As I think about the design of this place, I think about the man who put me here, who drugged me, picturing him in the final moments before my blackout. It’s hard to remember much after that. I remember being blindfolded, gagged, my ears covered, but whatever he gave me, it messed with my head. My perspective, my reality. I had the vague sense of being carried somewhere, perhaps into the boot of a car or the back of a van – it felt like I was there for hours – except it seemed almost coffin-like, smaller than a boot should have been; certainly smaller than the back of a van. There was maybe the high-pitched hum of a vehicle engine at some point later on, but I’m not certain of that. Over the time I’ve been a prisoner in this room, I’ve started to worry that what I think was the sound of an engine is, in fact, an embellished moment, something that never took place, a recollection added because I’ve been alone for so long, replaying the same memories so often that they’ve distorted and twisted out of shape. But then, at other times, I force myself to stick to what I remember. I tell myself I’m not mistaken. I did hear the drone of an engine. I was in a small, narrow space. And wherever I am, it’s not a town or a city. There’s nowhere in a city where the noise just stops like this. Wherever I was driven to, wherever this place is, it must be way out in the countryside. Somewhere remote.

So I don’t know where I am, I just know who took me.

I know who he is.

But here, alone in this darkness, there’s no one for me to tell.

45

The sun came up just before seven, bleeding out across the horizon, the sky blooming orange, and then pink, and then mauve. I sat at the window, watching it, bone-tired but unable to sleep, and waited for Healy to finish up in the kitchen. Apart from the sound of the kettle boiling, and the occasional moan from the cow sheds, it was quiet.

He limped through, the injuries Isaac Mills had inflicted on him still evident. He’d been awake when I got back, sitting alone in the pre-dawn blackness of the living room, waiting for me to return, and I told him about what I’d heard, and then played him the things that Patrick Perry and the woman had discussed during their meeting in the woman’s car. That was where Patrick must have been going during his walks and why he always went alone. The two of us sat and listened to the tape in silence, to the sobs of Beatrix Steards’s birth mother, her tears, the words she couldn’t express. She’d never been a killer.

She’d just been a parent.