As far as sticking to his resolution went, the first day was an outstanding success. It lasted, so far as he could tell, a little short of a million years.
ON THE MORNING of the second day, he opened his eyes and found himself lying in the most comfortable bed he had ever encountered. It was the kind of bed that a person would have to be bodily picked up and carried away from just in order to get up in the morning. But it paled in comparison to the pillows his head rested on, stuffed with down to such precisely-calibrated firmness that they could only have been the end-result of centuries of research. He was covered with crisply-laundered cotton sheets, topped by an old-fashioned quilt. He felt warm and safe and perfectly relaxed. Whatever else had happened to him, he had clearly fallen into the hands of people who took sleep seriously, and it was difficult to hate such people.
He lay there for a long while staring up at the ceiling, which was high and painted a cream colour. In the centre of the ceiling a complex floral rose executed in plaster dropped a cable from which hung a four-branched light fitting in what looked like tarnished brass. Nice. Understated. A little old-fashioned. Not fussy.
Unwillingly, because if he was to be honest with himself he would much rather have spent the rest of his life lying there with his head supported by those marvellous pillows, he sat up in the bed and looked at the room.
And it wasn’t bad. Not very large, decorated in a Baltic rococo revival style he remembered from a magazine article he’d read a few years ago. Two of the walls had large windows, and between them stood the clean pale-wood lines of various pieces of furniture – wardrobes, dressing tables, chests of drawers, cabinets. The wallpaper, which only a few hours ago had seemed so outlandishly garish that he’d thought in a rare lucid moment that it had been put there specifically to drive him out of his mind, was actually a rather muted and thoroughly decent Regency stripe. The door to the en suite facilities, which yesterday had seemed as far away as Proxima Centauri, stood ajar just a few steps from the bed across the rug-covered floorboards.
From his sitting position, he saw a dressing gown draped across the foot of the bed. This seemed like an invitation, so he swung his legs out of the bed and put his feet down and they landed in a pair of slippers which had been placed in exactly the correct spot. The slippers were in the moccasin style, soft leather lined with what appeared to be sheepskin, stitched together with brightly-coloured thread, and the moment his feet hit them he never ever wanted to take them off again. He sat there for a while on the edge of the bed, wiggling his toes in the miraculous slippers. He was, he realised somewhat belatedly, wearing cotton pyjamas.
He stood up and felt a little light-headed for a moment, but it passed. He picked up the dressing gown and looked at it. It was navy blue, with a monogram on its breast pocket. After examining the monogram for some minutes, he decided it consisted of a design composed of every single letter of the alphabet, picked out in gold thread and surmounted by an heraldic animal he was unfamiliar with. He put the dressing gown on, did up its belt, put his hands in the pockets.
In hostile territory, always assume you’re under surveillance. No need to skulk about, then. He walked across to the nearest window, pulled the curtain and the net curtain behind it aside, and looked out. The window looked down into the courtyard of an anonymous five-storey building. It was a big courtyard, and it was covered with a fresh fall of snow. Right in the middle someone had built a snowman, complete with a broom and a carrot for a nose. The snowman was wearing a black top hat.
Rudi craned his neck. All he could see was rows of windows in the other wings of the building, all identically net-curtained. Doors at ground level. Aerials on the roofs.
He let the curtains fall and started to explore the room. One door led to a small kitchen. Microwave, induction hob, kettle, fridge-freezer. In the fridge were bottles of water with labels in Finnish, packages of cooked sliced meat, a pack of unsmoked back bacon, a block of unsalted butter, six eggs, a litre of semi-skimmed milk, a bag of prewashed salad. In the freezer were neatly-wrapped and labelled packs of beef, pork and lamb, several bags of beef mince, a tub of chocolate Häagen Dazs. A cupboard beside the sink revealed a wire basket full of onions, carrots, potatoes. Another revealed a bin containing four different kinds of loaf. Mugs and cups and saucers. Paper packets of flour, plain and self-raising. Packages of tea and coffee and sugar. An unopened bottle of sunflower oil, an unopened bottle of olive oil. Some of those little packs of chocolate biscuits you got in hotels. Packets of stock cubes – beef, lamb, pork and vegetable. A spice rack on the wall with little jars of spices dangling from it, all their seals unbroken. Acrylic salt and pepper grinders. Pots and pans, utensils. He stood for a few moments looking at a knife-block the size of a small rucksack, from which protruded the handles of what appeared to be one of every kind of cook’s knife ever made. He took one out and weighed it in his hand. Sabatier. Not the way to treat it, putting it in a block. He slid it back into its slot and checked the kitchen bin, which contained nothing but a plastic bin-liner.
Back in the main room, he stood with his hands in the pockets of the dressing gown and blew out his cheeks. He went into the bathroom, half expecting chaos and disorder, but everything was neat and clean, no sign of the terrible things his body had recently been doing there. Nicely tiled in pale blue. Toilet, bidet, washbasin, shower, all in white. Wrapped soaps and unopened bottles of shampoo, all with Finnish labels. Toothspray and brush still sealed in crinkly plastic beside the washbasin, alongside two similarly-sealed glass tumblers and a can of shaving gel and a package of plastic razors. Cupboard under the sink with spare toilet rolls on one shelf, cleaning materials on the one beneath. He looked at himself in the mirror over the washbasin and he looked not so bad, really, considering. A little pale, maybe. There was a tiny little red mark on his cheek where one of Ash’s men had shot him with what he presumed was a soluble crystal of sedative. He ruffled his hair and went back into the bedroom.
Cupboards. A wardrobe containing nothing but empty hangers and a couple of those little scented cloth sachets that are supposed to deter moths. A desk with drawers containing ballpoint pens and tablets of unheaded good-quality notepaper. Opening the door of one of the cupboards revealed a state-of-the-art entertainment centre, gestural interface, onboard base of thousands of albums and movies. He waved up the main menu, looked at the options, shut it down again and put his hands in his pockets and looked around the room.
All of which, obviously, was intended to make him feel safe and calm and happy. Which it did, and not just in the obvious way. As much as anything, the room was a message. It told him the people who had abducted him were not without resources. It told him they were professional. It told him they had done their homework – they’d given him the means to do his own cooking. It told him how lucky he was not to have woken up chained to a radiator in a derelict flat in one of the many bad parts of Warsaw. It told him that if the people who had abducted him had wanted him to wake up chained to a radiator in a derelict flat in a bad part of Warsaw, that was where he would have woken up.
It did not, of course, tell him who the hell they were. Just claiming to represent the English government did not make it so.