My ankles shifted position on the floor.
‘You’re a fighter, David. I like that.’
‘You’ve lost control here.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, no. We’re in total control.’
‘You’ve lost control!’ I said again, forcing the anger up through my throat. I gritted my teeth and willed myself to move. Just an inch. Anything at all.
All I felt was one of my calf muscles twitch.
‘Where’s Alex?’
He laughed. ‘Don’t you know when to give up?’
‘Where is he?’
He flicked the scourge again, the thongs brushing his leg.
‘Alex was different. He came to me just over a year ago after a long time in the wilderness. I didn’t go out and find him. He was given to me.’ A pause. ‘He was different.’
Another twitch — this time in my knee.
‘Different?’
‘When I first started the farm, I suppose I expected every kid I took in to respond to what we were doing. They had problems. We were offering them a way out. And for a while it all worked beautifully. The first two became wonderful, clean-living people. People I could use. I got Zack off drugs, and he became a recruiter for me. Then I gave Jade her dignity back after years of abuse and she contributed to our operations down in London.’
He leaned back in his chair. It creaked under his weight.
‘But then things got more difficult. Zack found this heroin addict down in Bristol. She’d been beaten by her dealer and raped by her pimp. He found her in an alleyway in the middle of winter, left for dead. So we started her on a detox programme.’
He paused, breathed out.
‘But then one night she told me she didn’t want to be here any more. I told her she had made her choice and now she had to stick to it.’ His body sank a little. ‘So, she pulled out a pair of scissors — and stabbed one of my people in the chest.’
I looked up at him.
‘I hit her,’ he said, stamping a foot on the ground. ‘And then I hit her again and again and again. And when I finished, she wasn’t moving any more.’
He stopped, glanced at me.
‘She pleaded with us to help her, so we brought her here with the promise of a new life. And she repaid us, repaid me, by murdering one of my best friends.’
Regret passed across his eyes.
‘But I had an epiphany after that. A watershed moment. When others fought us like she did, threw everything we offered them back in our faces, I realized we had to deal with them. We’d taken them out of society, given them a roof over their head. We’d made sacrifices for them. So, they’d make a sacrifice for us. They’d become martyrs.’
‘That’s why you brought in Legion.’
‘Yes,’ he said matter-of-factly, and got to his feet. ‘We’d been in the army together. He had some unique skills. You see how a man values life when you’re on a battlefield, David. You see how quickly he is prepared to turn life into death. Most soldiers, most people, don’t want to have to kill. They have a line that they don’t ever want to cross.’ I followed him as he moved around to my side, the scourge dangling from his hand. ‘But, for him, there was no line.’
‘I thought this was a mission from God?’
‘It is.’
‘You ever read the Ten Commandments?’
He smiled. ‘I was protecting the project.’
‘You brought in a murdering psychopath.’
‘You will never understand, David. You’ve never had a cause to fight for.’ He looked briefly at the wedding band. ‘Other than the memory of your dead wife. And what sort of cause is that?’
He smiled again as he saw the anger burning in me, and then disappeared behind me, out of sight.
‘So, he just killed the ones that didn’t work out?’ I said.
Andrew didn’t reply.
And then it came to me.
‘Oh, shit — you used their bodies…’
‘Yes,’ he replied from behind me. ‘We used the bodies of the ones that didn’t respond to the programme. We have people in useful places; a net cast wider than you can possibly imagine. In the hospital system. In the police. Do you know how to remove evidence from a police database, David? I think you’d be surprised at how easy it is.’
I heard him move again.
‘You don’t have to work your way up the tree. You can get someone trained in HOLMES in a very short space of time and from there… well, it’s amazing what you can do just by sitting at someone else’s computer and using their login details.’
‘You’re framing people.’
He reappeared on my other side, looking down at me. There was a frown on his face, as if he couldn’t comprehend my simplicity.
‘It’s a bigger win. Our men and women on the inside, they’ve experienced redemption. They’re like Zack and Jade were. Once broken, now repaired. They give others that same chance by protecting what we have.’
The first pang of something flickered inside my body, close to my groin. A dull ache. The sensation was moving through my body like an oil spill.
He smiled and pressed a finger against my forehead.
‘Feel something?’
I wriggled my head, and his finger fell away.
I closed my eyes. Tried to use the darkness to refocus myself. When I reopened them, he was staring at me, the smile still there.
‘Whose body did you use for Alex?’
He shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters to the people who love him.’
He watched me for a moment. ‘You don’t know anything, David. Most of their families don’t care if they’re dead or alive.’
‘You think Mary cares whether Alex is alive?’
‘She does now she’s seen him.’
‘She did anyway!’
He paused for a moment.
‘Like I said, I didn’t have a choice with Alex. My hand was forced.’
Then I lost my train of thought. The dull ache came again, but this time it was stronger. It flared in my groin. In my lower back.
I sucked in some air.
‘This thing is out of control,’ I said.
The sound of my voice amused him. He leaned in a little closer to me, stooping slightly, looking up at me. ‘Oooooh, ouch,’ he mocked quietly. ‘Does it hurt?’
My mouth was filling with saliva. And I was sweating. Trails of it were coming off my hairline and running down my face. Deep inside — in my stomach, at the bottom of my throat — vomit bubbled, burning in the middle of my breastplate. Worse was the feeling emerging from the base of my back, in my groin, crawling up my spine. As every nerve end started to fire, my back tightened, the skin stretching across my muscles. The pain was focused there. Whatever they’d done to me was in my back.
Andrew stood again, staring down at me with a mixture of amusement and disgust in his face. Picking up the chair, he moved back towards the door and disappeared inside. He slammed it shut behind him — and I could feel the vibrations pass across the floor. Pain suddenly burst its way out from my back and into the centre of my chest.
‘Fuck!’
I yelled out again.
It felt like someone was squeezing the life out of my heart. When I tried to shift my weight from one side to another, it was torture. My whole body spasmed. And, finally, my wedding ring fell, pinging against the floor of the fridge and rolling away.
The door opened again, and Andrew emerged from the darkness without the chair. The scourge was hanging from his belt now. Clasped in his hands was a long mirror. There were marks all over it — greasy drag marks, as if fingers had clawed across the glass.
He stood in front of me, the mirror turned away, and pulled the scourge from his belt. He held it up by its handle, so the tassles dropped down in front of me.