‘You live here?’ he said.

‘We can’t all afford mortgages.’

True enough, true enough. He was lucky in so many ways. They pushed hard at the main door and it gave. They went in, one friend either side of him with a hand on his back. Inside, the place was damp and rotten, the stairs half-blocked with torn mattresses and lavatory seats, runs of piping and lengths of broken skirting-board.

‘Very salubrious.’

‘It’s all right once you get up.’

They climbed two storeys. There were a couple of doors off the landing, both open.

‘In here, Allan.’

So he walked in.

There was no electricity, but one of his friends had a torch. The place was a midden.

‘I wouldn’t have taken youse for down and outs, lads.’

‘The kitchen’s OK.’

So they took him through there. He saw a wooden chair which had once been padded. It sat on what was left of the linoleum floor. He was sobering up fast, but not fast enough.

They hauled him down on to the chair. He heard tape being ripped from a roll, binding him to the chair, around and around. Then around his head, covering his mouth. His legs next, all the way down to the ankles. He was trying to cry out, gagging on the tape. A blow landed on the side of his head. His eyes and ears went fuzzy for a moment. The side of his head hurt, like it had just connected with a girder. Wild shadows flew across the walls.

‘Looks like a mummy, doesn’t he?’

‘Aye, and he’ll be crying for his daddy in a minute.’

The Adidas bag was on the floor in front of him, unzipped.

‘Now,’ one of them said, ‘I’ll just get out my games kit.’

Pliers, claw-hammer, staple-gun, electric screwdriver, and a saw.

Night sweat, salt stinging his eyes, trickling in, trickling out again. He knew what was happening, but still didn’t believe it. The two men weren’t saying anything. They were laying a sheet of heavy-duty polythene out on the floor. Then they carried him and the chair on to the sheet. He was wriggling, trying to scream, eyes screwed shut, straining against his bonds. When he opened his eyes, he saw a clear polythene bag. They pulled it down over his head and sealed it with tape around his neck. He breathed in through his nostrils and the bag contracted. One of them picked up the saw, then put it down and picked up the hammer instead.

Somehow, fuelled by sheer terror, Allan Mitchison got to his feet, still tied to the chair. The kitchen window was in front of him. It had been boarded up, but the boards had been torn away. The frame was still there, but only fragments of the actual window panes remained. The two men were busy with their tools. He stumbled between them and out of the window.

They didn’t wait to watch him fall. They just gathered up the tools, folded the plastic sheet into an untidy bundle, put everything back in the Adidas bag, and zipped it shut.