Already Dead(114)

Sheena had listened long enough. Finally, she decided to talk. Perhaps Fry had just driven her to it.

‘There were these two men that Charlie met,’ said Sheena.

‘Yes, the Gibson brothers.’

‘That’s them. Ryan Gibson was on a driving course that we both did in Chesterfield. I didn’t like him at all. And his brother was even worse. I can’t remember his name, but he was horrible.’

‘The brother is called Sean,’ said Fry.

‘Well, they were doing the job on this Glen Turner character. Charlie and me, we were supposed to go back and get him after a while. We were only going to scare him, you see. Charlie said what they were doing was only like waterboarding. No worse than that.’

‘Waterboarding?’

‘The CIA do it with al-Qaeda suspects. Turner would never have gone to the police and reported us. He would have had to explain why it happened. Charlie had all that figured out. He’s a clever bloke, Charlie. I mean, he was.’

Fry stared at her. Yes, waterboarding was clever, but simple. Among torture methods, it had a history as old as civilisation itself. She had no idea who invented it, but she knew it had been popular across the world, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Khmer Rouge. The Americans had executed Japanese soldiers on war crimes charges for using it during the Second World War, then decades later had used it themselves. It needed so little equipment. Just a cloth and a bucket of water – and someone to hold your victim down.

Layers of cloth were placed over the face, the head tilted back and downwards, and a slow cascade of water was poured over the cloth. You would hold your breath for a while, and then you’d have to exhale. The next inhalation brought the damp cloth tight against the nostrils. She imagined it would feel something like a huge, wet paw suddenly clamped over her face. They said you were unable to tell at that point whether you were breathing in or out. You were flooded more by sheer panic than by water. No one lasted long, they said. You would pray for the relief of being hauled upright and having the stifling layers pulled off.

As the prisoner gagged and choked on the water, they said, the terror of imminent death was overwhelming, with all the physical and psychological reactions. An intense stress response, a rapid heartbeat, the gasping for breath. There was supposed to be a real risk of death from actually drowning, or from a heart attack, or from damage to the lungs by the inhalation of water. As a result of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the victim might simply give up, losing consciousness as water was allowed to fill the airways. Waterboarding could cause the sort of ‘severe pain’ prohibited by the United Nations Convention against Torture. Long-term effects for survivors included panic attacks, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. People would panic and gasp for breath whenever it rained, even years afterwards.

There were instructions for waterboarding on the internet now. You could even watch a video of the journalist Christopher Hitchens going through it himself and managing to last only sixteen seconds before he capitulated – but at least he’d volunteered for the experience. Once you made information like that generally available, people were bound to use it. Not long ago, in another part of the country, burglars had broken into an expensive house and waterboarded an elderly woman to get the combination of her safe.

Like them, Charlie Dean and his associates hadn’t felt bound by the United Nations Convention. Who did, these days?

Fry thought about the position of the body, the doubt over whether Glen Turner might have died from drowning. There had been a two-litre Coke bottle, perfect for pouring a controlled flow of water. And the towels. Oh, God the towels. They would have been put over Turner’s face and soaked with water. When he was finally forced to breathe in, his body would tell him he was drowning, whether he was or not.

‘Like waterboarding?’ she said. ‘It undoubtedly was waterboarding.’

‘You know what it is?’

‘Yes, I know what waterboarding is. But…?’

‘What?’

‘Glen Turner. He was hardly a terrorist. Did he really deserve what you did to him?’

She turned her face away and stared at the wall. ‘We thought so at the time. I suppose things look different when you think about them afterwards.’

‘You said you were supposed to go back after a while to rescue him. But you didn’t go back, did you?’

‘Not then. Not straight away. It was the man in the red rain jacket—’

‘He scared you. Yes, you said so. But it turns out he should have been more scared of you, doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that.’