No job description given for Evans, she noted, as she stood up to shake his hand.
The man nodded at Sara, only briefly, before his eyes went back to Toreth. His gaze was intense now, almost hungry, as though he could pull something out of Toreth just by looking at him. "You're doing well?"
"Fine. I moved to I&I from Justice with the Interrogation Division. I made senior para-investigator."
"Youngest ever," Sara said impulsively.
"Really?" Evans beamed. "A senior para-investigator. I should have recognised your uniform, of course. Well, that's wonderful. Didn't I always say you had it in you?"
"Uh, yeah." A short, awkward pause followed, before Toreth said, "How about you?"
"I'm retired. I have been for years. Ah, yes. Tempora mutantur . . . "
"And we change with them," Toreth said.
That drew another delighted smile. "Yes, indeed." He took Toreth's hand in both of his and shook it warmly. "A pleasure to see you again, my boy. Really it is. A pleasure. But I must be going. I, ah — "
"Yes?"
"We parted on bad terms, I know. I wanted to let you know I quite forgave you for your little prank." He squeezed Toreth's hand. "Well . . . goodbye, and good luck — not that you seem to need it."
Evans released Toreth's hand, and nodded to Sara. "Goodbye, Ms Lovelady." Then he turned and strode smartly away.
Toreth sat down and pulled a glass towards him. "Would you fucking believe it?" he said, apparently to the juice. "Gee Evans."
Sara lasted for an agonised thirty seconds before she said, "Who was that?"
"Someone I haven't seen for a fuck of a long time."
"Oh, come
on
."
He took a sip of juice and made a face. "This is yours. Or they fucked up the order." He tried the other glass. "No, my mistake; this is the grapefruit."
"
Toreth
."
A silence, then Toreth nodded. "Okay. But first — " He swirled his glass, spreading the spilled juice in a circle on the table. "First you've got to promise not to laugh."
Sara stared at him. "Laugh?"
"Some of it's . . . soppy, Chev would call it. Although where the hell he got that from, I don't know."
"Kel, I expect. And of course I won't laugh." More seemed to be required. "I promise."
"Okay. Right. I don't know if I ever mentioned, but when I was thirteen, I was sent to a Retraining Centre." Toreth looked up. "Heard of them?"
Sara shook her head. "No more than the name."
"Before your time. They were a bit like the Assessment Centres are now. Administration-run, one step down from a juvenile re-education facility. Except that back then they weren't just somewhere to send you to keep you out of trouble while they found out what the problem was and whether it could be fixed. Kids mostly stayed there until they got old enough to be passed on to one of the adult places."
He paused again, so she asked, "Why were you there?"
"I stabbed someone at school." He smiled — the one that always made her shiver, which she duly did. "The little tosser was so fucking scared of me that when he got out of the ICU he wouldn't say I'd done it, not even on a witness interrogation. He was underage, of course, so they couldn't really interrogate him. But everyone knew it was me, so they whipped up some poxy psych report and bundled me off to this RC place."
He shrugged. "It was okay, actually. I mean, it was a prison: all the doors locked on the outside, there was a fuck-off huge fence, and the guards were six foot six, and that's across the shoulders. Ready to kick the shit out of you at the first sign of trouble. But it was okay. You know — relatively."
Relative to being at home was what he meant.
"And because it was supposed to be educational, they did have lessons. Gee was a teacher. Pretty good teacher, too — he taught me how to read. Or, well . . . I
could
read, I just didn't want to." He shook his head. "Hard to explain, now. But Gee actually liked teaching. We spoiled it for him, of course. Jesus, he loathed most of the kids in there."
"I bet."
"What did he used to say when we got a new one sent in? Fuck, I can't remember. Oh, God, that was it — another one down from the trees in search of the secret of fire. Real knuckledraggers. Most of them were doped all the time, or so fucking fried on smuggled-in stuff that they couldn't remember their own names."
"And you weren't?"
He grinned. "Even back then I drew the line at filling myself full of that kind of crap. So I ended up listening, for a change. I was bored, I suppose. There wasn't anything better to do, and I was Gee's star pupil, just 'cause I was one of the few kids in there who
could
think without moving my lips or drooling. He used to call me — "
He paused, looking down, circling the glass again.
"What?" Sara asked.
"Ah, shit. He used to say I looked like an angel." Toreth actually flushed. "My hair was a lot longer then, and lighter and — " He raised his eyes, frowning. "I knew you'd laugh."
Sara cleared her throat. "I wasn't!" Or not much. She decided to try flattery. "In fact, I can kind of see his point."
The frown darkened. "Don't take the piss. I was telling you about Gee. Do you want to hear it or not?"
"Please." She picked up her glass and settled back.
"Okay. What he
really
wanted was to be a teacher in an olde-worlde boys' school. Kind of place that only ever existed in books anyway. Of course, nowhere respectable would've let him within a hundred kilometres. He was cracked — completely fucked in the head. Still is, I should think. But the RCs would take anyone mad enough to work there, so he got to make his own little fantasy world. He had a study, a bit like the club room in the sim: wood panels, carpet, two leather chairs, huge wooden desk, all the props. He'd decorated it himself; everywhere else was plastic-coated walls and steel furniture screwed to the floor."
Toreth stared across the bar, eyes distant. "I remember how it smelled. Nice, actually, compared to the rest of the place. Him, and boot polish, and paper and burning dust. He had a fake coal fire, which must've been a hundred years old. Amazing it never set fire to the building. One whole wall was paper books. Old, a lot of them. All school stories or spanking stories, or books about — " He frowned. "What's the word? Ah, yeah — corporal punishment. Anyway, he used to make me stand there, in front of the fire, and read them to him."
The abrupt turn in the conversation, coupled with Toreth's matter-of-fact tone, left Sara wondering if she was hearing it correctly. She couldn't help asking, "Make?"
"In a way. He called it private tuition. He pulled me out of lessons to do it, and when the alternatives were standing there reading out regulations for the flogging of ratings in the eighteenth-century British Navy or sitting through the brain-numbing crap the rest of them got, it wasn't much of a choice." He frowned thoughtfully. "You know, I bet some of that was restricted historical material. I've never thought of that before. He was lucky no one reported it."
Toreth took a sip of his grapefruit juice. "Anyway, Gee liked boys — blond boys — and he had a spanking kink like you would not believe. No, not a kink. A real fetish. He genuinely couldn't get it up without it."
"He used to spank you?" Sara was amazed by how calm she sounded. Not to mention how calm
he
was.
"
Oh
yes. With a slipper, mostly." His eyes crinkled, halfway between a smile and a grimace. "He had a cane as well, though. Kept it hanging on the wall — a metre, metre and a half long, about as thick as your finger. When he got it down he used to say, 'This is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you.' I used to tell him to fucking try it himself."
Toreth wasn't always the most truthful storyteller, and she suddenly and very badly wanted this to be a lie, although she knew it wasn't.
"He didn't use it very often, thank God. It was for when I actually did something wrong, which was less often than you'd think, because
fuck
that thing hurt. It was always multiples of six." He shifted, hunching down in the chair. "Thirty, that was the most. Just once, when I deliberately screwed up an external test he'd arranged 'specially for me. Christ, he was furious. Enough that I don't think he even got off on it at the time. Bet he enjoyed remembering it afterwards, though. It was supposed to be thirty-six, I think, but he stopped when the — God, it was . . . " He stopped, wincing at the memory, then shook his head. "I was sick afterwards, in his waste-paper bin. He wasn't very pleased about that, either."
Her outrage escaped in a squeak, and he straightened up and smiled. "I suppose it all worked out in the end, 'cause I never threw another fucking test, I can tell you that."
"But that's barbaric!" She couldn't keep quiet any longer. "
And
illegal.
We
couldn't do that. You weren't old enough for a waiver, even if he was allowed to do it."
"I suppose so." He sounded vaguely surprised by her outburst. "Legal wasn't a big thing in the RC. No one who lets their kids get sent somewhere like that gives a fuck about them, and who else is going to care? Anyway, it was usually a slipper, which was okay. Bend down, hands on your knees, keep still. Take it like a man." Toreth snorted with laughter. "Can you believe he really said that?"
Sara still couldn't believe the bastard had done it at all, but there didn't seem to be much point in saying so.
"It was supposedly for getting the reading wrong," Toreth continued, "which is why the lessons worked. I used to concentrate so hard, getting it word perfect, making him wait. An hour or so and he'd be squirming in the chair, desperate for it. Then I'd start fucking it up, on purpose, and eventually he'd tell me to take my trousers down. It never did much for me, but I've had a lot worse."
Grossly unfair as it was, she had the urge to ask Toreth how he could've let Evans do it to him. "Did he ever — ?" Abuse you. Rape you.
"Fuck me?" Toreth nodded. "Not often, though. Wasn't what he wanted. Mostly he'd come while he was smacking me, if he came at all. He was getting on a bit, even then. But if I'd been behaving, he'd make an exception. Considering that he didn't actually like touching, he wasn't a bad lay. He gave a decent handjob, anyway, although he used to wrap his hand in a white hankie first. Completely fucking cracked, like I said. He'd do other stuff as well, when I could sweet-talk him into it. First man — adult — I ever fucked, which was about as much his thing as the spanking was mine."
The tone was as unmistakable as it was unbelievable. Affection. "You
liked
him?"
Toreth blinked. "Never really thought about it like that, but I — yeah, I suppose so. Okay, I was fifteen, so I thought Gee was about a hundred and fifty, but he was fit enough that it wasn't completely disgusting. He was the one who started me on my exercise kick. Something else to pass the time that I ended up enjoying."
Sara struggled for a response, finding nothing. This wasn't supposed to be the kind of thing you simply told someone over lunch, never mind worry that they'd
laugh
about it. She knew she was staring, and couldn't help it. Toreth didn't seem to care, though. If anything, he looked faintly amused by her reaction. It just wasn't —
She thought back to a conversation with Warrick, when Carnac had been at I&I. Toreth
wasn't
normal. Most of the time he could pass well enough, and then something like this happened, almost as if to underline how profoundly not normal he was.
"What happened in the end?" she asked.
"Nothing very exciting. After a couple of years, when I'd stopped fucking around with the reading and learned some stuff from him apart from pervy school stories, Gee swung me a resit for my level threes, and another psych test. He sent the results to the Interrogation Division, and I got a promise of sponsorship for training there if my level fours were okay. And then the RC kicked me out and sent me home. I suppose I counted as a success for them. You should've seen that fucking bitch's face when I told her I was — "
He stopped dead. "Anyway, that's it," he said after a moment.
That fucking bitch — Toreth's mother. They'd need to be late into an alcohol-fuelled night before he would manage a whole sentence about
her
. "So he's the reason you ended up at Interrogation?"
"Yeah, I suppose so. I was getting a bit old for him by then, so he wanted me out of the way."
There was a tight edge in his voice, and Sara decided to drop the subject. "What did he mean about the little prank?" she asked.
"Oh, yeah." Toreth ran his hand through his hair. "The little prank. Fuck. Last few weeks I was there, Gee started breaking in my replacement. Younger model. He looked like a pig. Really, he did — pink and shiny, with a fat, scrunched-up little face and tiny eyes. A pig in a blond wig. Bastard."
Clear anger showed now, for the first time, and Sara wasn't sure where it was directed.
His smile had turned shivery again. "A fortnight before I went home, I planted a camera in his study, and got some lovely stuff: spanking, a couple of canings, lots of Gee with his hand on his cock through his trousers and that expression on his face — disgusted with himself and loving it. Pig-boy crying and begging him to stop."
He shrugged. "Pig-boy was a lot better at that bit than I was. Gee never got much out of me beyond screaming at him to fuck off and screw himself when he was laying into me with that bloody cane. He didn't mind, though — as long as you were still bending over and you were making
some
kind of a noise, he was well away. Anyway, last day there, I broke into one of the computer rooms, made about a hundred copies of the recordings and passed them out round the place. Kids, guards, whoever wanted one. Fucking hysterical. I bet there's still people out there with them."
All she could come up with was, "Did they arrest him?"