Sidney Sheldon’s The Silent Widow. Тилли Бэгшоу

       PROLOGUE

      ‘No! Please no! I can’t …’

      The old man’s eyes widened in terror as he stared at the drill, straining against the ropes that bound him. He imagined the spiral metal bit grinding into his flesh, splintering his bones like shrapnel as they nailed him to the wooden beam.

      As they crucified him.

      Surely they knew he was good for the money? He would give them what they wanted – everything they wanted! He was no good to them dead.

      How long had he been in the warehouse now? Days? Or only hours? Slipping in and out of consciousness between the beatings, he’d lost track, aware only of the pain in his body: the screaming burns on his skin, thin and creased with age like crepe paper. The fractured ribs and swollen eyes and lips. The tiny razor cuts to his genitals. They had tortured and humiliated him in every sadistic way imaginable, while the young woman stood in the corner impassively and filmed on her mobile phone. Hateful bitch. He despised her most of all, more even than his tormentors.

      They appeared to be reaching a crescendo, some sort of grand finale with the drill. Or at least he did. Their boss. The ringmaster at this circus of terror.

      The man with the brown eyes.

      The devil incarnate.

      ‘Please!’

      The old man’s sobs turned to screams as his torturers switched on the drill, passing it laughingly between them as they revved it louder and louder.

      ‘I’ll do anything! Oh God, no!’ A warm river of liquid excrement exploded out of his bowels and streamed down his shaking legs.

      The man with the brown eyes smiled.

      ‘What’s that you say?’ he taunted, cupping a manicured hand to his ear. ‘I’m sorry, my friend, with the sound of that drill I can’t hear you.’

      He looked on as his men did his bidding, aroused as always by the pleading and the shrieks and the blood, and finally by the silence, once the show was over. Aroused too by the young woman dutifully filming it all for his pleasure, as he’d commanded her to do. He preferred killing women. But ending a life, any life, was a high like no other. The ultimate expression of power.

      Once, the battered old man hanging lifelessly from the beam in front of him had been rich and powerful. More powerful than him. Or so he’d thought.

      But look at him now. Like a carcass in an abattoir.

      ‘Should we cut him down, boss?’ one of the goons asked his master.

      ‘No.’ The man with the brown eyes stepped forward. ‘Leave him there.’ Pulling a wad of hundred-dollar bills from his inside jacket pocket, he stuffed them violently into the corpse’s mouth.

      The stupid old man had never understood.

      It was never about the money …