up and swivelled around, he had gone.
I moved my arms gently, massaging, stretching and bending until the feeling got back near normal. All the joints worked, the arms turned in their sockets, the elbows bent. But it took an age to get my legs free; the knots were tight and my fingers were sloppy. When I finished I had complete movement, it was 8.15 am and I had seven feet of hard, thin cord to play with.
I coiled the rope around my waist under my shirt and waited. At nine am I urinated near the door and most of it ran out. At nine-thirty there was some swearing outside and the door was unlocked. Rex was there with his trusty Browning, but the piss had produced some mud outside and he’d got it on his nice clean drill trousers.
‘You filthy bastard,’ he said.
‘What’d you expect me to do? Piss in my mouth?’
He kept the gun steady and sneaked a look down at his slacks. Dry cleaning job, definitely.
‘I oughter brain you for this.’ His face went dark with anger and he lost a good bit of the slightly overweight elegance I’d credited him with. I felt better and gave him some more.
‘It’s only piss. Shouldn’t stain if you get ‘em off quick and give ‘em a good soak. Get them off now.’.
He looked ready to explode but a voice hailed him from behind. He drew in a deep, cooling-off breath.
‘Get up. Try anything funny and I’ll shoot you.’
I got up and walked stiffly to the door; I took a long step over the puddle and gave Rex a grin. He prodded me hard in a very tender rib with the gun.
‘The house. Move!’
We tramped up a wide brick path to the house. The shapes of the previous night became identifiable buildings-a big garage, something that looked like a stable, a greenhouse. The property was a big place; the white fences ran up over a hill in one direction and the pasture flowed on uninterruptedly in another direction until it met the bush.
The house was Australian baronial, a huge affair, two-storeyed with a wide, white pillared verandah right around. There was a lot of sandstone in its construction and a good deal of timber and glass. Old timber, cedar and jarrah. It was a nineteenth-century house, a wool fortune house.
A fresh-looking Toyota Land Cruiser was parked near it; that made me check for other transportation in
