Chapter Text
It took only ten minutes of silence for the officers at Glasgow’s West End police station to grow tired of Frances’s ambivalence. They must have been hoping that she would be nervous or even afraid in her interview, knowing that she’d finally been caught. Clearly they’d gotten big heads about coincidentally being the ones who got to hold her until such time as she could be formally arraigned — which for the moment meant twelve to twenty-four hours — but it still lent an unreasonable self-importance to the men.
Frances, however, had been arrested before, in far less pleasant circumstances. Facing this at twenty-one and not in a hospital bed in New York, freshly maimed and weeping, was so simple that the urge to answer cleverly was difficult to withstand. Instead, using better judgment and thinking more of Mat and whether they’d come for him at the hospital too than anything else, she simply answered each the same way: No comment. No comment. No comment. Her expression did not change; no tone of voice, no jibe nor accusation made her flinch. And after a while, it was plainly annoying them.
One of them, a man in his forties with thinning brown hair going gray at the temples, leaned towards the tape recorder sat on the table between them, and said,
“Interview paused for the afternoon at 16:30,” before switching it off. Then he stood and grabbed her arm abruptly, dragging her from the chair where she sat with hands cuffed in front of her. Frances managed to keep her feet under her, and the blank mask on her face never slipped as she was pulled down the hallway.
“All right,” said the man, “I think we ought to try something different.” Frances raised an eyebrow, and the other one — skinnier, younger, blond — grimaced.
“There’s someone here who wants to see you.” This was something she didn’t have a good guess at, for once. Somehow, she doubted that the call she’d requested be made to Jenny Fleming had gotten through at all, and she’d only made it to try and prevent Chris from showing up. Wat Scott might come for his erstwhile daughter, but he seemed unlikely to claim vengeance in private. Rather than ask, though, she simply waited in silence.
For a little while, they left her sitting alone inside of a holding cell, behind a metal door with its small window shuttered and the lights turned off, which didn’t faze her in the slightest. It was all a question of timing — whether she could catch up with Harvey, whether she could still contact Mat in hospital, if there was any further chance to keep Chris out of the whole bloody mess, whether she could actually reach anyone outside of these walls. But as escaping wasn’t a possibility at present, she tried instead to focus her mind on what to do the second she might make it into one.
That focus didn’t last long; whoever had wanted to see her was back. The same two officers had returned, along with a familiar face. It was an unassuming man nearing middle age, who Frances recognized as having done her booking paperwork, taking down any information she’d been obliged to disclose. Now, there was a glaring contempt painted across his pinched face, and he closed the and locked the door behind him sharply.
“I hear you haven’t been cooperating,” he said, his glower deepening when Frances neither moved nor expressed any reaction to his presence. “I thought you’d be a tough case, Frances Crawford, seeing as nobody here’s ever had dealings with a terrorist before. Excepting myself, that is.”
This time Frances raised her eyes to him, meeting the hatred in them head-on.
“Oh? Who were you serving with, then?” His jaw twitched.
“2 PARA, if you must know. Belfast.” Frances raised her eyebrows.
“Bit of a step down, this, isn’t it?” The question was a mistake, she knew at once, because he glanced over to his fellows.
“See, this is the first thing you’ve got wrong with her — she’s still talking like this, she’s certainly not ready to be questioned. You need to soften the bastards up first.” Then, he grabbed her hair and dragged her to the middle of the room before kicking her onto her back and saying calmly, “If one of you’d hold her legs and the other her arms?”
Frances didn’t cry out when she was moved, nor even try to stop it when the officers laid hands on her, cuffing her wrists above her head for good measure; she only remained impassive, calculating as she tried to prove to the leader that this was not going to frighten her into submission. Expecting a beating, Frances was surprised, unpleasantly, when instead he simply glared down at her and said to his subordinate,
“Cover her mouth.”
“Huh?”
“Cover her mouth and her nose. See how long she lasts doing nothing then, and we’ll move on.”
Frances gritted her teeth, but didn’t have the chance to breathe in deeply. With her hands cuffed, the man above her was free to use both of his in following the order; the pair of them hovered over her, looking down, while the third seemed to be straining for a good view as her lungs began to burn. It wasn’t long before her chest heaved and spasmed against her will. “Involuntary reactions,” said the para, as Frances had started to think of him. “She’s scum, but she’s not superhuman.”
“You think she’ll hang on better if she’s stubborn?” asked the man at her feet, and the para laughed.
“We’ll have to see, won’t we?”
Much as Frances despised it, they were right. Beyond her carefully cultivated logic and control, an animal part of her which panicked at the lack of air couldn’t be repressed forever. As the fire in her chest grew and her head spun, she found herself gasping uselessly against the smothering hand, and her body jerked under the men holding it. This was when the para indicated something, and the man holding her legs shifted downward, leaving more space. Finally, as her vision started spotting, she heard the para call,
“Stop!” Her chest heaved with much needed breath as he kept up his seemingly endless lecture. “You see she’s about to faint? Don’t let her pass out.” Then, unexpectedly, he struck her hard across the face and snapped her back into awareness of her own body. Regrettably, a sense of vulnerability was creeping in at the edges of her determination, and she was already rattled when the para ordered her to be choked again, even as he reached, unexpectedly, for the button on her jeans. He tugged down the zipper and started dragging them down over her hips, not bothering to get them much much further down than her lower thigh—at least not yet. Though he’d left the rest of her clothes, and his disgusted expression hadn’t changed, it still made her stomach flip when coupled with the rising terror of losing her breath once more and the sound of two other men snickering at her. The para waited until she was at a more precipitous edge of consciousness before letting her breathe again this time.
“This when we start interrogating, then?” the younger man sneered. “I think we ought to get personal.” Something between anger and annoyance flared in her chest, and her jaw clenched as a mad thought crossed her mind: Can’t you think of anything better to do? She almost wanted to voice it, out of sheer spite.
Again, the para surprised her, in a way that made a sort of dull horror sink in her chest.
“No,” he said. “You’re not here to be entertained. What we need is to know she can be made to talk next time, when she’s cracked a bit; if she looks like she’s been through it, d’you really expect to have another chance? If you’re going to leave a mark, do it someplace nobody will look for one.” The one at her feet grumbled something under his breath, and she could tell that all three of them were staring at her. Though she still kept silent, Frances closed her eyes momentarily out of a desire to escape from it; she forced herself to open them again, unwilling to give in, and looked up just in time to see the para draw out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. This time she could feel her jaw twitch as the lighter clicked and the little flame leapt to life against the paper.
“Careful now,” he told the other men. “Hold tight — and you’d best keep her quiet.” He looked down at her grimly, and reached down to pull her thighs apart, Frances shuddering under his hands. “You can take a good look now if you want; I’m not going to stop until she screams.”
Frances knew what was coming. She braced for the sensation of the cigarette meeting the sensitive skin on her inner thigh, but it still made her try to jerk away involuntarily in the mens’ grasp. And he was right — she couldn’t stifle a pained noise, but the sound was bitten back despite the pain that turned from a single, searing shock to a deepening throb as the burn sank below her skin. The para’s colleague held her still with incessant pressure, and she could feel the other’s hand close over her mouth again. That was what told her the next burn was coming — her other leg, and she felt a sting of tears in her eyes which she blinked back as she tried to contain a yell.
They wanted to break her, so she mustn’t be broken. This was the simple thought which she tried to maintain each time a new burn was placed. The pain of it compounded, growing at an exponential pace as tender skin surrounding one mark was marred by another, and Frances was crying out. Not for it to stop, and not for help, but simply because she could not contain it. Again, that animal side won, and she screamed and screamed, until she forgot to breathe behind the hand muffling her, until her head spun and tears welled up. It was around the time when she could no longer blink those tears back, and felt them running into her hair as she bucked and twisted in the mens’ grip, that she realized she couldn’t understand the words the para was saying anymore. She’d started to move somewhere inside herself, hiding in a way that filled her for the first time with real shame and — damn it, this was what they wanted.
She couldn’t seem to pull herself back, though. Another burn was pressed in, and then the new marks stopped. Instead, hands — she didn’t know whose — pressed at the skin over the wounds, and made each and every one of them scream with pain in unison. Still gasping for breath, choking against the stranger’s palm, she could feel the moment when it finally overwhelmed her. The agony searing her skin and her lungs at once was accompanied by a rushing in her ears. Then, more abruptly than she’d expected, she was tipped over the edge of what she could withstand, and blackness crashed down on her.