Chapter 25: The Crown Prince's Playground

The Emir decided to inspect the torture suite of the Ruby Palace in more detail. Accompanied only by the Golden Palace's Chief Eunuch, he let himself into the suite and proceeded to tour the rooms, of which there were six, placed three on either side of the corridor with the sloping floor and the drain. In the first room, containing the rack, he wasted no time, merely ascertaining that the equipment was all working satisfactorily. The mechanism moved easily and smoothly and the cuffs locked and unlocked as they should. The electrocution circuits he could not test without a subject to torture, but the meters appeared to show that the voltage across the terminals was changing as he turned the rheostats up. A quick brushing of one electrode against another produced a small spark at low voltages, so he moved on to the second room.

This was again easily recognisable as a chamber devoted to pressure, just as the first was devoted to strain. Here in neat rows on appropriately shaped hooks along the wall hung thumbscrews, nipple clips, clamps, devices like long thigh-boots with screw driven compression jointing, corsets which also had automated tightening devices, and even a headpiece rather like a full-face motor-cycle helmet, but once more adjustable. In one corner there was a Judas Chair consisting of a narrow vertical cone of highly polished metal over which hung a skeletal seat complete with a restraining harness which could be lowered as required.

The third and room was devoid of any instruments, weapons, furniture, or even the ubiquitous whips. On the wall at the end of the corridor was a book-case apparently filled with the literature of torture. Few of the books were in English, but one that the Emir recognised dealt with the tortures used in the second World War, notably by the Germans.

The fourth room was also empty. The Emir turned to the Chief Eunuch and asked the obvious question merely by raising one eyebrow.

"I understand, from members of the late Crown Prince Gamel's staff that His Highness had not yet completed his collection of ... ahem ... reproduction antiques. The other two rooms are, I understand, fully equipped."

"The instruments are all authentic then?" asked the Emir.

"They are all exact working replicas, specially made for the late Crown Prince, imitating genuine antiques now in various Museums of Torture, such as the Mittelalterliches Foltermuseum, in Rüdesheim in Germany and the Museo dello Torturo in San Gimignano in Italy. They have been constructed using modern methods and materials," that worthy replied.

The Emir smiled at the thought of the Tribunal of the Holy Office in Spain in the fifteenth century equipped with a motorised rack which could also administer controlled electric shocks to the heretic. The fifth room was dedicated to liquid tortures. Here the victim could be subjected to drowning, ice immersion, pressure hosing, forced insertion of high pressure liquids, Chinese Drip tortures, or even boiled alive, to judge from the array of equipment and the associated control panel.

The final room had an array of ropes, slings, nooses and pulleys. The Emir found few of the devices comprehensible, but the theme of this chamber was clearly a chamber where the victim was subjected to hanging in all its varied forms.