Mambo by Campbell Armstrong

little thing, anaemic, small-breasted. Her name was Penny Ford and she lived in a one-room flat where she’d taken Ruhr after a casual encounter in a pub. When Pagan had interviewed her she’d said that she wasn’t in the habit of inviting strange fellows home, you understand, but Ruhr had been, well, bloody persistent and anyhow he didn’t have a place to stay, and she was only human after all. And her rent was almost due into the bargain and she was a bit short of the readies. She’d imagined a straight screw, Pagan thought. Uncomplicated sex, a quick exchange of money, end of the matter. Ruhr had other notions.
    Penny Ford hadn’t been able to tell Pagan why Ruhr was in Cambridge or how he had travelled there or where he was living. She knew nothing about him. She was informative only when it came to his sexual demands. Pagan remembered the girl’s quiet voice. We had sex, and I thought that was the end of it … I went inside the lavatory and when I came back he was sitting up on the edge of the bed and looking at me … well, in a funny kind of way … And he was making this dry whistling sort of noise, you know, tuneless like, but weird, like he wants to whistle only he doesn’t know how … He asks me to come over. Which I did, because I thought he wanted another go. He asks me to sit on his knee. Which I also did .
    And then?
    He has this terrible disfigured hand, of course. That made me sympathetic to him at first. I see him take something out of his jacket, which is hanging on the back of a chair. It’s a metal contraption with a leather strap, strangest thing I ever saw. And ugly as sin .
    Ugly as sin, Pagan thought. What had so spooked Penny Ford was an unusual artifact consisting of a strap and two long steel protuberances, both sharpened at the end. At first glance the contraption had no apparent function, until you realised – as Penny Ford did – that it was the prosthetic device Ruhr fastened over his deformed hand. The two sharp metal columns, each about six inches long, took the place of the missing fingers.
    He wants me to spread my legs so he can stick that bloody thing inside me, honest to God … Can you imagine what that sharp steel would have done to me? I mean, sex is one thing, but that was evil …
    Evil: Pagan remembered thinking it was an impressive word. Penny understandably resisted Ruhr’s request and the German had become threatening, catching her by the hair and trying to force her to obey him. She’d struggled and screamed. Ruhr might have been able to silence the girl and slip away easily, but by sheer chance two plainclothes detectives were already inside the house questioning a first-floor tenant about a recent burglary. They responded to the screams immediately, imagining at worst a domestic dispute. They hadn’t expected to corner the world’s most wanted terrorist with his trousers hanging round his knees and his underwear at half-mast. Pagan had found this image very entertaining before. In the shadow of recent events it didn’t seem remotely amusing now. Ruhr was sick and vicious. Worse, he was also at liberty, and Frank Pagan was not.
    Pagan sat upright. “Christ, I want out of here.”
    Martin Burr shook his head. “There are persons in the morgue with more colour than you. Accept your fate and be still.”
    â€œI need some fresh air, that’s all.”
    Burr smiled. “Even if you were able to leave, you don’t have anything here to wear. When they brought you in, your suit was totally ruined.”
    â€œRuined?”
    â€œBloodstained and torn.”
    The suit, made specially for him by a tailor with basement premises in Soho, had cost Frank Pagan a month’s salary. In normal circumstances he would have lamented the wreckage of a fashionable beige linen suit, but not now. “I’ll leave in a bloody bedsheet if I have to.”
    â€œFrank Pagan wandering