his chaperone to open the door, and then together they entered the room.
His face fell. He had rather hoped the woman would already be in place, but although the chair was in situ there was no sign of a subject. At least his instruments were there, laid out on the table: scalpel, surgical saw, pliers.
He was about to make his way over to the table and take a seat when he felt arms grasp him roughly from behind. “Hey—” he started to say as the first man was joined by a second and he was lifted bodily, dragged to the chair, and shoved down. In a routine that he himself had witnessed many times before, the men fastened him to the chair.
“What are you doing?” he said with no hint of fear or surprise in his voice, because he had always half expected that something like this might happen. “Who is behind this?”
His answer came as one of the men dragged across a second chair and set it up in front of him. A silver laptop was placed on the chair and opened. The man fiddled for a while before an image resolved.
“Full screen, make it full screen,” said another. Now Grandfather could see who was behind this role reversal.
It was Sergei. At the other end of the link he sat and dispassionately surveyed a scene that he had presumably masterminded. More than ever now, Grandfather was pleased that he had made Ivan Vinitsky suffer. Now he understood it was Sergei’s intention to make him suffer in return, to avenge his brother, but—and here Grandfather smiled—they would not have the stomach to inflict the kind of pain that was his specialty. They were too weak for that.
“Hello, Ded,” said his grandson’s second in command over the link. “All has gone according to my plan, I see.”
“Your brother begged,” snarled Grandfather. A grin split his lips despite himself, despite his situation.
“As will you, Ded, as will you,” Sergei assured him. “Now, where shall we start? Is everything ready?”
“Yes, boss,” said one of the men.
“Tell us, Ded, where should we begin?” asked Sergei politely.
“The nipples,” croaked Grandfather. “I always start with the nipples.”
He looked into the eyes of the man who had betrayed him as they cut off his sweater and then sliced his nipples away. And when that was over, he told them, “Next . . . next, the ears.”
Sergei shook his head in disgust and closed his laptop, leaving a black screen to watch the rest of the old man’s torture.
CHAPTER 57
RIGHT, THOUGHT SHELLEY. He had just enough time to get to Millharbour across the river, a journey he had to make quickly, but without attracting attention from the cops. In his favor: he had an hour. Points against? This was London and you never went anywhere fast.
As he drove he watched Canary Wharf Tower grow in his windshield, steam rising from its pyramid roof, the aircraft-warning light blinking on and off hypnotically. Soon enough he had passed it, and he knew he was close to Millharbour. Now it was as though he were in its shadow.
Funny, he thought as he traveled, he had been brought up not far from here, in Limehouse, but it might as well have been another country for all he recognized it. In his time it was abandoned dockyards. There were no towers, just neglected cranes. He’d gone away, joined the army at seventeen, and when he returned the London he knew had gone.
As he left Canary Wharf behind, the elevated tracks of the railway line—the Docklands Light Railway—rose to his left, tracing his journey as the gleaming office blocks eventually gave way to the more modest units at the far end of Millharbour, all of which backed onto a less picturesque and therefore less expensive section of the River Thames.
Here there was little to no traffic. The main reason anybody had to be in this area was to work at one of the office blocks or factory units, and most of those were shut for the night, workers tucked up in bed.
And then he came to it, the road he needed. He hadn’t realized the last time he’d come—something to do with being cooped up in the back of a van—but it was a cul-de-sac. On one side was a row of office units, on the other a patch of land fenced off, signs promising more office units to come.
Further down the road he saw that three of the units were burned-out shells, and parked close to them,