The Devil You Know

Seventeen

BACK IN HAMPSTEAD WAY BEFORE I WAS READY TO be. Hauling off on that lion-head knocker again in the bright stillness of a very early Saturday morning. I’d taken Friday off to recover, but I was still stiff and aching and feeling like I might shed limbs if I moved too fast. I asked myself bleakly if I was living right. The answer came when the door opened, letting out a sweet smell of sandalwood and revealing Barbara Dodson in jeans and tight T-shirt.

“He’s in the study,” she said, standing back to let me walk past her. “You can go straight through.”

I stepped inside. “How’s Sebastian?” I asked.

She gave me a long, thoughtful look. “Sebastian’s on great form. Happier than he’s been since we moved in here. Peter’s been feeling a little sorry for himself, though. We can’t get a word out of him.”

“Probably a phase he’s going through,” I suggested.

She nodded slowly. “Probably.”

I walked on down the hall into the study, limping only slightly.

Supercop James was standing just inside the door, steeling himself to tackle me as soon as I came in. He went straight for the jugular, predictably enough. “I’m assuming you came over to apologize,” he snarled. “For your sake, I hope that’s why you’re here.”

I was too tired for games. “No,” I told him, “you’re not assuming that at all. You’re assuming I came here to blackmail you. You’re hoping you can buy me off cheap or scare me into changing my mind.”

His eyes widened by an infinitesimal fraction, and his lips parted to show his clenched teeth. He was wound up very tight indeed—tight enough so that he might even break, without careful handling. But I didn’t know him well enough to tailor my approach to his tender sensibilities, so I gave it to him straight.

“You’re right,” I told him. “This is a shakedown. But contrary to everything you’ve ever been told about blackmailers, if you give me what I want, I’ll go away and leave you alone. And it’s not money, it’s just information. I want you to pull some police records for me. Three, to be precise. Do you think you can do that?”

Dodson gave a short laugh that sounded like it must have hurt coming out.

“Just information? You want me to steal files from the Met? Go against everything my job is about? Can you think of a single good reason why I shouldn’t punch you in the mouth for resisting arrest, and then arrest you?”

I nodded stonily. “Yeah,” I said. “Just the one. Davey Simmons. According to all the newspaper reports I could get my hands on, he asphyxiated after inhaling a cocktail of superglue and antifreeze from a plastic ASDA bag. Not a nice way to go.”

The color drained out of Dodson’s face, leaving it gray and slightly glistening, like wet cement. He sat down in the black leather office chair. I could tell he was staring death in the face. Not his own death—he looked as though he could probably have coped with that a fair bit better—but someone else’s. “Davey Simmons was a human train wreck,” he said without conviction.

“Yeah. I read that, too. Broken home, in and out of trouble, psychiatric problems, couple of convictions. But the police thought it was a bloody odd setup, all the same. Did any of your mates ever talk over the finer points of it with you?”

Dodson shot me a look full of hate. “No,” he said tightly. “They didn’t.”

“You see, there was glue in his hair. And on his right cheek. It was as though the bag had been held over his whole head, rather than just over his mouth and nose—which I believe is the preferred mode of delivery for fans of recreational Bostick. The bruises on his wrists got them thinking, too. Could someone have held him down and shoved a bag over his head, then held it there until he died? That’d be a pretty shitty thing to do to someone, wouldn’t it?”

There was a long silence, tense at first, but becoming slacker as Dodson’s fury surrendered to despair. “It was a joke,” he muttered, almost too low to hear.

“Yeah?” I said unsympathetically. “What’s the punch line?”

Dodson didn’t seem to hear. “Peter and his friends found . . . Simmons . . . in a toilet cubicle. He’d mixed the stuff up in the bag, and he was already inhaling it. They wanted to scare him. For a joke. Maybe teach him a lesson.”

I let the silence lie for a bit longer this time. Then I put the little sheaf of paper I’d got from Nicky down on the desk in front of him. He stared at it dully.

“These three,” I said, pointing. “The ones I’ve gone over in highlighter. They’re the only ones I’m interested in. I want autopsy reports, witness statements, and anything else you can lay your hands on. By tonight.”

He shook his head. “Impossible,” he said. “That amount of material—” Then he started to read the stuff and shook his head again, even more emphatically. “I’m not in Murder anymore. I don’t have access to any of this stuff.”

“I’m sure you can call in some favors from old friends, you being a big man in SOCA these days. And photocopies will be fine. Hell, at a pinch, even a disk will be fine. Just get me the stuff, and then we can walk out of each other’s lives again. For good, this time.”

I took a step toward the door. Dodson came jerkily to his feet. His arm shot out and he blocked me, stepped in close, and stared down at me from his full, imposing height.

“Peter didn’t mean for the boy to die,” he said with a menacing emphasis. “You understand me?”

“I wouldn’t have an opinion about that,” I said evenly, meeting his wide-eyed stare with a narrower one of my own.

“I’ve already punished him. I think his own guilt would have been enough, but I’ve grounded him for the rest of the school term, and I’ve canceled a holiday we had planned in Switzerland. It’s not as though I just let this pass. It’s not as though he doesn’t understand what he’s done.”

“Davey Simmons is dead,” I said in the same level tone. “So fuck you and the squad car you rode in on.”

I thought Dodson was going to hit me, but he just let his arms drop to his sides and looked away.

“Tonight,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And then we never hear from you again.”

“Exactly.”

“I could make life very difficult for you, too, Castor.”

“I don’t doubt it. But let’s make each other happy instead, eh?”

I let myself out. Barbara had very sensibly made herself scarce.

What now? No word from Nicky about the laptop. No way I was going anywhere near the archive again, in case Ajulutsikael the sex demon was still staking the place out. What did that leave?

It left Rosa. I knew the odds were stacked fairly heavily against me finding her, but she could make this so much easier. I was certain she knew the dead woman—reasonably certain that she could fill in the last few gaps for me and give me what I needed to make sense of this mess.

Of course, I had to assume that Damjohn knew that, too. If he was as heavily mixed up in all of this as I thought he was, he’d have put Rosa somewhere where I couldn’t get close to her, so Kissing the Pink was probably a nonstarter. All the same, that was where I had to go.

It was the dead time of midafternoon, when the lunchtime City crowd had evaporated away like a bead of sweat on a pole dancer’s cleavage, and the sex tourists were still sleeping off the debaucheries of the night before. I walked in off the street to find the doorman—not Arnold, fortunately—half asleep in his cubicle and the club itself three-quarters empty. Evidently we were in between dances—the wide-screen TV was showing a soft-core porn movie so old and so labored that it had to count as kitsch rather than titillation.

I was a little afraid of running into Damjohn himself or, even worse, into Scrub, but there was no sign of either of them. A guy I didn’t know from Adam was guarding the inner door that led up to the brothel, and he nodded me through without a look.

“You’ve got a girl named Rosa,” I said to the blonde apparition who was serving behind the upstairs bar. She looked like a centerfold, which is to say that her tan was carotene-poisoned orange, and I was nearly certain she had two staples through her midriff. She flashed me a nonjudgmental smile and nodded vigorously, but the nod didn’t mean anything. “That’s right, darling,” she said. “Only she’s not in today. We’ve got some girls who are just as young, though. We’ve got Jasmine, who’s five foot six and very busty—only just turned eighteen, and you can help her celebrate—”

I cut her off before she could start taking me through Jasmine’s tariff in detail. “I’d really love to see Rosa again,” I said, hoping the implied lie would be taken at face value. “When is she here next?”

“She does Fridays and Saturdays,” the woman said, the smile slipping almost imperceptibly.

“Today is Saturday,” I pointed out helpfully.

She nodded again. “That’s right, sweetheart. Only she’s not in today. She took a day off on flextime.”

Flextime. Right. I kept my face straight because I’m a professional, God damn it. But I knew the next kite wouldn’t fly.

“Do you have her home number?” I asked.

The smile was folded away abruptly and put back into storage for a more fitting occasion.

“I can’t give out personal details, dear, you know that. I’ve got lots of other girls here. You have a look around and see if there’s anyone you like the look of.”

I took the brush-off with moronic good humor, which seemed to be the safest way to go. And then I took my leave as soon as I could without drawing attention to myself.

So Rosa had disappeared. Nothing more I could do there for the time being. Nothing much I could do anywhere until Nicky called. Probably the best thing I could do would be to go back to bed and sleep, because I’d probably need the energy later.

But there was something else nagging at the edges of my mind—something I’d dismissed as coincidence, once and then again. It’s funny how coincidences look less and less coincidental as they pile up against each other. So I called Rich, who was surprised to hear that I was still on the job. “I dunno, Castor,” he said, only half joking. “After that business with Alice’s keys, you’re sort of a leper.”

I rubbed absently at one of the scratches on my arm. “Yeah, I’m feeling like one,” I said. “Keep losing bits and pieces of myself. Rich, remember when you told me about the Russian documents? You said they’d come from somewhere down around Bishopsgate. And you said that you were the one who found them. How did that happen, exactly?”

Like Cheryl, Rich seemed surprised that I was still harping on about the Russian collection. “It was a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend sort of deal,” he said. “One of my old lecturers at the Royal Holloway knew a guy whose grandad came here just before the Revolution. He had suitcases full of this stuff, and he didn’t even speak enough Russian himself to make sense of them. But I thought you said you drew a blank on all that stuff in the boxes. How can it be relevant now?”

“It probably can’t,” I admitted. “But the coincidence worries me. The ghost turning up so hot on the heels of the collection, and speaking in Russian.” And the weeping woman I saw when I was touch-sifting the stuff but I didn’t mention that. “Have you still got the address?”

“I might have. I don’t even know if the bloke is still there, though.”

“Doesn’t matter. I thought I might go over and take a look around. If there’s nobody there, I don’t lose anything except time.”

“Hang on a minute, then. I’ll go take a look.”

It took a lot longer than a minute; I was close to hanging up and dialing again when Rich finally got back to the phone.

“Found it,” he said cheerfully. “I knew it was around here somewhere. Most of the correspondence went through Peele, but I found the guy’s first letter to me. Number 14 Oak Court, Folgate Street. That’s right off Bishopsgate, up the Shoreditch end.”

“Thanks, Rich.”

“Let me know how it comes out. You’ve got me interested now.”

“I will.”

I hung up and headed east.

Nobody remembers the name of the medieval bishop who built the bishop’s gate and gave it its name. But then again, he was a lazy bugger and deserved to be forgotten. All he was doing was building himself a back door through the city wall so he could commute from his gaff in sunny Southwark to St. Helen’s Church without having to walk around to Aldgate or Moorgate—and maybe so he could have a pint at the Catherine Wheel on Petticoat Lane on the way.

There’s precious little of either sanctity or idleness about Bishopsgate these days. It’s all banks and offices and finance houses most of the way up from Cheapside, having been homogenized and beaten flat by the slow historical tidal wave of monopoly capitalism. But if you’re lucky or persistent, you can step off that old main drag into a maze of courts and alleys that date from when London’s wall still stood and her gates were locked at night in case unwelcome guests should come calling. Hand Alley. Catherine Wheel Alley. Sandys Row. Petticoat Lane itself. Old names for old places. That weight of time hangs over you when you walk them.

But Oak Court was postwar and carried no weight except for a few gallons of ink and paint squandered in uninspired graffiti. Three stories of yellow brick, with external walkways on each level and a blind eye here and there where a window had been covered over with rain-swollen hardboard. Three staircases, too, one at each end and one in the middle, separated by two squares of dead-and-alive lawn with a wrought-iron bench in the center of each. It was a dispiriting place. You wouldn’t want to be one of the people who had to call it home.

I climbed the central stairwell. The sharp stink of piss cut the duller but more pervasive scent of mildew, and the brickwork was stained brown-black close to the ground—stained and still wet, as if the building bore wounds that had only half healed.

Number 14 was on the top floor. I rang the bell and, when I heard no sound, knocked on the door as well, but the place looked deserted. At the bottom of the full-length glass panel, there was a sill of dust, and through it I could see an untidy avalanche of old circulars from Pizza Hut and campaign fliers from the local Conservative Party. Counting back to the general election, I decided it had been a while since anyone was in residence here.

I turned away and headed for the stairs. When I got to them, the force of very old habit made me glance back over my shoulder one last time to make sure that nobody had come to the door just as I left. Nobody had, but as I turned, I felt a familiar prickling of the hairs at the base of my neck—the familiar pressure of eyes against my skin and my psyche.

I was being watched—by something that was already dead.

I couldn’t tell whether my watcher was close by or far away. Out on the walkway like this, thirty feet above the street, I could be seen from a fair distance. But forewarned is forearmed. I kept on going down the stairs, and as I went, I unshipped my whistle and transferred it into my sleeve.

There was no sign of anyone down on the street. I headed back toward Liverpool Street, using windows where I could to glance behind me without turning my head. There was no sign that I was being followed.

As soon as I got around the corner, I broke into a sprint, made it to the next turning, and sprinted again, heading for a sign fifty yards away that said MATTHEW’S SANDWICH BAR. It was a narrow place, only just wide enough to take the counter and the queue, which was surprisingly long, given that this was the middle of a Saturday afternoon. I got through the door at a dead run and joined the end of the line, turning my back to the street. A window behind the counter allowed me to look back toward the corner without seeming to.

About a minute later, a man turned the corner, then hesitated and looked to left and right, at a loss. He was followed a second or two after that by a second man, who loomed over the first like a bulldozer over a kid’s bike. The first man was Gabe McClennan. The second was Scrub.

They looked around a little more, then conferred briefly. It was clear even from this distance that Scrub was angry, and McClennan was defensive. The big man prodded the chest of the smaller one with a thick, stubby finger, and his face worked as he presumably chewed Gabe out for losing me. Gabe threw out his arms, pleaded his case, and was prodded again. Then there was a little more subdued pantomime of pointing fingers and anxious, searching glances, including several back the way they’d come. Finally they parted, McClennan going on down Bishopsgate, while Scrub retraced his steps.

I gave them thirty seconds or so to get clear, then set off after McClennan. It wasn’t a hard choice. He wouldn’t be able to squeeze my skull into a pile of loose chippings if he turned around and saw me.

I caught sight of him almost immediately because he was still looking restlessly left and right as he walked along, hoping to pick up my trail again. In case he decided to look behind him, too, I hung back and made sure there were always at least a couple of people between us. His white hair made a handy beacon, so I was unlikely to lose him.

He walked the length of Bishopsgate. Every so often he turned off along one of the side streets, but when he saw no sign of me there, he doubled back onto the thoroughfare itself, heading south toward Houndsditch. When he got there, he hailed a cab and shot off toward the river.

I swore an oath and legged it after him, since there was no other cab in sight. At Cornhill I got lucky, as one pulled out onto Gracechurch Street right in front of me and stopped in response to my frantic hail. “Follow the guy in front,” I panted.

“Lovely,” the cabbie enthused. He was a tubby Asian guy with the broadest cockney accent I’d ever heard. “I’ve always wanted to do a number like that. You leave it to me, squire, and I’ll see you right.”

He was as good as his word. As we turned right onto Upper Thames Street and fed into the dense stream of traffic along the Embankment, he faked and wove his way from lane to lane to keep McClennan’s cab in sight. In the process he earned himself a few blasts of the horn and at least one “Drive in a straight line, you fucking arsehole!” but I could see the back of Gabe’s head framed in the window, and he didn’t turn around.

We followed the river through Westminster and Pimlico, and I began to wonder where the hell we were heading. I’d only followed Gabe on a whim, hoping that he might lead me to Rosa—which required a long chain of hopeful assumptions, starting with the one where Damjohn had taken Rosa out of circulation in the first place. If she’d just had it away on her own two heels, then I was wasting my time.

That conclusion looked more and more likely as McClennan’s cab took a right at Oakley Street and drove on up toward the King’s Road. It was stretching credibility past breaking point to believe that Damjohn might have an establishment up here. As far as my understanding goes, the brothels of Kensington and Chelsea are very much a closed shop and, good manners aside, any East End lags trying to get into that particular game would be slit up a treat.

Gabe jumped ship at last just before Sands End, paid off the cab, and continued on foot. I did the same.

“That good enough for you?” my cabbie asked, deservedly smug.

“You could write the book, mate,” I said, tipping him a fiver. Then I was off after Gabe before he could get too much of a lead on me.

He didn’t go far, though. He stopped at the next street corner—Lots Road—under a pub sign that showed a horse leaping a brook, took out his mobile, and had an intense conversation with someone. He glanced up at the sign, said something into the phone, nodded. Then he put the phone away and walked on into the pub—the Runagate.

I debated with myself whether I should give this up as a bad job. It would be useful to see who Gabe was meeting up with—more useful still to be able to eavesdrop, but that was probably asking too much. In any case, having come this far, it seemed a bit ridiculous just to jump into another cab and go back into the City.

Cautiously, I followed Gabe inside. The place was reassuringly crowded, and I was able to pause on the threshold and get my bearings. I couldn’t see Gabe at first, but that was because his highly visible hair was momentarily eclipsed behind a row of tankards hanging up on the far side of the bar. A few seconds later, he turned away from me with a pint in his hand to walk over toward the side door—and out through it. As the door opened and then closed, I had a glimpse of a beer garden beyond, with small wooden picnic tables and bright green parasols.

That made life a bit more problematic. If I followed him through that door, I might be walking right into his line of sight, and there’d be no crowd to hide behind. It would probably be better to go around the outside of the building and at least see the lay of the land before I moved in.

I stepped back out onto the street. Barely ten feet away, Scrub was squeezing his huge bulk out of a minicab, making it rock wildly on its suspension.

I ducked back inside before he could see me and looked around for somewhere to hide. No upstairs. No saloon. The gents. I crossed the bar in three strides, threw the door open, and ducked inside.

The only other occupant, who was waving his hands under a hot-air drier, glanced around at me and then gawped in disbelief. Fortunately, I already knew that the deck of fate was stacked against me, so the fact that the other man was Weasel-Face Arnold didn’t faze me in the slightest. I hauled off and kicked him as hard as I could where a kick was likely to have the most immediate and dramatic effect. Then, as he doubled over, I got a good, solid grip on his neck and rammed his head sideways into the unyielding white ceramic of a sink. He folded without a sound.

Damn! Taken on its own merits, the violence had been quite cathartic, but I had nothing to tie him up with, and as soon as he was found, the whole place would be up in arms. Whatever was going on here, it was probably a bad idea to try getting any closer to it right then.

On an impulse, I went through Arnold’s pockets. Nothing particularly exciting there, but I took his wallet and his mobile phone just in case either of them might prove to be useful later on.

I opened the door a crack, checked out as much of the bar as I could see, and then stepped out. No sign of Scrub, for which I was devoutly grateful. Most likely he was already out in the beer garden with McClennan.

I went back out onto the street again, which immediately made me feel a little bit safer. At least I was away from the epicenter of whatever alarums and excursions would follow on when Arnold was found—so there was probably nothing to lose by taking a look around the side, so long as I kept my head down.

I rounded the building. The approach looked good, because there was a fence around the beer garden that came up almost to head height. Peering around the corner of the building, I caught sight of Scrub’s unmistakable back on a bench in the far corner, his enormous frame almost completely hiding McClennan from view. They were talking earnestly, but I was too far away to hear a word.

By bending over like an old man, I was able to shuffle my way around the outside of the fence without being seen. I knew when I was in the right place, because I could hear McClennan’s voice, raised in complaint.

“. . . never told us what the hell was going on. That’s all I object to. If I’m told up front what the risks are, I’ll take them. But this—this just isn’t what I signed up for, and I—”

Scrub’s basso-profundo rumble cut through McClennan’s feeble-sounding litany of grievances with three terse words.

“You’re on retainer.”

“Yes. Yes, thank you for reminding me of that fact. I’m on retainer. As an exorcist. Nobody mentioned raising hell-kin. Nobody mentioned performing necromantic surgery on a ghost with too much mouth to it. Why didn’t he just let me toast the fucking thing? Then we wouldn’t be having any of these problems.”

“Castor?” Scrub growled. “Castor isn’t a problem. First of all, he couldn’t find his arse with a map. Secondly, there’s no evidence anywhere that he can get his hands on. And thirdly, I’m going to kill him as soon as Mr. D gets tired of using your fuck-pig demon.”

“I half killed myself raising that thing.” Gabe spat the words out, bitterly angry. “Just the effort of bringing it up from Hell—you don’t have any fucking idea! And then I had to do the binding while I was still weak and sick from calling her, and if I hadn’t got every last detail down right, she would’ve torn me apart.”

“Mr. D assumes you’re competent to do your job.”

“Oh, thanks.” Gabe’s laugh sounded like it must have left welts coming out. “Thanks so fucking much. Am I supposed to be flattered?”

“You’re supposed to do what you’re told.”

“Right, right. And if Castor gets his hands on the other little trollop?”

“He won’t.”

“Why doesn’t Damjohn just kill her and be done with it?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

Gabe didn’t seem to have any answer to that. The silence lengthened and was followed by a change of subject.

“What’s keeping that fucking moron?” Scrub’s voice, rumbling like a train passing under your feet.

“He said he had to piss.”

“Well, go and get him.”

Which was my cue to leave.

Rosa. Rosa was the key. But I didn’t have any idea how to find her or even where to start looking.

Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. It was just that nosing around the only starting point I had—the strip club—felt uncomfortably like sticking my head into the muzzle of a cannon and striking a match to see what was in there.

I was honestly amazed at my own stupidity.

The blonde on the upstairs bar shot me a look that conveyed a lot of dislike and mistrust with great economy. But my opening words were calculated to disarm her suspicions and make her love me like a long-lost brother.

“You know,” I said, smiling cheerfully, “I don’t think I’ve ever stood a round in here.”

The blonde’s lower jaw went through a cataclysmic plunge. She did her best to reel it back in.

“The drinks are on me,” I clarified helpfully. “Let’s have champagne all ’round, shall we?” I took out my wallet and slapped my credit card down on the bar. Well, okay, it was Arnold’s wallet and Arnold’s credit card, but I know he would have been happy at the thought of giving pleasure to so many people.

The barmaid recovered from her surprise and hurriedly went diving for bottles, in case I unexpectedly recovered my sanity. I took the first one from her, ripped off the foil, and popped the cork as she was setting up the glasses. The girls at the end of the bar had gotten wind of what was going on by now, and they all crowded around. I knew that the markup on the drinks was colossal and that they were probably on a percentage of bar takings as well as what they took in the bedrooms; persuading a punter to buy them a glass of champagne was an easy earner compared to the regular daily grind, if that’s the right expression.

I handed each glass out as soon as I’d poured it, pressing it into an outstretched hand happily and clumsily—and with the maximum of skin-to-skin contact. My psychic antenna was fully alert, but it only works by touch. I knew what I was looking for, but I also knew I’d have to take whatever I could get.

I struck gold around about number eight or nine. She was a pouty, slightly emaciated brunette dressed in a fire-engine red bra and panties (the panties bearing a sequined love heart at front and center), a gauzy see-through top, and a pair of black stockings adorned with fleur-de-lys.

“We’ve never met,” I said to her, taking her hand in both of mine and getting a stronger psychic fix on her. “What’s your name?”

“It’s Jasmine,” she said, giving me what she probably thought was a sultry look. “What’s yours?”

“I’m John,” I said, because it was the first thing that came to mind.

“And would you like to go upstairs with me, John?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’d be great.”

She smiled warmly. “What sort of thing do you like?”

“I’d like a full body-to-body massage,” I hazarded. And then, to forestall more detailed questioning, “Do you do Glaswegian?”

Jasmine bluffed like a trouper. “Of course I do, you naughty boy,” she purred. She took a key that the blonde woman handed to her, glanced perfunctorily at the number, and led me away with her arm crooked proprietorially in mine. After all, I was the only John in the place.

I couldn’t tell if I’d actually been into the room she took me to, but it was identical to all the ones I’d seen—a bleak, clean little box, and in its way as perfect a triumph of function over form as a battery cell on a chicken farm.

“So you tell me exactly how you’d like me to do it,” Jasmine coaxed, sitting me down on the bed, “and I’ll tell you how much it’s going to be.”

I put on a crestfallen face. “Actually, Jasmine,” I admitted, “I was hoping we could just talk—since it’s my first time with you, and all. So what’s the price for missionary with no trimmings?”

I was expecting ructions, but she took it in her stride; it must be more common than I’d imagined for punters to get this far and then lose their nerve.

“It’s sixty, John. Let’s get that sorted now, and then we’ve got all the time in the world just to get to know each other.”

Docilely, I counted three twenties into Jasmine’s hand. She slipped out of the room, presumably to hand it over to the duty madam, and then came back in again a few seconds later and closed the door behind her.

“Do you want me to take my clothes off?” she asked, standing over me and smiling down at me with her hands cupping her breasts.

It seemed a token gesture, given how skimpy her outfit was to start with—and it wouldn’t do anything to establish the necessary mood of calm consultation. “No, thanks,” I assured her. “What you’re wearing now is fine. Absolutely fine.”

She sat down next to me, put a hand on my knee, and snuggled in close. She had a floral smell that was sweet and delicate, but it reminded me—unfairly—of Juliet, a.k.a. Ajulutsikael. I fought the urge to pull away.

“So what would you like to talk about, John?” she cooed little-girlishly.

I went for broke. “You’ve got a colleague named Rosa,” I said. “And I guess you work some of the same nights, so I was hoping you might know her.”

It wasn’t what she expected or wanted to hear, but she rolled with it.

“Is Rosa your favorite?” she asked in the same Shirley Temple tone.

I thought about the steak knife. “Rosa leaves a very powerful impression,” I acknowledged, genuflecting at the secret altar of my conscience in penance for such a cheesy line. “And ever since I saw her, I’ve been wanting to meet up with her again. But she’s not in today.”

“That’s right. She’s not.” Jasmine was still playing the game by the house rules, but there was a guarded edge to her voice. “Do you want me to pretend to be her? You can call me Rosa, if that makes it better for you.”

I shook my head brusquely. “I want to make sure she’s all right. And I want to talk to her again.”

Jasmine didn’t answer. Either I’d struck a nerve, or she was just wondering if my obsession might spill over into actual violence. I was hoping for the former, because when I’d touched her hand, I’d got a fleeting glimpse of Rosa’s face on the surface of her mind. At the very least, she knew the girl; and, perhaps, if my luck was in, she was concerned about her already.

But her first reaction wasn’t promising. “Rosa’s fine,” she said. Her voice had changed now, closed down to a flat monotone. She took her hand off my knee.

“How do you know that?”

A pause. “Because I saw her yesterday. She’s fine.”

“When yesterday?”

Anger flared in her eyes. “Look, if you’re social services or someone, you can kiss my sodding arse!”

“I only paid for missionary, remember? I’m not social services. And I’m not a cop, either, but then you probably have pretty good radar for cops. I really do just need to talk to her. And I really am worried about her. If you tell me she’s okay, then that’s great. But when did you see her?”

Bowing to the inevitable, I took out my dwindling roll of cash and held out another twenty for her to take. She didn’t make a move for it. She just scowled at me, but not in aggression. It was more like her flexing her facial muscles as she came back out of role and took off the mask. My luck was holding. It looked as though I’d guessed right, and Jasmine was worried about Rosa on her own account. At least, that was the only reason I could think of for her not either whistling for the bouncer or helping herself to the extra twenty.

She still had to decide how far to trust me, though, and I could see it was going to be someway short of the full distance. “In the afternoon,” she said. “About two. She came in late, and Patty had words with her. Then Scrub”—she stumbled slightly on the name; I could see there was no love lost there—“Scrub came in and took her to see Mr. Damjohn.”

The pause lengthened.

“And?” I prompted.

Jasmine looked unhappy. “And she never came back in again after that.”

“Do you know where Scrub took her?”

Jasmine rolled her eyes, then shook her head once, tersely. How would she know? Why would she want to find out? This clearly wasn’t the kind of place where you asked too many questions. But that was still what I had to do.

“Does it happen often?” I asked. “Scrub taking the girls off for a talk with the boss? Does Damjohn give you a quarterly review or something?”

Another head shake. “If he needs to see us, he sees us here. But mostly he leaves it to Patty to sort out the girls. He takes care of the downstairs stuff.”

“Well, did Scrub say anything about why Damjohn needed to talk to Rosa?”

Jasmine didn’t answer at first, so I waited. Sometimes waiting works a lot better than asking again.

“He said—she’d been told before. She’d been warned. That was all. He didn’t say about what. Then she said she’d just been out for a walk. She hadn’t met anyone on the way, she just needed a walk.”

It seemed blindingly obvious that what Rosa had been warned about was tailing me. But she’d done it anyway—not to talk to me, but to take a swipe at me with a kitchen cleaver borrowed for the occasion. You did it to her. You did it to her again.

“Did they leave in a car?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“A BMW?”

“I didn’t see. But I heard it pull away.”

“Do you have any idea where Damjohn lives?”

Jasmine laughed without a trace of humor. “A long way away from here, I’ll bet. No. Nobody knows where he lives. This is the only place where we ever see him.”

“He never takes a couple of the girls back home for some unpaid overtime? Droit du seigneur sort of thing.”

“No. Not that I’ve ever heard of. Carole reckons he’s gay.”

I didn’t agree. From my brief acquaintance with Damjohn—and especially from that unwanted flash of images and ideas when I’d shaken his hand—I suspected that he got his kicks in some other way that only touched on sex at an odd tangent.

“Nothing else?” I asked, just to make sure.

She thought hard, frowned, looked at me doubtfully.

“I think Scrub said—but it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Said what?”

“Well—what I heard was ‘It’s the nice lady for you.’”

“The nice lady?”

“Yeah. Or maybe ‘the kind lady.’ Something like that. I don’t know. It just sounded funny, so it stayed in my mind.”

“Thanks, Jasmine,” I said, meaning it. “Thanks for trusting me.”

She wasn’t much consoled, but this time, when I held out the twenty, she took it and slipped it into her stocking top. “Do you think you can find her?” she asked. Her professional polish had all faded away in the space of a minute; she looked close to tears now.

“I don’t know. But I’m going to try.”

“Will Scrub—will she be okay?”

There was no point in sweetening the pill; whores know self-deceiving bullshit better than priests do. “I don’t know that, either,” I admitted. “I think she might be okay for a while, at least. If there’s something Damjohn doesn’t want her talking about, there’s no point in going over the top to keep her quiet if it’s only going to come out another way.”

Jasmine didn’t ask what I meant by that, and I didn’t explain. She probably wouldn’t have understood in any case, but to me it was looking like one of those logic problems that end up with the proposition that all men are Socrates, and Socrates is a rubber chicken. Thesis: I was the one who was nosing around where he shouldn’t be and asking all the awkward questions. Antithesis: Rosa was only dangerous if she told me something I wasn’t supposed to know. Synthesis: They only needed to keep her out of circulation until they’d succeeded in nailing me.

Fucking wonderful.

It felt like a long day. I went back to Pen’s place around four and killed some time recording a tune on a Walkman I’d picked up at Camden Market last year. It’s an old one—cassettes only—but it comes with its own plug-in mike and speakers, which makes it handy in all sorts of ways. It took a while to get the tune exactly right, and I was far from sure that I’d ever need it, but I had nothing better to do until either Dodson or Nicky called me and gave me the green light. I had John Gittings’s pincer movement in my mind—it had nearly got me killed the first time we’d tried it, but that was no reason to ditch a good idea. I worked steadily for an hour and a half and got a certain amount of relief from my turbulent thoughts.

Nicky didn’t call in the end; he just appeared, out of nowhere, in the accepted conspiracy-theorist style. I went downstairs looking for coffee and realized as I was pouring a generous scoopful into the moka pot that he was there, behind me, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. He hadn’t moved at all since I came in. I could have gone right back out again without noticing him—and when I did notice him, I thought for a second that he was a visitant from some other plane entirely.

When I saw that it was just Nicky, I swore at him vehemently. He took the abuse with stoical indifference.

“I’ve done enough talking on the phone for one week,” he said quietly. “I work hard on my footprint, Felix. I keep it small for good reasons.”

“Your footprint?” I echoed sardonically.

“The traceable, recordable, visible part of my life,” he paraphrased, deadpan. “If I wanted to be visible, I’d sign onto the electoral register, wouldn’t I?”

“Whatever,” I said, giving it up. I pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him. “Have you got anything for me?”

He nodded and unfolded his arms, revealing the laptop sitting between them on the table. He pushed it across to me, and I took it.

“And—some kind of written summary?” I hazarded hopefully.

“No need for one. One folder—RUSSIAN; one file—RUSSIAN1; three thousand, two hundred records in an unbroken numerical sequence with the prefix BATR1038. Data entry in every case is by one user—the system gives him a handle of 017—and all amendments are by the same user. There’s only one conclusion a reasonable mind could draw.”

“And that is?”

“017 was the only man-slash-woman-slash-data-processing-entity to have any contact with this folder at any point.”

I absorbed this in silence, cast into momentary depression, until I saw the bolt-hole in Nicky’s wording. “You said a reasonable mind,” I pointed out.

He nodded. “Absolutely. A mind like mine, that welcomes paranoia as a way of maintaining a critical edge, comes out somewhere quite different.”

“Come on, Nicky,” I said. “Give me the punch line.”

“In a hundred and fifty-three cases, user 017 suddenly and for no apparent reason switches to a different data-input method. I found it in config.sys, because the log entry had actually been rewritten to allow it.”

“Layman’s English.”

“He ditched his keyboard and overwrote selected fields from a handheld Bluetooth keypad—probably that diNovo thing that Logitech were trailing in Houston a while back. The beauty of that is—well, I’m assuming that this is a dongle system. Keyboards are connected via an individually coded hardware key.”

“Right.”

“So a Bluetooth device wouldn’t physically connect to the computer at all. It wouldn’t have to fit the keyhole, because it wouldn’t be going in through the keyhole. It’s a completely wireless system.”

I chewed this over for a moment or two.

“But it was still user 017?” I said. “Same guy, different keyboard?”

Nicky grinned evilly. He was enjoying this. “It was someone telling the system he was user 017. But he had to use his own handle when he altered that config file. Even when you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you still cast a shadow. He’s user 020.”

“Got you, you bastard,” I muttered. “Nicky, that’s brilliant—thanks. I’ll be wrapping this up in the next day or so, and then you can expect Christmas to come early.”

Nicky took the praise as stoically as he’d taken the curses earlier; it would have been beneath his dignity to take a bow. But he didn’t move. “There’s one other thing, Felix,” he said.

“Go on.”

“While I was in there anyway, I took a look around some of the other folders. There were a couple of dozen of them, going back about six or seven years. The older ones are fine—no tampering, no anomalous entries. But for three years or so now, user 020 has been keeping really busy. The earliest Bluetooth-fed entry was last March. Before that, he was using an IRF widget, but the principle was the same—using the back door that the system keeps open so that you can dock your laptop or your Palm Pilot with your main machine and update address books and the like.”

He stood up.

“About two thousand records were affected,” he said. “On this drive, anyway. Assuming there are other self-contained input machines, there’s no saying what else Mr. Twenty has been getting up to.”

As he walked to the door, I called out after him, “Nicky, what’s he doing to the records? Just so I’m absolutely clear. What’s he falsifying?”

“You already know that, Felix,” Nicky chided me.

“He’s deleting them,” I said. “He’s wiping items off the system.”

“Exactly. Hey, I was never here, which is why you didn’t see me. Have a nice evening.”