‘Are you OK?’ Adrian asked.

Parker ignored the question.

‘Where are we?’ Adrian added.

‘This is my house, I grew up here,’ Parker said.

Adrian felt a chill as Parker said the words, the coldness of the house suddenly making sense. Adrian had seen some of the horrors that Parkers had experienced in his youth and he imagined life wasn’t much better at home. He had to shake off the thoughts that were starting to creep up on him and focus on the task at hand. He didn’t know why he empathised with this man so much, but he really struggled to look at who he was now without remembering the photographs of the torture Parker had endured as a child. He couldn’t think about that now, but he heard Gary’s words in his head. Adrian didn’t know if he would ever be able to bring Parker in. The fact that Finn had found Parker in his own house made Adrian think he had underestimated Finn Blackwell.

‘Where is he? Where is Finn?’

‘The boy? He left a few moments ago, he got a phone call. He probably won’t be long,’ Parker said calmly.

This situation was not upsetting him in the slightest – to look at him he could have been sitting on a sunlounger by a pool.

‘Have you been strapped to this chair the whole time he was in custody?’ Adrian said; although he had no doubt this was something Parker could easily cope with, after knowing the things he had endured before.

‘Is that where he was? Glad you were on to him, because I really wasn’t until the last minute.’

‘How did he overpower you? You’re bigger than him.’

‘I needed to know what he knew, so as soon as I realised he had found me here, I allowed him to get the upper hand so that I can find out more about him, find out who the other player is.’

‘Do you have a plan to get out of here?’ Adrian said, knowing he should be the one with the plan but acknowledging that he was completely unprepared for this.

‘Not yet, but something will come to me.’

‘Does he know who you are?’

‘Someone knows who I am, but he doesn’t seem to have a clue. He seems quite paranoid and disturbed.’

‘Did you find out anything about who is involved? Do you know who the final professor is?’

‘No. But he does take phone calls occasionally. I assume he is working with whoever is on the other end of the phone. They sent him here.’

The chairs were particularly suited to this kind of thing, with the metal bars and leather straps in the exact places where it would be handy to wrap duct tape around and around, but Adrian couldn’t imagine that Parker wouldn’t have been able to break free in the twenty-four hours Finn Blackwell had been in custody and that made him nervous. What kind of person deliberately stays strapped to a chair for over a day, waiting for their captor to come back?