You Are Dead

65

Wednesday 17 December

The cramps in her legs were getting worse. Sometimes the pain was so acute Logan cried out; particularly her right leg. It was going into spasm again now. It felt at times as if the muscle was a giant elastic band that was about to snap and rip through the flesh. She desperately, so very desperately, wanted to be able to stretch her leg. To stand up.

She fought the pain, gasping, breathing faster and faster until it subsided, leaving her spent, with tears that she could not wipe away stinging her eyes.

How long? God, how long had she been here? She shivered from cold, from fear. Then she remembered something she had been taught, that deep breathing was a way to relax. She took in several deep breaths, filling her lungs, slowly. She had time to fill. So much time. Then she wriggled, as much as she could before the bonds cut into her wrists and ankles, raising her head the small distance the strap around her neck would allow.

She tried to make plans in her head. If she could get the bastard to untie her, even if just for a few moments, she might be able to headbutt him. She had strong hands from her work; if she could momentarily stun him and get a grip on his neck she might be able to choke him.

But if she tried and failed, what then?

She thought about it constantly, turning it over and over. At some point, surely, he was going to have to untie her. Wasn’t he?

To pass some of the time, and to try to get back into a positive mood, she played a game of thinking back on different happy moments in her life. The summer holidays when she was a kid going with her parents to the cottage they rented every year in Cornwall. Rowing on the river and picnicking beside it with her parents and her brother and sister. Peeling a hardboiled egg and dunking it in a little mound of salt on her paper plate, then biting into it; followed by a mouthful of buttered crusty bread; then a bite of a tomato picked from the greenhouse that morning.

She was salivating. Craving, suddenly, a hardboiled egg with bread and butter. Anything other than the bland-tasting protein shakes her captor had been giving her. She tried to switch her mind to Jamie. To the happy day she had first met him, at a dismal birthday party in an upstairs room of a pub. It had been an old school friend’s birthday, but there had been barely anyone in the room she knew, and the people she had talked to seemed universally dull. She was mooching around a table laden with blocks of Cheddar, pickles and slightly stale baguettes, holding a plastic beaker of warm white wine, about to go outside to have a cigarette and maybe to find some better company, when her mate John Southern suddenly appeared alongside her with Jamie and introduced them, before going off to find another beer.

‘You look about as bored as I feel,’ he had said.

‘You can join my escape committee,’ she’d replied.

‘Willingly, but I think it might be rude to leave before the speeches.’

‘I’m going to nip out for a cigarette — do you smoke?’ she had asked.

‘No, but I’ll come out with you.’

Logan thought, for a fleeting instant, she could smell the sweet aroma of cigarette smoke. But then it was gone. The memory of Jamie faded. Then suddenly she heard a faint sound.

Splashing. A scraping sound of something being dragged. Footsteps. Rustle of clothing. A flashlight beam jigging. Something was happening! Hope rose inside her. Something was happening! Had the police come for her?

Then the light went out. She was surrounded once more by darkness and silence.

‘Hello?’ she cried. ‘Hello? Help. Help me! Please help me, someone, please help me!’