He could feel the anger flowing through his veins. If you didn’t deserve to die for what you did to me sixteen years ago, then you’ve certainly put the ink on your own death warrant with what you are doing right here and right now. No man capable of inflicting that kind of misery can complain about the grisly death that justly awaits him.

Katie was tied to a stake, exactly as she had been depicted on television – though at least the gag had been removed. It was a thick wooden pole, stripped of its bark, and dug deep into the ground. Her hands were strapped behind her back, held in place with thick leather bindings, and her feet and her chest were lashed to the stake as well. It was impossible for her to move a muscle from her neck downwards. She was wearing the clothes she had been captured in, but by now they were stained and filthy. Her blouse was ripped, and there was a gash running down the side of her blue jeans. No one had unstrapped her to allow her to go to the toilet, so it was obvious she had no choice but to soil herself where she was. A vile stench was rising up from her stake, and around her feet it was possible to see small piles of human waste. It was her face that looked the worst, though. Her eyes were bloodshot and wasted, with a dark, hollow look to them, and the skin across her face was already dry, stretched and caked with sweat, dirt and blood. There was a cut across one cheekbone, which had dried into an ugly scar, but with some blood still seeping from the wound. And her hair was matted, thick with sweat, and was starting to form itself into ugly clumps that would soon fall clean away from her head.

The pretty young television star who was filling a thousand newspaper front pages back in Britain was long gone. Instead, her place was taken by a haggard, beaten person, who was already closer to a corpse than a woman.

How long exactly she had been tied to this stake, it was impossible for Porter to tell. Probably since they took the poor girl late on Sunday night. That made five continuous nights now. It would be virtually impossible for her to get any sleep, nor did it look as if they had been feeding her. There was a jug of water on a table next to her, but there was no way she could reach it with her arms bound behind her back. The closer you looked at her, Porter realised, the more of a miracle it was that she had survived this long. Another day, and the bastards probably wouldn’t need to chop her head off. She’d be dead already.

They might not have tortured her – not yet anyway – Porter told himself, but that made no difference. They were treating her worse than any animal.