The Dungeon & Christmas With the Executioner

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  "Come again?"

  Winter tried again, with fewer syllables. "What makes you so sure?"

  "Oh, right. His footwork, mostly. If you've had any kind of training, even if you're just a brawler, you get your footwork right. If someone comes at you, you don't want to end up on the floor. If you go down, it's pretty much all over. So you keep your stance wide, knees bent. You do it without thinking. When I went for this guy, he froze. His feet didn't move. No way you can fake that. He was bloody hopeless. I could have taken him on my own, pissed, with both hands tied behind my back."

  "Thank you. I'll be in touch."

  Interesting.

  Winter returned to the waiting call.

  "Apologies, John. You were saying?"

  If Strickland was irritated by Winter keeping him waiting, his tone didn't betray it.

  "I found a perfect match for the physical description you gave me. Similar M.O., too. Remember that urban myth doing the rounds about a monster chucking people off the top of a bus? Turns out it's based on a real incident. The victims were Reaperz Crew boys. I found one of them."

  Winter grunted. The Reaperz Crew were the biggest gang in east London. They'd kept their drug business confined to a handful of postcodes around Walthamstow, but they were big enough to be on his radar. Not big enough to be a concern. Not yet.

  "Bring him in tomorrow, John. We'll have a chat." The tiniest hesitation from Strickland. Winter realised it had sounded too much like an order. "I assume that's what you were calling to suggest?"

  "Of course. Is the dungeon free?"

  Winter looked out at the lake. Its surface was mirror calm now. Twenty feet down, Doctor Chandra, diving weights hooked onto his body, was beginning the slow process of transformation from human being to fish food.

  "Yes. It's free."

  Chapter Four

  Bedlam Boy snapped awake in the darkness of Tom's room. He rolled off the bed and stripped naked. The curtains of the tiny attic room were open, and the moonlight revealed his silver, grey, and dark blue body reflected in the long mirror on the cupboard door.

  His injuries were superficial. The ribs looked the worst, but they weren't broken. His lip was split, and an ugly bruise shaded his left cheek. Legs, arms, shoulders, and back were scuffed, grazed, and sore. Another twenty-four hours and his body would be a patchwork of bruises.

  The first aid kit in the bathroom yielded a bandage roll. He bound his ribs. They'd heal faster without the binding, but, for tonight, he didn't want the pain to distract him from his work.

  He got dressed again, putting on a hooded sweatshirt under the jacket, adding a black fleece neck warmer. After lacing up his running shoes, he pulled out the wallet he had lifted from his attacker's jacket pocket. Cash, credit cards, gym membership, a coffee shop loyalty card. No address, but enough information to get one.

  He descended the stairs without a sound. The first time he had climbed them, he had noted every squeak, and he knew which steps to avoid. He ducked into his landlady's bedroom. Her snores continued as he walked across to her dressing table. He found what he needed and retraced his steps.

  Outside, the Boy jogged to the high street. He kept his pace slow, wanting to warm his damaged muscles.

  1:20 a.m. The internet cafe was quiet. A couple of gamers with headsets trading insults with their virtual opponents. The Boy paid for thirty minutes and sat at the back.

  Tom Lewis didn't own a smart phone. His Nokia could make calls and send and receive texts. Not that he could read them. But the rubber case that protected it was a custom job. Bedlam Boy used his thumbnail to peel the back of the case away, revealing a USB drive in a tiny compartment.

  The drive re-booted the PC with Bedlam Boy's custom Linux operating system, running anonymous browsing software.

  The wallet had two bank cards, which helped narrow the search. The name, Mark Adams, was so common he assumed it was fake, but triangulating bank locations with the gym membership gave the Boy three addresses in Twickenham. The first was a children's entertainer, and his face was all over social media. The third was eighty-three years old.

  The second Mark Adams was notable for his lack of internet presence, and his bank was among those hacked three years earlier. Everyone changed their passwords as advised, but not so many moved house.

  Address memorised, the Boy logged off, leaving the cafe's computer free of any evidence he'd been there.

  It was three miles to St Margarets, where Mr Adams lived. He set off, hood up, jogging at an easy pace.

  Mark Adams and his twin were, Bedlam Boy concluded, likely just cheap muscle with no formal connections to Winter. But he didn't doubt for a second that the crime boss had sent them. With Marty and Rhoda dead, and after the personal threat on the recording he sent to Winter, it was a question of when, not if, Winter would find Tom Lewis. There were weak points in any plan, even one as carefully constructed as the Boy's. The next stage was crucial, and events had to follow the correct pattern for him to triumph. If Winter deviated too far from his predicted behaviour, if the potential exposure of the incriminating recording wasn't enough leverage, then Bedlam Boy's entire existence would be for nothing. Everything hung in the balance. For once, his lips didn't twitch with a smile.

  When he reached Adams’ street, the Boy jogged down it without pausing, looking both ways. Adams lived in a mid-terrace house. Bedlam Boy turned right at the end of the road. The back gardens led down to a footpath, then onto allotments.

  Two streets away, a skip full of bricks and rubble stood in front of a scaffolded house. The Boy picked up three bricks, tucking one under his arm, then jogged back.

  Nothing moved on the street apart from a fox, which looked at the interloper with a frank, open curiosity. It followed, watching from a distance when the hooded man stopped in front of a house, placed one brick on a low wall, and pulled his arm back. The fox didn't move until the first window exploded, the crash of breaking glass sending it scurrying back to the allotments. The second and third crashes followed the first in the time it takes to draw a breath.

  The Boy was running before the third brick reached its target. He sprinted to the end of the street, turning left this time. Halfway up the parallel terrace, he turned left again, entering the narrow alleyway he'd noted on his first pass of the street. A wheelie bin at the far end provided ample cover. He sat behind it and waited, watching the houses opposite.

  The door of the first house was open. A woman in a thick towelling dressing gown stood in the garden, looking at her broken window. She was on the phone. As Bedlam Boy nudged the wheelie bin forward to get a better view, the door of the third house opened, and two men came out, one cradling a pug. While one hung back, checking the shattered window, the man with the pug walked over to his neighbour. They were too far away for the Boy to hear their conversation. The middle house's door remained shut.

  A handful of residents were on the street to discuss the incident, but most had drifted back inside by the time the police arrived, twenty-five minutes after the Boy lobbed the first brick.

  The police officers inspected the damage and took notes. Three minutes after arriving, the female officer knocked on the door of the middle house. The hall light came on, and when the door opened, the Boy recognised one of the men who'd attacked Tom. Tall, barefoot and bare-chested, saying very little, looking past the police officer to scan the street.

  "Hello, Mark Adams," the Boy whispered, then ran back down the alleyway and onto the parallel street, taking a roundabout route back to the terrace to make sure he wasn't spotted.

  He approached the back of the houses through the allotment, climbing the fence and dropping into the small paved yard. At the back door, he listened, his ear pressed up against the keyhole. Adams was still talking to the police officer. Good.

  Any burglar knows that back doors are generally not as secure as front doors. Strange, really, since front doors are generally overlooked by the neighbours, so it would be a bold thief who tried to break in tha
t way. Adams's back door was solid enough, but the lock was a simple pin cylinder.

  The Boy reached into his pocket and brought out the hairpins he had borrowed from his landlady's bedroom. He poked the key out of the lock, hearing it hit the mat. The lock clicked open seventeen seconds later. Once inside, he replaced the key and locked the door.

  He breathed in deeply. No pets. Curry for dinner, something with fresh green chillies. One plate in the sink. Three empty beer bottles on the side. Adams lived alone.

  The kitchen door was open an inch. The Boy put his eye up to the gap. At the end of the hall, the front door was shut, but on the latch. Adams was talking to the police officer in front of the broken window.

  Bedlam Boy moved through the hall and up the stairs like a shadow. He went straight to the bedroom, took a pillow case, then went quickly from room to room, removing every lightbulb before placing them carefully inside.

  Back in the bedroom, he put the pillow case on the floor and used his heel to break the glass bulbs. He tipped them out onto the polished floorboards, then stood behind the door and waited.

  The conversations outside stopped and the front door latch snapped back into place as Adams came back in.

  The Boy melted into the darkness, his heart rate slowing. He had learned to detect the presence of another human being nearby through non-visual clues, but the ability was a rare one. He doubted Adams would even register his scent, as subtle as it was. But a stray movement, however tiny, might alert his attacker to the presence of a stranger in his house. Bedlam Boy's pulse dropped steadily, and he relaxed into utter stillness, his stance a variant of Tai Chi's mountain.

  Click. Adams's footsteps on the stairs stopped when the landing light didn't come on. He waited. He was, the Boy knew, thinking and listening. The footsteps retreated. Good. It meant he was checking the back door. When he found it locked, it would allay his suspicions.

  Sure enough, the footsteps returned a minute later. At the top of the stairs, he hesitated before coming towards the bedroom. The Boy maintained a state of relaxed readiness.

  The bedroom light clicked. When nothing happened, Adams went across the hall to the bathroom and tried that. He was cautious and thorough. Maybe further up the hierarchy than a basic thug. If none of the upstairs lights were working, a blown fuse was the obvious culprit. Check now, or wait until morning. If the former, and if the fuse box was downstairs, Bedlam Boy would follow. The latter would be more fun, though.

  It was the latter.

  Adams took two steps into the bedroom. His right foot, with all his weight on it, landed on a jagged broken bulb, sending a shard of glass two inches into the flesh of the arch. The shock and pain made him lurch sideways, and his left foot stamped heel-first into more glass, puncturing the skin in multiple places.

  His momentum took him forward, so Adams tried a kind of crippled hop, hoping he could leap clear of the lethal carpet. He was off balance when the Boy broke his jaw with the small truncheon he had taken from the jacket hanging behind the door.

  Adams spun, hit the wall, and came down on his left side, landing on the shattered glass. His instinctive gasp turned into a groan of pain as the movement caused the broken bones of his jaw to grind together.

  "Don't pass out," said the Boy, stepping out the darkness. He grabbed Adams's wrist and dragged him out of the glass, causing hundreds of fresh lacerations. Adams looked up at him in fear. He knew he had lost this fight before it had even begun. The Boy wondered how much he could see in the darkness as a hooded man, a scarf over the lower half of his face, bent over him.

  The Boy tossed Adams's wallet onto the floor. "You attacked the wrong man. Do me a favour. Please pass on the following message to your brother."

  The Twins' assault on Tom Lewis left no injuries requiring hospitalisation. The Boy had no such inhibitions. He broke three of Adams's ribs, shattered his left hip, and continued raining damage onto that leg until certain his enemy would never walk without a stick.

  He picked up the beside phone, dialled 999, and requested an ambulance.

  "Yes. I'm calling on behalf of Mark Adams. He and his brother are violent criminals. I've just done the local community a favour and beaten the living shit out of him. Multiple fractures, some deep lacerations and a broken jaw. Concussion too, I'd imagine. If you could send someone over. No hurry, as he really is a piece of lowlife scum. Thank you."

  He gave them the address, stepped over the whimpering Adams, and left.

  It was still dark when he got to Hounslow. He ducked into an alleyway close to home, unwound the bandage from his ribs and threw it away.

  In his room, he changed back into Tom's work clothes and lay on the bed. The success of all his plans might come down to what happened in the next twenty-four hours.

  He had made his play. Now it was Winter's move.

  The call came at lunchtime the next day. Winter was watching an investment programme. The stock market rose or fell depending on the fear and greed of shareholders. In another, more boring, life, he believed he might well have prospered as a trader, given his ability to manipulate those emotions.

  His phone rattled on the desk. The Twins.

  "Yes?"

  "Mark's in hospital. He was attacked last night. In his house."

  Mark? Winter was blank for a moment. It was the first time he'd heard a first name.

  "Who did it?"

  "He doesn't know. But he lost his wallet when we beat up the bald guy yesterday. And whoever attacked him returned it. Warned us off."

  "The same man?"

  "Can't be. I told you, he was bloody hopeless. But this bastard, whoever he is, knows him. His mate or something. And he destroyed Mark. His leg is completely busted up. Why didn't you tell us about this other guy? My brother's in a bloody hospital bed, they're about to operate, and—"

  "Don't forget who you're speaking to." Winter's voice was calm. The Twin stopped talking for a few seconds.

  "I'm sorry, sir. It's just, my brother… the shock. They say he'll need metal plates and rods. This guy took him apart."

  Winter rang off. Interesting. It seemed Tom Lewis, if that was who they'd found, had a protector. Either that, or his personality was one big fake, and he was a dangerous killer out for revenge. No matter. It would be easy enough to find out which.

  He messaged Strickland on the encrypted app they used.

  Once you've brought in the eyewitness, I have another job for you. Irene Lewis's boy is alive. I'll give you the details when I see you.

  Time to find out who they were dealing with.

  Chapter Five

  Detective Inspector Debbie Capelli, long divorced from a philandering Italian she'd met at a multi-car pileup in Croydon, broke her husband's nose but kept his surname. Her maiden name was Smith. Debbie Smith evoked beige walls, sensible shoes, weak tea, and not getting ideas above your station. Debbie Capelli was different; a mix of exotic and silly. She could have a guest-starring role in a daytime soap, a brief spell in the charts with a breezy, upbeat summer hit, or, as ex-colleagues sometimes pointed out, her own page on Pornhub. Debbie Capelli was dangerous, exciting, unpredictable. Debbie Smith kept her favourite recipes in a folder, sliding each one into a clear plastic pocket to stop it getting stained.

  The truth was, Debbie conceded, slowing her Fiat on Fulham High Street, ready to dive into any available parking space, her surname had become a lie. Or, at the very least, false advertising. Her life was more Smith than Capelli. Thirty-three years in the police, and her only car chase had ended as soon as it started. The Ford Mondeo belonging to a crackhead drug dealer rolled to a stop three seconds after he stamped on the accelerator. He'd forgotten to fill the tank. West London police work didn't live up to Luther. It didn't even live up to Juliet Bravo. As for the recipes, she'd started her own folder two decades ago.

  She found a parking space on a side street near Putney Bridge. Tom Lewis's file was in the glove compartment. Debbie knew the contents of the file backwards, but she scanne
d it again anyway. His case was the only one in her career where she'd failed to maintain a professional distance. She'd long since given up trying. When she saw the picture of twelve-year-old Tom, smiling at the camera alongside his dad, both holding ice creams, the familiar maternal instinct kicked in. Childless herself, she supposed it was inevitable she would bond with the boy who had nothing, not even his memories. His case was the only reason she didn't want to retire when the option came up in four years' time. While Robert Winter walked free, she owed Tom Lewis.

  Tom entered the witness protection programme over nineteen years ago. When he was transferred to a private hospital, it was Debbie who announced his death to stop Winter coming back to finish the job. Everyone knew it was Winter. Trouble had been brewing for months, although most of the organised crime team would have put money on Winter losing that particular fight.

  Debbie was on duty the night of the Richmond attack, arriving behind the fire engines, the heat pulsing at her face like a living thing. The ambulance crew watched with her. No one expected survivors. They stood talking in emergency service demarcated groups, with no sense of hurry; just a depressed air of resignation accompanied by the usual black humour.

  As dawn broke, the chief fire officer waved the two paramedics forward. The forensic team waited, ready to photograph any charred remains before sifting through the rubble, categorising the evidence.

  It took the paramedics a few minutes to identify two shapes among the twisted, blackened, smoking remains as human. The wind changed direction at one point, and Debbie suspected that led the paramedics to the corpses. She still couldn't eat at barbecues.

  The paramedics called the forensic team over once the smouldering husks had been officially declared dead. The first paramedic returned to the ambulance while her colleague lit a cigarette and strolled around the edge of the garden. Before joining the police, Debbie wondered why so many health professionals smoked. It didn't take long to realise that being surrounded by pain and death produced a fatalistic attitude in those who stuck it out. They met Death every day, and justice or compassion didn't feature on his agenda. On a typical shift, they shut the eyes of a ninety-year-old who died in her sleep, then did the same for a three-year-old run over outside his house. Each cigarette said, I know you're coming, but up yours, sunshine.