Adrian gets to his feet. He walks over to the wall and leans against it. He licks his lips and plasters on a smile. ‘Obviously, there’s certain things I’m supposed to do,’ he says. ‘But now I’m the only one here, so there’s nothing to stop me pissing all over your food if I feel like it. Nothing to stop me doing all sorts of things.’ There’s a sheen of sweat on Adrian’s face and, standing there scratching his belly, he resembles nothing so much as the creepy, friendless twerp he has clearly been made to feel like too many times. But the sickly smile is still terrifying.
Adrian pushes himself away from the wall, moves towards the bed.
The pain has fed his anger as he hoped it would. It felt good to rant at Adrian and now, watching him get closer, he’s feeling stronger than he has at any time since he was taken. He starts to imagine getting out of this room, thinks about what he will do to Adrian, how much damage he will inflict, as soon as he comes up with any sort of plan. The anger, if it is not keeping the fear at bay completely, is at least balancing things out a little.
‘You want to be careful,’ Adrian says. ‘Shooting your mouth off.’ He reaches behind and draws the Taser from his back pocket. ‘Might be fun to see what happens if we push this up against your balls and give you a jolt.’
‘I’ll probably get a stiffy. A bit more painful than Viagra, but you might be on to something there.’
Adrian fires the Taser, watches the current arc between the electrodes for a few seconds, then puts it back in his pocket. ‘I’m not talking about that though.’ He nods towards the door. ‘She left her scalpel behind.’ He carries on nodding. ‘Oh yeah, and if you keep winding me up, I might be tempted to have a crack with it. I mean how hard can it be, right?’ He holds out his hand towards the bed. ‘Thing is though, I’m not getting a lot of sleep, no more than you probably, and what with that and way too much coffee… well, you can imagine.’ Adrian’s hand begins to shake theatrically and he stares at it, eyes wide, amused and mock-alarmed in equal measure.
From the bed, he stares at it too and just like that, the anger is gone. The rush of confidence evaporates. The part of his brain that is still managing to think sensibly is telling him that, despite what they’ve done so far, they obviously want to keep him alive. Reassuring him that money, or whatever else they’re after, is far too important to them to risk killing him.
Suddenly though, it’s the other part of his brain where the synapses are beginning to spark and spit. However much he tries to fight it, to dampen down the dread that presses him hard back into the pillow, a gallery of friends and family, of those he loves, is taking shape behind his eyes.
He begins to think about dying in this room.
THIRTY-FIVE
Jeffrey Batchelor closed his eyes and turned his face to the spray. He tried to imagine that the boat he was on would soon be pulling into Shanklin or Douglas or that he was heading home after a day’s fishing off Falmouth with the girls. That it was Sonia, Rachel and Jodi sitting across from him and that it was their voices just audible beneath the crash of waves and the throb of engines, and not those of Nicklin or Fletcher.
Their laughter he could hear.
The Batchelors had always enjoyed holidays in the UK; ‘stay-cations’ or whatever they were called. He and Sonia had both travelled abroad as students and he had been all over Europe on research trips for work, but any attempt at anything far-flung as a family had usually ended badly. Foreign holidays had been cursed with illness and lost luggage, the stress of complex travel arrangements almost always resulting in arguments. To be fair, it had been the adult members of the family who probably deserved most of the blame. He knew that with other families it was the other way round more often than not, the kids moaning about being away from friends and TV and a decent Wi-Fi signal, but he and Sonia were the ones who got bitten or caught food poisoning. The ones who fell out and spoiled it for everyone else. The girls had been great as a rule, trudging off to the Isle of Wight or the Lake District without complaint, content to play their part as the younger half of the ‘Boring Batchelors’. He knew that they had found it dull, the weather and the walking, the old-fashioned card games, especially as they had got older. He and Sonia had always known that they’d be off somewhere more interesting with their mates, first chance they had.
Jodi had always talked about travelling…
He opened his eyes, saw the Irish Sea rising and falling ahead of him, the edge of the boat moving in rhythm with it.
He was on his way to a very different island, and because he was not the same as the man who had brought him, because he was sensible and sensitive and reacted to things the way the vast majority of ordinary people did, he was as scared as it was possible to be at the thought of what was waiting for him. The things he was going there to do.
Nicklin had told him how perfect the island was, had talked for hours about the history of the place, the stories of those who had travelled to the place and were buried there.
‘Think about that, Jeff,’ he had said. ‘Twenty thousand of them. They reckon you’re only ever six feet from a rat in London. Where we’re going, you’re probably never more than that far from the bones of a saint.’
If it was true, then up to now Batchelor hadn’t felt it. There was peace and quiet for sure, but nothing he would call spiritual. Maybe he was just too frightened to pick up on all that stuff.
More than anything, he wanted to talk to Sonia, and Nicklin was still telling him that it was going to happen. All a question of timing, he said. Batchelor had spent a long time now, trying to work out what he would say when the moment came, knowing that he might not have very long in which to say it. He would need to pick his words carefully.
Listen, love, it’s me. You’ll be hearing things, from reporters and from the police probably and I just wanted you to hear them from me first. You remember what happened a month or so after I started my sentence? To me, I mean. You remember that things were suddenly different …
Should he tell her the truth? That was the big question.
It was easy enough to tell her how much he loved her, that he missed her, but what about when it came to giving her reasons? Would she hate him if he did? He thought he knew his wife well enough to believe that she wouldn’t, but it was still a gamble.
Was it worth risking that, just to have her understand?
Something happened, love. I’m talking about Jodi and Nathan. I found something out …
Having her hate him was not a price he was prepared to pay.
He hoped he would know what to say when it came to it, when he heard his wife’s voice. He hoped that his faith would guide him. He hoped above all that there would be enough of it left by then. It had been such a struggle clinging on to it, plenty of times when it would have been so much easier to just let it go. The journey he had been on had been so strange and terrible that were it not for the conviction that it must all be somehow necessary, he would have stopped believing long before now.
From staring up at his daughter, her flawless features grey and bloated, to the sea that was now spitting in his face and moving beneath him, remorselessly bearing him towards an island built on bones.
From that bedroom to this boat.
He heard a laugh and looked across at Nicklin. The man who had saved him for reasons that were now obvious enough.
Nicklin smiled. Shouted, ‘All right, Jeff?’
Batchelor smiled back, nodded.
Another price that was far too high.
THIRTY-SIX