Thicker Than Water

Trudie was cross-legged on the floor, her arms handcuffed behind her back. He’d put something over her head that looked very like a bondage rig: a helmet with a rubber face mask attached, the whole thing secured under her chin and around her neck with two thick straps. There were no eyeholes in the mask.

‘Can she breathe?’ I asked.

‘Course she can breathe,’ Cheadle snapped. ‘She just can’t effing see, is all. The kid goes there.’

He pointed to a bare and maculate mattress thrown down diagonally across the floor of the van.

I leaned forward and laid Bic down on it carefully. He was still twitching and muttering, but he never even came close to waking. I wished I’d remembered to bring a blanket. Cheadle was right, the night was warm enough to make blankets unnecessary: it would just have made this feel less like a kidnapping.

Cheadle slammed the door shut and I went round to the passenger side.

‘Trudie is in your safe keeping, Castor,’ Gwillam reminded me. ‘No less than the boy.’

I nodded, acknowledging the point.

‘We should be back inside of an hour,’ I said. ‘One way or another. Be ready for us. I want to get this over with. And Gwillam - if we’re followed, we stop. No second chances.’

I climbed into the passenger seat and there was a solid metallic chunking sound as Cheadle reached down to lock the doors from his side.

‘You got a mobile on you?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I admitted.

‘Turn it off. They might not know your number, but if they do you might just as well be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.

Better put it in there, for the duration.’ He pointed down to a box at my feet. I’d taken it to be a toolbox but when I opened it, it proved to have thicker sides than that, the interior space small and cluttered. Cluttered with telecommunications gear, mainly: esoteric stuff whose purposes I didn’t know and didn’t care to guess: there were even some naked circuit boards.

‘Right,’ said Cheadle, ‘we’re off.’

He backed down the steps again, bumpity bumpity bump, and reversed out onto the road.

‘Is Trudie going to be okay back there?’ I asked."

"He threw the briefest of glances towards the back of the van. ‘Should be,’ he said. ‘So long as she hadn’t got any inner-ear problems.’ There was an observation window which presumably opened into the van’s rear space, but when I went to open it Cheadle put his hand on mine and shook his head.

‘No no no. The magical mystery tour is waiting to take her away.