We drove.
Fast but not that fast. There was little traffic around at this time of night, but the driver kept below the speed limit, like a good criminal should. Then we seemed to go slower and I thought we must be moving into town rather than driving out of it. There was no opening up on a motorway, only slowing down to an inner-city crawl.
Then we were on rough terrain, bumping over uneven surfaces, and going down.
The transit van stopped.
We had reached our destination.
The razor blade was drawn across my eyelid. I felt a sharp sting of pain and I cursed as a dribble of blood ran down my face like a teardrop.
‘Be a good little pig and you can die with both of your eyes,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be on YouTube with your eyes hanging out, do you?’ He laughed. ‘Your daughter wouldn’t want to watch that for the rest of her life, would she?’
The driver opened the back door. And then he didn’t speak any more.
They helped me out into an abandoned underground car park. No, not abandoned. Unfinished. That was why there were no vehicles. This place was still being built.
There were junk-food cartons and empty cans littered around, the refuse of builders working underground in the summer heat. I thought of Tara Jones and her belief that major building work was happening near to the kill site.
Three masked faces stared at me for a moment and then turned away. The big one was behind me. A meaty hand shoved me in the back and I felt his breath as he walked behind me across the empty car park.
It was massive. Shopping mall? Office block? Luxury apartments? The three figures in front of me moved quickly and the big man behind gave me a casual crack across the back of my head whenever I seemed to slow my pace. He still held the razor blade between the thumb and index finger of his right hand and whenever he hit me, I felt the blade randomly slash through hair and skin.
We came to a dimly lit staircase and started down. At the bottom – two storeys down? – we entered a broad, low-ceilinged tunnel. We were in total darkness now. But they knew where they were going. Then we were crossing uneven floor surfaces towards distant lights.
Machinery. Noise. I caught a glimpse of it.
It was a boiler room.
We walked past it and came to a door. The door was unlocked and we passed inside. We went down some more steps and came to a short, strange corridor that was like something from a dream.
We moved down it in slow single file.
And I could not believe what I was seeing.
The walls and ceiling came closer with every step.
I tried to clear my head. I thought my nerve endings were still rattled from the CEW.
But it was real.
The corridor really did become smaller. The ceiling really did get lower. By the time we reached the end we had to press our hands against our sides and lower our heads.
There was a room at the end of the corridor.
And my heart fell away. For I knew this room.
I saw the white tiles stained green and yellow by a century of weather and neglect. And choked down the sickness when I saw the kitchen step stool where they had stood Mahmud Irani, Hector Welles and Darren Donovan.
The room radiated pure evil.
The sharp red light of someone’s smart phone was aiming at my face. From behind me the big man took my hands and I heard the jangle of the handcuffs. Finally they were taking full physical control. He was about to secure my hands behind my back so that I would hang quietly.
‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’ he asked me.
And I fought for my life.
I dragged the heel of my right shoe from his kneecap to his ankle, feeling the skin peel away beneath his trousers, hearing him shriek with sudden agony, the handcuffs clattering to the ground.
Then the others were all on me, aiming wild, random punches that caught me on the ear and in the shoulder and did nothing, but one of them knew how to kick because I felt the air whoosh out of me as the toe of a shoe caught me just below the lowest rib and then in the soft spot low on my temple.
It was enough to put me on my knees.
The big man fell on me and grasped me in a headlock, cursing me, his breath sour against my face. The red light had fallen away. They were not filming me now.
‘Fucking pig! Fucking bastard!’
It was a good headlock. I could not move my arms or my legs or my feet. So I pressed my mouth against his face and sank my teeth into his cheek, biting through the Nomex face mask and into his flesh.
He howled and tried to stand up as I held on like a dog with a dying rat. But I was weakened and breathless and sickened by those two kicks and the others pulled me off him.
I felt the noose drop over my head.
They lifted me up, not bothering with the handcuffs now, as they half-dragged and half-pushed me onto the stool, planning to do me as they had done Hector Welles, and I could see him before me now, his unsecured hands still tearing the flesh from his throat with his dying breath, clawing so hard that his fingernails were torn out and buried in his neck.
I screamed with rage and terror.
But I was exhausted.
Then I was standing on the kitchen step stool and my fingers were ripping at the rope around my neck. I looked up and saw that one of them had passed the rope over an ancient pipe that crossed the stained ceiling of that forgotten room. The masked faces were all looking at me, the big figure touching the torn Nomex face mask where it was stained with his blood.
Someone was trying to kick the stool away.
Two of them were shouting at each other.
‘Do you know why—’
‘Just do it!’
The stool flew away and suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet and the rope around my neck was strangling me. My eyes rolled into the back of my head and my fingers tore at the tightening rope for a second that seemed to last for a thousand years. In that never-ending moment I felt my head tip grotesquely to one side as the rope angled towards the knot and I could feel my body weight killing me.
The blood stopped flowing to my brain.
The air stopped flowing to my lungs.
I knew that I was dying.
I saw nothing.
I stared at the ceiling and I didn’t see it.
I looked up at the rope and I didn’t see it.
There was only the sensation of strangulation as my hands tore at the rope around my neck.
My hands fell away from my throat. My legs kicked and flayed, and I had nothing in me to stop them, and I felt myself on the very edge of the blackness that lasts forever, and it felt as sweet and welcome as home.
But then I reached behind me, my fingers scrambling under the back of my polo shirt, clawing at the base of my spine.
And I felt the plastic grip of the Glock 17.
Then it was in my right hand and I was pointing it at the ceiling, pulling the trigger, the crack of gunfire deafening in that confined place, then pulling the trigger again as fast as I could. I was aware of their screams and shouts but I kept pulling the trigger, trying to break the rope that was killing me, and then the sounds seemed to be coming from underwater and then I heard nothing, nothing at all, just an unbroken ringing in my ears as my heart surged with desperation when I realised that it had not worked.
I was still hanging.
The secret room turned red.
The blood flow to my brain had stopped and that blocked dam of blood seemed to be filling the room.
I closed my eyes.
My hand fell to my side. My fingers were opening, my friend’s gun was slipping from my hand and the unbroken blackness was all I wanted now. I felt the full kilo of polymer and steel in my hand. Someone was trying to prise it from my grasp. I lashed out at them with my foot.
Then something happened in my ears.