In Cold Blood by Mark Dawson Page A

they’ll never forget.”
    Joe looked up, eyes forward, and saw that Farax was watching them. His eyes glittered with malevolent interest, cunning, and Joe suddenly felt as if the young man had the ability to look right through him. He swallowed down his fear as they continued on.
     
    THEY CONTINUED NORTH. They passed a mishmash of construction styles: the boxy white houses, concrete blockwork buildings with corrugated tin roofs, dwellings that were little more than tents. There were a handful of shops with little in the way of goods on display. There were no bars, and no sign of any alcohol, anywhere. People continued to stop and stare. They made for an incongruous parade.
    The man in the lead stopped and pointed sharply to his left. They turned through a gateway, not even big enough for a car, and into a reasonably sized compound. It was walled on all sides, an eight foot rendered barrier that, while crumbling in places, would still be a significant obstacle to scale for anyone who might come and rescue them. There was a brushwood hut in the corner of the yard where two goats bleated at the disturbance. Steel gates slammed shut behind them, sealing them inside.
    The house in the middle of the compound was three storeys high. It was made from thick stone blocks and the windows were thin and miserly, covered by green shutters. The entrance had once been grand, but the fine design had been blasted by the salty wind and no-one had cared to maintain it. The house was topped with a decorative crenelated pediment that had been scarred by the passage of time, too, and when they got closer Joe saw jagged holes where the stone had been chipped away by automatic gunfire.
    There were two armed guards at the main door and they moved aside as the procession approached. They went inside. It was dark and damp and difficult to make out any details. They passed drums of well water, a hole-in-the-floor privy and a series of rooms in which bed rolls had been arranged. Quarters for the men, Joe guessed. They continued deeper inside, the leader pausing at a door to unlock it, and then opening it to reveal a flight of stairs that descended to a basement.
    “Down,” he said.
    They did as they were told. There was a single bare lightbulb at the foot of the stairs and, in its feeble light, the descent on the stone treads, slick with moss and lichen, was treacherous. There was a further door at the foot of the stairs and it, too, needed to be unlocked.
    “Here. You stay here.”
    Joe was the first inside. They were in the basement. It was a large room that must have stretched out beneath the footprint of the house above, with dimensions of perhaps twenty metres by ten metres. There was a rough dirt floor, concreted over in places, damp from moisture that streamed from the ceiling and ran down the walls. It was windowless and lit only by the dull light that seeped in through a grid of ventilation bricks that were set into the wall just below the ceiling and another bare sixty watt bulb, not nearly bright enough to cast aside the deep shadows in the corners of the room. A tarpaulin had been spread across a quarter of the space and a series of mattresses had been stacked atop it. That was their sleeping arrangement. There were no chairs. A couple of buckets on the far side of the room were the toilet facilities.
    “We can’t stay here!” Harry Torres exclaimed.
    “What would you prefer?” Farax asked him.
    “I wouldn’t keep my dog down here.”
    “ Harry ,” Joe said. “Take it easy. That won’t help.”
    “Come on, Joe, this is bullshit.”
    “And getting agitated about it is not going to help us at all. Calm down.”
    Torres flashed a hot stare at him, but held his tongue.
    Farax retreated to the door. “I will return later, Joe,” he said. “Perhaps we can talk about improving your accommodation. You know what you have to do.”
    Joe’s stomach turned over. He could feel Joyce’s eyes in his back. “I’m sorry, Farax.