He took Zaid’s money, his inheritance and his identity, and he lived a life that didn’t belong to him. The one photograph on his wall at home of the actual Zaid, with his parents at the house in Marbella, was just for show, for the rare visitors he had. Zaid and Vale had looked enough alike as kids for any disparities to pass relatively unnoticed, especially at a superficial glance – or, as with me, for people to note that something wasn’t right in the pictures on that wall, but not be certain of exactly what.

The photos of Vale’s mother that were mounted among the others – the woman I thought had been a nanny in the real childhood pictures of Vale – were what really mattered to him. When he’d said to me that his parents were remarkable, he’d never meant his father. His dad was an alcoholic, a failure, lost to him and his mother way before he drank himself to death. His mother, though, was different. As much as it was possible for a person like Adrian Vale to love someone, he loved her.

It might have been the only authentic thing about him.

Suddenly, I was back.

In the darkness. In the silence.

I was in the same place I’d been kept for weeks, this prison with no doors and no escape. I could still hear the same noise – the fault in my ears, the hum that was either inside my head or somewhere above me. But now something had changed.

Something was different.

It’s the darkness.

It wasn’t much, but it was there: a grey square directly overhead, maybe twenty feet above me, shifting across.

A hatch.

I’m in some kind of hole.

It moved again, opening further, and the minimal, charcoal-coloured light was enough for me to see that I’d been right all along: the roof in here was triangular, too high to reach with just my arms, and there were no doors anywhere, no windows, no exits at ground level.

Only above.

A rope tumbled down from the hatch.

59

The end of the rope hit the floor.

I didn’t move.

I just stood there and watched. I was frightened, frozen. I couldn’t work out what was happening. All this darkness, all this silence – weeks, maybe months of it – and now this.

I stepped closer to the rope.

There were knots all the way up, large enough to get a foot on to and aid an ascent. This system was obviously how the food, the water and the blankets had come in; not this exact rope perhaps, but one like it, secured to some kind of platform or container so that the meagre supplies they left for me could be lowered all the way down.

And always when I was asleep.