Mosaic

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• Jo Bannister
  
• Epigraph
  
• Burning for Burning
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Wound for Wound
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Life for Life
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  

Jo Bannister lives in Northern Ireland, where she worked as a journalist and editor on local newspapers. Since giving up the day job, her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards. Most of her spare time is spent with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. She is currently working on a new series of psychological crime/thrillers.

And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for
life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for
foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, strife for
strife.

The Book of the Covenant, as told to Moses:
Exodus 21 Mosaic law

The big man with the white moustache like a Viking's leaned in and out of Joel Grant's field of vision. That field was narrowed by the restraints upon him and by his own weakness, but when the big man leaned close he said things and when he moved away he did things, and what he did made Grant scream and his exhausted body twist and writhe like a jerked marionette.

This long after Grant could not remember what he had said, only what he had wanted; nor could he remember what the man had done to him that had hurt so much. Forgetting was necessary, Nature's way of ensuring that he would not spend the rest of his life on the rack, remembering the experience all his waking hours and helplessly reliving it every night. But Grant resented the loss, even mourned it, feeling—though he could not have explained the feeling—that part of his being had been stolen from him. He knew that he had suffered, and survived, but having no cogent memory of the first he could not ever quite focus the second into reality. He dwelt in a kind of limbo, as if the big man had retained his soul.

Nor did forgetting allow him a dreamless sleep. As the big man with the white moustache loomed in and out of his vision he screamed and writhed, and shouted obscenities until someone struck him in the face. The blow was not vicious, not painful, but it was repeated rhythmically and insistently until he began to emerge from the nightmare.

He woke finally to a brilliance of electric light, the slick of sweat down his body, a tangle of sheets about his legs and a sound like the wind that was his own gasping, panting breath. A warm ache of terror lay upon his limbs and his cheek tingled.

A woman knelt on the bed beside him. Her night attire consisted of a wristwatch, and she was mopping his face and throat and the hollows under his collarbones with a cold wet flannel. When she saw intelligence creeping into his staring, terrified eyes she put the flannel into his hand and looked at her watch.

“You took your time coming out of that one.”

From somewhere Grant managed to find a shaky grin. “Why leave when you're enjoying yourself?”

Liz Fallon smiled back. “You're getting your sense of humour back.”

“No. I'm just getting better at pretending I have one.”

She shrugged. “Have it your own way.” She did a lot for him that most people would not consider part of a normal relationship, but she drew the line at coaxing him at four o'clock in the morning. There was a pocket diary on the table by the bed. She made a note in it.

Weakness whining in his voice, Grant said petulantly, “I don't see what good you think that does, either.”

Liz thought about how he must feel, not only being nursed like a sick child but needing it, and hung onto her patience. “It proves you're getting better. It used to be seven nights a week. Now it's three. That's a big improvement.”

“It's still seven,” growled Grant, wiping the flannel down his forearms with distaste and hands that were not steady. The sweat had poured from him like a river: even the sheets were damp. “I only wake you up three nights a week.”

“You used to wake me up seven, so it's still progress.”

“Maybe it's your insomnia that's getting better,” Grant said snidely. “There's nothing like good works for a clear conscience.”

Liz put the diary back and regarded him calmly. “Joel, do we have to have this conversation now? It's the middle of the night: I'm tired, I want to go back to bed. You should get some more sleep, too.”

He mumbled something into the flannel.

“What?”

“I said, I daren't,” he shouted. “I daren't go to sleep, because when I do he does it to me again, what he did before, and I can't even remember what it was.”

It was not that her patience snapped, only that she recognized when it could do more harm than good. “It's your dream, Joel,” she said sharply. “Fight him for it Hurt him. Maybe if you can beat him you'll be free of it. You were a fighter: well, fight now.”

She rose from the bed with serpentine grace, her long golden back smoothly straightening, and walked from his room without haste or hesitation, closing the door behind her with a crisp, quiet, very final snap.

After she had gone Grant went on looking at the light bulb above him until the element printed tiny bright horseshoes all over his retinae. “Fight?” he mused bitterly. “Don't you know, girl, that's the first thing they do to you—knock all the fight out?”

The big man with the white moustache made a small, deliberate gesture of his hand towards the door.

The man on the kitchen chair could barely see the door—that also was deliberate—but the whites of his eyes showed as he tried automatically to follow the gesture. The man on the chair was afraid. He was also black, and here being a seated black man in the presence of a standing white man was enough to make anyone afraid. There was nothing he could do about it, however, except endure it as best he could and show it as little as possible.

De Witte was speaking. He had an unusually deep voice, with a hint of bass music in the lower register which gave range to the customarily rather nasal accent. He also spoke slowly, but nothing about him suggested a correspondingly slow intellect. He might conceivably have got the job other than on merit—a donkey could get elected prime minister as long as it was white and brayed in a Boer accent—he might even have got the reputation some other way. But the hard bright diamonds that served De Witte as eyes could only have been acquired either by mining or by being a cold, clever, ruthless bastard. De Witte's hands were too clean for a miner's; though only in that one respect.

He said, in his deep unhurried musical voice, “That's the way out. You go out that door and you're in a corridor; turn left, round the corner and there's another door, and that one lets you onto the street It can't be more than twenty strides—the sort of distance you could do in a few seconds from a standing start. But I've got to tell you, boy, you'd never make it. Three ways you can get out of here: dead, mad and co-operative. The last is not only the easiest, it's the quickest.

“Listen, you're not a fool, I'm not a fool, so we won't talk nonsense. I won't tell you that every man who comes in here gives me what I want in the end, because that isn't true and you know it. But you also know that those men who hold out, you don't bump into them on street corners afterwards. You want any kind of life after this, you'll co-operate. You've still got six, seven years on Robben Island, but in the end you'll walk away. It sure beats twenty years in a padded cell or going out the door in a plastic bag. This is not a nice place, you don't want to spend the rest of your life here.”

The man on the chair made a tiny shuddering movement. It might have been a spasm of pure fear, except that De Witte, who had seen it before, knew otherwise. It was the fractional muscular tremor of action no sooner decided upon than abandoned. In his mind, and at the end of his nerves, the prisoner had made a desperate dive for the half-seen door behind him; but at the last moment his courage had failed him. Beneath the white moustache De Witte smiled to himself. The first battle was over and won. The man no longer saw himself as a fighter but as a captive. Now that was out of the way, real progress could begin.

De Witte strolled over to the door and leaned against it, casually, letting the lesson sink in. He moved as he spoke: unhurriedly, but with the promise of speed and of strength. He went on: “I understand your position. You've got appearances to keep up. You can't talk too soon. Some things you can't tell me at all. You can't talk until I hurt you some. Don't worry, I know the routine—I've done this before. So what we do is, give you something to show for your visit—nothing too bad, it'll look worse than it is—and then you can give me something to show for my time. It doesn't have to be too important, just something for the files. Then we can call it a day.”

Though there's always tomorrow, thought De Witte, a shade bleakly, and the day after that, and the day after that, and pretty soon you'll run out of trivial things to tell me to stop the hurting that will be anything but token, and you'll tell me everything you know and some things you can only guess at before I decide I've had my money's worth out of you. And when we haul in a couple of dozen of your comrades in consequence, they'll come spitting fire and swearing vengeance on your poor tattered hide; but by the time they too have been through this room, and betrayed sorae friends of their own and learnt to spew up their own insides at the sound of a footstep outside the door, they won't hate you any more. They won't even hate me. They won't have the guts.

Not until late that evening did the side-door he had described open to allow De Witte onto the street. It was a back street, dark and quiet, linking nowhere with nowhere else, where no one came and no one passed, which was exactly how the men who had chosen the site and designed the building wanted it. It was made for secret arrivals and departures. De Witte did not care who saw him come or go, but at the end of a long day it was easier to have his car meet him here than go right through the building to the front steps and meet it there.