The only time I’ve ever seen injuries like this was years ago when a plumber came to the Emergency Department after drinking a glass of drain cleaner which he’d mistaken for his glass of beer. I have no idea what’s happened to Felix, but if I don’t get him help soon, he’s not going to survive.

I swing my phone torch wildly around the room. It’s bigger than the last, and looks as if it was finished more recently: the floor is concrete rather than earth, and it obviously has electricity as a bare bulb hangs from the ceiling. There’s a large chest freezer in the corner of the cellar, and, to judge from the hum, it has power, too. I can’t imagine how anyone ever got it down here. I don’t even want to think about what Stacey might be keeping inside it.

I prop my phone on the floor against the wall so that my hands are free to help Felix. His left arm is bent at an unnatural angle over his head, and I realise he’s handcuffed to a thick metal pipe running along the basement wall. His muscles must have atrophied in that position: he stiffens in agony when I try to move him. He’s just skin and bone: he must have lost at least thirty pounds. What I can’t understand is why Stacey’s bothered to keep him alive. If she wanted him dead, why not simply kill him? Why prolong the agony like this? It’s unspeakably cruel.

I need to get help, but I don’t want to leave Felix. I pick up my phone to see if by some miracle I have signal down here, but before I can use it, something heavy hits me from behind and everything goes black.

chapter 61

millie

Pain.

A pain so overpowering I can’t think.

Pain.

It feels as if my eyelids are weighted shut. Just the movement of air in and out of my lungs when I breathe is enough to make my head explode. I gasp and see flashes of blinding light behind my eyes, and then oblivion returns.

The next time I wake, the pain has diminished to a throbbing ache at the back of my skull, leaving just enough space for me to feel the soreness in my neck and shoulders, the numbness in my left arm. Something sharp digs into my back: I’m propped against a stone wall. Concrete beneath my legs and buttocks. Darkness around me, and the reek of urine, sweat, blood and faeces.

And fear.