odour of the burning butane gas filled the room like bad perfume. The sound of the blow torch was a threatening hissing now. Xena placed the tip of the flame against the top edge of the whiskey tumbler the man had been drinking from. The glass turned blue.
‘Wait until you feel this. Then you will tell me,’ said Xena. Her tone had changed. It was demanding now.
‘What? Fu …’ The end of that confident word was bitten off by the piercing scream that came from deep within his throat. Xena had touched the flame against the pale skin of his shoulder.
He began thrashing. Like a fish flailing. He moved from side to side, squirming away from the skin-blistering heat. But he couldn’t move fast enough. And his legs and arms were stretched out tight.
Easy targets.
The smell in the room changed and the atmosphere with it. Pain and whimpering, sizzling and guttural roars filled the air.
The man had become a dog.
Then Xena asked him again.
‘The password, please.’ She spoke softly, as if they were still playing a game.
‘If you give it up, I will release you. You can explain these little burns to your wife. But the ones I will inflict next will require hospital treatment. Or the services of a morgue.’ She clicked the flame off, then pressed the hot tip hard and fast into the biggest blister she had inflicted, near his ankle.
‘What do you say, Mr Hare?’
The man answered with a defiant, animal roar. He shook the bed under him. The last vestige of his pride in working at BXH bellowed out of him.
Xena lit the flame again. She reached forward, touched it to his chest, and ran it fast down the middle until smoke from his burning body hair filled the room with a sickly odour.
‘Stop, stop!’ he screamed. His body squirmed to escape the heat.
‘It’s #89*99,’ he shouted. ‘Please! Stop!’
Bidoner keyed the password into his phone and pressed send.
‘I hope you’re not lying,’ said Xena. ‘I want all this to have a happy ending.’
She squeezed his thigh with her hand, then stroked it.
Tears streamed from under his blindfold. His cheeks were red. It was good he couldn’t see the weals on his body, because he would know immediately that he wouldn’t be able to explain any of them to his wife.
‘Please, let me go. I promise not to tell anyone. I swear, on my children’s lives.’
Lord Bidoner’s mobile beeped as an incoming message came in. He nodded at Xena. The code had worked.
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But there is one more thing I must do for you.’
She put the Turboflame down and went to the fridge. She took out a six-inch-long serrated knife, honed with care to a perfect blade, from the freezer section.
She held it in the air, admiring its cold edge.
‘Now you will find release,’ she said.
The man’s body went still. His toes, which had scrunched up, half straightened. The only sound was his pain-filled whimpering.
The panic room in the apartment on Fifth Avenue, overlooking the skyscrapers of Manhattan, was soundproof. It was why they used the room.
Xena flicked the blade across the man’s pale skin, once, then twice, fascinated by how quickly blood gushed, how fast it flowed from a few simple cuts.
‘This is for my brothers,’ she said.
‘Don’t,’ he whimpered. Fear trembled in his voice. ‘I have two children, a wife.’
She growled, psyching herself up.
‘Prima quattuor invocare unum,’ she said, as she grabbed him, jerking him upwards and castrating him with one swinging motion.
She held the bloody remains up in the air.
His screams of terror and pain vibrated through the room as blood spurted two feet high. A foul smell followed and the man’s words became a babbling.
Lord Bidoner held his nose. He’d seen enough. He went out to the main room of the apartment, with its view towards the glittering Jazz-era spire of the Empire State Building.
‘You did good, my dear. The first offering has been done correctly,’ he said, when Xena joined him.
She was panting.
‘Come here.’
He pushed her up against the inch-thick glass of the window, as Manhattan glittered behind them.
Afterwards, he handed her a balloon glass containing a large shot of Asbach 21. She sipped the brandy, then downed it in one gulp.
Then she lay down on the sleek oak coffee table that dominated the room. The canyon of lights stretching into the velvet Manhattan night reflected all the way along the length of the table and onto her ebony skin.
He reached down and stroked her shoulder. It was trembling.
‘Three more before the moon rises again. That is what the book says. That is what we will do.’
She smiled up at him. Her white teeth shone as she leaned her head back and stretched.
A creak rang out against the muffled noise of night-time London.
‘Sean?’ Isabel’s voice echoed. Her head was off the pillow. Was that a shadow moving? The moment of deep pleasure at sensing his return was replaced in a second by fear, as no response came.
She slid out of bed. Alek, who was now four, was in the next room. If that was Sean out there, playing some game, she was going to make him pay. Big time. She’d just finished one of the most demanding projects she had worked on during her time as an IT security consultant, and her brain had been fried to mush. She needed sleep.
She stood in the doorway.
There was no one on the landing.
She peered downstairs. The house felt deserted. The heating had been off for hours. She went into Alek’s room, checked his breathing and tucked him in.
Was this going to be a replay of that night a few weeks ago when he didn’t come home? The thought made her shudder. In all the time she’d known him he’d never done anything like what he’d done that night.
She remembered the creak that had woken her. What had that been about?
Had she imagined it? Her dreams had been strange recently. Images from Istanbul and Jerusalem came too often. Maybe that was what had roused her.
She went downstairs and turned on all the lights. Nothing was out of place, though there was an odd smell. A lemony tang, as if a cleaner had passed through. She stood near the front door. This was all Sean’s fault. She picked up the telephone and pressed redial. The call went to voicemail, again.
She slammed the phone down.
Bastard.
Stop it. He’ll be home soon.
She turned out the lights, headed back to bed, and tried to sleep. The icy wind buffeting the window didn’t help. Neither did the cold space where Sean’s freckled body should have been.
The matchbook-thin Bang & Olufsen docking system said it was five past three. How many years do you get these days if you murder your husband?
She lay there, seething, angry not only with Sean, but with the idiots at BXH too. And with whoever had decided to hold their stupid celebration the night before.