The Dungeon & Christmas With the Executioner Read online

  When the smoker yelled from the far side of the burning house, Debbie reached him first. The body lay face down, half-concealed by a hedge. Thin legs poked out of the undergrowth. Dirty bare feet and pyjamas. Debbie traced the kid's route through the dew-wet grass back to the house.

  "He's alive. Broken leg, dislocated shoulder. Minor burns. Christ!"

  The paramedic pushed the hedge aside to get a proper look at his face. His colleague arrived with a wheeled stretcher. At the press of a button, it concertinaed to the ground.

  "On three," said the first paramedic, as his colleague squatted beside him. Debbie saw Tom's face for the first time. Her first thought was that he wouldn't survive the stretcher journey to the ambulance, never mind get to hospital.

  The boy's features were obscured by blood, which seeped from a bullet wound in his head. She couldn't guess the colour of his hair, matted in crimson clumps like alien plants sprouting from his skull. His eyes were closed, chest barely moving under pale blue cotton pyjamas. The last time Debbie saw anything so graphic was on the cover of three thousand pirated horror DVDs in a warehouse. The gaping wound on that cover had been laughable. This one not so much.

  Back at the station, Detective Chief Inspector Stevens twitched with excitement. "The boy survived. Once we get his witness statement, Winter is finished."

  Debbie thought of that face, fragments of smashed-meringue skull in his blood-soaked hair. "I wouldn't get your hopes up, Sir."

  According to the neurosurgeon who'd operated on him, Tom would likely never speak again, his synaptic network irrevocably damaged. His brain had suffered significant injuries. Surgery mitigated that damage, but could only go so far. Neuroscience, explained the surgeon, was the Wild West of medicine, every frontier leading to new mysteries. They understood so little of the brain that it was impossible to predict the long-term results of serious trauma. Debbie asked him when Tom might be able to make a statement. "If you forced me to guess? Never."

  Tom's progress had surprised everyone, but it only went so far. He could speak, after a fashion, but his medium and long term memory were severely compromised. The witness statement had never come. Tom couldn't remember anything of that night. He remembered little of his childhood.

  Debbie had volunteered as Tom's liaison in witness protection. He knew her and trusted her. They'd met regularly ever since.

  The worst time for her had been the missing years. Between the age of twenty and twenty-seven, Tom stopped coming to their meetings. When she tried to find him, he had vanished. He'd finished a job on a building site, left his room in a shared house, and dropped off the face of the earth. After six months, the police stopped active work on the missing persons case. After a year, Stevens called her into his office and ordered her to give it up. He thought Tom was dead. It took Debbie another twelve months to believe him. After seven years, Tom turned up at the station. When she asked where he'd been, he said, "Asleep."

  Since then, Tom had never skipped a meeting. He wouldn't talk about the missing years. But whatever he'd been doing, whatever had happened to him, he came back changed. Not just physically—somehow he had grown even broader—but something deeper. Something buried. He'd been easily agitated before, often upset and confused. That had gone. His lack of communication was the same, but there was a calmness behind it now. His life was the same - the menial jobs, the drifting from place to place. But he was centred. If Debbie hadn't known better, she would have described Tom as a man who had discovered his vocation.

  Debbie put the file in her shoulder bag and walked to the cafe. She approached it with the river in front of her, knowing that Tom always sat somewhere where he could look out at the water. He couldn't read, but he once told her he enjoyed watching the patterns made by moving water, the way they constantly changed.

  He wasn't at his usual table. Tom always turned up early. His struggles with reading, writing, and short-term memory loss made keeping appointments a challenge, so he over-compensated. The cafe wasn't busy. Debbie waited by the counter, expecting Tom to emerge from the toilet. When he didn't, she asked the barista, but no one had seen him.

  She took her cappuccino to the window table and swivelled in her seat to watch the door. Ten minutes later, she called him. No answer. After her third cup, she left.

  Her phone rang as she was getting back into the car.

  "Tom?"

  "Mm. S-sorry. Mm. Forgot."

  He was a terrible liar. She'd left the usual voicemail that morning.

  "Not to worry, Tom. Are you okay?"

  "Mm. Okay."

  "We can rearrange. Or skip this meeting and put one in the calendar for April."

  "A-April." He didn't hesitate. Debbie's stomach turned and her throat constricted. She knew it was ridiculous to feel hurt, but she did. Tom enjoyed their meetings. She knew he did. Was he going to disappear again?

  "Okay. If that's what you want. But if you need me in the meantime, for anything at all, you call me, Tom. Got that?"

  "Mm."

  "Good. Well. Happy Christmas. I'll see you in April."

  "Mm. Bye."

  Debbie started the Fiat, then turned the engine off again, staring out of the windscreen. She reminded herself that Tom Lewis was an adult, with his own life. After this many years, their meetings weren't mandatory, but she thought he enjoyed them as much as she did. She made a note on her phone to check up on him at the start of January.

  Something was going on. She knew it.

  Chapter Six

  The man on the back seat of the SUV looked through the high iron gates towards the building they guarded. The house beyond might have belonged to a banker, a professional athlete, or a TV chef. Perhaps a bestselling author. From the road, which wound between the A1 to the east and Elstree to the west, nothing could be seen other than a gravelled drive snaking out of view downhill behind high walls and iron gates.

  It was seven p.m.; the car pinned to the dark tarmac by security spotlights while cameras mounted on the gate swivelled to film it.

  Two sizeable men in tight suits approached the SUV. The car's driver, a small, trim man in his fifties, his grey hair in a military-style crewcut, sighed.

  "Why is it that steroid-injecting, protein powder-swilling, weight training-obsessed, closeted gay bodyguards always buy suits that don't fit? It's not that no one makes them big enough. But they buy jackets that won't quite button across their coconut-oiled pecs. Why is that?"

  One of the two men inspected the vehicle with a thermal-imaging camera. The other leaned down to the driver's window, nodding when he recognised the man behind the wheel.

  "I don't know, man." The voice of the man on the back seat was thin and croaky. He coughed.

  The bodyguards held a key fob to a smaller pedestrian entrance and walked through as the main gates swung open.

  The driver twisted round on the leather seat to face his passenger. "What?"

  Up until an hour ago, the man sitting behind the driver had considered himself above his peers, above the law, above everyone. His clothes and tattoos marked him out as untouchable in the few square miles of north east London where he grew up. He was a killer. Not scared of anybody. He swallowed hard before he could speak.

  "I said I don't know. I don't know why they do it."

  "What's your name? Daz? Gazza?"

  "Tariq. It's Tariq."

  "Tariq. Right. Here's the thing, Tariq. Ever heard of a hypothetical question?"

  Tariq examined his cable-tied hands, his eyes flicking up to the driver's, then away again when he met that unblinking stare. Three months ago, he, and two gang members, had been badly beaten up. By one guy. He'd lost three teeth, broken a leg, two ribs and his wrist, and suffered a concussion. From invincibility to fearful and paranoid in one night. He was still a leader, still a killer, still someone people crossed the road to avoid, but Tariq knew the truth. He was a coward, and it was only a matter of time before some chancer called him out. His authority had been irretrievably damaged when
two of his lieutenants witnessed him getting thrown out of the window of a double decker.

  This old fart in his shiny German SUV hadn't even raised his voice to get the better of him. He arrived in his gleaming car, parked it by the row of shops where Tariq and the boys sold wraps of crack in between putting the shits up pensioners buying groceries.

  The old guy got out of the car and walked up to them, stopping five yards away, arms by his sides. Polished boots, suit, buttoned black winter coat, cashmere scarf. Even his haircut looked expensive. Tariq and the guys smirked.

  "You the boys who got the crap beaten out of them on a bus?"

  Tariq couldn't let that pass. Not without losing what little face he had left. He unfurled himself from the wall and approached the old geezer with a rolling gait. This style of walking was part studied menace and part necessity; trousers as low as Tariq's would end up around his ankles if he walked normally.

  He eyed the interloper with an expression of lazy threat, getting right into his face before answering.

  "What the fuck did you s—"

  An open-handed smack; hard, shocking. It came so fast, so unexpected, he didn't even flinch. The crack of it echoed off the walls and bounced from the grey council houses over the road. Tariq took a step back. The old geezer's hands were by his side, and he looked unruffled. "Yes or no?" was all he said.

  Tariq's ascendance in the ranks of the Reaperz Crew had been assured until that thing on the bus had beaten him to a pulp. Tariq was still clinging onto the slim hope that he could recover his credibility, given time.

  Now this. A slap from an old geezer. The world went quiet. And, just like that, it was over.

  "Yes," said Tariq. He didn't look behind him, didn't need to clock the faces of those witnessing this humiliation. There was no fight left in him. Some people were properly dangerous, properly crazy. Predators. The monster on the bus was a predator. This old geezer wasn't at that level, but he was closer to it than Tariq ever would be.

  "Put your hands in front of you."

  "What?" Tariq spiralled into a state of fatalistic apathy. His body ached, and his tongue found the pink gums where the three teeth were missing.

  "Imagine I'm a copper. Hands in front."

  Tariq obeyed and heard the zip of the cable tie's teeth as his wrists came together.

  The old geezer didn't even bother grabbing Tariq's arm. He turned his back, opened the rear door of the car.

  "Get in."

  Tariq complied without looking back, knowing that, whatever happened, he wouldn't be running things anymore.

  Now he was somewhere near Elstree, where every house cost millions, about as far out of his comfort zone as he'd ever been, and the old geezer wanted to chat about hypothetical questions. A sputter of defiance flared up in his gut.

  "Yeah, actually, I—"

  Crack. Tariq didn't see that slap coming either.

  "I think you're missing the point, Tariq. You're a lowlife piece of shit. My car will have to be cleaned to get rid of your stench. I don't want you to speak. At all. Not unless I make it very clear I expect you to say something. Do you understand?"

  Tariq pressed his knees together to stop them knocking against each other. He thought it might be safe to nod.

  "Good."

  The gates shut behind the car as it purred down the drive. The forecast had predicted icy roads, but the gravel supplied plenty of grip as the SUV rounded the long bend, forked to the right, and drove behind the house, then beneath, the underground garage door sliding closed behind it.

  Chapter Seven

  It was lunchtime when Tom woke up. He blinked into the pillow, wondering why his body ached so much. Had Bedlam Boy come back? For a moment, he believed it, sitting up with a smile on his face. Then the smile faded as he remembered why he was aching.

  In the bathroom, he angled the mirror to check his body. Blue-black and purple bruises on his ribs, arms, and legs. His right eye was puffy, the cheek below a swollen, angry red.

  His phone had the two circles on the screen that meant he had a message. He pressed the right button and picked up Mrs Capelli's voicemail. They were supposed to meet. But she would see the bruises on his face. She would ask questions. Tom didn't trust the police—the Boy would never go near them—but Mrs Capelli was different. Debbie had always been there. Always.

  His finger hesitated over the button to call her number. He hated talking on the phone even more than talking in person, but it was okay with Debbie. She never prompted him or interrupted, but gave him all the time he needed to find the right words and say them.

  He put the phone down. Something much more insistent—and far stronger—than instinct told him not to call her, and not to meet her. It could only be Bedlam Boy. Maybe this meant he was finally coming back. He hadn't protected Tom against the men who had hit and kicked him. But the attack might bring the Boy back. Tom missed seeing him in the shadows, knowing he was nearby. The last time had been so long ago it scared him.

  He went back into the bathroom, splashed water on his face. Something wasn't right, but he couldn't understand what. The Boy felt so close, like he was standing in the next room. But, at the same time, he was staying away from Tom. Almost like he was hiding.

  Had Tom done something wrong? Bedlam Boy was all he had. The Boy would never leave Tom. Would he?

  At work, everyone looked at his bruised face, but no one said anything. No one except Mr Cracknell, who took him into the canteen for a cup of tea. He even opened a packet of unbroken biscuits.

  "You in trouble, Tom?"

  Tom shook his head. "Fell. Mm, f-fell over."

  "Right. Well. Do you want a lift home tonight?"

  Tom wanted to say yes. He even started to form the word. Before he could do it, his mouth opened. "No, thank you, Mr Cracknell."

  The Boy. He must be coming. He must be. Tom nodded his thanks and left, before his boss asked him what had happened to his stammer.

  Tom avoided the alleyway tonight, but there was no avoiding the park which lay between the industrial estate and his rented room. A mixture of fear and excitement coursed through him as he trudged through the gates. Bedlam Boy might be here, waiting for him.

  The path wound through trees, and the shadows there lay deep and dark. Tom slowed as he passed each one, waiting for a shifting blur, an invisible face turning to look his way, a glint of starlight reflected in the Boy's dark eyes. Nothing. No one.

  On a bench, a silhouette. Tom stopped, squinted. Then a red dot glowed, illuminating a beard inside a hood, as a stranger smoked, his head tilted towards Tom.

  "Problem, pal? Jog on, will ya?"

  Tom stared at the man. There hadn't been any anger in the stranger's challenge, but it would be best to keep walking, not provoke anyone. He shuffled on, moving to the far side of the path to pass the man, who continued to watch him. After another twenty yards, he looked back, but the man was on his phone. He stood as he talked, then walked in the same direction as Tom.

  Not following, just leaving the park. Even so, Tom's pulse quickened. Still no Bedlam Boy.

  Tom understood, at a deep, basic level, that his existence, his hollowed-out, fractional, daily life, only had meaning in that it enabled Bedlam Boy to do his work. And the Boy's work, while beyond his understanding, would be great and glorious. When he woke from a nightmare of his mother screaming, he didn't panic. He waited. He waited until a sense of calm, an unarguable assurance that everything would be made right settled over him like a warm blanket. That was Bedlam Boy. He brought Tom happiness. Or, at least, an absence of sadness.

  No Bedlam Boy in the shadows. No contact from him since moving to Hounslow. Impossible that the Boy had left him. Impossible. What would Tom do when the warehouse job ended? Tom had no plans. The Boy always took care of it.

  Ahead, the streetlights were out. Tom looked up hopefully. Bedlam Boy drew strength from the darkness. Tom scanned the empty street, the front gardens' grass replaced by concrete for parking. The opposite side
of the street lined with cars and work vans. Narrow vertical shafts of light from drawn curtains.

  Something… something was wrong. Tom hesitated, looked over his shoulder. The smoking man flicked the cigarette away. Still on his phone, still walking behind Tom, not hurrying.

  A movement along the park fence to the right. A second man, big, squat, coming from the south side of the park. Both men hard to make out in the darkness. Still no Bedlam Boy. The two men walked together without a word. They both looked at Tom. He walked faster.

  A distant part of his brain signalled something about the scene in front of him. Tom swung his head from left to right as he walked, but whatever information his brain had picked up, Tom couldn't interpret it. He swallowed. His spit tasted funny, like when he'd put two pence on his tongue pretending to be a magician.

  Tom started humming. He stumbled across to the side of the street, past the parked vehicles. With them between him and the two men, maybe he could run and turn the corner before they noticed.

  The first van was a light colour, dirty, a few years old, the sort of vehicle a million small businesses used. Tom looked at the number plate, sounding out the first letter. T. T for Tom. T for tomato. T for Terry. T for terror. The distant part of his brain sent up a flare now, but too far away. Tom paused by the passenger door, his forehead creased in thought.

  He'd seen that number plate before. But the memory made no sense, because it was nowhere he remembered visiting. In his mind the number plate lay on a workbench. The letters and numbers meant nothing, but he recognised the pattern they made. And the pattern on the front of the van matched the one on the workbench.