I turned away from him. Said nothing.
Dismissing him.
‘What does that look mean?’
He leaned towards me.
‘Huh? ’
‘You don’t care about anyone.’
‘We do.’
‘By giving them more drugs?’
‘Yes.’
‘By taking out their teeth?’
He shoved the table towards me. It juddered against the lino, sticking. Rocking back and forth.
‘Don’t sit there and judge what you don’t understand!’ he screamed. ‘You don’t know the programme, you piece of shit! We give them a chance!’
I didn’t reply.
He came around the table, teeth gritted, hand reaching for my hair. I turned in the chair and ducked beneath his grasp — but the binds stopped me from moving any further. He clamped a hand around my throat and pushed me back so I was looking up at him. He was out of breath. Rage boiling. But as we stared at each other his eyes narrowed again, and he saw everything clearly. He saw I’d got to him.
He let go of me.
‘You’re clever, David.’
‘If I was clever, I would have put a bullet in your head before you murdered a teenaged girl in cold blood.’
‘You mean Sarah?’ He shook his head. ‘You murdered her by turning up here.’
‘I didn’t pull the trigger.’
He didn’t answer, and walked back around to the other side of the table.
‘There’s a cause greater than her,’ he said.
‘She was one of your own.’
‘She was your bargaining chip. You’d use her against us until you got what you wanted. Without her, you had nothing.’
I stared at him. ‘So, you just do what your boss says?’
‘What?’
‘Whoever phoned you before you killed Sarah. He just gives you the orders and you do what he tells you. Even if it means killing an innocent girl?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Don’t you value life?’
He shot a look at me. ‘I value it greatly,’ he said. ‘I value it more than you can possibly imagine.’
He leaned over and removed a wallet from the pocket of his trousers. Inside the wallet was a driver’s licence. He held it up to me. There was a photograph of him on it.
‘I’m sure you’ve already read about me. I served ten years for stabbing an old man with a piece of glass. You know why?’
‘You were a drug addict.’
‘Right. I needed saving. That’s what redemption is. Digging up a bad seed and planting a good one in its place.’
‘And you’ve redeemed yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your idea of redemption is different from mine.’
‘Not so different, David,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’re also a killer.’
Click.
A noise from behind me. The door opening. Myzwik looked over my shoulder. Suddenly, his expression changed completely: everything fell away, all control.
He was scared.
In front of me, in one of the picture frames, I saw a reflection. A shape standing close to my shoulder. A silhouette. I couldn’t see his face. Couldn’t see whether he was looking at me, or looking at Myzwik. But I could smell something.
A smell like decay.
I glanced at Myzwik. His eyes flicked between me and the man behind me, and then he edged away slightly, clearing his throat, as if he couldn’t stand the smell. He slid away, along the kitchen counter, back towards the corner of the room.
When I looked at the picture frame again, I saw why.
In the reflection was Legion, his mask half-hidden in darkness, a needle in his hands. And before I had a chance to do anything, he came at me and plunged the needle into my neck.
Everything went black.
37
When I came round, I was sitting in the middle of a disused industrial fridge. There were no windows, and it was lit by the dull glow from a single strip light above me. Meat hooks hung from a long metal tube to my left. There were two doors, both of them closed: one seemed to be the entrance, dotted brown and orange with rust; the second was some sort of side door, painted the same cream colour as the walls. Speckles of blood ran across its surface.
I was sitting in an old wooden chair, but they hadn’t tied me to it. My shoeless feet were flat to the floor, exactly parallel to one another, my arms flat to the sides of the seat. My fingers had been spread out, equally spaced, and my wedding ring had been removed and placed on the top of my hand. They’d taken off my shirt and trousers. All I had on were my boxer shorts.
And I couldn’t move.
My head could turn from side to side — but the rest of me was paralysed. I couldn’t shift a single muscle. Couldn’t even wriggle a finger. I knew what I wanted to do, begged my body to do it, but nothing happened. I was dead from the neck down.
I yelled out. A huge, guttural noise, fed by anger, which echoed around the fridge. When it faded out, I yelled for a second time, louder and longer.
The noise died again.
‘What have you done to me?’
Nothing. The only sound was the dripping.
I swallowed.
Inside I could feel everything. The saliva sliding down my throat. The pounding of my heart against my ribs. A sharp, acidic burn, like fire in my lungs. The freezer was cold but I could feel a bead of sweat pop from a pore on my forehead and run down my face. Past my eyes, my nose, my mouth and down towards my neck. As soon as it passed the middle of my throat, the sensation disappeared. On the surface of my skin, from the neck down, there was no feeling at all. I was dead. It was like my organs and muscles were no longer connected to my blood vessels and nerves.
Clunk.
The entrance door started opening. A slow, grinding rumble as it forced its way out from the door frame. A man filled the doorway. Not Legion. Another. He was massive: probably six foot four and eighteen stone. His blond hair was closely cropped, and he was dressed head to toe in black. He watched me for a moment. Tilted his head slightly. Seemed vaguely amused by what he was seeing. And then he stepped forward and brought his arms out from behind his back. There was something in his hands. At first I thought it was a belt. Then I realized it was something worse: a multi-thonged whip, twelve tassles dangling from the end. It looked like a medieval scourge.
‘What the hell have you done to me?’
The man didn’t reply. Just stepped further inside the freezer and pushed the door shut behind him. It made another immense wheeze. He walked over to the side door next to the meat hooks and opened it. Beyond, it was dark. He looked back at me once, and disappeared inside.
‘What the hell have you done to me?’ I shouted after him.
Silence.
I looked down at myself again, tried desperately to move my fingers, my hands, my legs. All I got in return was the sensation of it happening. My wedding ring remained perched on top of my hand. Perfectly still.
The man stepped back out of the darkness. He was still carrying the scourge, but in his other hand he held a chair. He walked over to me, placed the seat down opposite, so our feet were almost touching, and sat and watched me.
‘My name is Andrew,’ he said eventually.
‘What have you done to me?’
‘It’s good to finally meet you, David.’
‘What have you don—’
‘In a lot of ways I admire you,’ he cut in, holding a finger up for me to be quiet. ‘A lot of ways. My organization has managed to protect itself against people like you. On the rare occasions outsiders have got close to us before, we’ve thrown them off the scent. But not you, David. You’re special. Until you came along, no one ever found out about what we have here. We made some mistakes, I suppose. But I think we underestimated you too.’