by Chris Thomas
‘I was squatting in it. The idiot who owns it used to leave the back open while he went around the backyard locking all the gates. I would run in when he wasn’t looking and hide among the racks. When you lot all turned up, I jumped into this big wooden crate that was lying on the floor. The screaming got too much at one point and I tried to escape but I think I knocked something over. After that, I just panicked when I saw what was going on and started throwing whatever I could find to hand. Then your big fat friends caught me and bundled me into your car.’
Alistair smiled at the side of his mouth; he was warming to this kid. For the next hour or so, they spoke as Daisy ate and drank. Daisy told him all about her escape from the house, how she had been held there and plied with alcohol and drugs, living in the woods and then ending up on the trading estate. Alistair probed more into her past, her family, how she had ended up on the streets, careful to avoid seeming as though he was simply after the gory details.
Once she realised it was unlikely that he wanted to murder her, she began to relax a little. And then it all became too much. She began sobbing; the pain and anger that she had fought so hard to suppress for the last few weeks exploded from her like a volcano of emotions. Thumping her fists on the table, she pushed the chair away, picked up the glass decanter, and launched it across the room, shattering it against the wall into a thousand pieces. After kicking the chair against the table, she sat down on the edge of the sofa with her head in her hands, crying. Alistair, who had quietly remained seated with his arms crossed whilst Daisy had her moment, looked at her for a while, slightly unsure how to deal with this creature.
‘That was a twelve hundred pound Lalique decanter, you know,’ was the best that he could muster.
‘I hate myself,’ replied Daisy, not really listening to what he said. ‘I hate them for what they did to me, but I hate myself for letting them affect me this much. I thought I was getting over it, but it’s still there. When I close my eyes at night, when I walk into an empty room or down a dark road. They’re there, inside me, eating away.’
Alistair stood up and walked over to her, handing her a white napkin with which she wiped her face.
‘You seem a lot stronger to me. Far stronger than you probably believe. Look at how far you’ve come just since you escaped that house. You have a strong will to survive. Not many people have that.’
Daisy scrunched the napkin up and held it against the side of her face. It reminded her of a small pink rag bear that she’d had as a child, something that gave her comfort amongst all the turmoil in her surroundings.
She was still struggling to make sense of this man. Compared to the people she had run from, he seemed like a saint. But she had witnessed something that she couldn’t imagine even her previous captors being capable of.
‘You remind me a lot of my sister,’ continued Alistair, as Daisy stopped crying, sniffed, and glanced up at him. ‘She had a troubled time during her teenage years. Not for the same reasons that you’ve told me about, I hasten to add. Compared to your upbringing, she practically wanted for nothing. We had nothing like this growing up, but we had a secure, loving, modest home.
‘My parents saw it as her “going off the rails” or falling in with “the wrong crowd” and they weren’t really sure what they had done to cause it. She started skipping school, dabbling in drugs. Pot and speed mainly at the beginning. But then she started living in a thoroughly squalid little squat with a bunch of other drop-outs. “Anarchists”, they called themselves. Any rally against anything and they would turn up, just to make trouble. But really they were nothing more than unemployed junkies.
‘One day, her boyfriend, off his face on some drug or another, beat her absolutely black and blue. I remember seeing her in the hospital bed, all the tubes and wires coming out of her, and how much it seemed to destroy my parents. The helplessness, the feeling of failure despite giving her nothing but love. It was made all the worse when she decided not to press charges. I went around to the squat to find the scumbag that did it, but ended up being arrested because I tried to kick the door in to gain entry. The whole hypocrisy of the situation was what angered me the most. That the law favoured these worthless members of society who are happy to break the law when it suits them, but then expect the law to protect them when they want it. This was just as I was starting out on my business ventures and I vowed then that if I ever had the means, I would start doing something about it.’
‘But you murdered someone …’
‘Who enjoyed torturing children to extort money from their parents. Who thought nothing of brutally raping young men for his own enjoyment. Who carried out the violent orders of his drug lord boss with an almost childlike glee. Anyway, we don’t see it as murdering, more punishing.’
‘But what makes you think that you can judge people?’ asked Daisy.
‘Nothing,’ replied Alistair, nonchalantly. ‘But does that make me any less qualified to judge people than those actual judges who let these people off? Look, the first episode we did of the Red Room had an audience in the low teens. But news spreads quickly nowadays and we’d struck a nerve with people. The last episode, it was in the thousands. You always hear people talk about how ‘they should bring back hanging’. Well that’s all we’re doing. We’ve brought back hanging, just updated it slightly for the twenty-first century.’
‘What if you get caught?’
‘Well that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?’ replied Alistair, with a slight glint in his eye. ‘Over the course of running this show, we’ve come to know a little about our audience. You know what type of people watch?’
‘Criminals?’ replied Daisy, with what she assumed was a fairly obvious answer.
Alistair chuckled. ‘No. Well I say no, some of them are. They seem to enjoy it actually. But mostly our audience consists of doctors, businessmen, scientists, lawyers, even the odd senior police officer or judge. And not just from this country, people tap in from all over the world to watch. Anonymously, obviously. Could you imagine the uproar if word ever got out that a senior judge was taking part in something like this? But that’s the beauty. It’s people who, on the face of it, have to play by the rules and within the boundaries of society, whilst secretly yearning for something more. We just offer them a playground in which to do so.’
Daisy stared at him blankly as he smiled back. She stood up and went back over to what was left of her drink, wiping away the last remnants of her tears. For a moment, there was silence.
‘So, what happened to your sister?’ she asked, gently.
‘She’s doing OK, thank you,’ replied Alistair. ‘We took her out of the life in which she had found herself and moved her back with my parents. Unfortunately, the strain of it all took its toll on my mother. She died about a year later from sepsis resulting from complications with her stomach ulcers. That was the wake-up call for my sister. She has her own life now and has carved quite a successful career for herself, but we are very close and like to look out for each other. Her relationship with my father is still a little rocky, but he’s coming around slowly.’
Daisy nodded in understanding, not really sure what else to say. At that moment, the silence was shattered as the large wooden doors shot open, slamming back against the wall and causing Daisy to jump and nearly drop her glass.
‘Jarvis,’ said Alistair, calmly. ‘Don’t worry about knocking, it’s fine.’
‘You need to see this,’ a bright red, sweaty Jarvis replied, ignoring the sarcasm. Seeing Daisy across the table, he motioned for Alistair to come outside. ‘It’s probably best if we do this in the hallway.’
‘OK,’ replied Alistair, rising to his feet. ‘Oh, Daisy, this is Jarvis. He is what’s known as a tech guru. Hence why the slightest amount of physical exercise lends him the appearance of an asthmatic in an iron man competition.’
Daisy smiled as the two men left the room and closed the doors behind them.
‘What is it?’ asked Alistair.
&nbs
p; ‘We had a breach in the firewall during the last episode,’ said Jarvis, pointing at a portion of the read-out.
‘How did that happen? I thought it was absolutely watertight,’ said Alistair.
‘It was. I think it may have happened when your new friend in there caused her little fracas,’ said Jarvis, looking towards the room.
Alistair stroked his goatee, contemplating. His ability to think quickly had always been his greatest strength.
‘I’m going to need to make a couple of phone calls. Gather everyone in the dining room.’
‘What about her?’
‘Make sure she stays in her room. She may be of some use to us.’
35
The phone on the arm of the settee began to vibrate, slowly shifting towards the edge before falling off the side. It continued shuffling around on the laminate flooring as the ringtone began. Joe continued staring at the television, as he had done for the last half an hour or so, the ice cube in his glass of Jack Daniels long since melted. As the strains of Eye of the Tiger mixed with the buzzing sound of the handset against the hard floor filled the room, he pulled his gaze from the empty screen and bent down to pick the phone up.
Unknown Number
He swiped the icon to the left to reject the call and placed the phone back on the arm. Returning his stare to the television, a message alert sounded. He quickly grabbed the handset, hoping it was a message from Ellie. The message preview on his home screen simply said,
You missed a call from Unknown Number
It had been nearly an hour since he had replied to Ellie’s message, begging her to come home. Her text had said that she needed to go away for a few days, clear her head. It told him in no uncertain terms not to contact her and that if he went anywhere near her parents’ house, he could forget about ever seeing her again. When she returned home, she would call him to discuss how they were going to split their belongings.
He thought back a couple of weeks. To how ordinary and boring his life was, stuck in one big rut stumbling from one weekend to another. At this precise moment in time he would give anything to go back, to slip back into that rut. Ordinarily, at about two o’clock on a Saturday he would be mowing the lawn, or coming back from the hardware store with a few shelves to put up. The rest of the day would be taken up watching the football scores come in before working out which pub he was meeting his mates in, whether Ellie was coming or if she was off out with her own friends. But at two o’clock on this particular Saturday, he was sat staring at a television screen with nothing showing, thinking about how he had messed his life up to such an extent. His head wasn’t sure whether to dwell on the fact that his fiancée had left and threatened to never see him again, or on the fact that someone was murdered in his family’s warehouse the night before.
The unknown number rang his mobile again. He picked it up and stared at it as it vibrated in his hand, his right thumb hovering over the red circle. A few seconds later he switched to the green icon and swiped it right. After all, it wasn’t as if his life could get much worse.
‘What?’ he snapped, abruptly, at the handset, switching the sound to speaker.
‘Is that Joe Henderson?’ asked the caller.
‘Yes,’ he replied, curtly.
‘Good afternoon, Mister Henderson. My name is Detective Sergeant Peter Harris from the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crimes Unit.’
Joe rubbed a sweaty palm across his face. ‘Fuck me gently,’ he muttered to himself, as he realised his life probably had just become considerably worse.
‘Excuse me?’ came the voice on the phone.
‘Nothing, sorry. What can I do for you?’
‘Well, perhaps you could tell me.’
‘Pass. No idea what you mean.’
‘Really, Mister Henderson? You have absolutely no idea why I might be ringing you?’
Joe held the phone at arm’s length, stuck his other middle finger up at the screen and mouthed an exaggerated ‘Fuck you’.
‘OK, Mister Henderson – or can I call you Joe? How about if I tell you that last night we were monitoring a webcast on the deep web called the Red Room, during which a man called Cramer McAllister was tortured and then murdered at the behest of a paying audience.’
Best option now was to keep quiet and hope this bloke went away.
‘Then what if I told you that during that transmission, something happened that allowed us brief access into their server, which subsequently let us trace their physical location to an industrial estate. Or more precisely to a warehouse on said industrial estate. More precisely still, to a warehouse owned by your family.’
Joe’s head started pounding. The abrupt man at the warehouse, Dave or Alan, he couldn’t remember which, had warned him that they would need to debrief him in case the police became involved. But they hadn’t, at least not yet. Why not? Did they know this was going to happen and it was easier just to throw him to the wolves to let him take the rap for it? After all, it wasn’t like he knew who they were and, in the heat of all the nerves and anxiety, it was unlikely that he would be able to identify or even describe them.
‘Joe?’ came the voice, after a short while.
‘I’m still here,’ he just about managed. As he waited for the voice to carry on talking, the doorbell rang. ‘For god’s sake. Look, hang on a minute.’
He dragged himself out of the sofa, gulped down the last of his bourbon, and opened the door. Stood on his porch were two men. One of the men had a phone held to his ear, and both held police badges in their outstretched arms.
‘Won’t be needing this anymore,’ said Harris, as he put the phone in his inside suit pocket. ‘Can we come in?’
Joe said nothing, but stepped aside as the two men walked past and went straight into the lounge.
‘How about you stick the kettle on, Joe? We have some very important matters to discuss, matters of such gravity that they must be accompanied by a nice cup of tea.’
A few minutes later, Joe returned to the lounge with two mugs of tea. ‘You don’t seem like you’re here to arrest me. I’ve seen TV, how come you didn’t smash my front door in with a steel battering ram?’
‘Perhaps you would like to begin with telling me how this show came to be filmed at your warehouse? You seem like a fairly normal person, certainly not the sort to be capable of pulling off what we saw last night,’ said Harris, as he flipped the top page over on his notepad.
‘Thanks, I suppose I should take that as a compliment,’ replied Joe.
The two men stared at each other. A raise of the eyebrows from Harris was sufficient for Joe to realise he was backed into a very tight, inescapable corner.
‘Alright,’ he sighed, finally breaking down. ‘It all started a couple of weeks ago when I went back to my mate’s flat after the pub and he showed me Tor. Before that, I’d only heard about it in the newspapers. The usual Daily Mail shit about how illegal immigrants are selling machine guns to children on the deep web, or something. After he showed me the first video, I felt compelled to look further into it, despite the sick stuff he showed me. Nothing, you know, dodgy with kids or anything. Eventually I stumbled across the Enter The Dark message board forum where they advertised, and something just made me do it. I can’t explain it. It was as though not knowing what it was made it more compulsive.’
‘Even though it could have been “dodgy with kids”?’ interrupted Harris.
Joe nodded. ‘I didn’t think of it like that at the time. Maybe I was just being naïve, and assumed, hoped even, that they wouldn’t be so brazen in advertising it on a message board if it was that bad.’
‘So, what did you think it would be then? Funny videos of babies falling asleep into their bowl of cereal?’ asked Harris, sarcastically.
‘No of course not. But look, it just somehow took over me. Everything about it, the mystery, the secrecy, the virtual currency. It just made me forget for a bit quite how dull my life had become.’
Joe began to sob, and the knots in his s
tomach ate away at him as the enormity of his situation sank in. It took all his effort to pull himself together and continue his account of the night when his whole world had come crashing down around him.
‘SO, just so I’m clear. You had taken part in the bidding of the previous episode, your bid failed and they essentially held you to ransom. They forced you to provide the warehouse for them to stage the episode and, now, have just let you go? Seems an awful risk for them,’ said Harris, running the pencil back over his notes.
‘They’re very persuasive, and can track my every move, know everything about me. They knew I would have too much to risk to go to the police. To be honest, I just wanted the whole thing to be over last night, so I let them get on with it. And after seeing what they were capable of, I wasn’t about to go making more trouble for myself.’
‘But you didn’t see any of them?’
‘Not really, they hooded me up and handcuffed me to a chair. The only people I saw were these big burly bouncer type blokes who, as far as I could tell from their accents, were Eastern European, and the two who came to the warehouse to set it all up. When the big car arrived, I guess the people in charge, I didn’t get to see any of them. And once it was all finished and they finally untied me, they’d more or less all disappeared.’
‘I see,’ said Harris, as he finished scribbling notes down. ‘OK, look, we could arrest you this instant. Take you down to the station, process you, and you could go to jail for a few years. But we know you’re not the brains behind this. You’re of more use to us if they think that we haven’t caught up with you. So you have a choice essentially, either—’
‘Help you or go to jail,’ interrupted Joe.
‘Exactly,’ replied Harris. ‘Although chances are you might go to jail anyway. Let’s be honest, a person was murdered on your property, with your prior knowledge. But if you help, that would stack very heavily in your favour. By heavily, I mean you would be a fool not to help us.’
Joe sucked the droplet of blood that had pooled on the side of his thumb. A message popped up on his phone sat on the coffee table, and from where he was sat he could see the preview of the reply from Ellie, simply saying ‘No’. He knew that, once again, he had very little option.