by Dick Francis
I stood up once more and passed the broken end back through the ring.
This time I turned the wood through ninety degrees so that it was edge on, and hoped it would be more difficult to break. Then I leaned on it with as much weight as I dared.
The ring moved. I felt it. I leaned again. It moved some more.
I was so excited that I was laughing.
The ring had almost moved half a revolution. I put the wooden strip into my mouth to hold it, almost gagging on the vomit-tasting cloth. I then reached up and tried to turn the ring with my fingers. It was stiff but it turned, slowly at first, then over and over until I could feel it part company with the wall.
I could lower my arms. I was free of my shackle. What bliss!
I quickly hauled down my trousers and pants, and then crouched against the wall to defecate. I could remember from my boyhood that my father had often described his morning constitutional on the lavatory as his golden moment of the day. Now, at long last, I knew what he meant. The relief was incredible. So much so that I hardly cared that disengaging myself from the wall was only the first step in my escape.
I pulled my things up and heel-and-toed my way along the wall until I found a corner. With difficulty, I sat down on the floor. I still had my wrists tied and I was still wearing the hood but the joy of not having to stand up any longer was immense.
Stage one was complete. Now I had to remove the hood and free my wrists. No problem, I thought. If I could get away from that wall everything else must be a piece of cake.
I lifted my hands to my neck and found the drawstring of the hood. With my hands still bound together at the wrists, it was not easy to untie the knot, and I’d probably tightened it with all my earlier tugging. However, I finally managed to get the string free and I gratefully pulled the oppressive, fetid cloth over my head. I breathed deeply. The atmosphere may not have been that fresh, for obvious reasons, but it was a whole lot better than the rancid, vomit-smelling air I’d been breathing for the past thirty-six hours.
I shook my head and pushed my fingers through my hair.
Stage two complete. Now for my hands.
It was too dark to see exactly how they were tied but, by feeling with my tongue, I worked out that my kidnapper had used the sort of ties that gardeners use to secure bags of garden waste, or saplings to poles. The loose end went through a collar on the other end, and was then pulled tight, very tight, one tie on each wrist looped through both each other and the chain.
I tried biting my way through the plastic but it was too tough and my efforts ended with me still tied up, but now with a sore mouth where the free ends of the ties kept sticking into my gums.
I looked around. It may have been dark but there was just enough light entering for me to see the position of the window. I thought that, if I could get outside, I might be able to find something to cut the plastic. But how was I going to get outside with only one leg, and with my wrists tied up?
How about the glass in the window? Could I use that to cut the plastic?
If getting down to the floor had been difficult, it was nothing compared to getting up again. Finally, I was upright, but cramp in my calf had me hopping around to try to ease it. I leaned on the wall and stretched forward and the cramp thankfully subsided.
I hopped along the wall to the window.
It wasn’t glass, it was perspex. It would be. I suppose the horses would break glass. The window was actually made of two panes of perspex in wooden frames, one above the other, like a sash window. I slid the bottom pane up. The real outdoor fresh air tasted so sweet.
But now I discovered there was another problem.
The window was covered on the outside by metal bars set about four inches apart. I’d had no food for two days but even I wasn’t yet slim enough to fit through that gap. I rested my head on my arms. I could feel the panic beginning to rise in me again. I was so thirsty and I could hear the rain. I held my arms out through the window as far as they would go but they didn’t reach the falling water. There was just enough light for me to see that the roof had an overhang. I would have needed arms six feet long to reach the rain. And, to add insult to injury, it began to fall more heavily, beating like a drum against the stable roof.
Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.
More in hope than expectation, I hopped further along the wall to the stable doors. As I’d expected, they were bolted. I pushed at them but they didn’t shift. I would have stood and kicked them down if only I’d had a second leg to stand on while I did so.
Instead I slithered down in the corner by the door until I was again sitting on the floor. Wiggling myself into position on my back, I tried to use my left leg to kick the lower section of the door. I kicked as hard as I could but the door didn’t budge. All I managed to do was to slide myself in the other direction across the stone floor.
I gave up and went to sleep.
It was light when I woke and I could see my prison cell properly for the first time. It was nothing extraordinary, just a regular stable stall with black-painted wooden boarding round the walls, and timber roof beams visible above.
I worked myself back into the corner by the door and sat up, leaning against the wall, to inspect the bindings on my wrists.
The black plastic ties looked so thin and flimsy but, try as I might, I couldn’t break them. I twisted my wrists first one way then the other but all that happened was that the plastic dug painfully into my flesh, causing it to bleed. The damned plastic ties seemed totally unaffected.
The length of chain was still attached to the ties. It was grey and looked to me like galvanized steel. There were fifteen links in all, I counted them, each link a little under one inch long with a shiny brass padlock still attaching the end link to the now-unscrewed ring. The chain looked brand new. No wonder I hadn’t been able to break it.
I tried to use the point of the ring to cut through one of the ties but I couldn’t get a proper grip on it and only managed instead to cut through the skin at the base of my thumb as the point slipped off the surface of the plastic.
I looked around the stable for something sharp, or for a rough brick corner, anything I could use to saw my way through my bonds. Up on the wall opposite the window was a salt-lick housing, a metal slot about four inches wide, seven high and one inch deep, into which a block of salt or minerals could be dropped so that, as the name suggested, the horse could lick it. The housing was empty, old and rusting.
I struggled up from the floor and hopped over to it. As I had hoped, the top of the metal slot had been roughened by the rust. I hooked the plastic ties over one of the edges, with a wrist on either side, and sawed back and forth. The plastic was no match for the metal edge and the tie on my left wrist parted quite easily. Wonderful!
I massaged the flesh, then set about ridding myself completely of the remaining tie round my right wrist, and the chain that still hung from it. That task proved a little more difficult but, after a few minutes, I was finally free of the damn things.
Stage three was complete. Now to get out of this stable.
*
Stable doors are always locked from the outside, whether or not the horse has bolted first, and this one was no exception.
I could just see the locks from the window. The metal bars were bowed away slightly from the frame and, by turning sideways I could use my left eye to see the bolts, top and bottom in the lower door and a single bolt in the upper. All three had been slid fully away from me, and then folded flat.
I took the window bars in my hands and tried to shake them. Not even a quiver. It was as if they were set in concrete.
So there was no easy way out, but I’d hardly expected there to be. No one was going to go to the trouble of shackling me to the wall with a chain and padlock only then to leave the door wide open.
The way out, as I saw it, was to go up.
I could see from the window that the stable where I was imprisoned was just one in a whole line of them t
hat stretched away in both directions. The walls between the individual stalls did not go all the way to the pitched roof; they were the same height as the walls at the front and rear of the building, about nine feet high. So there was a triangular space between the top of the wall and the roof. A wooden roof truss sat on top of the wall but there was still plenty of room for someone to get through the gap from one stall to the next. All I had to do was climb the wall.
Easy, I thought. There had been walls much higher than this on the assault course at Sandhurst, walls I had been forced to cross time and time again. However, there were some big differences. Either there had been a rope hanging from the top or there’d been a team of us working together. And I had been much fitter and stronger when at Sandhurst, and, of course, I’d had two feet to work with.
I looked at either side of the stable. Which way should I go?
In the end, the decision was simple. In the corner opposite the door was a metal manger set across the angle. It was about four feet from the floor. I may have had only one foot, but I had two knees and I was soon using them to kneel on the edge of the manger while reaching up with my fingers for the top of the wall.
All those hours of trying to break the battalion record for pull-ups finally paid off. Fuelled by a massive determination to free myself, together with the all-consuming craving for a drink, I pulled myself up onto the top of the wall and swung my legs through the gap in the truss and into the next stall.
Dropping down was less easy and I ended up sprawled on my back. But I didn’t care, I was laughing again. I turned over and crawled on my hands and knees to the door.
It was locked.
My cries of joy turned to tears of frustration.
OK, I thought, getting a grip on things, how about the window?
More bars. Squeezing myself up against them, I could see that there were bars on all the stable windows.
OK, I just have to keep going. One of these damn stables must have a door that’s open.
Having done it once, the manoeuvre was easier the second time. I even managed not to end up horizontal on the floor. But the next door was also locked.
What if they were all bolted shut? Was I wasting my energy and, worse still, breathing out precious water vapour in a fruitless attempt?
I clambered onto the manger in the corner and went over the next wall. The door to that box was also locked. I sat in the corner and wept. I realized that I must be dehydrated as I wept without tears.
What would happen, I wondered, when the lack of water became critical? I’d been thirsty now for so long that every part of my mouth and throat was sore, but I didn’t feel that I was dying yet. How would my body react over the next day or so? What would be the first sign that it was shutting down? Would I even realize?
I thrust such thoughts from my mind. Come on, I told myself. Maybe the door will be open in the next stable.
It wasn’t.
My fingers hurt from pulling myself up and, on that occasion, I had twisted my ankle when I dropped down. Thankfully, it wasn’t a bad injury, but it was enough to send me into another bout of despair. Was this how it would happen? Would I become an emotional, gibbering wreck? Would I eventually just curl up in a ball in a corner and die?
‘No!’ I shouted out loud. ‘I will not die here.’
Willpower alone pulled me up over the next wall. Beyond it I found not another stable but an empty and disused tack room at the end of the row. I used the saddle racks to ease my way to the floor and save my ankle from further punishment.
The tack-room door was locked, of course. It would be.
And I could see there was nowhere else to go. The far wall of the tack room went all the way to the roof. It was the end of the building, the end of the line.
The door had a mortice deadlock, I could see through the keyhole. Why, I wondered, had someone bothered to lock an empty room?
I leaned against the locked door in renewed frustration. For the very first time I really began to believe that I would die in this stable block.
My stomach hurt from lack of food and my throat felt as though it was on fire from lack of water. I had expended so much of my reserves just getting to the tack room that the thought of going all the way back to where I’d started, and then beyond, filled me with horror. And there was no saying that I would be able to. The mangers would now all be on the wrong side of the walls.
I looked through the small window alongside the door. The light was beginning to fade as fresh, delicious, glorious rain fell again into puddles that were tantalizingly out of my reach. It would soon be dark. This would be my third night of captivity. Without water to drink, would I still be alive for a fourth?
Suddenly, as I looked through at the gloom and rain, I realized there were no bars on this window. The bars had been placed over the stable windows to keep the horses’ heads in, not to keep burglars out. There were no horses in the tack room, so no bars.
And the single pane of this window was glass, not plastic like the others.
I looked around for something with which I could break it. There was absolutely nothing, so I sat on one of the saddle racks and removed my shoe.
The glass was no match for a thirsty man in a frenzy. I used the shoe to knock all the glass from the frame, careful to leave no jagged shards behind.
The window was small, but it was big enough. I clambered through head first, using the end of my stump to stand on the frame while I pulled my complete leg through. Soon I was standing outside the building.
What a magnificent feeling. Stage four was complete.
I hopped out from under the overhanging roof to stand in the rain with my head held back, and my mouth wide open.
Never had anything tasted so sweet.
12
Escaping from the stable building was only the first of the hurdles.
I didn’t know where I was and I could hardly hop very far. I was hungry, with no food, and, perhaps most important of all, I had no idea who had tried to kill me.
Would they try again when they discovered that I was still alive?
And would they come back here to check? To dispose of the body?
Why had they not made sure by bashing my head in rather than leaving me alive to die slowly?
I knew from my own experience that killing another person wasn’t easy. It was fine if you could do it at a distance. Firing a rocket-propelled grenade into an enemy position was easy. Taking out an enemy commander from half a mile away using a sniper rifle and a telescopic sight was a piece of cake. But sticking a bayonet into the chest of a squirming, screaming human being at arm’s length was quite another matter.
Whoever had done this had left me alive in the stable for their own benefit, not for mine. They had intended to kill me but had wanted time and dehydration to do their dirty work for them.
In that respect, I had an advantage over them. If, and when, we met again they might hesitate before killing me outright and that hesitation would be enough for me, and an end for them. Another Sandhurst instructor floated into my memory. ‘Never hesitate,’ he’d said. ‘Hesitate, and you’re dead.’
*
The falling rain did not give me anywhere near enough water to quench my roaring thirst so I tried one of the taps that were positioned outside each stable. I turned the handle but no water came out. Not surprisingly, the water was off.
In the end, I lay down on the concrete and lapped water from a puddle like a dog. It was easier and more fulfilling than using my cupped hands to try to lift it to my mouth.
Hunger and mobility were now my highest priorities.
What I needed was a crutch, something like a broom to put under my arm. I crawled on hands and knees back along the line of stables until I came to the one I had been held in. I pulled myself upright, slid the bolts on both parts of the door, and opened them wide. I had become used to the fresh outside air and the rank, disgusting smell in the stable caught me unawares. I retched but there was nothing in my stoma
ch to throw up. Had I really lived in there for two days? How bad would the smell have been if I’d died there?
There was no broom in the stable, I knew that, but I had decided to take the ring, the chain and the padlock away with me. If I did go to the police, I would have them as evidence. I also collected the bits of the plastic ties. One never knew, perhaps they were distinctive enough to point to whoever had bought them.
I looked around my prison cell one last time before closing the door. I slid home the bolts as if wanting to lock the place out of my memory.
I hopped along the line and opened the next stable. I was looking for a broom, but I discovered something a whole lot better.
Suddenly things were looking up. Lying on the floor was my artificial leg, together with my overcoat.
Hanging me up to die had been a calculated evil. But removing my leg had been nothing more than pure malice. I resolved, there and then, that I would make the person who did this to me pay a heavy price.
I leaned against the door frame and put the leg on, rolling the securing rubber sleeve up over my knee.
I had always rather hated it, this thing that wasn’t a real part of me. But now I gladly accepted it back as more than just a necessary evil – it was a chum, an ally, and a brother. If nothing else, the last two days had taught me that, without my metal-and-plastic companion, I would be a helpless and incapable warrior in battle. But, together, my prosthesis and I would be a force to be reckoned with.
The joy of walking again on two legs was immense. The familiar clink-clink was like music to my soul.
I picked up my coat and put it on against the cold. My shirt was still wet from standing in the rain and I was grateful for the coat’s thick, warm, fleecy lining. I put my hands into the pockets and found, to my surprise, my mobile telephone, my wallet, my car keys, and the business card from Mr Hoogland.
The phone was off. I’d switched it off for the inquest. I turned it on and the familiar screen appeared. I wondered who I should call.
Who did I trust?