The Dungeon & Christmas With the Executioner Read online

  Bedlam Boy 2

  The Dungeon, & Christmas with the Executioner

  Ian W. Sainsbury

  Copyright © 2020 by Ian W. Sainsbury

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  1. Part One: The Dungeon

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  11. Part Two: Christmas with the Executioner

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Author’s Note

  Books by Ian W. Sainsbury

  1

  Part One: The Dungeon

  Robert Winter, in as far as he ever loved anything, loved his house.

  He never married. Aged fourteen, his father took him to a brothel and showed him what money could buy, which turned out to be almost anything. Young, old, fat, thin, male, female, any nationality, any personality. The best whores were excellent actors, faking nymphomania, or the frigidity of an upper-class virgin. Winter preferred the genuine article. As he got older, he discovered his tastes were not unique, and he recognised a business opportunity. A talented escort might be able to act the part of a well-educated middle-class girl forced into a life of sexual humiliation, but she would never be perfect. Far better if the girl underneath you genuinely graduated with a 2:1 from York and owned an Irish setter called Giles.

  Sexual relationships, for Winter, weren't indicators of affection or commitment, but a release valve. He had no doubt that, were most people able to access the same well-stocked sexual larder, the societal norms of marriage and monogamy would fall apart like wet tissue.

  Winter had no children or pets. Friendship he considered an interesting concept, although only if it might benefit him. Winter enjoyed the clarity of self-knowledge. He was a narcissist and a psychopath. The labels didn't upset him. He doubted either condition put him at a disadvantage. Quite the opposite. It freed him from the sticky web of relationships holding most people back. Unencumbered by notions of loyalty, trust, or affection, he remained clear-sighted.

  But he loved his house.

  He'd had it built four years earlier. The architect, French, chic, and ridiculously expensive, came with a shelf-full of awards and the fees to match. The architect was surprised to start with no restrictions, as the existing dwelling had been flattened. He mentioned planning regulations and building control, protesting when Winter showed him the pile of rubble that remained of the original Edwardian house. But a phone call from the local authority convinced the architect to go ahead. The head of planning, a mother of two healthy children, assured the architect that Mr Winter had done everyone a favour by pulling the old house down. She encouraged the architect to do anything Mr Winter asked. Anything at all.

  Winter wanted a modern castle, so he commissioned one. The ideal of one man, a leader, in an echoing fortress was appealing. Not literally. There would be no draughty stone halls in Winter's castle. It would be concrete, fully insulated, with vast triple-glazed windows. The architect made his vision a reality, down to the modern dungeon below ground level. On that part of the blueprints, the prim little Frenchman marked it as a playroom and winked when discussing it. Winter let him call the soundproof room whatever he liked. Playroom wasn't entirely inaccurate, after all.

  The work itself progressed smoothly. No disagreements about money, no arguments over schedules. The house took shape over one glorious summer, and, on the day Winter moved in, he enjoyed a glass of chilled Manzanilla on the south terrace, overlooking the city of London. His own hidden empire lay there in Britain's capital, and his move to this modern castle was a symbolic moment.

  Winter's organisation relied on men and women who were afraid of him. Fear was the most effective management technique. Appealing to greed didn't work. Those who could be bought would always be open to a higher offer. Respect was all very well, but find the right nerve to probe, the weakness to exploit, the fires of ambition to fan, and respect crumbled like stale cake. No. Fear worked. Easy to maintain, too. Punish mistakes with ruthless cruelty and make sure everyone knows about it. Don't just have someone killed. Skin them and strangle them with their own intestines, then post the pictures online. For example.

  The only man who didn't fear him was Strickland, but they had an agreement. Strickland started out as Winter's enforcer, becoming so successful that he'd built his own, lucrative, business as a reliable and discreet hired killer. Winter recognised talent and encouraged Strickland to expand, taking on outside clients. Winter always came first, should he need to call upon his colleague's services. Strickland owed him.

  When Marty Nicholson was found dead, Winter's nephew cold and stiff a few feet away, it looked like an ill-advised hit by someone who didn't know who they had targeted. No criminal outfit in London had the balls to take on Winter. If they did, they wouldn't start at the bottom with Marty. They'd come straight for Winter, knowing if they failed, they, and everyone they knew, died.

  But then a contact at the Met passed on the note.

  Bedlam Boy is coming.

  Winter researched the name online, trawling a few sites detailing the history of Bethlem hospital in London. The famous madhouse, once as popular a destination for tourists as London Zoo. Ironically, according to the accounts Winter read, the hospital's opulent facade was just that - a surface illusion. Inside were weak foundations, crumbling walls that let in the rain, and decay. Respectable on the outside, rotten on the inside. If the writer of the note wanted to make a point, it was a bit laboured.

  The online search also found a song, but, by then, Winter stopped wasting his time. He didn't need obscure songs and poems to track down the fool who'd killed Marty, Tay, and Rhoda.

  When Rhoda called from Paris, he thought she'd lost her mind. She hardly mentioned the recording she intended blackmailing him with. She sounded paranoid, deluded, and scared. He made a mental shortlist of who he should send to kill her. Then she mentioned Bedlam Boy, and Tom Lewis. And, despite how unlikely it was, since every member of the Lewis family died that night, it made sense. It meant Winter didn't have to worry about rivals eyeing his position. It was nothing but revenge. Stupid, predictable revenge. In Winter's opinion, revenge wasn't a dish best served cold, but a dish best not served at all.

  Rhoda wasn't stupid or fanciful. If she ever regretted leaving the Lewis family to join Winter, she didn't show it. She reliably procured candidates for Winter's organisation to groom and sell to the highest bidder. And yet she fled London in the middle of the night, convinced that the man pursuing her was the dead son of Irene and Michael Lewis.

  Any doubts ended with the video of her murder, and the subsequent phone call from her killer. Winter viewed it multiple times, referring to Lewis family photographs, comparing the freeze-frame on his phone with pictures of the twelve-year-old boy. It might be him. If not, he certainly wanted Winter to believe it. How did a dead boy come back to life twenty years later?

  Today, Winter intended to get an answer. His thoughts turned to the man in the dungeon. Doctor Sanjeev Chandran, bundled into a car on his way back from the newsagent that morning
. Winter's men left him, tied hand and foot, at nine-forty. It was now six o'clock. Eight hours would soften a civilian. Winter knew he could have shortened the process with carefully applied violence, but beating up an octogenarian retired GP held little allure. This way, the doctor's imagination would have done the heavy lifting on its own. Winter needed merely to play his part.

  The steel door to the dungeon was four inches thick. To open it, you either needed to know the eight-digit code, or to have had your thumb-print registered on the system. Winter pushed his thumb against the screen. The door groaned theatrically as it opened. The sound added a certain gothic touch to the ambiance.

  The old man blinked rapidly as the harsh fluorescent lights blinked into life on the ceiling. His coat had been taken from him, and the dungeon was unheated, so he was curled up in one corner, and miserable with cold. He pushed himself into a sitting position on the sawdust-sprinkled concrete, then stood, despite the obvious pain it caused him as his limbs stretched. He wore a white shirt - now dirty with dust and sweat, and his trousers were belted about an inch below his ribs. He held himself with such dignity as he could manage in the circumstances.

  "Why am I here, sir? What right do you have to imprison me?"

  "Shh." The doctor stopped blinking. He looked at Winter's face and did as he was told.

  Winter was not a remarkable looking man. In fact, he would have described himself as average. Average height, a few inches shy of six feet. Average weight, or—possibly—a little under the national mean, which seemed to be trending toward obesity. Symmetrical facial features, white hair shaved close, pale blue eyes, somewhat of a Roman nose. Looking perhaps a few years younger than his actual age, which was sixty-three. But Doctor Chandra wouldn't be the first person to fall silent and look away when meeting Winter. Perhaps true strength of will, sureness of purpose, and unquestionable leadership were such rare qualities that people experienced a physical reaction when encountering them for the first time.

  "You signed some death certificates twenty years ago. I want to ask you about them."

  The doctor coughed, bringing his tied hands up to cover his mouth. He didn't protest his situation. One look at Winter had persuaded him that cooperation was his only option. "I have signed hundreds of death certificates. I'm not sure I will be able to recall any specifics from so long ago."

  "Oh, I think you'll remember these. A fire at a big house in Richmond. Three bodies. The father and child were shot in the head before the fire started. The mother was left to burn alive, with a bullet wound to her stomach."

  The doctor paled, moistening his lips several times before responding. Winter knew that the details he had just given were more accurate than those released to the press. He guessed the doctor had just worked this out.

  "I remember," he said.

  "Good. Now then, I want you to answer this next question truthfully."

  When Winter paused, the doctor looked up, his voice cracking. "I will. I will."

  "I know. There was an anomaly with one of the death certificates, was there not?"

  "Yes. Yes. I remember. The police, they told me, they wanted me to… I mean, they insisted—"

  Winter waved his hands impatiently. "Take a breath, then tell me what happened."

  The doctor did as instructed. "I pronounced two dead immediately. The third was taken to hospital with critical injuries. A gunshot to the head."

  "Being shot in the head is usually fatal." Winter's tone was even and calm.

  "Usually, true. Not always. The skull is remarkably thick, and the bullet, as I recall, hit the victim at an angle on the frontal bone. The impact sent fragments of bone into the brain, but the bullet itself did not penetrate the skull."

  However badly Marty Nicholson died, considered Winter, it couldn't have been as badly as he deserved, the incompetent coward. Winter had been too soft back then. Letting Marty stay in the organisation, working on the counterfeiting side. Everyone believed the forger had lost his taste for violence after killing a child. But he hadn't even managed to do that properly.

  "What happened to the boy?"

  "I don't know. The police told me he had died, that he had never come out of his coma."

  "And you were happy to sign his death certificate without checking for yourself?"

  "I… I… well, no. I refused, initially."

  "And what changed your mind, Doctor Chandra. Ah. The witness protection programme."

  The doctor nodded.

  "There you go. Wasn't so hard, was it?"

  Winter reached under his jacket, bringing out the Glock. The doctor's eyes widened. Winter had no interest in scaring the man. He shot him twice in the heart, putting a third bullet in the back of the head when the body was on the floor.

  That's how you shoot someone, Marty.

  He checked his watch. Time for an hour's reading before getting ready for the auction. Self-improvement was so important.

  Chapter Two

  The auction took place at Excelsior Warehouses in northwest London, on an industrial estate owned by Winter.

  In the middle of the huge, empty building, a space marked out the dimensions of a small theatre. The stage was dressed like an intimate cabaret performance space, complete with a professional lighting gantry.

  Four motorhomes acted as dressing rooms for the performers. They arrived in a convoy of SUVs, which drove into the building through a shuttered entrance wide and high enough to admit a private jet. Once the stars of the show had been dropped at the dressing rooms, the vehicles left, parking two hundred yards away. Make-up, rehearsals, and soundchecks followed. The final touch, after the stage, lighting, mics, and cabaret seating, were the cameras. Five of them, broadcast quality, three of them closeup on the stage, two for wide shots. Operated by members of Winter's crew, trained by a moonlighting BBC cameraman. Each camera broadcasting live on the internet.

  At ten-thirty, Winter arrived. He sat in the darkness at the back with a laptop.

  At eleven-forty-five, the fourteen guests received emails with the auction's IP address. They logged on through 4freeker, a Tor-like labyrinth of international servers with an exit node chosen randomly. The technical side was down to Penny, his housekeeper and assistant. Winter grasped the basics, but it was Penny who'd provided the means for the masterstroke he'd put in place at the first online auction, a decade ago.

  Before then, those wishing to bid at the auction sent proxies. Now, guests downloaded the itemised menu for the evening in advance from a secure server. Out of context, it looked innocent enough, like a casting list. They bid in person, from the security of their scrambled, encrypted connections. And they thought they were safe.

  The red lights on the cameras glowed, and the screen of Winter's laptop divided into white squares, each one turning blue when a guest logged in. The squares were numbered one to fourteen. He smiled.

  At midnight, the music level dipped and Penny stepped onto the stage, veiled to preserve her anonymity. After a quarter of a century running his household, anticipating his needs, and fading into the background, she knew Winter better than anybody and, as far as he ever trusted anyone, he trusted Penny.

  She was Ron Capinsky's widow. Winter beat her husband to death in the early days of his rise to notoriety. Capinsky's prominence in London's criminal underworld had been a mystery. He seemed to have been born lucky, always in the right place at the right time. He moved from armed robbery to white-collar fraud at the same time Winter was eying the human trafficking trade. Fraud, when the victims were bankers and CEOs, was a largely victimless crime. Capinsky's problem was that he missed the old days, the violence of the robberies. He started throwing his weight around, picking fights with the wrong people. Winter was one of them. The last one.

  Penny had come to him a week later. Not with a burning thirst for revenge, but a business proposition. A morning in her company proved enough to convince Winter that Capinsky's success was entirely due to his wife's savvy.

  "So why do you want
to help me?"

  Penny was the most straightforward person Winter had ever dealt with.

  "Because organising a complicated criminal empire, and spotting business opportunities, is what I'm good at. Better than good, actually. And you will pay me well."

  She named a figure that made him laugh out loud. "I just murdered your husband," he said, "so I'll ask you again. Why do you want to help me?"

  She answered by taking off her blouse, revealing a network of old bruises, scars, and burns covering her upper body.

  Winter paid the salary. She'd proved to be worth it many times over.

  Penny stepped up to the mic. No stage presence, her manner brisk and business-like, rather than entertaining. The remote bidders were there to spend money. They just wanted to see what they were buying, and the lights and set gave the evening a Hollywood sheen.

  "Lot One. Emma."

  Winter imagined the billionaires in their offices perusing their menus.

  1. Emma. 22. 5'7". Educated at Cheltenham Girls School. Brought up in the Cotswolds. Primary language English. Fluent in French, Spanish, Italian. Dropped out of Durham University, where she read English Literature. 50.

  The last figure was the reserve.

  Lot One climbed the stairs and moved to the centre of the stage. A dark red dress. Winter frowned from the back of the room. A little too obvious for his tastes, that dress. Lot One was blonde, and—had her diet not been controlled by her handlers for the past months—Winter suspected she might go from curvy to plump.

  The girl, on Penny's instructions, twirled. Winter knew his customers. He looked at square twelve and saw the first bid come up on-screen. It was a strong opening bid. Winter may have been wrong about the dress. Sonia, who ran the groomers, taking charge of costume and makeup backstage, understood how to bring out the best in each girl. Lot One's Rubenesque figure filled the dress. The eighty-four-year-old financier behind square twelve loved an hourglass figure, especially when combined with a cut-glass accent.