Cast Iron

Chapter eight

When Bertrand regained consciousness, he opened his eyes to disorientating darkness. Then his first awareness was of Sophie’s face next to his, her lips, her breath, her whispered words, ‘Oh, thank God. I thought they’d killed you.’ And yet it all seemed to come to him once removed, as if through gauze.

Pain followed, searing inside his head like a red-hot poker. He tried to sit up, and winced from the bruising in his midriff. Well-developed abdominal muscles were all that had saved him from serious internal injury during the repeated kicking from heavy boots.

He tried to adjust his position and reach out to Sophie, but his hands were tied behind his back. More pain. Rough plastic cord cutting into soft flesh around his wrists.

Next came the realisation that they were moving, and he heard the roar of an engine. They were in the back of a vehicle of some sort.

‘Where are we?’ he whispered in despair.

‘I don’t know.’ Sophie’s voice sounded ragged. ‘They put sacks over our heads and tied us up and threw us in here. We’ve been driving forever.’

‘Why? For God’s sake, what do these people want with us?’

‘I have no idea.’ And he could hear that she was close to tears.

He said, ‘It can only be some terrible mistake.’

He manoeuvred himself next to Sophie, so that they could at least take some comfort and warmth from one another. For a long time, then, he listened to her sobbing. Before eventually it eventually tailed away. Crying brought neither comfort nor resolution, and eventually the body abandoned its expression of fear and pain through tears. It was just too exhausting.

They almost rolled on to their sides as the vehicle swung suddenly to the right, and then the rhythm of the wheels on the road beneath them changed. A different surface, pitted and bumpy. They found themselves tossed around the empty space in the back of the van as the driver made no allowance for the change of road, dropping a gear and accelerating left and right into several successive bends. Then there was a long straight stretch before they slowed almost to a stop and turned through what must have been a narrow opening, and on to a gravel surface that crunched beneath their tyres. This was no proper road. It was peppered by potholes that the driver negotiated carefully to avoid breaking an axle.

They lurched from side to side before swinging unexpectedly on to a smoother surface and drawing abruptly to a halt. Bertrand’s heart rate increased. While he might have prayed for the discomfort of their journey to come to an end, they were at least safe as long as they kept moving. Now that they had stopped, the unknown kicked in once again, and fear returned.

‘Stick close to me,’ he whispered to Sophie. ‘Don’t let them separate us.’

He felt her lean in hard against him. But, in the same moment, doors flew open and rough hands reached in to pull them apart and drag them from the vehicle. Bertrand landed heavily on the ground and dropped involuntarily to his knees. He found himself hyperventilating, almost suffocating behind the hood they had tied over his head. He felt the air around him cooler on his skin, but none of it seemed to be reaching his lungs, and he had a sudden fear of throwing up inside the sack, choking on his own vomit.

‘Bertrand!’ he heard Sophie wailing, and he tried in vain to free himself of the hands that dragged him to his feet.

‘It’s alright, I’m still here.’

‘Shut up!’ a voice breathed in his ear.

Their captors were whispering to one another in the dark, and he had the clear impression that there were more than just two of them now. Someone held him by the collar and propelled him forward until he nearly tripped on the first of a flight of steps. He staggered up them, uncertain when they would come to an end. But there were only half a dozen. He tripped again on the sill of a door, then heard the whispering voices, and their footsteps and rasping breath echo all around some cavernous space.

A tiled or stone floor clattered beneath their feet, and they were led forward to a door that scraped open, and then down a flight of steps leading into a smell of damp. Bertrand shivered in the cold, fetid air. He heard light switches being thrown, and muted yellow electric light filtered through the weave of his hood. They seemed to go through a room and then into a corridor before, some ten or fifteen feet further on, they were pushed through an open doorway into an empty space.

Bertrand heard Sophie scream with fright, and then hands on his hood ripped it away to leave him blinking in the harsh light of a single electric bulb that hung from the ceiling. He screwed his eyes up and, through his pain, saw Sophie standing in the middle of the room, her hair tangled around a bruised face with dried blood around her lip. Her eyes were black with fear.

There were two men in the room with them. Both still wearing ski masks. One stood by the door, a baseball bat dangling from a gloved hand. The other wielded a box cutter, and for a moment Bertrand thought the man was going to slash him with it. Instead, he turned Bertrand around before cutting his wrists free. The rush of blood back into his hands was almost as painful as the cut of the cord. The man pushed Bertrand towards the back wall, then turned to free Sophie. She stumbled to clutch the young man who had proposed marriage to her only two hours before, and he felt the trembling in the fingers that grabbed him. Her handbag and his shoulder bag lay in the middle of the room, on a dusty concrete floor.

The masked men turned and left without a word. The door slammed shut. A heavy, panelled wooden door. And they heard a bolt slide into place and a key turn in the lock. Footsteps receded down the corridor. Another door banged, and then there was silence.

For several long moments, Bertrand and Sophie stood holding each other, bodies trembling, breathing in short, tremulous bursts. Confusion and disorientation and fear breeding inertia.

‘You okay?’ he whispered finally, not quite sure why he was whispering.

‘Oh, sure,’ she said. ‘Never felt better.’

And Bertrand almost smiled. Battered and bruised and deeply distressed, Sophie was still possessed of the withering sarcasm he knew she’d inherited from her father.

He cast his eyes around the room, but there wasn’t much to see. Naked walls, painted a pale hospital green and scarred by the years. A concrete floor. And high up on the wall opposite the door, a window big enough for a man to crawl through, but too high to reach, and barred on the outside. The glass was caked with grime and it was well-nigh impossible to see beyond it.

In the corner lay a worn-looking mattress with a couple of grey woollen blankets folded one on top of the other. Bertrand’s spirits dipped even lower. They were clearly expected to sleep here, and the provision of a mattress suggested that it was going to be for more than just one night.

‘What the hell do these people want with us?’ he said, abandoning his whisper, and his voice seemed inordinately loud in the confined space of the room which had become their prison.

But if Sophie heard, she wasn’t listening. She detached herself suddenly from him and dropped to her knees in the middle of the room, grabbing her handbag and rifling through it in an almost hysterical frenzy. ‘Shit!’ She threw it aside and grabbed Bertrand’s shoulder bag. But she chucked it away after the briefest of searches. ‘They’ve taken our phones!’

Which came as no real surprise to Bertrand. Their captors would hardly have gone to all the trouble of kidnapping them and bringing them here, only to leave them with phones to call for help. There was a sickening sense of professionalism about the whole thing, and he slid down the wall to sit on the floor, pulling his knees up to his chest and folding his arms around his shins in despair.