Cast Iron

Chapter seventeen

The tracks of Sophie’s tears stained her face. The light was starting to fade on their third full day of incarceration and her sense of hopelessness was absolute. Both she and Bertrand had lost any and all control of their lives. Already the days were beginning to blur, losing shape and reason.

Bertrand looked terrible. She had done her best to clean the blood from his face, but smears of it had dried brown on his stubbled cheek and around his mouth. His shirt was covered in it. Yet more of it had dried solid in his nasal passages, making it hard for him to talk, and he was convinced that his nose was broken. His pain had morphed to a dull ache and then to numbness, and he had spent much of today sleeping.

He lay with his head in her lap, as she sat with her back to the wall, listening to him slow-steady breathing through his mouth.

At least their captors had relented and started bringing them food once more. Yoghurt, bread, coffee. Sophie had already decided that if she ever got out of here she would never consume any of these three things ever again.

While Bertrand dozed, and in between spells of self-pity and tears, Sophie had thought a lot about their situation. Bertrand had acted impulsively and alone in attacking the bringer of the food yesterday, driven by anger and frustration. Sophie had been taken as much by surprise as the man he attacked. Frozen by shock and fear and unable to help. If only they had discussed it in advance, thought it through, had a plan, the outcome might have been different.

And now, it seemed to her, it was no longer possible for them simply to sit and await the unfolding of events which appeared less and less likely to end well. It was time to become proactive. To do something before they both lost the will to resist.

She looked down into her lap and saw that Bertrand was looking up at her. She had no idea how long he had been awake.

‘What time is it?’ he said.

She shrugged. How could she know? They had taken their watches. ‘Late,’ she said. ‘It’ll be dark soon.’ She paused, and lowered her voice. ‘We’ve got to try and get out of here.’

He nodded. ‘I know.’ Stiffly, he pulled himself up into a sitting position. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘For not doing a better job of protecting you.’

She felt the temptation to weep again, but instead wrapped her arms around him and held him close. ‘We’ll do it together this time,’ she whispered. ‘I feel like doing these fucking people some damage.’

‘Me, too.’ He untangled himself from Sophie and got to his feet, stretching sore muscles and aching joints. It was important that he was both physically and mentally alert. ‘I can take either of them, one on one,’ he said. ‘But not both at the same time.’

‘What about your face?’

He grimaced painfully in a grotesque parody of a smile. ‘They can’t do much more damage to it than they already have.’

‘No, I mean... are you fit for it?’

He flexed his fingers and balled them into fists at his side. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘And what are we going to do if we get out? We’ve no idea where we are.’

‘Well, let’s get a look at the lie of the land, then.’

Sophie pulled herself to her feet, frowning. ‘How?’

‘If I lace my fingers together into a stirrup, you can step into it and I’ll hoist you up to take a look out of the window. But we’d better do it quick, before it gets dark.’ He crouched, making his stirrup, and she put one foot carefully into it, pushing up as he straightened his legs, and sliding up the wall to clutch the window frame and peer outside.

The glass was very nearly opaque with dirt and mud spatter, but Sophie could see enough through the external bars to realise that the window was only just above ground level. There was a gravel path beyond it, then an overgrown grassy bank rising into deciduous woods that seemed to stretch away into darkness. She could see a very tall pine tree on the edge of the woods, reaching high above the other trees, almost opposite the window.

When Bertrand lowered her to the floor she told him what she had seen, but in truth it gave them very little idea of where they actually were, and how far beyond the trees they might have to go to reach safety. If they got out.

‘This is some kind of big house,’ Bertrand said. ‘Did you notice how cold it was when we arrived? Didn’t feel like anyone lived here.’

Sophie nodded. ‘And we’re in the basement.’ Then she lowered her head, shaking it, and felt tears welling up again. ‘But what’s the point? We know all this. We’ve been through it a hundred times. None of it means anything if we can’t get past those two men at the door.’

‘We can do that,’ Bertrand said, his voice gently insistent. ‘If we work together. But we have to be fast. I can grab the first guy. But I can only hold him for a moment. You’ll have to disable him and free me up to go for the second guy. They won’t be expecting it, so we should have surprise on our side.’

Sophie took a deep breath and lifted her head. ‘You’re right. My papa always says you’ll never achieve anything if you can’t visualise it.’ She forced a laugh. Then, with her strongest Scottish accent, in parody of her papa, she said, ‘If you can’t see yourself sitting at the head of the table in the boardroom you’ll never be chairman of the company.’

Bertrand managed a smile. ‘If that’s what you want to be.’

‘No, but he’s right. How can we be free if we can’t picture it happening?’ She looked at him. ‘How do I disable him?’

Bertrand shrugged. ‘Fingers in his eyes.’

But she shook her head. ‘He’ll be bucking and fighting against you. No way I can guarantee to get his eyes. Better a swift, hard kick in the balls. I hear that men don’t much care for that.’

Bertrand grinned now. This was more like the old Sophie. ‘Okay. So, I’ll bang on the door and ask to go to the toilet. When they open the door I’ll grab the first guy, back into the wall in the corridor and turn him towards you. You’ll have one chance before the other guy’s on us.’

The full enormity of what they were planning struck her suddenly, and she experienced a sharp, stabbing fear. It was madness. They could never do it. But she made herself close her eyes and visualise the alternative. Do nothing and meekly accept whatever fate these people have in store for them. Not an option. She opened her eyes again and nodded. ‘What happens if only one of us gets away?’

‘If you get away,’ Bertrand said, ‘keep running and don’t look back. I can look after myself. Just bear in mind that these guys are working in shifts. There’s at least four of them, so there’ll probably be others somewhere else in the house.’

Sophie couldn’t imagine a single scenario where she would leave Bertrand here on his own. ‘And if you’re the one who gets away?’

‘I’ll come back for you.’

‘No, you won’t,’ she said, raising her voice. ‘You’ll go and you’ll get help. And then you’ll come back for me.’ Although the very idea of being left here on her own without him was almost unthinkable. It was one more scenario she absolutely wasn’t going to visualise. And the hopelessness of it all descended on her again like a black mist.

‘We should wait till it’s dark,’ Bertrand said. ‘Then, if we get out, we have a better chance of getting away.’

She nodded and they sat down on the floor, backs to the wall below the window, to watch as the last light of the day slowly faded on the wall opposite.

After a long silence Bertrand said, ‘You know we have to do this, right? We have to try. Even if we fail.’

She nodded. ‘I know.’ Though she couldn’t help wishing there was some other way. She turned to look at him. His bloody face and broken nose — and she saw the determination in his eyes. ‘I love you, Bertrand,’ she said. His dark eyes grew moist, even as she looked into them, and she knew that apart from her papa, there was no one else in this world that she would trust with her life like she trusted Bertrand.

He tore his eyes away from her and saw that the shape of the window, made by the outside light on the opposite wall, was gone. The dull burn of the single bulb overhead now filled the room with its sad electric light. And it occurred to him that this room being in darkness would help their cause. He scrambled to his feet. ‘Come on, I’ll give you a punt up. Use your sleeve to protect your hand and unscrew the bulb. If it’s dark in here they’ll not be able to see in.’

‘It’ll make them wary,’ she said, standing up to join him.

‘Yes, but if they can’t see where we are it’ll still give us the advantage.’ He crouched once more, interlacing his fingers to give her a stirrup, then slowly rose, straining to take her full weight as she reached for the bulb, one hand on his head to steady herself. He heard the scrape of metal on metal as it unscrewed, and then darkness as she jumped down clutching the bulb. He heard her smashing it on the wall, and by the last light of the day leaking in through the window above, saw her holding the jagged end of it in her hand, like a weapon.

‘I hope I get the chance to stick this in one of their faces,’ she hissed, and he could feel that the adrenalin was already pumping through her system.

He guided her to the right side of the door and stood her with her back to the wall, then took a deep breath before banging on the door and shouting. ‘Toilet!’ No point in losing the momentum of the moment.

They waited for nearly a minute, but there was no response. He banged again and kept shouting until they heard a door slamming somewhere in the house, and then footsteps in the corridor. Sophie closed her eyes and tried to control her breathing.

The footsteps stopped outside the door and there were several long seconds of silence. Then a voice. ‘What’s happened to the light?’

‘The bulb burned out,’ Bertrand said. ‘Can you hurry, please, I’m desperate.’

‘Stand back against the far wall!’ the voice came from the other side of the door, and then they heard the scrape of the key in the lock. Another moment of silence before the door was kicked in, bursting open in an explosion of dust. Bertrand stood, braced and ready, and saw the owner of the voice standing in hooded silhouette against the lit corridor behind him, a baseball bat dangling from his right hand. The shadow of his companion was cast in elongated distortion across the floor.

Bertrand leaped on him before the man’s eyes had a moment to adjust to the darkness of the room. The two of them crashed out into the corridor, Bertrand’s muscled forearm like a steel rod around his neck. The baseball bat rattled away across the concrete. Bertrand backed into the wall and Sophie stepped into the light, driving her foot hard into the man’s crotch. Bertrand felt the man’s whole body judder, and the pain that exploded from his mouth was almost palpable. Then he went limp, falling to the floor, pulling his knees up to his chest in the foetal position and rolling around, whimpering in agony.

But Bertrand had no time even to move before the second man was on him, his fist smashing into a face already bruised and swollen from the headbutt of the previous day. And the two men fell to the floor. Bertrand was almost blinded by pain. He felt a fist slamming into his gut and forcing all the air from his lungs.

Then the man’s whole body shook and went limp, becoming a dead weight on top of Bertrand. The sound of the baseball bat striking his head had made the oddest hollow sound, like wood on a leather ball. Bertrand looked up to see Sophie standing above them, before a shadow rose up behind her, enveloping her almost like a glove and pulling her down. The first man had recovered sufficiently to rejoin the fight.

Bertrand fought to drag himself out from under the man that Sophie had struck with the bat, but the blow to his head had not been enough to disable him entirely, and he was already pulling himself to his knees as Bertrand rolled free. Bertrand could see the door ahead of him at the end of the corridor. But Sophie was down, and both men were now back in the fight.

‘Run!’ Sophie screamed at him. He hesitated, and she bellowed with all her might, ‘Go! For God’s sake, go!’ And he turned and sprinted down the hall, towards the light at the end of it.

The sounds that followed him turned his blood to ice. Their wounded captors bawling with fury and venom. Sophie’s scream echoing off cold plaster walls and concrete floors. He very nearly stopped and turned back. But he knew she would be furious with him. All this would have been in vain. A painful and pointless exercise.

The door at the end of the hall opened into a room that leaked warmth and cigarette smoke out into the cold of the corridor. In the middle of the room two chairs were pushed back from a table scarred with cigarette burns and scattered with playing cards. There had been a game in progress, and a cigarette still burned in the ashtray. A kettle stood on a unit against the back wall, alongside a tray of food ready prepared to take along to the prisoners.

A door at the other side of the room opened straight on to a narrow staircase that led steeply up into darkness. Bertrand took the stairs two at a time, trying hard not to listen to the bedlam he had left in his wake. At the top, he fumbled in the dark to unlatch a door that opened into the tiled entrance hallway of what must once have been a grand manor house. Soft light burned in art deco uplighters. Wooden panelling, scarred by the years, and cream-painted walls that had seen better days.

At the far end of the hall, a rising moon was already casting colourless light through stained glass in the main door. A broad staircase rose behind him to a half landing, before dividing and leading up, left and right, to a gallery running all around the upper floor.

He didn’t stop to think, but ran for the door, feet clattering on the mosaic of tiles beneath them. Past double doors that stood open. The light of a fire flickering in a hearth. And then men’s voices shouting, and moments later, footsteps coming after him.

To his enormous relief, the front door was not locked. He threw it open and ran out into the night. Down a short flight of steps and on to a gravel driveway. Cold air caressed him like the chill touch of death, and he shivered as he ran past several vehicles parked in the drive, one of them almost certainly the van that had brought them here.

He could hear his pursuers not far behind him, but couldn’t afford to turn and look. Immediately off to his right, trees threw deep shadows in the moonlight, and he plunged off into their embrace, finding himself immediately swallowed by darkness and wild, uncultivated woodland.

Briars and tangling shrubs snagged and tore at his trousers as he crashed through the undergrowth. His lungs were bursting now, but he was driven on by fear and sheer determination, arms pumping, legs straining every sinew as he forced them forward against the pain of each stride.

He could hear and feel that he was putting distance between himself and the men who were chasing him, and in a slash of moonlight he saw a bank of ferns falling steeply away from what looked like a deer track. Below was the sound of running water, and he saw moonlight coruscating on its broken surface.

Bertrand jumped the path and slid on his backside down towards the flickering reflections below until he felt cold water break over his feet and legs, and he tipped forward, suddenly, involuntarily, into the stream. The shock of it very nearly took his breath away. It was only a foot or so deep, the bed of it littered with stones worn smooth over eons, and he got to his feet, dripping wet, and stumbled forwards toward where a large fallen boulder cast its shadow on the water. He doubled up and rolled under the overhang and into the protection of its darkness. He came to a brutally sudden, gasping halt, pressed up against wet, cold rock, and tried to hold his breath, straining to hear above the running of the water.

Voices came to him in the night. Shouting. Angry, frustrated. They had lost him, without any idea that he had gone down into the stream. He waited for several trembling minutes, listening to their voices fade into the darkness, before he crawled out from his hiding place and scrambled, warily, back up the slope to the deer path. He could hear them distantly, still shouting to one another, as they spread out further into the woods. And he turned and limped back the way he had come, like a wounded animal, cold and wet and frightened, and almost consumed by guilt at having abandoned Sophie to her fate.

Sophie lay on the cold floor, sobbing in the dark, broken pieces of light bulb beneath her. They had thrown her immediately back into the room, and she had heard the door locking and their footsteps retreating along the concrete as they set off after Bertrand.

In her heart of hearts, she had always feared that, if only one of them got away, it would be Bertrand. It had been altogether too much to hope that they would both escape. She heard in her mind the echo of her own voice screaming at him to go. And she had seen his hesitation. She knew just how painful it must have been for him to leave her, but she didn’t blame him. He was more likely to evade capture out there than she was. He was stronger, more resilient. He was their best hope.

Still, it did nothing to ameliorate the sense of total despair that gripped her. She was on her own now, and if Bertrand succeeded in getting away she feared those men would take their anger out on her.

Somewhere in the outside distance she heard men’s voices shouting, and then silence. A silence so thick and pervasive she felt she could almost touch it. She pulled herself up into a sitting position and leaned back against the wall. Looking up at the window, she could tell that there was moonlight out there, but it must have risen on the far side of the house, casting its light towards the woods, for none of it came directly into the room. Very slowly, her eyes accustomed themselves to what little light there was, until she could see her own hands trembling in front of her.

She prayed that Bertrand would get away. If they caught him, God only knew what they would do to him. She closed her eyes and thought about her father. It would be his birthday tomorrow, she remembered. And when she didn’t turn up, they were bound to realise something was wrong. And if Bertrand escaped, he could lead them back here. She wanted nothing more right now than to feel her father’s arms around her, his soft Scottish brogue, calm and reassuring as he held her, telling her that everything was going to be all right.

Then she heard rapid footsteps out in the hall, and she pulled herself up to her feet, heart pushing into her throat and nearly choking her. The key turned in the lock, and she stood, blinking painfully in the sudden glare of electric light from the corridor as the door was thrown open. There was just the one man. Still hooded. With Bertrand gone, they clearly didn’t think she posed the same threat.

He stepped into the room, and fingers of steel closed around her throat, almost lifting her off her feet. She could barely breathe, and his face came to within inches of hers, so that she could smell his sour breath through the fabric of the mask. ‘Some boyfriend, eh? Leaving you here on your own. What a fucking hero.’ He released his grip a little.

‘Yeah, well, you would know,’ she spat back at him. ‘Easy to play the big man with someone who can’t fight back.’

‘Shut your fucking mouth, bitch!’ And he took the open palm of his hand across the side of her face. A bruising, powerful slap that knocked her off her feet and sent her sprawling in the dust.

She rolled over on to her back, tears springing to her eyes, and saw his blurred figure stepping towards her. She said, ‘Guess you’re pissed off cos he got away.’ Her words and voice sounded much braver than she felt. ‘Well, he didn’t leave me. He’ll be back. With help.’

He leaned over and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her roughly to her feet. Again, he pushed his face right into hers. ‘Yeah, he probably will. But you know what? We’ll all be long gone by then. And your old man might get the message sooner than planned, but get it he will. Bitch!’ And he threw her out into the corridor.

Bertrand watched the house from the cover of the trees, acutely aware that his pursuers would likely give up the chase and come back this way very soon. One glance at the clarity of the sky overhead told him that they were nowhere near any village or conurbation. There was no light pollution of any kind, except from the moon itself, which shed its silver light across the land like frost.

The house was huge. Stone-built on three levels, and to Bertrand’s eye looked nineteenth- or early twentieth-century. It had seen better days. Most of the windows were shuttered, and creeper grew freely up the walls and into the eaves. Juliette balconies all along the first floor were balustraded by rusted wrought iron, and the walls were stained where gutters blocked by leaves had overflowed and rainwater had run down the stone.

On the other side of the driveway he could see an overgrown lawn stretching away to a separate garage sitting in the shadow of a large chestnut tree which was in the process of piling its leaves up all around it.

From behind him, in the woods, he heard voices and the sounds of men slashing their way back through the undergrowth. He knew he had to move, and that he would have to break cover, exposing himself to the glare of the moonlight and full visibility to anyone watching from the house. But he could see a light in only one window, and nobody at it. So he sprinted across the gravel, past the vehicles parked there, and ploughed through the long grass of the untended lawn, already wet with dew.

To his surprise, when he reached the garage, he found that the door was not locked, and he slipped inside.

Moonlight spilled in through windows along the far side, and he could see three vehicles of some sort, covered over with dust sheets. The place smelled damp and fusty, as if it hadn’t been in use for a long time, and, as he crossed to a heavy workbench against the near wall, dust rose up from his feet and hung in the silver light.

A toolbox lay open, some of its contents strewn across the worktop. Hammers and saws hung from hooks on the wall above it. He lifted a short crowbar, curved and forked at one end, and hefted it in his hand. It felt solid and heavy, and would make not only a good weapon, but an ideal tool with which to pry free the bars on the window to the room they had been kept in.

From the shadow of the garage, he peered out across the expanse of grass and saw his pursuers, three men, emerging from the woods and hurrying back into the house.

It had occurred to him as he crouched, shivering, in the water beneath the boulder by the stream, that he couldn’t leave Sophie here. However long it took him to find and secure help, by the time he got back, their captors would almost certainly have gone, and taken Sophie with them. He had to get her out now.

As soon as his pursuers were inside, Bertrand ran, crouching, from the shadows to the near wall of the house. An overgrown path ran around it. And he followed it quickly to the back. There were extensions here, and a couple of outbuildings, but no sign of life, and he ran past the bins and the rear entrance to the deep shadow that the moon cast on the far side of the house. Beyond lay the woods that Sophie had seen from the window.

She had described a tall pine tree that stood high above the others, and he saw it now, his marker to identify the window to the room in which they had been kept. There were several windows at path height along this side of the house, each allowing light into basement rooms. All were barred and lay in darkness. But even at a glance Bertrand could see that the bars were rusted, and corroded where their fixings were set into the wall. A simple matter to prise them free with the crowbar.

He eased his way carefully along the wall until he saw the faintest light falling out over the path from one of the windows. It was almost opposite the tall pine. This had to be it. He reached it and dropped to his knees, peering down into the semi-darkness of the room below. The door stood wide open, light from the corridor beyond lying in a long slab of yellow across the floor. He saw the mattress they had slept on for the last three nights, and their blankets lying in a tangled heap. But the room was empty.

Almost at the same moment, he heard the sound of vehicle motors starting up at the front of the house, and he cursed audibly with the realisation that he was already too late. He scrambled to his feet, clutching his crowbar, determined to do battle with however many of them he had to, and sprinted as hard as he could around to the front of the house. In time to see all three vehicles accelerating away along the drive, headlights raking the darkness, one behind the other. Sheer frustration impelled him to throw his crowbar at their retreating brake lights and bellow into the night.

But they were gone. And they had Sophie with them.

They had left almost everything behind them in their haste to leave. Certainly they weren’t taking any chances that Bertrand would return quickly with help. The room on the ground floor, where they had clearly spent much of their time, was littered with food wrappers and beer cans, and ashtrays full to overflowing. The freezer in the kitchen was stacked with frozen meals that they had been cooking in a microwave, as well as the part-baked bread they had been feeding to Sophie and Bertrand. There was at least a week’s worth of yoghurt in the fridge. So they had been planning to be here for a few more days, at least.

There was a telephone in a back room, and for a moment Bertrand’s hopes were roused. But the line was dead, and he could find nothing in the house that gave a clue as to where in the world it was.

He went down to the cellars, through the room where the men had been playing cards, and along the corridor to the open door of the place that had been his and Sophie’s prison cell. He saw blood on the floor. Fresh blood, so he knew it wasn’t his. And feelings of rage and frustration and guilt so consumed him that he could barely breathe. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he turned and ran back up the stairs, the world blurring around him.

His footfalls in the hall echoed back at him from the walls, and he felt the cold again as he ran out and down the steps to the drive. His clothes were still wet, and he realised that he felt no pain because his body was mostly numb. All he could think was that he had to get help. That somehow he had to get word to Enzo. If anyone knew what to do now, it would be Sophie’s papa.

He fell into a long, loping stride as he followed the driveway through the trees and eventually out, through an open gate, on to a narrow, single-track road. Which way to turn? He tried to think back to their arrival in the van and the sharp turn into the drive, and he turned right.

The road was in poor condition, cracked and potholed, and took a long sweep around the perimeter of woods brooding darkly behind a high deer-fence on his right. On his left, flat, open country stretched away to an unseen horizon. He could see moonlight reflecting on fragments of water.

After fifteen minutes or so, his reserves of energy were starting to exhaust themselves, and his run had slowed to a walk. There were trees on both sides now, their shadows, cast by the moon, turning the ribbon of tarmac into a river of darkness, treacherous underfoot with its crumbling and pitted surface. Before suddenly he emerged into wide-open country, and in the far distance, away to his left, saw the headlights of cars on a road. A motorway, he thought, because they were travelling fast and straight. But it was a long way away. Three, maybe four kilometres, and there was no guarantee that the road he was on would lead him to it. The only way to be sure of reaching the highway was to go cross-country.

This was rough land, once forested but now cleared and overgrown, roots and tangling creeper making progress difficult, and it didn’t take Bertrand long, after leaving the road, to realise it could take him several hours to reach the motorway.

It was less flat than it had looked, and he found himself clambering over boulders and the remains of fallen trees. Then suddenly, in his haste, he pitched forward as the ground gave way beneath his feet. For a moment he felt the unconstrained freedom of falling through the air, before his head struck something very hard and he hit the ground with such force that, in the moments before he passed out, he was completely unable to draw a breath.