Twist Read online

  7

  Red had regained consciousness about an hour previously with no recollection of how she came to be lying on a dirty mattress in the corner of a small dark room with no windows beneath its low ceiling.

  Her eyes had adjusted quickly to the gloom, making full use of the thin ribbon of light beneath the door. For a while she’d tried to piece together the events that had brought her here but could only get as far as the men strong-arming her into the Mercedes, the bear-like one swearing in what sounded like Russian when she had bitten his hand.

  After that her mind was as bare and empty as the cell she was in. There were no furnishings and only a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room. It didn’t give off much light but she thought maybe she could use the metal inside the light fitting to try to pick the lock.

  Doubling up the stained mattress to stand on, she reached up and twisted the bulb but found it would not budge. Running her fingers up its neck to where the glass joined the metal she found two tiny bumps where it had been spot-welded to the fitting, and when she cupped the bulb and lifted it in her hand her suspicion was confirmed. The frosted glass was too thick and it was concealing something compact and dense in the middle of the ring of LEDs. Something like a camera.

  She stared up at the black dome, picturing the two men watching her and whoever else they kept imprisoned down here in their dungeon. She sat back down on the mattress and remembered the rules FBoss had imposed after Harry had failed to turn up.

  Go out and play, but keep a low profile. No risks and no thieving. If you need money just ask me … at least until the heat dies down.

  She wished he was here with her now. No cage could hold him. He always had a plan and he could talk his way out of anything. So why had she done exactly the opposite of what he’d told her, wandering out on a frozen January afternoon, to embark on a one-woman crime wave which had culminated in a failed attempt to rob a high-class brothel presumably run by the Russian mob?

  She had no illusions about what lay in store for her. About what those two animals would do to her once they got word from their boss. They wouldn’t wait for confirmation of her identity. They would shred her existing ID and brand her as their own and there was nothing she could do to stop them.

  She had fallen through the cracks into an alternative world in which the power of her captors was absolute. There was no human kindness in them. They were as dead-eyed and indifferent to the suffering they caused as abattoir workers. They just worked the machine that their boss had designed. The one that lured poor young women with the promise of a better life, trafficked and broke them, then put them to work selling their bodies to pay debts that escalated at impossible rates of interest.

  There was only one card she could play now and it scared her. It would mean breaking the one rule that mattered most. The pact of silence, the bond of trust that once broken might sever her link to the only family she had ever known.

  She heard the key turn in the lock and watched as the one she had come to think of as ‘the bear’ filled the door frame and stepped into the room, fingers like sausages beginning to work on the buckle of his belt. She couldn’t see the other one. They had probably drawn straws and the other one would be sulking, sipping his coffee, watching his partner get first dibs on a screen somewhere.

  She stood up and straightened her shoulders uttering a silent prayer that he knew some English.

  ‘You are making a mistake,’ she said. ‘I already belong to someone known to you.’

  He said nothing, but looked once up at the light bulb before stepping towards her, forcing her back into the corner of the room.

  ‘Give me my phone,’ she began again. ‘I will prove it to you. Give it to me.’

  She felt the terror mount as he ignored her. Probably he spoke English just fine but it was easier if he pretended not to. To shut out the last-minute pleas of ‘you don’t have to do this’ that he must have heard many times before.

  She felt his hand reach out towards her and touch her hair where it lay on her right shoulder. His grip was gentle and he looked at her hair with curiosity like he had never seen red hair before. Then there was a voice from the doorway, something in Russian, a string of words that were quietly spoken and commanding and she felt the weight of his paw lift from her shoulder as he turned to see the other man standing in the doorway.

  He was nodding and she saw that he was holding her mobile phone in his right hand, offering it to her.

  ‘What name?’ he said.

  ‘Sikes,’ she replied. ‘Bill Sikes … William Sikes, a thief.’

  ‘Si … kes?’ the man repeated his name, snapping it into two distinct syllables.

  ‘He works for Fagin, FBoss.’ Spoon-feeding them each syllable she continued, ‘Fay … gin … ess … cue. A master thief. Paintings, pictures … not just any old shit.’

  For the best part of five seconds the blond stocky one stood looking at Sikes on the mobile phone and then he turned to the Bear and shook his head.

  ‘No!’ she shouted as the Bear advanced on her again. ‘No. You have heard of us. We did Hauser and Wirth in Piccadilly and the Lisson in Marylebone and the Blain in Mayfair. And the last one was all over the news … the …’

  The Bear reached her and picked her up with one hand, choking her words as he pinned her to the wall. She struggled, gripping his forearm with her hands, fighting to remain conscious, telling herself she had been here before and to wait until the man was on top of her before …

  ‘Stop!’ the blond one said, entering the room from behind them and rattling off a sentence in Russian that contained the words ‘Ninjas’ and ‘White Cube’ before extending her mobile to her.

  ‘Call Si-kes,’ he said, motioning for the Bear to let her down.

  She quick-dialled but there was no answer. She tried again, picturing him at the gym, his mobile phone vibrating silently in his duffel bag in the corner, wrapping the bandages round his big, scarred fists before stepping into the ring to hurt someone.

  ‘Hello.’

  He finally picked up and his voice took her by surprise.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘I’m in trouble. It’s serious. Listen. Some Russians took me. They have me in a basement. They want confirmation …’

  She paused for a moment, struggling to finish the sentence, listening to him breathing.

  ‘They want confirmation …’ she tried again.

  She could not finish the sentence. She knew she had crossed the line and she knew what the remaining words would cost her and the debt she would owe Sikes forever.

  She looked up into the blond Russian’s emotionless eyes.

  ‘They want confirmation that I belong to you.’

  8

  Twist looked down at the inky black water of the canal and wondered if his mate Martin was still fishing it. He remembered meeting Martin for the first time down by the canal. He’d pulled out the holding net and shown him a fish that he said was a trout. It had been about three inches long and had spines up the ridge of its back and later, when Martin had fried it in butter, a black diesel-like liquid had oozed out of it.

  Martin claimed that they were a special kind of urban sub-species of the freshwater variant. They were blind and navigated the hidden rivers that ran deep beneath London using sonar when the Thames was in spate. Twist smiled to himself as he ran, remembering Martin’s hand swimming through the ancient subterranean tributaries that kinked and ox-bowed deep underground to the pools where they spawned in perpetual darkness. He laughed to himself thinking about Martin, stoned as a trout down by the canal bank, and he wished his only real friend was with him now.

  ‘Define “real”,’ Alan, Twist’s social worker, had asked him the day before he and Martin had gone before the magistrate for tagging ‘crash’ up a forty-eight sheet M&S lingerie ad that had been jamming the A40 just before the Hanger Lane roundabout.

  ‘Someone who is there for you when you need them most,’ Twist had repli
ed, watching as Alan had nodded, sympathetically, and listened as Twist had told him it had been his idea, not Martin’s to hit the poster.

  Which was the opposite of what Alan had told the judge the next day before going on to explain that Martin’s psychological profile revealed sociopathic tendencies which had impacted negatively on his ‘client’ who had formed ‘unhealthy attachments’ since childhood.

  Twist had also taken the DSM1V, the mental health assessment they gave all repeat juvenile offenders and it hadn’t said anything about wanting to hang out with arseholes. So when his time to take the stand had come he’d told the magistrate the truth. That he always had the ideas and Martin just went along with it. And that there wasn’t anyone in the world alive today who’d had his back more than Martin and there wasn’t anyone he could think of that put himself out more for other people, even sometimes for strangers he’d hardly met.

  But the old man in the wig hadn’t budged. He’d just nodded condescendingly and asked Twist if he had any actual evidence that he wanted to share with the court; he said he hadn’t, which had given Alan his chance to stand up and drop the bombshell that had blown his head apart.

  He revealed how Twist’s need for attachment stemmed from the fact of his abandonment, shortly after his birth, on the doorstep of a block of flats in London’s exclusive Holland Park. Bubble-wrapped for protection against the cold, he’d been found in the bottom of a Harvey Nichols bag by a Colombian cleaner who had taken him into her arms and out of the cold, and wept when efforts to trace a receipt found in the bottom of the bag to his birth mother had ended in failure.

  Twist could not remember exactly what had happened next in the courtroom. Only that he’d managed to punch Alan hard in the back of the head and the sensation of having his face pushed into floorboards as the magistrate had called for order.

  A year had passed since the trial. Six months inside Beltham for criminal damage and six months on the run, living out of skips and off the two quid caricatures he sketched for tourists in Leicester Square; trying to find out from friends what had happened to Martin, hearing rumours that he’d been sectioned and stuck in a loony bin near his nan’s house in Broadstairs.

  Twist hadn’t said a word to Alan since the day he’d punched him but still the little shit persisted. Every Monday morning, first thing, without fail, Twist got an email. The message was always the same. That he was sorry. That he knew he’d overstepped the mark trying to get Twist a reduced sentence and promising that if they met off the record he would do two things to make amends.

  Firstly, they could go and see Martin together. Secondly, and only if Twist thought it was a good idea, and after they’d discussed it, Alan would find the money to pay a professional tracing service to track his birth mother …

  Twist hadn’t responded to any of the emails. He didn’t trust Alan further than he could throw him but once the idea was in his head he’d found it hard to exorcise. At first he’d tried to shut it out but recently, living alone in the tower block, he’d started to dwell on the offer again, lying awake at night trying to picture her face and coming up with theories as to why she’d had to abandon him.

  Alan said there were a couple of charities that specialised in tracking the birth relatives of orphans who were not registered on a contact register or with an adoption agency which, given that Twist had been brought up in foster homes, would be the best way to go.

  And what at first had sounded like a long shot, designed to sucker him into meeting Alan, had come to seem possible. The doctors had been able to estimate the time of his birth to within a twenty-four-hour window and while there was a high chance his mother would have given birth in a hospital she would definitely not have reappeared for a mandatory six-week postnatal check.

  So, as Alan had explained countless times in his Monday-morning emails, it was possible to eliminate the lion’s share of the two thousand babies born in the UK who shared his birthday. From this long list the trackers could then eliminate the names of all the mothers of babies that had been given up for adoption.

  The short list that remained would, Alan guessed, hold no more than ten names, women who could be easily tracked using the Electoral Roll and the Register of Births and Deaths. So unless Twist’s mother had given birth outside a hospital, died or left the country, there was a high chance of finding her.

  The temperature was falling fast now and he could see that a thin glaze of ice had formed on the canal in the shadows where the towers blocked out the winter sun. In a week, maybe two, the ice would thicken and the annual ritual would begin. Boys from the estates would gather in gangs on the footbridge and drop breeze blocks, weighted traffic cones and shopping trolleys onto the ice to test it before stepping out to try to cross it.

  The cold was a problem but darkness had never bothered him. He’d got used to it when he was tagging. The three guys he ran with from the estates would sit in Snark’s mum’s garage smoking dank then pack and go out. They would always have a target. The spot they were going to hit. Sometimes they would even have a plan. A way in and an exit route, the four of them working together, taking it in turns to tag the spot while the others stood watch. But they rarely had any message to get across. Leastways, nothing more profound than ‘X was here’.

  Not like the activists Twist had begun to follow later on. Zealots who didn’t seem to care if they got pressure hosed after chaining themselves to a Japanese whaler or arrested after abseiling down the clock face of Big Ben dressed as Batman. But that had become annoying. Being stuck with dead-heads while he was sketching in his notebooks the whole time until it had come to seem like wasted effort, monkeying up drainpipes, running from blokes who’d lose their jobs if they didn’t catch the punks who’d hit the warehouse or the District Line train they’d been contracted to protect.

  Apart from Martin, who was a dreamer like Twist, the others in Snark’s crew could have been surfers or base jumpers. They got high and had nothing to say for themselves. Twist was dyslexic but it hadn’t stopped him learning to read. By force of will he had kept himself up to speed with reading and writing so that he could cram his head with ideas. And so what if he couldn’t spell his name. He could look at a face for sixty seconds and reproduce a perfect likeness in under three minutes.

  And as his stack of notebooks had grown in height so had his dissatisfaction with Snark, who had a mean streak and who Twist came to believe might even be jealous.

  In Beltham, Twist had worked in the lending library. The range was shit but the little librarian who ran it let him read his Kindle. There were also a lot of over-sized coffee-table books donated by art galleries and museums. And that was how Twist had started copying art.

  A week after he’d been working in the library he’d been beckoned into the stockroom at the back. The librarian had kicked a dusty red plastic storage container full of charcoal and oil paints across the room to Twist, who had spent twelve hours a day, Monday to Saturday, for the next five months, ‘taking stock’ of Velasquez, Michelangelo, Picasso and Vermeer. He watched podcasts on techniques in his bunk at night and told himself that one day, when he got out, he would visit the art galleries and see the pictures and, just like he did with faces, recreate them from memory on the walls and tunnels and trains of London.

  9

  The Bear stopped at a closed door off a stairwell which read Fire Escape. Through it Red could hear techno, slowed down so that it sounded like the death throes of some great beast. Opening the door, the Bear ushered Red inside. She was temporarily blinded by red laser bursts but had a sense of a vast blackness, or a massive, square room which was completely empty as though they had stepped out into space. Then Red heard the blond one close the door behind her and she became aware of movement in the darkness as a strobe light flashed like sheet lightning and Red caught her first glimpse of the second level of hell.

  To her right on a red divan, a young woman was cradling an old man’s head between her legs while a fat man in a top hat drank f
rom a bottle of vodka on an adjoining leather armchair, head thrown back as two girls stroked his chest. The Bear grabbed Red by the wrist and pulled her across the floor, careful not to tread on the carnal malefactors who writhed and contorted on the shagpile carpet beneath their feet, their faces grotesque masks of pleasure and pain, lit intermittently by the dancing strobes.

  Sparks flashed in the darkness some sixty feet away and she caught sight of a stick-thin brunette with a white-painted face biting on a latex bit, her back arching as a man in a white surgeon’s mask applied two wires to her skeletal buttocks.

  There was a voice in the speakers. It was deep and distorted so that Red could not understand what it was saying but it was somehow commanding as if the people in the room had no choice but to obey it. She stumbled over someone’s leg and looked down to see a woman on her knees as two men held her arms and a third tightened what looked like a garden hose around her neck until her eyes bulged and the skin of her cheeks flooded with blood.

  A hand reached out and snatched at her ankle as the Bear opened a second steel door in the wall on the far side of the room. They began to climb up a narrow winding stairwell lined with padlocked doors and mirrors, then stopped at a red wooden door at the top.

  The Bear looked to his blond colleague, who nodded, and the big man knocked three times and waited, listening at the door.

  ‘Enter,’ said a Russian voice from within and the Bear turned the handle and stepped inside, standing by the end of the door, watching Red as she walked in, blinking in the strange light that danced like water across the white marble floor.

  The Bear pushed her forwards and as she walked she saw the source of the light came from illuminated glass water pipes which ran parallel to the corridor-like room before opening out into a round chamber dimly lit by spotlights in the roof.