Page 36 of The Man Made of Smoke

“It wasn’t the kind of place with CCTV.”

Which is just a stupid excuse, and John feels frustration rising inside him. The familiar anger is probably only a short distance behind. On one level, he gets it: returning to the place he was taken from would be traumatic for Field, and it’s the last thing he wants to do. But the woman in the woods deserves justice, and he finds it hard to control the urge to grab Field and shake him until he sees sense.

He can’t do that, of course, but how else can he persuade him? Daniel would be so much better at this than he is, John thinks. What would his son suggest?

Keeping calm, probably.

“Even so,” he says. “Someone there might have seen what happened?”

“He’s not the kind of man other people see.”

And John is about to reply—maybe even give into the frustration and reach out the way he knows he shouldn’t—but Field’s choice of words give him pause.

He’s not the kind of man other people see.

A beat of silence in the study.

“Okay,” John says. “Let’s leave that for now.”

Field looks down at the carpet. He knows what’s coming next.

“Tell me about the woman,” John says.

He couldn’t tell how long he was pushed on the trolley for, but eventually it came to a stop. His gaze flicked frantically left and right. The space he was in now was more open than the path through the undergrowth. Thathad felt like a woodland trail, whereas he could tell this was a clearing of some kind. The fairy lights had been left behind them, and there was a different kind of illumination now.

The man behind him was breathing heavily.

And then he became aware that the man was moving around to the right-hand side of the gurney. Instinctively, he looked in the other direction, blinking quickly, keeping his gaze fixed on a line of trees that were almost lost in the shadows.

Don’t look.

Don’t look at him.

The man began grunting softly. A few seconds later, still restrained, Field felt his body moving. It took him a moment to understand what was happening, and then he understood. The gurney he was lying on juddered as it was rotated slowly upward. While he remained strapped firmly in place, he was being moved from a horizontal position to a vertical one.

The prickling of stars above receded backward in a series of jerks, each one accompanied by a grunt of effort from the man at his side. Field felt delirious. The constellations above him appeared to be swirling. He thought that if he could just get them to settle then perhaps he could remember them and somehow be able to work out where he was.

And then he was upright.

It was easier to make sense of his surroundings now. It was indeed a clearing, somewhere deep in a forest, and it was lit by bright bulbs screwed into the tops of the wooden posts that were dotted around. A swirl of cables was spread out over the ground, and he could hear a generator humming away out of sight. The scene had a dreamlike quality to it. It reminded him of a movie set at night.

Ahead of him, he could see a series of wooden pens, and he had been positioned so as to be facing directly into one of them. When he saw the woman there, his mind suddenly became cold and clear, as though a glass of iced water had been thrown at his face.

She was lying on the ground, curled up on her side, illuminated well enough by the lights for him to see that she was alive and awake andlooking back at him. A wooden post had been driven into the ground in the center of the pen. She was chained to it.

The two of them stared at each other for a few seconds.

Even though Field had never been as terrified as he was right then, he still felt a desperate urge to break free and help her somehow. To rescue her. To stop whatever he had been brought here to watch from happening.

And then he became aware that the presence beside him was gone.

“No,” he tried to say.

The man walked over to the pen. Field could see him now. He was dressed entirely in black, apart from his face, which was obscured by a featureless white mask.

He had a knife in one hand. A can of petrol in the other.

Darren Field’s heart started beating even harder—no, no, no—and he strained frantically, impotently, stretching against his bonds as he watched the man approach the woman. And then—

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