Land of the Living

Land of the Living By Nicci French

To Timmy and Eve

Askews

Part One

Darkness. Darkness for a long time. Open my eyes and close, open and close. The same. Darkness inside, darkness outside.

I'd been dreaming. Tossed around in a black dark sea. Staked out on a mountain in the night. An animal I couldn't see sniffed and snuffled around me. I felt a wet nose on my skin. When you know you're dreaming you wake up. Sometimes you wake into another dream. But when you wake and nothing changes, that must be reality.

Darkness and things out there in the darkness. Pain. It was far away from her and then closer to her and then part of her. Part of me. I was filled to the brim with hot, liquid pain. Although the darkness remained, I could see the pain. Flashes of yellow and red and blue, fireworks exploding silently behind my eyes.

I started to search for something without really knowing what it was. I didn't know where it was. I didn't know what it was. Nightingale. Farthingale. It took an effort, like hauling a package out of the water of a deep dark lake. That was it. Abigail. I recognized that. My name was Abigail. Abbie. Tabbie. Abbie the Tabbie. The other name was harder. There were bits missing from my head and it seemed to have got lost among the missing bits. I remembered a class register. Auster, Bishop, Brown, Byrne, Cassini, Cole, Daley, Devereaux, Eve, Finch, Fry. No, stop. Go back. Finch. No. Devereaux. Yes, that was it. A rhyme came to me. A rhyme from long, long ago. Not Deverox like box. Nor Deveroo like shoe. But Devereaux like show. Abbie Devereaux. I clung to the name as if it was a life-ring that had been thrown to me in a stormy sea. The stormy sea was in my head mostly. Wave after wave of pain rolling in and dashing itself against the inside of my skull.

I closed my eyes again. I let my name go.

Everything was part of everything else. Everything existed at the same time as everything else. How long was it like that? Minutes. Hours. And then, like figures emerging from a fog, things resolved and separated. There was a taste of metal in my mouth and a smell of metal stinging my nostrils but the smell became a mustiness that made me think of garden sheds, tunnels, basements, cellars, damp dirty forgotten places.

I listened. Just the sound of my own breathing, unnaturally loud. I held my breath. No sound. Just the beating of my heart. Was that a noise or just the blood pumping inside my body, pushing against my ears?

I was uncomfortable. There was an ache down my back, my pelvis, my legs. I turned over. No. I didn't turn over. I didn't move. I couldn't move. I pulled up my arms as if to fend something off. No. The arms didn't move. I couldn't turn. Was I paralysed? I couldn't feel my legs. My toes. I concentrated everything on my toes. Left big toe rubbing against the toe beside. Right big toe rubbing against the toe beside. No problem. I could do it. Inside a sock. No shoe. I wasn't wearing shoes.

My fingers. I drummed them. The tips touched something rough. Cement or brick. Was this a hospital? Injured. An accident. Lying somewhere, waiting to be found. A railway accident. The wreckage of a train. Machinery on top of me. Wreckage. In a tunnel. Help coming. Heat-seeking equipment. I tried to remember the train. Couldn't remember. Or a plane. Or a car. Car more likely. Driving late at night, headlights on the windscreen, falling asleep. I knew the feeling, pinching myself to stay awake, slapping my cheeks, shouting, opening the window so the cold air hit my eyeballs. Maybe this time I failed. Veered off the road, down an embankment, rolled over, the car lost in undergrowth. When would I be reported missing? How do you look for a lost car?

I mustn't wait to be rescued. I might die of dehydration or blood loss just yards from people driving to work. I would have to move. If only I could see the way. No moon. No stars. It might only be twenty yards to safety. Up an embankment. If I could feel my toes, then I could move. Turn over first. Ignore the pain. I turned but this time I felt something hold me back. I flexed my legs and arms, tightened and loosened the muscles. There were restraints. Over my forearms and just above my elbows. My ankles and thighs. My chest. I could lift my head, as if in the feeble beginning of an attempt at a sit-up. Something else. Not just dark. It was dark but not just that. My head was covered.

Think clearly. There must be a reason for this. Think. People in prison were restrained. Not relevant. What else? Patients in hospitals can have restraints placed on them in order to prevent them harming themselves. Lying on a trolley. Restrained on a trolley prior to being wheeled in for an operation. I've been in an accident. Say, a car accident, which is most likely. Statistically. Severe but not life-threatening. Any sudden movement could cause, and the phrase came to me out of nowhere, severe internal bleeding. The patient could fall off the trolley. It's just a matter of waiting for the nurse or the anaesthetist. Perhaps I had been given the anaesthetic already. Or a pre-anaesthetic. Hence the vacancies in my brain. Strange quiet, but you do hear of people in hospitals lying around on trolleys for hours waiting for a free operating theatre.

Problems with the theory. I didn't seem to be lying on a trolley. The smell was of darkness, mildew, things that were old and decaying. All I could feel with my fingers was concrete, or stone. My body was lying on something hard. I tried to think of other possibilities. After famous disasters bodies were stored in improvised morgues. School gymnasiums. Church halls. I could have been in a disaster. The injured could have been placed wherever there was room. Restrained to prevent them injuring themselves. Would they be hooded as well? Surgeons were hooded. But not their eyes. Perhaps to prevent infection.

I raised my head again. With my chin I felt a shirt. I was wearing clothes. Yes. I could feel them on my skin. A shirt, trousers, socks. No shoes.

There were other things at the edge, clamouring to be admitted to my brain. Bad things. Restrained. In the dark. Hooded. Ridiculous. Could it be a joke? I remembered stories of students. They get you paralytic ally drunk, put you on a train at Aberdeen. You wake up in London dressed only in your underwear with a fifty-pence piece in your hand. Everyone will jump out in a minute, pull off the blindfold and shout, "April fool." We'll all laugh. But was it April? I remembered cold. Had summer been? Was summer still to come? But of course a summer had always been and there was always another summer to come.

All the alleys were blind. I had gone up them all and found nothing. Something had happened. I knew that. One possibility was that it was something funny. It didn't feel funny. Another possibility, possibility number two, was that something had happened and it was in the process of being officially dealt with. The hood or bandage, yes, very possibly a bandage. That was a thought. I might have received a head wound, eye or ear damage and my entire head was bandaged and hooded for my own protection. They would be removed. There would be some stinging. The cheery face of a nurse. A doctor frowning at me. Don't worry, nothing to worry about. That's what they'd say. Call me 'dear'.

There were other possibilities. Bad ones. I thought of the stone under my fingers. The damp air, like a cave. Until now, there had been only the pain and also the mess of my thoughts, but now there was something else. Fear in my chest like sludge. I made a sound. A low groan. I was able to speak. I didn't know who to call or what to say. I shouted more loudly. I thought the echoing or harshness of the sound might tell me something about where I was but it was muffled by my hood. I shouted again so that my throat hurt.

Now there was a movement nearby. Smells. Sweat and scent. A sound of breathing, somebody scrambling. Now my mouth was full of cloth. I couldn't breathe. Only through my nose. Something tied hard around my face. Breath on me, hot on my cheek, and then, out of the darkness, a voice, little more than a whisper, hoarse, strained, thick so I could barely make it out.

"No," it said. "Make another sound and I'll block your nose as well."

I was gagging on the cloth. It filled my mouth, bulged in my cheeks, rubbed against my gums. The taste of grease and rancid cabbage filled my throat. A spasm jerked my body, nausea rising through me like damp. I mustn't be sick. I tried to take a breath, tried to gasp through the cloth but I couldn't. I couldn't. I was all stopped up. I tugged with my arms and my ankles against the restraints and tried to take a breath and it was as if my whole body was twitching and shuddering on the rough stone floor and no air inside me, just violent space and red behind my bulging eyes and a heart that was jolting up through my throat and a strange dry sound coming from me, like a cough that wouldn't form. I was a dying fish. A fish thrashing on the hard floor. I was hooked and tied down, but inside me I was coming loose, all my innards tearing apart. Is this what it's like? To die? To be buried alive.

I had to breathe. How do you breathe? Through your nose. He'd said so. The voice had said he'd block my nose next. Breathe through my nose. Breathe now. I couldn't take enough air in that way. I couldn't stop myself trying to gasp, trying to fill myself up with air. My tongue was too big to fit in the tiny space left in my mouth. It kept pushing against the cloth. I felt my body buck again. Breathe slowly. Calmly. In and out, in and out. Breathe like that until there's nothing except the sense of it. This is how to keep alive. Breathe. Thick, musty air in my nostrils, oily rottenness running down my throat. I tried not to swallow but then I had to and again biliousness flowed through me, filled my mouth. I couldn't bear it. I could bear it, I could, I could, I could.

Breathe in and out, Abbie. Abbie. I am Abbie. Abigail Devereaux. In and out. Don't think. Breathe. You are alive.

The pain inside my skull rolled back. I lifted my head a bit and the pain surged towards my eyes. I blinked my eyes and it was the same deep darkness when they were open and when they were closed. My eyelashes scraped against the hood. I was cold. I could feel that now. My feet were chilly inside the socks. Were they my socks? They felt too big and rough; unfamiliar. My left calf ached. I tried to flex my leg muscles to get rid of the crampy feeling. There was an itch on my cheek, under the hood. I lay there for a few seconds, concentrating only on the itch, then I turned my head and tried to rub the itch against a hunched shoulder. No good. So I squirmed until I could scrape my face along the floor.

And I was damp. Between my legs and under my thighs, stinging my skin beneath my trousers. Were they my trousers? I was lying in my own piss, in the dark, in a hood, tied down, gagged. Breathe in and out, I told myself. Breathe in and out all the time. Try to let thoughts out slowly, bit by bit, so you don't drown in them. I felt the pressure of the fears dammed up inside me, and my body was a fragile, cracking shell full of pounding waters. I made myself think only of breathing, in and out of my nostrils. In and out.

Someone a man, the man who had pushed this cloth into my mouth had put me in this place. He had taken me, strapped me down. I was his prisoner. Why? I couldn't think about that yet. I listened for a sound, any sound except the sound of my breath and the sound of my heart and, when I moved, the rasp of my hands or feet against the rough floor. Perhaps he was here with me, in the room, crouching somewhere. But there was no other sound. For the moment I was alone. I lay there. I listened to my heart. Silence pressed down on me.

An image flitted through my head. A yellow butterfly on a leaf, wings quivering. It was like a sudden ray of light. Was it something I was remembering, a moment rescued out of the past and stored away till now? Or was it just my brain throwing up a picture, some kind of reflex, a short circuit?

A man had tied me in a dark place. He must have snatched me and taken me here. But I had no memory of that happening. I scrabbled in my brain, but it was blank an empty room, an abandoned house, no echoes. Nothing. I could remember nothing. A sob rose in my throat. I mustn't cry. I must think, but carefully now, hold back the fear. I must not go deep down. I must stay on the surface. Just think of what I know. Facts. Slowly I will make up a picture and then I'll be able to look at it.

My name is Abigail; Abbie. I am twenty-five years old, and I live with my boyfriend, Terry, Terence Wilmott, in a poky flat on Westcott Road. That's it: Terry. Terry will be worried. He will phone the police. Hell tell them I have gone missing. They'll drive here with flashing lights and wailing sirens and hammer down the door and light and air will come flooding in. No, just facts. I work at Jay and Joiner's, designing office interiors. I have a desk, with a white and blue lap-top computer, a small grey phone, a pile of paper, an oval ashtray full of paperclips and elastic bands.

When was I last there? It seemed impossibly far off, like a dream that disappears when you try to hold on to it; like someone else's life. I couldn't remember. How long had I lain here? An hour, or a day, or a week? It was January, I knew that at least, I thought I knew that. Outside, it was cold and the days were short. Maybe it had snowed. No, I mustn't think of things like snow, sunlight on white. Stick only to what I knew: January, but I couldn't tell if it was day or night. Or perhaps it was February now. I tried to think of the last day I clearly remembered, but it was like looking into a thick fog, with indistinct shapes looming.

Start with New Year's Eve, dancing with friends and everyone kissing each other on the stroke of midnight. Kissing people on the lips, people I knew well and people I'd met a few times and strangers who came up to me with arms open and an expectant smile because kissing is what you do on New Year's Eve. Don't think of all that, though. After New Year's Eve, then, yes, there were days that stirred in my mind. The office, phones ringing, expense forms in my in-tray. Cups of cooling bitter coffee. But maybe that was before, not after. Or before and after, day after day. Everything was blurred and without meaning.

I tried to shift. My toes felt stiff with cold and my neck ached and my head banged. The taste in my mouth was foul. Why was I here and what was going to happen to me? I was laid out on my back like a sacrifice, arms and legs pinned down. Dread ran through me. He could starve me. He could rape me. He could torture me. He could kill me. Maybe he had already raped me. I pressed myself against the floor and whimpered deep down in my throat. Two tears escaped from my eyes and I felt them tickle and sting as they ran down towards my ears.

Don't cry, Abbie. You mustn't cry.

Think of the butterfly, which means nothing but which is beautiful. I pictured the yellow butterfly on its green leaf. I let it fill my mind, so light on the leaf it could be blown away like a feather. I heard footsteps. They were soft, as if the man was barefooted. They padded closer and stopped. There was a sound of someone breathing heavily, almost panting, as if he was climbing or scrambling towards me. I lay rigid in the silence. He was standing over me. There was a click, and even from beneath the hood I could tell he had switched on a torch. I could hardly see anything, but I could at least see through the grain of the fabric that it was no longer entirely dark. He must be standing over me and shining a torch down on my body.

"You're wet," he murmured, or maybe it sounded like a murmur through my hood. "Silly girl."

I sensed him leaning towards me. I heard him breathing and I heard my own breathing getting louder and faster. He pulled the hood up slightly and, quite gently, pulled out the cloth. I felt a fingertip on my lower lip. For a few seconds, all I could do was pant with the relief of it, pulling the air into my lungs. I heard myself say, "Thank you." My voice sounded light and feeble. "Water."

He undid the restraints on my arms and my chest, so that only my legs were tied at the ankle. He slid an arm under my neck and lifted me into a sitting position. A new kind of pain pulsed inside my skull. I didn't dare make any movements by myself. I sat passively, and let him put my arms behind my back and tie my wrists together, roughly so that the rope cut into my flesh. Was it rope? It felt harder than that, like washing line or wire.

"Open your mouth," he said in his muffled whisper. I did so. He slid a straw up the hood and between my lips. "Drink."

The water was tepid and left a stale taste in my mouth.

He put a hand on the back of my neck, and started to rub at it. I

sat rigid. I mustn't cry out. I mustn't make a sound. I mustn't be sick. His fingers pressed into my skin.

"Where do you hurt?" he said.

"Nowhere." My voice was a whisper.

"Nowhere? You wouldn't lie to me?"

Anger filled my head like a glorious roaring wind and it was stronger even than the fear. "You piece of shit," I shouted, in a mad, high-pitched voice. "Let me go, let me go, and then I'm going to kill you, you'll see'

The cloth was rammed back into my mouth.

"You're going to kill me. Good. I like that."

For a long time I concentrated on nothing but breathing. I had heard of people feeling claustrophobic in their own bodies, trapped as if in prison. They became tormented by the idea that they would never be able to escape. My life was reduced to the tiny passages of air in my nostrils. If they became blocked, I would die. That happened. People were tied up, gagged, with no intention to kill them. Just a small error in the binding the gag tied too close to the nose and they would choke and die.

I made myself breathe in one-two-three, out one-two-three. In, out. I'd seen a film once, some kind of war film, in which a super-tough soldier hid from the enemy in a river breathing just through a single straw. I was like that and the thought made my chest hurt and made me breathe in spasms. I had to calm myself. Instead of thinking of the soldier and his straw and what would have happened if the straw had become blocked, I tried to think of the water in the river, cool and calm and slow-moving and beautiful, the sun glistening on it in the morning.

In my mind, the water grew slower and slower until it was quite still. I imagined it starting to freeze, solid like glass so that you could see the fish swimming silently underneath. I couldn't stop myself. I saw myself falling through the ice, trapped underneath. I had read or heard or been told that if you fall through ice and can't find the hole, there is a thin layer of air between the ice and the water and you can lie under the ice and breathe the air. And what ii then? It might be better just to have drowned. I had always been terrified of drowning above all things, but I had read or heard or been told that drowning was in fact a pleasant way to die. I could believe it. What was unpleasant and terrifying was trying to avoid drowning. Fear is trying to avoid death. Giving yourself up to death is like falling asleep.

One-two-three, one-two-three, I was becoming calmer. Some people, probably about two per cent of the population at least, would have died already of panic or asphyxiation if they'd had done to them what I was having done to me. So I was already doing better than someone. I was alive. I was breathing.

I was lying down now, with my ankles tied and my wrists tied, my mouth gagged and a hood over my head. I wasn't tied to anything any more. I struggled into a squatting position, then very slowly stood up. Tried to stand up. My head bumped against a roof. It must be just under five foot high. I sat down again, panting with the effort.

At least I could move my body. Wriggle and hump along, like a snake in the dust. But I hardly dared. I had the sense that I was somewhere up high. When he came into the room, he was underneath me. The footsteps and his voice came from down below. He climbed to get at me.

I stretched my feet in one direction and felt only the floor. I swivelled painfully around, my T-shirt riding up and bare skin on my back scraping along the roughness beneath me. I stretched my feet. Floor. I humped forward. Slowly. Feet feeling. Then not feeling not feeling the hardness underneath. Stretched over a space, a blank. Nothing underneath. I lay down and moved forward again, bit by bit. Legs hanging over, bent at the knee. If I sat up now, I'd be sitting over a fall, a cliff. My breath juddered in my chest with panic. I started shifting backwards. My back hurt. My head crashed and banged. I kept wriggling and scraping backwards until I was pressed up against a wall.

I sat up. I pressed my bound hands against the wall. Damp coarse brick against my fingertips.

I shuffled upright along the wall in one direction, until I met the corner. Then in the other direction, my muscles burning with the effort. It must be about ten feet wide. Ten feet wide and four feet deep.

It was hard to think clearly because the pain in my head kept getting in the way. Was it a bang? A scrape? Something in my brain?

I was shivering with cold. I had to keep thinking, keep my mind busy, keep it off things. I had been kidnapped in some way. I was being held against my will. Why did kidnaps happen? To take hostages, for money or for a political reason. My total wealth, once credit card and store card debts were deducted, amounted to about two thousand pounds, half of it bound up in my rusty old car. As for politics, I was a working-environment consultant not an ambassador. But then I didn't remember anything. I could be in South America, now, or Lebanon. Except that the voice was clearly English, southern English as far as I could tell from the soft, thick whisper.

So what other reasons were there? I had argued myself towards an area where everything looked really, really bad. I felt tears bubbling up in my eyes. Calm down. Calm down. I mustn't get all snotty, blocked up.

He hadn't killed me. That was a good sign. Except it wasn't necessarily all that good a sign in the long run it might be a bad sign in a way that made me feel sick even to think about. But it was all I had. I flexed my muscles very gently. I couldn't move. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know where I'd been captured, or when, or how. Or for what reason. I couldn't see anything. I didn't even know anything about the room I was lying in. It felt damp. Maybe it was underground or in a shed. I didn't know anything about the man. Or men. Or people. He was probably close by. I didn't know if I knew him. I didn't know what he looked like.

That might be useful. If I could identify him, he might.. . Well, that might be worse. Professional kidnappers wore hoods so that the hostage never saw them. Putting a hood over my head might be the same thing, the other way round. And he was doing something to his voice, muffling it somehow, so that he didn't sound like a human at all. It might even be that he was planning to hold me for just a little while and let me go. He could dump me in some other part of London and it would be impossible for me ever to find him again. I would know nothing nothing at all. That was the first bit of remotely good news.

I had no idea how long I had been here but at the very outside it couldn't be more than three days, maybe even two. I felt dreadful but I didn't feel especially weak. I felt hungry but not ill with hunger. Maybe two days. Terry would have reported me missing. I wouldn't have turned up at work. They would phone Terry, he would be baffled. He would have tried my mobile phone. Where was that? The police might have been called within hours. By now there would be a huge hunt. Lines of people scouring wasteland. All leave cancelled. Sniffer dogs. Helicopters. Another promising thought. You can't just grab an adult off the street and hide them somewhere without creating some sort of suspicion. They would be out there, knocking at doors, marching into houses, shining torches into dark places. Any time now I'd hear them, see them. All I had to do was stay alive as long as ... Just stay alive. Stay alive.

I had shouted at him before. I'd said I'd kill him. That was the only thing I could remember having said to him, except I'd said, "Thank you," when he gave me water. I hated the fact I'd said thank you. But when I'd shouted, I'd made him angry. What were his words? "You kill me? That's a good one." Something like that. That's not promising. "You kill me?" That might seem good to him because in fact he's going to kill me.

I tried to seize some other kind of comfort. It might just seem funny to him because I was so much in his power that the idea of me getting back at him was completely ludicrous. I was taking a risk being rude to him. I'd made him angry. He could have tortured me or hit me or anything. But he hadn't done anything. That might be useful to know. He had kidnapped me, he had me tied down and I'd threatened him. It could be that if I stand up to him he feels weakened and unable to do anything to me. If I don't give in to him, that may be the best way of playing him along. He might have kidnapped a woman because he's frightened of women and this is the only way to control at least one woman. He might expect me just to be begging pathetically for my life and that would give him the control he wants. But if I don't yield, then it's not going according to his plan.

Or it might be the opposite. It might have shown nothing more than that he's in control. It doesn't matter to him what I say. He just finds it funny and is proceeding with his plan, whatever that is. Surely the point is to be as much of a flesh-and-blood person for him as possible so that he finds it harder to do anything to me. But if that is threatening to him, then it might make him angrier. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't fight, I couldn't escape. All I could do was slow him up.

What was the best way of doing that? Making him angry? Happy? Scared? I lay on the floor and stared into the stifling darkness of my hood.

There was a change of texture in the blackness around me. There was a sound and a smell. Once again there was that hoarse, croaking whisper. "I'm going to take your gag out. If you shout I'll bleed you like an animal. If you've heard and understood what I've said, nod your head."

I nodded frantically. The hands large, warm hands fiddled behind my neck. The knot was untied, the cloth pulled roughly from my mouth. As soon as I was free I coughed and coughed. A hand held my head down and I felt the straw pushed into my mouth. I sucked the water until a bubbling sound told me it was gone.

"There," he said. "There's a bucket here. Do you want to use it?"

"What do you mean?" Get him talking.

"You know. Toilet."

He was embarrassed. Was that a good sign?

"I want to go to a proper one."

"It's the bucket or you can lie in your own piss, sweetheart."

"All right."

"I'll put you by the bucket. You can feel it with your feet. I'll stand back. You try anything funny I'll cut you up. All right?"

"Yes."

There was the sound of him going down some steps, and then I felt his arms under my armpits, then as I slithered towards him, around me. Hard, strong hands. I was pressed against him. An animal smell, sweat, something else. One arm under my thighs. Nausea in my throat. Swung across and put down lightly on a rough floor, gritty. I raised myself up straight. My legs and back felt terribly sore. My hair was seized by a hand and I felt something hard against my neck.

"You know what this is?"

"No."

"It's a blade. I'm going to untie the wire holding your hands together. Try anything and I'll use it."

"I won't. I want you to leave me alone."

"It's dark. I'll step back."

I felt pressure as he freed a knot behind my back. He stepped away. For just a second I thought of trying something until I saw the absurdity of it. Partially tied up, hooded, in a dark room with a man carrying a knife.

"Go ahead," he said.

I hadn't really meant it. I just wanted to be moved. I felt my clothes. T-shirt, slacks. I couldn't do this.

"You'll have the bucket again tomorrow morning."

Tomorrow morning. Good. Some information. All right, all right. He said it was dark. I unfastened my trousers, pulled them and my knickers down and sat on the bucket. Nothing but a dribble. I stood up again, pulled the trousers up.

"Can I say something?"

"What?"

"I don't know what this is about. But you mustn't do this. You won't get away with it. You may not realize what'll happen when they find me. But you can let me go. Drive me somewhere. Turn me loose. That'll be it. I'll have been reported missing, they'll be looking for me. I know you can do what you like to me and it probably won't do me any good but you'll be caught. If you let me go, we can just go back to our lives. Otherwise, you'll be caught."

"That's what they all say. When they say anything."

"What?"

"Stand still."

"All?"

The sensation of knots being refastened. The sensation of being lifted up high, set down like a small child being put up on a high shelf. Like a doll. A dead animal.

"Stay there," he said. "Right there."

I sat there, thinking he would go away now.

"Open your mouth."

He was beside me. The rag was pushed in, another cloth tied hard around my face. I heard footsteps then felt a new pressure around my neck. Tight. I was pulled back. I could feel the wall behind my back.

"Listen," the voice said. "This is a wire looped around your neck. It goes through a loop behind you and fastens on a bolt in the wall. Understand? Nod your head."

I nodded.

"You're on a platform. Understand?"

I nodded.

"If you move, you'll slip off the ledge, the wire will throttle you and you'll die. Understand?"

I nodded.

"Good."

And there was silence. Just silence. And my heart, pounding like the sea. The wire burned my neck. I breathed, in and out, in and out.

I was standing on a wooden jetty and the lake around me was still as a mirror. Not a ripple of wind. I could see smooth pebbles far beneath me, pink and brown and grey. I bent my knees slightly and brought up my arms to dive into the cool, quiet water, and then suddenly something caught me round the neck, and I was falling with a sickening lurch but being held back at the same time, and the water disappeared, became inky darkness instead. The noose was digging into my neck. I sat up straight. For a moment I was a blank, then fear rushed in, filling all the spaces in my body. My heart was pounding and my mouth dry. Sweat ran down my forehead, under the hood, and I could feel wisps of hair sticking to my cheeks. I was clammy with fear, itchy and sticky and sour. My fear was so real now it was something I could smell.

I had fallen asleep. How could that be? How could I sleep when I was trussed up like a chicken waiting for its neck to be snapped? I'd always wondered how prisoners could sleep before the day of execution, but I'd slept. How long for? I had no idea perhaps a few minutes, nodding off on this ledge before the noose woke me; or perhaps several hours, longer. I didn't know if it was night still or morning. Time had stopped.

Except that time hadn't stopped. It was marching on. It was running out. Silence roared around my ears. Something was going to happen, and I didn't know what and I didn't know when, but I knew something was going to happen. It could be now, as soon as I stopped this thought, or it could be ages away, through the sludge of days. His words came back to me, and with them came a burning sensation in my stomach. It was as if there was an animal inside me, a scabby rodent with sharp yellow teeth eating away at me. "That's what all the others said." What did that mean? I knew what it meant. It meant that there had been others before me. They were dead and I was the next here on a ledge with a noose round my neck, and then after me after me .. .

Breathe and think. Make plans. Plans of escape were futile. All I had was my brain and the words I spoke to him when he pulled this foul rag out of my mouth. I counted in my head. Seconds into minutes into hours. Was I counting too fast or too slowly? I tried to slow down. I was thirsty and the inside of my mouth felt soft and rotten. My breath must stink by now. I needed water, ice-cold water. Gallons of clean water pulled up from a well deep in the earth. I was no longer hungry at all. Eating food would be like eating twigs or gravel. But clean cold water in a tall glass tumbler, chinking with ice, that would be good. I kept on counting. I mustn't stop.

One hour, twenty-eight minutes, thirty-three seconds. How many seconds was that altogether? I tried to continue counting while doing the sum in my head, but everything scrambled, and I lost the time and I lost the sum. Tears were rolling down my cheek.

I shuffled forward and stretched my body out as far as I could, leaning back my neck until the noose cut in just under my chin. I balanced myself on the ledge, its edge sharp in the small of my back and my lower body hanging over. The wire must be about three feet long. I was like a see-saw. I could tip backwards again, and go on sitting and waiting and counting seconds and minutes and hours, or I could tip forwards into the darkness. He would find me hanging there, the wire noose around my neck. That would be one way of beating him; beating time. It would be that easy.

I shuffled myself back into a sitting position. My whole body was trembling with the effort. I concentrated on breathing, in and out. I thought of the lake in my dream, with its still water. I thought of the river and its fish. I thought of the yellow butterfly on the green leaf. It quivered there, almost as light as the air around it. One whisper of wind would dislodge it. That's like life, I thought; my life is that fragile now.

My name is Abbie. Abigail Devereaux. Abbie. I repeated my name to myself; I tried to hear the sound out loud. But the sound quickly lost its meaning. What did it signify, to be Abbie? Nothing. Just a collection of syllables. Two syllables. Two mouthfuls of air.

"I had this dream," I said. My voice sounded hoarse and feeble, as if the noose had already damaged my windpipe. "I slept and I had this dream. Did you have a dream? Do you dream?" I'd rehearsed this sentence while waiting for him I didn't want to tell him personal things about myself, because somehow that felt risky. And I didn't want to ask him anything specific about himself, because if I knew anything about him he could never let me go. I asked about dreams, because they are intimate but abstract; they feel important but their meanings are vague, insubstantial. But now, speaking my sentence out loud with him beside me, it sounded famous.

"Sometimes. Finish your water and then you can use the bucket."

"Did you dream last night?" I persisted, though I knew it was futile. He was a few inches from me. If I put out an arm I could touch him. I resisted the sudden urge to grab hold of him and wail and howl and plead.

"You can't dream if you haven't slept."

"You didn't sleep?"

"Drink."

I took a few more sips, making the water last as long as I could. My throat was sore. It had been night, and yet he hadn't slept. What had he been doing?

"Do you have insomnia?" I tried to appear sympathetic; my voice sounded horribly artificial.

"That's crap," he said. "You work and then you sleep when you need to. Day or night. That's all."

There was a faint grainy light showing through the hood. If I lifted my head up high and peered downwards, perhaps I would see something; his outstretched legs beside mine, his hand on the ledge. I mustn't look. I mustn't see anything. I mustn't know anything. I must stay in the dark.

I did exercises. I pulled my knees up and let them down again. Fifty times. I lay down and tried to sit up. I couldn't do it. Not even once.

People in solitary confinement often went mad. I had read about that. I must have imagined briefly what it would be like, to be locked up and all alone. Sometimes they recited poetry to themselves, but I didn't know any poetry, or if I did I could remember none of it. I knew nursery rhymes. Mary had a little lamb. Hickory dickory dock. The cheery, insistent rhythm felt obscene and mad, like someone inside my sore head, tapping away. I could make up a poem. What rhymed with dark? Stark, hark, lark, park, bark. I couldn't make up poems. I'd never been able to.

I tried once more to reach back into my memory not my long memory, the memory of my life and my friends and my family, not the things that made me into who I am, the passage of time like rings in a tree trunk, not all of that, don't think of that. My recent memory, the memory that would tell me how I came to be here, now. There was nothing. A thick wall lay between me here and me there.

I recited tables inside my head. I could do the two times table, and the three, but after that I got muddled. Everything became jumbled up. I started to cry again. Silently.

I shuffled forward until I found the drop. I struggled into a sitting position. It couldn't be that high. He had stood beneath me and lifted me down. Four feet, maybe five. Not more, surely. I wriggled my feet in their bindings. I took a deep breath and shuffled forward a few inches more, so I was teetering on the edge. I would count to five, then I'd jump. One, two, three, four .. .

I heard a sound. A sound at the other end of the room. Wheezing laughter. He was watching me. Squatting in the dark like a toad, watching me writhing around pathetically on the platform. A sob rose in my chest.

"Go on, then. Jump."

I wriggled backwards.

"See what happens when you fall."

Back a bit more. Legs on the ledge now. I shifted myself back against the wall and lay slumped there. Tears rolled down my cheeks, under my hood.

"Sometimes I like watching you," he said. "You dunno, do you? When I'm here and when I'm not. I'm quiet, like."

Eyes in the darkness, watching me.

"What time is it?" "Drink your water."

"Please. Is it still morning? Or afternoon?" "That doesn't matter any more." "Can I .. . ?" "What?"

What? I didn't know. What should I ask for? "I'm just an ordinary person," I said. "I'm not good but I'm not bad either."

"Everyone has a breaking point," he said. "That's the thing."

Nobody knows what they would do, if it came to it. Nobody knows. I thought of the lake, and the river, and the yellow butterfly on the green leaf. I made myself a picture of a tree with silver bark and light green leaves. A silver birch. I put it on the top of a smooth green hill. I made a breeze to rustle through its leaves, turning them so that they glinted and shone as if there were lights among the branches. I put a small white cloud just above it. Had I ever seen a tree just like that? I couldn't remember.

"I'm very cold."

"Yes."

"Could I have a blanket? Something to cover me."

"Please."

"What?"

"You have to say please."

"Please. Please give me a blanket."

"No."

Once again I was filled with wild anger. It felt strong enough to suffocate me. I swallowed hard. Beneath the hood, I stared, blinked. I imagined him looking at me, sitting with my arms behind my back and my neck in a noose and my head in a hood. I was like one of those people you see in newspaper pictures, being led out into a square to be shot by a line of men with guns. But he couldn't see my expression beneath the hood. He didn't know what I was thinking. I made my voice expressionless.

"All right," I said.

When the time came, would he hurt me? Or was he just going to let me die bit by bit? I was no good with pain. If I was tortured, I would crack and give up any secret, I was sure of that. But this was much worse. He would be torturing me and there would be nothing I could do to stop him, no information to give. Or perhaps he would want sex. Lying on top of me in the dark, forcing me. Pull my hood off, naked face, the rag from my mouth, push in his tongue. Push in his ... I shook my head violently, and the pain in my head was almost a relief.

I had once read or heard or been told how soldiers who wanted to join the SAS were ordered to run a long distance with a heavy pack on their back. They ran and ran, and at last they arrived at the end, near to collapsing. And then they were ordered to turn round and run the distance back again. You think you can't bear any more, but you can.

There is always more in you than you think. Hidden depths. That's what I told myself. For what was my breaking point?

I was woken by slaps on my face. I didn't want to wake. What was the point? What was there to wake for? Just curl up and sleep. More slaps. Hood pulled up, the gag pulled out of my mouth.

"You awake?"

"Yes. Stop."

"I've got food. Open your mouth."

"What food?"

"What the fuck does that matter?"

"Drink first. Mouth dry."

There was muttering in the dark. Steps going away and down. That was good. A tiny victory. A minuscule bit of control. Steps came back up. The straw in my mouth. I was desperately thirsty but I also needed to rinse away the lint and fluff of the awful old rag I'd been choking on for so long.

"Open your mouth."

A metal spoon was pushed into my mouth with something soft on it. Suddenly the idea of eating something I couldn't see, pushed into my mouth by this man who was going to kill me, was so disgusting that I imagined chewing on raw human flesh. I started to retch and spit. More swearing.

"Fucking eat or I'll cut the water off for a day."

A day. That was good. He wasn't planning to kill me today.

"Wait," I said, and took several deep breaths. "All right."

The spoon scraped in a bowl. I felt it in my mouth. I licked the food and swallowed it. It was something porridgy, but blander and smoother and slightly sweet. It tasted like one of those powdery bland mushes for babies. Or it might have been one of those concoctions that is given to convalescents, the sort you buy in a chemist's. I thought of gibbering glassy-eyed people sitting in hospital beds being spoon-fed by bored nurses. I swallowed and more food was pushed into my mouth. Four spoonfuls altogether. I wasn't being fattened, just kept alive. When I was finished I sucked more water through a straw.

"Pudding?" I said.

"No."

I had an idea. An important idea.

"When did we meet?"

"What do you mean?"

"Since I woke up here, I've had the most terrible headache. Was it you? Did you hit me?"

"What are you on about? Are you fucking me around? Don't you fuck me around. I could do anything to you."

"I'm not. I don't mean anything like that. The last thing I remember .. . I'm not even sure. It's all so blurred. I can remember being at work, I can remember .. ." I was going to say 'my boyfriend' but I thought that making him jealous, if that's what it would do, might not be a good idea. "I remember my flat. Doing something in my flat. I woke up here and I've no idea how I got here or how we met. I wanted you to tell me."

There was a long pause. I almost wondered if he had gone but then there was a whinnying sound, which I realized with a shock was a wheezing laugh.

"What?" I said. "What did I say? What?"

Keep talking. Maintain communication. I was thinking all the time. Thinking, thinking. Thinking to stay alive, and thinking to stop feeling, because I knew dimly that if I allowed myself to feel I would be throwing myself off a cliff into darkness.

"I've got you," he said.

"Got me?"

"You're wearing a hood. You're not seeing my face. You're being clever. If you can make me think you never saw me, then maybe I'll let you go." Another wheezing laugh. "You think about that, do you, while you're lying there? Do you think about going back to the world?"

I felt a lurch of misery that almost made me howl. But it also made me think. So we did meet. He didn't just grab me from behind in a dark alley and hit me over the head. Do I know this man? If I saw him, would I know his face? If he spoke naturally, would I recognize his voice?

"If you don't believe me, then it doesn't matter if you tell me again, does it?"

The rag was jammed into my mouth. I was lifted down and led over to the bucket. Carried back. Dumped on the ledge. No wire. I took that to mean that he wasn't going out of the building. I felt his breath close on my face, that smell.

"You're lying in here trying to work things out. I like that. You're thinking that if you can make me believe that you can't identify me, I'll play with you for a while, then I'll let you go. You don't understand. You don't see the point. But I like it." I listened to his scraping whisper, trying to recall if the voice was in any way familiar. "They're different. Like Kelly, for example. Take Kelly." He rolled the name round in his mouth as if it was a piece of toffee. "She just cried and fucking cried all the time. Wasn't a bloody plan. Just crying. It was a bloody relief just to shut her up."

Don't cry, Abbie. Don't get on his nerves. Don't bore him.

The thought came to me out of the darkness. He's been keeping me alive. I didn't mean that he hadn't killed me. I had been in this room now for two or three or four days. You can live for weeks without food but how long can a human being survive without water? If I had just been locked in this room, unattended, I would be dead or dying by now. The water I'd gulped down had been his water. The food in my gut was his food. I was like an animal on his farm. I was his. I knew nothing about him. Outside this room, out in the world, this man was probably stupid, ugly, repulsive, a failure.

He might be too shy to talk to women, work mates might bully him. He could be the silent, weird one in the corner.

But here I was his. He was my lover and my father and my God. If he wanted to come in and quietly strangle me, he could. I had to devote every single waking second to thinking of ways to deal with him. To make him love me, or like me, or be scared of me. If he wanted to break down a woman before killing her, then I had to remain strong. If he hated women for their hostility, then I had to reassure him. If he tortured women who rejected him, then I had to ... what? Accept him? Which was the right choice? I didn't know.

Always and above all I had to stop myself believing that it probably didn't matter what I did.

I didn't count the time without the wire. It didn't seem to matter. But after a time he came back in. I felt his presence. A hand on my shoulder made me start. Was he checking I was still alive?

Two choices. I could escape in my mind. The yellow butterfly. Cool water. Water to drink, water to plunge into. I tried to re-create my world in my head. The flat. I walked through the rooms, looked at pictures on the wall, touched the carpet, named the objects on shelves. I walked around my parents' house. There were odd blanks. My father's garden shed, the drawers in Terry's desk. But still. So much in my head. So many things. In there and out there. But sometimes as I was wandering through these imaginary rooms, the floor would disappear from beneath my feet and I would fall. These mind games might be keeping me sane but I mustn't just keep sane. I must also keep alive. I must make plans. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to hurt, gouge, mash him. All I needed was an opportunity but I couldn't see any possibility of an opportunity.

I tried to imagine that he hadn't really killed anybody. He might be lying to scare me. I couldn't make myself believe it. He wasn't just making an obscene phone call. I was here, in this room. He didn't need to make up stories. I knew nothing about this man but I knew he had done this before. He had practised. He was in control.

The odds against me were bad. They were as bad as they could be. So any plan I could come up with didn't have to have a particularly good chance of success. But I couldn't think of any plan at all that had any chance of success. My only plan was to stretch it out as long as I could. But I didn't even know if I was stretching it out. I had a horrible feeling another horrible feeling, all my feelings were horrible that this was all on his timetable. All talk, all my feeble plans and strategies, was just noise in his ear like a mosquito buzzing around his head. When he was ready, he would slap it.

"Why do you do this?" "What?"

"Why me? What have I done to you?" A wheezing laugh. A rag stuffed in my mouth.

More knee pull-ups. I couldn't do more than sixteen. I was getting worse. My legs hurt. My arms ached.

Why me? I tried to stop myself asking the question but I couldn't. I've seen pictures of murdered women, in newspapers and on TV. But not murdered. Hardly ever. No. I'd seen them when they thought their lives were going to be ordinary. I suppose that when the families give the photos to the TV companies they choose the prettiest, smiliest pictures. They're probably from high-school yearbooks most of the time. But they're blown up larger than they were meant to be. It gives them a slightly blurry, creepy feel. They don't know what's going to happen to them and we do. We're not like them.

I couldn't believe that I was going to be one of them. Terry would go through my stuff and find a picture. Probably that stupid one I got for my passport last year in which I look as if I've got something trapped in one of my eyes and I'm smelling a bad smell simultaneously. He'll give it to the police and they'll blow it up so it looks all blurry and I'll be famous for being dead and it's so unfair.

I went through the unlucky women I knew. There was Sadie, who was left a month before Christmas by her boyfriend when she was nearly eight months pregnant. Marie has been in and out of hospital for her chemotherapy and has been wearing a headscarf. Pauline and Liz were made redundant from the firm when Laurence did the belt-tightening the year before last. He told them on a Friday evening when everybody had left, and when we came in on Monday morning they were gone. Even six months later Liz was still crying about it. They're all luckier than me. And some time in the next few days they'll know it. They'll hear about it and they'll each become mini-celebrities in their own right. They'll be saying to acquaintances, colleagues at work, with excitement covered with a thin layer of deepest sympathy, "You know that woman, Abbie Devereaux, the one in the papers? I knew her. I can't believe it." And they'll all be shocked and they'll all tell themselves secretly that they might have had their problems but at least they weren't Abbie Devereaux. Thank God that the lightning had struck her and not them.

But I am Abbie Devereaux and it's not fair.

He came in and slipped the wire around my throat. I was going to count this time. I'd been thinking about this, planning it. How would I stop myself losing count? I worked out a plan. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. That's 3,600 seconds. I would imagine walking up a hill in a town beginning with A. A hill with 3,600 houses and I would count the houses as I walked past them. I couldn't think of a town beginning with A, though. Yes, Aberdeen. I walked up the hill in Aberdeen. One, two, three, four .. . When I got to the top of the hill in Aberdeen, I began again in Bristol. Then Cardiff, then Dublin, Eastbourne, Folkestone and then, when I was half-way up the hill in Gillingham, he was back in the room, the wire was slipped off my neck. Six and a half hours.

If you are in a hole, stop digging. A stitch in time saves nine. Don't cross a bridge till you come to it. Don't burn your bridges. Was that right, two sets of bridges? What else? Think, think, think. No use crying over spilt milk. Look before you leap. Too many cooks spoil the broth and many hands make light work and don't put all your eggs in one basket and birds of a feather flock together and one swallow doesn't make a summer. Red sky at night, shepherd's delight. My delight. But red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning. How many roads must a man walk down, before .. . ? No, that was something else. A song. A song not a saying. What was the tune? I tried to remember, to put music in my brain and to hear the sound in this dense and silent dark. No use.

Pictures were easier. A yellow butterfly on a green leaf. Don't fly away. A river, with fish in it. A lake of clear, clean water. A silver tree on a smooth hill, with its leaves furling in the breeze. What else? Nothing else. Nothing. I was too cold.

"Hello. I was hoping you would come soon."

"You haven't finished your water."

"There's no hurry, is there? There are so many things I wanted to ask you."

He made a faint guttural sound. I was shaking, but perhaps that was because I was so chilled. I couldn't imagine ever being warm again, or clean. Or free.

"I mean, here we are, two people alone in this place. We should get to know each other. Talk to each other." He said nothing. I couldn't tell if he was even listening. I drew a breath and continued: "After all, you must have chosen me for a reason. You seem like a man who has reasons, is that right? You're logical, I think. I like that. Logical' Was logical a word? It sounded all wrong.

"Go on," he said.

Go on. Good. What should I say next? There was a sore patch above my lip. I put out the tip of my tongue to touch it; it felt like a cold sore. Perhaps my whole body was breaking out in sores and blisters. "Yes. Logical. Purposely." No. Definitely the wrong word. Try again. "Purposeful. You're someone who is strong. Am I right?" There was a silence. I could hear him breathing hoarsely. "Yes. I think I'm right. Men should be strong, though many are weak. Many," I repeated. "But I think you're lonely as well. People don't recognize your hopes. No, your strengths, I meant strengths, not hopes. Are you lonely?" But it was like dropping stones into a deep well. I spoke the stupid words and they disappeared into the darkness. "Or do you like being alone?"

"Maybe."

"We all need someone to love us, though," I said. "No one can be all alone." I would do anything to survive, I thought. I'd let him hold me and fuck me and I'd even pretend I liked it. Anything, to live. "And there must have been a reason you chose me, rather than somebody else."

"Do you want to hear what I think? Eh? Do you?" He put a hand on my thigh. He rubbed his hand up and down.

"Yes. Tell me." Oh, don't let me be sick and don't let me scream out loud.

"I think you haven't got a clue what you look like at the moment." He gave his wheezy laugh. "You think you can flirt with me, eh? Trap me like that, as if I'm stupid? But you've no idea what you look like, sweetheart. You don't look like a person at all. You haven't even got a face. You look like a-a-a thing. Or an animal. And you smell, too. You smell of piss and shit." He laughed once more, and his hand on my thigh tightened until he was pinching me hard and I cried out in pain and humiliation.

"Abbie, who tried so hard," he whispered. "Kelly who cried and Abbie who tried. I can make you into a rhyme. Cried, tried, died. It's all the same to me, in the end."

Cried, tried, died. Rhymes in the dark again. Time was running out. I knew it was. I imagined an hourglass with the sand falling through it in a steady stream. If you looked at it, the sand always seemed to fall faster as it reached the end.

He was lifting me off the ledge again. My toes buzzed with pins and needles and my legs felt as if they did not belong to me any more. They were stiff, like sticks, or not like sticks, like twigs that might snap at any moment. I stumbled and lurched and he held on to my arm to keep me upright. His fingers dug into my flesh. Perhaps they were leaving bruises there, four on top and one underneath. I could tell there was a light. It was dark grey not black inside the hood. He dragged me along the floor, then said: "Sit. Bucket."

He didn't bother to untie my wrists. He tugged down my trousers himself. I felt his hands on my flesh. I didn't care. I sat. I felt the metal rim under me and behind my back. I curled my fingers round it and tried to breathe calmly. When I'd finished, I stood up and he pulled up the trousers again. They were loose on me now. I took a kick at the bucket and sent it flying. I heard it hit his legs and tip. He grunted and I launched myself blindly in the direction of the grunt, screaming as hard as I could with the rag stuffed in my mouth. It didn't sound like a scream, but a shallow croaking noise. I hurtled into him, but it was like running into a solid wall. He put up an arm to stop me and I brought up my head and butted him in the chin. Pain filled my head; there was red behind my eyes.

"Oh," he said. Then he hit me. And hit me again. He held me by the shoulder and he punched me in the stomach. "Oh, Abbie," he said.

I sat on the ledge. Where did I hurt? Everywhere. I could no longer tell which bit of me was which. Where the pain in my head stopped and the pain in my neck began; where the cold in my legs became the cold in my body; where the taste in my ulcerous mouth became the bile in my throat and the nausea in my stomach; where the sound ringing in my ears became the silence packed in around me. I tried to flex my toes but couldn't. I twisted my fingers together. Which fingers belonged to my right hand and which to my left?

I tried the times tables again. I couldn't even make it through the two times table. How was that possible? Even tiny children can do the two times table. They chanted it in class. I could hear the chanting inside my head but it didn't make any sense.

What did I know? I knew I was Abbie. I knew I was twenty-five. I knew it was winter outside. I knew other things too. Yellow and blue makes green, like the blue summer sea meeting the yellow sand. Crushed shells make sand. Melted sand makes glass; water in a glass tumbler, ice chinking. Trees make paper. Scissors, paper, stone. There are eight notes in an octave. There are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, fifty-two weeks in a year. Thirty days have September, April, June and November but I couldn't finish that one off.

I mustn't sleep. And yet I slept, falling into a shallow, muttering dream. Then I woke with a jerk because he was there beside me. There was no light this time. And no water. At first he said nothing, but I could hear him breathing. Then he began his muffled whispering in the darkness.

"Kelly. Kath. Fran. Gail. Lauren."

I sat quite still. I didn't move at all.

"Kelly. Kath. Fran. Gail. Lauren."

It was a shuffling drone. He repeated the five names over and again, and I sat there, with my head hung forward a bit as if I was still asleep. There were tears sliding over my cheeks, but he couldn't see that. They stung. I imagined them making tracks down my skin, like snail tracks. Silver.

Then he stood up and left and I went on crying silently in the dark.

"Drink."

I drank.

"Eat."

Four more spoonfuls of sweet sludge.

"Bucket."

My name is Abbie. Abigail Devereaux. Please help me, someone. Please.

Nobody will help me.

Yellow butterfly. Green leaf. Please don't fly away.

He slipped the wire around my neck almost with a kind of tenderness. For the third time, or was it the fourth?

I felt his fingers around the neck checking the position. If I was thinking about him all the time, then I must always be in his mind. What did he feel towards me? Was it a kind of love? Or was he like a farmer with a pig that must be kept penned and fed in the days before it is slaughtered? I imagined him in a day or two coming in and tightening the wire around my neck or cutting my throat as a weary duty.

When he was gone, I began counting again. I did countries this time. I walked along a hot sunny street in Australia counting the houses. It was raining as I climbed a winding medieval lane in Belgium. It was hot in Chad. Cold in Denmark. Blustery in Ecuador. Then at number 2,351 in a long, tree-lined avenue in France I heard a door close outside, footsteps. He had been away for about five hours forty minutes. A shorter time than before. He was anxious about me. Or his time away varied at random. What did it matter?

More of the gruel fed to me with a spoon. Not as much as before. I wasn't being fattened. I was being thinned while being kept alive. The bucket. Carried back to the ledge.

"You're feeling tired," he said.

"What?"

"You're not talking as much."

I decided to make the effort once more to be bright and charming and strong. It was like dragging an enormously heavy sack up a steep hill.

"Do you miss my talk?" My voice seemed to come from a long way off.

"You're fading."

"No. Not fading. Just a bit sleepy at the moment. Tired. You know how it is. Very tired. Echoes in my head." I tried to concentrate on what I was saying, but words didn't seem to fit together properly any more. "Can you cope with that?" I said, meaninglessly.

"You don't know what I can cope with. You don't know anything about me."

"There are things I know. Things I don't know, of course, more things. Most. I know you've grabbed me. But why me? I'd like to know why me. I don't know that. Soon they'll catch you. They will. I listen for footsteps. They'll rescue me."

There was his wheezy laughter beside me. I shivered. Oh, I was cold all over. Cold, dirty, aching, scared.

"It's not a joke," I said, with an effort. "They'll save me. Someone. Terry. I have a boyfriend, you know. Terence Wilmott. He'll come. I have a job. I work at Jay and Joiner's. I tell people what to do. They won't let me go." That was a mistake, to tell him things like that. I tried to force the words in a different direction. My tongue was thick and my mouth dry. "Or the police. They'll find me. You should let me go before they find me. I won't tell. I won't tell and I have nothing to tell. There is nothing to tell, after all'

"You talk too much."

"Then you talk. Talk to me now." All I knew was that he mustn't stuff my mouth with a rag and tie a wire round my throat. "What are you thinking?"

"You'd no way understand what I'm thinking, even if I told you."

"Try me. Talk to me. We could talk. Find a way out. Find a way for me to go." No, I shouldn't be saying that. Keep thoughts silent. Concentrate.

A long silence in the darkness. I thought of him sitting out there, a foul, wheezing thing.

"You want me to talk to you?"

"Yes. Can't you tell me your name? No, no, not your real name. Another name something I can call you."

"I know what you're trying to do. Do you know what you're trying to do?"

"I want to talk to you."

"No, you don't, sweetheart. You're trying to be clever. You're trying to be a clever girl. You're trying to be, like, all psychological."

"No. No."

"You reckon that you can become my friend." He chuckled. "You're tied up and you know you can't escape. You know you can't get at me. I'm in control. The only reason you're alive at this moment is because I want you to be. So you wonder what you can do. You reckon that maybe I'm a sad, lonely man and I'm scared of girls. And if only you can be all friendly with me that I'll let you go. You see, you don't understand at all."

"I just want to talk. Too much silence."

"You see, some of them just snivel. They're just like an animal that's been half run over and it's flapping around on the road and it's just waiting to be put out of its misery, to be stamped on. And others tried to bargain with me. Like Fran. She said she'd do anything I wanted if I let her go. As if she had anything to bargain with. What do you think of that?"

I felt sick.

"I don't know."

"Gail used to pray. I heard her when I took the gag off. Didn't do her any good."

"How do you know?"

"What do you mean?"

"How do you know it didn't do her any good? You don't know."

"I know, I promise you. Funny, isn't it? Some whined, some tried to be all seductive. You did a bit of that. Some prayed. Lauren, she fought and fought and never let up. Had to do her in quick. It all amounts to the same thing in the end."

I wanted to cry. I wanted to sob and sob and be held and comforted and I knew that was the one thing I must never do. Then I would be the flapping wounded animal and he would stamp on me.

"Is this real?" I said.

"What?"

"These women."

That coughing laugh.

"You'll be with them in a few days. Ask them yourself."

He went away but things seemed different. He was back again in a few minutes as if he couldn't stay away. He had thought of something else. He had inserted the gag and now he removed it again. I felt his lips near my ear, wet wool and sweet meaty oniony breath.

"One day soon," he said, 'and you won't know in advance, I'll come in here and I'll give you a piece of paper and a pen and you can write a letter. A goodbye letter. You can write to anybody you want. I'll post it. You can say anything you want, unless I don't like it. I don't want any moaning. It can be like a will if you want. You can leave your favourite teddy bear to somebody or whatever. And then when you've written the letter, I'll do the deed. Did you hear what I said? Yes or no."

"Yes."

"Good."

He pushed the gag into my mouth. He was gone.

I wondered what Gail had prayed for. Did I love life as much as those other women? Kelly, who cried for her lost life. Fran, who desperately offered herself. Lauren who fought. Gail who prayed. For what? Maybe just for peace. For release. I doubted that I was as good as Gail. If I prayed, it wouldn't be for peace. I would pray for a gun and my hands untied. Or a knife. Or a stone. Or a nail. Anything to do damage.

A last letter. No last meal but a last letter. Who would I write to? Terry? What would I say? If you find someone else, be better to them than you were to me. Not exactly. To my parents? I imagined writing a noble letter full of wise thoughts about life that would make everybody feel better. When somebody dies it's important for the people who knew them to find ways of comforting themselves. She didn't suffer. Or, she did suffer, but at least it's over and she is at rest. Or, she showed her spirit to the end. That might make people feel better. Good old Abbie, she managed to crack a few jokes even when she was about to be murdered. What a lesson to us all. What a fucking lesson to us all in how to deal with the problem of being murdered. Pay attention, children. If ever you're captured by a psychopath and he's about to kill you, here's this letter by Abigail Devereaux. That's exactly the spirit in which to be murdered. Brave and forgiving and at the same time not taking herself too seriously.

But I'm not wise and I'm not forgiving and I'm not brave and I just want it all to go away. People talk about what you would have for your last meal as if it were some little game like your desert island discs. Well, if there were a last meal I wouldn't be able to swallow it. And if there's a last letter a brilliant bit of writing to sum up my life -I won't be able to write it. I can't write a howl in the darkness.

When I was first here, all that time ago, I was tormented by the thought of ordinary people a few hundred yards or a mile away. People in a hurry somewhere, wondering what they were going to watch on TV tonight, feeling for their change, deciding what bar of chocolate to buy. Now it all seems far away. I don't belong to that world any more. I live in a cave deep down in the earth where light has never penetrated.

When I was first here I had a dream about being buried alive. It was the most frightening thing I could think of. I was shut in a dark box. I was pushing at the lid of the box but the lid couldn't be opened because above the lid was thick, heavy earth and above the earth was a stone slab. It seemed the most frightening thing that my brain could think of. Now I think of it and it doesn't seem the most frightening thing at all, because I'm already in that grave. My heart is beating, my lungs are breathing, but it doesn't really matter. I'm dead. I'm in my grave.

"Did I fight back?"

"What are you on about?"

"I don't remember. I want you to tell me. Did I come peacefully? Did you have to force me? I was banged on the head. I don't remember."

The laugh.

"Still trying that on? It's so too late for that. But if you want to play that game, all right, yeah, you did fight back. I had to smash you up a bit. You fought worse than anybody. I had to give you a few thumps, quieten you down."

"Good."

"What?"

"Nothing."

Do the knee-ups. Don't give up. One, two, three, four, five. Have to do ten. Try. Try harder. Six, seven, eight, nine. One more. Ten. Horrible sickness rising up in me. Don't give up. Breathe, in and out. Never give up.

All right, then. My last letter. It's not to anyone. Well, maybe it's to someone who doesn't exist, whom I might have met in the future. Like writing a diary. I used to write a diary when I was a teenager, but it always had this embarrassing tone. It made me into a stranger, and one I didn't particularly like. I never knew who it was for, or to.

Where was I? Yes. My letter. When did I last write a letter? I can't remember. I write lots of emails, and every so often I send postcards, you know the kind of thing, the rain is raining or the sun is shining and I'm thinking of you, here, now. But real letters, well, it's been ages. I had a friend called Sheila who went and lived in Kenya in her gap year, doing voluntary work and living in a thatched hut in a small village. I wrote her letters every so often, but I never knew if they were going to arrive, and I discovered when she came home that only a couple of them ever did. It's a strange feeling you get when you're writing to someone and not knowing if they'll ever read it. Like those times when you're talking to someone, really talking, I mean, and you turn round and they've left the room. What happens to those words and thoughts? Things that don't ever arrive.

My mouth felt horrible, full of blisters. My gums were soft and swollen. When I swallowed, it was like swallowing poison, the taste of the rag and the taste of my own decay, so I tried not to do it, but it was very hard.

I sat in the dark, I twisted my hands together. My nails had got longer. One of the facts that everyone knows is that nails go on growing after you've died, but I've heard or read or been told that's not true. It's just the skin shrinks, or something. Who told me that? I couldn't remember. There's a lot I'd forgotten. It was as if things were falling away, one by one, the things that bound me to life.

The letter. Who would I leave my things to? What have I got to leave? I don't have a house, or a flat. I've got a car that's rusty round the edges. Terry tuts when he looks at it, but in a pleased kind of way, as if he's saying, "Women!" A few clothes, not so many. Sadie can have those except she's bigger than me after having a baby. Some books. A few bits of jewellery, nothing expensive, though. Not much. They could all be sorted out in a couple of hours.

What was it like outside, I wondered. Perhaps it was sunny. I tried to picture sunlight falling on roads and houses, but it was no use. Those pictures had gone the butterfly, the lake, the river, the tree. I tried to put them in my mind, but they dissolved, wouldn't hold together. Maybe outside it was foggy instead, all the shapes shrouded. I knew it wasn't night yet. At night for six hours, five hours he put a noose round my neck and left.

I thought I heard a sound. What was it? Him, padding towards me? Was this it, then? I held my breath, but my heart pounded so fast and blood roared round my head that for a moment all I could hear was the rushing inside my own body. Could you die of fear? No, there was no one there. I was still all alone on my ledge, in the dark. It wasn't time yet. But I knew it would be soon. He watched me. He knew I was coming apart, bit by bit. That was what he wanted. I knew that was what he wanted. He wanted me to stop being me, and then he could kill me.

And I watched myself blindly in the darkness. How can the brain know that it is failing, the mind feel itself disintegrate? Is that what it is like to go mad? Is there a period of time when you know, with the bit of you that is going mad, that you're going mad? When do you give up and, with a ghastly kind of relief, let yourself fall into the abyss? I imagined a pair of hands gripping on to a ledge, hanging on, and then very slowly the fingers relax, uncurl. You fall through space and nothing can stop you.

The letter. Dear anyone, help me, help me, help me, I can't do it any more. Please. Oh, Jesus, please.

My eyes stung and prickled. My throat was sore, sorer than usual, I mean. As if there were bits of grit in it. Or glass. Maybe I was getting a cold. Then I would gradually stop being able to breathe. All blocked up.

"Drink."

I drank. Just a few sips this time.

"Eat."

Four spoonfuls of mush. I could barely swallow.

"Bucket."

I was lifted down, lifted back up. I felt like a rubbishy plastic doll. For a brief moment, I thought about writhing and kicking, but I knew he could squeeze the life out of me. I felt his hands holding me around my ribcage. He could snap me.

"Noose."

"Piece of shit," I said.

"What?"

"You. Rubbish. Piece of shit."

He hit me in the mouth. I could taste my blood. Sweet, metallic.

"Garbage," I said.

He stuffed the gag into my mouth.

Five hours perhaps, and some minutes. How many was it last time I counted? I couldn't remember any more. Then he'd come back. Perhaps he would be carrying a piece of paper and a pen. Outside, it must be dark now; probably it had been dark for hours. Perhaps there was a moon, stars. I imagined pricks of light in the black sky.

Here I was, alone inside my hood, inside my head. Here I was and nothing else seemed real any more. At first, I had not let myself think of life beyond this room, of ordinary life as it had been. I had thought that would be a way of taunting myself and going mad. Now that I wanted to remember things, I couldn't, or not properly. It was as if the sun had gone in and a storm was brewing and night was coming. It was coming.

I tried to put myself in the flat, but I couldn't. I tried to see myself at work, but I couldn't. Memories lay in gathering darkness. I remembered this, though: I remembered swimming in a loch in Scotland, I couldn't recall when, years ago, and the water was so brackish and murky that you couldn't see through it. I couldn't even see my hands clearly when I stretched them out in front of me. But when I did the crawl, I could see silver bubbles of air in the dark water. Cascading bubbles of silver air.

Why do I remember that when other memories were shutting down? The lights were going out, one by one. Soon there would be nothing left. Then he would have won.

I knew what I was going to do. I wasn't going to write any letter. I wasn't going to wait for him to come into the room with his piece of paper. It was the only power I had left. The power of not waiting for him to kill me. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. No memory, no hope. Just that. And it was perfectly simple, really. If I went on sitting here, sooner or later and probably sooner, tomorrow or the next day, I could sense the moment was near he would murder me. Any doubt of that had gone. I was quite sure that he had murdered the other women and he would do the same to me. I wasn't going to outwit him. I wasn't going to escape when he lifted me down. I wasn't going to persuade him that he should set me free after all. The police weren't going to burst into the room and rescue me. Terry wasn't going to come. Nobody was. I wasn't going to wake up one morning and discover it had all been a nightmare. I was going to die.

I told myself this at last. If I waited, he would kill me, as sure as anything was sure. I felt no hope at all. My pitiful attempts to change that had been like hurling myself against a solid wall. But if I threw myself off this ledge, the noose would hang me. That's what he had told me, and I could feel the wire round my neck if I leant forward. He must have known that I wouldn't try. Nobody in their right mind would kill themselves in order not to die.

Yet that is exactly what I was going to do. Throw myself off. Because it was the only thing left I could do. My last chance to be Abbie.

And I didn't have much time. I would have to do it before he came back, while I still could. While I had the will.

I breathed in and held my breath. Why not now, before I lost courage? I breathed out again. Because it's impossible to do it, that's why. You think: Just one more second of life. One more minute. Not now. Any time that isn't now.

And if you jump, then you're saying no more breath and no more thought; no more sleeping and knowing you'll wake, no more fear, no more hope. So, of course, you hold off, like when you climb up to the high diving board and all the time you think you can do it until you reach the top step and walk along the springy platform and look down at the turquoise water and it all seems so horribly far away and you know you can't, after all. Can't. Because it is impossible.

But then you do. Almost without knowing in advance, while in your mind you are turning round and heading back to safety, you step off and you're falling. No more waiting. No more terror. No more. And maybe in any case it would be better to die. If I'm going to die, better to kill myself.

And I do what I know I can't. I do jump. I do fall.

Terrible pain around my neck. Flashes of colour behind my eyes. A small interested corner of my brain looked on and said to itself: This is what it is like to die. The last gulps of air, the final pumps of blood before the fading into death and not existing.

The lights did fade but the pain became sharper and more localized. My neck. A scraping on a cheek. One leg felt as if it had been bent backwards. My face, my breasts, my stomach were so hard on the ground it felt for a moment as if I'd pulled the wall down with me and it was lying on top of me, weighing me down.

And I wasn't dead. I was alive.

Then a thought came into my mind like a jab of steel right through me. I wasn't tied down. He wasn't here. How long had he gone? Think. Think. This time I hadn't counted. Quite a long time. My wrists were still tied behind my back. I tugged at them. Useless. I almost sobbed. Had I done this just to lie helpless on the floor? I swore to myself that if I could do nothing else I would kill myself by smashing my head on the stone. If I had no other power, I could at least deny him that pleasure.

My body felt sore and starved into weakness. And there was a new fear. I had virtually abandoned myself to death and there had been peace in that. It had been a form of anaesthetic. But now I

had a chance. That knowledge brought feelings back into my limbs. I was able to be very, very frightened again.

I swung my body around. Now my back was resting on my tethered arms. If I could push them over my feet so they were in front of me. It was a gymnast's trick and I'm so far from being a gymnast. I raised my feet off the ground and stretched them back as if I were going to touch the ground behind my head. Now the pressure was off my wrists. I made an exploratory attempt to pull my hands round. They wouldn't go round. I pushed and pushed. No. I groaned. Then I spoke to myself. Silently. It went like this: Some time soon, in one minute or three hours or maybe five, he will come back and he will kill you. There will absolutely definitely never be another chance after this one. You know this can be done. You have seen children doing it as a game. You probably did it when you were a girl. You would cut your hands off, if that would get you out of these knots. You don't have to do that. You just have to get your hands in front of you. If it means you need the strength to dislocate your shoulders, then do it. Strain yourself. Get ready. Five, four, three, two, one.

And I pushed with all the force in my body. I thought my arms would come away from my shoulders and I pushed harder and my hands were behind my thighs. If my ankles hadn't been tied together it would have been easier. Now I was trussed up like a pig ready to have a bolt shot into its head. I made myself think of that as I pulled my knees down on to my chest, back as far as I could, and worked my hands round my feet. The muscles in my back, my neck, my arms and shoulders were screaming but suddenly my arms were in front of me and I was gasping and felt the sweat running off me.

I sat up and pulled the hood off my head with my tied hands, thinking as I did so that he would be there looking at me when I did it. I pulled the gag out of my mouth and drank air as if it were cold water. It was dark. No, not entirely dark. Very dim light. I looked at my wrists. They were secured by some sort of wire. It wasn't knotted. The ends were twisted around each other. With my teeth it was really quite easy to undo. It just took time. Ten horrible seconds for each twist and my lips were bleeding now. And then, with the last twist, it came away and my hands were free. I freed my ankles within a couple of minutes. I stood up and then fell immediately, shouting in pain. My feet felt as if they were being pumped up and were going to burst. I rubbed and scratched at my ankles until I could stand again.

I looked around. In the near darkness I could see brick walls, the dirty cement floor. There were some rough shelves, broken pallets on the floor. I could see the ledge where I had spent the past days. Then I remembered. I lifted the wire noose over my head. One end was attached to a bolt that my fall had pulled out of the wall. How lucky had I been? I felt my neck with the tips of my fingers.

I looked in the direction the man had always come from. There was a closed wooden door with no handle on the inside. I tried to grasp it with my fingers but I couldn't get any purchase. I needed something quick. On the other side of the room there was a dark doorway. I walked across and looked through it. I couldn't see anything. The idea of walking into the dark seemed horrible. The only way out I was sure of was the closed wooden door. Maybe it was the only way out. Was there any sense in getting further away from that possible means of escape?

I was panting and shivering and sweating. The beating of my heart was echoing in my ears but I tried to stop and make myself think. What could I do? I could hide somewhere in the darkness. He might think I'd gone and run out, leaving the door open. It seemed hopeless. He would probably just switch a light on and catch me straight away. I could find some weapon. I could hide by the door and really smash him when he came in. That was so tempting. Even if it failed, and it surely would fail, I would have a chance to damage him and that was what I wanted to do more than anything. I wanted to rip the flesh off his bones.

No, the best chance must be to try to get out through that door while he was away. I didn't know if the door was actually locked. I felt around on the floor for something I could use to lever it open. I touched some useless pieces of wood and then felt a strip of metal. If I could hook that on to the door, I could pull it. Or if there was a latch on the other side, then I might be able to push the strip through the crack in the door and raise it. I came close to the door and felt for the crack. I was about to slip the strip through when I heard a sound. I stopped breathing and listened. There was no doubt. I heard the rattle of a door opening, footsteps. I almost sank down on the floor in tears.

The whole idea of staying by the door and wrestling with him was just stupid. I tiptoed across the room into the awful darkness. If it were just a closed storeroom I would be trapped like an animal. I ran through into what seemed like a corridor. There were entrances on either side. Get further away. Buy myself some time. He might have to search them. I ran along to the back where there was a wall. There was a doorway on either side. I looked through the left. Nothing but dark. Through the right. There really was something. I could see a light. Up in the wall across the floor. Through some sort of glass. Behind me, far behind me in the darkness, I heard a noise, a shout, a door, footsteps, and from then on everything was like one of those nightmares in which things happen in the wrong order, in which you run as fast as you can but the ground has become like soup and you don't get anywhere, you are pursued and don't get away. I left it to some primitive, instinctive part of my brain to make the decisions and save my life. I know that I grabbed something and there was the sound of shattering glass and I was pushing myself through a gap that felt too small for me but I was through and there was a raking pain along my body and there was something wet. There was a banging noise somewhere. It was behind me. And shouting.

I ran up some steps. I could feel wind. Air. I could feel outside. There were lights in the distance. I ran and ran towards them. Running in a dream. Running past objects and not seeing what they were. Running because if I stopped I was dead. My feet, in their socks, stumbled and tripped on the cold ground. Pebbles and sharp objects bit into them. He would be fast. I had to run randomly in different directions. I wasn't able to see properly. Those days underground. The lights hurt my eyes like a flare through frosted glass. I heard my own footsteps, unnaturally loud even without shoes. Just keep on running. Don't think about where it hurts; don't think about anything. Run.

Somewhere inside me I knew that I needed to find something moving. A car. A person. I mustn't run into anywhere deserted. People. Get to people. But I couldn't run and concentrate. Mustn't stop. Mustn't. And then there it was, a light in a window. I was in a street of houses. Some were boarded up. More than boarded up. They had heavy metal grilles across the doors and windows. But there was a light. I had a moment of great lucidity. I wanted to run to the door and scream and shout and bang on it but I had this fear among all the other fears that if I did that, the person inside would turn the television up higher and he would come and find me and take me back.

So in a mad way I just pressed the doorbell and heard a chime somewhere far inside. Answer answer answer answer. I heard footsteps. Slow, quiet shuffling. Finally, after a million years, the door opened and I fell on it and through and on to the floor.

"Police. Please. Police. Please."

And even as I was lying there clawing at someone's lino, I knew it just sounded like 'please please please please please'.

Part Two

"Do you want me to make a proper statement?"

"Later," he said. "For the moment I'd just like us to talk."

I couldn't see him properly at first. He was a silhouette against the window of my hospital room. My eyes were sensitive to the glare and I had to look away. When he came closer to the bed I was able to make out his features, his short brown hair, dark eyes. He was Detective Inspector Jack Cross. He was the person I could now leave everything to. But first I had to explain it all to him. There was so much.

"I've already talked to somebody. A woman in a uniform. Jackson."

"Jackman. I know. I wanted to hear it for myself. What do you remember first?"

That was how I told the story. He asked questions and I tried to answer them and after more than an hour I answered one of his questions and he was silent and I felt I had said everything I could possibly say. He was silent for several minutes. He didn't smile at me or even look at me. I saw different expressions move across his face. Confusion, frustration, deep thought. He rubbed his eyes.

"Two more things," he said finally. "Your memory. The last thing you remember is what? Being at work? At home?"

"I'm sorry. That's all blurry. I've spent days thinking and thinking. I remember being at work. Bits of my flat. I don't have a definite last moment."

So you have no memory of encountering this man."

"No."

He took a small notebook out of a side pocket, and a pen.

"And those other names."

"Kelly. Kath. Fran. Gail. Lauren."

He wrote them down as I spoke them.

"Do you remember anything about them? A second name? Any suggestion of where he found them, what he did to them?"

"I told you everything."

He shut the notebook with a sigh and stood up. "Wait," he said, and walked away.

I'd already become used to the pace of hospital life, the slow motion with long pauses in between, so I was surprised when barely five minutes later the detective returned with an older man, dressed in an immaculate pin-striped suit. A white handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket. He picked up the clipboard on the end of my bed as if it was all a bit boring. He didn't ask me how I felt. But he looked at me as if I were something he had stumbled over.

"This is Dr. Richard Burns," said DI Cross. "He's in charge of your case. We're going to move you. You're going to have a room of your own. With a TV."

Dr. Burns replaced the clipboard. He took off his spectacles.

"Miss Devereaux," he said. "We're all going to be rather busy with you."

The cold air hit me in the face, as if someone had slapped me. I gasped and my breath plumed up in the air. My eyes stung with the cold glare of light.

"It's all right," said Jack Cross. "You can get back into the car if you want."

"I like it." I tipped my head back and breathed in deeply. The sky was completely blue, not even a wisp of cloud, and the sun was a washed-out disc, casting no heat. Everything sparkled with frost. Dirty old London looked wonderful.

We were in a street of terraced houses. Most of them were boarded up with planks, some had metal grilles across their entrances and windows. The small front gardens were thick with nettles and brambles and rubbish.

"It was here, wasn't it?"

"Number forty-two," said Cross, pointing across the street. "This is where you fetched up and scared Tony Russell half to death. You remember this at least?"

"It's all a bit of a daze," I said. "I was in a blind panic. I thought he was right behind me. I was running as randomly as possible to shake him off."

I looked across at the house. It hardly looked less abandoned than the rest of the street. Cross leant back into the car and retrieved an anorak. I was dressed in a strange assemblage of other people's clothing that had been found for me in the hospital. I tried not to think of the women who might have worn them before. Cross's manner was affable and relaxed. We might have been strolling to a pub.

"I hoped we could retrace your footsteps," he said. "Which direction did you come from?"

That was easy. I pointed down the street, away from where we'd come.

"That makes sense," he said. "Let's go there, then."

We walked down the street.

"That man I said," I said. "The one in number forty-two."

"Russell," said Cross. "Tony Russell."

"Did he see him?"

"He's not much of a witness," said Cross, 'old Tony Russell. In any case, he slammed the door shut and dialled 999."

At the end of the street I expected more rows of terraced houses but instead we were faced with one corner of a huge, almost completely derelict housing estate whose windows were smashed and doors boarded up. There were two archway entrances immediately ahead and others further down.

"What's this?" I said.

"The Browning estate," said Cross.

"Does anybody live here?"

It's due for demolition. It's been due for demolition for twenty years."

"Why?"

"Because it's a shithole."

"This must have been where I was kept."

"Do you remember?"

"I know I came from this direction." I looked up and down desperately. "I ran under one of those archways. I must have been in that estate."

"You reckon?"

"I suppose so."

"Do you remember which archway you came through?"

I walked across the road. I looked so hard that it hurt.

"They're quite similar. It was dark, I was running desperately. I'm so sorry. I'd had a hood over my eyes for days. I was almost hallucinating. I was in such a state."

Cross took a deep breath. He was obviously disappointed.

"Maybe we can narrow down the possibilities."

We walked up and down the street and into the courtyards through the archway. It was awful. I could just about see what must have been in the architect's head when he designed it. It would have been like an Italian village, piazzas, open spaces for people to sit and walk and talk. Lots of little passageways so that people could walk through and around it. But it hadn't worked out. Cross pointed out to me how the passageways had been perfect for all different kinds of concealment, for shooting up, for mugging, for getting away. He showed me where a body had been found in a skip.

I became more and more miserable. All the spaces and arcades and terraces looked the same. And in the daylight it looked like nothing I'd ever seen before. Cross was patient with me. He just waited, his hands thrust into his pockets and his breath curling up into the air. He started asking me about time instead of direction. Did I remember how long it had taken me to run from the building to Tony Russell's house? I tried to recall it. I couldn't get it to make sense. He kept trying. Five minutes? I didn't know. More? Less? I didn't know. Had I run all the way? Yes, of course I had. As fast as I could? Yes, I'd thought he might be behind me. I had run so fast that it hurt. So how far would I be able to run at top speed? I didn't know. A few minutes? I couldn't tell. It wasn't normal. I was running for my life.

Gradually the day seemed colder, greyer.

"I'm not helping, am I?" I said.

Cross seemed distracted and hardly heard me. "What?" he said.

"I wanted to do better."

"Take your time."

Jack Cross barely spoke on the short journey back to the hospital. He stared out of the window. He murmured a few routine words to the driver.

"Are you going to search the estate?" I asked.

"I wouldn't know where to start," he said. "There's over a thousand derelict flats there."

"I was underground, I think. Or in a basement. Or at least on the ground floor."

"Miss Devereaux, the Browning estate is about a quarter of a mile square. Or more. I don't have the men."

He walked back with me to my new special room. That was something, a room of my own. He stopped at the door.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought it would go better."

"Don't worry," he said, with a smile that quickly faded. "We're depending on you. You're all we've got. If there's anything else .. ."

"There's the other women Kelly, Kath, Fran, Gail and Lauren. Can't you check them out?"

Suddenly Jack Cross looked weary of it all.

"I've got someone on it. But I've got to say, it's not as simple as you think."

"What do you mean?"

"How do you imagine I can check for the names? We don't have a last name, any location, a date, even an approximate one. We have nothing. We've got a bunch of common first names."

"So what can you do?"

He shrugged.

A nurse wheeled a telephone into my room and gave me a small handful of change. I waited until she was out of the room and then fed in a twenty-pence piece.

"Mum?"

"Abigail, is that you?"

"Yes."

"Is everything all right?"

"Mum, I wanted to tell you

"I've had the most terrible time."

"Mum, I just needed to talk to you, to tell you something."

"It's the pains in my stomach. I've not been sleeping."

I paused for a moment. I took a deep breath. "I'm sorry," I said. "Have you been to the doctor?"

"I'm always going to the doctor. He gave me some pills, but he doesn't take it seriously. I've not been sleeping."

"That's awful." My hand tightened round the phone. "You couldn't come to London for the day, could you?"

"To London?"

"Yes."

"Not at the moment, Abigail. Not the way I've been feeling. I can't go anywhere."

"It's less than an hour on the train."

"And your father's not been well."

"What's wrong?"

"His usual. But why don't you come and see us? It's been ages."

"Yes."

"Give us some notice, though."

"Yes."

"I should go," she said. "I'm making a cake."

"Yes. All right."

"Ring again soon."

"Yes."

"Goodbye, then."

"Goodbye," I said. "Goodbye, Mum."

I was woken by a large machine being pushed through the door. It was a monstrous floor-cleaning machine with a revolving circular contraption and nozzles releasing soapy water. It would quite obviously have been far better to use a bucket and a mop and this machine was especially useless in the confined space of my room. It couldn't reach into the corners and it couldn't go under the bed and it didn't like tables very much so the man behind it pushed it along the few exposed spaces. He was followed by another man. This man didn't look like a cleaner or a nurse or even a doctor since he was dressed in black shoes, baggy brown trousers, a navy blue jacket that looked as if it was made out of sacking, and an open-necked checked shirt. He had wiry all-over-the-place grey hair. He was carrying a stack of files under his arm. He was trying to speak. I could see his mouth moving. But the noise of the cleaning machine drowned everything so he stood rather awkwardly by the wall until the machine had passed him and headed down the ward. He looked dubiously after it.

"One day somebody's going to check one of those machines and discover it doesn't do anything," he said.

"Who are you?" I said.

"Mulligan," he said. "Charles Mulligan. I've come to have a word with you."

I got out of the bed.

"Have you got any identification?"

"What?"

I walked past him and shouted for a passing nurse. She looked reluctant but she saw that I meant business. I said that a stranger had come into my room. There was a brief argument and she led him away to make a phone call. I went back to bed. A few minutes later the door of my room opened and the man was led back in by a more senior-looking nurse. "This man has permission to see you," she said. "He will be with you for a very short time."

She left with a suspicious glance at Charles Mulligan. He took some horn-rimmed glasses from his jacket pocket and put them on.

"That was probably sensible," he said. "It was very boring but probably sensible. What I was in the middle of saying was that Dick Burns rang me and asked me to have a word with you."

"Are you a doctor?"

He put down his files on the table and pulled a chair over towards the bed. "Is it all right if I sit down?"

"Yes."

I am a doctor. I mean, I'm qualified as a doctor. I don't spend much of my time in the hospital."

"Are you a psychiatrist? Or a psychologist?"

He gave a nervous, chopping ha-ha laugh.

"No, no, no, I'm a neurologist, really, more or less. I study the brain as if it were a thing. I work with computers and cut up mouse brains, that sort of thing. I talk to people as well, of course. When necessary."

"I'm sorry," I said. "But what are you doing here?"

"I said. Dick rang me up. Fascinating case." A sudden expression of alarm appeared on his face. "I know it was awful as well. I'm terribly sorry. But Dick asked if I could come and have a look at you. Is that all right?"

"What for?"

He rubbed his face with his hands and looked almost excessively sympathetic. "Dick told me something of what you've gone through. It's horrible. I'm sure somebody will be coming to talk to you about that. About the trauma. And all of that." His sentence had trailed off and he looked lost. Now he pushed his fingers through his curly hair. It didn't do much to straighten it. "Now, Abigail, is it all right if I call you that?" I nodded. "And call me Charlie. I'd like to talk to you about your amnesia. Do you feel up to that?" I nodded again. "Good." He gave a faint smile. He had got on to his real subject and his talk, his whole manner, was more assured. I liked that. "Now, this is the only time I'm going to behave like a real doctor, but I'd like to have a look at your head. Is that all right?" More nodding. "I looked at your notes. Plenty of bruising all over, but no particular reference to headaches, soreness on the head, that sort of thing. Is that right?"

"My very first memory, from after the bit where I lost my memory, if you know what I mean. I woke up and I had a terrible pain in my head."

"Right. Do you mind if I take some notes?" He took a mangy little notebook out of his pocket and began writing. Then he put it on the bed and leant forward. "They're going to pop you into a machine later for a quick look at your brain. But this is a different sort of examination. Do you mind?" As he said this, he leant forward and very gently touched my face and all over my head. I love my head being touched. It's my secret fetish. The main thing I love about getting my hair cut is having my hair washed by a stranger, those fingers on my scalp. Terry as well. Sometimes we'd sit in the bath together and he'd wash my hair. That's what relationships are for, little things like that. Charles Mulligan gave a little murmuring sound as his fingertips pattered over my head. I gave a little cry when he touched above my right ear. "That hurt?"

"It's just sore." He looked more closely. "Is there a problem?"

"Swollen and bruised but I can't see anything significant." He sat back. "There. That's all done." He reached over for a file. It took some rummaging to find the right one. "Now I'm going to ask you some questions. They might seem a bit silly, but bear with me. They'll take a bit of time. Are you up to it? I could come back later, or tomorrow, if you need a rest. I know you've had a hard day."

I shook my head. "I just want to do anything I can as quickly as possible."

"Great." He opened a large printed booklet. "You ready?"

"Yes."

"What's your name?"

"Is this part of the test?"

"That's sort of a philosophical question. Do you want to bear with me?"

"Abigail Elizabeth Devereaux."

"When were you born?"

"The twenty-first of August, 1976."

"What's the name of the Prime Minister?"

"Are you serious? I'm not that bad."

"I'm testing various kinds of memory. It'll get harder."

So I told him the name of the Prime Minister. I told him the day of the week and that we were in St. Anthony's Hospital. I counted backwards from twenty. I counted forwards in threes. I counted backwards from a hundred in sevens. I was rather proud of myself.

Then it started to get hard. He showed me a page of different shapes. He chatted to me for a moment about something stupid and then showed me another page of shapes. I had to remember which were on both sheets. He got a bit embarrassed as he read me a story about a boy taking a pig to the market. I had to tell it back to him. He showed me stars and triangles paired with colours, word pairs. He showed me four increasingly complicated shapes. The fourth one looked like a vandalized electricity pylon. It made me dizzy even to look at, let alone draw from memory.

"This is giving me a bloody headache," I said, as I struggled with it.

"Are you all right?" he said, with concern.

"It makes my head spin."

"I know what you mean," he said. "I get stuck at the counting backwards. Don't worry, there are just a couple more."

He started to recite sequences of numbers. Groups of three and four were a doddle. He stopped at eight, which I could just about manage. Then I had to recite the sequences backwards that really made my brain ache. After that he brought out a sheet of coloured squares. He tapped them in an order which I had to repeat. Again up to eight. And then backwards.

"Fuck," I said, when he put the sheet away.

"Yes," he said. "That's all. We're done."

"So, did I pass? Am I brain-damaged?"

He smiled cheerfully. "I don't know. I have no tests for the pre-morbid period. Sorry, that sounds grim. I mean for the period before the onset of amnesia. But I can't believe that it was much better than this. You've got a remarkably good memory. Your spatial recall in particular is excellent. I'd swap you any time."

I couldn't help blushing. "Well, thanks, um, Charlie, but.. ."

He looked serious for a moment and peered at me closely. "What do you think?" he said.

"I feel fine. I mean, I don't feel fine. I have bad dreams and I keep going over and over things in my head. But I can think clearly. It's just that gap in my memory. I keep trying and trying to remember but it's like staring into pitch darkness."

He began putting the papers back into files.

"Try looking at the boundaries," he said. "Take your image of an area of darkness. You could say that there is an area that's entirely dark and another that's entirely light. You could try concentrating on where the two areas meet."

"I've done that, Charlie. Oh, God, I've done it. There's no problem for the afterwards bit. I woke up and I was there in that place. I didn't know how I'd got there, didn't remember being grabbed. Before it's different. I can't remember the last thing I did or anything like that. There's no cut-off point. I just have vague recent memories of being at work. It was like I went into the darkness slowly without noticing."

"I see," Charles said, and wrote something more. It made me nervous when he did that.

"But isn't there something ridiculous about it? The one thing I need to remember is gone. I don't want to know who the bloody Prime Minister is. I want to remember how I was grabbed, what he looks like. What I've been thinking is, could it be something that happened that was so disturbing that I've suppressed it?"

He clicked his pen shut. When he replied it was almost as if he were trying to hide a faint smile. "And that maybe I could dangle my watch in front of your face and it would all come flooding back?"

"That would be very useful."

"Maybe," he said. "But I'm sure your amnesia is unrelated to any form of post-traumatic stress. Or indeed any psychological symptom."

"When I'm talking to Cross I mean the police it just feels so ridiculous."

"It's unfortunate and frustrating," he said. "But it's not ridiculous. Post-traumatic amnesia after a closed head injury such as yours isn't uncommon. It usually happens in car crashes. They bang their head during the smash. When they wake up after the injury they don't remember the crash, but often they don't remember the hours or even days leading up to it either."

I touched my head gently. Suddenly it felt so fragile.

"Post-traumatic," I said. "I thought you said it wasn't something psychological."

"It isn't," he said. "Psychogenic amnesia -I mean amnesia caused by psychological influences, rather than an injury to the brain is rarer in cases like yours. And also how shall I say? more dubious."

"What do you mean?"

He gave a wary cough. "I'm not a psychologist, so maybe I'm biased. But, for example, a substantial percentage of murderers claim to have no memory of committing their murders. These are not people who have received physical injuries. There could be various explanations. They are often very drunk, which can result in memory black-outs. Committing a murder is, presumably, an extremely stressful thing to do, more than almost anything else that can be imagined. That could affect memory. Some of us sceptics might also say that there is often an incentive for a murderer to claim he has no memory of what happened."

"But being kidnapped and threatened with death must be pretty bloody stressful. Couldn't that have made me forget for psychological reasons?"

"Not in my opinion, but if I were standing in court and you were a lawyer, you could get me to admit that it was possible. I'm afraid you're going to have a few other people prodding you like a lab rat to answer questions like that."

He stood up and mustered his files under his arm with some difficulty. "Abigail," he said.

"Abbie."

"Abbie. You're a fascinating case. I don't think I'm going to be able to resist coming back."

"That's all right," I said. "I seem to have lots of time on my hands. But I've got one question: is there any chance of my memory coming back?"

He paused for a moment and pulled an odd face, which must have been some sort of indication that he was thinking. "Yes, it's possible."

"Could I be hypnotized?"

Suddenly he looked shocked and rummaged in his pocket, which was a particularly awkward operation with his armful of files. He extracted a card and gave it to me. "That's got various numbers on it. If anybody comes in here and starts dangling things in front of your eyes or talking to you in a soothing voice, call me straight away."

With that he was gone, and I lay on the bed with my sore, vulnerable head. My head with a black hole in it.

"Have you talked to your boyfriend?"

I only managed to murmur something. I wasn't entirely awake and DI Cross leant closer over me in concern.

"Shall I call someone?" he asked.

"No. And, no, I haven't."

"We're having a bit of difficulty tracking him down at the moment."

"Me too," I said. "I've left three messages on the answering-machine. It'll be because of his work."

"Does he go away often?"

"He's an IT consultant, whatever that means. He's always flying off to Belgium or Australia or wherever on special projects."

"But you can't remember when you last saw him?"

"No."

"Do you want to talk to your parents?"

"No! No, please."

There was a pause. I was doing so badly. I tried to think of something I could give Cross. "Would it help if you could have a look at our flat? I'll be back there in a day or two, I guess, but there might be something there. Maybe that's where I was grabbed. I might have left a note."

Cross's blank expression barely altered. "Do you have a key you can give me?"

"As you know I've got nothing except the clothes I escaped in. But in the front garden, to the left of the front door, there are two things that look like ordinary stones. But they're these crazy mail-order gimmicks and one of them is hollowed out. Inside there's a spare key. You can use that."

"Do you have any allergies, Miss Devereaux?"

"I don't think so. I came up in hives once with some shellfish."

"Do you suffer from epilepsy?"

"No."

"Are you pregnant?"

I shook my head so hard it hurt.

It doesn't mean anything but we're legally obliged to tell you that a CAT scan can have side effects, but the likelihood is extremely small, negligible. Would you sign this consent form? Here and here."

Suddenly the nurse was sounding like an air stewardess. I thought of those demonstrations with the life jacket In the unlikely event of a landing on water.

"I don't even know what a CAT scan is," I said, as I signed.

"Don't worry. The technologist will explain it all to you in a minute."

I was led into a large, fiercely bright room. I saw the hi-tech trolley where I was going to lie, padded and concave in the middle, and, behind it, a white tunnel into the heart of the machine. It looked like a toilet bowl turned on its side.

"Ms Devereaux, my name is Jan Carlton. Won't you sit down for a minute?" A tall spindly woman in an overall gestured to a chair. "Do you know what a CAT scan is?"

"It's one of those names you hear," I said cautiously.

"We like you to be prepared. Is there anything you're unsure about?"

"Everything, really."

"It's really just an X-ray enhanced by a computer, which is in another room. Think of your body as a giant loaf of bread."

"A loaf?"

"Yes. The CAT scan looks at a particular area of your body in slices, you see, then it puts together the slices into a three-dimensional view."

"Oh, you meant a sliced loaf ?"

"It's just a comparison."

"I thought scans were for cancer."

"They are. It's just a way of looking inside the body. It's a standard procedure for anyone who has had an injury, severe headaches, trauma."

"What do I have to do?"

"We'll just pop you on the table and slide you into that thing that looks like a white doughnut. You'll hear humming, and you'll probably see the track spinning around. It won't last long at all. All you have to do is lie completely still."

I had to put on a hospital robe again. I lay down on the table and stared at the ceiling.

"This will feel a little cold."

She rubbed gel into my temples, smearing it over my newly washed hair. She slid a hard metal helmet under my skull.

"I'm tightening these screws. It might feel a bit uncomfortable." She fastened some straps over my shoulders, arms and stomach, pulling them taut. "The table is about to start moving."

"Table?" I said feebly, as I slid slowly away from her and through the tunnel. I was lying inside a metal chamber and, yes, there was that humming. I swallowed hard. It wasn't quite dark in here. I could see lines moving round above me. Out there, a few feet away, was a bright room with a competent woman in it, making sure everything was as it should be. Beyond that was another room with a computer showing pictures of my brain. Upstairs there were wards, patients, nurses, doctors, cleaners, porters, visitors, people carrying clipboards and pushing trolleys. Outside, there was a wind coming in from the east and it might well snow. And here I was, lying in a humming metal tube.

I thought that some people, having gone through what I had gone through, might find it difficult to be confined like this. I closed my eyes. I could make up my own pictures. I could remember the blue sky that I'd seen this morning; the electric-blue that stretched from horizon to horizon and sparkled so. I could imagine the snow falling gently out of the dull, low sky and settling on houses, cars, bare trees. But in the darkness the sound of humming seemed to change. It sounded more like a kind of wheezing. And I could hear footsteps. There were footsteps coming towards me. Footsteps in the darkness. I opened my mouth to call out, but I couldn't speak or make a sound, except for a strangled whimper.

What was happening? I tried again but it was as if something was blocking my mouth. I couldn't breathe properly. I couldn't draw air through my mouth; I was gasping but nothing was happening. I was going to suffocate in here. My chest was hurting. I couldn't draw breath, not properly. It came in ragged bursts that gave me no relief. The footsteps came closer. I was trapped and I was drowning. Drowning in the air. A roaring built up in my head and I opened my eyes and it was still dark and I closed them and there was red behind my eyes. My eyes were burning in my sockets. Then the roaring split apart, as if my head had burst open to let out all the horror.

I was screaming at last. The tube was filled with the sound of my howling. My ears throbbed and my throat tore with it and I couldn't stop. I tried to make the screams into words. I tried to say, "Help!" or "Please," anything, but all the sounds crashed and bubbled and streamed together. Everything was shaking and then there were bright lights in my eyes and hands on me. Hands that held me down, that wouldn't let me go. I screamed again. Wailed. Screams were pouring out of me. I couldn't see in the light. Everything stung. Everything around me bore down on me. There were new sounds, voices somewhere, someone calling my name. Eyes looking at me out of the dazzling light; watching me and there was nowhere to hide because I couldn't move. Fingers touching me. Cold metal on my skin. On my arm. Something wet. Something sharp. Something piercing my skin.

Then suddenly everything was quiet and it was as if the light that hurt and the terrible sounds were gradually fading away from me. Everything was fading and going grey and far off, like night falling, and you just want it to be day. Just want it to be snow.

When I woke up, I didn't know if it was the next morning or many mornings later. The world was in black and white but I knew that it wasn't the world. It was me. I felt like there was a grey filter over my eyes, bleaching the colour out. My tongue felt dry and fluffy. I

felt fidgety and irritable. I wanted to scratch myself or scratch somebody else. I wanted to get up and do something, but I didn't know what. Breakfast tasted of cardboard and cotton wool. Every noise made me wince.

I lay in the bed and thought dark thoughts and then made plans, which involved getting up and finding someone, anyone, in authority and telling them that it was time for me to go home, and then finding Detective Inspector Cross and telling him to bloody get on with his inquiry, and somewhere in the middle of this a woman came in. No nurse's uniform, no white coat. She must have been in her fifties. Red-haired, pale freckly skin, rimless glasses. She wore a honey-coloured sweater, shiny grey trousers. She smiled at me.

"I'm Dr. Beddoes," she said. There was a pause. "Irene Beddoes." That was Irene rhyming with 'sheen' and 'clean' rather than with 'eenymeeny'. "I saw you yesterday afternoon. Do you remember our conversation?"

"No."

"You were drifting in and out of sleep. I wasn't sure how much you were taking in."

I had slept and still I felt tired. Tired and grey.

"I've been seen by a neurologist," I said. "He tested my memory. I've been put into a machine. I've been examined for physical injuries and been patched up a bit. What are you here for?"

Her concerned smile only wavered a little. "We thought you might like someone to talk to."

"I've talked to the police."

"I know."

"Are you a psychiatrist?"

"Among other things." She gestured at the chair. "Do you mind if I sit down?"

"No, of course not."

She dragged it over and sat by the bed. She smelt nice; subtly fragrant. I thought of spring flowers.

"I talked to Jack Cross," she said. "He told me your story. You've been through a terrifying ordeal."

"I'm just happy to have escaped," I said. "I don't want you to see me as some sort of victim. I think I'm doing OK, you know. For several days I was dead. It may sound stupid but it was true. I was above ground, I was breathing and eating, but I knew I was dead. I didn't exist in the same world that everyone else occupied. What do you call it? The land of the living. The place where people worry about money and sex and paying bills. Mainly through luck I escaped and I'm alive again and I just think every day is something I never thought I'd be allowed."

"Yes," Dr. Beddoes said, but still looking concerned for me.

"The other thing is that I'm not ill. I know I was knocked around a bit. I know that I've got a problem with my memory because I got a bang on the head. But I feel fine on the whole. A bit unreal, maybe. And this isn't how I imagined it would be."

"What would be?"

"Being free. I'm lying in this bed in an old itchy nightie that doesn't belong to me and people bringing me awful food on a trolley and people coming and sitting next to my bed and looking at me with anxious expressions on their faces and talking to me in a soft voice as if they were trying to talk me off a window-sill. What I really want is to get back to my flat and get on with my life. See my friends. Go to a pub again, to a cafe, walk down ordinary streets in my own clothes, go dancing, lie in bed on a Sunday morning with the sun streaming in through the windows, eat what I want when I want, go for a walk at night down by the river .. . But he's still out there, in the world I want to be in. If you want to know, that's what I really can't get out of my mind, the idea that he's still walking the streets."

There was a silence and I felt a bit embarrassed by my outburst. But she didn't look too disconcerted.

"Your flat," she said. "Where's that?"

"It's not exactly mine," I said. "It actually belongs to my ... to the guy I live with. Terry."

"Has he been in to see you?"

"He's away. I've tried calling but he must be working somewhere he travels a lot."

"Have you seen anyone else? Family or friends?"

"No. I just want to get out of here and then I'll call them." She looked at me and I felt a need to explain. "I guess I'm putting off telling my story," I admitted. "I don't know where to begin. I don't know how to tell it because it's still not finished. I want there to be a proper ending to it before I begin, if you see what I mean."

"You want him to be caught first?"

"Yes."

"But maybe, in the meantime, you could talk to me."

"Maybe," I said cautiously. "What I really want to do, though -the one thing I know I need is to get out of here. It's as if this hospital is a half-way house between being in prison and being free. I'm in limbo here."

Dr. Beddoes contemplated me for a moment. "Something terrible happened to you, Abbie. You're being dealt with by about five different speciali ties at the hospital and that's not to mention the police. It's quite a logistical struggle to get everybody to communicate. But as far as I understand there is a general agreement that you should stay here for at least a couple more days. For a start, I know that the neurologists want to keep you under observation for a time, just in case. And the police obviously are very worried indeed. The man you encountered must be exceptionally dangerous and they would rather have you in a more secure environment while they make certain decisions."

"Do they think I might be under threat?"

"I can't speak for them, but I think it's extremely difficult to assess. That's part of the problem. What I want to say is that I would like to use the next couple of days to talk to you. Obviously it's up to you but I think I could be helpful to you. Not just that. It's possible that if we talk things over we might come up with details that could assist the police, but that would only be by the way. You talk about just wanting to get back to your normal life." There was now a sudden, long pause that I found disconcerting. "I'm thinking about how to put this. You might not find it as easy to return to your life as you assume. It may be that you take things with you from an experience like this."

"You think I'm contaminated by it?"

"Contaminated?" She looked for a moment as if she were smelling the contamination, or trying to sniff it out. "No. But you had a normal life, then suddenly you were thrown out of it into a terrible horror. Now you have to return to normality. You have to decide what to do with this thing that happened. We all need to find ways of accommodating things that have happened to us. I think that if we talked, I could help you do that."

I looked away from her and I saw the greyness of the world again. When I spoke it was as much to myself as to her. "I don't know how I'm supposed to accommodate someone wanting to kidnap and kill me. That's the first thing. The second is that my life wasn't as smooth as all that before it happened. But I'll give it a try."

"We'll meet for a chat," she said. "And you aren't going to have to lie on a couch. We can do it in more pleasant surroundings, if you like."

"That would be great."

"I may even be able to find somewhere that serves proper coffee."

"That would be the most therapeutic thing of all."

She smiled and stood up and shook my hand and left. When Dr. Beddoes arrived, I had wanted to turn my back to her and close my eyes. Now that she had gone, I was shocked to realize that I already missed her.

"Sadie?"

"Abbie!" Her voice was warm and clear, and relief spread through me. "Where are you calling from?" she said. "Are you still on holiday?"

"Holiday? No. No, I'm in hospital, Sadie."

"My God! What's wrong?"

"Can you come and see me? I can't talk about it over the phone."

"How do I know he didn't rape me?"

Jack Cross was sitting on the chair by my bed, fiddling with the tight knot of his tie. He nodded at the question, then said: "We can't know for sure, but there's no suggestion of that."

"How do you know?"

"When you were admitted to hospital, you were, well, examined, et cetera, et cetera."

"And?"

"And there was no evidence of sexual assault."

"That's something, at least." I felt curiously blank. "So what else has happened?"

"We're building up a picture," he said carefully.

"But.. ."

"One of the people we obviously want to talk to is your boyfriend, Terence Wilmott."

"And?"

"How would you describe your relationship with him?"

"Why on earth should I say anything about it at all? What's Terry got to do with anything?"

"As I said, we're building up a picture."

"Well, we're fine," I said defensively. "We have our ups and downs, of course."

"What sort of downs?"

"It wasn't Terry, if that's what you're thinking."

"What?"

"He didn't do this. I know the man concealed his voice and I didn't see him but it wasn't Terry. I know Terry's smell. I know him backwards and forwards. He'll be back soon from wherever he's gone off to and then you can talk to him."

"He's not abroad."

"Oh?" I looked at him then. "Why do you say that?"

"His passport's still in his flat."

"Is it? Well, he must be in the UK, then."

"Yes. Somewhere."

I stood in front of the mirror and saw a stranger there. I was no longer me. I was someone else. A thin woman with matted hair and a bruised face. Chalky-grey skin. Sharp bones. Glassy, frightened eyes. I looked like a dead person.

I met Dr. Beddoes in a courtyard in the hospital because, although it was so cold, I had a longing to be outside. The nurses had found me a giant strawberry-pink quilted coat. The courtyard had clearly been designed to be soothing to neurotic patients. It was too shady for grass, but there were plants with huge dark green fronds and the centrepiece was a water feature. A large bronze pot was full and permanently overflowing with water running down the outside. I was alone for a few minutes, so I wandered over and examined it. It looked like a machine for wasting water but I noticed an opening around the base, so I supposed that it was sucked back up again. Round and round for ever.

Irene Beddoes had brought us both mugs of coffee and biscuits wrapped in Cellophane. We sat on a slightly damp wooden bench. She gestured at the wet ornament.

"They got that because I thought it would be relaxing in a Japanese, Zen sort of way," she said. "I find it rather creepy."

"Why?"

"Wasn't there someone in hell who was condemned to spend the whole of eternity trying to fill a huge earthenware jar with water a jar that had a hole in it?"

"I didn't know that."

"I shouldn't have told you. I may have spoiled it for you."

"I like it; I like the sound. It's a happy sound."

"That's the spirit," she said.

It felt wonderful but a bit strange to be sitting outside on this sunny winter day. I only sipped at my mug of coffee. I had to be careful. I already felt on edge. Too much caffeine would turn me into a basket case.

"How are you doing?" she asked. It seemed a fairly inept beginning.

"You know what I hate about being in hospital? People are being nice and everything and I've got my own room and a T V, but still there's something about being in a room where people don't have to knock before they come in. People I've never seen before come in and clean or bring food and the nice ones give me a nod and the others just get on with it."

"Do you get scared?"

I didn't answer at first. I took another sip of coffee and a bite of my biscuit. Then I said, "Yes, of course. I mean, I think I get scared in different ways I'm scared thinking about what it was like; remembering it all over again, almost as if I was still inside it and had never got away. The whole thing kind of closes in on me, like I'm underwater or something. Drowning in it. Most of the time I try not to let myself remember. I try and push it away from me. Perhaps I shouldn't do that. Do you think it's healthier to go over it?" I didn't give her time to answer. "And the other thing I get scared about is the idea that he hasn't been caught. And that maybe he's just waiting for me to come out and then he'll grab me again. When I let myself think of that I can't breathe properly. Everything in my body seems to be breaking up with fear. So, yes. I get scared. Not always, though. Sometimes I just feel very, very lucky to be alive. But I wish they'd catch him. I don't suppose I'll be able to feel safe again, until that happens."

Irene Beddoes was the first person I'd met whom I could talk to about what had happened to me in that room, and what I had felt. She wasn't a friend. I could tell her about my sense of losing myself, of being turned, bit by bit, into an animal, or an object. I told her about his laugh, his whisper, the bucket. I told her I'd wet myself. I told her about how I would have done anything, let him do anything to me, in order to stay alive. And she listened, saying nothing. I talked and I talked until my voice grew weary. Then I stopped and leant towards her. "Do you think you can help me remember my lost days?"

"My concern, my job, is what's happening in your head, what you've been going through and what you are still going through. If it results in anything that helps the investigation, then that's a bonus. The police are doing everything they can, Abbie."

"I'm not sure I've given them much to go on."

"Your job is to get better."

I sat back in my chair. I looked up at the floors of the hospital surrounding us. One floor up a small boy with a high forehead and a solemn face was looking down at us. I could hear the hum of traffic outside, the sound of horns.

"You know one of my nightmares?" I said.

"What?"

"I've got lots of them, actually. Like being back in that room again. And I hate being in this limbo, I feel trapped. But sometimes I fear that I'm going to leave hospital, go back to my life and it'll just go back to normal and the man will never be found and the only trace there'll be will be the bits of memory of him like a worm crawling around in my head eating me up."

Irene Beddoes looked at me; her eyes were keen. "Didn't you like your life?" she said. "Don't you like the idea of getting it back?"

"That's not what I mean," I said. "I mean that I can't bear the idea of nothing coming of all this. And I'll never be able to get rid of the idea as long as I live. You know the people who get that sort of deafness, except it's not deafness. It's not silence. It's a noise in their ears and it never goes away and it drives people mad until sometimes they kill themselves just to shut it up."

"Could you tell me about yourself, Abbie? Before all of this."

I took a sip of my coffee. From being too hot, it was now too cold. "Where do I start? I'm twenty-five. Um .. ." I stopped, at a loss.

"Where do you work?"

"For the last couple of years I've been working like a lunatic for a company that furnishes offices."

"What do you mean?"

"If some company is setting up a new office, we can do as little or as much as people want. Sometimes it's just designing the wallpaper, sometimes it's everything from the pens to the computer system."

"Do you enjoy it?"

"Kind of. I can't believe I'll still be doing it in ten years' time or even in one year's time, when I come to think of it. I just kind of wandered into it and discovered I was quite good at it. Sometimes we're sitting around, but when the pressure's on we work all night. That's what people pay us for."

"And you have a boyfriend?"

"Yes. I met Terry through work. That's the way most people meet, isn't it? I don't know where else I'd meet anyone. He works with company computer systems and I moved in with him about a year ago."

She just sat and waited for me to say more, so of course I did, because I've always talked too much, especially when there's a silence and because I wanted to talk, I suppose, about things I'd never put into words before. So now I took the plunge in a gabble.

"Actually, the last few months haven't been exactly brilliant. Well, they've been awful in many ways. I was working too hard and he was working too hard and when he works hard, he drinks hard. I don't think he's an alcoholic or anything, he just drinks when he wants to unwind. But the trouble is, he doesn't unwind, or not for long. He gets weepy or he gets angry."

"Angry about what?"

"I don't know, really. Everything. Life. Me. He gets angry with me, because I'm there, I think. And he, well, he-' I stopped abruptly. This was very hard to say.

"Is he violent?" Irene Beddoes asked.

I felt I was slipping down a slope towards things I had never properly told anyone.

"Sometimes," I muttered.

"Does he hit you?"

"He's lashed out a couple of times. Yes. I always thought I was the kind of woman who would never let myself be hit more than once. If you'd asked me a few months ago, I'd have said that I would just walk if a man hit me. But I didn't. I don't know why. He was always so very sorry, and I guess I felt sorry for him. Does that sound stupid? I felt he was doing something that hurt him much more than it hurt me. When I talk about it well, I've never really talked about it before now, actually, but now, I feel that this isn't me I'm describing. I'm not like the woman who stays with a man who treats her badly. I'm more well, more the kind of woman who escaped from a cellar and now just wants to get on with life."

"And you did terrifically," she said warmly.

"I don't think of it like that. Really. I just did the best I could."

"By the sound of it that was very good indeed. I've made something of a study of these sort of psychopaths .. ."

"You didn't tell me that," I said. "You said you were a psychiatrist and that you weren't interested in all that side of it."

"The way you handled yourself was first amazingly resilient, just to survive at all. Then there was your remarkable escape. That is almost unprecedented."

"You've only heard my version. Maybe I exaggerated it to make myself seem more heroic'

"I don't see how that's possible," she said. "After all, you're here. You're alive."

"That's true," I said. "Anyway, now you know all about me."

"I wouldn't say that. Maybe over the next day or two we can meet again."

"I'd like that," I said.

"I'm going to get us lunch in a minute. You must be starving. First I'd like to ask a favour."

"What?"

She didn't answer. Instead she started rummaging in her shoulder-bag. While she did this I thought about her. I had to make an effort to prevent myself feeling that she was the sort of mother I would have invented for myself: warm where my mother was detached, assured where my mother was nervous, intelligent where my mother was, well, not exactly Einstein, and just sort of deep and complicated and interesting.

She pulled a file out of the bag. She put it on the table and removed a piece of paper, a printed form, which she put in front of me.

"What's this?" I asked. "Are you trying to sell me insurance?"

She didn't smile. "I want to help you," she said, 'and I want to make a proper assessment and in order to do that I want to build up as complete a picture as I possibly can. I'd like to have access to your medical records, and for that I need your permission. I need you to sign this."

"Are you serious?" I said. "It's just bundles of stuff about injections for going on holiday and antibiotics when I had a chest infection."

"It would be useful," she said, offering a pen.

I shrugged and signed. "I don't envy you," I said. "So, what do we do now?"

"I'd like to talk," she said. "Or, rather, I'd like you to talk. Just talk and see where it takes you."

And I did. I gave myself up to it. Irene Beddoes went into the building and returned with sandwiches and salad and fizzy water and tea and biscuits, and the sun moved across the sky and I talked, and sometimes, as I thought of the sheer tiredness that my life had been over the last year, I cried, but mainly I talked and talked and talked until I was exhausted and the courtyard had become dark and cold and she led me through echoey corridors back to my room.

There was a large bunch of daffodils on my bed, and a note scribbled across the back of a used envelope. "Sorry you weren't here. I waited as long as I could. I'll come back as soon as I can. Loads of love and I'm thinking of you, Sadie."

I sat on the bed, weak with disappointment.

"How's the investigation going?"

"We're short of anything to investigate."

"There's the women."

"There's five female names."

"Six. Including me."

"If you .. ." Cross paused and looked awkward.

"If I remember anything," I said, 'you'll be the first to know."

"This is your brain."

"My brain." I looked at the scan spread out on the light board in front of us and then touched my temples. "How odd to look at your own brain. Well, is it all right?"

Charlie Mulligan smiled at me. "It seems pretty good to me."

"It's a bit shadowy."

"It's the way it's meant to look."

"But I still can't remember. There's a hole in my life."

"Maybe there always will be."

"A disaster-shaped hole."

"Or perhaps memory will gradually return and fill it in."

"Can I do anything about it?"

"Don't fret away at it. Relax."

"You don't know who you're talking to."

"There are worse things than forgetting," he said mildly. "Anyway, I ought to be getting on."

"Back to your mice."

He held out his hand and I grasped it. It was warm and firm. "Back to my mice. Get in touch if you need anything."

If I need something you can do anything about, I thought. But I just nodded and tried to smile.

"I read somewhere that you only really fall in love twice, maybe three times, in your life."

"Do you think that's true?"

"I don't know. Maybe. But, then, I've either fallen in love lots of times, or hardly ever. There's the bit where you can't sleep and you can't eat and you feel sick and breathless, and you don't know if you're very happy or completely wretched. You just want to be with him and the rest of the world can go hang."

"Yes."

"I've had that feeling quite a lot of times. But it doesn't last long. Sometimes just a few days; sometimes until the moment after you've had sex. It settles down and then you have to see what you're left with. And usually it's not much. Like ashes after the fire's gone out. You think: God, what was that all about? And sometimes you still care, feel affection, desire. But is that love? The time I was most intensely in love was when I was at university. God, I adored him. But it didn't last."

"Did he leave you?"

"Yes. I cried for weeks. I thought I'd never get over it."

"What about Terry? Has the relationship with him been stronger than other ones?"

"Longer, at least, which must count for something, some kind of commitment. Or endurance." I gave a laugh that didn't sound quite like my normal laugh. "I mean, I feel I know him really well, now. I know him in a way that I hardly know anyone. All the intimate little things, all the things he hides from other people .. . And the more I know him the more reason there is to leave him, but the harder it gets to do it. If that makes sense?"

"You make it sound as if you're trapped."

"Lots of people feel trapped in their relationships at times, don't they?"

"So you feel trapped at work and trapped at home?"

"That's a bit dramatic. I've just let things get into a rut."

"Which you've wanted to escape from?"

"You get into things gradually, and you don't realize quite where you are until it's a crisis and you suddenly see."

"So you're saying .. . ?"

"This is my crisis."

The next day when Irene came to my room .. . My room. I would catch myself saying that. As if it was where I was going to spend the rest of my life. As if I wouldn't be able to cope with a world outside where I would have to buy things for myself, make decisions.

She was as composed as always. She smiled and asked me how I'd slept. In the real world, people might sometimes ask you how you were, but they didn't really want to know. You were just meant to answer, "Fine." They didn't ask you how you'd slept, how you were eating, how you were feeling, and really want to know the answer. Irene Beddoes wanted to know. She would look at me with her intelligent eyes and wait for me to speak. So I said I'd slept fine, but it wasn't true. That was yet another thing about hospital. I had my own private room, of course, but unless your room was on an island in the middle of the Pacific you were always going to be woken at about two thirty in the morning by some woman screaming. Someone would come and deal with her but I'd be left staring at the dark, thinking about dying and being dead and about that cellar and the voice in my ear.

"Yes, fine," I said.

"Your file arrived," she said.

"What file?"

"From your GP. Your basic NHS file."

"Oh, God," I said. "I'd forgotten about that. I suppose it's full of stuff that's going to be taken down and used in evidence against me."

"Why do you say that?"

"It was just a joke. Now you're going to say that there's no such thing as "just a joke"."

"You didn't tell me you'd been treated for depression."

"Have I?"

She glanced down at her notebook. "You were prescribed an SSRI in November 1995."

"What's that?"

"An antidepressant."

"I don't remember that."

"Try."

I thought for a moment. 1995. University. Wreckage.

"That must have been when I split up with Jules. I told you about that yesterday. I got into a terrible state; I thought my heart was broken. Well, I suppose it was. I wasn't getting out of bed in the morning. I was crying all the time. I couldn't seem to stop. Strange how much water there is inside you. So a friend of mine made me go to the college doctor. He prescribed some pills, but I can't even remember taking them." I caught myself and laughed. "When I say I can't remember, I don't mean more amnesia. It just never seemed important."

"Why didn't you mention it to me before?"

"When I was about eight I was given a penknife for my birthday. Unbelievable, but true. About eight minutes later I was trying to carve a bit of wood in the garden and the knife went into my finger." I held up my left hand. "Look, there's still quite a nice scar. It bled like anything. I may be imagining it, but when I look at the scar I can feel what it was like when the knife slipped and went in. I didn't mention that either."

"Abbie, we've been talking about your mood. We've been talking about how you react to stress. But you didn't mention it."

"Are you saying that I forgot it, the way I can't remember being grabbed by this man? But I did mention it. I told you about it when we talked yesterday."

"Yes, but you didn't mention that you received medical treatment."

"Only because I didn't think of it as relevant. I had an affair with someone at university then got depressed when it went wrong. Oh, OK, maybe it's relevant. Everything's relevant, I suppose. Maybe I didn't mention it because it was so sad and I felt so abandoned."

"Abandoned?"

"Yes. Well, of course. I was in love and he wasn't."

"I was interested, looking through your files, in how you had reacted to other episodes of stress in your life."

"If you want to compare me being held prisoner by someone who wanted to kill me with bits of my life where I broke up with a boyfriend or where I had some kind of eczema that took about two years to go away have you reached that bit of the file? well, then, all I can say is that there is no comparison."

"There is one thing they all have in common, which is that they happen to you. And I look for patterns. This has become an event in your life. Like everything that happens in your life it will change you in some way. I hope I can help you to make sure it doesn't affect you in a bad way."

"But there are things that happen in life that are just bad and that is one of them. It's always going to be bad. I can't turn it to good. The only thing I can think of that's really important is for this incredibly dangerous man to be found and locked away where he can never do this again to anyone else." I looked out of the window. Over the buildings I could see a clear blue sky. I couldn't feel the cold outside but somehow I could see it. Even looking at it made this hateful room unbearably stuffy. "There's another thing."

"What?" said Irene.

"I need to leave here. I really do, or I'll never be able to. I need to be in ordinary life again. I suppose I can't just get up and put on these borrowed clothes though, come to think of it, I don't know why not but I'm going to track down Dr. Burns, or leave a message with his secretary, and tell him that I'm leaving tomorrow. I'll leave a forwarding address with Jack Cross. And if you still feel that it's worth talking to me, then I can come and meet you at any place you suggest. But I can't stay here any longer."

Irene Beddoes always reacted as if it was always just what she had been expecting me to say, and that she quite understood.

"That may be right," she said. "Could you do us one favour? As we've talked about before, you're being seen by all sorts of different people and departments. I'm sorry about all the delays but as you can imagine it's a logistical nightmare getting everybody together at the same time to agree on a decision. I've just heard that there's going to be a meeting tomorrow morning with absolutely everybody. We're going to talk about where we go from here. One of the obvious issues is about you leaving."

"Can I come?"

"What?"

"Can I come to the meeting?"

For the first time ever Irene looked at a loss. "I'm sorry, that's not possible."

"You mean there are things I might not want to hear?"

She smiled her reassuring smile. "Not at all. Patients don't attend case conferences. It's just one of those things."

"It's just that I think of it more as an investigation in which I'm involved."

"There's nothing cloak-and-dagger about it. I'll come and see you straight away."

I wasn't looking at her. My gaze was drawn to the window once more. "I'll have my bag packed," I said.

I didn't get Jack Cross that afternoon. He was too busy. I got a less important detective called Detective Constable Lavis. He was one of those men who was so tall that he was constantly ducking as if he was about to bump his head, even if he was in a room like mine that was about nine feet tall. He looked very much a stand-in, but he was friendly too, as if it was me and him against everybody else. He sat down on the chair next to my bed, which looked ridiculously small under him.

"I tried to contact Cross," I said.

"He's out of the office," Lavis said.

That's what they told me," I said. "I hoped he'd give me a call."

"He's a bit busy," Lavis said. "He sent me."

"I was going to tell him that I'm leaving the hospital."

"Right," said Lavis, as if he had hardly heard what I'd said. "I'll pass that on. I've just been sent along to talk about a couple of things."

"Like what?"

"Good news," he said cheerfully. "Your boyfriend. Terry Wilmott. We were getting a bit worried about him, but he's turned up."

"Was he working or was he on a binge?"

"Bit of a drinker, is he?"

"From time to time."

"I met him yesterday. He looked a bit pasty but he was all right."

"Did he say where he'd been?"

"He said he'd been ill. He'd been staying in some cottage in Wales that a friend of his owns."

"That sounds like Terry. Did he say anything else?"

"There was nothing much he had to contribute."

"So the mystery is cleared up," I said. "Idiot. I'll give him a ring."

"So he hasn't been in touch?"

"Obviously not."

Lavis looked ill at ease. He reminded me of the sort of adolescent who blushed when you asked him the time.

"The boss has been sending me out on some inquiries," he said. "I called at your company, Jay and Joiner's. Nice people."

"If you say so."

"We were attempting to establish the sort of period when you disappeared."

"Did you?"

I suppose." He gave a sniff and looked around as if checking out an escape route. "What are your plans?"

"I already said. I'm planning to leave tomorrow."

"What about work?"

"I'll get in touch with them. I haven't really felt up to it but I suppose I'll go back in the next week or two."

"You'll go back to work?" he said. He sounded surprised.

"What else? I've got a living to earn. And it's not just that. I've got to get back to normal life while there's a life for me to get to."

"Yes, right," said Lavis.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I know that my personal problems aren't really your business."

"No," said Lavis.

"I suppose you've got your hands full with the investigation."

"Pretty much."

"I know that I haven't been giving you much to go on."

"We're doing what we can."

"I'm really sorry that I couldn't find the place where I'd been held. I'm not exactly the greatest witness in criminal history. But I feel completely in the dark. Have there been any other developments? I suppose they must have checked out those names I gave Cross. The names of the other victims. I was hoping that would give them a clue. Have they found anything? I assume they haven't because if they had they would have told me. Except that nobody tells me anything. That's one of the problems about being in this bed, in this room. I think that if nothing else I've gained some kind of insight into what it's like to be old and ill. People just treat you as if you were slightly thick. Do you know what I mean? They come in here and they talk slowly and ask extremely simple questions as if I have a mental problem. And they don't believe I need to be told anything. I honestly think that if I didn't have a tantrum every so often, they would forget me altogether."

The reason I was babbling on and on was that Lavis was shifting in his seat looking trapped and not answering, and the longer I babbled on the more trapped he looked. I felt that I'd become like one of those people in the street who walk along muttering to themselves and every so often they manage to stop someone and rant to them about their problems and about how everybody is out to get them.

"I haven't been able to tell you very much," I said. "I mean, I've said loads but it hasn't been much use."

"No, that's fine," said Lavis, as he stood up. He was about to make a break for it. "I just needed to check a couple of things. As I said."

"I'm sorry that I've been going on and on and on," I said. "I'm a bit stir crazy."

"That's fine," said Lavis, as he edged away from me towards the safety of the open door. But he didn't contradict me.

The St. Anthony Hospital NHS Trust

Date: 28 January 2002

Subject: Case Conference Abigail Elizabeth Devereaux, Room

4E, Barrington Wing. Hosp. No. 923903

Cc. Detective Chief Superintendent Gordon Lovell, Laurraine

Falkner (Chief Executive), Professor Ian Burke (Medical Director).

Record made by Susan Barton (Medical Administration Assistant).

nb: restricted circulation

Present: Detective Chief Superintendent Lovell, Detective Inspector Cross, Dr. Burns, Dr. Beddoes, Prof. Mulligan.

Detective Inspector Cross began the meeting with an account of the case and the progress of related investigation. On 22 January Ms Devereaux was brought by ambulance from Ferdinand Road. Interviewed the following day, she claimed to have been kidnapped and threatened with death. The investigation has been hampered by lack of independent evidence. Ms Devereaux is unable to recall her capture. She was kept hooded and bound. Her only significant memory was a list of female first names, the names her captor claimed to be previous victims.

Ms Devereaux escaped from this captivity but, on being escorted back to the area, was unfortunately unable to locate the place she had escaped from.

Dr. Beddoes asked if such escapes were unusual. DI Cross said his experience of such cases was limited. She asked if the investigation had made any progress at all. DI Cross said it was still in a preliminary stage.

Dr. Burns described the mostly superficial injuries suffered by Ms Devereaux. He stated that her dehydrated, malnourished state, while not dangerous, was consistent with some form of physical ordeal.

Dr. Beddoes asked if there was any physical evidence of violence or torture. Dr. Burns said that there were bruises around neck and wrists suggesting physical restraint.

Dr. Burns reported that the CAT scan showed no obvious cerebral lesions.

Professor Mulligan described his evaluation of Ms Devereaux. He announced his conclusion that her account of her post-traumatic amnesia was consistent with his examination.

Dr. Beddoes asked if he had found any objective, physical evidence of such injury and such amnesia. Professor Mulligan said that such findings were not relevant. There was an animated discussion between them not detailed here.

Dr. Beddoes gave her report on her assessment of Ms Devereaux. She found Ms Devereaux an articulate, intelligent, attractive subject. Her account of her ordeal was compelling and convincing. Further examination revealed that Ms Devereaux had been undergoing considerable stress in the months before the alleged ordeal. She had been under considerable pressure at her employment culminating in her being compelled to take a period of leave for stress-related reasons. This period of leave began shortly before, by Ms Devereaux's account, her period of imprisonment began. Her relationship with her boyfriend had also been a source of considerable strain, due to his excessive drinking and violent behaviour.

Dr. Beddoes reported that, on further examination, other relevant factors had come to light. Contrary to her own account, Ms Devereaux had a history of mental instability, and had indeed received medical treatment in the past. This she had failed to mention during her first interviews. She also had a history of reporting violence. Records showed that on one occasion she had called the police in response to a domestic disturbance. This was with her boyfriend.

She also had apparent difficulty in recalling these events. This was obviously comparable to her current reported amnesia. When these doubts began to appear in Dr. Beddoes' mind, she had consulted widely with others on the case in search of any independent, objective confirmation of Ms Devereaux's claim. There was none. Dr. Beddoes said it was her conclusion that Ms Devereaux's disorders were psychological in origin and that the best course of action was a course of cognitive therapy and medication.

Professor Mulligan asked about the marks found on Ms Devereaux's body and about her having been found in an emaciated state in an area of London distant from her home and work. Dr. Beddoes replied that Professor Mulligan was there for his expertise in certain narrow neurological matters.

Detective Chief Inspector Lovell asked if Dr. Beddoes was stating that no crime had been committed. Dr. Beddoes said that she was not certain of what might or might not have occurred between Ms Devereaux and her boyfriend. But she was certain that the kidnap was a fantasy. In her view, not a fabrication. It was a cry for help.

DCI Lovell said the immediate question was whether Ms Devereaux should be charged with wasting police time.

There was loud discussion. DI Cross stated that he was not yet ready to dismiss Ms Devereaux's account. Professor Mulligan asked Dr. Beddoes if she was aware that if she was wrong then the result would be to cut Ms Devereaux loose and expose her to mortal danger. There followed more agitated discussion not summarized here.

Professor Mulligan stated that he wished it to be entered into the record that he dissented from the prevailing decision of the meeting. He stated that if anything happened to Ms Devereaux it would be on the consciences of everybody at this meeting. (Susan

Barton excepted. Inserted on Professor Mulligan's instructions.) Professor Mulligan then left the meeting.

There was discussion as to how to proceed. DCI Lovell ordered DI Cross to halt the inquiry. Dr. Beddoes said she would immediately visit Ms Devereaux and discuss a therapeutic regime.

Dr. Beddoes thanked the other members of the meeting for their co-operation. She described it as a model of how medical and legal organizations should work together. Dr. Burns asked when Ms Devereaux's bed would be available.

Part Three

One

Walk. Just walk. One foot in front of the other. Don't stop, don't pause, don't look round. Keep your head up and your eyes ahead of you. Let faces blur. Pretend you know where you are going. People calling your name, but it's an echo of an echo, bouncing off the white walls. They're calling a stranger, not you. Don't listen. That's all over now, the listening and talking and doing what you're told. Being good. Keep walking. Not running, walking. Through those double doors, which slide silently open as you approach. No tears now. Don't cry. You are not mad, Abbie. You are not mad. Past the ambulances, the cars, the porters with their trolleys. Don't stop now. Step into the wide world. This is freedom, except you are not free. Not free, not safe. But not mad. You are not mad. And you are alive. Breathe in and out and walk forward now.

The sky was startlingly blue and the ground icy. The world glittered with cold. My cheeks burned with it, my eyes stung, and my fingers were numb where they gripped the plastic bag I was carrying. My feet, in their stupid slipshod shoes, crunched on the gravel. I stood outside the tall Victorian house, at the top of which was our flat -well, Terry's, really, but I'd lived in it for nearly two years now. It was me who'd painted our bedroom, opened up the fireplace, bought second-hand pieces of furniture and large mirrors and pictures and rugs and vases and the general clutter that made a place feel like home.

I tipped my head carefully to look up. The movement seemed to make pain spill over in my skull. The flat didn't appear particularly homely right now. It looked chilly and empty. The bathroom window was still cracked, and there were no lights on. The curtains in our bedroom were drawn, which meant either that Terry was sleeping off the kind of hangover that made him pasty-faced and sour-tempered, or that he'd not bothered to open them when he staggered out of bed that morning, late for work. I hoped it was the latter.

I tried the bell anyway. If I put my ear to the door, I could hear it far above me a spluttery ring because the battery was running out. It seemed to have been running out for months. I waited then tried again. I pushed open the metal letter-box and squinted inside to see if anyone was coming down the stairs, but could only see an empty strip of maroon carpet.

I retrieved the spare key hidden under the stone but I dropped it a couple of times before I managed to fit it into the lock with my frozen fingers. Even inside, in the hall, my breath steamed in the air. I hoped Terry had left the heating on, or that at least the water was hot enough for a bath. I was grubby and cold, and my body still felt as if everything had come loose inside. It was a poor kind of homecoming. The poorest, really.

It was an effort to go up the flights of stairs, past the flat on the first floor, where I could hear the sound of a television. My legs felt heavy and I was panting by the time I reached our door on the next floor up. I called out, as I turned the key. "Hello? Hello, it's me. I'm back." Nothing. "Terry? Hello?"

Silence, except for the noise of a tap dripping in the bathroom. Suddenly, without warning, fear flooded me and I had to stop quite still, holding on to the door to steady my crumbling legs. I breathed deeply, in and out, until the fear had ebbed again, then stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind me.

I don't know what I noticed first. Probably it was just the mess: the muddy shoes on the living-room floor, unwashed dishes piled up in the sink, dead tulips drooping on the kitchen table, next to several empty bottles and an overflowing ashtray. Grimy surfaces, stale air. But then I saw that there were odd spaces here and there, where things should be but weren't. My CD player, for a start, which we'd always kept on a low table in the living room next to the little television. Except it wasn't a little television any longer, but a new big one. Automatically I looked next at the small desk in the corner of my room for my laptop and it, too, was gone. It was go an old one, a dinosaur in computer terms, but I groaned to think of the things stored in there that were lost all the email addresses, for a start, which I'd never made a note of anywhere else.

I sat down on the sofa, next to a pile of old newspapers and Terry's overcoat. Had we been robbed? Books seemed to be missing as well there were gaps all along the shelves. I tried to remember what had been there: a giant encyclopedia from the lower shelf; several novels from the shelf above; an anthology of poetry; the Good Pub Guide perhaps. Certainly a couple of cookery books.

I went into our bedroom. The bed was unmade; the jumbled-up duvet still held the shape of Terry's body. There was a pile of dirty clothes on the floor, along with two empty wine bottles. I opened the curtains to let in the dazzling sunshine, opened the window to feel the fierce, clean air blasting into the room, and then stared around. It's always hard to see what isn't there; to notice absence. But the alarm clock was gone from my side of the bed. My wooden box of jewellery was gone too, from the top of the chest of drawers. There wasn't anything valuable in it -just a few earrings, bangles, a couple of necklaces, things given to me over the years but they were mementoes and gifts and could never be replaced.

I opened the drawers. My underwear was gone, except for an old pair of black knickers stuffed at the back. Several of my T-shirts were missing, a couple of pairs of jeans and smarter trousers and at least three of my jumpers, including the expensive one I'd succumbed to in the January sales. I pulled open the wardrobe doors. All of Terry's things were in there, as far as I could see, but some of the hangers on my side were empty. A couple of dresses were missing. My black coat wasn't in the cupboard, or my leather jacket. Neither were most of my shoes just a couple of pairs of sandals and some scuffed trainers remained on the wardrobe floor. Most of my work clothes seemed to be still there, though. I looked around, bewildered, and I saw that some of the missing clothes had been stuffed into a bulging bin-bag at the base of our bed.

"Terry," I said aloud. "You bastard."

I went into the bathroom. The lavatory seat was up and I banged it down. No Tampax, no makeup, no moisturizing cream, no perfume, no body spray, no deodorant. I'd been cleared away. Even my toothbrush was gone. I opened the cabinet. All the first-aid stuff was still there. I unscrewed the bottle of paracetamol and poured two into my palm. I swallowed them without water. My head banged.

This was a dream, I thought. A nightmare, in which I was being rubbed out of my own life. I'd wake up soon. But that was the difficulty where had the nightmare begun, and at which point would I wake? Back in my old life, and nothing had happened and everything was just a feverish concoction inside my head? Back on the ledge, a rag stuffed into my mouth, my mind clouding over, waiting to die? Back in hospital, still thinking the doctors were going to cure me and the police were going to save me?

I went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. While I was waiting for it to boil, I rooted around in the fridge for I was suddenly dizzy with hunger. There wasn't much in there, apart from several bottles of beer and three or four oven-ready meals stacked on top of each other. I made myself a Marmite and lettuce sandwich on white bread, plast icky like the hospital bread, and poured boiling water over a tea bag.

But mid-bite, still standing by the fridge and with a strip of lettuce dangling from my lower lip, a thought came to me. Where was my bag, with my purse, my money, my cards and my keys? I picked up cushions, looked behind coats on hooks, opened drawers. I looked in places it wouldn't be and places I had already searched.

I must have been carrying it when I'd been snatched. Which meant that he had my address, keys, everything, while I had nothing at all. Nothing. I didn't have a single penny. I had been so furious and so ashamed when Dr. Beddoes told me about the 'treatment regime' she was going to begin that would help me to 'move on', I shouted something incoherent at her and said that if she wanted me to listen to a single further word from her or anybody connected with the hospital she would have to have me strapped down and sedated. Then I had marched out of the hospital in the clothes I'd been found in, trying not to let my knees buckle under me, trying not to weep, rant, beg. I'd refused all offers of a lift, some money,

proper explanations, a follow-up session with a psychiatrist, help. I didn't need help. I needed them to catch him and make me safe. And I needed to punch Dr. Beddoes in her smug face. I didn't say any more. There was no point. Words had become like vicious traps, springing shut on me. Everything I had said to the police, the doctors and to that fucking Irene Beddoes had been turned against me. I should have taken the money, though.

I didn't want my sandwich any more. I chucked it into the bin, which looked as if it hadn't been emptied since I was last here, and took a sip of cooling tea. I walked over to the window and looked out, pressing my forehead against the icy pane and almost expecting to see him standing there on the pavement below, looking up at me, laughing.

Except I wouldn't know that it was him. He could be anyone. He could be that old man dragging a resistant dachshund with stiff legs, or that young guy with a pony-tail, or that nice-looking father in a bobble hat with a red-cheeked child beside him. There was a thin layer of snow on the trees and on the roofs of houses and cars, and the people who passed were muffled up in thick coats and scarves, and had their heads bent against the cold.

No one raised their heads to see me standing there. I was completely at a loss. I didn't even know what I was thinking. I didn't know what to do next, or whom to turn to for help. I didn't know what help I would be asking for: tell me what happened, tell me what to do, tell me who I am, tell me where to go from here, only tell me .. .

I shut my eyes and tried for the thousandth time to remember something, anything. Just a tiny chink of light in the darkness would do. There was no light, and when I opened my eyes again I was staring once more into the street, made unfamiliar by winter.

I went to the phone and dialled Terry's number at work. It rang and rang. I tried his mobile number and got voice mail

"Terry," I said. "Terry, it's me. Abbie. I urgently need to speak to you."

I phoned Sadie's number next, but only got an answering-machine and I didn't want to leave a message. I thought about calling Sheila and Guy but then I would have to explain it all and I didn't want to do that, not now.

I had imagined coming home and telling my story. Friends would sit round me with wide eyes, listening. It would be a horror story with a happy ending, a story of despair, then hope; of ultimate triumph. I would be a kind of heroine, because I'd survived and was telling them the tale. The awfulness of what had happened would be redeemed by the ending. What could I say now? The police think I'm lying. They think I made it all up. I know about suspicion: it spreads. It is like an ugly stain.

What do you do when you're feeling lost, angry, depressed, scared, a bit ill and very cold? I ran a bath, very hot and deep, and took all my clothes off. I looked at myself in the mirror. There were hollows in my cheeks and my buttocks; my pelvic bones and my ribs jutted out sharply. I was a stranger to myself. I stood on the scales that were under the sink: I'd lost over a stone.

I lowered myself into the scalding water, held my nostrils together between finger and thumb, took a deep breath and disappeared under the surface completely. When I finally emerged, spluttering into the steamed-up air, someone was shouting. They were shouting at me. I blinked and a face came furiously into focus.

"Terry!" I said.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing in there? Have you gone mad?"

He was still in his thick jacket and his face was blotchy with cold. I pinched my nose and slid under the water again, to shut out the sight of him, to stop the voice that was calling me mad.

Two

I scrambled out of the bath with Terry glaring at me, wrapped myself in a towel, and went into the bedroom. I grabbed clothes from wherever I could find them a pair of old jeans from the bin-bag, an itchy, dark-blue sweater from the drawer, some scuffed trainers, that old pair of scrunched-up black knickers. At least they were clean. On the shelf above the bath I found a hair band so I was able to tie up my wet hair with trembling hands.

Terry was sitting in the wicker chair in the corner of the living room. In the wicker chair I'd bought in a second-hand shop in the high street one rainy Sunday morning. I'd even carried it back myself, using it as an umbrella. He leant forward and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. The ashtray I'd taken with me as a souvenir from a cafe where I'd once waitressed. He took another cigarette from the packet lying on the table and lit it. With his copper hair, his pale skin, he looked beautiful, the Terry I had first met. It was when he started to talk that problems began.

"Aren't you going to ask me if I'm all right?" I said. Though, of course, it was too late for that. If I had to ask him to ask me, it wasn't going to work as an expression of concern. Like when you ask someone if they love you if you have to ask them, they don't. Or not enough. Not the way you want them to.

"What?" he said. He made it sound more like a statement than a question.

"What's going on?"

"That's what I want to know. You look dreadful. And that cut .. . What's wrong with you?"

"You know I've been in hospital?"

He took a long slow drag on his cigarette and blew out the smoke slowly, savouring it, as if it was of far more interest than I was. There were two bad-tempered Terrys. There was angry,

shouty Terry. The one I'd briefly glimpsed in the bathroom. And there was quiet, calm, sarcastic Terry, the one sitting in the wicker chair smoking his cigarette.

"Yes, I heard," he said. "Eventually. I heard from the police. They came here."

"I tried to phone you," I said. "You weren't here. Well, you know you weren't here, of course."

"I've been away."

"Terry," I said, "I've been having the most well, the most terrible, terrible time. I want to .. ." I stopped, I didn't know what I wanted or what to say. I certainly did not want to be sitting in a chilly room with an angry man. A hug, I thought. A hug, a cup of cocoa, someone saying they're glad I'm home, someone saying they missed me, someone making me feel safe. That's what I need right now. "I can't remember things," I said at last. "I'm all in the dark and I need your help to sort things out." No reaction. "I should be dead," I said.

Another bloody slow drag at the cigarette. Was he on something? There seemed to be an extra beat before everything he said, as if there was some ironic subtext that I was missing. People talk about being able to feel when a storm is coming. Their old war wound starts to ache or something. I've never been able to manage it myself. My own war wounds ache all the time. But whenever a row is coming with Terry, I can feel it. I can feel it all over my skin and in the hairs on the back of my neck and in my spine and my stomach and behind my eyes, and I can feel it in the air. But this time my own anger stirred inside me, too.

"Terry," I said, 'did you hear what I said?"

"Am I missing something?"

"What?"

"Is this some weird way of coming back?"

"They discharged me from the hospital. That's all. What did they tell you? Haven't you heard anything about it? I've got so much to tell you. Oh, God, you'll never believe it." I gave a gulp when I heard myself say that, and hurried to correct myself. "Except it's true, of course."

"Isn't it a bit late for that?"

"Sorry? I guess you've got a few things to tell me about as well. Where were you?"

Terry gave a barking kind of laugh then looked around as if he was worried that someone else might be looking at him. I closed my eyes then opened them again. He was still there in the wicker chair, smoking, and I was still here, standing over him.

"Are you drunk?" I asked.

"This is some kind of put-on, right?"

"What do you mean?"

"Is this some way of getting back at me?"

I shook my head to clear it, and it throbbed violently. I felt as if I was seeing everything through a grey mist.

"Listen, Terry. O K? I was grabbed by a madman. He hit me on the head and I blacked out. I don't know what happened, only some of it. But I could have died. I nearly did. I was in hospital. You weren't around. I tried to call you, but you never answered. Probably you were on a binge, is that it? But I've come home."

Now Terry's expression changed. He looked puzzled, completely thrown. His cigarette burned between his fingers as if he'd forgotten about it.

"Abbie .. . I just don't get this."

I sat down on the sofa. The sofa was Terry's. I think his mother had passed it on to him years before. I rubbed my eyes. "I know the police talked to you," I said warily. I wanted to tell as little as I could to Terry. And that was part of the problem, wasn't it? "What did they say?"

Now it was Terry's turn to look wary. "They wanted to know when I'd last seen you."

"And what did you tell them?"

Another slow drag on the cigarette. "I just answered their questions."

"And they were satisfied?"

"I told them where I'd been staying. I think they made a couple of calls to check. That seemed to be enough for them."

"What did they tell you about me?"

"They said you'd been injured."

' "Injured"?" I said. "That was their word?"

He gave a shrug. "Something like that."

"I was attacked," I said.

"Who by?"

"I don't know. I never saw his face."

"You what?" He gawped at me. "What happened?"

"I don't know. I've got no memory of it. I was hit. Hard. On the head. I can't remember anything for days and days."

I had his attention now. He clearly had so many questions, he could hardly think of which one to ask.

"If you don't remember anything, how do you know you didn't just fall over and hit your head?"

"He took me prisoner, Terry. He was going to kill me. I escaped."

At this point, I suppose, pathetically, I felt that any human being would come over and hold me and say, "How awful," but Terry just carried on with his interrogation, as if he hadn't really heard what I was saying.

"I thought you didn't see him."

"I was blindfolded. It was in the dark."

"Oh," he said. There was a long pause. "Christ."

"Yes."

I'm sorry, Abbie," he said awkwardly. It was far too little and it came too late to mean anything; awareness of this was written all over his face. Then he asked: "So what are the police doing?"

This was the question I had been dreading. This was why I hadn't wanted to get into a detailed discussion. Even though I knew I was right, I felt ashamed even in front of Terry and at the same time I felt bitterly angry with myself for that.

"They don't believe me," I said. "They think it never happened."

"But what about the injuries? Those bruises?"

I pulled a face. I wanted to cry but I absolutely was not going to cry in front of bloody Terry. Which was another part of the trouble.

"From what I understand, the people who are on my side think I imagined it. The people who aren't on my side think I made it up. They all think they're doing me a favour by not charging me with wasting police time. So they've turned me loose. I'm out in the open again, with no protection." I waited for him to come over to me. He didn't move. His face had a blank look to it. I took a deep breath. "So what's happened with my stuff ? Who took it?"

"You did."

"What? Me?"

"Two weeks ago."

"I took it?"

"Yes." Terry shifted in his chair. He looked at me closely. "Is this true? Do you not remember anything?"

I shook my head.

"It's all fuzzy. There's a whole dark cloud over the last few weeks. I've got a vague memory of being at work, of being here. Then it all fades. But what are you talking about? What do you mean I took it?"

Now it was Terry who looked embarrassed. His eyes were flickering, as if he was thinking quickly, trying to come up with something. Then he looked calm again.

"You left," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"It's not as if you haven't threatened to about a million times. And don't look at me as if it's something that's my fault."

"I'm not looking at you in any way at all'

He narrowed his eyes. "You really don't remember?"

"Not a thing."

He lit another cigarette. "We had a row," he said.

"What about?"

"I don't remember. What are rows ever about? Something stupid. Maybe it was the final straw."

"What a cliche that is."

"Well, there you are. Maybe I used a cliche that offended you or picked up the wrong spoon. We had a row. You said that that was it. I thought you were joking and I, well, I went out. But when I got back you were gathering up your stuff. Most of it, anyway. You took everything you could fit into your car and then you drove off."

"Is this true?"

"Look around you, Abbie. Who else would want your C D player apart from you?"

"So you're saying it was just one of our rows."

"One of our worse rows."

I felt bleak and cold. There seemed no reason for concealing anything now.

"I've forgotten a lot of things," I said. "But I remember that our worse rows usually ended with you lashing out at me."

"That's not true."

"Did you hit me?"

"No," said Terry. But the expression on his face was both defensive and ashamed.

"You know, that was one of the reasons why the police didn't believe me. I'm a victim. I've got a history. I'm a woman who has been hit. I called the police before. Do you remember that evening? Maybe you don't remember it. You'd been drinking and there was some sort of row. I don't remember what that one was about either. Was it the one where I'd washed a shirt of yours that you wanted to wear and it was still wet? And I said if it was a problem, why didn't you wash it yourself ? Was it that one? Or was it one of the ones where you said I ruined your life by going on at you? There were a lot of those. It's hard to tell those ones apart. But it ended with you grabbing the kitchen knife and me calling the police."

"No, I don't remember that," Terry said. "You're exaggerating."

"No! I'm not exaggerating, I'm not making it up. I'm saying what happens when you get drunk. First you get cheerful, then aggressively cheerful, then maudlin and self-pitying, and by the fourth drink you're angry. And if I'm there, you're angry with me. And I'm not going to sit here like some vengeful woman and list the things I've seen you do when you're drunk. But for some reason that I've never been able to work out, you get off on it. And then, for some reason I've also never been able to fathom, I believe you when you cry and say it'll never, not ever, happen again."

Terry stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. Was that his fourth, or his fifth?

"Abbie, this is a pretty good fucking imitation of the row we had."

"Then I wish that I remembered it, because I rather like the woman I was who pulled herself together and walked out."

"Yes," said Terry, sounding suddenly almost as tired as I was. "I rather liked her as well. You know, I'm sorry I didn't come and see you in the hospital. I was going to when I heard about it, and then stuff came up and then suddenly you were in my bath."

"That's all right," I said. "So where are my things?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean?"

"You left me, remember?"

"When did I leave you?"

"When?"

"What date?"

"Oh. On Saturday."

"Which Saturday?"

He cast me a glance, as if he suspected this was some elaborate charade. "Saturday January the twelfth. Around midday," he added.

"But that was sixteen days ago! I don't remember it." Once again, I felt close to tears. "Didn't I leave a forwarding address?"

"You went to stay with Sadie, I think. But that was just for a night."

"And after that?"

"No idea."

"Oh, my God," I said, and just held my head in my hands. "So where do I go now?"

"You could stay here for a bit, if you want. It would be all right. Just until you got things sorted out. We could talk things over .. . You know."

I looked at Terry sitting there in his cloud of cigarette smoke. And I thought of that woman, the woman I couldn't remember, me, who had taken the decision and walked out sixteen days earlier.

"No," I said. "No. I've got things to sort out. All sorts of things."

I looked around. Didn't someone say that if you leave something somewhere, it shows you want to come back? For sort of the same reason, I felt I had to take something away. Anything. There was a

IOI

small globe on the mantelpiece. Terry had given it to me on the only birthday of mine we had spent together. I took hold of it. He looked quizzical.

"It's mine," I said. "You gave it to me. It was my birthday present."

I moved towards the door and then I remembered something. "Sorry, Terry," I said. "I haven't got my purse. I haven't got anything. Could you lend me some money? Ten pounds. Twenty. Anything."

With a vast sigh, Terry got up and walked across to where his jacket was hanging over the back of the sofa. He searched through his wallet. "I can give you fifteen," he said. "I'm sorry. But I'll need the rest tonight."

"That's all right."

And he counted the money out as if he were paying the paper bill. A ten-pound note, three pound coins and then a mass of silver and copper. I took it all.

Three

I spent 2.80 on the Underground, and put a twenty-pence piece into the open violin case of a busker who was standing at the bottom of the escalator, playing "Yesterday' and trying to catch people's eyes as they flowed past him on their way home from work. I spent another fiver on a bottle of red wine when I reached Kennington. Now I had just seven pounds left, stuffed into my back pocket. I kept feeling it to make sure it was still there, one folded note and five coins. I had a plastic bag full of the unfamiliar clothes I'd been found in six days ago; only six days. I had a globe. As I stumbled along the street, head down against the wind and nose turning red, I felt dangerously unencumbered. It was as if without all the ordinary stuff of my previous life I was weightless and inexplicable and could drift away like a feather.

I had let myself dream of this: walking down the cold street with a bottle of wine to see a dear friend. Now I kept glancing around to see who was walking beside me, behind me. Why had I never noticed before how strange people look, especially in winter when they're muffled and buttoned up into themselves? My old shoes kept slipping on the ice. At one point a man put out his hand to steady me as we crossed the road. I wrenched my arm away and he stared at me in surprise.

"Be in, be in, be in," I said, as I pressed the bell to Sadie's basement flat and waited. I should have phoned in advance. What if she was out somewhere, or away? But she was never out at this time of day. Pippa was only six or seven weeks old and Sadie was euphorically housebound. I pressed the bell again.

"Coming!" called a voice. I could see her figure through the frosted glass. "Who is it?"

"Me. Abbie."

"Abbie! I thought you were still in hospital! Hang on."

I heard her cursing and fiddling with the locks and the door swung open and there she was, with Pippa in her arms, swaddled in thick towels and only a section of wrinkled pink face showing.

"I was just giving her a bath' she began, then stopped. "Jesus! Look at you!"

"I should have phoned in advance. I just .. . sorry, I needed to see you."

"Jesus!" she said again, stepping back to let me inside.

A sour-sweet heat hit me as Sadie closed the door behind us. Mustard and talcum powder and milk and vomit and soap. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

"Bliss," I said, and put my face towards Pippa. "Hello, sweetie, do you remember me?" Pippa opened her mouth and I could see right down her clean pink tunnel of throat to her tonsils. She gave a single thin yell. "No?" I said. "Well, that's not surprising, really. I'm not sure I remember me either."

"What on earth's happened to you?" asked Sadie. She pulled Pippa more firmly towards her and jiggled her slightly, in that instinctive way that all mothers seem to have. "You look'

"I know. Awful." I put the globe on the kitchen table. "This is for Pippa."

"What can I get you? Here, sit down. Move those baby clothes."

"Can I have a biscuit or a bit of bread or something? I feel a bit wobbly."

"Of course. God, what's been going on with you?" Pippa began to grizzle and Sadie lifted her up higher until she was bunched under her chin. "Sssh, it's all right now," she crooned in her new sing-song voice, which none of us had heard until Pippa was born. "There, there, my little poppet."

"You need to deal with her. I've come barging in at just the wrong time."

"She wants her feed."

"Go on. I can wait."

"Are you sure? You know where everything is. Make us both some tea. There are some digestives, I think. Have a look."

"I brought wine."

"I'm breast-feeding, I shouldn't, really."

"You have a glass and I'll manage the rest."

"I'll just change her, then I'll feed her in here. I want to hear everything. God, you're so thin. How much weight have you lost, anyway?"

"Sadie?"

"Yes?" She turned in the doorway.

"Can I stay?"

"Stay?"

"Just for a bit."

"Sure. Though I'm surprised you want to, really. It's just the sofa, mind, and the springs are gone and you know how Pippa wakes in the night."

"That doesn't matter."

"You said that last time, until it happened."

"Last time?"

"Yes." She looked at me strangely.

"I can't remember."

"What?"

"I can't remember," I repeated. I felt so tired I thought I'd fall over.

"Look, make yourself comfortable," Sadie said, "I'll be back. Five minutes, max."

I opened the bottle of wine and poured two glasses. I took a sip from mine and at once felt dizzy. I needed something to eat. I rummaged in the cupboards and found a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, which I ate standing up, cramming them into my mouth. I took another cautious sip of wine, then sat down on the sofa again. My head throbbed, my eyes burned with fatigue and the cut on my side was prickling. It felt so wonderfully warm and safe in here, down in the basement, with baby clothes draped over radiators and a big vase of dark orange chrysanthemums on the table, like flames.

"OK?" Sadie was back. She sat beside me, unbuttoned her shirt and undid her bra. She held Pippa to her breast, then sighed and settled back. "Tell me, then. It was bloody Terry, wasn't it? Your poor face, it's still bruised. You shouldn't have gone back. I thought you'd gone on holiday."

"Holiday?" I repeated.

"You said you were going to book one," she said.

"There was no holiday," I said.

"What did he do this time?"

"Who?"

"Terry." She peered at me. "Are you all right?"

"What makes you think it was Terry?"

"It's obvious. Especially after what happened last time. Oh, Abbie."

"What do you mean, "last time"?"

"When he hit you."

"So he did hit me."

"Yes. Hard. Abbie? You must remember."

"Tell me anyway."

She looked at me, puzzled, wondering if this was some kind of joke.

"This is weird. You argued, he hit you, you left him and came here. You said it was over for good this time. You were very determined. Almost excited, really. Happy, even. So you went back?"

"No." I shook my head. "At least, I don't know. But it wasn't him."

"You're not making sense." She stared at me, frowning, and then turned back to Pippa.

"I got hit over the head," I said. "Now I can't remember things. I can't remember leaving Terry, or coming here, or anything."

She made a whistling sound between her teeth. I couldn't tell if it was shock or incredulity. "You mean, you were concussed or something?"

"Something like that."

"So you really can't remember?"

"I really can't."

"You can't remember leaving Terry?"

"No."

"Or coming here?"

"No."

"Or moving out again?"

"Did I move out again? I suppose I must have done nothing of mine's here, is it? Where did I go?"

"You really can't remember?"

"No." I felt tired of saying it.

"You went to Sheila and Guy's."

"So I went there on the Sunday?"

"I guess. Yes, that must be right. Days of the week seem to merge for me at the moment."

"And you didn't see me again, till now, I mean?"

"No. I thought you were away."

"Oh, well."

"Abbie, tell me what happened. The whole story."

The whole story: I took a sip of my wine and looked at her, while she whispered endearments to her baby. I badly needed to talk to someone, to pour it all out, everything that had happened, the terror in the dark, the shame, the horrible, terminal loneliness, the sense of being dead. I needed to tell someone about the police and the way they'd taken all those emotions and turned them back on me and I needed that someone to be solid as a rock in their faith in me. If they weren't ... I drained the wine in my glass and poured myself some more. If not Sadie, then who? She was my best friend, my oldest friend. I'd been the one she'd turned to after Bob dumped her, when she was eight months pregnant. If Sadie didn't believe me, who would? I took a deep breath.