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body and the subsequent months in Liz Fallon’s house had gone a long way towards repairing his mind, but that instinct for danger went deeper than iodine and kindness and when the conditions which had fostered it recurred—this long after, this far away—that instinct galvanized him like an electric shock and he woke with the cry that Liz heard through her own slumber.
    For Grant it was as if the nightmare had finally claimed him back: waking had not freed him from it, left it to slither away, noisome but harmless like seaweed from the ankles of a paddling child, but had confirmed it in its own reality. It was as if he had known of this possibility all along, and that was what the dread was really about: not something that was over but something still to come. In that moment of waking he thought that, by some means which he had not at present the intellectual control to consider, he was back in South Africa, in the security building in Pretoriakin his midnight cell, and the soft background susurrous of despair fell to a breathless pause while booted feet stalked the corridors and the tumblers fell in a single lock. Even through his own surging fear Grant had felt the wash of relief across the rest of the block. He could not blame them for that: he too had known the brief, intense pulse of joy when it was someone else’s turn.
    But now after two years it was his again, and he jacked himself up the bed to cower against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest. If any lingering rationality was aware that the fresh stripes over his knees, the cool of cotton sheets and the sophisticated geometric wallpaper half seen by moonshine failed to support his perception of events, the discrepancy did not penetrate sufficiently far into his fear to make him question. Yet some detached portion of his mind, or perhaps only a reflex of his body, knew where he was because while he crouched against the wall one hand was scrabbling wildly for the light switch.
    When he found it the room sprang into bright relief. Grant still did not know where he was: the room was not his old cell and the big man looming over him had no moustache, but that was the only difference—he was the same sort of man, his eyes held the same sort of promise, and Grant knew that when he spoke the same Boer accent would lance through his nerves. He did not think he could bear for it to start again.
    Vanderbilt had thought he was groping for a weapon. He dived at the crouching man, one big hand pinning Grant’s arm to the wall, the other clamping across his mouth. His bones were not much bigger than a girl’s, though squarer. When the light came on, almost simultaneously, Vanderbilt realized there was no weapon and allowed himself a pause—kneeling on the bed, the smaller man immobile in his broad hands—to assess the situation. Had they made enough noise to waken the girl? He thought back and decided they had not—a decision in which he was more misled than mistaken. He had still to get Grant out of the house and away without arousing pursuit. For that he had to take the girl out of the equation, at least temporarily. He could gag her while she slept and then tie her without causing her harm, he thought What he had had to do to the Kop girl still rankled with him. He regarded Grant pensively. He was light enough to carry without inconvenience as far as the car he had left in deep shadow in an adjacent side-street. This late no one should see them, but if Vanderbilt took his time he could anyway make it look as if he was helping a drunk. Vanderbilt often took risks, but none he did not have to.
    Grant’s eyes, wide with terror, gazed whitely back over the silencing hand. Vanderbilt made up his mind. He jerked Grant’s head forward and then back against the wall, hard, and when his eyes rolled up he tugged him forward onto the bony prominence of a waiting knee which met his jaw with a dull sound like rocks and stopped him dead.