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.