by Vince Vogel
“Good,” Dorring said. He came forward and placed the pen in the fingers of that hand. It was taped to Anderson’s side and poking out the bottom, just above his right thigh. Dorring placed the notepad on the thigh so that Anderson could write on it.
“Where is the young girl from Charles Carter’s room?” Dorring asked.
Anderson sat motionless, the pen hovering over the paper. Then it moved.
Don’t know.
“Okay,” Dorring said.
Taking the pliers, he swooped forward, fixed their end on a bottom canine tooth and began twisting it and bending it from side to side. Blood emerged from the root and spread down the gum, so that it created a pool under the tongue. Anderson began making a terrible sound. A hissing, choking sound that was essentially a gagged scream. Dorring felt the tooth crack and he pulled it out.
Holding the broken canine up to Anderson, he said, “We have a whole mouth of teeth. Then we have your fingernails. Then we have your fingers. Then toenails. Then toes. Then hands. Then feet. Bit by bit, until you’re no more than a torso.”
Anderson began writing on the pad. Dorring and Otis looked down. In scraggly writing he marked down: Men will come. Soon. Alarm. Then we see how much of YOU is left
Meeting Anderson’s eyes, Dorring said, “I gather they won’t be here for a while. So until then.”
And with that, he swooped forward and grabbed the other lower canine. But he didn’t stop there. Oh no. He went for the top canines. Then he removed the incisors. Then the front teeth until there was a large gap in the front, the gums torn up and oozing blood that Anderson retched on. The whole time Dorring had done it, the choking, gagging, rasping sound had torn out of Anderson like an exorcised demon.
Taking a small makeup mirror from his pocket, Dorring held it before Anderson. His eyes were closed shut.
“Open your eyes,” Dorring commanded.
Anderson didn’t react. So Dorring used the pliers to grab ahold of the bridge of the manager’s nose and squeeze so tight he felt the bone crack. The eyes shot open as another rasping scream flew out of the open mouth.
“Take a look,” Dorring said, letting go of the nose. “You like it?”
Anderson stared into the mirror and began sobbing, his bulky body jolting in the chair.
“Asstar!” hissed almost inaudibly from his open mouth.
They gathered that he’d shouted the word ‘Bastard’.
“The rest will follow,” Dorring told him as the mirror shivered in his hand. “So tell me where she is.”
“A… ah…” Anderson gasped.
“The pen and pad,” Dorring suggested.
With difficulty, the pen held at an awkward angle and the pad moving underneath the nib, he wrote down Darren Crosby.
“Who’s Darren Crosby?”
Man that brought her.
“The girl with Charles Carter?”
Yes.
“But that doesn’t explain where she is now.”
Crosby took. Later.
“Where to?”
Don’t know. Only deal Crosby.
“Where can we find this man?”
Don’t know. Carter contact.
“You’re a liar. You know the men that bring girls here. Don’t you? You’ve always known. So tell me who Crosby is with?”
Don’t know. Very powerful. High up. Carter contact. Not Belgravia.
Otis came around the man and glared into his eyes. “He’s a lyin’ bastard,” he snarled. “Tryin’ to save his masters. Walkin’ around in his nice suit like he’s somebody, when all the time, he’s a bastard slave what traded his own in for gold coin. Maybe losin’ the rest o’ his teeth’ll jog his memory.”
“Okay,” Dorring said, handing over the pliers.
Otis came before the manager. He pushed his hand into the mouth, stretching the edges of the lips to breaking point. He took ahold of a rear molar, a big one with a big root. He gripped it hard and began twisting the tooth. It made a creaking and a cracking sound as he snapped it from its holding.
“Agh!” streamed from Anderson’s mouth.
The tooth gave way and Otis lifted it out. He wasted no time. Dropped it to the floor and then hit the next molar. More hissing screams.
By the time Otis had finished, the mouth was nothing but bloody, swollen gums, clear of all teeth. Anderson was slumped in the chair, mumbling, sweat dripping from his wet hair. They’d removed the gag now, but it appeared he couldn’t close the mouth anymore.
Dorring reached into his pocket. The next item was a pair of secateurs. Their metal ends sparkled in the light. Anderson appeared non compos mentis. His eyes stared out into nothingness. His mouth was wide open. At one point, Dorring had heard a crack, like a rock splitting, and realized that Otis had gone in so hard, he’d fractured the man’s jaw.
“Hey!” Dorring said, slapping Anderson around the face.
The eyes came back to life and he raised them to the secateurs. He cringed immediately.
“Next will be a finger,” Dorring said.
He went to the left hand. The right had the pen. He gripped the secateurs around a finger and squeezed ever so slightly, so that Anderson could feel the blade of the pincers pressing into the flesh.
“They’ll… kill… me,” hissed from the manager’s swollen mouth.
“We’ll kill you,” Dorring assured him. “At least if you get past us, you can think about avoiding them. You have the chance to run from them. Us, however, have you taped to this chair. There’s no getting away from us. So tell us what we want, or your friends won’t have to kill you. Because I swear to you, if you don’t give us all the information we want, we’ll cut pieces off you until there’s nothing left but a pile of body parts in the middle of this room.”
This appeared to sink in. Anderson thought for a few seconds and realized that he was doomed no matter what. The part about being able to survive today worked on him. Dorring was right. The logical conclusion was that he could die today or live to fight another.
“I only have…”—he had to swallow every few seconds as his mouth filled up with blood—“…a telephone number… for Crosby. No address… Only telephone calls if there’s trouble… Members arrange things themselves… We only admit them…”
“Okay, that’s a start. Write it down.”
Anderson began jotting the number down. When he had, Dorring used the phone he’d pulled out of Anderson’s pocket to dial the number. It was down as X.
“Mr. Anderson,” a man answered after a few rings.
“Darren Crosby?” Dorring said.
“Yeah. You know it is. You called me, remember—”
Dorring put the phone down and then switched it off.
“Who does he work for?” was his next question to the manager.
“Don’t know. He’s our… only contact with them… they’re underground… real underground.”
“You know where they source the girls?”
“No. He’s our only contact… Only him…”
Dorring stared at him with malevolence oozing from his cold, gray eyes. He crouched down so that they met with Anderson’s. The manager tried to turn away and Dorring grabbed him by the chin. It hurt the fractured jaw and he screamed a little.
“Look at me,” Dorring snarled, and the eyes came back and met his own, cringing under the weight of their glare. “Who killed Carter?”
Otis was glaring at the man. This very question had bugged him ever since John had visited the day before.
“Don’t… know. I wasn’t… here.”
“But surely you heard?”
“They say they found the girl… in the corner… she was crying. They called… Crosby… He came and got her… We called the police in the morning.”
“Did the girl do it?” Otis asked.
“Don’t know… Maybe.”
“If you are lying to us,” Dorring said, “we will be back. Do you have a list of clients? Men attached to the Belgravia?”
“Ye
s. It’s on… the computer…”
Dorring went to a large desk in the far corner and switched the computer on. It whirred into action and within a few seconds, the screen came alive.
“What’s the password?” he asked the manager.
“Eye of Ra.”
Dorring began entering it. Meanwhile, Otis was staring down at the manager.
“Because o’ men like you,” the old man snarled, “the world has gone to shit. Tradin’ ya morals for thirty pieces o’ silver. Fuck it!”
The secateurs were close by on the floor. Otis reached down and grabbed them. With Dorring none the wiser as he went through the desktop on the computer, Otis placed the secateurs around one of Anderson’s fingers.
“No!” the manager hissed.
“Yes,” Otis assured him.
He was about to squeeze the handle. It would be just like pruning a tree. Just the same amount of tension as a small sapling branch that needed pruning off. But as he went to do it, something odd happened.
“Fuck!” Dorring exclaimed, making Otis turn to him.
As he’d gone to enter a file with the appellation Members, the screen had suddenly changed. It filled with his own image, live footage from the webcam sitting above the monitor. It clicked and took a picture of him, before the screen went blank and the computer shut down.
Anderson began laughing. A terrible, hissing sound.
“What happened?” Otis asked, the secateurs still on the finger.
“We need to leave,” Dorring said, coming away from the computer.
“Why?”
Dorring didn’t answer. Instead, he came before Anderson, Otis letting go of the finger and coming away.
“Who just took my picture?” he asked.
Anderson stopped laughing.
“I don’t know… Honestly. I only know… what I need to. But there are people in this world that are far more powerful than you could ever imagine. And you’ve just pissed them off. Now they know you. Now they come for you.”
“I’m masked,” Dorring said. “They won’t know anything.”
“They will if your retinas have ever been placed on file.”
Dorring went cold.
“We need to leave,” he said to Otis.
“What about him?” the old man said, nodding in the direction of Anderson.
Without saying a word, Dorring took the rifle from the corner. He came back to Anderson, holding the barrel in both hands. Leaning back, he lurched forward and smashed the butt into the bridge of the manager’s nose so hard that he was knocked out.
Handing the rifle to Otis, Dorring said, “You take this and I’ll carry him to the car.”
After that, they left.
18
“It’s two sugars, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Cathy,” Barker replied, taking the cup of tea she handed over.
It was actually none now. In the last year, he’d been diagnosed with diabetes and was on medication. But two sugars in the odd tea wouldn’t hurt, and he didn’t want to make a fuss and have her pour the drink down the sink.
Cathy came and sat down in an armchair opposite him. Her auburn hair shone in the sunbeams that came into the room through a gap in the curtains. It had always been that color, but she had to dye it that way now. She was middle-aged, but he’d known her since she’d been a twenty-five year old. When he had been one too. When she’d been friends with his wife and they’d been a foursome, along with her husband John. His old partner.
John was in a bedroom in another corner of the bungalow. He was being seen to by a nurse. Something that happened a lot since he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. Barker had spoken to him about a month ago and John had informed him that his last chemotherapy and radiotherapy sessions had failed. They were offering more, but he’d turned it down. Palliative care was what he was on now. Now he would let nature take its course.
“He shouldn’t be long,” Cathy, John’s wife, said.
Barker nodded and sipped his tea. It tasted extremely sweet and he tried to recall if he’d found it so before. It’d been a year since he’d tasted real sugar. It was exceptionally sweet when compared to the chemical sweeteners he consumed nowadays.
“So how’s Betty?” Cathy asked.
“She’s fine. I’ll have to bring her down at some point.”
“Yes. How long’s it been?”
Barker had to think. “Three years, I think.”
“Blimey. That long. I guess it’s one of the pitfalls of moving so far away from London. From everyone we knew.”
“How’re you finding it out here, Cath?”
She sighed long and loud, glancing off to the empty doorway as she did.
“It’s hard,” she said. “After all this time, we still don’t know anyone ’round here.”
“But the countryside’s nice, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes. It’s beautiful. But without friends, it lacks life.”
Barker nodded and sipped more of his tea. When he lowered his mug, he went to say something, but was stopped when he heard talking in the hallway outside the door. A second or two later, a thirty-something woman with dark hair and dressed in a blue nurse's uniform was there.
Glancing into the room at Cathy, she said, “We’re all done. So I’ll be seeing you the same time next week.”
Cathy placed her tea down on a side table and got up. She went to the door and in a quiet voice asked to talk to the nurse outside. The nurse nodded and they left the house.
When they had, the yellow, gaunt face of John came to the door.
“They’re gonna have their little chat,” he said to Barker. “She’s gonna chew that poor girl’s ear off. See how I am an’ everything. Won’t believe me when I tell her.”
“She worries about you, John,” Barker said.
“Too late to worry, old pal,” John replied.
With rickety, stiff movements, John came into the lounge and took a seat opposite Barker. Leaning forward, he offered his hand. Barker took it and the sick man squeezed his fingers as hard as he could. For a moment, Barker stared at him. It was terrible how wasted John had become. He used to be athletic. Had been a keen amateur boxer. Played soccer for the same police team as Bob had. Every Sunday running around a pitch for an hour and a half. He’d been the fittest of them all. Now, he barely had a morsel of meat hanging on his bones enough to feed a rat.
“She know you’re comin’ with me?” Barker asked his old partner.
“Nah,” John replied, shaking his head. “I told her we was goin’ out for a drink.”
Barker let go of the waif hand and sat back in the chair.
“Well, we better go then,” he said.
John nodded.
At that moment, Cathy came back into the house. When she reentered the lounge, John and Barker were already standing.
“Thanks for the tea, Cath,” Barker said.
“You not staying a little longer?” she asked.
“Man wants to get to the pub,” John said. “So we better go.”
Cathy came forward and enveloped her husband in her arms, pressing her face into the nook of his neck and shoulder. John wore an embarrassed expression when he turned his eyes to Barker.
It was as though he was saying: ‘This is what it’s like to be dying. Your very appearance makes people sad because you can’t help but remind them of the fact of your ever diminishing mortality. Therefore, you are a walking reminder of their impending loss. It’s like living through your own funeral.’
19
Dorring stood in a pay phone on a bank of the River Thames. It was the fourth one he’d tried. The rest had been out of order. Two of them hadn’t even had a phone in. They merely had a set of dead wires hanging out of a hole, all around which were cards advertising various escorts. The one he stood in now stank of urine. It smelled like a drunk’s piss. Heavy in ammonia and alcohol. Almost enough to make his eyes water.
Through the dirty glass of the box stood the brown, oily waters of the
Thames, the sun glittering off it. Behind him, Otis sat in the car with the engine running.
“So you got the address for me?” Dorring asked the person on the other end of the line.
“Yeah. But first I’d like to know why you need it?” a male’s voice asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s flagged.”
“Flagged? What for?”
“I don’t know. It just says that if anyone asked about it, I’m to file a report to a secure email.”
“Whose email?”
“It doesn’t say. It’s secure and doesn’t have an exact address. Only an option on the screen. Which makes me think it’s one of yours.”
“One of mine?”
“Yeah. Government.”
The government weren’t one of his anymore, of course. But the man on the other end of the line wasn’t to know that. For all he knew, Dorring was still Agent 192. The password he’d given was still active, so there was no reason to suspect Dorring was with anyone else.
“Which department?” Dorring asked.
“Hey, man. What do I know? It’s flagged. That’s all. It doesn’t say who you have to send the message to.”
“Well, do you have to send a message?”
“Not if you don’t want me to. I can just come out of the page.”
“Then do that.”
“Cool. Okay, here’s the address attached to the mobile number you gave me. One Darren Crosby. Ninety-nine Ashburn Close, Leyton, E11 2JG.”
“Cool. Cheers.”
Dorring put the phone down and got back in the car.
“You get it?” Otis asked.
“Yes, I did.”
As he twisted the keys in the ignition, Bess began whining in the back. It was a hot day and the dog had her chin resting on the window frame, tongue hanging out and constantly panting like an engine ticking over.
“She needs to go for a little walk about,” Otis said.
“Okay,” Dorring said while checking his mirrors and swinging the car into the road. “There’s a park nearby. We’ll take her there and then go to this address.”
“Sound like a plan.”
As they drove off, a banging sound began resonating from the trunk. Like someone kicking the side and murmuring.