I was beginning to be annoyed. First, I was feeling bad about letting the rat-faced guy go without telling me anything. Now I had another chance. Second, Simone might want to take Bertha out again, so I didn’t have all day to mess around with him. Bad luck for the guy, but then again he’d been the one to take that Spyderco knife out in the first place.

I picked up the mohawk helmet and went down to the river and took my time filling it with water. The guy was watching me as I came back. He must have realized what was happening because he went bug-eyed and started huffing and puffing and wriggling all over the place.

I took his feet and dragged him around until his head was positioned downhill and the feet were pointing up a fifteen or twenty degree incline. I soaked the Hermes scarf and put it over his mouth and nose. He struggled, so I knelt over him and used my knees to pin his head like a vice. I slowly poured water from the helmet on to the scarf. Soon the Hermes silk was thoroughly soaked and the guy struggled to breathe through it. Luxury waterboarding.

I stopped pouring. “I’m going to sort of kill you, but not quite. Then we’ll talk.”

He wriggled. I poured slowly. Waterboarding simulates drowning. Because of the incline, the technique doesn’t actually get water into the lungs and so doesn’t asphyxiate the subject. It just fills up the head and neck with water so they think they’re drowning. We had it done to us in training so we’d know how it felt when we did it to someone else. I lasted longer than most. Around twenty seconds. I never saw anyone beat twenty-five.

A professional athlete or a trained operative can exhale out the nose slowly for around fourteen seconds. After that, they’ve got to inhale, to get oxygen to the brain. When they try to inhale through a wet cloth they’re sucking in water because the wet cloth is a one-way valve. You can exhale through it, but you can’t inhale through it. The cloth sucks into your mouth and you start to panic. That’s understandable when you’ve got collapsed lungs that can’t fill up with air.

This is precisely what was going on at that very moment. The ponytail guy’s lungs were collapsed and he was unable to refill them. He was panicking and convulsing, like a rigid muscle. His neck was thick-veined and red with the struggle to get air pumping into his lungs again. I stopped pouring. He’d lasted a little over ten seconds, which I didn’t think was too bad, given the circumstances.