"Hello?" She rang the bell on the desk at the police station, and looked about for anybody who might be at all official. She hoped that the people here spoke English, or at least that they understood enough of it to follow what she was going to have to tell them. She did not think for a minute that she had enough Spanish to adequately put across the Chris/Kim rivalry, and its years of maturing hatred. She certainly wouldn't be able to explain to them the likely results of a re-match, should the volatile pair have come across one another again. Laura knew that she stood no chance of keeping Chris's temper in check. That was something that was beyond Zo‘ and Kathy and everybody else. She knew that even Frank himself had never been able to hold his son back when that rage was on the boil. Kim was no different. She was able to present a cooler front to the world, but in the right circumstances she could play the wild card as well as could Chris. Perhaps the petulance was less in her case, but Chris's spoilt little boy act had its female equivalent in Kim. Sparks couldn't help but fly, without someone in between to try to mute the effects. "Can I help you?" A tall man dressed in an immaculate uniform came from an inner office. He stood almost to attention in front of her, white teeth flashing in the hot light coming through the windows. He had barely the trace of an accent, and her confidence grew accordingly. "I hope so." Relieved to have found someone so obviously competent, Laura fumbled for some form of identification. "My name is Laura Johnstone. I'm a British businesswoman, over here for some meetings with local companies." "I am pleased to meet you." He put his hands behind his back, his shoulders squaring even more than they had been before. "What can I do for you, Miss Johnstone?" "My boyfriend. He's vanished, and I don't know what can have happened to him. I'm rather afraid that he may have done something stupid. You see, there's this woman. A British woman, named Kim Robinson, and--" "Kim Robinson?" The officer frowned. "Your boyfriend - his name is Christopher Robinson, yes?" "No." The frown, fading from the officer's forehead, seemed to leap across to adorn her own brow instead. "His name is Christopher Tate. The thing isÉ" "You had better come with me." Holding a hand up to forestall further words, he opened a hatchway in the desk so that she could walk through to his side. "We were called to a hotel room early yesterday by a Mrs Kim Robinson. Her ex-husband was causing trouble, trying to kidnap their young son." "Son?" She shook her head. "No, you don't understandÉ" "I think I do." He opened a heavy wooden door and gestured for her to precede him into the darkened corridor beyond. "Your boyfriend has lied to you, Miss Johnstone. He came here to meet his ex-wife. He is a violent and dangerous man." She shook her head. "Look, we must be talking about a different person here. My Chris is in a wheelchair. He's never been married to somebody called Kim, and as for this about a son--" "You can maybe help us all the same." The officer had stopped in front of another door, which he opened with a large key taken from his pocket. Beyond the door there was a musty smell, of damp and mould and stale air. A table stood a few paces away, covered with old newspapers, and bearing a half-empty bottle of something which sported a peeling label. The cork lay next to the bottle, tinged red from the liquid it had been designed to seal up. A wheelchair, empty but still very familiar, stood next to the table. Laura ran to it. "This is your boyfriend's chair?" The officer joined her beside it, then pointed through the walls of steel bars that made up the cells surrounding them. "He is over there." "Where?" She walked closer to the bars, looking about the empty cells, smelling the desolation and the horrible, cold air. The whole place had the feel of a medieval dungeon, forgotten by the world above. In one of the cells, lying on a bunk, she could just make out the figure of a man, but the light was so bad that she could be sure of nothing more than his basic shape. She stepped closer, pressing herself against the bars. "Chris?" He didn't move, and she raised her voice, frowning through the gloom to get a better look at him. "Chris?" He turned, and she caught a flash of dark eyes reflecting what little light there was. The officer handed her a torch and she flashed it through the bars, wondering why somebody couldn't see their way clear to replacing the light bulb in the room. An empty socket dangled from the ceiling on a long wire, and the officer, seeing her pointed look towards it, had the grace to colour slightly. He faded away, as though intent upon a light bulb finding mission. "Chris?" she called again, almost hoping that it was him. If it wasn't she was going to feel like a real fool. A low moan answered her. The shape on the bunk shifted, and turned directly into the light of her torch. She gasped. Chris Tate stared back at her, but it was hardly the man that she knew. His right eye was marked by a growing bruise, his jaw shadowed by the early growth of stubble. She did not recognise the look in his eyes, but she thought that she recognised its cause. How must he feel, lying on that bunk, entirely alone, with no way of moving about? "Laura?" The unaccustomed light was clearly hurting his eyes, but she did not turn it away. "Laura, you have to listen to me. It's Kim. She's here, she told them lies. She said I was her ex-husband." Indignation at this effrontery coloured his voice beyond the previous monotone. "You have to get me out of here." "How?" She was still horrified by the whole situation, and not yet thinking properly. To see him like this, with his face marked by what could only have been tearstains, his whole demeanour suggesting utter dejection; it hurt her almost more than she could bear. "Go and see her. You have to talk to Kim." He was struggling to move closer to her, trying to swing himself around; but the bunk was too narrow, and to move too much would clearly send him tumbling to the floor. "The ambassador. Shouldn't I go to see him? I mean, this is hardly--" "Forget the ambassador!" There was anguish in his voice. "Laura, we're not in England. There's no PACE here. Just go to see Kim. She started this, and she's the only one that can finish it." He leant against the bars, his fingers gripping them with some of his usual tenacity. "Please, Laura." "Where is she?" She did not want to go and see Kim. The last thing that she wanted was to go before the woman who was behind this; but if it was what Chris wanted, it was what she would do. She was more than capable of standing up to Kim; of that she was certain. "At the Hotel Aldoro. Room 314." He lay back down, seeming to shrink in stature as he did so. "Go on. Before they decide to hold you too, as an accessory." "An accessory to what?" "I don't know." There was bitter humour in his voice. "I haven't got a bloody clue. Just get out of here. Quickly." And then he was silent, and the torch light flickered in her hand. She turned and left him, the silence of the dark and stale little room closing about behind her as she went. The last thing that she heard was the sound of his ragged breathing in the semidarkness, as he struggled to stay calm.

And the hours passed. They had replaced the bulb in the room's single light socket and it swung silently, backwards and forwards, casting a flickering light that did little to dispel the gloom, or to improve his mood. He was trapped, in a cell no more than six feet by two, for he could move no further than beyond those limiting borders. The air was close and still, the silence all-consuming. His heart ached. "KimÉ" The single word was usually enough to make his blood boil, but now he muttered it just to stay calm. He had been in the cell for - what? - twenty-four hours? Maybe more, certainly not less. It felt more, but then Time itself had become an uncertain concept. It hurt his head to think about it, and it pained his heart to consider how much longer he might be forced to stay. He blinked up at the ceiling. A small spider trailed its way across the looming grey dampness, and he found himself wondering if it was poisonous. What would happen if it fell? Did it matter? He cursed himself for being so negative; so easy to depress. If he was like this after twenty-four hours, what would he be like after four or five days? Or weeks? The thought made his head reel. They couldn't keep him here that long - could they? He might be a foreigner, and easy to forget, but he had Laura out there. And others, beyond her. But they were far away; miles and miles away, in another world entirely. He closed his eyes. He could seeÉ trees. Trees and bushes, and the view from the upstairs window at Home Farm, where he had once looked out upon his new world after first moving there, all those years ago. He hadn't looked out of that window in a long time. There was little attraction these days, in looking out across land that he knew so well; land that had once belonged to his father, but now belonged to someone else. He had ceased to love the land so much anyway, in recent years. It had become tainted, largely by Kim, and all that she had done. He still loved Home Farm, in a strange sort of way; he knew that he would have done anything for it, to have had it in his possession. But it meant a different thing to him now. He opened his eyes again, and the trees and the grass fell away. Gone was his car, with its smooth engine and subtle power, ready to take him wherever he wanted to go. Gone was the view from that upstairs window. Gone were the faces of the people he had been trying to think of. He could no longer see Zo‘, or Kathy. Laura's face, too, had vanished into the dreary, grey dampness which surrounded him. The only face that still echoed within his eyelids was that of his step-mother. She had bettered him again, and he knew it. He knew it with an anger that sickened him in its intensity, and seemed to drive hot spikes through his brain. She had tricked him, and he had been sucked into yet another of her traps. He hated her. His mind screamed his hatred in silent venom, and his breathing grew faster accordingly. She was out there somewhere. Somewhere outside, in all that glorious sunshine, she was walking about, laughing at yet another victory over Chris Tate, the man she loved to goad. She was wandering about, free to go wherever she pleased, with the wind in her hair, and the world at her fingertips. And all the time, he was lying here on the bunk, trapped in his tiny world, able only to sit up, and to move around just a little, always with the risk of falling from the thin bunk. Once on the floor there was little that he could do. Whether or not he would be able to climb back up onto the bed was one thing; whether or not he would care enough to try was another. He certainly had little desire to try dragging himself across the rough concrete floor to reach the metal chair screwed to the ground on the other side of the cell. His head hurt with the frustration that welled inside him. His chest hurt from the ragged breathing, and the sobs that were trying to break free. He clenched his fists, feeling the nails dig into his palms until they threatened to draw blood. He stared at the white knuckles with a detached interest. They were not his hands. They couldn't be - they were shaking uncontrollably. He forced himself to sit up, balancing on the edge of the bunk, his shaking fists pressed into the blanket beneath him in a last ditch effort to control them; but his emotions were too strong. The frustration and the anger were boiling within him, growing with every moment. He wanted to smash something, or to hit something, but the only thing that was there for him to hit was the wall; the wall and the bars. He slammed his hands against them, feeling pain strike its way up his arms. It did not seem to register within him. The anger flowed freely. He hated the cell, he hated his lack of manoeuvrability. He hated the policemen beyond the damp stone walls. He hated Kim. More than anything else, he hated Kim. He hated the face that kept torturing his mind. He hated the voice that resounded inside his skull. Her laugh, her gently insulting tone. Her patronising smile, which she reserved just for him. But through it all; through all of the hatred, and all of the madness, was a brewing sense of uselessness. He could do nothing. He could not get at her. He could not do the damage that his incensed mind screamed for. He had been angry before. Anger was a part of him. He was no stranger to temper tantrums, that much he could not deny. But here, in his tiny world of six feet by two, sitting at chest-height above the floor, there was nothing that he could do to relieve the rages. He could not break anything, he could not yell at anybody, he could not tear or smash or destroy. And worst of all, he could not get at Kim. His head felt as though it might explode. Everything hurt now. His fists hurt from the pounding against the walls. His chest hurt from the ragged breathing and the fierce tenseness that kept his whole body taut and tight. He knew that he was torturing himself. He knew, somewhere deep within, that if he could only relax, and try to think other thoughts, the time would pass more quickly and he would not feel so much anger, so much pain. It meant nothing. What was he without his anger? What was he without his pain, and his rage, and his need for revenge? He was nothing; except a man lying on a bunk, unable to stand up, unable to walk, unable to do anything to relieve some of the dreadful monotony except stare up at the ceiling. Without his anger, he was nothing. The anger hurt, but it was better than being empty, than being just some paralysed man, lying on a bed. He pulled his legs back up, lying back down on the bunk. He did not lie on his back this time, staring up at the ceiling. Instead he lay on his side. He wanted to curl up into a ball, and try to deny that he was even in here; to try and make the rest of the world go away and take the cell with it. But his legs remained stubbornly where they were, unable to draw themselves up to his chest, and he could not be bothered to move them. His arms folded themselves around his chest, the hands still clenched into their unyielding fists. He could not relax them. It felt, strangely, that if he did allow his fingers to uncurl, something else would uncurl with them. So long as his fists were clenched, he was safe. Safe from what exactly, he had no idea. He wished that somebody would come and talk to him, come and tell him how long he was to remain here, what was going to happen to him next. He had seen nobody since Laura's visit, and that was already several hours ago. Before that he had seen almost no one. They had brought him food, but he had not eaten it. They had left it out of his reach anyway. A long, drawn out sigh came from deep within him, and he let his eyes drift shut. Once again the tears were falling, but this time he felt them on his cheeks. He did nothing to stop them. They were not tears of misery, but of rage. Pure, unchecked anger without an outlet. His whole body shuddered with the force of his desperate fury. He bit his lip until the blood ran, listening to the pulse hammering in his ears. Even his heartbeat sounded angry. He tried to console himself with thoughts of Laura, but her face turned into Kim's in his mind. He could not keep them separate; could not prevent Kim's image from burning a hole in his consciousness. Defeated, he emptied his mind of all thoughts. The storm in his mind had burned itself out, and exhausted he gave himself to the shadows.