Eighty-seven

A master in the art of anticipation, the interrogator could predict exactly the pain threshold of anyone trussed up in the seat before him.

His wife had spent decades begging him to stop, to find a less severe career. But, as he told her time and again, there was nothing quite so satisfying as extracting information from the lips of the unwilling.

Omary circumnavigated the questions, and tried to gauge where they were leading, if anywhere at all. He was asked about his father and his grandfather, about his income and his schooling, and about the scar on his right cheek.

The examination lasted an hour or more, but was nothing more than a warm-up for things to come. Lighting another cigarette, the interrogator blew out – the grey smoke billowing like a storm cloud into the light.

‘Now, Mr. Omary,’ he said, his tone deepening, ‘you are to tell me about the heroin. Where did it come from?’

His muscles fatigued with lactic acid, Hicham Omary struggled to keep his cool. He was damned if a two-bit torturer was going to ruffle him.

‘I’m a businessman, not a drug dealer,’ he replied.

‘I am looking for correct answers,’ the interrogator said. ‘And if I don’t get them, I shall use the equipment.’ He waved a hand towards the apparatus hanging on the walls. ‘I have a special treatment for everyone they send to me,’ he said.

‘Do you expect me to make something up, something to incriminate myself?’

‘I expect you to speak the truth.’

‘Then listen to me. I don’t know anything about the drugs I’m supposed to have bought or sold. And you know it as well as I. You can see it in my eyes. But if you’d like to continue this little charade, we can. You can pull out my teeth with those pliers. Or you can electrocute me with those wires, or cut me into little pieces with the knives. But my response is not going to change.’

‘My superiors in Rabat are waiting for your confession, and I have vowed to get it for them. But I think a few more days in the hole will soften you. You will return there now and be put on half rations, and a nice cold bath twice a day.’

The interrogator called out to the guard and, a moment later, Omary was hobbling forwards down the corridor. The blindfold had been left off, allowing him to look into the other cells as he went.

Unlike his own cubicle, the others had bars rather than a full steel door. The walls of the first were painted in black and white spirals, a ploy to drive a sane inmate mad. The next was spattered with a profusion of dark dried blood, from a suicide.

In the first cell, the prisoner was huddled up on the concrete floor. In the second, a convict was standing with his head in his hands. And the man in the third cell was tethered by a metre-long chain to the wall.

Staggering forwards, Omary got eye contact with him for a fleeting moment. The man’s eyes hung in an empty face, swollen with illness, with fear, with nights of treatment in the torture cell.

Until that moment, Hicham Omary managed to remain composed. But the sight of real terror, of a life hanging by a thread, was too much to bear.

As soon as he had been kicked back into his cell, the shackles removed, and the door slammed shut, he broke down and wept like he had never wept before.