The Stars’ Tennis Balls

This is, after all, England – and I shall make no important decisions without referring to it. Although it seems now that I may have done the police and the establishment an injustice, the sign over the desk is still a good idea.

In the normal course of events, Sir Charles had been due to arrive at Catherine Street at mid-day for a diary meeting. It seemed obvious to me however, given the lack of any news, that he must have come down the previous night to bail out his son and establish some kind of media blackout. None the less, I was determined to ensure the full involvement of the press somehow, even if it meant another anonymous call from a phone-box. First, however, I would have to see precisely how events had unravelled at Catherine Street. The prospect of Ned’s embarrassed explanations and confused protestations of innocence to his father filled me with delicious anticipation. Would he have been sent up to bed without any supper? Would he have been believed? I had decided to offer him exactly the same spaniel-eyed tactlessness and clumsy sympathy that he so crassly meted out to me.

Despite a great eagerness to be there as soon as possible, I took the tube to Victoria at my usual time of half past nine. While I would have loved to be there earlier, it was important not to show that I expected today to be anything more than a perfectly normal Friday.

As I turned into Catherine Street I was delighted to see a police car parked outside the house. Things were looking up. Such a sight argued against any concerted or coherent cover-up: at the most it suggested a very incompetent one. If the police had been got at they would hardly be there now, with an unmarked car outside the front door. Perhaps the Drug Squad were searching the place from top to bottom, I thought, hoping to enter and see floorboards up and books scattered all over the Bokhara. What an agreeable prospect. I looked up at the faзade and fancied I saw a face pressed against the window of the first floor study.

I let myself into the house and mounted the stairs, preparing an expression in which I hoped that mild curiosity and impassive preparedness were nicely blended.

Sir Charles was at his desk in conversation with two policemen. I saw that Ned’s girlfriend, Portia, had been the face at the window. She stood at it now, restlessly turning her head one way and the other to look up and down the street, her breath misting the pane.

‘Ashley, thank heaven!’ cried Sir Charles, rising excitedly to his feet as I came in.

‘Sir Charles, what is it? Is there something wrong?’

‘Have you seen Ned?’

‘Ned? Not since yesterday, sir, no. Why? Has he gone missing?’

‘He hasn’t been seen since four o’clock yesterday afternoon!’

‘Good lord!’ I said. ‘But that’s bizarre …

The policemen were eyeing me with curiosity and I bowed my head respectfully in their direction.

‘Gentlemen, this is Mr Barson-Garland, my researcher,’ said Sir Charles with a wave of the hand in my direction.

The two policemen half rose from their seats and nodded grave good mornings to me.

‘These kind officers are being very helpful, Ashley. But so far the thing seems to be a complete mystery.’

Very helpful? The Metropolitan Police should look to its policies on interdepartmental co-operation. I thought. The buffoons of the drug squad haven’t yet bothered to tell these poor flatfoots that they were holding Ned.

I had to confess that I hadn’t imagined that a minor offence like the possession of cannabis could warrant an overnight stay in the cells. But it struck me that on arrest, to save his father embarrassment, Ned might have refused to give his name. Perhaps such a lack of cooperation, allied to the arrogant Maddstone manner, had so annoyed the arresting officers that they had thrown him in a cell simply in order to teach him a lesson.

‘Have you tried calling the hospitals?’ I suggested. ‘Or police stations, even. If he was mugged perhaps, or…

‘Yes, yes,’ said Sir Charles, sitting down again. He had taken up the natural position of authority at his desk, with the policemen sitting respectfully across from him, caps on lap and notebooks in hand, like secretaries about to take dictation. ‘We have tried everything. A missing persons alert has been put out, every police station and hospital in London has been contacted. Officers from Special Branch will be here soon. There is always the possibility you see, given my position,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘that the security angle may have to be considered.’

There was something in the way he said ‘given my position’ that reminded me forcibly of Ned. The same Maddstone-maddening apologetic ruefulness – as if status, authority and birth were embarrassing solecisms to be understood and pardoned.

One of the policemen turned to me. ‘When did you last see Mr Maddstone, sir?’

I considered the question. ‘Um, about mid-day, I should say. Let me see. I spent the morning working on correspondence…’ My eye travelled to Sir Charles’s desk, where the pile of post still lay, unsigned. ‘Those letters there, in fact. Then I left at … what time did we leave, Portia?’

Portia turned from the window with a blank stare. I could see that she hadn’t slept all night and that the question hadn’t penetrated, only my calling her name.

‘I went off with your cousin Gordon,’ I reminded her. ‘To show him round Parliament. Do you remember? When was that, would you say?’

‘Lunchtime,’ she said in a dull voice. ‘You went off at lunchtime. And then you came back.’

‘Came back?’ I said, raising an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think … oh yes, you’re quite right, though. I let myself in to pick up my briefcase at … I suppose it was around three o’clock, but I didn’t see Ned then. You were both up … you were both – otherwise engaged,’ I amended with care, winning the ghost of a smile from one of the policemen. ‘And then you were off to a job interview somewhere, weren’t you? What happened?’

The story tumbled from her. I could tell that she had told it many times, to others and over and over again to herself and that in the telling of it she hoped somehow for a meaning or clue to emerge. Ned had not been there when she emerged from her interview. She had waited around Catherine Street, gone home, phoned and phoned and then at seven in the morning she had finally managed to persuade a House of Commons official to telephone Sir Charles in the country. He had driven up and called the police, who had so far discovered nothing.

‘You’ll forgive me, miss,’ one of them said now. ‘But there were no bad words between you and Mr Maddstone, were there? No quarrel or anything of that nature?’

Portia stared at him. ‘Quarrel? Me and Ned? No, that was impossible. We have never … we could never… We were like…’

Sir Charles went over to her with a handkerchief and put an arm round her shoulder. The policemen exchanged glances, then saw me looking at them and transferred their gazes down to their notebooks. All deeply affecting.

‘Is there anything that you think I could be doing?’ I said. ‘Anyone I should call?’

‘That’s very kind, Ashley, but I don’t think…’ Sir Charles began.

‘There is the question of the media, sir,’ said one of the policemen. ‘They can be very useful. Maybe Mr Barson-Garland here could call someone you know in the newspaper world.’

Sir Charles stiffened. The press were not his favourite institution. They liked to mock him for being ‘out of touch’ and for possessing an accent that made the Duke of Edinburgh sound like a filing clerk. They habitually referred to him as Barkingstone, Loonystone and Sir Charles the Mad.

‘Do we really think that’s necessary?’ he said worriedly. ‘Surely they would only-’

Any further consideration of the role of the press was put aside by a loud pealing on the doorbell. Portia gasped and, wriggling from Sir Charles’s grip, went to the window and looked down.

‘Oh. It’s just three men,’ she said dully.

‘That’ll be Special Branch, sir.’

Sir Charles stood alone on the carpet, suddenly looking every month his age. It occurred to me that he had put his arm round Portia to support himself as much as her.

‘I’ll let them in,’ I said.

And so the morning wore on. One nugget of news finally came through just before lunchtime and it puzzled me greatly. I relayed it to Rufus and Gordon over another pub lunch in the shadow of Big Ben.

‘It seems that the police paid a visit to the Knightsbridge College,’ I told them. ‘Apparently four Spanish students saw a blond English youth being picked up and driven off in a car. They can’t agree on whether it was a Vauxhall or a Ford and have been taken off somewhere to look at pictures of Ned.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Rufus. ‘They’ll recognise him straight away.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Gordon. ‘The cops already know it’s him. They’re the ones who picked him up, for Christ’s sake.’

‘The more time that passes and the more policemen that get involved, the less likely it appears that they ever picked him up at all,’ I murmured, but Gordon was listening to Rufus.

‘That car was definitely a Vauxhall,’ he was saying with conviction. ‘No doubt about that. A T-reg Cavalier. And they looked like Drug Squad to me. Unshaven, leather-jackets, tattered 501s, Adidas trainers. Classic DS. It’s their idea of undercover. Pathetic, really.’

‘Christ, what a screw-up. You mean the Drug Squad are holding the guy and they don’t realise that he’s been reported missing? Maybe we should make another call.’

‘Gordon, that is a disastrous idea,’ I said. ‘Listen to me. You have to get it into your head that whatever kind of jeans and whatever kind of footwear favoured by those men we saw yesterday, they were in fact not the Drug Squad, nor any other kind of squad.’

I spent a very fervent quarter of an hour persuading the pair of them that for us to confess to any part in the business would only confuse matters.

‘It has to be a coincidence,’ I explained. ‘Ned has been kidnapped. That is the obvious and the only explanation. It just so happens that the kidnappers chose that particular time and place. If you think about it, it’s not as illogical as it seems. Yesterday would have been the first proper opportunity they’d’ve had for a long time. He’s been at school for months and then away sailing. But yesterday, yesterday they could have followed him and Portia from the house all the way to Knightsbridge, seen him left alone on the pavement and nabbed him. We saw the whole thing and of course assumed it was an arrest. In fact the police probably didn’t think our tip-off worth bothering with. Or,’ I added, ‘they heard Rufus giggling in the background and recognised it for what it was, a schoolboy hoax. In any case, it’s just a coincidence. Nothing more.’

It sounded pretty thin to me, but they bought it and chewed on it for a while. Gordon, as I thought he would be, was the first to see the flaw.

‘If he’s been kidnapped, why hasn’t there been some kind of ransom demand?’

I was ready for that. ‘There are kidnappers and kidnappers,’ I said darkly. ‘For two years Ned’s father was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.’

Their mouths dropped as they took in the significance of this.

‘So now you see,’ I continued, ‘why we must lie low and not say a word. None of it has anything to do with us.’

‘Except that we witnessed it,’ said Gordon. ‘We might be needed for evidence…

‘Those Spanish students were right there, they can give plenty of descriptions. We were the other side of a busy street. No, believe me, there’s nothing we can add but confusion.’

I left the pub confident that I could trust them not to do or say anything indiscreet. I arrived back at Catherine Street and found that to gain admittance I now had to show my House of Commons pass to a policeman posted by the front door.

There is a chaise-longue in Maddstone’s office, all plush and gilt, the kind on which exotic princesses used to pose with panthers. I went upstairs to find Sir Charles slumped on it, the colour drained from his face. Portia was leaning against him, or he against her, and the tears were pouring down her face. It was clear that news of great import had broken while I had been away.

A man in his middle to late twenties sat on the desk, talking into the telephone. His eyes had taken me in as I entered the room and I had the unpleasant feeling that, lazy and pleasant as his inspection seemed to be, he had seen right through to the back of my soul and been unimpressed with what he had found there. An intelligence operative of some kind, I told myself, trying to shake the feeling off. No doubt a course of training in the perfection of that kind of look goes along with instruction in the use of code books, microfilms and cyanide capsules.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

Sir Charles opened his eyes and tried to speak. The man was completely in pieces. If this is the quality of our political leaders, I thought, then no wonder the country has gone to the dogs. You won’t find me cracking like that when I’m in power.

When I’m in power…

How strange. That’s the first time I’ve ever articulated such a thought. I have always told myself that I was going to become a teacher. How very strange. Now that I’ve written it down I feel pleasantly relieved. Perhaps I knew it all along. Well, well.

‘And you might be?’ said the man on the desk, gently replacing the receiver and smiling across at me.

‘Ashley Barson-Garland, I’m Sir Charles’s personal assistant.’

‘Ashley Barson-Garland, Ashley Barson-Garland…’ he picked up two black notebooks that lay by the telephone. ‘What frightful handwriting our friends in blue have … ah, yes, here we are. Ashley Barson-Garland. Says here you’re a researcher for Sir Charles and a school friend of Edward’s. But surely you must be at least twenty-two? Twenty-three perhaps?’

‘I shall be eighteen in two weeks,’ I said, flushing slightly. It has not been uncommon for new boys at school to take me for a member of staff and I dislike being reminded that I look older than my years.

‘My mistake. My name is Smith.’

Smith indeed. A deliberate insult. I went forward to shake his hand and he had the cheek to look into his palm afterwards and then to my face, causing me to flush again.

‘Well, Mr Barson-Garland,’ he said, and I would have found open revulsion infinitely less offensive than the expressionless way he now took a handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped it against his hand. ‘I’m afraid that while you were at luncheon some rather bad news came in…

The tone of ‘While you were at luncheon’ seemed to suggest that I had been guilty of some terrible, sybaritic dereliction of duty. In fact, Sir Charles had insisted that I get something to eat and the policemen with him had agreed there was nothing further I could do.

‘Bad news?’ I said, resisting the temptation to explain this and open myself to further humiliation.

‘… it seems that a call was made to the offices of The Times newspaper an hour ago claiming responsibility for kidnapping Edward Maddstone. We are working on the assumption that the call was genuine.’

‘But who? Why?’

‘The claim was made by a man purporting to represent the IRA. As for why …

Sir Charles made a kind of moaning noise and Portia hugged him close to her.

‘Oh Jesus,’ I whispered. ‘I was right.’

‘You were right?’ ‘Smith’ raised his eyebrows in mild astonishment.

‘Well, the thought had crossed my mind,’ I said. ‘I mean it seemed a possible explanation, you know. Given, given…, everything,’ I completed, lamely.

‘What a sharp fellow you are, Mr Barson-Garland.

Well, perhaps you might employ some of that sharpness in making yourself useful, if you’ve a mind to?’

I nodded vigorously. ‘Of course. Anything.’

‘The Times will give us a little time to check out the information before they act upon it, but act upon it they surely will. I think perhaps Sir Charles and the young lady here should leave before the media circus arrives and all hell breaks loose. Perhaps you can think of a suitable bolt-hole. Where do you live, yourself?’

‘Tredway Gardens,’ I said. ‘It’s just a flat.’

‘And do you ah, share it with anyone?’ He put the question innocently enough, but again I had the impression that he had detected something in me that amused him.

‘Tom Grove. He works in party headquarters, it’s his house, I have the basement. Sir Charles’s PPS made the arrangement,’ I said, annoyed at myself for feeling the need to elaborate.

‘I see,’ said Smith. ‘Well, let us repair thither and that right speedily.’

‘I can’t drive a car I’m afraid…’

‘My dear old periwinkle, leave all that to me.

As I write this, Sir Charles is upstairs in Tom’s bedroom, asleep. The man Smith arranged for a doctor to come and pump him full of tranquillisers.

Poor Tom Grove has been warned away. Portia was driven off for further questioning half an hour ago, still hysterical with grief. Seems a little hard on her, but I dare say the authorities know what they’re doing. Smith himself has disappeared to ‘rattle a few trays’ somewhere, whatever that means, but said that he would ‘pop his head round the door’ sometime tomorrow, would I mind meanwhile ‘commanding the support trench’ – he really is insufferably pleased with himself.

The flat is now pleasantly calm, however, with no sign of the press anywhere. A part of me feels a little sorry for Ned, but another part tells me that, wherever he is and whatever is happening to him, it will do him a great deal of good.

Enough for the moment. I think I shall watch the six o’clock news now.

No matter how strongly she fought it, Portia's evenings at home had fallen into a routine. She had tried for a long time to prolong a state of perpetual crisis by arguing with Pete and Hillary over everything and nothing, but over the weeks the outbursts subsided and life began to assume a normality that she was not able to resist, however much of a betrayal the very assumption of ordinariness in life might signify.

Were it not for Gordon, she felt she would have gone mad. With tremendous tact and psychological understanding, he had suggested that instead of waiting for news or continuing to sit by Sir Charles’s bedside looking in vain for signs of recovery, she could do Gordon a great favour by showing him the sights of London. All the crazy tourist shit, he meant. Stupid stuff that would take her mind off Maddstone Junior and Maddstone Senior at least for a few hours every day. He’d really appreciate it, he was starting to feel homesick and he still couldn’t find his way round the city.

Pete conceded that it would be cruel to hold her to any promise of working through the summer holidays and had provided enough pocket money for the two of them to buy summer travel passes and spend long days trailing around galleries, churches, museums and royal palaces.

‘I want you both to keep a notebook,’ Peter had said. ‘The architecture and building in London is a discourse on the movement of power and money. You’ll find it’s a kind of economic geology. From the church to the kings to the aristocracy to the merchant classes to the banks and finally to the multinationals. It’s like reading rock strata.’

Gordon and Portia took no notice of this and pressed the buttons at the Science Museum, giggled at the Yeomen of the Guard and tried to get the sentries in their boxes outside St James’s Palace to flinch or move their eyes, just like the other adolescent tourists they accompanied around London. Portia found that taking Gordon around her favourite art galleries and explaining the pictures to him was as close as she had come to pleasure for many weeks. It was something to be able to answer questions, to be needed and useful.

Pete never asked to see the notebook he had insisted on. His own time was taken up by his summer students at the polytechnic. One of them had flattered him into forming a discussion group for the analysis of British colonialism in Northern Ireland and Peter had bullied the Inner London Educational Authority into funding a visit to Belfast so that they could see for themselves what was happening ‘on the ground’, as Pete liked to say. Hillary, busy with her novel was happy enough in the belief that Portia was in the hands of a sensible cousin.

Twice a week Portia still went to visit Sir Charles. It was a relief to her that the press were no longer keeping up a vigil outside the hospital gates, but it was a sign too of waning public interest and that worried her. Events had moved on and the disappearance of the cabinet minister’s son had slipped from the front pages to smaller paragraphs inside until quietly dropping from the agenda entirely. At the height of the public fever, when the Prime Minister, cutting short her holiday in the south of France, had stood at the hospital entrance assuring the cameras that steps would be taken and revenge exacted, Ned’s kidnapping had been the sensation of the summer period known in journalistic circles – Portia discovered with distaste – as ‘the silly season’. But, as sightings of Ned dwindled and reports emerged that the IRA were now denying any part in the affair, the papers began to suggest that the whole thing had never been anything more than a family row, a teenage tantrum of the kind that went on every day. They resumed with relish the usual August parade of fifty-stone women, two-tailed dogs and string beans that spelled out ‘armageddon’ in Hebrew. The senior newsmen left Britain for their summer holidays, and the deputies minding the shop preferred not to mess with tradition. Besides, the only person worth interviewing would have been Charles Maddstone, and he wasn’t saying a word. To anybody.

The two massive strokes that had felled him during the week following his son’s disappearance had been so severe that doctors doubted he would ever walk or talk again. The first had completely incapacitated the left side of his body and the second had reduced him to a state of motionless coma. Portia found that her time at his bedside gave her an opportunity to talk without any fear of being misunderstood.

‘No news, Daddy,’ she would say, closing the door of the private room, drawing up a chair and offering the latest scrap of news. Calling him ‘Daddy’ gave her a secret and almost erotic thrill. ‘Someone was seen in Scarborough, but it was another false alarm.’

She would talk on, pouring out whatever came into her mind, every now and again finding opportunities to emphasise Ned’s name in a sentence and glancing across to see if that one mention might be the lowered rope to pull Sir Charles from the well of his unconsciousness.

One day, as she repeated to him for the thousandth time the story of the afternoon Ned had come into the Hard Rock Café with his friends, there was a knock on the door.

A doctor Portia had never seen before told her that he had spoken to Sir Charles’s sister, Georgina.

‘It may be time to consider switching off the life-support, he said, ‘and let the old fellow slip away.

‘But Ned is the next-of-kin,’ protested Portia, outraged. ‘It’s his decision.'

‘It’s been over a month. We must face up to the fact that there is no chance of any change. Miss Maddstone has said that she will think about it for a week before coming to any decision. I do not believe,’ the doctor added, ‘that you are a member of the family?’

Back home at Hampstead, Pete explained that any decision of this kind in a private hospital would be based on financial rather than clinical considerations.

‘It’ll be the insurance company, believe me,’ he said. ‘That kind of twenty-four hour intensive care is expensive. The money men will be the ones clamouring for the machines to be switched off.’

Gordon was surprised to hear this. ‘I thought England had a public health system.'

‘A public health system?’ Pete snorted. ‘That’ll be the day…’

Oh, God, here we go, thought Portia. Gordon should have known better than to walk into that one. There’ll be no stopping Pete now.

In fact, Peter was only warming up when Hillary came downstairs demanding to know what clothes he wanted to take on what he had been rather grandly calling his ‘Northern Ireland Fact Finding Trip’.

It always amazed Portia that her mother, such an ardent and devoted feminist on paper and in conversation, should spend so much time, when it came to the realities of everyday life, looking after Pete’s every need. From childhood on, Portia had never seen her father so much as pick up a sock, let alone wash one. Hillary cooked for him, shopped for him, washed his clothes and packed his bags, and not once had Portia heard her complain. If all men truly were, as Hillary had written so many times, rapists, it seemed odd to Portia that they should be waited on like Maharajahs.

As they discussed the wardrobe that would most make Pete look assured, supportive and at home on the streets of West Belfast, Gordon came up to Portia and suggested they leave Pete and Hillary and go for a walk somewhere.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to the Flask. You’ll like it.’

‘What is that, some kind of park?’

‘It’s a pub. You’ll like it.’

Gordon knew perfectly well what the Flask Inn was, since he had already been there twice in the company of Rufus Cade. He wanted Portia to have the pleasure of introducing him to it, however. He discovered early on that the more helpless and ignorant he appeared, the more she liked it. Gordon was used to that. Most of the girls he had known back home had been the same.

‘You guys make sure you’re back before eleven,’ Hillary insisted. ‘In time to say goodbye to Pete.’

A loud pealing came on the doorbell as they left the room and Portia’s heart gave a little jump. She had learned not to get too excited by the sound of the door or the telephone, but one day soon a call would come and it would be the call. You never knew…

‘And see who that is,’ Pete shouted after them. ‘If it’s not important, we’re out.’

As they went downstairs, a huge bang shook the front door as if a car had slammed into it. An even louder one followed and the whole hallway shuddered. At the third bang, the front door splintered off its hinges and fell inwards with a crash, shattering the floor tiles and rocking the staircase. Three men in gasmasks and body armour stepped through.

At precisely the same time, to the very second, there came a delicate tinkle of broken glass in the sitting room above, followed by the thumping hiss of tear gas canisters and the shrill terrified screams of Hillary and Pete.

Dr Mallo was a very simple man. He approached life rationally, not empirically. The horizons of his world were narrowly confined and this afforded him, he believed, more happiness than that granted to the majority of his fellow creatures. The young Englishman in front of him now, for example, was of no interest to him at all. The trained psychiatrist in him recognised the submerged tension, emotional sublimation and signs of erotic shame in him as a matter of course, but only the paperwork and money being laid on the desk were worthy of scrutiny and serious attention. Where the man came from, the source of his money, the authority behind the documents he produced and the reasons for his neuroses were questions that only an empiricist or – worse still – a psychologist, would ask. The only questions Dr Mallo considered worth asking were questions of authenticity, quantity, reliability and seriousness of purpose.

‘This money,’ said Dr Mallo, ‘is good for one year of treatment. Also, with the current weakness of the pound, what you have given me is, I regret, too little by approximately one and one quarter percent.'

Oliver Delft took a thick wad of twenty pound notes from his pocket. ‘The case is a severe one,’ he said. ‘Regular sums will be paid into a bank of your choice, annually or quarterly. I believe this procedure is agreeable to you? Unluckily, as you know, this is not the first time my family has had occasion to avail itself of your services.’

‘Sometimes these problems lie deep within genetic inheritance,’ said Mallo, watching the money being counted onto the table. ‘Enough, one hundred and forty is fifteen pounds too much. Be pleased to sign here and here. I can offer change for you in dollars US or francs Swiss.’

Oliver replaced the roll of money and took the proffered pen.

‘Dollars, if you’d be so kind.’

‘I note,’ said Dr Mallo, ‘that your unfortunate brother has no name.

‘I’m afraid you will discover that he has many,’ said Oliver with a rueful smile. ‘Last year he was the rightful heir to the Getty fortune. He kept that one up for over six months, almost a record. In his time he has been…, let me see, Margaret Thatcher’s secret lover, he has been an abused orphan, a Palestinian gunrunner, a member of the Danish royal family – frankly, you name it, he’s tried it.’

‘You don’t say?’ murmured the doctor. ‘And at the present time?’

‘It’s back to politics. Thinks he’s the son of an English cabinet minister called Maddstone. Won’t answer to any name but Ed. Or is it Ned? No saying how long it’ll last. He gets it all from the newspapers, of course. The real Maddstone boy was snatched by terrorists two days ago. Dare say you’ve read about it in the papers?’

Mallo gave no answer.

‘Anyway,’ Oliver continued, ‘that’s the current delusion. It’s sad to have to give up on the lad, but we just can’t cope with him any more I’m afraid. He’s young, extremely fit and capable of terrible violence. He’s done some appalling things to the family. Quite unforgivable things. You wouldn’t credit it to look at him, but then I believe that’s often the way.’

‘Indeed so.’

‘I understand also that this kind of mania is generally somewhat intractable. Permanent often, I believe.’

‘Sometimes it is regretfully true, patients seldom respond quickly. If, however, some improvement were noted…?’

‘I think it very unlikely,’ said Oliver. ‘But if the family’s circumstances were to change in any way and we found ourselves willing to give him another chance we would of course be in touch with you in the usual manner. Otherwise

‘Otherwise, sir, you may trust that he will receive the highest quality of care. In the event of demise …

‘He is very dear to me, I trust that you and your staff will ensure that he lives a long and, in so far as he is able, happy life. My father and uncles assure me that you are to be relied upon in this respect.'

‘Naturally we are to be relied upon,’ the doctor assured him. ‘Our diet and exercise regimes here are of the highest standard. You will be pleased also by the seriousness with which we regard issues of hygiene, safety and general health. Besides, we are subject to rigorous inspection from the authorities. There are patients who have lived happily amongst us for more than thirty years. Indeed we have three men who were placed here by your…, grandfather.’

‘You’ll find that the company and conversation of other people excites him,’ said Oliver, rising. ‘They feed his delusions. You may find it best to keep him on his own until he is a great deal calmer. Let the memory of his old life fade away.

‘Of course, of course, you may depend upon it. And when shall we expect the pleasure of receiving him?’

‘My friends will arrive here with him some time later this afternoon. I wish I could stay to see him settled in, but pressure of work I’m afraid…’

‘Really, I quite understand. If there’s nothing more you wish to see, a car will take you to the airport directly.’

Ned awoke from a dream of rivers of gore and spittle pouring from Paddy Leclare’s mouth and knew at once that the movement under him was of a sea in full swell. He tried to open his eyes. For a moment it felt that they had become glued tight by blood and sweat, before he realised that they were indeed wide open. It was simply that there was nothing to see. Either he was in a place where no light shone – not the smallest reflection of anything – or he had become stone blind. Some instinct told him that he was not blind but enclosed in a vacuum of absolute darkness.

While the grinding ache in his shoulder socket hung like a black cloud over his every conscious moment, he found that he could foreground each of his other torments. He could concentrate separately on the hot pain of the torn skin around his wrists for example, on the nauseating throb of his smashed nose or on the stabs of a broken rib that pierced his lungs with each breath or movement. These tortures feasted on him like a swarm of angry wasps, yet behind them all, the shoulder, nagging like an evil memory, rasped and grated against its socket with relentless cruelty. But behind even the sick torment of his ruined shoulder, terrible as it was, other agonies raged that were harder yet to bear, the agonies of bewilderment, loneliness and naked fear.

Ned’s mind was so closed in by terror and confusion that he became less and less able to make sense of any past or present identity. In delirium and over the course of hours that might have been minutes or days, he reached out with his mind to every image that had ever been sacred to him, his father, cricket, a yacht skiffing in the wind, his best woollen blazer, hot porridge lightly salted, the sound of the school bell at evening – the images came randomly – a pair of silver hair-brushes he had found in a jumble sale and polished to perfect brightness, the gear wheels on his first bicycle, the sharp sour stink of National Geographic magazines, cold milk, freshly sharpened pencils, his naked body in the mirror, gingerbread, the clatter of hockey-sticks at bully-off, the smell of a record-duster…, yet each picture that he fixed upon flew from his mental grip, and, like soap from a closing fist, the harder he tried to force them the further they leapt away.

The image above all others that he had saved from bringing into the open could at last be denied no longer, and he conjured up Portia to be with him. But she would not come. Her handwriting, her laugh, the shining warmth of her skin, the grin of animal wickedness in her eyes – they had all gone.

Now only Christ was left. Christ would come to him and lift him from this empty despair. Ned’s torn lips could barely close on the words of his prayers. He asked for pity and hope and love. He asked for a sign that he had been heard. And then, all at once, Jesus rose and floated before him, glowing with light. Ned looked into the gentle, loving eyes of his saviour and leaned up to be taken into his arms and away from this terrible place. With a snarl of fury, Satan sprang forward and opened his huge mouth. He tore the Son of God into bloody pieces and turning towards Ned with a roar of triumph, he closed his black jaws around him.

Ned awoke again in darkness to the sound of the van’s engine and the swift hum of passing traffic. Perhaps he had imagined the sea.

All that he had to connect him to reality now were his pain and the rhythmic flip of tyres on tarmac road. It was as if he had been reborn, reborn into a churning waste of unending isolation and pain. Every instant seemed to contain an eternity of suffering that flung him further away from what he had been and further towards a new existence in which friendship, family, future and love Gould never have a part.

Later he imagined that he had been inside a white room. He recalled a glare of fluorescent light and the rising stench from him as a scalpel cut the string from around his waist and his trousers fell to the floor. He thought he had felt a sharp sting in his arm, a quite new slam of pain and a jarring thump in his shoulder, streams of warm water washing over him and strong arms bearing him away.

He awoke once more to find himself on a bed in a small room whose every surface had been painted cream. The door, walls and ceiling, the tubular steel at the end of the bed, the bars on the single window and the clouds in the sky beyond – all were cream. He couldn’t tell the colour of the floor because the room was small and something was pinning him tight to the bed. When he raised his head, stretching the nape, he could see two thick belts of black webbing strapped across his chest and legs, each fastened by what appeared to be seat-belt buckles. But when he raised his head, the muscles in the back of his neck burned and the broken ribs shifted and clicked inside his chest, so instead he lay back and let the general ache of his body comfort and console him. He was calmer now and almost frivolously cheerful. The black torrent of his nightmares had subsided and the stupidity of his situation was starting to entertain him.

He dozed for a while and awoke with the bedroom still washed by the same creamy daylight. The skin in the arm below his good shoulder itched and a memory surfaced of the first of the straps having at some time been unbuckled, hands forcing him to sit upright and a needle pricking his skin. He believed that he had woozily murmured ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you’ before falling asleep again. He stared at the cream ceiling and attempted to assemble his thoughts. Before he could do so he heard the sound of footsteps squeaking on a shiny surface. Ned raised his head an inch from the pillow as they approached. A door close by opened and closed, and Ned sank down again.

Keys rattled in the lock and Ned started awake, annoyed with himself for having slipped off again.

‘Hello there, young sir! Feeling much better now, I am sure.'

A plump little man in a white dentist’s tunic came into the room, smiling and twinkling. He had spoken with an accent that Ned could not place. A very tall and elegant younger man with white-blond hair and pale blue eyes stayed in the doorway, holding in his hands a steel bowl.

‘You have been most unwell, my chap, and we are here to see that you may become better and stronger.’

Ned started to speak, but the plump little man raised a hand.

‘No, no. There will be time for us to talk a little later on. My name is Dr Mallo and we will have many good chats, I promise you. But now I want you to know that Rolf will be looking after you. You have done a great amount of harm to yourself and we must give your body some time to be healed. Rolf can help you with your pain…’ he gestured to the tall man who came forward, holding out the steel bowl with outstretched arms like a communion server offering the paten, '… and in gratitude for this, I hope you will be very calm and not disturb yourself, yes?’ Ned nodded and watched as Dr Mallo took a syringe and a glass phial from the bowl.

‘Excellent, this is excellent. You are a good fellow.’

Rolf stooped down to loosen the strap around Ned’s chest. Ned forced himself upright and watched the doctor push the needle into the cork top of the phial.

‘But this is very fine! Already you sit up on your own!’ Dr Mallo beaming with approval, raised the loose sleeve of Ned’s gown and rubbed cotton wool on the upper arm. ‘That is cold, I know. Now, Rolf is more in practice with needles than I, but I am hoping this will not hurt… So! It was nothing.’

Ned lay back again and immediately a warm surge of calm flooded his brain. He smiled up at the doctor and at Rolf, who was bending over the bed and buckling the straps.

‘S’nice… s’very nice. Z’lovely…’

Dr Mallo beamed again and moved round to the other side of the bed. ‘And your shoulder is not so hurtful?’

‘It’s fine,’ murmured Ned, his mind floating happily. ‘I can’t feel a thing.’

‘We have strapped him tightly for you. You are young and he will mend very nicely, I think. So. Sleep now and stay at peace.

Ned could not remember either of them leaving the room and when he next awoke, it was nearly dark.

Over the next few days Ned tried his best to exchange even the smallest number of words with Rolf, who visited at regular intervals with his steel bowl and syringe, sometimes bringing with him fresh dressings, a plastic bottle to urinate into and flasks of soup which Ned was only allowed to drink through a shiny steel tube.

Rolf proved entirely uncommunicative. Ned decided that he couldn’t speak English. Dr Mallo, whom he had not seen since, had spoken with an accent that might have been German or Scandinavian, so it seemed logical that Rolf too was foreign.

No, Ned was the foreigner. Wherever he might be, it was far from England. The black nightmare of his day or days in the pain and dark was proof of that. Distant seagull cries gave Ned the impression that he was close to the sea, perhaps even on an island. Some instinct told him that he was somewhere north. Perhaps it was the nature of the light that made him so sure, perhaps it was his interpretation of Dr Mallo’s accent, which he now believed may have been Scandinavian. That would accord too with the sharp blue of Rolf’s eyes and the silver blondness of his hair.

Ned began to use the periods of physical pain and mental clarity that attended him for the hour or so before each injection to consider his circumstances. He decided after a while that it was not the nature of the light that told him he was in a northern country, it was its steadiness, its constancy. No matter at what time Ned awoke, the sky outside his window was always bright, or at the most in a state of gentle twilight. At this time of year, Ned knew, the farther North you travelled, the shorter the hours of darkness. The night he had sailed on the Orphana for Oban, the night Paddy died, it had been dark only for the briefest time.

Ned was sure that Oliver Delft’s colleague, Mr Gaine was mad or criminal. He had beaten and broken Ned and taken him away with two evil, ugly, violent and malevolent psychopaths whose dead and brutal eyes would haunt Ned for ever. He had arrived here, where he was being treated kindly and with consideration, yet kept tied to his bed in a locked room with bars on its window. What could that mean?

Somewhere, Oliver Delft and Ned’s father would be looking for him. Perhaps Mr Gaine was demanding a ransom. Ned was sure enough of Delft’s skill and his father’s influence to feel confident that he would not get away with it.

But meanwhile, what could his father be thinking? And Portia, what of her?

He was puzzled that it should be so, but it was his father, not Portia, who visited him in the loud and vivid dreams that filled his sleeping hours. In his waking moments, when he pictured what he would do when he got back, when he thought of home and school and the places and people that he knew, Portia’s image was never there. Ned was not worried that he had to force her to his mind. He supposed that he was frightened she would have been angry at his disappearance. She might have believed that he had run away from her. Perhaps she even feared that she had disappointed him somehow during their afternoon in his bedroom and that he had escaped like a coward at the first opportunity. When this whole nonsense had been cleared up Ned would take her away to a country inn and they would get to know each other all over again.

For the moment, Ned hoped that Rolf might at least bring him something to read. When his straps were loosened, he could sit up easily now and he believed he could move his right shoulder and the muscles of his upper body well enough to handle books. Reading would help pass the time, which was beginning to hang more and more heavily as the pain receded and the drugs began to have less and less hold over his mind. Besides, the school had given him a reading list at the end of the summer term and Ned didn’t want to be left behind.

He started to ask Rolf each time he came.

‘Morning, Rolf. I was thinking… Are there any books here, by any chance?’

‘Rolf, I can definitely move well enough to read now…

‘It doesn’t matter what kind of books, really, but if you could find some on European history…'

‘Perhaps you could ask Dr Mallo what he thinks, but I really believe it might help me to get better…

‘Did you ask Dr Mallo? What did he say?’

‘Rolf, please! If you can understand me, can I have something to read? Anything…’

‘Rolf, I want to see Dr Mallo. Understand? You … tell… Dr Mallo… come to me, yes? Soon. I see Dr Mallo. It’s very important…’

Anger began to boil up inside Ned and anger forced him into a terrible mistake. It was impossible, he decided angrily during his endless hours of isolation, that Rolf could have failed to understand him. He was being deliberately cruel.

One morning, he could take it no longer.

‘What has Dr Mallo said about my books? Tell me.’

Rolf continued his methodical routine of loosening the straps and preparing for Ned’s injection.

‘I want to know what Dr Mallo has said. Tell me.’

Rolf handed him an empty urine bottle without a word. Ned, seething with the bitter injustice of it all, passed the bottle under his bedclothes and began to fill it, anger rising and rising within him.

Rolf leaned forward with the syringe and Ned, maddened as much by the calm routine as by the silence, pulled the bottle up and threw the contents into Rolf’s face.

For at least five seconds, Rolf stood completely still and allowed the urine to drip down his face and off his chin.

Ned’s temper subsided in an instant, and he tried unsuccessfully to smother a laugh. Rolf bent slowly down and replaced the syringe on the trolley, picked up a towel, folded it carefully into four and started to pad his face. There was something in the cold impassivity of his demeanour that turned Ned’s laughter to fear and he started to babble apology like a three-year-old.

‘Please don’t tell Dr Mallo!’ he pleaded. ‘I’m sorry, Rolf, I’m sorry! But, I just wanted to … I’m so sorry, I didn’t know what I was doing…’

Rolf replaced the towel on the trolley and straightened up. He looked at Ned speculatively, without a trace of visible anger or concern.

‘I don’t know what came over me, Rolf. Please forgive me!’

Rolf beckoned with his hands for Ned to lie down, the usual gesture he made to show that he was ready to fasten the straps.

‘But what about my injection? My injection, Rolf…’

Rolf snapped the buckles and looked down at Ned, his head cocked to one side.

‘Rolf, I’m really sorry, I promise …

Rolf placed both hands, one on top of the other, flat on Ned’s shoulder and pushed down, his whole weight behind it, like a baker pressing dough. The ball gave a crack as it jumped from its socket.

Rolf gave a little nod, then turned and wheeled the trolley from the room. Within a few hours Ned had lost his voice. The screaming had torn his throat to shreds.

Over the eternal days that followed he lay alone and whimpering. Unvisited, undrugged and soaked in his own sweat and urine, he had nothing to turn his mind to but two terrible facts and one impossible question.

Firstly, Rolf had not lost his temper. If he had done what he did in the heat of the moment, while Ned was laughing right in his piss-streaming face, there might be some possibility of reconciliation or appeal. The violence would have been terrible, but human.

Secondly, and Ned wept and wept at the cruelty of this, Rolf had quite deliberately set to work on Ned’s good shoulder, the left. The right shoulder, still recovering from its earlier mauling, he had left alone. Such implacable, methodical malice offered no hope at all.

Thirdly came the question: a question that grew and grew inside him as he whispered it to himself over and over again.

Why? What had been his offence? In the name of Jesus … why?