The Dungeon & Christmas With the Executioner

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  The air rushed into his lungs, crisp and beautiful. Tom didn't think air tasted of anything, but now he knew different, although he could never have described it. His chest heaved, bringing more oxygen into his body, the pressure easing and the room returning.

  For a time, the only sound was Tom panting and crying. The man spoke again.

  "Your real name, Tom." And this time, before Tom answered, the knee was pushing into his back, and the pressure resumed; his windpipe pinched closed a second time. When his sucking lungs found no air, his brain seized up. Like a car he'd been in once. Something happened to the engine, and the driver put it in limp mode. Tom's brain went into limp mode.

  When the shorter man released him, Tom sucked in the beautiful air again, crying with fear and relief. He begged them to stop, but only formed the first consonant. "Pl, pl, pl pl."

  "What's that, Tom?"

  The material tightened on his throat.

  "Wait a moment, Christopher." The pressure loosened. Tom experienced a rush of gratitude towards the man in the speaker.

  "You have trouble speaking, Tom. Is that right?"

  Tom nodded. "Mm. Mm."

  "Very well. For now, let's make it simpler. I'll say a few names. When you hear your real last name, I'd like you to nod for me. To stop these men hurting you. Do you understand?"

  Tom wasn't sure. He thought hard; nodded.

  "Good. And Tom?"

  Tom looked up at the speaker. The small white box with glass at the front next to it wasn't, as Tom first thought, a broken light, but a camera. Tom looked up to show he was listening.

  "Don't lie to me. If you do, I'll know. And David and Christopher will hurt you. You don't want that, do you?"

  He shook his head this time.

  "Here are the names. Nod at the right one. Purcell. Maidment. Wood. Lewis."

  Tom nodded.

  "Thank you, Tom. David, Christopher, that will be all."

  While David pointed the taser, Christopher cut away the cables. Blood pulsed back into Tom's numb toes and fingers. The two men left with the chair.

  He had told the man the truth. Now they knew his name.

  Tom Lewis.

  He hoped Debbie wouldn't mind.

  Perhaps they would let him go now.

  Chapter Ten

  Torture provided a means to an end. Winter took no pleasure in it, although he suspected Christopher enjoyed it. Violence could be as dangerous as sex in his business. Some men and women became ensnared by a need to inflict pain, or to kill. Both had their place, but when it became an end rather than the means it led to disaster. Unpredictable, savage criminals only rose to the top in movies. In real life, if you thought your boss might shoot you in the head when you said the wrong thing, you tried to shoot him in the head first to avoid the situation arising. Like everything else, it was a balance. Winter relied on fear to run his organisation, but the fear needed to be rooted in logic, in the expectation of a proportionate response. If someone insulted Winter, he'd have them beaten. If they tried to muscle in on his business, skimmed from the profits, or tried to cheat him, then they died. Reasonable. Logical.

  Tom Lewis had been in the dungeon three nights and two days. By December twenty-fourth they'd got nothing out of him. Lewis was still the same stammering idiot they'd brought in.

  Winter's men stuck to a simple list of questions. How did Lewis find Marty and Rhoda? What was he planning next? And what was this Bedlam Boy crap? Nothing got a response. Winter wanted those answers first, before discussing Rhoda's incriminating recording.

  The boys on dungeon duty alternated asphyxiation and good old-fashioned beatings, but nothing worked. When they punched Lewis, he cried. Winter was astonished. In his early thirties, built like a fighter, Tom Lewis was one of the broadest-shouldered men he'd ever seen, with arms as hard as oak. Shaved head, over six feet tall, he looked like he had stamina, like he could take punishment without complaint. Not so. When Christopher punched him in the gut, he folded to the floor and sobbed like a child. A couple of kicks later and he stopped, becoming unresponsive. At Winter's order, they checked his breathing and his pulse. Deeply asleep. Snoring, sometimes. Slapping, pinching, or kicking did nothing. He became unreachable.

  If they left him alone, Lewis would emerge from his catatonic state and sit up, snivelling. During the next beating, the same pattern of crying and withdrawal followed. They went back to the sleep deprivation.

  Near the end of the third day, Winter admitted his doubts, if only to himself. Lack of sleep tripped up liars. It chipped away at the subject's sense of reality, slowing their thought processes, making it near-impossible to dissemble. But Lewis's answers, and his demeanour, remained consistent. He displayed nothing other than the same halfwit idiocy since arriving. Which left two possibilities. First, he was what he appeared to be, which meant—despite the strong resemblance Lewis bore to Rhoda's killer—that they had the wrong guy. The man downstairs was brain damaged, incapable of planning, and carrying out, three murders. The second possibility made Lewis the smartest, most devious opponent Winter had ever encountered, able to hide a considerable intellect behind this dribbling cretinous facade. If the latter, he began the pretence twenty years ago, never dropping the facade. Not possible.

  If Winter was torturing the wrong man, the real killer remained at large, hunting his people, and still in possession of a recording that threatened to turn Winter's empire to dust.

  Fresh thinking was called for. Perhaps a leaf out of the intelligence community's playbook. Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. That was how the CIA described it. Americans had a peculiar genius for euphemism.

  He pushed the intercom for the dungeon's anteroom. "David?"

  "Sir?"

  "Waterboard him."

  The downside of waterboarding was the possibility of brain damage or death. Who could judge what effect it might have on an already compromised brain? Only one way to find out.

  Winter turned off the monitor when David and Christopher wheeled the modified stretcher into the dungeon, securing Lewis with two broad leather straps, his head six inches lower than his feet.

  He wanted to see this in person.

  When the taller and shorter men tied Tom up this time, they pulled a black hood over his face. He heard them come back, pushing something on wheels. When they guided him there, shoving down, Tom wondered if it was a bed, if they would let him sleep. He didn't like the hood; he tried to tell them, but, as usual, the words got stuck. The men weren't listening, anyway. They pulled straps across his chest and legs, tilted him backwards.

  It was dark inside the hood, which gave Tom a moment of hope. He hadn't been in the dark since arriving in the grey room. Bedlam Boy called him from the dark, from the shadows, coming to find him. Now Tom desperately needed to find the companion who'd been with him since he woke from his coma. The Boy lived in the dark corners; born in darkness, Tom knew, and only able to return the same way.

  The hood didn't help. Dark, but the same dark as when Tom closed his eyes. Not real darkness. Bedlam Boy didn't come. Tom screamed out for him in his mind, but found no trace. The Boy needed the shadows, but no shadows existed in this terrible place.

  After they tipped him backwards, he heard footsteps. Tom recognised the voice from the speaker. This man was in charge. He might stop the bad things from happening.

  But he didn't. He didn't stop it. He told the men to begin. And, fifteen seconds later, Tom wanted to die.

  Tom turned his mind away from what was happening. He tried to picture his mum and dad, the faces he saw in his dreams.

  If he died, that would be okay. He'd been dead before.

  He slept, after. Not for long. His face and neck were still damp. Someone shouted. The taller man.

  "Get up, you stupid arsehole. Wakey, wakey. Happy Christmas, mong. Get up."

  Christmas? Tom was sure he'd been in this room for weeks, and the holiday must have come and gone ages ago. His mind reeled at his skewed sense of time. Unless the ma
n was lying. Tom didn't think so. Not this time.

  He rubbed his fingers along the front of his filthy shirt, put his hand up to his head. No hood. Apart from a darker patch of sawdust where the water poured through the cloth on his face onto the floor, there was no sign of what they did to him.

  "Enjoy that, Tommy boy? Bit of fun? Sounds like fun. Skateboarding's fun. Kiteboarding's fun. I bet waterboarding's fun too. Don't worry, we'll let you have another go."

  Tom didn't answer. He had tried to understand what was going on since they brought him here. He'd listened to the men, answered their questions when he could. But Tom found it hard enough to speak when calm. When terrified and in pain, he didn't stand a chance.

  He slumped against the wall, half-awake. The lights still blazed. Even if he wanted to, Bedlam Boy couldn't come to him. Not without the darkness. He was going to die here.

  11

  Part Two: Christmas with the Executioner

  Winter woke at six Christmas morning.

  He reviewed his schedule, eating porridge steel-milled from Irish oats with a sprinkling of blueberries and flaked almonds. Winter always ate breakfast standing, facing the rising sun. Studies showed the most successful leaders rose early and followed established routines.

  He read his notes. A jog around the grounds, a review of the finances after the auction, a call to the grooming parlours for an update on the latest candidates. It was a holiday, so perhaps some reading in the afternoon - Winter liked to keep up with the latest medical and psychological journals, and any interviews with, or books about, leaders. There was always something new to learn. There would be no work this evening. He expected nine for dinner - members of his crew who didn't have families to sit down with. Strickland, too.

  This kind of gesture was normal from employers at Christmas.

  Goal-setting featured in the routine of every successful business person Winter studied. And he could vouch for its efficacy. The important thing was to specify your goals, breaking down the elements necessary to achieve them. No good saying you wanted a billion pounds. Too vague. Better to plan on earning your first hundred thousand by your twentieth birthday, half a million before the next, ten million by the time you reached twenty-five, and so on. Next, set annual, monthly, weekly, then daily goals. At the most granular level, you could decide how best to spend each half-hour period to maximise your potential.

  When Winter set the goal of taking over the human trafficking business in London, he made a list of his rivals. Rather than trying to kill everyone in his way before forty, he broke it down into manageable chunks. His goal-setting meant he only needed to murder one-point-six people a month over a five year period.

  Winter also read psychological studies claiming that many successful people, once they reached the summit of their personal mountain, were unhappy, empty, unfulfilled. Rich but miserable. A footnote provided Winter with the exceptions to that rule: sociopaths and psychopaths.

  Winter thought the psychologists rather missed the point. Psychopaths didn't indulge in the pursuit of happiness. It was pointless. He pursued results. He wanted to win. And he always did.

  Before leaving for his run, Winter checked on Tom Lewis. And what he witnessed on his monitor led to a decision that meant nobody ever forgot this Christmas.

  At first, Winter thought Lewis had lost what passed for his mind. Bare-chested, he held his shirt like a matador, stretched between his hands. Like he expected a bull to materialise in the corner of the room. He looked at the ceiling, back at the wall, angled the shirt.

  He muttered to himself as he did this. From the way his lips moved, it wasn't the usual toneless humming. Winter turned up the volume. Lewis's voice rose and fell as if speaking in sentences. No. Too repetitive for that. The same short sentence, over and over. Lewis stood at the far end of the room. Two mics listened from the ceiling above the door. Even when Winter turned up the volume of his headphones, he couldn't make the words out.

  Tom walked across to the opposite corner, looking over his shoulder, stretching out the shirt, still mumbling. He kept adjusting the position, looking up before holding the shirt a few inches higher.

  After three and a half minutes of what looked like an experimental theatre piece, Lewis moved to the front of the dungeon. He didn't take a direct route, avoiding the spot where the tattooed kid bled out. Didn't want his bare feet touching the dried blood. Squeamish, as well as crying when punched. Surely this couldn't be the guy who shot Marty and Tay, or threw Rhoda from the top of a Parisian landmark?

  The cameras had fisheye lenses. Lewis's stupid scarred bald head looked swollen, his body elongating and stretching beneath it. He flapped open the shirt again, looking up at the light, starting to make adjustments. Winter leaned forward. The shirt was meant to block the light. This time, when Lewis spoke under the mics, his voice was clear. He repeated the same phrase, over and over, looking from the ceiling to the corner.

  "The boy needs the dark, the boy needs the dark, the boy needs the dark, the boy needs the dark."

  The boy? Winter didn't know what Lewis's nursery rhyme chant meant, but it was the only sentence with a subject, verb, and object that had passed his lips in the dungeon.

  He frowned at the screen. Sleep deprivation didn't work. Torture failed. Lewis had no dependents, no friends, no partner. And Winter wiped out his family twenty years ago. No leverage left.

  After the Reaperz Crew kid had identified Lewis as the man who attacked him and his gang on the bus, Winter had dropped the idea of an accomplice. But days of torture with no result left Winter, for the first time he could remember, almost out of ideas. The Tom Lewis downstairs could barely wipe his own arse, let alone carry out a complicated revenge strategy.

  Schizophrenia? Multiple personalities? It was known as dissociative identity disorder these days, Winter remembered. He'd scanned a few articles, but Lewis didn't fit the diagnosis; there had been no signs of alternate personalities during his imprisonment. Switching between 'alters'—different personalities—was often triggered by stress, and he'd been given plenty of that.

  A half-remembered psychology article nagged at him. There was something, some piece he'd read about a rare condition. He sat back, thumbs pressing on his forehead for a moment. No. It wouldn't come. He turned to the internet. Winter knew he was unusual in not liking the ease of finding information online. He treasured his autonomy, his self-reliance, and Google was a lazy way out. Still, on this occasion…

  Three minutes later, he had found the name of the condition: nyctophilia. Love of the dark. There was surprisingly little information. Winter dug deeper, looking for examples of people who behave differently in the dark, but there wasn't enough research available. Some clinicians even dismissed it as non-existent.

  Winter drummed his fingers on the desk. The concept of the carrot and the stick was not an unfamiliar one, but it hardly applied when you were torturing someone for information. In that situation, the alternative to the stick was just another kind of stick. Bigger, harder, electrified, or with spikes sticking out of it. The closest thing to a carrot was promising someone you'd kill them quickly if they told you what you wanted to know, rather than flaying them alive or making them eat their own body parts.

  But, since nothing else had worked, perhaps giving Tom Lewis what he wanted was worth trying. He brought up the anteroom on the second screen.

  "David?"

  "Sir?"

  "Turn off the lights in the dungeon."

  David stood up immediately. No one questioned Winter's orders. The dungeon's cameras had no night vision. The only time the lights were off was when the room was unoccupied. Perhaps worth considering an upgrade.

  Winter donned the headphones again and listened to the sounds coming from the dungeon.

  "—the dark. The boy needs the dark. The boy needs the dark. The—"

  The monitor went dark and the voice stopped at exactly the same moment. Winter closed his eyes and put his hands over the cups of the headphones,
pushing them closer to his ears.

  For a minute, there was no sound at all. Winter had the curious, and disconcerting, sensation that, as hard as he was listening to Tom Lewis, Tom Lewis was listening to him. There was no two-way traffic when the intercom was closed, but it didn't stop him feeling there was. When sound returned, Winter had to concentrate to make sense of what he was hearing. He thought Lewis was putting his shirt back on. Next, the sound of bare feet on sawdust. Four steps. That would take him into the middle of the room. Another scrunch of sawdust and a scraping sound. Had Lewis sat down?

  Then nothing except the sound of breathing; each breath slightly deeper than the one before. When it settled into a steady rhythm, Winter timed each inhalation and exhalation using the minute hand of his watch. He did it for ten minutes to make sure. Each of Lewis's breaths lasted forty-seven seconds. This wasn't sleep. He was either meditating, or lapsing into a coma.

  Winter took off the headphones, placed them on the desk and stared, frowning, at the dark screen.

  "David. Listen in on him once an hour. Let me know if there's any change."

  He flicked through the other camera feeds from their positions around the house. Penny had come through from the annexe and was reviewing a list on her tablet at the kitchen table. Winter pushed the button to speak. "Earl Grey in an hour, Penny. Going for my run now."

  Penny nodded at the screen before returning her attention to the list.

  Winter went upstairs to change. He was setting off thirty-seven minutes later than usual. His planned routine had been disrupted already. He made some mental adjustments as he ran towards the artificial lake he'd installed alongside the woods. He'd had it stocked with perch, chub, pike, and bass when it was dug and filled. One day, maybe he'd finally learn to fish. But fishing looked so bloody boring, and there were far more interesting ways to fill his time. Also, he was as likely to hook a body as a fish out of the water.