Page 38 of The Taskmaster

I kept the water going.

“You fucking do. Now tell me, why weren’t there any records? Why did they call me ghost boy?”

He lifted his head, trying to sit taller as the water reached his chest. “There weren’t any records of you anywhere,” he gasped, and I shut the water off, giving him chance to compose himself, and give me what I wanted.

“Go on,” I urged.

“There were no records,” he stated breathlessly. “Not at the home, with social services, not anywhere.”

“Why? Where did they go?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was because...” He faltered.

“Speak,” I snapped, and he took a deep breath.

“You had no records to begin with.”

“You’re not giving me anything here, Gabriel. I already know I had no records. I want to know why. Someone knows something, and I think that someone is you.”

He was blubbering, shivering with the cold and mumbling incoherently, and it was pissing me off.

“You knew my parents. There were police records about what happened to them. Are you telling me they didn’t register my birth? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think they could. I think... I don’t know. I have no idea. They didn’t tell me.”

He was talking in fucking riddles now. Really shitty ones that made no sense.

“What the fuck do you mean?” I growled.

“I don’t know,” he sobbed. “I don’t know anything. I wasn’t important to them. I didn’t have that kind of information.”

“So who did?”

He was silent for a beat, and I lost my shit.

“WHO THE FUCK KNOWS, GABRIEL? I NEED A NAME. WHO KNOWS WHERE MY RECORDS ARE, AND WHY I WAS KEPT THERE, HIDDEN AWAY LIKE A FUCKING PRISONER?”

I was shaking. My finger hovering over the button as I tried to contain my fury.

“Q,” he replied.

“Who the fuck is Q?” I’d never heard that name mentioned before, not even when I was at the home. This was new information to me, and I needed more.

“I don’t know. No one told me his full name. I never met him. But he was the guy at the top. He’s the one that’d know.”

“And you expect me to believe you don’t know who he is? They paid you all that money, trusted you with shipping their precious cargo, and you didn’t know who they were? Bullshit. Give me a name. Now. Before I come in there and rip your fucking head off, and SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS!”

I pushed the button and let the water fill the tank again, reaching his shoulders and then creeping up his neck as he pleaded, “Please. I don’t know anything. I’ve told you everything.”

I watched him on the screen, gasping for air as he craned his neck. And then the screens showing Abigail’s apartment caught my eye. I saw her half-drunk wine glass on the coffee table and her body lying on her sofa. When I said I’d left something else at the same time as I left that twenty-pound note on her floor, I wasn’t joking. There was a generous helping of sedative in her bottle of wine. But when I’d put it there, I had every intention of using it to drug her, take her, and bring her into one of my games.

But I didn’t want to do that anymore.

And seeing her comatose on the couch wasn’t the reason I was about to break every one of my teeth with how hard my jaw was clenched.

No.

It was the dark, hooded figure that was on another screen, standing outside her door, trying to break into her apartment.