Harlan moved the knife towards the drawing. He had no intention of damaging such a potentially important piece of evidence, but he figured the bluff was worth a shot.
“Why? Why do you want to know where it is?” Jones asked as the blade touched the canvas, a note of pleading replacing the anger in his voice.
“So it is somewhere real and not just something from your imagination.”
“I…I didn’t say that.”
Harlan took out his phone. Watching intently for Jones’s reaction, he showed him the photo of the storm- drain. “Does that place look familiar to you?”
Jones didn’t show the faintest hint of recognition. He looked at the photo blankly — perhaps just a shade too blankly. “No.”
“I think it does. I think you’ve been there.”
“Why the hell would I have been there?”
“To abuse and maybe even murder children.”
Jones’s puffy alcoholic’s face scrunched into a horrified red ball. “You’re off your fucking head.”
Harlan opened his mouth to ask another question, but closed it again as a siren blared past the house. Soon the street would be swarming with firemen and police, making it almost impossible for him to get away unnoticed. He needed answers fast, and as he’d feared, it was clearly going to take more than questioning to get them. He gagged Jones, then looked around for something hard and heavy. His gaze fixed on the old truncheon, which was leant, handle up, against the foot of the armchair. Jones moaned through his gag as Harlan rolled him onto his side and twisted his arms so that his fingers were splayed out flat on the floorboards. Harlan snatched up the truncheon, raising it overhead, his knuckles showing bone-white where they gripped it. One second passed, two, three and still the truncheon didn’t descend. Harlan’s breath came rapidly through the mask’s mouth-hole. Ethan’s life depends on you, he shouted silently at himself. Do it! Fucking do it!
Harlan brought the truncheon down on Jones’s fingers with bone-crunching force. Jones let out a scream that was loud even through the gag. Harlan hit his fingers again. He waited for Jones’s screams to subside, before removing his gag. “Now will you tell me?” He managed to keep his voice cold and level, even though his insides were reeling and churning.
Jones stared up at him, eyes swollen with fear and hate, breath rasping with agony. He said nothing.
“Much more of this and you’ll never be able to paint again.”
Still nothing.
Harlan replaced the gag. Jones kicked and writhed amongst the wreckage of his life’s work, trying desperately but vainly to break his bonds. Holding him steady, Harlan pummelled his fingers with all the force his muscular arms could exert. Jones’s screams changed into retches. Harlan tore away the packing tape and Jones vomited up what looked, and smelt, like a can’s worth of cider muddied with blood. Suppressing a retch himself, Harlan said, “It won’t stop until you tell me. Understand?”
His pale, mottled face contorted almost beyond recognition, Jones sobbed into his vomit. Suddenly, his whole body trembling from the effort as if palsied, he managed to lift his head and scream, “Help!”
Harlan snatched up a handful of shredded canvas and stuffed it into Jones’s mouth. He stuck fresh packing tape over it. Jones’s eyes bulged as if he couldn’t breathe. Sweat dribbled into Harlan’s eyes. He blinked to clear his vision. This wasn’t working. He didn’t have time to gradually beat the truth out of Jones. Any second now the plainclothes policemen might come knocking, and then the game would be up. He had to go further, faster. He had to make Jones believe it was a straight choice between spilling what he knew and death. And there was only one way he could think of to do that.
Composing his features into a mask of implacable resolve, Harlan reached up and removed the Halloween mask. He put down the truncheon and picked up his knife. He pushed his face close to Jones’s. “I’m letting you see my face so you’ll know I’m serious when I say this. The only way you’re going to live through this is if you tell me what I want to know.” With one hand Harlan removed the gag, with the other he pressed the knife to Jones’s windpipe. “Now talk.”
Spittle stretched like an elastic band from Jones’s lips as he sobbed, “I already told you the truth. Oh God, please don’t-” He broke off as Harlan pressed harder. The blade drew blood as his Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively.
Somewhere in some deep, dark part of Harlan, the same frenzy that’d overtaken him earlier stirred. He pictured himself slashing at Jones until he was as unrecognisable as his paintings. The unbidden thought vibrated through his mind and down his arm. When it reached the knife, Jones flinched as if from an electric shock. “Okay, I’ll talk,” he gasped, his voice deflating to a hoarse whisper as fear sucked the last dregs of resistance out of him. “You’re right. My drawing and that photo you showed me are of the same place.”
An almost euphoric sense of relief swept through Harlan, and not just because he may well have got one step closer to finding Ethan. It’d shocked him nearly as much as it had Jones to realise that he hadn’t been bluffing. He really would’ve killed Jones if he had to. “You’ve been there?”
“A long time ago. Before I went to prison.”
“What year? What month?”
“2003. I don’t remember what month. It was hot, so I guess it was summertime.”
“Did you go alone?”
There was a pause. The blade twitched against Jones’s throat, prompting him to speak. “No. Someone took me.”
“Who? What’s their name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t fucking bullshit me.”
“I’m not. He never told me his name and I never asked it. Sometimes it’s best that way.”
“Well what does he look like?”
“I dunno what he looks like now, but back then he had long dark hair and a beard. I used to call him the Prophet, y’know, ’cos he looked like something out of the Bible.”
“What about height and build?”
“About the same as you, I think. I can’t really remember. It was that long ago.”
“How did you meet?”
“He sold toys on the street in the city centre. This other guy I knew pointed him out to me because he’d seen him at an offenders’ hostel.”
“A sex offender’s hostel?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he do time for?”
“I dunno. You don’t ask questions like that, do you? Anyway, I used to buy things from him occasionally — stuffed toys, cheap plastic jewellery, things like that — and we got to talking about photography.”
“Why did he take you to the storm-drain?”
“He said he had some photographs I might be interested in buying. So we drove out there to take a look at them.”
Thinking about what Jim had told him, Harlan shuddered as he felt that primal urge of frenzy nibble at the edges of his mind again. As if sensing this, Jones continued quickly, “I only went there the once.”
“Just to buy photos?”
“Yes.”
Harlan tapped the charcoal drawing. “That seems to suggest you went there for a lot more than photos.”
“I didn’t do that drawing, the Prophet did. He started doing art when he was inside, same as me. I saw it on his wall and, well, I liked it, so I asked if I could buy it. He gave it me for nothing.”
Squinting at the drawing, Harlan saw that the lower half of the adult figure’s face was indeed slightly misshapen, as if they had a beard. His brow puckered as something occurred to him. “Are you saying that was hanging on the wall of the storm-drain?”
Jones winced as if he’d let something slip unintentionally. He winced again as a slight movement of the blade brought a fresh trickle of blood from his throat. “No. It was on the wall of his caravan. He took me there as well as the drain.”
