1
The drip of water echoed somewhere in the darkness. It was a slow, hollow plink… plink… plink… that counted off the seconds like a metronome, counting down the seconds of her life. Each drop landed with echoing precision, reminding her she was still alive – but maybe not for much longer.
She was cold. Not the cold that made you shiver and pull a blanket tighter, but the deep, bone-aching kind that settled inside you like rot. Her skin was goose-pimpled, her back pressed against a hard, flat surface that could be anything. She couldn’t tell. All she knew was that it was damp, unyielding and drained the warmth from her body.
She was naked. Not stripped butexposed, like something being studied. Her arms were pinned behind her, wrists chafing against tight bindings. Rope? Wire? She couldn’t tell – her hands had gone numb long ago. Her legs were bound too, ankles tethered together with a similar roughness. Something – thick leather straps, maybe – pressed across her chest and hips, anchoring her to whatever slab she’d been placed on.
She tried to move, but her body no longer listened. She’dthrashed when she first woke. Kicked. Screamed. The pain had come fast and sharp, a cramp in her arms, a tightening in her chest. Panic. But now… now there was only stillness. Fatigue had dulled the edge of terror, replacing it with a cold, creeping resignation.
At first, she thought she had gone blind. That fear had suffocated her more than the ropes ever could. But no – there was something covering her eyes. Fabric. Thick, tight, maybe tape. A blindfold. When she stopped sobbing and began listening, she could hear the soft rasp of her own breath beneath it, feeling the weight pressing down on her eyelids.
The darkness magnified everything else – each smell, each sound. And God, the smell – old wood, damp stone and something fouler lurking beneath. Rot. Dust. Time. It clung to her nostrils and coated her tongue like mould. She gagged involuntarily, bile rising into her throat.
She realised something else.
No gag.
Her mouth was free.
She could scream.
She could wail, plead, howl like an animal – but she didn’t. She knew nobody would hear, or else she would have been eating a rag. She had screamed upon waking and shouted until her throat was raw, until she thought her lungs would burst. Nobody came.
No footsteps. No voices. No sound. Just the dripping.
Whoever brought her here – whoever tied her down – had no interest in hearing her beg.
A sound. She froze.
Were those footsteps? No… just her own heart pounding in her ears, mocking her. She let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Her chest ached with every shallow inhale.
She struggled to recall how she had ended up here. Had she been stolen from the street? Or from her home? Was it day or night? Was anyone searching for her?
Her mind was blank. She tried to focus, but thoughts kept slipping away, like a hand emerging from the ocean before the swimmer sank for good. She remembered a voice – a low one – calm and disarming. Then nothing.
There was something worse than fear now. The waiting. The unknowing. The certainty that something was coming… and it wouldn’t be mercy.
Tears slid down her temples, pooling in her ears.
And somewhere in the dark, the dripping continued.
Plink… plink… plink…
2
TUESDAY
The call came just after 6a.m.
Detective Chief Inspector Liam Brodie had just turned into his street, lathered in sweat, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He hadn’t run like this in a long time, but he had decided to stave off the inevitable hardening of the arteries and possibly an impending heart attack.
He had started using the treadmill in his flat, previously used for hanging clothes on, but after a dust down and a quick read of the instruction manual again, he had tentatively stepped on board and hoped it didn’t break.
Once he’d mastered the treadmill, he’d started running in the streets around his flat at Newhaven, the Firth of Forth begging him to come in for a dip when he was sweating buckets. He had decided to ignore the invitation for a personal tour of Davy Jones’s locker, and had kept his head down, feeling the pavement fighting back against every step.
Now that summer was officially here, the sun was up well before him. As he turned onto his street and slowed down, hecould feel the pain in his knees from the jarring they got with every step.
He looked at his watch as he felt the buzzing on his wrist. His boss’s name appeared on the small screen, which jostled for place with the heart monitor – both with the potential for bad news.
