‘And tell them what? That someone dropped off a cute little puppy for our son in a van in the middle of the night? It’s not exactly going to trigger police roadblocks and stingers.’

  ‘Someone? It was Clio, Adam. You’re always making excuses for her. She broke into my parents’ house in the middle of the night and took Freddie out of his own bed – abducted him, for God’s sake, while I was asleep two feet away. It was totally traumatising for Freddie, not to mention a criminal offence. I would never have forgiven myself – or her – if we hadn’t found him. If we call the police, we can show them Ji’s laptop, the live feed, tell them about the incident in the park, the photo she sent, tonight’s attempted kidnapping.’

  She’s got a point. Maybe that’s what needs to happen. He’s trying to do too much on his own. ‘OK, I’ll call you when I’ve got the number plate. And if the police come out to the house, let Ji explain to them about the live feed. Get him to show them the site on the dark web. I don’t think they’ll do anything, there’s not enough evidence of criminal activity, but it’s worth a try.’

  ‘Promise me you’ll turn round as soon as you’ve got the number plate?’

  Adam taps the steering wheel. ‘If I do, they’ll follow me back to you and realise that Freddie’s not in the van. I don’t think Clio’s told Louis that she hasn’t got him with her. I also think I’m the real prize here. Freddie’s attempted abduction was a sideshow.’

  ‘Is that what you call it – a sideshow? I’ve never been so scared in my life, Adam, for those few minutes he was missing.’

  ‘Me too,’ Adam says. ‘But I think it was just to lure me back into the frame.’

  ‘So why can’t you step out of the frame now?’

  ‘This will never end until I meet Louis again.’

  Tania falls silent. ‘Call me with the number plate as soon as you’ve caught up with her,’ she says.

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘And then let the police take over. They can stop the van, talk to Clio, to Louis. They can put an end to all this.’

  ‘OK,’ Adam says. ‘Call you back in a minute. I can see the van up ahead.’ He doesn’t add that Clio is driving like a woman possessed.

  ‘Be careful, Adam. There are two little people here who need their daddy back.’

  ‘I love you,’ he says, welling up.

  He reaches forward and ends the call, not wanting to dwell on his family, what he’s put them through. He needs to think straight, keep his head clear.

  Clio is pulling away from him. He puts his foot down, checking the rearview mirror for police. There are speed cameras on the A303 and he knows where they all are, but that’s the least of his problems right now.

  Up ahead, a set of temporary traffic lights turns red after Clio passes them. They are still red when Adam draws up. He taps the steering wheel impatiently. Strange. The lights look more temporary than usual, flimsy foldaway units, and there’s no sign of any roadworks. No sign of traffic lights on the other side of the road either. They change to green and Adam pulls away. Further down the road, Clio is already approaching the Countess Roundabout at speed. More traffic lights, but they are a permanent, familiar fixture and remain on green as she accelerates through the junction and heads on to Stonehenge. Adam does the same, driving up to the roundabout at 80 mph, worried that he’ll lose Clio. He begins to slow, in case the lights change. They remain green, so he keeps going.

  It’s too late when he sees the red Toyota pickup to his right. There’s no time to brake or to alter course. Instead, he braces himself as the pickup rams into the side of the Touran, just behind the driver’s seat. Did it jump the lights? Weren’t the lights showing green, his right of way? Adam sees his family in the kitchen, like a portrait painting: Tilly on Tania’s lap, Freddie holding the puppy, all of them staring impassively at him. As the car begins to roll, the night air ripped apart by the sound of twisting metal, Adam’s last thought is of the Ferrari, spinning in the air before it lands in the undergrowth.

  67

  Adam doesn’t know where he is when he wakes. There’s a howling wind, gusting from all directions, and waves crashing. Or is it his head throbbing with pain? He can smell the ocean, the ionised air. The sea feels close, threatening. Everywhere is pitch black. And then he realises.

  He tries to remove the tight blindfold from his eyes, but his hands don’t move. They are tied behind his back. Panic rises like a racing tide. A strong blast of wind, the roar of another wave. Instinctively, he turns to look at the sea, but his head is bound too.

  Is he in a neck brace? Had an accident?

  It’s coming back now.

  A roundabout. Green traffic lights. A pickup truck approaching at speed from the right. The injustice of it.

  He attempts to shake a leg. Nothing. Both ankles are constricted, bound in what feels like coarse, heavy-duty tape. His torso too. He tries to shake his shoulders, arch his back, kick his feet, terrified now. Is he paralysed?

  ‘Hello?’ he shouts out, his ears pumping like pistons with blood. ‘Hello?’

  He doesn’t expect a response, his voice lost in the din of the roiling sea, but the reply is almost instant.

  ‘You’re awake.’

  A familiar voice, close but distant.

  ‘Where am I?’ Adam asks, eyes bulging with fear beneath the blindfold.

  His voice works, but it could be in his head. The other voice too. What if he’s still unconscious, strapped into his car seat, the paramedics trying to talk to him? It feels like he’s on a chair of some sort, with a high back.

  ‘Am I dead?’ he asks, his mouth parched with fear.

  Is this what death feels like? He checks his body again for pain. His lower back aches and his head and neck are on fire. It feels like there’s a bandage around his forehead rather than tape, in addition to the blindfold. His chest is painful too when he breathes in, a sign of fractured ribs. Otherwise he’s OK, intact. Just sitting in the middle of a raging storm.

  ‘Dead? Not yet.’

  A hint of mirth. It’s Louis. Adam knows it’s him, but he’s in denial, doesn’t want to make the connection, link the words to the person. At some subconscious level, his brain understands what that voice means, the existential threat it represents.

  The date is expired. This is the time.

  The inky blackness in front of his eyes is chased away by a bright light – artificial, strong enough to be visible through his blindfold.

  How can he be sure that he’s alive? He’s conscious, aware of himself, his own thoughts, the terror that’s stealing through his body. And he can feel his limbs, even flex them a little. They don’t appear to be taped up in the same way as his torso, just secured at the wrists and ankles.

  ‘Where am I?’ he repeats. His voice sounds distant, detached, as if someone else is speaking the words.

  ‘On stage. You were in the theatre when I first saw you, trying not to undress Mephistopheles with your salivating, student eyes. And now here you are, at the end of our acquaintance, treading the boards once again.’

  On stage?

  The blindfold is ripped from his face, leaving the bandage in place, which continues to restrict any head movement. Adam opens his eyes and flinches. In front of him, standing close, too close, is a figure in a Greek mask. It takes a second for Adam to realise that it’s Louis. The mask is porcelain-white with a tragic, open mouth, through which Adam can see Louis’ distinctive lips, twitching like a sphincter. His eyes blink at him out of two drooping, mournful sockets.

  Adam’s own frightened eyes flick from side to side, trying to take in his circumstances, assess them for danger, but they’re struggling to work after being blindfolded so tightly.

  Slowly, his surroundings become clearer. He is on a cliff edge at night, his back to the sea, the wind swirling around him in anger. ‘Lifeboat weather’, his dad used to call it. He’s been bound up in silver duct tape, as he suspected. The whole cliff face seems to shudder as a huge wave – a ‘walloper’ – crashes behind him on the rocks far below, throwing up plumes of spray. He wishes his dad was alive, was here now to help him, wherever he is.

  Then Adam realises, blinking his eyes to sharpen their focus. He’s on the outdoor stage of the Minack Theatre. Behind Louis, rows of familiar seating carved out of the granite cliff rise steeply upwards, the names of plays written on the concrete seats like tombstones: The Tempest, 1932; Elektra, 1960: Doctor Faustus, 1967. He thinks again of his dad, how he used to bring him here as a child, telling him the story of when the theatre was built by hand as he sketched the rugged coastline. He always had his sketchbook.

  To Adam’s right, a camera on a tripod. In front of him, a big white station clock, propped up on a front-row seat. A single gantry spotlight casts him in a pale pool of yellow from its position below the control room, a small hut overlooking the stage. And to his left, on top of a stone plinth close to the cliff edge, an open laptop, its distinctive glow lighting up a handgun beside it. The spotlight must have been what he saw earlier, when he was blindfolded, but the beam is less bright now. Sufficient to illuminate him but not so strong as to attract the attention of any boats out at sea. Adam passed this point so many times in his year on the gill-netter.

  He closes his eyes, wishes he were with his mum at the Nook in Newlyn, warming himself against the wonky range – so close and yet so far. Instead, he’s further down the Cornish coast, four miles from Land’s End, on the very edge of Britain, overlooking the mouth of the English Channel. His dad called the Minack the eighth wonder of the world, chiselled out of the rocks in the 1930s by its founder Rowena Cade, who brought sand up from the beach far below to mix the concrete herself. Louis must have broken into the outdoor theatre complex, fired up one of the spotlights, hacked into the security cameras. Maybe they had been watching him last year, when he was here with his mum and Freddie.

  ‘Where is my family?’ he asks, trying to stay calm, think rationally.

  Another huge wave thumps into the rocks. He remembers it now, the zawn, a fissure in the granite far below, where the angry, protesting sea is funnelled and trapped. He wants to turn around, see how close he is to the ninety-foot drop. The theatre’s vertiginous setting used to scare him as a child, add to the drama playing out on the stage.

  ‘Freddie’s here,’ Louis says.

  Adam breaks into a cold sweat. He tries to lash out, but the tape bites into his wrists and ankles.

  ‘What have you done with him?’ Adam asks. ‘If you so much as—’

  ‘Please, I know we’re on stage, but cut the histrionics,’ Louis says, dismissing Adam with a flick of his hand. ‘He’s fine. Clio’s looking after him. Positively spoiling him, by all accounts. You know what she’s like. She gave him a puppy, of all things.’

  Another shard of memory glints in the darkness of Adam’s mind. Clio took Freddie away in her van. Except that she didn’t. She left him at his grandparents’, and the puppy too. Away from the cameras. Ji had been watching the live feed and he was convinced that Clio had gone round to the back of the van with Freddie and put him inside, which means that Louis would have assumed the same. But Adam had found Freddie seconds later, hadn’t he? Nearly run him over outside the gates, in a camera blind spot. Is that what really happened? He’s sure it is. He held his son in his own arms, took him back to Tania.

  ‘Where is he?’ Adam asks, almost shouting to be heard above the waves.

  ‘Up in the car park with Clio and the puppy,’ Louis says.

  Adam remembers the car park at the top of the cliffs, beyond the visitor centre and café.

  ‘Waiting for his cue, apparently,’ Louis says, ‘like the seasoned young actor he is. Chip off the old block.’

  For the first time, Adam feels a glimmer of hope. Louis definitely thinks that Clio abducted Freddie. The online audience thinks so too – the audience that he assumes is watching him now. And Louis might not think to question whether Clio actually has Freddie with her, if she has only recently arrived by van and hasn’t yet come down to see him. He stops himself. Too many ifs.

  ‘And what is his cue?’ Adam asks.

  ‘That depends on the audience.’ Louis walks over to check the laptop. ‘What fate they choose for him. Yours, of course, has already been decided.’

  Adam closes his eyes, fearing the worst. How will this perverted performance end? He prays that his son is still with Tania and not in the back of the van in the car park.

  ‘What is my fate?’ he asks.

  ‘I suppose it’s only fair that you should know,’ Louis says, walking back to Adam, his mask at once emotionless and chilling, like a demented gargoyle, forcing him to focus on Louis’ words.

  ‘Does the name Duncan MacDougall mean anything to you?’ Louis asks.

  ‘No,’ Adam says, trying not to let his thoughts run off to dark places.

  ‘He was a doctor from Massachusetts. Published a scientific study in 1907 that claimed to have measured the weight of the human soul.’

  It’s coming back to Adam now. He remembers Louis mentioning MacDougall once at uni, when he was filming him on his way to the Anatomy Building. Louis kept asking him where Adam thought the seat of the human soul was located. The Mesopotamians thought it was in the liver. Descartes, the pineal gland. It troubled him then and it troubles him even more now.

  ‘Twenty-one grams,’ Louis says. ‘“The weight of a stack of five nickels. The weight of a hummingbird. A chocolate bar.” They made a film about it once. MacDougall’s study was selective in its reporting, to say the least, but it was still an interesting experiment. He placed a tuberculosis patient, about to die in his deathbed, on a giant set of industrial beam scales. At the precise moment of death, he lost three quarters of an ounce – 21.3 grams.’

  ‘What’s all this got to do with me?’ Adam asks, but he already suspects the answer.

  ‘What’s about to happen here tonight is not really my doing. It’s been decided by your audience – without whom no film is complete. You know I’ve always believed that.’ Louis nods at the camera. ‘And you also can’t have forgotten that in exchange for me keeping quiet about what really happened in the bathroom at that party, you agreed to me making another film that would capture your soul on celluloid. As the great Al Pacino himself once said, “The camera can film my face, but until it captures my soul, you don’t have a movie.”Now is the time to honour our deal. I appreciate we agreed twenty-four years, which was all very Faustian in an undergraduate sort of way, but I have moved with the times, and have no plans to drag you down to hell. It’s so… sixteenth century.’

  Adam can still remember how it felt to be manhandled off stage by a group of demons at the end of Doctor Faustus. The director had asked him if he was OK with a few bruises and Adam had happily agreed, keen to impress Clio with his commitment. Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer! If only he were in a play now.

  ‘We live in the digital age, which is why I have gone for something more contemporary,’ Louis continues. ‘I’ve decided to mint an NFT of your soul and sell it to the highest bidder. Your life seems to have caught the imagination. Perhaps it’s the personal history between us, our Faustian backstory, the finality of it. People have started to bid serious money over the last few days, as they’ve watched your life fall apart. So I’ve had to take it seriously too. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the process, but you need a lot of bureaucratic details to mint an NFT on a blockchain.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind.’

  ‘It’s all about certifying the ownership and properties of the asset that an NFT’s associated with – in this case a human soul,’ he says, ignoring Adam as he walks around the stage in the shadowy windswept gloom. Only Adam is spotlit. ‘I know your date of birth, your name, where you were born, your parents’ names, but I don’t know the weight of your soul. And this level of detail really matters on public blockchains, in the world of Web 3.0.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Adam says, desperately trying to remember what Ji told him about NFTs.

  Louis holds up a hand like a lecturer challenged by an impatient student. ‘You’re sitting on a chair. And that chair is on a finely calibrated, digital platform scale.’

  Adam tries in vain to move his feet, feel for the platform.

  ‘More often used in slaughterhouses for weighing animal carcasses,’ Louis continues. ‘A bed really wasn’t practical. Not out here in the furthest reaches of Cornwall. When you die, which you’re about to do, by the way’ – he glances at the clock – ‘in just over fifteen minutes, from a single dum-dum bullet to the head – spoiler alert! – we’ll measure your weight loss, taking into account the mass of the bullet, of course, all of which will be watched by your adoring audience, one of whom has paid a lot of money for the privilege to take your life. To own your soul.’

  Louis pauses, as if he can sense the nausea rising in Adam’s throat. Adam wretches, his torso straining against the duct tape. Another monstrous wave crashes out of sight, sluicing into the zawn.

  ‘You’re a popular man,’ Louis continues. ‘The bidding’s gone sky high. NFTs are more fashionable than I thought. Not so niche, after all.’

  ‘Am I online now?’ Adam asks, glancing at the camera lens.

  He spits out some bile, tries not to dwell on what he’s just heard. A single shot to the head. Dum-dum bullets are designed to expand upon impact rather than pass through the body. An A & E surgeon who worked in a Cape Town hospital once told Adam all about them, the internal trauma they cause. Adam can only guess at Louis’ gruesome logic: that he doesn’t want to lose a few grams of brain matter that might distort the final weigh-in.

  ‘When are any of our lives not online?’ Louis says. ‘Tonight, my own camera here is providing the close-up. And the CCTV up there below the control room is kindly providing a locked-off wider shot. We’ve been filming you for the last few months. On and off. As per our deal. But let’s be honest, your life wasn’t the most compelling watch – a bickering marriage, unbearable children, no social life to speak of, obsessed with your job, presumably because it was a respite from your depressed wife. Bit of a bath-time dodger too, if we’re honest, preferred the fun bits of parenting at weekends rather than the diurnal slog, despite your reputation for being a hands-on dad. So I started to curate your day-to-day existence. Bring back an old flame, throw in a sexual misconduct claim at work, abduct the son and you begin to see what a man’s made of, observe the real person, capture their soul. I’m afraid no one would have bid for it if I hadn’t… spiced things up a little.’