Less than a minute later, Henry Mills was out on the street and, fleetingly, back in the real world that he’d imagined he’d left behind for good. Feeling the sun on his face, he squinted as he got his bearings. A couple of people walking by, on their way to work, stepped around him without a second glance. A taxi roared past. Life outside was going on as normal.
Towering over the other cars parked on Chandos Place, the Dennis high-security prison van was about ten yards down the road. After aiming a half-hearted kick at the Skoda Yeti illegally parked in front of the police garage, Jeremy walked Mills towards the back of the prison van, nodding at the driver as he passed. Mills waited patiently on the pavement while the guard stepped up on to the footplate to open the back door.
The door would not budge.
‘Christ!’ Jumping back down from the footplate, Jeremy pushed past his prisoner and jogged back to the front of the van. ‘It’s locked,’ he shouted at the driver. ‘Open it up!’
Engine revving, a blue flower-delivery van turned into the street, heading towards them. Mills watched the driver talking animatedly into his mobile phone while steering with one hand. Isn’t there a law against that? he wondered. Either way, the driver was going far too fast. As he accelerated down the street, a woman pedestrian scuttled for cover. Ignoring the screeching of brakes and the blaring horn, Henry Mills smiled. He looked up at the clear blue sky and felt himself floating away. Blinking away his tears, he heard a second van racing down the street towards him. He knew that this was his moment. ‘I’m coming, Agatha,’ he mumbled to himself, as he stepped into the middle of the road and closed his eyes.
FOURTEEN
September 1973
During the first few days on board the White Lady, William Pettigrew’s captors operated a rigorous sleep-deprivation programme. He was kept awake with regular soakings from the water jets and random beatings. A head-count was taken every hour. In case anyone ever took a chance to doze off in their hammock, a sailor known as the ‘Bird of Torture’ would bang on the metal doors to further keep sleep away. They were fed once a day — water and a thin porridge. A few shovelled it in, most picked disinterestedly; there was always plenty left over for the seagulls.
Every so often, a group of sailors would appear and three or four people would be taken away for interrogation in the cabins which had been turned into torture chambers on the decks below. It was impossible to tune out the yelling and screaming that came up through the floor as the electric shocks were applied. The sessions could last twenty minutes or they could last ten hours. Afterwards, some of the victims came back, others didn’t.
The first time he was tortured, Pettigrew shat himself almost before the cattle prod tickled his balls. His interrogators laughed and then made him eat it. They laughed even more when he immediately vomited the shit back up. They told him to eat it again. He tried, but this time he could not even manage to get it into his mouth. After some curses and some punches, they hosed him down.
More electric shocks, this time to the anus. He started shitting blood, bright crimson splashes on the floor rapidly darkening in the heat. That caused more hilarity. They hosed him down again. By now he welcomed the water jet. If nothing else, he could be clean.
The questioning was random and perfunctory. This was not sophisticated intelligence-gathering, and they were not interested in any answers. They had a lot of people to get through and could only waste so much time on each individual. No one cared about anything he had to say. No one recorded anything. No one took any notes. He was like a fly having its wings pulled off by a bunch of sadistic schoolboys.
It was all a charade. Emotionally, Pettigrew had closed down. He could feel the pain, but he didn’t have any thoughts about it. There was nothing he could say that could make him useful to these people, nothing to hang on to that could fire a determination inside him to live. It wasn’t a question of trying to survive. It was just a question of seeing it through.
Their only question was what do you know?
‘I know nothing,’ he would say, as calmly as possible.
‘What do you know?’
‘I know nothing.’ That was true enough, even in the beginning. By the third or fourth time they asked him, he could barely remember his own name.
They would give him a few slaps, maybe another shock, and ask again.
‘What do you know?’
Slap.
‘I know… nothing.’ Pettigrew couldn’t even think straight enough to make something up. Names? By the time that they finally got round to him, who was left? Who could they not have possibly rounded up already?
‘What do you know?’
Slap.
‘Nothing.’
Pettigrew didn’t want to make anything up. He knew that if he started giving them any kind of ‘information’ that it could only prolong things. By now he just wanted it all to be over as quickly as possible.
‘What do you know?’
Slap.
‘What do you know?’
He had nothing more to say. There were no more words. He was on a journey back to a time before language, before words; to a time when all you could do was howl.
After his second torture session, Pettigrew was told that he would immediately be shot because he was a fucking Communist whore — both a traitor to the Church and a traitor to the country.
They blindfolded him and pushed him up against a wall. Someone stepped in front of his face and said softly, ‘It’s over for you. The good priests are coming back now. The ones Allende stopped from teaching; the ones who were banned from hearing confessions; the ones who had to work as taxi drivers to make a living. I mean the priests who defended the Supreme Court and the Constitution of the Republic of Chile and opposed the creation of a Communist state. The ones who love the Church and don’t want to see it destroyed by faggot perverts like you.’
Pettigrew said nothing. All he could think was, It’s finally over.
‘Understand this: the Marxist invasion of the Church is at an end. The theology of liberation is dead.’
He could sense the excitement in his beating breast. Thank you, God.
‘You are dead.’
The voice stepped away and there was silence for five, ten, fifteen seconds. The safety-catch of a pistol was flicked off.
Someone cried, ‘ Fire! ’
A gull squawked overhead.
He stood there, shaking, refusing to still be alive. It should have been all over by now.
On the way back to the hammocks, someone clipped him round the ear, mistaking his sobs of frustration for sobs of relief.
His torturers soon became bored. After his fifth session, they left Pettigrew chained to a metal bedframe with a muslin hood over his head. At some point, he heard shouting. The sounds of people running around. General activity of men doing their jobs. Slowly, the ship’s anchor came up.
A little later, he heard the door to the cabin open. Excited youthful voices gathered by the door. Then they brought in a woman and he heard them chain her to the bed next to his. Then they argued over who should go first.
Apart from a few shadows moving across the bottom corner of his field of vision, he couldn’t see anything because of the hood over his head.
But he heard her screams.
Maybe he had died; died and gone to Hell. The sounds were bad, but the smell was worse. He lost count after the fifth time they raped her. Most were quick about it, but one man seemed to take an eternity. ‘Hurry up, Julio,’ one of his companions squealed. ‘We’ll find you another one later.’
‘You can do him,’ someone else said, kicking Pettigrew’s bedframe so hard that it bounced off the floor. ‘Just flip him over, you won’t know the difference.’ There was laughter and he felt spittle spray across his chest.