by Johnny Mains
The girl processed the information for a while, then laughed. Adara rolled her eyes, while Shakil explained to Maddy that his name meant ‘sexy’ in Arabic. Adara caught Shakil’s eye and put her finger in her mouth, making like she was about to vomit. Shakil got that mischievous glint in his eye, and added, ‘Lots of Pakistani names have Arabic origins, and most of them mean something. For example, “Adara” means “virgin”.’ Everyone looked at Adara and laughed.
‘Does not!’ Adara stuck her middle finger up at Shakil, eliciting more hilarity. The blonde whispered something in Shakil’s ear, ‘Let’s see what you got then, Mr Terrorist,’ and went to kiss him, her hand straying downwards towards the boy’s crotch. But just then Shakil’s favourite Doors song came on the stereo. ‘I love that song!’ and he was off – leaving Maddy to wonder whether her low-cut top was showing enough cleavage.
As Adara recalled her brother dancing to ‘Light My Fire’ in front of a room of admiring girls and jealous boys, his shoulder-length black hair glistening under the dim lighting, Shakil was hosed down with freezing water and his fine locks were shaved off by a brute of a guard who doubled as the prison’s ‘hairdresser’. Shakil had been very proud of his hair, and the sight of it falling on the stone floor, and the bald, bleeding reflection staring out at him from a mirror that was shoved in front of his face with the words ‘Who’s a pretty boy, then?’, broke him. What with the fluorescent yellow jumpsuit he’d been forced to don after his ‘shower’, in place of his customary jeans, Nirvana T-shirt and leather jacket, the old Shakil was no more.
Then Adara remembered that a couple of the boys at the party had started a conversation about making bombs. One of the boys said that it would be easy to make a home-made bomb, while the other disagreed. Shakil had piped up, saying that you could make a detonator really easily out of just about anything – even a mobile phone. Shakil knew a lot about explosives, as his father was an engineer, specialising in demolitions, who was often asked by the council to demolish traditional areas of the East End so that developers could turn them into car parks or high-rise hell holes for the underprivileged.
‘You see, son,’ Adara had heard her father say to Shakil more than once, ‘You could be blowing things up too, just like your old man, if you just went to college and studied engineering, instead of playing guitar and thinking about girls all day.’
Maybe someone had reported Shakil’s stupid teenage conversation to the authorities. How sick would that be? What kind of a world were they living in if you couldn’t even chat at a party without being kidnapped by the police several hours later?
‘Mum, we gotta go back . . . Dad . . .’
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
‘There was some stupid conversation at the party last night about making bombs.’
‘Oh God.’ Mrs Malik was starting to feel light-headed again.
‘We have to go back and explain that no way would Shakil make a bomb; he just knows about explosives because of Dad’s job.’
‘Okay, sweetheart, we’ll go back and tell them,’ said her father.
‘But what if they take your father away as well?’ Mrs Malik had aged ten years in the last few hours. ‘What if they don’t give us Shakil back, but take away your father too?’
‘We have to try,’ Mr Malik was adamant.
So Adara and her parents went back to the police station – that day, as they would every day in the weeks that followed.
The interrogation had not lasted long, as after several pelts around the back, chest, face and head, Shakil was already unconscious.
‘We’ll have to do something about your technique,’ the Warden told the interrogating officer. ‘This isn’t going to work. I’m seriously thinking we need to look at the equipment we have at our disposal, starting with that weird looking thing in the basement.’
The weird looking thing in the basement was a Scavenger’s Daughter – the one claim to fame of one Leonard Skeffington, Lieutenant of the Tower of London during the reign of King Henry VIII. Mr Skeffington must have been either a very bored or a very unpleasant man – perhaps both – for it would have taken him no small amount of time to come up with a device that matched the infamous rack, both in terms of the pain and the damage it caused its victims. And having a day job at the Tower of London, Mr Skeffington would have had ample opportunity to observe both instruments in practice. While the rack stretched people until their limbs were dislocated and then torn from their sockets, the Scavenger’s Daughter compressed them – in a foetal position – until they bled from their orifices and their bones broke.
Had the Warden displayed any interest in the Tower’s rich history, or had he taken the time to speak to the former Chief Yeoman Warder of the Tower or any of his staff before having them thrown out of the complex, he would have known all about the Scavenger’s Daughter, but – perhaps luckily for Shakil – he hadn’t and he didn’t.
Now a breeze with no discernible source stirred in the torture chamber. The ropes on the rack creaked and shadows flitted uneasily around Mr Skeffington’s invention. Eddies of dust formed and whirled out into the corridor, swirling around the feet of a guard who’d been trailing slightly behind the Warden’s guided tour of the Tower complex. Bob shivered as the temperature suddenly dropped, and hurried to join the others.
It had been a long tour, but the Warden was still going strong and was just now explaining to the Home Secretary and the heads of MI5 and MI6 his plans for the redevelopment of the Tower.
‘As you know, the Prime Minister has informed me that the war on terror will require the detention and interrogation of many more suspects than previously thought.’ The Warden was positively beaming at the attention he was getting from some of the country’s most important men. ‘So I am having plans drawn up for a large number of holding cells with bunks. We are now about to enter phase one of the project, but once all the work is complete, the Tower will hold more inmates per square metre than any other prison in Europe.’
‘And how much time do you think you’ll need to finish the project, Warden?’ asked the Home Secretary.
Several hours later, and the cold wind that had started in the torture chamber now stirred the ropes on the row of gallows outside the White Tower, causing them to creak and swing. Had an observer chanced upon the scene, he or she might have had the impression that something heavy, yet unseen, was dangling from them.
Bob was on guard duty, patrolling the southern part of the Tower complex. He was in the basement of the Wakefield Tower, consciously avoiding the torture chamber and trying not to spend too long gazing into any of the dark corners, when he heard a child crying – a boy.
Bob froze, listening intently. ‘Hello?’ The sobbing came again and Bob moved cautiously towards the sound. ‘Hello?’ A second boy called out something – Bob couldn’t make out what. ‘Who’s there?’ Bob walked towards the voices, but as he did so they seemed to move away. ‘Wait!’ A flurry of footsteps and Bob followed, determined to find the boys. He couldn’t understand for the life of him what they were doing in the Tower, and in the middle of the night as well.
Bob followed the crying up the stairs to the ground floor and out of the building. As he stepped outside, he saw two small figures ahead of him. He hurried after them, calling to them. They disappeared into the Bloody Tower, and Bob went in after them. He didn’t see them again, but followed their voices up to a room on the first floor, where all trace of them disappeared. Confused and disconcerted, Bob was searching the room when he heard a blood-curdling scream in one of the adjoining chambers. He rushed next door and stopped short as he saw something coming rapidly towards him from the far end of the room. It was like a mist emerging from the darkness – a mist that transformed into solid matter, as a screaming woman, dressed in what to Bob looked like a ball gown, came running in his direction.
Bob shouted at the woman to stop, but she kept running at him
and kept screaming. The guard drew his weapon. ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’ The woman kept coming and Bob panicked, shooting at her a couple of times. As she reached him, the woman finally dropped – facedown – right in front of the shaking guard. Bob closed his eyes for a moment and sucked in air through his mouth; in his fear he had forgotten to breathe. He bent down and checked the woman’s pulse – nothing. That was when he noticed the gashes on her back; fragments of whitish backbone protruding from all the blood. He’d only had time to discharge two rounds at the woman, so why was her back slashed a dozen times? Bob looked at his gun, puzzled. Perhaps the new ammo they’d been issued splintered inside a person? He felt bad about killing the woman. He put his weapon away and went to report the incident.
Back in the White Tower, Bob was hurrying to see the Warden, when he bumped into the Head Guard.
‘What’s wrong, mate?’ Pete looked concerned. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I just killed a woman.’
‘What?’
‘I just shot a woman. She was coming at me. I told her to stop, but she wouldn’t listen. I think she was crazy.’
‘Bob, what the hell are you on about?’
‘I killed someone. I have to go report it.’
‘Whoa, whoa. Hang on a sec there, mate. Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but . . . have you been drinking?’
‘No. No, I haven’t.’ Bob tried to get past the older man, but Pete was having none of it.
‘Look, if you killed someone, then there’s a body, right?’
‘Right . . . Now let me past. I need to see the Warden.’
‘Let’s go and check that there’s definitely a body. You don’t want to bother the Warden and get yourself sacked if this is all just in your head.’
Pete wouldn’t let it go and eventually Bob found himself on his way back to the Bloody Tower.
‘This is a strange place,’ Pete was saying. ‘Sometimes people see things. My brother knew someone who was a Yeoman Warder here when it was still a tourist attraction. And he said that one of the other Warders left after something tried to strangle him in the Salt Tower – something nobody could see.’
‘Well, I definitely saw someone,’ Bob was getting upset again, ‘and I shot her.’ But when they got back to the Bloody Tower, there was no dead woman anywhere to be found.
A couple of hours later, around two in the morning, Crewes and Hampel were on guard duty in the White Tower. Crewes decided to check out the armoury. It was like Christmas come early. The gun in his holster forgotten, Crewes was soon happily swinging a poleaxe around the chamber.
‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ But five minutes later Hampel too had a large grin on his face and a poleaxe in his hands, and the two of them were giggling like schoolboys and re-enacting some light-sabre battle or other from an early episode of Star Wars.
Neither of them noticed the shadow that fell across the threshold, nor the huge masked figure that entered the room, nor the massive axe it was holding. Crewes didn’t even have time to discharge his gun or swing his poleaxe, but neither did he see what was coming. Hampel was less fortune for, although he got to fight briefly for his life, he also got to stare death right in the eyes and see the scant light glint for one blinding moment on the axe’s head before it came down and sideways.
As the masked figure strode back to the hell from which it had come, axe in one hand and the fruits of the night’s labours in the other, Shakil was lying shackled on the floor of his cell. He was running a fever, slipping in and out of consciousness. In one of his lucid moments, he became aware of a delicate scent, quite out of sorts with the damp, musty chamber that was his new home. He shouldn’t have smelled anything, as he could hardly breathe through his pulverised, blood-encrusted nostrils, and yet he did. The scent was sweet and floral – like a woman’s perfume, but weak and distant.
Shakil’s swollen, cracked lips moved incoherently as he found himself trying to hum a tune: ‘Sweet Jane. Sweet, sweet Jane’. Shakil knew the song so well, but in his present delirious state he couldn’t remember who it was by. His failure to remember distressed him and he wanted to cry, but then that scent wafted by again, closer this time. The Velvet Underground, Shakil remembered and smiled.
Just then the air in his cell stirred slightly and eddies of dust started to rise and twist. Shakil tried to change position, but only succeeded in causing a fresh stab of pain in his head and chest. He lost consciousness for a moment, then regained it as a soft, cool hand tenderly stroked his face.
‘Mum?’ he whispered before drifting off into a gentle sleep. But the woman who knelt beside him was not his mother.
The boy could not have been much older than her. His skin, dark compared to the pale young men of the court that she had been used to, made a stark and fascinating contrast with the whiteness of her own hand. There were even darker patches on his skin, where they had hit him, and bloody marks on his face and body.
The girl with the heavy embroidered dress and the long, reddish-golden hair continued to stroke Shakil’s face, gazing at him with sadness and compassion. A tear fell from her eye onto the boy’s cheek, and he stirred for a moment, then fell asleep once more.
As the grey light of dawn filtered in through the tiny barred window at the top of the cell, a gaping wound opened up in the girl’s neck and started to bleed profusely. She grimaced in pain and put her hand up to her neck. Her already pale complexion turned white as a sheet and she faded away to nothing. A tear rolled down Shakil’s cheek, but he slept on.
The following morning Shakil woke up to his cell door slamming open, and freezing cold water under pressure forced him against the wall of his cell. He was thrown a bowl of slop to eat, and he crawled over to it, stiff and feverish.
While Shakil tried to eat, his family were down at the police station again, being told that if they persisted in asking questions about him, they would be arrested as well. They followed their visit to the police with a trip to the offices of The Guardian. After a long wait, a sympathetic journalist informed them that if Shakil was being held on terror charges, then it was probably at the new detention centre in the Tower of London. This being the case, there was nothing The Guardian or any other newspaper could do, as there was a Government injunction against reporting on the Tower. Any journalist caught investigating issues relating to the complex would be imprisoned, and there would be repercussions against the editor and other staff at his or her newspaper.
‘I am very, very sorry for your son and for your family. But the only help I can give you is to tell you to forget about your son, or you will end up in prison yourselves, along with your daughter.’
‘I will not forget about my son!’ raged Mrs Malik as her husband and daughter escorted her out of the building – just as they would escort her out of various newspaper, police, human rights organisation and government buildings every day in the weeks that followed.
Shakil’s second interrogation was even shorter than the first. The boy only just managed to reiterate that all he’d done was to take part in a general drunken discussion about explosives at the party, that he wasn’t part of a terror cell, and that during his summer trip to Pakistan his uncle had taken him sightseeing with his aunt and cousins and not to a terror training camp, when Pete came in to report that the bodies of two guards who had been on duty late last night had been found in the Armoury.
‘What?’ For the first time since anyone in the room could remember, the Warden looked shaken.
‘Crewes and Hampel, sir. We found their bodies.’ Pete’s face was ashen, and he seemed unsteady on his feet. ‘At least, we think it’s them.’
‘What do you mean, you think it’s them?’
‘The heads sir . . .’
‘What about their heads?’
‘They’re missing, sir.’
‘What?’
‘I said .
. .’
‘I know what you said, man!’ The Warden pushed his seat away from the table so violently that it toppled over, and the interrogating officer dived to pick it up. ‘Take me to the bodies, and organise a search for the heads at once. Use the dogs.’
As the Warden swept out of the room with Pete in tow, the interrogating officer piped up in a feeble little voice, ‘Excuse me, sir . . .’ Despite his fear, pain and confusion, Shakil couldn’t believe how the interrogator’s whole demeanour changed when he spoke to the Warden.
‘What is it?’
‘What shall I do with him?’ The interrogator nodded in Shakil’s direction.
‘Take him back to his cell. We’ll continue this later.’
Shakil was thrown back in his cell, amidst his usual protestations that he hadn’t done anything, that they’d made a mistake and that he wanted to call his parents; and guards with dogs were dispatched to look for the missing heads.
The search came to an abortive end when the dogs were taken to the Salt Tower. As soon as the shadow of the tower fell on the two Alsatians, they started to whimper like puppies. And as their handler dragged them towards the threshold, they bayed and jumped about, trying to pull away from the building.
‘Come on, you little bastards, we’re going in!’ But Jeffries didn’t stand a chance. Max dropped into a crouch and started backing away, eyes fixed on the dark entrance to the Salt Tower, while Theo let out a plaintive howl, bit Jeffries on the hand and, when the shocked handler let go of his leash, ran in the opposite direction like the hounds of hell had been loosed on his fine black pedigree tail – now tucked between his legs, right under his belly, and fleeing for its dear fluffy life.
While Jeffries led the disgraced Max back to the kennels, then rounded up Theo and gave him a good hiding, the other guards entered the Salt Tower and searched it top to bottom, but found nothing. By dusk the heads still hadn’t turned up. A discussion flared up as to whether police and crime scene investigation teams should be brought in from the outside, but the Warden categorically refused, on the general rule of thumb that ‘What goes down in the Tower, stays in the Tower.’ The search for the heads would resume in the morning. For now, all guards were to be extra cautious and patrol only in pairs. The guards grumbled amongst themselves that Crewes and Hampel were in a pair when they were murdered, but nobody dared contradict the Warden. And so night fell.
