The Way I Found Her (38 page)

I heard one of them go out again, probably with the mop and pail, and so I said to whoever remained, ‘Where am I?'

‘Tais-toi,' someone said, then in broken English: ‘You quiet. You shut. Or we hurt you. Compris?'

‘J'ai froid,' I said again, and then I felt the man smelling of smoke come near me.

‘You shut!' he yelled. ‘Nothing! You say nothing, English boy!'

Then the men and the light went away. The men went first, then the light, and a door was closed and locked. Before the men left they removed the handcuffs, and slowly I reached up and pulled down the blindfold. I blinked. My eyes kept seeing round circles of light, floating on the darkness, paler and paler ghosts of the one that had been there.

The feeling of wanting to sleep had gone. I was preoccupied by the cold and, now, by a new thing, a sudden thirst that was so acute, it was as if I had no moisture left in my body.

I lay down, with my knees curled up to my stomach. I was on a mattress, but the mattress had no cover or sheet or anything and I could feel underneath me the little tufts of twine or whatever it is they put in the pockets of mattresses. I thought, I wonder if this mattress was made in another country, by women working for hardly any wages, like that garment worker in Spain on the TV programme about the Women of Europe? And asking myself this question reminded me that what I needed to acquire now was information about where I was.

I didn't stand up. I just got on to my knees and like this – like I'd gone up and down the line of Valentina's musical boxes, with Violette, that time when we were searching her room – I started to move around, off the mattress and on to the floor, which was hard and gritty, using one hand to keep guiding me along the wall and then stopping and feeling in front of me for objects in the room.

I hadn't gone far when my head nudged against another wall. Just before it did, my right hand located an iron pipe, coming out of the wall about six inches above the ground and turning and running almost to the corner, but not quite. I went back, to where the pipe began, and then moved forward again, keeping my hand on the pipe, which felt wider than normal heating or water pipes usually were, till it reached the place where it ended or broke off. I felt all around the broken end. It hadn't been capped off; it was just a hollow length of pipe, old and heavy, made of lead or iron, not copper, sticking out into the room. And I knew that one of two things might be attached to the other end of it – water or gas. I hoped it was water.

I knelt crouched by the pipe for a long time. Outside the room, some distance away, the men were talking. I thought I could hear at least three voices, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. I wanted to call out to them, to bring back the blanket, to bring water, but they'd warned me not to speak and I didn't have any idea what they might do if I disobeyed them. I thought, cold and thirst could turn out to be
nothing
; cold and thirst could be a state of luxury compared with what they might do . . .

I decided to go on with my investigation of the room. As I crawled around, I made a mental note of the probable distance I was covering. I calculated that my mattress was placed against the wall about a metre from where the pipe began. The length of the pipe was less than a metre, so the distance between my mattress and the back wall was less than two metres. I expected the back wall to run for only a few feet, as if the room was going to be a small rectangle, like a cell. But it wasn't. The back wall carried on for at least three metres, or possibly more.

There was nothing near it or on it at ground level, but my knees touched something soft as I came to the corner and it felt to me like hay. I began to pick it up in handfuls. Even holding it close to my eyes, I couldn't see what it was, but it smelled like hay and I thought that if there was enough of it I could burrow down in it and get warm. But there wasn't much – no more than an armful – so I let it go and carried on round the corner, along the third wall.

I was getting tired. I was less cold now, because I'd been moving around, but my thirst was really bad. An image of Violette's black arms holding the fat Orangina bottle and pouring it out into two glasses came into my mind, drenching it with longing. I let myself fall to the floor and rest.

I lay there for a long time. It was like I dreamed that I was asleep. When I sat up, I hit my head on something hard. I reached up to feel what it was and I realised it was a table. It was made of wood, like a table you might put in a kitchen. Slowly, I got to my feet, holding on to the table, and I felt all over the surface of it, just in case the kidnappers had kindly left me a glass of water. They hadn't, and my thirst went on, but then my hand touched something solid and I knew straight away what it was: it was my copy of
Le Grand Meaulnes
. I picked it up and pressed it to my face. I thought, if only they would give me some light in here, I could read to the end of it and find out whether Meaulnes is ever reunited with Yvonne de Galais or not.

I found other things on the table – my things. There was no kitchen knife and no wallet and no Concorde notebook. The men had been through my pockets and taken everything that could be useful to them or give them information. But they had put the rest of my stuff in a little pile on the table: a handkerchief that had once belonged to Hugh, a used métro ticket, one of Sergei's dog biscuits, the sifflet du chasseur and Elroy. And then on a wooden chair, drawn up to the table, I found my clothes. My trousers and denim jacket were there, but every pocket was empty and my shoes seemed to be missing.

I put on the jacket. Then I picked up everything else and stowed the things in two pockets, including my book. Before I tucked Elroy away, I spoke to him, which was a thing I hadn't done for years. I said: ‘War zone now entered.'

The jacket comforted me. I knew that this was what happened to people taken out of their lives and put into prisons or cellars or bombed-out buildings: they got attached to the tiniest thing, like a beetle or an empty tin or a pellet of fluff. And already, within an hour of finding myself in this place, I'd started to behave like one of them, almost crying with joy at recovering some of my clothes. I was sure that if anyone planned on torturing me I'd tell them whatever it was they wanted to know in five minutes.

I wished I knew what time it was – day or night. My Kermit alarm clock, with its luminous green hands and numbers, would have been a useful possession. When I was a child, I used to talk to the Kermit frog on the dial. I used to say, ‘Seven-thirty, Albuquerque,' and Kermit used to reply, ‘Seven-thirty, Albuquerque!' in his ace American accent. At that time I thought the word ‘Albuquerque' was the most brilliant word in the English language.

With my jacket on and everything safe in the pockets, I continued my casing of the edge of the room. By my measurements, it was about four metres long by three metres wide. The door was wooden and had no handle on the inside. A metal plate had been screwed over the place where the handle had been. Underneath the door there was a tiny gap of air, about a centimetre high, but no light came in through the gap, so it was difficult to imagine where the door led. I still had the feeling that the room was underground, except that the hay could indicate that an animal had once been kept in it and you probably wouldn't keep any animal in a cellar, in total darkness. And I still hoped that when the day came, a bit of light would get in somehow, from somewhere.

When I got back round to my mattress, I lay down on it. I knew it was old because it had a kind of mushroom smell about it. I thought, if I was going to kidnap someone, I'd at least provide them with a pillow. Then I got Elroy out and rubbed his balding head with my finger and thumb and went to sleep.

There
was
light in the room. It didn't come from under the door or from a window; it came from above. The shape of the morsel of light was oblong and thin.

I lay on my side and stared about me. The table and the chair were just visible and there was some other object, under the table, that I hadn't seen before. As far as I could tell, there was nothing else anywhere in the room.

I got up. I didn't feel cold any more. I walked to the middle of the room and stared up at the sliver of light. It was grey-white and flat and no wider than a Mars bar. It was the sky.

As time passed, it got whiter. It cast a little replica of itself on the floor at my feet. Quite soon, it was enough to see everything by.

I was in an attic. The roof was quite shallow, made of wooden rafters, with wood batons laid over them and slates fixed to the batons. The covering of slates was solid except in this one place, where one slate had slipped free of its pin and moved, leaving this minute opening of sky. There was a window in the attic – not round, but small and square and boarded up from the outside, with no single gap or chink anywhere in the boarding.

But I knew that the bit of light in the roof was going to make a difference to my life in this place and I also thought, the kidnappers probably haven't noticed it; they think it's pitch black in here, and what I have to do is to guard the light and keep it secret from them.

First, I counted the number of slates from the top of the wall above my bed to the slate that had moved. I counted them twice, to be sure, and the number was eleven. Then, as quietly as I could, I moved the table to the middle of the room, exactly underneath the eleventh slate. The ceiling wasn't very high, so I thought I might be able to reach it just by standing on the table, but I wasn't tall enough. I fetched the chair and put this on top of the table and stood on that. Now, my head came up almost to the roof. I slipped my hand through the gap and felt the air touch my fingers. I could hear a solitary bird singing, quite far away. And I could hear another sound, that was like a small boat moving through water.

Next, I moved the slate. I could make the gap wider by a few centimetres, or close it off completely. With the gap closed, the thick darkness returned and I thought, counting the slates is no good, because when the gap of light isn't there I can't see them. I'd understood what was prime – my ability to locate the slipped slate – but not
how
to achieve it.

I made the gap of light as wide as possible and looked round the room. The object that had been under the table was a bucket with a lid and I supposed this was meant to be my toilet. I considered placing this toilet exactly under the slate, but I knew it would get moved from time to time by the kidnappers and I had to measure with something that never moved.

Then I remembered Elroy's string. All I needed to do was run the string along the floor, out from my mattress to where the light's reflection fell on to the floor, and tie a knot in it at the exact place. I noticed now that the floor was made of dusty tiles. The only area where they weren't dusty was where I'd thrown up and the men had swabbed around with their bucket and mop. A tiny bit of colour was coming into things now and I could see that in the swabbed area the tiles looked brown.

I was about to climb down and fetch the vital string, when I heard, close to my mattress wall, the little knocking I'd heard before, like that of the knuckles of a hand, on the other side of the wall. I stood completely still on my chair and listened. This was the only noise in the building. I assumed, from the flat light, that it was still early and that the kidnappers or guards, or whoever they were, were still asleep.

Leaving the gap in the slates open, I climbed down and crossed to my mattress. I pressed my ear to the wall and I heard the knocking come again. Gently, I knocked in answer. I thought, if I'd learned Morse properly when Hugh wanted to teach it to me, I could send a message. But you often don't know, in a life, what's going to be useful and what's going to turn out to be a complete waste of time.

‘Qui est là?' I said. ‘Qui est là?'

There was a reply. But it was so quiet and tiny, it sounded like it was a beetle trying to speak.

‘Plus fort!' I said. ‘Parlez plus fort!'

Nothing came, so I resumed knocking. I knocked in sequences, one-two-three, one-two-three. And then I heard, as if from far, far away, a voice saying my name, my English name, Lewis. And I knew it was Valentina.

We tried to have a conversation through the wall. It was difficult for me to speak, because a crazed feeling of joy was spreading through my heart. I put both my hands against the wall, as if that was going to bring Valentina nearer to me.

The wall was thick, like it was made of blocks of stone. Our voices seemed to go into the stone and stay there. ‘Why?' Valentina kept saying. ‘Why?'

‘Why did they take me?'

‘Why you, Lewis?'

I was going to try to describe the way I'd pieced together the trail that led to the hospital, but I knew she'd only hear half of what I was saying, so I just said: ‘I don't know. I don't know. Are you all right, Valentina? Have you got a blanket?'

‘What, darling?'

‘Are you all right? Have they hurt you?'

‘I can't hear, Lewis . . .'

‘Did anyone hurt you?'

‘Hurt me?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh no. They don't hurt me. They just exasperate me. They think they're big-time villains. They've read some crime novels, I expect. Alexis thinks they're going to get away with this, but he's wrong.'

I was about to ask who Alexis was, when I heard shouting. It came from underneath us and I heard a door open, so I left the wall and climbed as quickly as I could on to the table and then on to the chair and moved the loose slate back into position, so that the little block of light went from the room. Then I replaced the table and chair by the wall, where they'd been. The moment I did this, I realised I hadn't had time to measure the distance from my bed to the slate. I'd just have to work patiently in the dark till I located it again.