The sharp red light of someone’s smart phone was aiming at my face. From behind me the big man took my hands and I heard the jangle of the handcuffs. Finally they were taking full physical control. He was about to secure my hands behind my back so that I would hang quietly.

‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’ he asked me.

And I fought for my life.

I dragged the heel of my right shoe from his kneecap to his ankle, feeling the skin peel away beneath his trousers, hearing him shriek with sudden agony, the handcuffs clattering to the ground.

Then the others were all on me, aiming wild, random punches that caught me on the ear and in the shoulder and did nothing, but one of them knew how to kick because I felt the air whoosh out of me as the toe of a shoe caught me just below the lowest rib and then in the soft spot low on my temple.

It was enough to put me on my knees.

The big man fell on me and grasped me in a headlock, cursing me, his breath sour against my face. The red light had fallen away. They were not filming me now.

‘Fucking pig! Fucking bastard!’

It was a good headlock. I could not move my arms or my legs or my feet. So I pressed my mouth against his face and sank my teeth into his cheek, biting through the Nomex face mask and into his flesh.

He howled and tried to stand up as I held on like a dog with a dying rat. But I was weakened and breathless and sickened by those two kicks and the others pulled me off him.

I felt the noose drop over my head.

They lifted me up, not bothering with the handcuffs now, as they half-dragged and half-pushed me onto the stool, planning to do me as they had done Hector Welles, and I could see him before me now, his unsecured hands still tearing the flesh from his throat with his dying breath, clawing so hard that his fingernails were torn out and buried in his neck.

I screamed with rage and terror.

But I was exhausted.

Then I was standing on the kitchen step stool and my fingers were ripping at the rope around my neck. I looked up and saw that one of them had passed the rope over an ancient pipe that crossed the stained ceiling of that forgotten room. The masked faces were all looking at me, the big figure touching the torn Nomex face mask where it was stained with his blood.

Someone was trying to kick the stool away.

Two of them were shouting at each other.

‘Do you know why—’

‘Just do it!’