‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I tried to run.’
‘Run from what?’
‘What do you think? This place. The programme.’
‘The programme?’
A creak outside the room.
‘Rose?’
She put a finger to her lips and studied the darkness beyond the door. ‘Seriously, you need to be quiet,’ she said eventually. ‘He likes to surprise you. He likes to watch. Give him an excuse and he will hurt you.’ She paused, felt for her bruise again. ‘The people who help run this place, I’ve watched them. Most of them still believe in something. They still seem to have rules. But the devil… I don’t know what the fuck he believes in.’ Rose stared at him. ‘He will hurt you,’ she said quietly. ‘And he will hurt me. That’s what he does for them.’ She paused, blinked. ‘Sometimes I think he might actually be the devil.’
Click.
They both looked towards the corner of the room. Into the darkness. The one corner where no light reached.
Then out of the night came a cockroach.
Its body clicked as it scurried across the floorboards. The girl’s eyes fixed on the insect, and, as they did, her mouth dropped open. She started to sob, moving back against the wall, her handcuffs rattling above her.
‘You going to save her, cockroach?’
A voice from the blackness of the night.
He shuffled across the floor on his backside, moving in as tight to the wall as he could. Water soaked through to his back. And even from across the other side of the room, he could smell the man in the mask now: an awful, decaying stench. Like a dead animal.
From the corner of the room, a sliver of a horn emerged, sprouting from the top of a red mask.
‘What are you going to do, cockroach?’ the voice continued, fleshy and guttural. ‘Break free and take her with you?’ Laughter, the sound muffled by the mask. ‘Andrew kept telling me you had to be treated differently. But I never saw it that way. You’re a mistake. You don’t fit in here. You complicate things, go against everything we’ve built. And you’re holding on to the miserable fucking existence you once called a life, with no intention of letting go. If anything, we should be treating you worse.’
More of the mask emerged from the darkness: an eye hole.
‘I never agreed with Andrew when he said you weren’t to go on the programme. I went along with it, but I lobbied hard to have you brought back down to earth. All the way back down.’
A second eye hole. Half the mask was visible now.
‘And now I win. Deep down, Andrew knows there can’t be one rule for you and one for everyone else. No one deserves special favours. That’s not what this place is about. You accept what we offer you — or you fight us. And you’ve been fighting us since the first day we brought you here. Maybe you haven’t tried to run like that skinny little bitch over there. But it’s been in your head. In your eyes. I’ve seen it. You want to fight us. And you know something?’
A long pause. Then, suddenly, the devil came out of the darkness, the smell with him, leaning in over the man handcuffed to the walls of the room.
‘I love it when you fight.’
He looked at the devil and tried to speak. But the words refused to rise through his throat. Breath hardly passed between his lips.
‘So, you’re on the real programme now, you filthy piece of shit. No more luxury. No more favours. And I hope you fight. I really hope you fight.’ Slowly, his tongue emerged from his lips, sliding along the ridge of the mouth slit, one end to the other. ‘Because I really, really want the chance to cut you up.’
Deep underground, in the bowels of their compound, was another place. The biggest room they had. It was split into two and divided by a set of double doors.
The largest part of the room was once used as an industrial fridge, but there was nothing in it now. It sat empty, its strip lights buzzing, its walls stained brown and red with rust, its floor dotted with tears and blood.
Next to it, on the other side of the double doors, was a second, smaller room. When they came for him at dawn four days later, unexpectedly, violently, that was where they took him. They dragged him to a solitary chair in the middle of the room and made him face what awaited.
The final part of the programme.
PART THREE
22
The sun had been up for two hours and I was still behind the door. On the ground, knees up to my chest. A thin shaft of light escaped between the curtains in the bedroom and shone across the bed, flashing in the dresser mirror. Outside, next door, I could hear Liz talking.
I looked at my watch. 9.44. I’d been in the same position for over six hours.
My eyes snapped open. I’d fallen asleep.
My mobile was ringing in the living room.
I got to my feet, bathed in sweat, and pushed at the bedroom door, edging around it to the hallway. Quietly, I moved through the house, checking every room. Every hiding place. The front door had been locked again. The only evidence the devil had ever existed was a tiny piece of dirt on the carpet immediately inside the door.
The phone was on the living-room table.
I looked at the display. ETHAN CARTER. Ethan had been in South Africa with me during the elections, and was now the political editor at The Times. I’d phoned him when I got in from the police station the night before, and left a message for him, giving him the name Jade O’Connell, the date of 1 March and the keyword ‘Mile End’. I asked him to look into the information, and to give me a call back.
The call ended. I waited for a couple of minutes, checking the house over a second time, and then went to my voicemail. He’d left a message.
‘Davey — I emailed you what I could find. Enjoy.’
The computer was in the spare bedroom. There was a message waiting from Ethan, with three attachments. The first was a copy of a Times front page. It was dated 2 March 2004. At the bottom was a story about a shooting at a bar in Mile End. Three dead, five injured. I read a little way, then opened up the other two attachments. One was a second-page story, dated 3 March, a column headed by a photograph of the bar with a caption beneath that read: The scene of the shooting. The third, dated 6 March, was smaller, a ‘News in Brief’ piece, with no picture. Each of the attachments had been blown up big.
I went back to the first attachment.
THREE DEAD IN EAST END SHOOTOUT
Three people were killed and five injured during a shootout at a bar in Mile End, London, yesterday.
Police couldn’t confirm the names of the dead but did say they believed all three victims were members of the Brasovs, a violent splinter group previously affiliated to notorious Romanian gang, Cernoziom.
Witnesses reported hearing gunshots go off inside the Lamb, a pub on Bow Road, as well as shouting and screaming, before two gunmen exited the building, eventually escaping in a white van. Police said they were interviewing witnesses, and are appealing for anyone who saw anything to come forward.
I closed the attachment and opened up the second one.
MILE END VICTIMS NAMED
The three members of the Brasov gang, killed on Friday at a pub on Bow Road in Mile End, London, have been named.