29/10/07
6:05 PM
Street End Lane

Adam loaded his pistol and looked up at the Special Branch chief.

"Right, you spooks keep to the back until we know the area is under control. Thermal imaging is drawing a blank, but in an old farmhouse the walls could be too thick for us to see through." Adam nodded in assent. He and Ros were sitting in the back of one of the Special Branch vans they'd brought down to raid the address he'd got from the driver. They might well be too late, Zaf must have been taken from here sixty hours ago or more, but they might have made a mistake. They might have left something behind that they could use to find them. "Okay, strike in three, two, one." All eight spec ops men burst out of the van and started to run down the farm track, Adam and Ros set off in their wake, pistols pointed at the ground.

"You sure you should even be doing this?" Ros asked.

"I'm fine." Adam said. The slash in his side was nowhere near enough to keep him off work, not when they were already a man down. It hurt, but it wasn't prohibitively painful.

The house came in to view, it looked for all the world like any other abandoned outbuilding; one floor, windows boarded up, door bolted and covered in peeling green paint. The soldiers charged at the door, obviously expecting to break it down. Adam and Ros pressed themselves in to the hedgerows. Adam felt bramble thorns pull at his clothes. The lead soldier fell back from the door with a curse, he'd more or less bounced off. It was stronger than the rotting wood it looked like. The second soldier came in with a lock drill and tried again. There was obviously something very solid behind it. It took nearly another minute of drilling and shoving before the door fell in. The soldiers filed in, two circled round, Adam and Ros stayed still.

They waited. For what felt like well over ten minutes, they waited. Eventually a soldier reappeared at the door and called

"All clear, they got out well ahead of us."

Adam and Ros started down the hill towards the door, Adam flicked the safety back on on his pistol. It was dark in the house, Adam pulled a torch from his pocket and shone it around the door. The door itself was reinforced with metal bars. Adam kept walking. To the left of the front door were two large rooms. The first contained bunk beds, three of them. No mattresses, just frames. Half a page of what might have been a porn magazine was trapped under the leg of one of the beds. An electric cable ran from the doorway up to a light socket in the middle of the ceiling. The next room was a kitchen. Two discarded gas bottles lay in a corner, along with various bits of plastic foodwrap. Whatever they'd cooked on was gone.

"Nothing very incriminating, is there?" Ros said. Adam didn't reply. They carried on.

The room immediately to the right of the door wasn't wood. It wasn't even wood reinforced with bars. It was solid steel, with a small, barred window near the top that could be closed from the outside. Like a prison door. Adam stepped in. This room was bare. There was a strong smell of human waste in here, a few bits of wet and bloody straw lay in the corners, as though someone had tried to sweep up, but not done a very good job of it.

"Do you think we'll get DNA from the blood?" Adam asked

Ros shrugged. "We might do."

"And dust this door for prints." Adam ordered one of the soldiers. "And anything made of glass or plastic, they hold prints well."

He backed out of the cell and made for the next room. This one was furnished. A desk stood more or less in the middle of the room, behind it was a row of shelves and a rack. In front of the table was empty space. Apart from four six-inch poles sticking up out of the concrete this room was lined with. In the tops of the poles were holes. Adam crept closer, as though the poles might rise up and bite him. There was blood on the floor here, quite a lot of it. Then he saw a leather strap lying beside one of the poles and understood. He could see it now. The poles were set a distance apart so that a grown man, Zaf, could be stretched out between and held with those straps, by wrists and ankles. Unable to move, unable to protect himself at all, only able to see them coming and dread it. Adam glanced across at Ros, she'd obviously reached the same conclusion.

"They knew we'd come." Ros said. Adam nodded mutely and turned to the desk. He tried the drawers in turn, they weren't locked. The first and second were empty, a single CD lay in a case in the third.

"Ros."

She came and looked over his shoulder. "Given that everything else has been stripped, I expect they left that for us on purpose."

"There still might be something on it we can use."

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