Porter started to follow. The pictures of Katie Dartmouth broadcast over the Internet and TV in the days after her captivity had been burned into his memory. But this was different. This was real life.
Hassad extinguished the gas lamp: an electric line had been fed down here from the generator above, and there were two lamps illuminating the room, making it far brighter than anywhere else in the mine. The room was a decent size, significantly larger than Hassad’s own room, or any of the other spaces Porter had seen cut into the rock. It was at least fifteen feet deep and twenty wide. The walls were squarer than they were elsewhere, and the room felt dry: there was none of the metallic dampness that filled the rest of the mine. There was a smell of sweat and excrement, like walking past an open sewer. In one corner, there was a webcam fixed to a wooden tripod: Hassad switched it off as soon as they stepped inside. But although the room was probably better than he expected, Katie Dartmouth herself looked far worse. As Porter looked at her, he could feel his heart sinking within his chest. What kind of barbarians could do this to an innocent woman? What kind of political point could possibly be worth this kind of suffering? How low into the pits of cruelty can a man sink that he would make another human being endure this amount of humiliation and pain?
He could feel the anger flowing through his veins. If you didn’t deserve to die for what you did to me sixteen years ago, then you’ve certainly put the ink on your own death warrant with what you are doing right here and right now. No man capable of inflicting that kind of misery can complain about the grisly death that justly awaits him.
Katie was tied to a stake, exactly as she had been depicted on television — though at least the gag had been removed. It was a thick wooden pole, stripped of its bark, and dug deep into the ground. Her hands were strapped behind her back, held in place with thick leather bindings, and her feet and her chest were lashed to the stake as well. It was impossible for her to move a muscle from her neck downwards. She was wearing the clothes she had been captured in, but by now they were stained and filthy. Her blouse was ripped, and there was a gash running down the side of her blue jeans. No one had unstrapped her to allow her to go to the toilet, so it was obvious she had no choice but to soil herself where she was. A vile stench was rising up from her stake, and around her feet it was possible to see small piles of human waste. It was her face that looked the worst, though. Her eyes were bloodshot and wasted, with a dark, hollow look to them, and the skin across her face was already dry, stretched and caked with sweat, dirt and blood. There was a cut across one cheekbone, which had dried into an ugly scar, but with some blood still seeping from the wound. And her hair was matted, thick with sweat, and was starting to form itself into ugly clumps that would soon fall clean away from her head.
The pretty young television star who was filling a thousand newspaper front pages back in Britain was long gone. Instead, her place was taken by a haggard, beaten person, who was already closer to a corpse than a woman.
How long exactly she had been tied to this stake, it was impossible for Porter to tell. Probably since they took the poor girl late on Sunday night. That made five continuous nights now. It would be virtually impossible for her to get any sleep, nor did it look as if they had been feeding her. There was a jug of water on a table next to her, but there was no way she could reach it with her arms bound behind her back. The closer you looked at her, Porter realised, the more of a miracle it was that she had survived this long. Another day, and the bastards probably wouldn’t need to chop her head off. She’d be dead already.
They might not have tortured her — not yet anyway — Porter told himself, but that made no difference. They were treating her worse than any animal.
Her eyes rolled towards his, the eyeballs moving slowly in their sockets. Porter had seen eyes like that before. There were plenty of junkies out on the streets, and they all had dilated pupils and eyeballs they were incapable of moving properly. It was one of the ways of spotting them, and Porter was always quick to steer clear of the crackheads sleeping rough on the streets: they were violent and dangerous, and usually so out of their heads they would attack you for no reason. Her eyes were exactly the same: slow, empty, full of pain, and devoid of any hope. But it wasn’t any kind of drug that had made her like that. It was the bastard standing right next to him.
Porter clenched his fists. It would take a man of iron self-discipline not to land a punch on Hassad’s face right now. And he had never been a man who had counted self-control among whatever qualities he might possess.
It was clear Katie Dartmouth was finding it hard to focus. Her mouth was immobile, and her face was too caked in blood and sweat for any sort of expression to be read into it. But you could see from her eyes she was confused and terrified. The last few days had taught her to greet every new moment with dread and loathing, and this one was no different. She was looking at Porter, struggling to focus, and yet as she did so, she seemed to flinch. ‘Are you …?’
She was struggling to speak, but it sounded more like the strangled cry of a dying animal than any noise a human might make. Again, Porter could feel a wave of anger welling up inside him. Her lips were so dry, and her throat so weak that it was clearly painful for her even to finish the sentence. ‘Are you …?’ she started again, this time trying to move her head upwards slightly so that she could see him properly.
‘I’m English, yes,’ said Porter, looking straight at her.
For the first time it was possible to see something other than despair in her eyes. Not hope exactly, Porter realised. That would be putting it too strongly. But there was some strength there that he hadn’t seen when he’d first walked in: a sign that she might be able to struggle through the next few hours at least.
‘Who …?’
Suddenly she started to cough violently. Her whole body had become badly dehydrated over the last few days and as she started to speak, her throat seized up. Porter could see the shame and humiliation in her eyes as the saliva started to dribble down the front of her mouth. Without being able to lift either of her hands, there was nothing she could do to stop it.
‘Who are you?’ she said finally when she managed to bring the coughing under control.
‘I’m the best news you’ve had since you got here,’ said Porter.
It looked as if she was attempting a smile, but her face was too weak for the muscles to respond. ‘I … I …’
The coughing started up again: a vicious hacking sound that appeared to throttle her, and caused teardrops to start forming around her strained and tired eyes.
‘Give her some bloody water,’ snapped Porter.
Hassad remained immobile, neither saying nor doing anything.
‘Fuck it, man, she’ll be bloody dead by tomorrow morning,’ growled Porter.
He walked over to the jug of water, picked it up and poured some into the tin cup next to it. Then he stood next to Katie, holding the back of her head in his hand. The stench was vile, worse than anything he had ever experienced even while he was sleeping rough. Anyone who has ever been homeless has developed a strong stomach, but Porter was struggling to keep himself from vomiting. He pushed the cup up to her lips, holding her head in position to give her any chance of drinking it. Her throat was so dry that at first the water just washed over her lips, the way a heavy rainfall will wash over the land, but eventually she was able to swallow some of the water, gulping it down greedily. When the cup was empty, Porter turned round to refill it from the jug. But Hassad was now holding it. ‘Here, let me,’ he said contemptuously.