It was barely eight in the morning and a sharp chill lingered in the shade of the courtyard. Mills shivered, but breathed in deeply. It was the first time in almost two days that he’d enjoyed some fresh air, and he appreciated it. His night in the cells below his feet had been extremely unpleasant, the liberally applied disinfectant failing to cover the smell of innumerable bodily evacuations. He had spent the last twelve hours breathing through his mouth and failing to get any sleep. Equally, he hadn’t been able to wash or shave in the last couple of days. Worst of all, he hadn’t been able to brush his teeth, and his mouth felt as if a small animal had died in it.
Edging slowly forward with dainty baby steps, he tried to focus on nothing other than the small patch of tarmac immediately in front of his feet.
‘Hold it!’ One of the guards, an emaciated skinhead called Jeremy, with a tattoo of an angel on the back of his neck, held up a hand.
The other guard stepped out from behind the prisoners and gazed sullenly at the assembled police vehicles in front of them. ‘Where’s the van?’ He turned to a mechanic who was working under the hood of a Toyota Prius hybrid. ‘Mate,’ he asked, nodding at his trio of prisoners, ‘where’s the transport for our friends here?’
The mechanic stood up and twiddled a spanner aimlessly. ‘Huh?’
‘The van for the Scrubs?’
‘Oh yeah, it’s outside.’ The mechanic pointed with his spanner at the closed metal gates covering the entrance. ‘They couldn’t get it in. Some genius parked in front of the doors. We’re waiting for them to get towed.’
The guards looked at each other.
Mills looked at the guards. His heart sank at the prospect of being sent back inside.
One of the other prisoners, the glue-sniffer, farted loudly and at length, eliciting a peal of hoarse laughter from the thief.
‘I’ll take them out one at a time,’ Jeremy decided, after a while. ‘You wait here with the others.’
‘Okay,’ the other guard nodded. ‘My shift finishes at half-nine, so let’s get on with it.’
Jeremy put a gentle hand on Mills’s shoulder. ‘Come on, sunshine,’ he said, gesturing towards a side door, right next to the main gates. ‘Over there.’
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.