Who could have done such a thing?
And why had I been so careless as to let it happen? I'd been off my guard, thinking about the inquest and my conversation with the lawyer, Mr. Hoogland. I had stuck my head up over the parapet, but I hadn't been shot, I'd been kidnapped.
I wasn't sure which was worse.
As time passed, I became hungrier and the pain in my bladder grew to the extent that in the end, I had to let go, the urine briefly warming my leg as it ran down to the floor.
But it was the thirst and the fatigue that were becoming my greatest problems.
In the army, soldiers were used to standing for long periods, especially in the Guards regiments. Lengthy stints of ceremonial duty outside the royal palaces in London taught all guardsmen to stand completely still for hours, unmoved and unamused by the antics of camera-wielding tourists or little boys with water pistols.
I had done my time there as a young guardsman, but nothing had prepared me for the hours of standing on only one leg, unable to go for a march up and down to alleviate the pain, and especially the cramp that started to appear in my calf. I tried rocking back and forth from heel to toe, but my heel was still sore and it didn't do much good. I tried resting my elbows on the ledge at the top of the wooden paneling to relieve the pressure. But nothing helped for long.
I bent my knee and allowed some of my weight to hang once more from my hands, but soon the pain in my shoulders returned and my hands started to go numb once more.
I spent some more time shouting, but no one came, and it just made me even thirstier.
What did the people who did this want from me?
I would gladly give them everything I owned just to sit down with a glass of water.
Values and Standards of the British Army stated that prisoners must be treated with respect and in accordance with both British and international laws. International Law is based on the four Geneva Convention treaties and the three additional protocols that set the standards for the humanitarian treatment of victims of war.
I knew; I'd been taught it at Sandhurst.
In particular, the conventions prohibit the use of torture. Hooding, sleep deprivation and continuous standing had all been designated as torture by case law in the European Court of Human Rights. To say nothing of the withholding of food and water.
Surely someone had to come soon.
But they didn't, and the light from the window went away as day turned into my second night in the stable.
I passed some of the time counting seconds.
Mississippi one, Mississippi two, Mississippi three, and so on… and on… and on. Mississippi sixty to one minute, Mississippi sixty times sixty to one hour. Anything to keep my mind off the pain in my leg.
Eventually, sometime that I reckoned, from my counting, must be after midnight, it dawned on me that my kidnapper simply wasn't going to arrive with food and water for his hostage. If he had been going to, he'd have come during the daylight hours or in the early evening.
I faced the shocking reality that I wasn't here to be ransomed, I was here to die.
In spite of the pain in my leg, I went to sleep standing up. i I only realized when I lost my balance and was woken by the jerk of the chain attached to my wrists. I twisted around so I was facing the wall and stood up again.
I was cold.
I could tell that I was only in my shirtsleeves. I'd been wearing an overcoat when I walked back to the car from the Coroner's Court, but it had obviously been removed.
I shivered, but the cold was the least of my worries.
I was desperately thirsty, and I knew that my body must be getting dehydrated. My kidneys had gone on making urine, and I had peed three times during the day, losing liquid down my leg that I could ill afford. I knew from my training that in these cool conditions, human beings could live for several weeks without food but only a matter of a few days without water.
The knowledge was not hugely comforting.
I thought back to the survival-skills instructor at Sandhurst who had told me that. The whole platoon had sat up and taken special notice of the attractive female captain from the Royal Army Medical Corps who had taught us about the physiological effects of the various situations in which we might find ourselves.
Sadly, there hadn't been a lecture on how to stand forever on one leg.
But the captain had turned out to be more than just an army medico who knew the theory, she was a get-up-and-go girl who had put it into practice. She was the female equivalent of Bear Grylls, spending all her army leave on expeditions to remote parts, and she could count both poles as well as the top of Everest in her resume.
"If you're in a bit of a spot," she had said, grossly understating some of the "spots" she had described from her own experiences, "never just sit and wait to be rescued. Your best bet for survival is always to evacuate under your own steam if that is humanly possible. There are well-documented occasions when people with broken legs, or worse, left for dead high up on Everest, have subsequently turned up alive at Base Camp. They crawled off the mountain. No one else was going to save them, so they saved themselves."
I was definitely in a bit of a spot.
Time, I thought, to save myself.
First things first. I had to get myself disconnected from the ring in the wall. It sounded deceptively easy.
I reached up with my hands to where the chain was attached by the padlock. The ring stuck straight out from the wall as if it had been screwed in as a single piece. I grabbed hold of it with my right hand and tried to twist it anticlockwise. It didn't budge an iota.
I went on trying for a long time. I wrapped the chain around the ring and put all my weight on it. I then tried to twist the chain, rotating my body around and around, back and forth, hoping that I would find a weak link to snap. Nothing.
Next, I tried turning the ring clockwise in case it had a left-hand screw thread. Still nothing, other than sore fingers.
I jerked it with the chain, on one occasion throwing myself off balance and back into the hanging-by-shoulders position. But still the damn ring didn't shift. If I couldn't detach myself from the ring, then I would simply hang here until I died of dehydration, and the exertions of trying to escape would reduce the time that would take.
"Always to evacuate under your own steam if that is humanly possible." That's what the lady captain had said. Maybe freeing myself from the ring wasn't humanly possible.
I felt like crying, but I knew that would be another loss of precious fluid.
And I desperately needed an evacuation of a different kind.
How degrading bodily functions could be when they occurred in the wrong place at the wrong time. At least in the hospital, when I'd been bedridden and incapable, there had been bedpans and nurses close by to assist. Here I was, standing on my one very sore leg, imprisoned in a stable, unable even to remove my trousers, let alone to squat or sit on a toilet.
Who was the bastard who would force me to shit in my pants?
I was angry. Bloody angry.
I tried to channel my anger into a resurgence of energy and strength as I once more gripped the ring and tried to turn it. Again it resisted.
"Come on, you bugger, move!" I shouted at the ring. But it didn't.
I rested my head in frustration on the ledge at the top of the wooden paneling. So fed up was I that I bit through the cloth of the hood into the wood.
It moved.
I thought I must be imagining it, so I bit the wood again. It definitely moved.
I felt around with my face. The ledge on the top of the paneling was about an inch and a half wide, with its front edge curved, and it was the curved edge that had moved. It was obviously a facing strip that had been glued or nailed to the front of the ledge.
I bit into the wood again. Even through the hood, I found I could get my front teeth behind the curved beading. I bit hard and pulled backwards, using my arms to press on the wall. The curved beading strip came away from the ledge far enough for me to get my mouth around it properly. I pulled back again and it came away some more.