Another smooth flat surface, at right angles to the floor. I banged it gently with my fist, and got back the noise and vibration of metal.
I thought that if I sat for a while with my back against the wall it would soon get light, and it would be easy then to see where I was. It had to get light, I thought forlornly. It simply had to.
It didn’t, of course.
When they’d given me light on the boat, I’d escaped. A mistake to be avoided.
It had to be faced. The darkness was deliberate, and would go on. It was no good, I told myself severely, sitting in a miserable huddle feeling sorry for myself.
I made a further exploration into unmapped territory, and found that my world was a good deal smaller than Columbus’s. It seemed prudent to move while still sitting down, on the flat-earth theory that one might fall over the edge; but two feet of shuffling to the right brought me to a corner.
The adjacent wall was also flat, smooth, and metal. I shifted my spine round on to it, and set off again to the right.
The traverse was short. I came almost at once to another corner. I found that if I sat in the centre of the wall I could reach both side walls at once quite easily with my finger-tips. Five feet, approximately, from side to side.
I shuffled round the second corner and pressed on. Three feet down that side, I knew where I was. The flatness of the metal wall was broken there by a big rounded bulge, whose meaning was as clear to my touch as if I’d been seeing it.
It was the semi-circular casing over a wheel; and I was inside a van.
I had a powerful, immediate picture of the fake ambulance I’d climbed into at Cheltenham. A white van, of a standard pattern, with the doors opening outwards at the rear. If I continued past the wheel, I would come to the rear doors.
And I would feel a proper fool, I thought, if all I had to do was open the doors and step out.
I wouldn’t have minded feeling a proper fool. The doors were firmly shut, and likely to remain so. There was no handle on the inside.
In the fourth corner I came across what I had this time been given in the way of life support systems, and if my spirits had already been at zero, at that point they went way below.
There was a five-gallon plastic jerry-can full of liquid, and a large paper carrier bag.
I unscrewed the cap of the jerry-can and sniffed at the contents. No smell. Sloshed some of the liquid out on to my hand, and tasted it.
Water.
I screwed the cap on again, fumbling in the dark.
Five gallons of water.
Oh no, I thought numbly. Oh dear God.
The carrier was packed to the top with flat plastic packets, each about four inches square. There was again no smell. I pulled one of the packets open, and found the contents were thin four-inch squares of sliced processed cheese.
I counted the packets with a sinking heart, taking them one by one from the carrier and stacking them on the floor. There were sixty of them. All, as far as I could tell, exactly the same.
Wretchedly I counted them from the floor back into the carrier, one by one, and there were still sixty. They had given me enough food and water to last for at least four weeks. There were going to be no twice a day visits: no one to talk to at all.
Sod them, I thought violently. If this was revenge, it was worse than anything I’d ever brought on any crook.
Spurred by anger, I stood without caution to explore the top part of the van, and banged my sore head on the roof. It was very nearly altogether too much. I found myself back on my knees, cursing and holding my head, and trying not to weep. A battered feeble figure, sniffing in the dark.
It wouldn’t do, I thought. It was necessary to be sternly unemotional. To ignore the aches and pains. To take a good cold grip of things, and make a plan and routine for survival.
When the fresh waves of headache passed, I got on with it.
The presence of food and drink meant, I thought, that survival was expected. That one day, if I didn’t manage a second escape, I would be released. Death, again, was not apparently on the agenda. Well, then, why was I getting into such a fuss?
I had read once of a man who had spent weeks down a pothole in silence and darkness to see how a total lack of external reference would affect the human body. He had survived with his mind intact and his body none the worse for wear, and his sense of time had gone remarkably little astray. What he could do, so could I. It was irrelevant, I thought sternly, that the scientist had volunteered for his incarceration, and had had his heartbeat and other vital signs monitored on the surface, and could have got out again any time he felt he’d had enough.
Feeling a good deal steadier for the one-man pep-talk, I got more slowly to my feet, sliding my spine up the side wall, and feeling for the roof with my hands. It was too low for me to stand upright, by four or six inches. With head and knees bent, I felt my way again right round the van.
Both sides were completely blank. The front wall was broken by the shape of a small panel which must have opened through to the driving cab. It seemed to be intended to slide, but was fastened shut as firmly as if it had been welded. There was no handle or bolt on the inside; only smoothed metal.
The rear doors at first seemed to be promising, as I discovered they were not entirely solid, but had windows. One each side, about twelve inches across, the distance from my wrist to my elbow, and half as high.
There was no glass in the windows. I stretched my hand cautiously through the one on the right, and immediately came to a halt. Something hard was jammed against the doors on the outside, holding them shut.
I was concentrating so much on the message from my fingers that I realised that I was crouching there with my eyes shut. Funny, really. I opened them. No light. What good were eyes without light.
Outside each window there was an area of coarse cloth, which felt like heavy canvas. At the outer sides of the window it was possible to push the canvas, to move it three or four inches away from the van. On the inner halves it was held tight against the van by whatever was jamming the doors shut.
I put an arm out of each outer section of window in turn, and felt as much of the outside of the van as I could reach. It was very little, and of no use. The whole of the back of the van was sheeted in canvas.
I slid down again to the floor and tried to visualise what I’d felt. A van covered in canvas with its rear doors jammed shut. Where could one park such a thing so that it wouldn’t be immediately discovered. In a garage? A barn? If I banged on the sides, would anyone hear me?
I banged on the sides of the van, but my fists made little noise, and there was nothing else to bang with. I shouted ‘Help’ a good many times through the windows, but no one came.
There was air perceptibly leaking in through the missing windows: I could feel it when I pushed the canvas outwards. No fear of asphyxiation.
It irritated me that I could do nothing useful with those windows. They were too small to crawl through, even without the canvas and whatever was holding it against the van. I couldn’t get my head through the spaces, let alone my shoulders.
I decided to eat some cheese and think things over. The cheese wasn’t bad. The thoughts produced the unwelcome reflection that this time I had no mattress, no blanket, no pillow, and no loo. Also no paperback novel, spare socks, or soap. The sail locker had been a Hilton compared with the van.
On the other hand, in an odd sort of way the time in the sail locker had prepared me better for this dourer cell. Instead of feeling more frightened, more hysterical, more despairing, I felt less. I had already been through all the horrors. Also, during the four days of freedom, I had not gone to the South Pole to avoid recapture. I’d feared it and done my best to dodge it, but in returning to my usual life, I’d known it might come.