Page 97 of The Taskmaster
I folded my arms and smiled at him.
“If you want me to lie, you’re going to be disappointed, because I’m gonna make this very easy for you. That police interrogation training you’ve honed over the years is lost on me.”
I pointed to the first bag and said, “That’s a femur. It belongs to Fred Wilson.” Then I went along the line, detailing what each bag contained. “A jawbone that used to chat shit when it lived inside Harold Fraser. The metacarpals belong to Mario Cane. Then these phalanges...” I glanced up, a hint of satisfaction rippling through me when I saw the look of horror on his face. “Belong to Paul Masters, Joel Spencer and Gabriel Tolley. You didn’t take all the evidence, though. There was a wallet there too, that belonged to Peter Hipkiss. And if you’d bothered to take the cigarettes and lighter from my mantlepiece, you’d find Nial Fagin’s DNA.”
I paused and sat back in the chair. “I think I went a bit overboard with the fingers to be honest. I should’ve changed it up. Kept a skull or hip bone. Maybe a couple of ribs... not that Charles Quinn would’ve been able to contribute to that.”
He didn’t see the funny side.
“You’ve just listed eight victims you’ve killed. Eight murders that you kept trophies for, am I right?”
“You are correct. Well counted, Officer.”
“And yet you show zero remorse.” His eyes were like darts, sharp and trying to penetrate the protective shield I always kept around me. But my shield was impenetrable. His disdain was lost on me. I didn’t care.
“The only remorse I have, is that I waited so long to take them out. They didn’t deserve to live. They’d breathed air for far longer than was acceptable in this world, as far as I’m concerned.”
“In your opinion.”
“In a lot of people’s opinion. Scrape beneath the surface, Officer, and you’ll find the scum they worked hard to hide from men like you.”
“Is that why Charles Quinn took you? Did he know you’d killed those men? Was it his way of getting revenge?”
“You really have no idea what you’re dealing with, do you?”
He leaned over the desk, and with a determined expression he said, “That’s why I need you to speak. I want to know why.”
And so I told him every dark, disturbing and sordid detail of what my life was like at Clivesdon House. How I’d managed to escape, and why I’d rebuilt my life, with the sole purpose of finding the men who’d destroyed it, and obliterating theirs.
Chapter Fifty
ISAIAH / GHOST BOY
Fourteen Years Ago
Ididn’t know how much longer I could go on living in this home. Surviving night after night in the hell they’d created. I saw boys come and go, no one stayed as long as I did. I was fourteen years old, and every day my prayer that someone would come and get me, or help me escape this wicked reality was withering to nothing. My fight was crumbling to dust, but I still clung to hope with my bloody, broken fingernails, dreading the day that they tore off completely and I was left with nothing. A dead boy that they’d throw away like yesterday’s trash.
“It’s sausage and mash tonight, love,” the new lady, that’d just started working in the kitchen told me, from the other side of the locked door.
She thought I was a troublemaker, a boy to be avoided at all costs because I had violent outbursts. I kicked and scratched, bit and hissed like a wild animal. I wasn’t mindful of who was around when that happened. I didn’t care. It was becoming a them or me situation. Kill or be killed. I think they knew thattoo. I’d heard them discuss what they’d do with me, now I was getting too old. It wasn’t good. My time was running out. I had to take my chances where I could.
They locked me in a windowless room in the day. I wasn’t allowed to sit with the others at mealtimes, and my meals were always served on a paper plate. No cutlery.
But today was different.
The lock clicked, and the door opened.
I scuttled backwards from my position on the floor. The woman’s face wrinkled in disgust as she stood in the doorway. I couldn’t tell if it was from the smell in the room, or the fact that all I had in here was a bucket for toileting, and a dirty mattress on the floor with coiled springs sticking out.
“Sausage and mash,” she said in a quieter voice as she bent down and placed a tray on the floor, then she backed out of the room slowly, her eyes never leaving mine.
When the door eventually closed and locked, I crawled on all fours to the tray and could hardly believe what I saw. A bottle of water, a China plate with hot food, and a metal knife and fork.
She was new. They hadn’t told her the protocol for feeding me. That woman was an angel sent to give me my last hope of escaping this hell hole before the devil consumed me.
I ate the food. Drank the bottled water. And stashed the knife and fork in the mattress to use later.
I didn’t see that woman again. Another member of staff came to the room later to take the tray away. The rest of the afternoon, I spent watching the door, waiting for someone to burst through and do a room check, trying to find the missing cutlery.
