It must be eight or nine o’clock when a different man comes back up the stairs. There is now very little light outside.

‘Move away from the door,’ he says, and I crouch on the floor near the window, ready to spring if he attacks me. The lock clicks, the handle twists back and a plate of food is pushed inside. I do not see a face, only a pale, hairless forearm. The voice says, Tucking stink here,’ and then is gone. He locks the door again and walks away.

There is no cutlery, nothing to drink, but I devour the food with my filthy hands, wrapped in the blanket which causes my skin to itch and catch. It is a tasteless stew, made with rice and carrots and old meat, full of fat and gristle, good for nothing but salt and energy. I make a spoon with the three middle fingers of my right hand and shovel the glutinous sauce into my mouth with demented speed. It appals me how quickly I have been reduced to an animal state. Somehow a fly has made its way into the room and it buzzes around the food and the piss before settling in my encrusted vomit. Why don’t they come for me? Why don’t they ask me any questions?

With all that I have suffered, the anguish over Kate’s death, all the years of solitude and the stupidity of exile, this is the absolute lowest point. I breathe and inhale an abject terror. The men and women of ETA are ruthless in the pursuit of their cause and they will not hesitate to harm me unless I give them what they want. But what is that? What has brought me here? In the numbed panic of capture I can assume only that Zulaika was responsible for this, that he is the creature of these people, their stooge and propaganda tool. He made two telephone calls, both in Basque, while we were eating. He must have been guiding them to me, setting me up. Zulaika ordered lunch not to prolong our interview, but to give ETA more time to reach the garage.

It becomes a pitch-black night with no moon. The birds have stopped singing and there are no more cars. Very occasionally a dog will bark far in the distance, but I never hear any of my captors. The sense of isolation is compounded by the noise of aeroplanes flying high overhead, the last of which passes at perhaps eleven or twelve o’clock. I remember as a child at boarding school in England staring up at planes as they flew out of London and envying the passengers their freedom, their luxury. I imagined myself a prisoner, unable to escape and join them in far-off lands. All that seems ridiculous now. I cannot begin to conceive of the journey, of the decisions taken, which have led me to this terror, to this improbable end.

Then the woman comes. She waits on the other side of the door and instructs me to stand by the window with my back to the room.

‘If you move towards me, we will kill you,’ she says in Spanish, and the threat is so commonplace, so stark and inhumane, that I have trouble associating it with a woman. She forces me to reply by saying, ‘Do you understand?’ and I speak my first words to my captors.

‘I understand. I’m standing beside the window.’

The lock clicks and the handle turns, something is placed on the floor, and then she withdraws from the room. I think I heard her sniff and even choke at the stench. The door is locked again and, from the other side, she says, ‘Drink that if you want to sleep.’ But the sudden intrusion of light from the stairwell has bruised my eyes and it is some time before I can adjust to the darkness again. I almost kick over a glass of water on my way to the door and my toes land on a piece of cloth. They have left me a pair of ripped cotton shorts. I pull them on, swallow the water in two long gulps and lie back on the bed. I dream of Mum and of Kate. I dream of home.

There must have been some kind of sedative in the water. I am woken in the black of Tuesday night by a turbulent noise. Two men are in the room with me and a bright light is being directed into my face. They are both wearing balaclavas and tear the blanket from my body, screaming, ‘Wake up! Get out of fucking bed!’, then lifting me, hooking my arms and slapping my face. Just as quickly, they are gone. Darkness as the door is locked again and their footsteps fade. I can neither see nor hear anything now. My brain is dizzy and numb. Dimly, it occurs to me that these will be the first stages of a sleep deprivation. If that is the case, they will come again in half an hour, then again before dawn, and repeatedly into tomorrow. The idea is to disorientate and to terrify, to take the prisoner to the very edge of unconsciousness and then to wake him, so that he begins to fear even sleep itself.

I lie down and try to be strong. I have to fight this. But I am so disorientated that I can barely concentrate. How long did I sleep for? How many hours of rest will I need in order to keep my wits about me when the torture begins? For the first time I confront the possibility of my own death and almost welcome it. If I had stayed with Lithiby and Hawkes, if JUSTIFY had succeeded, would Five or Six have trained me for something like this; would I have been better prepared? I catch the smell of piss and sick in the room and feel another desperate urge to urinate, lying still on the bed to try to make it pass. And then it must be another hour before they come again, the same two men, the same noise at the door so that this time I am ready for them, already awake when the torchlight is shone in my face. I reckon it a small triumph that I manage to sit up before they have the chance to manhandle me, and perhaps it is their revenge for this that they say something accusatory about tearing down the blanket, about my destroying the room, and one of them punches me hard, twice, around the kidneys. I am sick again, instantly. I drop my face over the side of the bed and must have hit their feet with the vomit because I am whipped, knuckle-hard, on the back of the head.

‘Fucking spy,’ a voice says, but the meaning of this, the implication, does not immediately sink in. The vomiting has left me breathless and I hear quick and savage laughter in the stairwell. My nose stings, an acid link with the back of my throat. For some pathetic reason I crave the presence of the woman now and find myself on the edge of tears. Do not cry, Alec. Do not pity yourself for what has happened here. I make a point of sitting up again, of moving away from the bed towards the window, still wrapped in the blanket, trying to steady myself by taking deep fresh breaths of air.

But they have me. They have total control. Throughout all of the following day, through the appointed meeting with Kitson, the long hours of sunlight and a car coming again to the house, I am kept awake. I have to shit and piss in the same disgusting corner of the room where flies now swarm in numbers and buzz around my body. Where did they come from? The woman offers me food which I am too cowardly and hungry to refuse. Occasionally I will drink water, neither knowing nor caring where it came from nor what it contains. In time, only one of them comes upstairs and keeps me awake simply by pounding on the door, rattling the handle and shouting obscenities that evaporate in the squalor of my prison. Not once do I call out to them, not once do I reply. I retain at least this small dignity. But I am otherwise broken, an ended man. If Kitson does not come for me soon I fear that I will simply never leave this place.

It must be the third day, or the fourth, by the time they come in, all three of them, and lead me out into the light. A pale half-naked Englishman, a spy, stumbling into a muddy courtyard surrounded by farm buildings in the rain. We do not linger long and I see only fragments of the green surrounding hills. In their balaclavas they take me into a barn about fifty metres from the front door and order me to stand against the far wall with my hands above my head.