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Everything I disclosed to this machine, secretly and confidentially, yesterday and Tuesday and Monday and Sunday, had gone. Everything I said and guessed and hoped and suspected could be heard by another. How to put your enemy several steps ahead of you in one easy lesson: tell them what you've done and what you're going to do; then make them a gift of the whole lot.

The unused tapes in their plastic outers had been left behind, as if to assure me that the burglars had known exactly what they were doing.

No-one could have known I was making these recordings. To that extent, their theft was opportunistic. The break-in was a fishing expedition.

And the catch must have surpassed expectation.

It was five minutes to midnight by my alarm clock. Ian Maple might already be 'waiting for me at the end of the street. The risks he'd proposed to run were surely doubled now. Whoever had the tapes could listen to them and judge what we were likely to do. They didn't know Ian had trailed man mountain to the warehouse, it was true, but they knew we'd be looking for Derek. They knew we weren't going to stand idly by.

Time was nearly up. I headed downstairs.

Eunice had fallen asleep, her anxiety lessened, I supposed, now I was on the premises. I turned off the fire and nudged her awake.

"Oh. Toby. There you are. I must have ... Is everything OK?"

"It's fine, Eunice. Nothing touched. Chequebook intact."

"Well, that's a blessing, though '

"You should get to bed."

"Yes. Yes, I should." She rose stiffly from the chair and I saw her out into the hall. "I'm glad you haven't lost anything, Toby. But to my mind that only makes it more mystifying."

"These druggies don't necessarily do things that make sense. It could have turned out a whole lot worse."

"Well, yes, that's true."

"I'll say goodnight, then. Try not to worry. You need some sleep. We both do."

That last point was undeniable. But I wasn't going to have the chance of any shut-eye for some time yet. I watched Eunice toddle off downstairs and waited for a minute or so after the basement door had closed behind her in case she came back. Then I headed out.

Ian Maple had parked his hire car at the end of the street. He flashed his headlights as I stepped out from the porch of the Sea Air. In the thirty yards or so of pavement I covered to reach him, I rehearsed the ways I could convince him that we shouldn't go ahead. The hardest thing of all to explain was how I'd failed to realize what a hostage to fortune the tapes represented. I should have taken better care of them, or better still never recorded my thoughts and experiences in the first place. That's what he'd say. It's certainly what he'd think.

How could I have been so stupid? Just how big a liability was I?

But he never said or thought anything of the kind. Because, when I opened the door and slipped into the passenger seat, I knew, with the shock of sudden self-awareness, that I wasn't going to tell him. I wasn't going to breathe a word.

"All set?" he asked, glancing round at me.

"All set."

We drove west along Kingsway through the chill and empty night. The Regency terraces of Hove gave way to the redbrick semis of Portslade.

Ian kept assiduously to the speed limit. Nothing was said. The journey stretched into the darkness beyond the amber coronas of the street lamps.

Some time after the road veered away from the shore, he turned off into the drab hinterland of Fishersgate. We went under a railway bridge and turned west again along a residential side street, ending in the closed gates of a small industrial estate.

"Here we are," he announced, pulling in some way short of the gates.

The jumble of brick-built warehouses and workshops within was deserted, the run-down look of most of them suggesting they contained no riches to make breaking in worthwhile. The close proximity of housing and the height of the fence were powerful deterrents as well.

"You're not going in here, are you?" I asked. "It only takes one insomniac to look out of the window .. ."

"Follow me," said Ian, opening his door. "You'll see."

We set off on foot, Ian carrying on one shoulder an old rucksack, which I assumed held the bolt-cutters and any other tools he reckoned we might need. An ill-lit path led off beside the garden wall of the last house before the gates to a footbridge over the railway line, with steps down from the bridge onto the empty eastbound- platform of Fishersgate station, a small unmanned halt. I lagged behind as Ian started down the steps from the bridge. The platform below us was fenced off from a strip of no-man's-land between it and the perimeter fence of the industrial estate. But there was nothing to prevent Ian scrambling over the railings near the bottom of the steps and dropping down into the strip. He signalled for me to follow, which I did, so much less adroitly that he had to give me a hand. We were trespassing now. And we'd soon be doing a lot worse than that.

The fence round the industrial estate was topped with razor-wire. There could be no question of climbing over it. We crouched at its base in deep shadow, listening and watching, just in case. But nothing stirred. There were no insomniacs, no late-night prowlers other than us. Ian pointed to the warehouse whose side wall was facing us and whispered, "That's it." The shuttered entrance was no more than twenty rubbish-strewn yards away. He slid the bolt-cutters out of the rucksack.

That's when I heard the rumble of an approaching train. Ian heard it in the same moment and crouched lower, pulling me down with him. There was a spark from the conductor rail somewhere behind us, then the train was rushing past through the station, its thinly peopled carriages brightly lit. And then it was gone again, surging on towards Worthing.

"Don't worry," said Ian as we cautiously raised our heads. "No-one will have seen us. And even if they did .. ."

He left the thought unfinished and started at the fence with the bolt-cutters. The wire yielded easily and within a couple of minutes he'd cut a large semicircle in the mesh. He pulled it back and held it there for me to crawl through, then scrambled after me.

We picked our way between a rusting skip and a pile of old car tyres to the front of man mountain's warehouse. There we paused again, ears and eyes straining in the darkness. But there was nothing to hear or see.

The premises around us hardly warranted guard-dog patrols. And we were out of sight of the nearby houses. I began to feel fractionally less anxious. There was clearly no-one about. Maybe man mountain hadn't thought we might try something like this. Or maybe, it occurred to me, the warehouse was a deliberate blind.

There was only one way to find out. Ian flicked on his torch and trained the beam on the padlocked hasp securing the wicket-door, then handed the torch to me and fastened the jaws of the bolt-cutters round the U-bar of the padlock. It put up stiffer resistance than the fence wire. Ian's forearms shook as he strained to pierce the steel, his breath steaming in the torchlight.

Suddenly, the steel gave. The U-bar snapped, the padlock fell to the ground and the hasp flopped forward. Ian shoved the bolt-cutters into his rucksack, flicked the hasp fully back and cautiously tried the handle below it. The door opened. He took the torch from me and stepped through. I followed, pushing the door shut behind me.

The torch beam moved around the interior. Quite what I'd expected I couldn't have said, but there was certainly no sign of Derek. The place looked like it had once been used for car repairs. I glimpsed an inspection ramp and a rack half-filled with tyres. Towards the rear was a small, partitioned-off office. But Derek's face did not pop into view at the window.

The torch beam moved back to the door. There was a panel of switches beside it. "Try them," said Ian. "Let's see what we've got."

I pushed one of the switches down. It controlled a fluorescent light fitted to one of the beams above us. The tube flickered and hummed into action. I pushed another switch, activating a second light. The shadows retreated.

But no secrets were revealed. The warehouse was bare and dusty, ancient car-repair equipment abandoned in its corners. We stood where we were for a moment, gazing about us in search of something, anything, that might suggest we were on the right track. But there was nothing to see. And nothing to hear either. If Derek was really being held there, even bound and gagged, he'd surely have made some noise. Yet there was none.

We moved past the office to an open door at the rear of the warehouse.

Ian stepped through with the torch and almost immediately retreated, shaking his head to me. I went back to check the office, even though I could see through the window that it was empty, save for one broken-backed swivel chair. There was nothing else.

"Looks like we've drawn a blank," I murmured to Ian as I joined him in the centre of the warehouse.

"I don't believe it."

"You can see for yourself."

"He's here. I know it."

"There's no-one here except us."

"There has to be."

"But there isn't."

"Hold on. What about those?" Ian pointed to a row of four steel plates, set in the concrete floor. "Covers for an inspection pit, do you reckon?"

"Must be, I suppose." I caught his gaze. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking we should take a look at what's under them."

He moved to the rectangle covered by the plates and prised up the ring handle countersunk in the one farthest from the entrance. A gentle tug didn't achieve anything. The plate was evidently heavier than it looked. Ian braced himself and pulled harder.

For a shard of a second I thought some creature a mouse maybe had raced out from under the plate and sped towards the wall. Something certainly flew faster than my eye could follow in that direction, then straight up the wall. There was a loud cracking noise above us. I looked up and saw the descending shadow of something large and heavy. I opened my mouth to shout a warning to Ian, who was standing directly beneath it. But he'd already seen it coming and was throwing himself clear.

Too late. With a deafening crash, a pear-shaped lump of concrete large enough to be used as a wrecking ball slammed into the floor. Ian screamed and fell, his trailing leg caught beneath it. The rope that had held the ball aloft wound down after it into the cloud of dust raised by the impact. The ball wobbled and rolled clear of Ian, then threatened to roll back again. I rushed forward and held it off him, then looked down into his white and grimacing face.

"Jesus Christ," he hissed through gritted teeth. "Jesus fucking Christ."

My gaze moved to his right leg. The curvature of the ball meant his foot and knee had escaped injury, but his ankle and lower shin were a bloody pulp. The angle of his foot and the jagged spike of bone protruding through a blood-darkened rent in his jeans told their own story. "I can't hold this for long," I shouted down to him. "Can you move?"

"Not .. ." He dragged himself a short distance across the floor, shuddering with the effort. "Not.. . far."

But it was far enough. I let the ball roll back into position and knelt beside him. There was sweat beading on his forehead. He was shivering, his breaths coming fast and shallow.

"Some sort of trap," he said, forcing the words out. "Very ... fucking clever."

"Your leg's a mess. Broken .. . and then some."

He nodded, absorbing the information. "Is there .. . much bleeding?"

"Not so very much, no."

"Let me see." Pushing himself up on his elbows, he squinted down at his leg. "Christ. That doesn't look good." He slowly lowered his head to the floor. "Raising the cover ... released a rope. I saw it.

But not.. . quickly enough."

"Me too."

"Safe ... if you tie it off on the wall first. Otherwise .. ." He shook his head, willing himself to concentrate. "What's in the pit?"

For a moment, I'd forgotten that was what we were supposed to be finding out. I kicked the loosened cover aside and peered in. Neatly stacked plastic bags of white powder met my gaze. I pulled up the other covers to reveal more of the same. "It's a drugs cache," I said.

"There's a lot here."

"Fuck," was all Ian managed by way of reaction.

I knelt back down beside him. "I'm going to call an ambulance," I said, pulling out my mobile and glancing at the wound in his leg.

"There's nothing else for it."

"Don't." He grabbed my arm. "We'll both be arrested."

"We have no choice. You can't stand up, let alone walk out of here."

"No. But .. . you can."

"I'm not leaving you in this state."

"You have to." He coughed, wincing from the pain that must have been increasing all the time. "I'll call the ambulance." He thrust his free hand into the pocket of his fleece and pulled out his own mobile.

"And I'll tell the police the truth. Except .. . I'll say I came here tonight .. . alone. I'll say ... I didn't tell you .. . what I was planning to do."

"You think they'll believe you?"

"I don't know. But .. . they're likelier to ... than if they have us both down ... as burglars ... or worse .. . trying to talk our way out of trouble .. . aren't they?"

"I'm not sure. There has to be '

"I don't have the strength to debate it. It's what we're going to do.

You'll back up ... my story .. . when the police .. . question you .. .

won't you?"

"Of course. But '

"That's good enough." He pressed the button on his phone three times and stared up at me. "You'd better get moving."

The fact that leaving Ian to wait for the emergency services to show up made sense didn't make it easy to do. He was in a lot of pain and his condition wasn't going to improve until he got the medical attention he badly needed. But he was right. By staying, I'd only be asking for trouble. Whatever I could do to redeem the situation couldn't be done from a police cell.