Truth Dare Kill by Gordon Ferris Page B

stomach rumbled and ached as the bus jolted over the potholes. I lay for the full hour in the hot bath soaking the pain away, and then made my way home. I was clean. Washed out more like. But I was beginning to think I’d live.
    I stopped at the Co-op for a fresh loaf, and waited while the girl stabbed and chopped with her two wooden spatulas at a slab of butter. She finished off the pat by pressing on the shape of a sheaf of corn. It weighed in at exactly my weekly allowance of four ounces. She smiled in pride. I bought a can of sardines and a packet of fags and handed over my coupons. I picked up the paper to check the date and saw it was Monday the seventh. Two days lost. Then the headlines jumped out. “Ripper suspect released!” Forty-eight hours was all it had taken. I glanced down at the smaller print trying to get my eyes to focus.
    The suspect had indeed been trying to destroy the evidence – but of a very different crime. The blood on the coat had been a pig’s. The man had been pinching meat from butchers all round Borough Market. He’d been boiling the carcasses in his flat and flogging the boiled meat to housewives who didn’t ask where he’d got it or how many stamps he needed. He was also making his own hooch. Stuff that would make you go blind. Between boiling the pigs and running the still, it was hardly surprising the neighbours had reported funny smells.
    He’d retracted his confession when he’d sobered up and the police had to let him go for the murders. To show there were no hard feelings, they nicked him again for pinching the meat and making the booze. There were no comments this time from Inspector Wilson of the Yard.
    I went up to my flat and opened the sardines. The loaf had a good black crust, just as I’d asked for, and the butter smelled of rich pastures and warm hide. I wolfed down the sandwich and began to feel better. Then I remembered the jotter.
    Or to be honest, I hadn’t forgotten, I just wasn’t ready. I sat down with a cigarette and drew it to me. I already had faint impressions of what I’d been recalling. It wasn’t good. It was never good. I read my words

    Don’t go down in the woods today – teddy bears waiting – behind the furnace into the woods – wetting yourself
    bring you back with arms funny and legs funny and head funny – and naked and screaming dead face screaming dead and throw you on to the pile for burning –
    pork burning
    I held my head in both hands to stop it splitting in two. I was made to bring them back from the woods one day. They picked me and two others to wheel the cart out the gates and into a little piece of woodland behind the camp. It was pretty: birds, grass and the smell of green. But you knew you weren’t there to pick bluebells.
    We followed a track and found two guards stripped to the waist, their white skin gleaming, contrasting with their tanned faces. One was sitting on a fallen tree, smoking. The other stood behind him, massaging his shoulders in a leisurely way.
    Around them was the evidence of their morning exercise. Three naked, nameless men hung from the branches of a chestnut tree. It was a fine tree with fruit forming all over it.
    The hanging men had their arms tied behind their backs. A rope was round their wrists and they’d been pulled up in the air so that their own weight dragged their bodies down and tore out their shoulder muscles and joints. The guards had been inventive. They’d tied stones to the swinging men’s ankles to add a little to the pain. Their bodies were covered with welts and bloody lines where they’d been whipped till their flesh disintegrated. Finally they’d been used as target practice for the guards’ Lugers. It must have been hot work.
    We hauled them down and laid them gently on the cart and prayed to the god none of us believed in any more to spare us from being the centrepiece of the next picnic. As we shoved our laden little cart back out of the clearing I looked behind. The seated guard had his head arched