A Serpent Uncoiled

by Simon Spurrier

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A missing mobster. A bizarre spiritualist society. And three deaths, linked by a chilling forensic detail. Working as an enforcer in London's criminal underworld brought Dan Shaper to the edge of a breakdown. Now he's a private investigator, kept perilously afloat by a growing cocktail of drugs. He needs to straighten-up and rebuild his life, but instead gets the attention of his old gangland masters and a job-offer from Mr George Glass. The elderly eccentric claims to be a New Age Messiah, but now needs a saviour of his own. He's been marked for murder. Adrift amidst liars and thugs, Shaper must push his capsizing mind to its limits: stalked not only by a unique and terrifying killer, but by the ghosts of his own brutal past.

Release date: June 19, 2012

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 386

Sample

London hacked up its lungs and glistened.

The November drizzle had held off for the first time in three nights, but the air seemed choked regardless: a clammy ambient moisture caressing slick bricks and grey, leafless trees. On ledges through Soho, pigeons sulked in moronic bedragglement, while brave smokers lurked in smoggy palls outside steaming pubs, muttering at the indignity. In doorways along Oxford Street tramps clutched at dreaming dogs for warmth, and in Camden even the dealers – initially optimistic at the break in the rain – took to lurking near kebab shops and club queues, leeching excess heat, to mumble their mantras:

‘Skunk, hash, pills . . . skunk, hash, pills . . .’

Out east, surly below a jaundiced sky, fog-windowed buses roared like dying lions through old puddles, dodging limping foxes and indifferent cats.

And in Hackney a girl screamed until her voice gave out.

The buses drove on. The foxes barely twitched.

The shriek surrendered to a ragged silence, then spiralled in a tangle of yelps to a single, shell-shocked moan. The neighbours turned up their TVs.

Only one man listened carefully, and he did so with a sigh, pulling his many-pocketed coat tighter. Even inside his grimy van – alone beneath a piss-toned street light – his breath steamed with every huff.

He was listening to sex and bemoaning his lack of arousal.

Not a twitch.

The girl rapidfired a series of gasps, like a train shunting through water, then groaned in a register reserved for wolves and whales. She yapped like a chihuahua, she babbled in a foreign language; and all along the fapfapfap noises never slowed.

The listening man rubbed his brows. With a pair of expensive headphones knuckling his brain it was easy to imagine the woman was speaking in tongues, and he smirked at the idea.

The Holy Spirit came upon her, he thought.

Right on her tits, I bet – the dirty old sod.

The man’s name was Dan Shaper. Anticipating a headache, he adjusted the headphones and flicked a switch on the matte-black receiver in his lap: Channel B. Another exquisitely hidden audio bug, another eavesdropped room, another eardrum assault. This one, he judged (with a connoisseur’s confidence), was only just getting started. For now, the male participant was the more enthusiastic.

‘Oh bitch,’ the voice rasped, syrupy with a forty-a-day wheeze. ‘Oh bitch, yeah, oh bitch, yeah . . .’

Shaper felt distinctly as though he was being rogered in the ear.

He sighed again and rummaged through endless pockets for the zipped edge of his medication file. On the outside it looked for all the world like a chunky personal organiser: a relic of the eighties fossilised in faux leather and nylon. But inside, replacing neat pages, it clutched at dozens of tinny tablet sachets, each in its own elastic loop. Pic’n’mix for the brain.

He ran fingers along coloured rows like an artist hunting shades, and turned down the volume on the receiver. Soon, he knew – after tonight, with a little luck – he’d need to take some time out: a detox holiday to reset and recharge. Even after years of practice, judiciously self-medicating to keep his brain at bay, his mental diet was a constant flirtation with disaster. The blood could only be polluted so far, and the psyche dammed so high, before the first turned irretrievably toxic and the other burst its banks.

All under control.

Two Phenotropils this time – fat Russian stims – to dissolve the glimmers of incipient paranoia. And perhaps half a benzo – Zoloft, for choice, net-bought with US decals – to see off the amphetamine shadows. Taking it easy.

He swallowed them with the dregs of his coffee and flicked onwards to Channel C.

‘Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh goddddd . . .’

He sighed again, profoundly unstirred. Melanie in Room 3 always feigned the most devout of climaxes.

At any other time, he supposed, he might have found this sad, grubby little gig a source of guilty arousal. But after a week of morosely flicking between squelches, shrieks, grunts, holy invocations and the occasional unprofessional fanny fart, he’d reached the unhappy state of desensitisation.

Besides, tonight there was a further impediment to his libido. At that moment it was sprawling across the passenger seat in a fog of fag smoke, helping itself to another beer and squinting at the bland terrace across the street.

‘Don’t look like a proper brothel to me,’ it slurred.

Shaper, a lifelong avoider of unenclosed urinals, was not the type to be comfortably horny in male company. Particularly when said company was six foot six, sweated pure testosterone, and was rumoured to be hung like a planet.

‘Don’t be an idiot, Vince,’ he muttered. ‘What’s a brothel supposed to look like?’

Vince – too tall, too wide, too pissed to do much but flap an enormous set of skinned knuckles out the window – stifled a belch. ‘Just thought it’d be . . . y’know. More obvious.’

‘Red lights, neon signs, tits in windows?’

‘Well . . .’

‘It’s not bloody Amsterdam, mate. You’ve got to be discreet.’

Melanie, with exquisite timing, chose that moment to go supernova: a pterodactyl shrill counted out in bedspring squeaks. Shaper loosened the headphones and ignored Vince’s smirk.

‘Discreet,’ the brute said. ‘Yeah.’

Vince was Shaper’s best friend – in the sense they could stand each other’s company longer than most – and despite first impressions, one of the more fundamentally interesting people he knew. True, the man worked in a variety of interrelated professions on an ad hoc, cash-in-hand basis, all of which tended to involve hitting people until someone told him to stop. And yet – for instance – he somehow knew a great deal about fine wines. He read literature by dead people Shaper had never heard of. He was avowedly homosexual, but technically (and secretly, since picking up his latest boyfriend) bi. He had a peculiar phobia about tomatoes, claiming their texture reminded him of baby skin. He was a human being with more surprising, inexplicable facets than anyone had any right to; he just also happened to be hired muscle who’d snap a leg for five hundred quid. He’d probably even apologise afterwards.

Vince, in his chaotic and contradictory way, stood as a perfect representative of the muddled world Shaper had occupied as long as he could remember. The man was also, Shaper could tell, insufferably bored.

Which meant, by automatic association, he was drunk, burpy, farty and irritating. There was a reason Shaper had never brought him on a job before.

Across the street a pair of figures – balding heads catching the lamplight like sickly eggs – slunk from the glow of a doorway and hurried off. A third was just arriving: a frail man bent over a stick, creaking into the house and out of sight. Little Mrs Swanson shuffled into view to close the door, thick-rimmed specs misting in the cold, and visibly had to restrain herself from waving across the street at Shaper. It had taken her three nights of delivering tea and cake to the van to fully grasp the concept of ‘undercover’ surveillance, and she still laid out biscuits in case he got cold and came inside. She was the least Madam-like Madam he’d ever met.

Good biscuits, too.

‘So how come the neighbours don’t complain?’ Vince grunted, derailing Shaper’s thoughts. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with a sigh, noting that the headache was now in full swing. As, in his ears, was Melanie.

‘They’re paid not to.’

‘How’d you know?’

He shot the brute a look. ‘’Cos it’s my bloody job to know, ain’t it?’

Watcher. Perve.

Troubleshooter. Issue wrangler.

Fixer.

The way Shaper saw it, all the men and women who grubbed about in his patch of dirt – all these broadly decent folk getting by with a few odd quid from a few odd sources – they needed someone to call in tricky times, same as anyone.

For Shaper’s people, the cops weren’t an option.

Take Mrs Swanson. As sweet an old lady as one could meet, who just happened to run the most successful knocking shop west of Stratford. For her, when certain ‘valuable products’ had started disappearing from the premises, a call to Shaper was as natural as a thrice-dialled ‘9’ was to a more conventional business owner.

‘Is this,’ she’d querulously asked, ‘the sort of thing you do?’

Oh yes.

Another eager customer knocked at the front door, sucking on his gums. Shaper caught Vince watching with narrowed eyes and could almost hear his inner cogs meshing.

‘Is it just me,’ the big man said, ‘or are these punters a bit . . . y’know?’

‘Long in the tooth?’

‘Like a bloody tyrannosaur, yeah.’

Shaper slow-clapped the observation. ‘Specialist establishment.’

Mrs Swanson’s genius, which had elevated her business from one among hundreds of unconvincing massage parlours into a coffin-dodgers-only cash cow, had been to realise that punters of a certain age were not only far less trouble than their younger counterparts, but far more prepared to divest themselves of their – as she’d put it – ‘ripened’ savings.

‘Used to be,’ Shaper explained, ‘she’d get the occasional old duffer showing up at the door who couldn’t bring himself to . . . fully commit.’

Vince, to prove his comprehension, straightened a curled finger with a cartoon squeak. Shaper nodded, bitterly aware of his own moribund tackle.

‘Exactly. And nobody wants to get sent home with a sympathetic refund, do they? So old Mr Droopy starts asking “Have you got anything for it . . . ?” and Mrs Swanson thinks, well, maybe I should.’

Vince smiled hugely, getting it. ‘So she starts shilling Viagra?’

‘To start with, yeah. Cialis, Revatio, Levitra. Healthy mark-up. Easy money.’

‘Genius!’

‘No, disaster.’

Vince scowled. ‘How come?’

Shaper loosened the headphones another notch, brain ache still growing. ‘’Cos Mr Droopy’s got a grandkid knows how to order it online for half the price. And the regulars compare notes in the changing room. Before you know it, they start showing up pre-primed.’

Vince raised a foaming toast to pensioner kind. ‘Cocktrastrophe!’

Between them, shrilling from the headphones, Melanie’s voice ramped up for a second climax. Shaper knew from too many nights sitting just here, concentration creaking at narcotic extremes, that she allowed two orgasms per customer – no more, no less – timed with eerie precision. Each of the girls had their own little routines and he’d come to know them all. Ruth with her post-coital analysis, persuading the john that – really, I don’t often say this, I mean it, that was great. Ksenia, she of the speaking-in-tongues, whose ecstasy (the customer was given to believe) was so profound that only her mother language could express it. Or Vicky, who made determined pleas that the punter blow raspberries in her cleavage then howled like a freight train. Compared to most, Melanie’s breathless little appeals to the Ultimate were preferable by far.

‘Oh god, oh god . . .’

He rolled his eyes and turned down the volume again.

And abruptly frowned. One of his hands had started to shake.

‘So?’ Vince prompted, oblivious to Shaper’s sudden trickle of fear. ‘What did the boss lady do?’

‘What? When?’

Not now, not now, not now.

Probably, he told himself – dismissing the dry mouth, clenching his fist, ignoring the way one of his feet had started tapping a silent rhythm in the footwell – it was just the cold. Nothing to worry about.

Or . . .

Or a warning. A klaxon shriek to announce the stims had failed in their mission and his brain was tilting off its axis.

Relax, idiot . . .

Vince, of course, had no inkling, beered-up and impatient. ‘C’mon,’ he prompted. ‘What did she do? When they stopped buying the Viagra?’

‘Oh, that.’ Shaper rubbed his temples, focusing. ‘What could she do? She went looking for an alternative.’

Briefing him at the start, the old lady had delicately explained the establishment had taken a bold step into more exotic territory. Feelers had been gently extended, and after a month or two the very shadiest of supply routes began to deliver.

‘What, then?’ said Vince.

Shaper looked away. ‘Powdered tiger cock,’ he muttered.

‘You what?’

He sighed. ‘Look, it’s a . . . a traditional Eastern medicine. The punters can’t get it themselves and it costs a bloody fortune. It’s a smart move.’

‘Powdered t— But . . . You what?’

‘I know.’

‘But that’s—’

‘I know, Vince, all right? The point is, they keep coming back.’ He gave a resigned shrug, feeling stupid. ‘And now someone’s stealing it. And I’m here to find out who.’

‘Tiger’s cock,’ Vince muttered, slumping into head-shaking silence. ‘Shit.’

It was, Shaper confessed, odd.

The merchandise arrived in exciting little tubs with intricate paper wrappings and ink drawings of tigers and naked women. Distributed by the girls themselves at the ‘point of sale’ – another Swansonism – the stuff fair crackled with arcane promise. All part, as Shaper had firmly opined, of the placebo effect. He doubted the stuff had been within a million miles of an actual tiger.

Mrs Swanson had put paid to that when she’d confessed, with an air of mortal guilt, that when ‘the product’ first started going missing she’d topped up stocks with a concoction of burnt sugar and flour. ‘We had to refund everyone,’ she’d mumbled. ‘None of the poor dears could perform at all.’

Using the powder, the punters never failed to get their money’s worth. Whole gaggles of shy old men achieved not only the means but the mindset: lousy with charisma and confidence.

It was, yes, odd.

Vince, massive chin jutting, didn’t do odd.

‘That’s why we’re here? To guard magic cat dick?’ He sniffed through the lumpy remains of what had once been a nose. ‘So why can’t we just sit inside and watch the bloody stuff?’

‘House rules. The stuff gets sold by the girls direct. “Intimate transaction” – nobody else in the room to keep an eye. Nobody dishing it out beforehand. Only chance is to work out who’s taking it and catch ’em purple-palmed.’ He worked his jaw. The shivers, he noted, had spread to the other hand. ‘And it’s got to be tonight.’

Vince flicked ash, muttering. ‘Tiger pizzle . . . It’s not fuckin’ Columbo, mate. How hard can it be?’

‘Lot sodding harder than I thought, all right?’ Shaper tried to knead the spasm out of his hands. ‘Look, it’s a brothel, OK? Whole thing’s about discretion and trust. Repeat buyers, like. The old dear almost croaked when I suggested cameras. And no customer searches either. Even the girls were arsey about me going through their bags, to start with.’

‘Not now?’

‘No, ’cos less product means less tips. Couple of days with an “out of stock” sign on the door and they were queuing up to help.’

‘Did it?’

‘Did it bollocks.’

Vince shrugged: case closed. ‘So it’s one of the punters.’

‘Uh-uh. I sat in that changing room every day for a week. Went through every bloody pocket there was. Watched ’em in the shower, even.’

Vince smirked. ‘Hot.’

‘Not remotely. And I’ll tell you this, mate, not a single one carried anything out of the bedrooms.’ He discreetly breathed a gust of stolen smoke. ‘In the same week five grand of the product went missing.’

Vince choked. ‘You what?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Five grand?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But it’s . . . it’s cat dick!’

The brute pitched an empty can into the van’s compartment and slumped into disgusted silence. Shaper had given up telling him not to.

‘Anyway,’ he said, as much to reassure himself as Vince, ‘tonight’s the night. You wouldn’t be bloody here otherwise. Simple case of cross-referencing, when you get down to it. Girls on duty, vanishing stocks. Connect the dots.’ He tapped the receiver kit with a confidence he didn’t feel. ‘It’s one of these three. I worked it out.’

It has to be tonight.

The shaking hands. The pins and needles in his toes. The sticky shadows of nausea. He recognised them all too well.

After two weeks on the job, after seven nights in the van, after too many hours straining to hear anything unusual among shrieks of fake ecstasy, it could hardly come as a shock. No sleep, no rest, no peace; just a twanging narcotic plateau of high focus, fraying with every breath.

Detox or detonate, mate.

By the end of the week before, already sensing the onrushing burnout, he’d said fuck it to doing things the hard way and broken into the brothel one morning, laying audio bugs in smoke detectors and plug sockets while Mrs Swanson napped. Silent and secret – skills he’d learnt long ago in the pursuit of less honourable goals. Client respect and staff trust were all well and good, he’d decided, but what Mrs Swanson didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

Or his fee.

‘It’s one of these three,’ he muttered again. ‘Definite.’

Almost convincing.

‘Fine. Great.’ Vince nodded at the receiver with a fresh upsurge of impatience. ‘Which one, then? ’Cos the quicker you get on with it, the quicker I can make with the Judge Dredd bit,’ he mimed a door-smashing kick, leg thumping off the windscreen, ‘and the quicker we can sod off down the pub. How’ll you tell?’

Shaper felt the shakes creep up his arms and pretended he didn’t.

‘By listening carefully.’

‘For?’

‘I don’t know. Anything out of the ordinary.’

Vince’s eyes bugged out. ‘Mate, there’s a houseful of geriatrics snocking back the powdered phallus of an apex-fucking-predator over there. Exactly what part of this is inside the ordinary?’

Shaper ignored him and cycled gloomily through the channels. Room 1 was silent now; Ksenia’s transaction over and done with. In Room 2 a guttural bellow suggested Vicky had finally persuaded her john to plant that raspberry, and – moving swiftly on – Room 3 brought him back to pious little Melanie, rising up the scale to yet another climax.

Nothing.

It had to be tonight. Already he could feel the narcotic swaddling dissolving like salt in a stream; his tolerance to the drugs growing stronger. Already he could sense the Sickness beneath the meds, quivering at the scent of freedom . . .

‘Mate,’ Vince rumbled, blind to the gathering panic. ‘I’ll tell you what, your job’s a lot more interesting than mine.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Different every day, innit? Tiger cock . . . Jesus.’ The brute tossed his dog-end out the window and tried not to slur. ‘I mean – me? You hit a bloke once, you hit him twice, might as well’ve hit him a thousand times. And don’t even get me started on bouncing outside clubs, there’s an exercise in monotony, Ker-ist . . .’

Shaper had stopped listening. Breath catching in his throat, something hot behind his eyes.

‘Hit a bloke once . . .’

Once, twice, thr—

‘Fuck!’ His hand scrabbled for the van door.

Vince, glancing up through the alcoholic fug, became aware only slowly that he was sitting alone, registering just an impression of something scruffy hurtling across the street.

‘Mate?’ he said.

By the time Shaper had pushed past Mrs Swanson, bewildered in the doorway, things were starting to fray in his brain.

Fuck.

The brothel was a fish-eyed ribbon of pink gloss, like a wet mouth beneath froth and fire. The shakes were in his shoulders now, fed by adrenaline, and as he blundered through the changing room he became convinced his skull was spitting with tesla-coil sparks, his feet crumpling through static frequencies. No wonder everyone was staring.

Narcotic meltdown in ten, nine, eight . . .

‘Coming through!’ he hollered. Then smirked.

Coming. Fnar.

Keep it together, keep it together . . .

Somewhere behind him he could hear Mrs Swanson administering apologies, chasing after him. Probably with her hands over her eyes – bless. He ignored her and aimed for Room 3.

‘Got you,’ he kept muttering. ‘Bloody got you.’

At the door he paused to pull himself together, brain testing the walls of its amphetamine prison, warping the world with every hammer-heart throb. He held his breath to quieten the din and pressed his ear to the wood.

Inside someone shrieked and gasped, bedsprings creaking, a male voice grunting in time. Clockwork fucking.

Fapfapfapfapfap.

Melanie’s voice rose in a new chorus – ‘Oh god, oh god . . .’ – and above it all, superimposed like a special secret, came the ghostly tolling of church bells, the stink of rotten meat, and a swarm of blood-red flies below the door.

The broken sensations of a broken brain, Shaper knew; invisible and silent to anyone else. His own unspoken suspicions, dressed in sensory drama.

The Sickness: fucking with him.

The door was locked. Shaper grinned as he backed up a step and lowered his shoulder, only distantly aware of the inner voice reminding him he’d brought someone with him for precisely this moment.

Fuck it.

He tensed for the charge.

And—

‘Stop this at once.’ Mrs Swanson darted into view, sprightlier than she looked. All trace of cheerful indulgence gone now, fishbowl eyes shooting razors. ‘This is a discreet establishment, Mr Shaper. I won’t have you barging into the—’

‘Three orgasms.’

She faltered. ‘P-pardon me?’

‘Three orgasms, Mrs S! Melanie only does two!’

Over the Madam’s shoulder, muffled through the door, the oh gods returned to joyous cries, staccato blasts broken by gasps. The bedsprings didn’t miss a beat.

‘She’s stalling, see?’

Mrs Swanson actually blushed at the melody, recoiling from the door. At a safer distance she regained her poise, waggling a finger. ‘Now see here—’

But Shaper was already moving.

The lock ripped open with a disappointing lack of splinters and screws. The door flopped aside as if embarrassed, and for just a second – before the shock of intrusion froze both occupants – the action continued unabated.

Shaper gawped.

Melanie, lingerie-clad, tight little body flushed with exertion, was bouncing on the bed like a schoolkid on E-numbers. Creak, creak, creak. Her hands, gently pinching her own face, were quivering the wet interiors of her cheeks against her gums, and all the while she moaned, grunted, shrieked.

Fapfapfapfap.

Convincing.

The girl stopped. For a second she simply stood and stared – at him, at Mrs Swanson, at the other customers peering from the changing room behind. And then she looked down, guilty, at the floor beside the bed.

Where a naked eighty-year-old with psoriasis was daintily shoving a double-bagged condom stuffed with powdered tiger cock up his arse.

Grunting in time.

Melanie crumpled cross-legged on to the bed, as if she’d been switched off. The old man creaked to his feet, jaw set. The offending package, interrupted in its patient insertion, bounced off his thighs like the shimmering turd of a wild haggis.

Behind him Mrs Swanson made a delicate little noise like a sleeping baby. ‘Oom.’

Shaper fought the urge to retch. ‘Right, then,’ he croaked. ‘You’re nicked.’

The room seemed to be filling with water, pooling against all physical sense across the ceiling. He felt the shakes work up into his throat. Just keep breathing.

‘You a cop, then?’ said the old man, voice unexpectedly deep.

The room hazed. A buzzing built in Shaper’s ears, somehow infecting him with a growing panic that it had always been there, and now that he’d noticed, it would never go away.

Paranoia. Brilliant.

‘Not exactly.’

‘Right, then.’ And the geriatric hit him.

Later, when his nose stopped bleeding, Shaper explained with some conviction that he hadn’t wanted to raise his fists against a potentially frail man, and had felt it the more honourable option to roll with the punch. Mrs Swanson and the girls, gathered to feed him restorative biscuits, nodded dutifully.

Fortunately, Vince – who had finally caught up – suffered no such reservations, and as Shaper went down like a sack of spuds, the big lug deftly stepped past and nutted the pensioner between the eyes. Vince was still carrying his beer.

Shaper enjoyed a moment or two of blissful unconsciousness, and when he darted back upright – too late – with a ninja-like grace that convinced nobody, he noticed with slight surprise that the shakes were gone.

Job’s a goodun.

Alice Colquhoun, always a sharp one, deduced she was going to die long before the killer’s blade punctured her skin. Like a death-row inmate thoughtlessly salivating at the distant scent of a favourite meal, she’d decoded her impending assassination before fully realising what she was doing, and even enjoyed a perverse shiver of satisfaction at her own cleverness.

Alone in a darkness of glossy plastic and rural odours – restrained, jaw aching at a rubber ball gag – she calculated her doom with the same detached logic that had built and sustained a career almost as high-flying as she liked to boast. Her entire life had been a mercenary thrust of self-confidence so iron-bound that her third husband had joked she could deter a bullet with a glare, yet here she was, trussed in a pink leotard, shivering through the rubble of her annihilated dignity.

Knowing, now, that she was going to die.

Through an iron door, barely visible in the gloom, a stereo whined with a poorly recorded sitar, its mosquito shrill increasingly punctured by the soft-flesh thumps of a tabla. Now and then, lost in the pulse, she could hear a gentle rustle, a wet-tongued cluck of anticipation from the next room.

Her killer, she knew: preparing for murder.

It was the restraints, in the end, that had settled the matter. Before she’d given them serious thought, through all the traumas of the evening – all the shocks and terrors and indignities – she’d maintained a façade of resilience, a characteristic refusal to despair. The hooded man breaking into her home, the waggled blade, the silent gestures compelling her to dress in her lurid jogging gear . . . And then the cowl on her head, the ride in a padded van, the endless jolts and shoves and terrors. At every stage she’d sustained herself against anguish by focusing on the breadth of possibilities that might yet underpin the mystery. The chance, say, that ransom notes were winging their way towards exes and major shareholders, or that unheard sirens were whooping closer even now. The hope, even, in the hateful pit of her soul, that her captor would prove to be merely some degenerate, some uncomplicated rapist whose appetites could be sated, or at least drawn out.

But no. The restraints had put paid to all that. In the context of all that had happened tonight, they glowed to Alice like beacons in the mire of confusion, the final shards of data to complete the equation. The restraints had doomed her as surely as the blade that would – without question – kill her.

Each of her hands was encased in a boxing glove, modified with soft laces and nappy foam, enveloping both arms to the elbow. Leather straps hooked into the knuckles, securing them to the cushioned seat behind her back. Similarly, duvet strips with strait-jacket cords were fitted round each ankle, rising to the knee, fastened with rubber-coated chains to the chair’s frame. All of it immaculately sewn and sealed, clean and unpatched.

That the rig was built to prevent escape was obvious from the outset (though Alice had methodically tested each seam anyway), but what had occurred only slowly was the obsessive gentleness of it all. There were no hard edges at the wrists, no chafing cords cutting ruddy lines round ankles and knees. Here was a soft sort of domination, a thing of care and padded pressure, and its sheer kinky inoffensiveness had hidden its true meaning all too long.

She had it now.

Her restraints had been designed solely and specifically to leave no marks on her skin. No signs of captivity, no trace of the evening’s terror.

Why take such fastidious care if a captivity was purely temporary – a prisoner awaiting ransom? Why such obsessive coddling if violence and rape were the only goals?

No. No, she was too clever to cling to empty hope. The restraints had assured her that, whatever happened next, the only thing that would ever prove she’d been taken from her home, that she’d suffered in terror and trauma, was her own testimony. It stood to reason she wouldn’t be given the opportunity to present it.

She blinked back incipient tears with a cold growl, refusing to succumb, and re-examined her prison. On hanging frames to either side, dimly perceptible beneath the plastic sheets which covered every surface, crude paintings of blue-faced figures thrust hips and tangled their many arms, waggling red tongues. Beneath their manic gaze a wooden table bore a rank of foggy jam jars and a single sputtering candle, its feeble glow the only illumination. Strangest of all, on the ground around her, a dozen chrome dog bowls stood arranged like a flotilla of UFOs, faint traces of straw and sawdust glimpsed through the membrane beneath.

In the light of Alice’s murderous predictions, even they fitted this place.

It would look like an accident, she supposed. Perhaps a mugging. Something ugly and senseless – an impersonal, chaotic end – to justify the killer’s insistence she wear her jogging gear. She found she could imagine the scene with a hideous clarity: her own body left to bleed out among the nettles of the Queen’s Park nature trail, whe