The Redemption Factory

by Sam Millar

  THE REDEMPTION FACTORY

  SAM MILLAR

  I dedicate The Redemption Factory to Brian, Liz and the “boys”, Jamsey, Ruari and Pearce.

  A great family, and even greater friends

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE MEAT IN ALL ITS BLOODY GLORY

  CHAPTER TWO DREAMS OF DARKNESS AND DELICIOUS DEATH

  CHAPTER THREE LUCKY

  CHAPTER FOUR A TASTE OF HIS OWN MEDICINE

  CHAPTER FIVE FAMILY IN THE BLOOD

  CHAPTER SIX STRANGE ENCOUNTERS, SOON TO BE FAMILIAR

  CHAPTER SEVEN BOXED IN BOXING CLEVER

  CHAPTER EIGHT A DARKNESS OF MINDS SEARCHING FOR LIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE GOING TO MEET THE MAN

  CHAPTER TEN THE HUNTER IN THE FOREST

  CHAPTER ELEVEN WHISPERS NEVER FADE

  CHAPTER TWELVE A SECRET SHOULD REMAIN JUST THAT

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN DANCE WITH ME, ONE LAST TIME

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN TWISTED SISTER? PUSSY CAT?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY, DON’T IT?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN TIDYING UP ALL LOOSE ENDS

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN QUIXOTE AND SANCHO

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN A STRANGE MIX OF PEOPLE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN A LITTLE BIT OF READING GOES A LONG WAY

  CHAPTER TWENTY A MEETING OF BATTERED SOULS

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  “From the one crime, recognise them all as culprits.”

  Virgil, Aeneid bk. 2, 1. 65

  “When a man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”

  George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

  THE OLD COTTAGE resembled a great boat that had barely cheated the storm. An outsider would laugh at its status, especially if told it were now a prison. But this was as much a prison of the mind as of the body: a psychological conundrum that told the sole prisoner lingering there that if he attempted to escape it would prove his guilt – if, that is, his former comrades hadn’t already determined it.

  The tide had left the shore and the smell drifting into the cottage was strong, like bleach mingling with burnt salt. It entered through the torn structure of the cottage, making its presence felt uninvitingly. There were other smells inside the confines of the cottage; of dried sweat, excrement and urine challenging the uninvited smell, competing for second place. Only one odour reigned supreme, gaining in strength as time elapsed: the copper odour of fear …

  The prisoner was naked, covered only in shadows, dirt and angry purple welts. His wrists were purple stigmata caused by the ‘strappado’ technique – a torture favoured by South American dictators in which a prisoner is left suspended from an overhanging with handcuffs until they slice deeply into the wrists.

  The floorboards where he rested, rose and dipped in an irregular wave, de-crucified by time and wear. A decapitated statue lay languishing in a corner, mottled with age and dung. Webs of silky dust covered a village of cigarette butts and lips of blue-moulded bread crusts.

  Cold bit at him, right down to his marrow, making him shake, making him wonder if this was what they were trying to do, freeze him to death?

  Abruptly, his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of feet on shells. The sound had a thickness to it, muffled, and he knew it was his captors with their wet, sand-covered boots.

  The door squeaked open and a sliver of light bleached his eyes, stinging them wet. He could feel the dampness of his bones being touched by the light, a little tongue licking at his skin.

  “Eat,” said a gruff voice and he felt a plate touch his exposed feet.

  The meagre meals had come intermittently, disorientating, consisting of the same grey and brown greasy matter, making it impossible to distinguish between breakfast and supper. This was deliberate: no concept of time turned hours to days, days to weeks …

  Only the ugly stubble on his face acted as a calendar, keeping him semi-sane.

  Ask them, said the voice in his head. Ask them.

  He despised the tormenting voice. He simply wanted to be left alone. Had he not been tortured enough?

  Ask them …

  “Can you tell me what’s happening? What the decision is?” He didn’t recognise the raw croak, the Judas sound that revealed his desperation.

  The captors, their faces concealed behind masks, ignored the questions, allowing the silence to become heavier, more poignant.

  Silence. Of course, thought the prisoner, and he almost smiled. He knew, from experience, that a perfect measure of silence had the potent power to be as ruthless and as terrifying as the actuality. It instilled fear, but so subtle you hardly realised it, until it was too late, touching you right on the shoulder.

  One of the captors housed a shotgun on the crank of his elbow, cradling it affectionately like a sleeping child. The prisoner remembered the first time he saw the ugly weapon speckled with tiny freckles of rust that teased out the metal into an uneven surface. Wire wool attached itself to the gaping entrance of the barrel and it reassured him, the gun’s condition. Neglect meant disuse. It was there to scare, subdue. Nothing else.

  Only when he realised that it was neither rust nor wire, but blood and hair did the full horror of his situation sink in.

  “You should be resting,” said one of the captors, finally breaking the silence.

  The balance of words sounded innocuous, almost caring. But the prisoner knew they were slippery and evil, like a snail captured in the sun.

  The door closed, chasing out the light. He listened to the footsteps fading, hoping never to hear them again, knowing he would. Soon …

  The morning moved on, though in the prisoner’s head he found it impossible to distinguish.

  He could hear the dense sound of gulls and the muffled sound of a car, thin in the background. It was raining outside and he listened intently to the fierceness of the rain and tried to picture its needles of porcupine quills battering the sandy ground.

  It was music, an oratorical salvation sent to save him, lift his spirits and it made him wonder if, perhaps, God did exist, after all.

  But the rain and music faded just as the boots treaded their way towards the door, their silent noise lurching his stomach.

  The fear that had slipped a few hours ago, returned, thicker, resting on his chest, affecting his breathing. There was a taste in his mouth, a distinct taste of watered metal, like a dentist drill. Only when he spat it out did he realise he was bleeding.

  Good old reliable ulcer, he thought with bitterness. I was wondering when you would show your ugly head …

  The aroma of bacon and eggs ghosted its way into the room. It was the most beautiful smell he had ever smelt and his belly growled with anticipation. But quickly the voices came back to torment. A good meal? You know what that means …

  A captor placed the food on the floor, before backing away, into the dark. The other one – the one normally carrying the ugly shotgun – remained, watching. The shotgun was gone, replaced by a revolver.

  “Why are you doing this to me? What have I done?” asked the prisoner.

  Both captors remained silent, unmoving in the fading light, like foxes hiding in the dark, shrewd and calculating.

  “At least allow me to look you in the eye, see your faces.” Anger was building in the naked man, an emotional release. It felt good to be human again, to hear his real voice, not some cardboard echo of it. If they wanted him to grovel, cry, they would be disappointed. Bitterly so. “Are you so ashamed of what you’re about to do that you can’t look me in the eyes?”

  For the first time that evening, one of the
captors spoke, his voice slightly muffled.

  “You’re the one who should be ashamed. Not us. You betrayed us, our ideals – everything we fought and died for, by judiciously passing information to the enemy.

  I hope it was worth it, all the money?”

  “That’s a lie! I never betrayed anyone in my life. I swear on my family’s –”

  “Save your swearing. It’ll do you no good – not with us. We’ve listened to your taped confession and the evidence against you. It was compelling. You set-up three of our men to be ambushed and murdered. They weren’t permitted to swear on family lives. Why should you? Now, suddenly faced with justice, you recant?”

  “Look at me! Look at my body, humiliated, covered in cigarette burns, my wrists torn and shattered. Even if I said I betrayed anyone, I was tortured into it. Those weren’t my words on the tape. They were the screams of a man being tortured, a wounded animal screaming for mercy. Admit it, wouldn’t you have said the same lies if you were tortured? Sleep deprivation for days on end? And don’t you find it a little perverse that we utilise the same torture methods we quickly condemn our enemies for? Such fucking hypocrites!”

  “Eat your meal,” said the captor, ignoring the questions.

  “You eat it,” taunted the prisoner. “Go on, prove you believe what they said about me. Eat with a good conscience. Let me see you swallow it, just like you’re swallowing the lies.”

  The captor walked to the back of the room and looked out the window. He seemed to be studying the incoming waves, their slow movement of formless curls.

  “Go on,” goaded the prisoner, encouraged by his captor’s silence. “Eat, drink and be merry with murder. Hopefully, the taste will always remind you of me …”

  One of the captors glanced at his watch. “You’ve less than 15 minutes. You should be making peace with God.”

  “God? Ha! Fuck all the gods – and fuck you, too! Remove your mask, you spineless bastards. Petrified I might come back and haunt you if I see your cowardly faces? Ha! That’s it, isn’t it, you pieces of shit?”

  The captors walked towards the prisoner, slowly removing his mask, allowing the feeble light to expose his features.

  “Take a good long look. Satisfy yourself, because this is the last face you will ever see again on this earth …”

  It had been almost a week since the captor uttered those prophetic words, but as he sat and listened to the tape again, his belief in the man’s guilt was no longer resolute. Truth be told, his belief in a few things had come under scrutiny lately, creating a residual scepticism totally alien before now. He was beginning to believe things he knew weren’t healthy to believe.

  He had listened to numerous taped confessions before, of other traitors and informants begging for mercy, asking for forgiveness for their dirty deeds; but there was something in this dead man’s voice, echoing eerily back from the tape’s grave, that began to gnaw annoyingly in his ear.

  No. A million times no. I did not – arghhhhhhhhhhhhh … bastards!

  Silence. A few seconds of silence. The captor knew that those few seconds could be days in real time; time to soften the prisoner up, get him to say what they wanted to hear: ventriloquism in the extreme …

  He clicked the tape off, pondering his next – if any – move. It was risky, having a copy of the original tape. Doctored copies had been make specifically for the ears of certain journalist and media outlets. They would hear the man confessing his sins, and how professional his interrogators had been. The interrogators’ voices would be calm, human and almost sympathetic. The prisoner’s voice would sound shaky, hesitant; a man avoiding the truth with a million lies in his head, his words stumbling like blocks of wood from his lying mouth.

  Of course, very few ever got to hear the official tape, the one with the screams and denials. This would be kept for future interrogators, learning new methods, deciding what worked, what didn’t.

  No. The sanitised version was for public consumption; the darker, more telling tape would be archived for the selected few, for the hierarchy.

  It should have been destroyed, by now. He had been foolish in keeping it – if only for a few days; if only to ease his conscience …

  From a crumbled cigarette box, he produced a cig and placed it in his mouth. The unlit tobacco tasted tired, putrid as the flame engulfed it. Everything seemed to have the same decaying taste, of late. He studied the lighter’s flame, then reached for the tape, bringing the two closer. He watched as the quivering flame from the lighter transformed into a tongue. He waited for it to speak …

  CHAPTER ONE

  MEAT IN ALL ITS BLOODY GLORY

  “I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”

  Leonardo da Vinci

  “For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”

  Pythagoras

  PAUL GOODMAN FELT like a condemned man while walking across the sodden grass leading towards the abattoir. A rosary of knots clung to his stomach, tightening at each step he took. Rain and cold nipped wickedly against his skin, stinging it. An involuntary shiver touched his spine and bowels, caused not by the weather, but by the thought that within a matter of minutes, he would be inside the building; inside the huge belly of the beast.

  The abattoir was located near Flaxman’s Row, the so-called industrial area beside an abandoned train station where dilapidated carriages sat glued together with rust and age. The dark, brooding weather matched his mood as he prepared himself for whatever lurked before him …

  Outside the abattoir’s gate, he gazed over the building. It was a mammoth, nondescript grey cement structure, a place covered in soot – darkened stones begging to be demolished.

  Dove-grey smoke drifted upward from a massive chimney stifling the air and veiling the sky, like a ghost, formless yet controlled, as if the building was a living being, breathing steam.

  There was something deceptively quiet and intimidating about the place, something eerily unsettling because it carried no direction of either sound or presence, like a delightful calmness, haunting, yet chillingly causing the hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end.

  Paul steeled himself, unconvincingly, as he walked, trying to settle his stomach with deep breaths, before making his way cautiously to the enormous main gate with its mural of strange, biblical-looking characters.

  Each character seemed possessed with exaggerated muscular form of impossibly precise features mixing with harmony and attributes.

  “Very nice,” whispered Paul mockingly. An inscription beneath the mural read House Of Redemption. “Creepy. What a place …”

  Seconds later, he entered a makeshift office housed by a flea-market table and two battered chairs. The walls, once an enthusiastic blue, were now tired and defeated with only a few drab flakes of paint still visible. Thick films of dust settled on shelves of unread books, most of which appeared to be about butchering.

  The place reeked of confinement mingling with a suffocating odour of dead carpet, neglected body odour and the urine stench of flowers left in water too long – a smell normally associated with churches. It made him wonder how any human being could voluntary cope with such stench. More importantly, how the hell would he manage, if he got the job? He didn’t want the job; he needed it.

  An unruly pool of shadows lounged in the room as light splintered in from a cracked window resting on the face of an unhealthy looking young woman – who was about the same age as Paul – occupying one of the chairs, varnishing her fingernails. So skinny, she resembled a stick insect. Her head was enlarged, disproportionately, and drooped burdensomely on her skinny frame, like an over-sized daffodil. Tiny bald spots speckled through her thin, greasy hair and Paul noticed a scant line of discoloration where hair had recently been removed.

  Her skin was stony-white and moist
with perspiration, like the sheen of patent leather. There was something terribly weird about the texture of the skin, though not by the multitude of tiny pinhole-dots mapping her face – presumably destroyed by acne – but by the reflective gleam of light sporadically released from it, reflecting like miniature rhinestones nesting there. For a brief, terrible second, it made Paul think of his mother’s skin, how it always glistened in the morning sunlight as the alcohol rose to the surface, seeping through her pores …

  “What d’ya want?” asked the young woman who, not bothering to glance in Paul’s direction, continued on her fingernails, seemingly fascinated by them. A faint odour, like a residue of hospital, of medicines and disinfectant and illness, oozed from an opening in her shirt. Each time she moved, the odour became sharper. It was an odd smell, and made him uncomfortable, gripping him with the feelings of his first day at school, the loneliness which had engulfed him in that imposing place, the shame and humiliation upon realizing he had wet his pants in his anxiety. A simple shame; but a shame that would remain forever.

  Paul found the young woman loathsome, but cleared his throat, as if dislodging phlegm would ease the tension with one good cough. “I’ve come for a job. I was told there was one up for grabs.”

  “Yea? Who told you that?” She had yet to look at Paul.

  “Stevie Foster. Told me on Thursday that there was a –”

  “That weasel never told the truth in his life,” she interrupted, still not looking in his direction. Her shrill voice was coiled with resentment and smothered anger. “Told me he had a two-pound dick.”

  Paul didn’t know if he should laugh or continue with the conversation. His nerves got the better of him. “No one has a dick that heavy. It would be massive.” He began to laugh nervously.

  “Weight? Who said anything about weight? Oh, he has a two-pound dick. His problem is that it’s the size of a two-pound coin,” she replied, not missing a beat. “Stevie’s problem is that he can’t keep a secret or lie convincingly.”