‘Be a good little pig and you can die with both of your eyes,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be on YouTube with your eyes hanging out, do you?’ He laughed. ‘Your daughter wouldn’t want to watch that for the rest of her life, would she?’

The driver opened the back door. And then he didn’t speak any more.

They helped me out into an abandoned underground car park. No, not abandoned. Unfinished. That was why there were no vehicles. This place was still being built.

There were junk-food cartons and empty cans littered around, the refuse of builders working underground in the summer heat. I thought of Tara Jones and her belief that major building work was happening near to the kill site.

Three masked faces stared at me for a moment and then turned away. The big one was behind me. A meaty hand shoved me in the back and I felt his breath as he walked behind me across the empty car park.

It was massive. Shopping mall? Office block? Luxury apartments? The three figures in front of me moved quickly and the big man behind gave me a casual crack across the back of my head whenever I seemed to slow my pace. He still held the razor blade between the thumb and index finger of his right hand and whenever he hit me, I felt the blade randomly slash through hair and skin.

We came to a dimly lit staircase and started down. At the bottom – two storeys down? – we entered a broad, low-ceilinged tunnel. We were in total darkness now. But they knew where they were going. Then we were crossing uneven floor surfaces towards distant lights.

Machinery. Noise. I caught a glimpse of it.

It was a boiler room.

We walked past it and came to a door. The door was unlocked and we passed inside. We went down some more steps and came to a short, strange corridor that was like something from a dream.

We moved down it in slow single file.

And I could not believe what I was seeing.

The walls and ceiling came closer with every step.

I tried to clear my head. I thought my nerve endings were still rattled from the CEW.

But it was real.

The corridor really did become smaller. The ceiling really did get lower. By the time we reached the end we had to press our hands against our sides and lower our heads.

There was a room at the end of the corridor.

And my heart fell away. For I knew this room.

I saw the white tiles stained green and yellow by a century of weather and neglect. And choked down the sickness when I saw the kitchen step stool where they had stood Mahmud Irani, Hector Welles and Darren Donovan.

The room radiated pure evil.