VALUES

Part Seven

18.00

It's been eighteen hours, Pitt thought, as he walked up the steps of the Finger's HQ. Eighteen hours ago you were looking forward to knocking off your shift and going home and getting a good night's sleep.

He'd forgotten about sleep a long time ago. He had to finish this now, see this through to the end. Whatever game was being played, whoever was pulling the strings, he was doubtless a part of it now. In too deep, no turning back.

He nodded politely to the guard on the door, stepped through into the reception area.

"Hello," he said to the receptionist. "Terry Pitt, with the Nose. I'm here to see one of your prisoners."

The receptionist looked up, smiled and said, "Ah, Mr Pitt. We've been expecting you. Do you have any ID?"

Pitt flashed his ID card and the receptionist typed some information into her computer. A few seconds later she said, "R. Irons?" He nodded. "If you speak to that guy on the door over there, he'll lead you to the cell."

The Nose agent glanced at the hulking figure in the party uniform standing by the door, frowned and walked towards him. The guard wordlessly led Pitt through the maze of corridors to Richard Irons.

18.10

There were photos laid out on the kitchen table of the Iron's household. Hundreds of snapshots of their existence, all giving the lie to a happy family life.

Jean Irons flicked through them again and again in her lonely kitchen, stifling back the tears. Here was Richard holding her from the ramparts of a chateau in France. Here was Richard grinning from a rubber ring in the sea off Margate. Here was a passport photo picture of the two of them, taken a lifetime ago when she'd just left school and he was a fresh-faced young squaddie.

I loved you once, Richard, she thought. I'm sure I did.

And it's awfully lonely here now.

Outside the wind howled loudly, through the thin windows. Jean got up and closed the curtains.

18.15

Pitt was led by his wordless guard into a small room, lit only by a lamp. A table was positioned in the middle of the room, and two chairs. An interrogation room, Pitt thought, taking a seat.

Irons was led in from the door opposite, bound in handcuffs. He was roughly thrown to his seat by his guard. The man was a mess, Pitt thought sadly. Had a huge scar down one cheek, doubtless from a little creative interrogation. His eyes were as wide as a hunted rabbit. He'd been in prison for just a few hours, and he looked to be on the brink of insanity.

Pitt dismissed his Finger-guard, who reluctantly left. He hadn't forgotten what Thatcher had told him. If he was going to risk being alone with this guy, it was a risk he was willing to take.

"Mr Irons," he smiled. "So we finally meet."

"Are you going to get me out of here?" Irons hissed desperately.

"No, I'm not," Pitt replied frankly. He raised a cigarette to his lips and wordlessly lit it. "But I am here to help you."

"You're no bloody help to me if I'm stuck in here!" Irons cried. "I'm a sitting duck!"

"Richard," Pitt said calmly. "At the moment, you're the safest man in London. Believe me, it ain't easy to break into Finger HQ. You've got nothing to fear. Would you like a cigarette?"

"Oh, would I," Irons said, gratefully accepting. Pitt lit it for him and continued.

He took a long drag on his cigarette, stared Irons out. "I don't think you killed those men, Mr Irons," he said. "In fact, I'm positive you didn't."

"Thank God for that!" Irons cried. "Tell those out there!"

"I know who's chasing you, Richard. And I feel there's still some stuff I ought to know before I can apprehend him." Pitt stared him dead in the eye. "Larkhill, Richard. Talk to me."

"Larkhill," Irons said, clutching his cigarette like a lifeline. "Larkhill… oh God."

"Come on, Richard. Talk to me. No-one else can hear us."

Irons stuck the cigarette in his mouth, took enough smoke in to cause a violent fit of coughing, and then said, "You know about the resettlement camps, then?"

Pitt nodded.

"I worked there, back in the early days. Under Lewis Prothero. I was a guard, a low-ranking squaddie, you know. They did… they did these experiments. These awful experiments. It was horrible, you know? Hormone therapy or something. People growing hands in their thighs, or extra nipples, or another bollock. You know, horrible stuff. There was a dyke called Rita Boyd who was on my wing and she… oh, Jesus." He took another drag on his cigarette, letting the flow of the nicotine steady his breath. "When we found her dead, her skin was like plastic or rubber… all hard, foamy, smooth… god. But that wasn't the worse." He looked down at his hands, understanding that he was walking down paths he didn't want to, but paths that would take him to where he wanted to be. He had to face this.

"Go on," Pitt said. "What was worse?"

"The Man," he said, shuddering. "The Man in Room Five."

"The man from the flames," Pitt muttered. "The man with the smile."

"Yes!" Irons hissed. "Oh, thank god! Then you've heard of him?"

"I've met some people," Pitt replied. "Who is he, Richard?"

Irons crushed out his cigarette. Pitt wordlessly handed him another. "There was nothing unusual about his appearance, I remember that. Ugly git, but normal looking, you know. It was his eyes. His big staring eyes. They were horrible, like bug eyes or something. You know, blank and expressionless, but you can tell they're looking at you, straight through you. Like a spider's eyes. You felt like he could look into your soul, he could tell what you were thinking, you know? I used to hate him. Hated him more than anyone there, because he could do something the others couldn't. He could scare me."

"And the roses? Where do they fit into this?"

"They gave him a garden, you know. As an experiment. He seemed to have this fanatical interest in it. He managed to grow roses, the first I'd seen since the war. Whole species we thought were extinct. And then one day…"

Irons looked down at his hands. They were shaking.

"Then one day, I walked into his cell, and he was just sat there in the middle, staring at me like a bug. I wanted to run, I wanted to hit him, I wanted to do anything but to be in that same bloody room as his. But he just sat there, and he offered me a rose. And I threatened to crush it. But then he said something… something weird. He said, "How can you show such little regard for something so rare in this world, Mr Irons?" And then, worst of all, "I'll teach you the value of human life one day, Mr Irons.""

And then it all clicked in Pitt's head, and he realised what the game was. It was like stepping back for the first time and seeing the chess board all laid out before you, realising that you were just a pawn at the centre of it all. But was it too late to stop the checkmate, he wondered.

"So…" Pitt said, with a satisfied and utterly fake smile. "The rose. He said he'd be back, and he was, correct? Now he's going to teach you the value of human life by throwing you into his position, the other side of the bars, correct?"

"No," Irons said. "Maybe. He told me I had twenty-four hours to live. You know that."

"Then what if this is it, Irons? Aren't you understanding what it's like to be here? Aren't you starting to appreciate human life more now that you know what you put all those poor Larkhill bastards through?"

Irons started to sob desperately. "No!" he said. "No, I don't! He's not finished, I know he's not. The game's not over yet."

Pitt grabbed Iron's shaking hands and yelled, "Listen to me, Irons! Can't you see what he's doing? He's driving you mad! He's not just going to kill you, he wants to destroy you! He wants to put you through what he went through – the imprisonment! Knowing that by the end of the day you could be dead! It's an eye for an eye!"

Irons looked up into Pitt's eyes. "You think…" he said.

"Wait it out," Pitt said. "And I promise you I'll find him. You focus on keeping your head round here."

Some horrible recognition flashed in Iron's eyes, and Pitt would never know that he had an old Jefferson Airplane song flying through his head as Pitt uttered those words.

Feed you head… feed your head.

"Now," Pitt said, releasing Iron's sweaty grip. "Can I trust you here?"

"I'm being transferred in a few hours," Irons replied. "To Blackgate, down in South Ken."

Pitt chuckled. "Well, no-one's going to be touching you there, are they?"

He grabbed his coat and left.

18.35

Pitt's car drove down a lonely highway under dead street-lights, across the rubble and ruins of what had once been London. A gentle drizzle clung to his car and the streetlights cast a weird white glow over his face. Aside from the tape player, which was playing a fuzzy version of the Rolling Stone's Angie, the only sound was the splash of the car on the damp tarmac and the squeak of the windscreen wipers.

Some sleep, he thought, rubbing a hand down his face. Some sleep and I can forget about this whole Irons business for now. He hadn't seen home in nearly a day, but there wasn't much to see. He rarely saw his wife much these days. She was a nurse in the hospital, and they were hardly on speaking terms much anyway. The good days were long behind them.

He turned off into a small residential street, passing dim orange street-lights and abandoned semis.

He hadn't been able to stop thinking about the chess board, and about his place on it. You're in the game now, Terry. You're as much a part of this as Irons. But the ball was out of his field, into the hands of the Finger. There was nothing else to do but to wait this out.

Still, though, he thought as he turned off down what had once been a bustling main street, there was still that feeling that there was something he was missing here. That perhaps he hadn't seen all the board yet, and that the masked man had one last piece to play. What could he be missing?

He turned off into another street and tried to shake it out of his mind. But he couldn't.

18.45

Richard Irons was back in his cell.

He'd been given a sandwich to stave away starvation, and Mickey the Fingerman had informed that he'd be transferred to Blackgate at nine o'clock. Not much time left, he thought, in this cell.

They'd decided that it was in the best interests of the Finger not to execute their agents, at least not for the moment. Instead Irons faced life imprisonment, locked away in Blackgate jail. They figured, Mickey had informed him with a wicked smile, that he could get intimately acquainted with everyone he'd sent there.

They had an awful lot of catching up to do.

But Richard Irons wasn't thinking of that. He was thinking of the man in the mask, of this Pitt character.

And above all, he was thinking of revenge.

19.00

Terry Pitt's car pulled up in its driveway and the lights were killed.

The detective left it and stepped up to the house. It sat in darkness, every bit as unfriendly as the Iron's household had been. With a sigh he unlocked the door, slipped off his shoes and stepped inside.

The house was spotlessly clean. No-one lived here long enough to make a mess of it, he reflected sadly, as he turned on a lamp in the living room. He took off his coat, hung it on a hook and collapsed on the sofa, adjusting his tie with one hand.

His head was pounding. He was hungry, tired and nauseous.

Can't rest for the moment, he thought. Best to get some food down my neck.

He wandered into the kitchen, knocking on the light, to discover that an enterprising spider had started building a web over one spotless corner of the work-top. He shook his head. Next to the sink a few sausage mouldered silently on a plate in a pool of tepid water with a small note attached. 'TERRY – DINNER TONIGHT – MANDY.' He looked at the sausages, three sad pink things on a damp saucer, and reluctantly started to fry some oil.

20.00

"Mr Irons?" It was Mickey, at the door. "We're going to be moving you in about forty-five minutes. Make sure you're ready."

"Alright," Irons called back.

In the time since Mickey had gone off on an errand, Irons had been very resourceful. Even in the increasingly chaotic remnants of what had once been a sane, rational mind was a streak of adaptability he'd had drilled into him as a serviceman. He could work around things. He could improvise.

Right now he'd been busy improvising a very nasty looking device from what had once been a steel leg of his bed. He'd spent much of the past hour undoing the screws with his bare hands, rolling up on to the bed when Mickey or another goon walked past. They'd given pretty easily, considering, but not without a little blood-loss.

It had given, eventually, and he'd just finished refining it into a long, jagged blade – hammering it into the plaster floor with the weight of the other side of the bed, crushing its flexible steel into a jagged point. It wouldn't be effective for long, he figured, but he could do some damage at close range with one quick stab.

And, surely, that would be enough.

With an almost manic smile he slid the blade up his top, holding it into place with the band of his trousers.

Yes. Yes, this would be enough.

20.15

Jean Irons sat alone in her living room.

Ted was in bed. She'd explained what had happened to daddy, and there'd been tears. She hadn't told them about her encounter with him earlier in the afternoon.

And now she was alone, in this empty house, this house that suddenly seemed too big. You're thinking he might come back aren't you? she thought to herself. You're thinking he'll break out.

And then she thought that was a ridiculous idea, that people didn't just break out of the Finger's grip. God alone knew that of all the people in London she'd know that.

But she locked the door anyway, and checked the windows. Just in case.

20.45

Richard Irons was led in cuffs out of the Finger HQ, into the cold night air. It seemed somehow refreshing and liberating to him now. He never thought he'd feel like that about the rain.

He stepped up into the back of the Finger Van, Mickey sitting up alongside him. Mickey's gun, in its holster, was clearly visible. A little threat, to make sure Mr Irons didn't step out of line along the way. Another Fingerman sat opposite, with another gun visible. Yet another took the front. They weren't taking any chances.

Unfortunately for them, Richard thought, they've taken one chance too many already. They didn't search him on the way out.

Unlucky for you, he thought, and a wide, mad smile spread across his face.

The back doors were slammed shut and the van started up and out into the night.

To be continued…