PROLOGUE
The Tefal steam iron was red-hot as I pressed it
hard onto the top of the man’s back, just below his shoulder. He
jolted violently, but the silver duct tape wrapped around his mouth
muffled his screams. I gave him a squeeze of steam from the power
jets, just for good measure. The acrid fumes of burning flesh
whooshed around the basement room, carried by the plumes of
vaporised water, tinged by the sulphur-like smell of charred hair.
There were pools of piss, shit and blood already on the floor, so
it didn’t really matter. Yet the victim still refused to give up
the location of his drugs or money. I temporarily removed his gag,
and he blabbered that he didn’t have the goods. When I put the gag
back on, he begged for mercy using his hands and eyes.
The man taped to the chair in front of me was one
of Britain’s top drug dealers, worth between 30 and 40 million
pounds. He had boasted about fearing no man and was responsible for
the murder of many – mainly his enemies – during his underworld
reign. Amongst his peers and rivals alike, he was feared like a
death-camp commandant and revered like a dictator. No one had ever
dared touch him. Me, personally – I couldn’t give two hoots.
Forty minutes earlier, my partner Marsellus and I
had burst his ken: a spartan, suburban mansion in a commuter town,
just outside London. Our aim was to ‘tax’ the drug dealer – that
is, to steal his drugs and money. Mucus now dripped from the man’s
bloodied nose, the detritus of kidnap and torture soiling his
Lacoste T-shirt and pastel-blue tennis shorts. The steel plate of
his wife’s state-of-the-art iron was now smeared with the sludgy,
brown mess of burned human matter, mostly skin and follicle.
Using the same controlled, monotone voice – which I
had learned from the psychological warfare manuals now used in
Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib – I whispered into the godfather’s
ear, ‘Tell me where the pound notes are, and I’ll turn the iron
off. You’ll never see me again.’ But he refused to play ball,
shaking his head desperately.
There followed a few seconds of struggle, while
Marsellus kicked the chair backwards and wrestled the detainee’s
shorts and boxers off. Within the same motion, I thrust the
near-melted-hot Tefal onto his naked bollocks, ramming it home hard
for full effect, following it through with multiple blasts of
steam.
Within two hours, I was on my way back to Liverpool
with £320,000 in the boot of my Lexus and 20 kilograms of cocaine
secreted at a safe house in Walthamstow in east London. Before I
left the drug dealer’s mansion, however, I wasn’t able to resist
going back for the biggest thrill of all. As he lay semi-conscious
on the floor, coated with a thin film of vomit and bile, I lifted
his head up and looked into his defeated and terrified eyes. Now I
would show him just how bad I really was. I took my
balaclava off. His eyes screamed in horror as he recognised my
features.
‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘You’ve just been taxed by the
Devil. I really do exist. Now, what the fuck are you going to do
about it?’
In my game, revealing your identity to a victim was
a cardinal sin, but I couldn’t resist this encore: showing him who
had done this to him, challenging him to seek revenge. Of course, I
knew that he never would. I was just testing myself, and, with
that, I disappeared into the night.