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of one he would go straight to eternal damnation, or at best to limbo, where the un-baptized babies go. As a devout Roman Catholic this is what Daniel Carbonardo believed, and it terrified him enough to loosen his sphincter muscle.
    The two men who took him out and back down the front steps of the Glenmoragh Private Hotel were none too gentle: louts, tough as a jockey’s backside, pugified and with no finesse to them, which was why he was frightened now. When you put a man to the question you did not usually want him to die, but there were sometimes accidents, and these brutes had not even the sense they were born with.With these two lumps of muscle—rampsmen, in popular jargon—an accident was waiting to occur. Daniel knew that he could sing his heart out and still end up very dead.
    Outside, two hansoms were waiting, the cabbies alert, horses snorting, and he knew others from the hotel—two or three men, he thought—were going to the second while the pair of punishers bundled him inside the first cab, sitting themselves one on either side of him, holding his arms in steely grips. As he was entering the cab he caught a glimpse of someone outside, standing in the road, ready to grab him if he tried to leap from the far door. That at least was professional, the kind of thing the Professor’s mob would do without pausing to think, like soldiers at a drill.
    The cab began to move, fast from the off, and the bully boys started softening him straight away, slinging a sacking hood over his head and clouting him to the face, making his brain whirl and his ears screech. They didn’t stop punching and slapping him for the length of the journey—he guessed about a mile, maybe a mile and a half. Rock-hard fists came at him, hitting his jaw, cheeks, mouth, and eyes, leaving him in a little mask of pain, with one eye closed, a lip split, and one tooth less, spat out inside the hood.
    â€œCome on, out with you,” one grunted when they came to a final standstill, the cab rocking on its springs, the horse still frisky after its gallop.
    â€œOut, you cunning bastard,” the other growled, close to his face. “Come on, you little Spanish bugger.”
    He heard the door open, felt the chill night air, and was pulled so roughly that he went sprawling onto the pavement, banging his face hard, tearing his trousers, and skinning his knees.
    They dragged him to his feet again, got his arms twisted behind his back, and frog-marched him up stone steps and into a house. He was aware that there was light and he could feel the warmth. Behindthe musty smell of the sacking he thought he caught a whiff of women: powder and sweat and ripe, overused cunny. A knocking shop, he thought, and as if his captors could read his mind, he got a heavy blow to the face, a fist catching him just above the nose. Beyond the pain, and from somewhere above him, he heard a woman laugh: nervous, shrill, humourless.
    Up more stairs, banging his shins, across a landing and stumbling, climbing again, a sharp turning of the stair and bare boards under his feet. They twisted his arms farther up his back, sending needles of pain through his shoulder blades, and one of them kicked him hard behind his right knee, almost bringing him down.
    Then they tore off the sacking hood and started in on ripping off his ulster, tearing at his jacket and shirt until he stood bare-chested, breathing hard, his eyes swivelling about to see what he might see, which was nothing. He knew he was in a near-empty attic room, two dormer windows to his right and people moving among the shadows at the far end, which was very dark, illuminated by only two weak little candles standing on boxes on the farther side of a long, narrow bath, filled almost to the brim with water that sloshed around and looked as cold as the North Sea in a blizzard.
    He felt both men place hands on his arms—one hand high above the elbow just below the shoulder, the other clamped