The Devil You Know

Twenty

RICH TRIED TO GET UP, BUT HE DIDN’T MAKE IT VERY far, because his body wouldn’t cooperate. He gawped up at me, blood trickling down his chin from where he’d bitten his lip when the handcuff impacted on his jaw.

“F-fuck!” he protested thickly, saliva frothing out to join the blood.

“Don’t get up, Rich,” I advised him, meaning it. “If you get up, I’m only going to knock you down again. You might end up breaking something.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring at me with eyes that were having to work at the moment just to focus.

“You’re frigging insane,” he bubbled.

“Yeah, Cheryl thinks so, too. But Cheryl’s no expert on sanity—not coming from that family. And Cheryl doesn’t know you like I do, does she, Rich?”

He tried again, and this time he made it into a sitting position, one arm raised protectively in case I hit him again, exploring his thickening lower lip gingerly with fingers that seemed to be shaking. He shot me another look, scared but angrily defiant. “I didn’t steal anything,” he said. “Tiler was all on his own. If you think I’m in on his bloody pilfering—”

I cut in. I didn’t have any patience for this. “Tiler doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “When I found out about his thieving, I thought it might be relevant in some way. I suppose I wanted it to be relevant, because I’d just come up empty-handed from the Russian collection, and I was desperate for anything that might point me in the right direction. Then Tiler whacked me in the face with an electric torch and threw me headfirst down a sodding stairwell, so I had something of a stake in him being guilty. But he isn’t. As far as I can tell, what he does is just a weird hobby. He loves old documents. I’ve been inside his head, so I know. He’s papered his bloody bedroom with them.

“No, I know you didn’t steal anything, Rich. But you did kill somebody. How many nineteenth-century parish record books is that worth, karmically speaking?”

Rich had been gathering his strength for a big effort. He rolled to his left and made a break for the door. I’d seen it coming; I got my foot in between his legs and rammed him squarely in the back with my shoulder, adding my own momentum to his. He went down more heavily this time with a grunt of pain.

I hauled him to his feet while he was still limp and groggy from the impact, dragged him across the room, and shoved him hard against the paneled wall. He started to slump toward the floor again, but I kept him more or less upright by leaning my shoulder against him, at the same time helping myself to his keys. There was only one Chubb in the bunch. I put it into the lock and turned. The click was loud in the bare, silent room.

Hooking the door open with my foot, I took two handfuls of his shirt, around about chest height, and half pushed, half slid him onto the stairwell. He mewled in panic. “No! No! Not down there!” He fought against me, which was a bad decision on his part, because we were both off balance. Breaking free from my grip, he tumbled arse over tip down the stairs.

I lunged out and found the wall, which just saved me from falling down after him. I took a moment to get my breath back and slammed the upper door securely behind us before following him down at my leisure. So long as we had Rich’s keys, we could get out anytime we liked, and in the meantime, we wouldn’t be disturbed.

Rich had fetched up on his side, sprawled against the bottom edge of the mattress. Standing over him, I took a rectangular card out of my pocket, opened my fingers, and let it fall. It fluttered down to land next to his head. He stared at it woozily. The card read ICOE 7405 818.

“In case of emergency,” I translated. “You said it to me last Monday when you offered me a bottle of Lucozade from the fridge. Then you started to say it again the next day, but you stopped yourself, and I filled in the gap for you. It had slipped my mind, to be honest. I was still thinking ICOE must be somebody’s nickname or something. But then you offered me your hip flask today at the wedding, and it clicked.”

Rich levered his upper body groggily off the floor. He shook his head, said something that was impossible to make out through his painful, hitching breath.

“Not much in the way of hard evidence?” I interpreted. “No, you’re probably right, there. But you knew where to look, didn’t you, Rich? When I said there was a downstairs room, your eyes went right to the door. Only the door’s camouflaged against that foul wood paneling, so there was no way you could have known it was there. No clean way, anyway.”

I was warming up now—and I was also goading him to answer me. I wanted the story. I wanted to hear out of his own mouth what had been done down here.

“So that’s strike one and strike two, yeah? Then there’s the fact that you’re shit-hot at Eastern European languages, and the ghost speaks in Russian. Only you never heard her speak, did you, Rich? Everybody else in the place did, but you—the only guy who could have definitively identified the language and told us all what she was talking about—you were stricken magically deaf.

“But strike four is my favorite. That was when you sneaked into Peele’s office and tore a page out of the incident book. I was straining my brain trying to think about why that was done—what anyone could possibly have to gain from it. And I finally came up with an answer. I finally realized what it was that was missing.

“This girl died sometime around the tenth of September—maybe a day or so before, give or take, but certainly not after. And the first sighting of the ghost was on Tuesday the thirteenth. But it wasn’t the first sighting that had been ripped out of the book. That was still there, written out in agonizing detail. Because the ghost couldn’t be hidden, obviously—everyone was seeing her by then. So what was being hidden was something else, something that our mystery guest didn’t want to have associated with the ghost, if questions were asked later.”

“Nothing”—Rich managed, his voice coming out as a breathy grunt—“to do with . . . me.”

I smiled bleakly at that. “Ah, but you see, I think it was,” I told him, standing over him in case he decided to make another run for it. “I think it was that famous time when you jammed your hand in a drawer. Proving what an amiable klutz you are. Proving that you don’t mind having a laugh at your own expense. Only it wasn’t a drawer, was it, Rich? You got that injury when she got hers. I’m guessing it was a scratch. Maybe a puncture wound of some kind, to the side of your hand. You’re the first-aid man, so nobody else had to see—and you made bloody sure they didn’t. But I’m pretty well convinced that was what it was, all the same.”

I paused not for effect but because I felt a lurch of nausea as I imagined the scene in my mind. Down here, where it had actually happened, the very words had a miasmic sense of weight and solidity. It was hard to get them out of my mouth.

“‘The instrument used in the attack had a number of different surfaces and edges that moved independently of each other,’” I quoted from recent, unpleasant memory.

Rich took a deep, shuddering breath. He ducked his head as though he was flinching away from a blow.

“It was your keys you used, wasn’t it, you bastard? No wonder you did your own hand in while you were turning her face into hamburger.”

To my amazement, Rich started to cry. Just a dry sob at first, and then another. Then he trembled again, and the tremble turned into the first in a series of great, racking heaves as the tears welled up in his eyes and spilled down his face.

“I didn’t—want to” he quavered, shooting me a look of desperate pleading. “Oh God, please, Castor, I didn’t want to! It was—it was”—his voice was lost in another wave of broken sobs. “I’m not a murderer,” he managed at last. “I’m not a murderer!”

“No? Well, neither am I,” I told him, my own self-disgust rising in me now like heartburn. “I’m just the bloke who comes in and clears up after the murderer. And I nearly did it, Rich. I was that close.” I held up my hand, finger and thumb a fraction of an inch apart. But he was folded in on his own pain and fear, and he didn’t look up. “I would have done it. I would have blasted that poor, screwed up little ghost into the void. All that stopped me was that Damjohn paid me a compliment I didn’t deserve and tried to kill me because he thought I must be trying to find out the truth. The truth! All I was interested in was getting paid!”

I knelt down at the foot of the wall, deliberately avoiding the mattress. I put my hand on the back of Rich’s neck and gripped hard. With skin-to-skin contact, and with his emotions as churned up as they were, he wouldn’t be able to lie to me without me knowing. He tried to pull away, but his heart wasn’t in it. He radiated self-pity and surrender.

“Tell me about it,” I suggested, and if he read an “or else” into my tone of voice, he was exactly right.

It was a few minutes before he could formulate a sentence. Then—with a few more pauses along the way for tears and hand-wringing—it all came spilling out.

It wasn’t Rich’s fault. It was Damjohn’s fault. Peele’s fault. The girl’s own fault, for panicking and making everything so much worse than it should have been. But not Rich’s fault. Fuck, no.

I sat and watched his matey persona dissolve under pressure into a stinking mulch of misery and denial.

It all started with Peele—or at least, that’s the best I can do by way of summary. It wasn’t as though Rich was telling this in a way that made any real sense. But it had been Peele who’d stabbed him in the back when he was looking for a promotion, and so it was Peele who’d kick-started the whole sorry chain of events.

Rich had been at the Bonnington for five years by this time—“five bloody years”—and it was no secret that he was after the senior archivist job. When Derek Watkins retired on ill-health grounds, who else was there besides Rich who was qualified to step in? Who else knew the whole system and had the personality to be able to handle the reading-room side of things as well as the organizational skills needed to keep things ticking over backstage?

But Peele had brought in an outsider. He’d poached Alice from Keats House, Alice who was—these things need to be spelled out clearly—younger than Rich biologically, his junior in terms of years served, and a woman.

He was choked. Well, you would be, wouldn’t you? To see your contribution undervalued like that, the rights of your case set aside, and not even to get an explanation, still less an apology. Rich had gone in to see Jeffrey as soon as he’d heard and had lodged a formal protest. He was told that the decision had been taken at JMT level. They wanted someone with more of a managerial background. He indicated that it might be difficult for him to work on a team under someone who’d swiped a promotion from under his nose. Jeffrey said that if Rich felt that strongly, his resignation would be reluctantly accepted, and his reference would be very positive.

He was fucked, in other words.

So Rich became fairly cynical and embittered about the archive job. He still needed it for the regular salary, but he decided to give it no more of his time and energies than he could possibly help. And since the only way up was dead man’s shoes, he’d look for some other way to supplement his income and give him the lifestyle he felt he was owed.

“I never wanted to be a millionaire,” he protested, snuffling as he massaged his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I just didn’t want to be stuck in the same fucking hole for the rest of my life. You need a few luxuries, just to keep yourself sane.”

He’d been frequenting one of Damjohn’s brothels for as long as he’d lived in London—not Kissing the Pink, but another place out in Edmonton that made no bones about what it was and didn’t bother with niceties like liquor licences or twinkly neon lights. Damjohn himself put in an appearance every Thursday night to collect the takings, and the ice had broken between them when Rich had recognized Damjohn’s Serbian accent and had been able to tell him wassup, or the equivalent, in his native tongue.

Damjohn had been very interested in Rich’s language skills. He invited Rich out to dinner at a fancy hotel and put the moves on him. He had, he intimated, a possible opening for a handsome young westerner with a clean British passport who could talk Russian, Czech, and Serbian at need. It would be easy work, too—occasional, well paid, and not impossible to fit in around a regular job. Rich took the bait.

It was hard to say no, he told me. Damjohn’s personality was so intense and powerful, he just swept you along. Rich looked at me defiantly, as if I was about to disagree. “He’s not Serbian, you know,” he told me truculently. “He was part of all that Kosovo shit, but only because he was caught in the middle of it. His family were all Slovenes—and after Slovenia decided to fly solo, the Slovenes in Kosovo had almost as fuck-awful a time as the Albanians. But he was in Vlasenica when the Serbian army came through, and he was lucky enough to fall in with a colonel, Nikolic, who was trying to update the census records for the area. Nikolic didn’t know his arse from his elbow, so Damjohn helped him out. Told him where people lived and if they were still around.”

“People?” I echoed. “What people, Rich? Albanians? Muslims?”

Rich shrugged. “People,” he repeated stubbornly. “The point is that Damjohn was a survivor. He could have been rounded up himself, but instead he made himself useful. And then he made himself indispensable. When they set up the concent—the transit camp at Susica, he was on staff. He was actually on staff. A Slovene! They used him to handle initial interviews. Triage. Only he didn’t bother with interviews—he had a better way. When a new truckload came in, he’d go in and sit with them, as if he was just another sheep-shagger caught out by a Serbian patrol, and if anyone spoke to him, he’d just shrug—no speakee. Then he’d listen to them talking among themselves, and within a few minutes, he’d know exactly who was who and what was what. He had an agreed signal to give to the guards—when he was ready, he’d give them the wink, or whatever, and they’d take him out as if they were going to interrogate him. So then he could give them the lowdown on everyone else in the batch, and sometimes—depending on what he’d overheard—leads on other people who were still hiding out up in the hills. Fucking incredible. If the war had gone on for another year, he’d probably have been running the place.”

Rich was looking intently at me as he said all this. He wanted me to understand why he couldn’t just say no to Damjohn—wanted me to share his awe, which clearly went beyond conventional morality. I found myself thinking back to the images I’d seen when I’d touched Damjohn’s hand. I knew from that brief flash that the man’s skills as an informer had been learned at a much earlier age; the war in Kosovo had just been another career opportunity for him.

Rich had been horrified, of course, when he found out what the work was. He only took it on a one-off basis, at first, because his car had just died, and he didn’t have any money for a deposit on a new one. And he was still fuming over the shit that had gone down at the archive, so he probably wasn’t thinking too straight. He just hadn’t thought enough about what he was getting into. If he had, he would never have gone on that initial run for Damjohn, and none of the rest of it would ever have—

“Just tell me what he asked you to do, for the love of Christ,” I interjected harshly. “And put the bullshit in an appendix at the end.”

Rich went on holiday to the Czech Republic. And while he was there, he went into a lot of city-center bars in Prague and Brno. Young people’s bars. He was looking for girls, and he wasn’t very good at it, at first. Oh, he could run a chat-up line as well as the next guy, and he knew how to trade on his well-heeled-westerner chic, but he didn’t know how to segue from that into doing the recruitment pitch.

Come to London right now, was roughly how it went. Leave your family and your friends behind, and you can get yourself a new life like you’d never even believe. You can do a secretarial course—government-funded—and after six weeks, you’ll be walking into a twenty-grand-a-year job. And you’ll be living in a flat with your rent and utilities paid, because everyone in London claims state benefit even if they’re working, so your only expenses will be food and clothes. Even if you only do it for a couple of years, you can come back with a stake. Stick to it for five years, you can come back rich. Or say fuck it and don’t come back at all.

Rich learned quickly, though. Part of the trick was to choose the right girl in the first place. The “leave your friends and family behind” line played best with women who didn’t have a big share of either, and he came to be good at spotting them. Young was good. Stupid was good. Ambitious was best of all; a girl with a hunger for the bright lights would tell herself bigger lies than you’d have the balls to tell her yourself and then invest more effort into believing them.

The reality behind the pitch was as squalid as you’d imagine it to be. Rich would help the girls to fill in a passport application and give them their traveling money from the Czech Republic to Sweden. In Sweden, they were looked over by an associate of Damjohn’s, a German named Dieter—no second name that Rich ever heard of, just Dieter. And if Dieter liked what he saw, he sent the girls on to London.

That was where they disappeared from the official statistics, though. They didn’t come into the UK by plane, and they didn’t come in on their own passports. If there was a trail, Sweden was where it ended. Rich himself came home alone and didn’t trouble himself with the unpleasant details.

“But you knew where the girls were going?” I demanded.

Rich hesitated, then nodded his head just once. “The flats,” he muttered. “I’m not saying I’m proud of myself. But all I was doing was talent-spotting. No rough stuff, Castor. I never hurt anybody!”

The flats were the bargain-basement end of Damjohn’s operation. The girls there weren’t whores by choice, they were co-opted. It was a matter of horses for courses, Rich explained morosely. In the West End and the City, you could charge a premium price for a premium product: beautiful girls with some personality and imagination who’d throw themselves into it—play games, dress up, talk the talk. The flats were a different approach for a different demographic: men who had very little in the way of disposable income, but who’d still pay for sex if the price point was low enough. In the clubs, the girls took 50 percent of whatever the john paid. In the flats, they worked for food. And they didn’t get to choose who they went with or what was on the menu. They just did what they were told.

Needless to say, the girls that Rich was recruiting couldn’t just be put to work as soon as they arrived in the UK. There was a certain amount of—not training, maybe, but conditioning—that had to be got through first. They had to be broken in, taught what was expected of them and what the rules were. Like never say no to anything. Never cry when you’re with a john. Never ask for help. And they needed to know the names of things—parts of the body, for example, and certain kinds of physical acts. After a little while, Rich got involved on that end of the operation, too. It wasn’t so glamorous—no exotic foreign travel, no expense account—but the perks were amazing.

His mind filled with images: flesh grinding against flesh like the cogs in a surreal and horrible machine.

“You got to screw them first,” I paraphrased.

He flinched. “No!” he protested. “Well, sometimes, yeah, but—if I wanted to, I could—I was mainly just talking them through it, but yeah, there were times. Jesus, Castor, they were prostitutes. The only difference was that with me, it was on the house. And it was a lot better if they did it with me than with Scrub, say. At least I didn’t hurt them.”

I didn’t want to argue about it. I was already deeper inside his head than I ever wanted to be. The thought of Scrub having sex with anybody was one I wished I could edit out of my brain forever. “You did hurt one of them,” I reminded him, and he groaned in anguish, squeezing his eyes tight shut.

Damjohn, it turned out, was a much better seducer than Rich would ever be. He’d reeled Rich in with the usual banal, irresistible inducements of money and sex and then worked systematically to compromise him to the point where he couldn’t say no to anything. Listening to Rich talk about it, I realized that there was nothing particularly personal about this; it was something Damjohn did automatically, partly because it was useful for business but mainly because it gave him pleasure. He’d even made a casual attempt to do it to me, just in passing, when he’d offered me time with the girls in lieu of cash money. And then once more, with feeling, when he’d offered me the same deal that Mephistopheles offered Faust. I wondered if it came from being an informer and agent provocateur in a former life. Maybe it helped you to feel good about yourself if you proved to your own satisfaction that every man had a price, and most had one that was lower than yours.

In Rich’s case, Damjohn had seen that the man’s true Achilles heel had more to do with security than with sex. Being a procurer of young girls for London brothels tickled Rich’s nostalgie de la boue, but he never once dreamed of quitting his job at the Bonnington; he clung to the steady pay and the safe shallows of the nine-to-five. So that was the area that Damjohn worked on. Every time they talked, he brought the conversation back around to what Rich did for a living and where he did it. He mused about paying a visit to the archive himself, which Rich tried hard to discourage him from. He asked Rich how much the collection was worth, how it was stored, how it was protected.

And on one occasion, Rich had mentioned the bizarre little suite of forgotten rooms tacked on at the side. He’d discovered it himself more or less by accident, on an idle afternoon in the summer, when Peele and Alice were off on holiday together in the Norfolk Broads, and the place was pretty much ticking over by itself. Rich was bored and restless, counting the days until his next trip to Eastern Europe, and there was nothing much to do, so he wandered around the building, trying out his keys on doors he’d never seen open, and in the process, he’d noticed the missing slice out of the first floor and wondered what the hell it was. It hadn’t taken him long after that to find the answer.

As soon as he told Damjohn about it, Damjohn wanted to see it. Again, Rich tried hard to talk him out of the idea, but there was never any way of saying no to the man and making it stick. He kept on at Rich until Rich finally brought him and Scrub over late one night and opened the door for them. They’d paced the place out, talking in murmurs between themselves whenever Rich was more than a few feet away from them. Then they’d sent him into the archive proper and shouted through the wall to him to test the acoustics. He’d barely heard a thing, even when Scrub was bellowing like a bull. Double-skin brickwork, combined with the state-of-the-art insulation that the strong rooms had to have: BS 5454 rearing its ugly head again.

Damjohn told Rich that he had plans for the secret rooms. He was always in need of places where some of his girls could be lodged for a few days or weeks when they first arrived in London, before they were moved out to his various premises elsewhere around the country. Damjohn owned some London properties himself, obviously—a lot of them—but he preferred to keep Chinese walls up between the legal and illegal aspects of his business life. The rooms at the Bonnington would make a great place for “breaking in” new girls for the flats.

Rich didn’t think so, and he pleaded with Damjohn to change his mind. He didn’t much mind about the girls, but Jesus, the risk to him—if it was found out, he’d lose his job. He’d probably go to jail. “And where do you imagine you’d go if it came out that you’d been involved in people trafficking, Mr. Clitheroe?” Damjohn had asked him mildly. “Sex slavery? Grooming of underage girls for prostitution?” Rich had almost broken down at that point. He hadn’t even known that one of the girls he’d helped to reel in was under age. She’d lied to him and used a fake ID to get her passport. Now he saw the legal parameters of what he’d done and realized how bad it might look to an unsympathetic eye. He begged Damjohn to let him off the hook—to drop him from the books. He wanted to go back to what he knew and forget this other world, with its hidden depths and reefs.

He could have saved his breath. Damjohn had made up his mind, and it came to pass exactly as he’d said. It’s a nasty feeling to discover that you’re in over your head when you thought you were only paddling. Rich had cried himself to sleep that night. My heart pumped lumpy custard for him.

He’d made stipulations, of course—insisted that the rooms were only to be visited at night, and that only one girl at a time could stay there. And when Scrub and a couple of silent men with toolboxes had come in one night to refit the place, Rich had asserted the right to be there and look over their shoulders, bugging them with suggestions while they worked. The restraint ring cemented to the floor was his idea; all the soundproofing in the world wouldn’t do a damn bit of good if one of the girls got into the upstairs room and started banging on the street door.

The room went into regular use a month or two after that. Rich was only told afterward, when the first girl—a Croatian recruited by one of Damjohn’s other talent scouts—had already been installed. He’d suffered terribly at first just from knowing she was there. The fear had lessened a little with time, but he still found himself finding excuses to wander close to the inner wall that corresponded to the basement room on the Bonnington side (that was the blind corridor where I’d found such a thick, fetid concentration of unhappiness) and straining his ears to check that the soundproofing was working okay. He slept fitfully, woken often by gut-wrenching dreams of being arrested and thrown into a police cell that somehow became the basement room, with its bare mattress.

But the girl had only stayed for two weeks before being moved on to one of the flats. Damjohn had continued to send Rich off on new Eastern European jaunts. A second and then a third girl had been rotated through the secret rooms, and the sheer relentlessness of the routine took the edge off his unease, gradually acclimated him to the new setup.

It was the fourth time that brought the problems. It was the fourth time that had made everything unravel. If three times is a charm, four is a curse. Rich fell silent again, his mind pulling almost tangibly against the undertow of memory. His breathing became fast and shallow, and he started to shake worse than ever.

“What was her name?” I asked him softly. He didn’t answer, but at that moment I felt her arrival at the edges of my perception. Not in the room, not yet. But close, and getting closer. “What was her name, Rich?”

“There were two of them,” he mumbled, shrinking in on himself. “Sisters. Snezhna and Rosa. Two at once! I couldn’t believe my fucking luck. Oh God, I wish I’d never seen them! I wish to Christ—”

He’d been working for Damjohn for almost two years by this time. He was an old hand and such an integral part of the operation that he had his own bank accounts to draw on—one at a Czech bank, another at a Russian one. He’d honed his skills in Moscow, Vilnius, and St. Petersburg, and he’d learned by experience that country mice were easier to catch than town mice. So this time he’d gone farther afield than ever, to Vladivostok, home of the Siberian fleet and of the Far Eastern National University. He’d read about how the economy there was imploding, and he was expecting to find and tap rich seams of desperation.

But Vladivostok was scary. As soon as he stepped off the tourist routes, he was surrounded by gangsters and pimps a hell of a lot harder and more serious about their work than he was. It felt like a place where he might accidentally and insensibly toggle from predator to prey.

Rich debated with himself. He felt vulnerable and exposed, but he didn’t want to go back empty-handed—Damjohn didn’t like paying for trips that brought him no tangible returns. In the end, Rich took a bus ride into the much smaller town of Oktyabrskiy, and that was a different animal altogether. Here was the Siberia he’d been expecting—the shops all boarded up, the damp misery of the people who hadn’t been able to buy or fight or work their way out. True, a tourist blended in here about as well as a candy-striped hippopotamus, but most of the people he was looking at now were whipped dogs rather than sharks. This was a place where he felt it was safe for him to operate.

Oktyabrskiy was where he’d met Snezhna—not in a club or a bar but behind the counter in an all-night grocery shop. She was very pretty and had a sort of naive grace to her. Definitely the sort of girl who’d bring in the passing trade in one of Damjohn’s flats.

But at the same time, Rich had an uneasy suspicion that she wasn’t the sort of woman who was likely to fall for his usual spiel. She answered his casual questions with deadpan solemnity, failed to laugh at a single one of his little jokes, and wrapped parcels of groceries with a stolid precision that suggested she wasn’t in the habit of fantasizing about the possibility of doing anything else. Rich started in on the hard sell anyway, because another lesson he’d learned by this time was that you take your opportunities where you find them. Someone like Snezhna was wasted in Siberia, he told her. In the West, she could live a life of luxury, have anything she wanted, never have to worry about money again.

Surprisingly, she fell for it so enthusiastically that he didn’t even have to try all that hard. She asked him all kinds of questions about the work, the place, the logistics of getting there. She didn’t have a passport, but if she could get one for herself, would Rich be able to give her any advice on the best way to travel to England? She’d perhaps come out just to see, at first, and then make her mind up once she was there.

Instead of having to hook Snezhna and play her, Rich found himself swept along by her momentum and having to slow her down. He couldn’t ship her out to Stockholm until he’d e-mailed Dieter to tell him she was coming, and sorting out the passport would take a few days at least, even working through channels already lubricated by regular bribes. First things first—he told her to come to the passport office the next morning to get things moving. Then she’d have all the time in the world to wrap up her affairs while the bureaucrats did their stately waltz.

And then Snezhna had turned up at the passport office with Rosa in tow. Seeing the two of them together—seeing how Snezhna’s arm had stayed protectively around her younger sister’s shoulders the whole time, and how she’d glared at any man who even cast a glance in Rosa’s direction—Rich had understood. Snezhna might lack ambition and imagination on her own behalf, but for Rosa, she wanted the world.

And he could understand the protectiveness, too. Where Snezhna was fetching, Rosa was beautiful—or at least, she pushed all of Rich’s buttons. He got briefly lyrical as he described her, not knowing that I’d already met her at the strip club. Rosa was gorgeous, he said: improbably huge brown eyes, chestnut hair falling halfway down her back, and understated curves that seemed to have a kind of Platonic perfection about them. As Rich put it, she was the kind of girl who’d still look like a virgin even while you were screwing her—an absolute must-have, in every sleazy double sense.

So he carried on promising Snezhna the moon on a silver platter as he booked tickets to Stockholm for the pair of them and dropped Dieter a line with the terse message that this was a two-for-one deal. He saw Snezhna three more times, with no greater intimacy passing between them than a kiss on the cheek. The girl genuinely thought that everything Rich had done was out of disinterested friendship. She wasn’t even cynical enough to conclude that he was trying to buy his way into her pants, let alone to guess at the truth.

So Rich went back to London feeling slightly frustrated and horny but with the satisfaction of a job well done—and with the happy prospect of having a little more spending money than usual that month. He went back to work in good spirits.

They evaporated a little a week later, when Damjohn told him in passing that there was a new girl coming to stay in the secret rooms. A new girl? Rich asked, getting interested. Maybe he could work off some of the sexual tension he’d been feeling ever since he met Rosa.

But the girl now locked in the basement under the Bonnington’s strong rooms was Snezhna.

Rich experienced hugely mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, just thinking about Snezhna made him think about her sister, too, and brought back with those memories a powerful feeling composed of two parts nostalgia to three parts lust. On the other hand, Snezhna must know by now that he had set her up for this—sold her and her sister into prostitution—and he didn’t relish meeting her again. Okay, the whole point of the “breaking in” was to take the fight out of the new girls, to make them docile and pliable. But the thought of looking Snezhna in the eye made him flinch.

So he begged off. He told Damjohn he’d prefer not to take part in the breaking-in. Damjohn asked him why, and he made up a story about a discharge from his penis that he was having looked at. Obviously Damjohn wouldn’t want the goods soiled at this early stage, so he curtly accepted Rich’s apologies and made other arrangements.

What about Rosa? Rich asked as casually as he could. “Nothing about Rosa,” Damjohn said. “At least as far as you’re concerned.” She was too good for the flats. After she’d had a few weeks to get used to the idea, he was going to try her out at Kissing the Pink. Possibly he’d take a personal interest in her training.

Rich dropped the subject and went back to work. But his libido wouldn’t let him rest. He kept thinking about Rosa and wishing he could see her again, perhaps even be the one who taught her her new trade. No use. Damjohn would laugh in his face if he asked, then use the information that he was besotted with the girl against him somehow. That was just how he was. And Rich had too strong a sense of self-preservation to fuck up this nice little earner for the sake of a sexual infatuation.

But with Rosa out of his reach, Snezhna began to seem like a more and more attractive prospect. He toyed with the idea of paying her a visit down in the basement. Day after day he played out the fantasy, until finally he found himself actually doing it. He stayed behind on a Friday night until everyone else had gone, said good-bye to Frank, and then walked around the block a few times until the light in the reception area had gone out, too. Then he let himself into the secret rooms and went down into the basement.

Snezhna was asleep. The breaking-in process was physically and psychologically shattering for most of the girls; they slept for a lot of the time when they weren’t being abused or lectured or threatened. Rich climbed in beside her, he told me—on top of her, his memories insisted—and put his lips on hers.

She woke up in a panic, too cowed to fight but terrified of the whole agonizing process starting up again. She tensed to endure the new ordeal, and then she saw who it was on the mattress with her.

Instantly her whole manner changed. She went straight from rigid passivity to spitting, cursing frenzy, screaming obscenities as she clawed at him. She went for his eyes and came within a half inch or so of having them, but he was able to grab her arms and use his weight to keep her pinned. Still she yelled and spat into his face: Bastard! Judas! Monster! Liar! Devil!

Rich got angry in return. All he wanted was sex; it couldn’t be any big deal after what Snezhna had already gone through. He pressed the point, and she fought with everything she had to keep him out. The details became hazy, both in what he was telling me and in what he was remembering. There was pain. His hand was rising and falling, the keys clutched in his fist like a flail, and his wrist jarred with agony every time his arm came down. There was sex, too, and a thrusting, shuddering climax like an epileptic fit, but it was all mixed together in his mind, and there was no clear sense of sequence. He didn’t know—didn’t want to know; wouldn’t let himself know—whether the woman was alive or dead when he finally succeeded in raping her. But if she was still alive then, she died soon after.

When he realized what he’d done, Rich felt a choking panic that was almost as strong in memory as it must have been at the time. He sat in the room next to Snezhna’s corpse for a long time, unable to form a single coherent idea. He remembered talking to himself and to her. He remembered laughing like a maniac and whimpering like a beaten dog. He kept thinking of what Damjohn would do when he found out. He wondered what sort of death—besides painful—he’d end up being allocated. Then he’d tell himself that it was just a whore—he could make the next run to Eastern Europe for free, find a replacement, and the balance would be right again. Damjohn wouldn’t care; Damjohn would let him off the hook. But after a moment or two, sick terror would set in again, and he’d be back where he started.

Finally, maybe an hour or two hours later, Rich began to pull himself together and think beyond the miasmic terror of the present moment. He had to tell Damjohn. It couldn’t be hidden, and there was nowhere he could run where he wouldn’t be found. Trying not to look at the ruined thing on the bed, he cleaned himself up as best he could with the blanket and then limped up the stairs, so oppressed by fear still that he thought he might faint and go tumbling all the way down again.

He called Damjohn at the strip club—the ICOE number. Well, if anything qualified as an emergency, this did. He made a halting, stumbling confession, which was met neither by fury nor by indulgence but by a cold, clinical pragmatism. Damjohn wanted the details. Where was the body now? What state was it in? How had the girl actually died? Had Rich remembered to lock the door behind him when he left? Had he ejaculated inside her? Had he used a condom? Had he brought his keys out of the room or left them with the body?

The catechism had a sobering effect. Rich was able to get a handle on what he’d done by describing it in such objective terms. By the time he’d finished talking, he was calm. Damjohn told him to go home and clean himself up—seriously clean himself up, with special attention to fingernails and what was under them. He should also soak his keys in bleach overnight, then boil them in a saucepan. His clothes had to be burned, but not in the backyard with the neighbors watching. The best option, Damjohn said, was to take them out to some waste ground in the middle of the night, soak them in kerosene, drop a match on them, and stay long enough to make sure that they were entirely reduced to ash.

Rich did as he was told. Having a program to work to helped, and so did the feeling that someone else was making the decisions now. When he’d raped and murdered Snezhna, it had felt as though he’d jumped the tracks of his life and was hurtling through empty space. Now he felt like he’d landed on the far side of a ravine, and things might be starting to make sense again.

All the same, the weekend was nastily surreal. He wandered around his flat, afraid to go out, afraid to be seen by anybody, afraid even to use the phone. His hand, which he’d gashed with one of the keys when he was hitting Snezhna, throbbed hypnotically and swelled up to agonizing tautness. He soaked it in antiseptic and popped cocodamol like Smarties.

There’s a T. S. Eliot poem about a guy who murders a girl, keeps her in his bathroom in a bathful of Lysol, and ends up getting confused about whether it’s him or the girl who’s actually dead. That was sort of the way it was for Rich, or so he said—and the anguish that squirmed in his mind as he said it gave some weight to the words.

Scrub dropped in on the Saturday afternoon to deliver a message from Damjohn: it was all sorted. Rich was by no means to go to the secret rooms. They were out of bounds for him now. But the body was taken care of, so nobody would ever connect it to him. And now he owed Mr. Damjohn a big, big favor, which he could bet his bottom dollar would someday be called in. In the meantime, he should go to work on Monday as if nothing had happened. Mr. Damjohn would take a grim view of it if Rich drew attention to himself by pulling a sickie, bursting into tears in public, failing in his professional duties, or whatever.

It was ironic, Rich said with a sobbing laugh. He was suddenly like one of the girls in the flats: told what to do and what to say and how to behave; having to choke down his own emotions and put on a performance that he thought might actually tear him apart.

But he forced himself to do it—to shower, shave, get dressed, go to work. He felt as though he was walking through some kind of fucked-up hallucination based on his own previous life, but nobody looked at him twice or seemed to sense anything odd about him. He went down to the reading room at lunchtime and went through the papers from cover to cover—nothing about a female body with a ruined face being found in Somers Town or anywhere else in London.

As always, normality began to work its healing spell on Rich. He got through the day with no slipups, no sign that he was anything other than himself. He even managed to enact a fake “accident” with a drawer that would explain his injured hand and allow him to keep it bandaged until it healed. He was keeping it together: riding out the waves of insane discontinuity that the murder had set off in his life.

At five-thirty (half an hour’s overtime—safely within the usual parameters), he went home, ate, watched TV, and drank a beer. Okay, he flaked out at about ten, exhausted by the emotional intensity of the eventless day, but still, he’d made it. If he could do it once, he could do it as many times as he had to.

Then, on the Tuesday, his world fell apart again. One of the part-timers came up screaming from one of the basement strong rooms. She’d seen a ghost: a woman without a face. When Rich heard those words, he fled to the gents’ toilet and threw his guts up. It was half an hour before he dared to venture out again, and he spent the rest of that day staying at the edges of all the eager discussions about the ghost, all the lurid speculation. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep the mask up if he had to talk about it. He had to pretend to keep an austere distance from such a childish subject.

On the Wednesday, he did call in sick. He just couldn’t face the thought of meeting Snezhna in the stacks: coming face to face, or rather face to not-a-face-anymore, with her in some dark, narrow space where no one could hear him scream. He told Alice that he had gastric flu. Then he drew the curtains and hid.

Somehow, Damjohn found out. Rich got another visit from Scrub, and it was a lot more painful than the first one. Scrub wanted Rich to understand that Mr. Damjohn expected high standards of professionalism from his employees, particularly in the area of doing what they were fucking told. He made the point imaginatively, using everyday objects from Rich’s kitchen to illustrate what would happen if Rich let Mr. Damjohn down in this respect. He also reminded Rich that if he didn’t pull himself together, he’d end up facing a murder charge. He had—in Scrub’s vivid phraseology—a big bastard sod of a lot to lose.

Rich did his best, with mixed results. He was able to go back into the Bonnington the next day and get back to work—where everyone was very solicitous about him, because it was obvious that he was still a bit shaky after his illness. And he was able to put a brave face on it through the days that followed, even though he felt like a condemned man whose execution was going to be sprung on him as an impromptu party rather than being set for a fixed time and place.

When the worst happened and he finally met the ghost, not in a strong room but in the middle of a corridor, he pissed himself—literally, physically, with a great access of terror so pure that it made him forget who and where he was. When he could think again, he was sprawled on the floor behind a desk in an empty storeroom, his drenched trousers cold and clinging, his hands shaking so hard he couldn’t even pull himself upright.

As soon as he could walk, he got up and headed straight out of the building. He knew that if he met anyone and had to talk to them, he’d break into pieces.

In the evening, Rich went to see Damjohn at Kissing the Pink. To his horror, Damjohn found the whole situation vastly amusing. Oh, it had its serious side, of course: a woman in whom he’d already invested a certain amount of money and time was now dead, and he’d had to go to some degree of inconvenience in the resulting cleanup. But he was, he told Rich, a man who’d always believed that the punishment should fit the crime—and in this case, the fit was exquisite.

In short, he told Rich to live with it, and in passing he renewed the threats that Scrub had already made. If Rich found that he couldn’t live with it, there was another option that would serve just as well from Damjohn’s point of view.

“The man’s a sadist,” Rich moaned. “A fucking sadist. He liked it that I was scared. He was getting off on it.”

I didn’t comment. The sense of the ghost’s presence was palpable now, so intense that it was like a thickening of the air. Snezhna was here; she was listening. She was hanging around Rich like a shroud, and although she still hadn’t shown herself in visible form, I was amazed that he couldn’t sense her. The room was full of her.

“Where did Gabe McClennan come in?” I asked, and Rich bared his teeth in a panting snarl.

“McClennan! That bastard! That was just part of the joke, wasn’t it? I went back, and I kept my nose clean. I did everything Damjohn had fucking well told me to do. And I made it all the way through September. But can you imagine what it was like, Castor? I mean, Jesus Christ! Every time I turned around, she was there. I kept on seeing her. Everyone kept on seeing her. And whenever she showed up, she was saying the same thing: asking where Rosa was. Gdyeh Rosa? Ya potrevozhnao Rosa. Again and again and again, never fucking letting up.

“I told Damjohn he couldn’t let it carry on. She might name me. She might name him. He’d sorted out the body, but now he had to sort out—the rest. What was still left of her.

“And he agreed. And he brought McClennan in.” Rich twisted his head around to look up at me, his haggard face contorted into a look of half-insane appeal. “But McClennan didn’t exorcise her—he only put that ward on her, so she couldn’t talk. Damjohn was just protecting his own arse. He still wanted me to go on suffering!”

Rich lapsed into silence, twitching slightly from time to time, his head once more clasped in his hands. I thought through everything I already knew in the light of what he’d just told me. It seemed to fit. And the emotional commentary track that I’d accessed by gripping the back of Rich’s neck had agreed with the words on every major point. He was telling the truth, as far as he knew it and believed it.

“What about the documents?” I asked. “The Russian collection? Where did it really come from?”

He rubbed snot and tears away from his face with a hand that still shook.

“One of the girls—not Snezhna, one of the earlier ones—had that stuff in her flat. Family heirloom sort of thing. I saw it, and I thought—yeah, that lot’s worth something. I could sell it to the archive. So I said I’d bring it over for her and get it valued. I used one of Damjohn’s flats—a vacant one—as a postal address, and I set the whole thing up. I said I was liaising with this old man, but it was just me.”

That was something else I should have worked out sooner. Scrub and McClennan hadn’t turned up in Bishopsgate by accident. Rich had probably phoned Damjohn as soon as he’d hung up from talking to me.

“And Rosa?” I asked him. “Did you ever see her again?”

Rich shook his head miserably without looking up. “Damjohn wouldn’t let me. He told me not to go back into the club or any of his other places. And he’s only used me on the talent run once since then. He says I’m on probation. He says I’ve got to wait, and he’ll call me when he needs me.”

Bizarrely, after all I’d heard, it was then that my stomach chose to turn over. It’s not likely that I’d have felt much pity for Rich in any case, given what he’d done. But the fact that he’d been able to go back to his old routine of picking up girls put him outside the human race, as far as my categories went—into some other conceptual space that he shared with the likes of Asmodeus.

But I still needed him for one thing more.

“Listen to me, Rich,” I told him. “Rosa’s gone missing. Damjohn’s got her hidden somewhere, in case she talks to me and helps me to put two and two together. She knows that her sister’s dead. Maybe he told her, or maybe she found out in some other way—but she must know, because she attacked me with a knife, thinking that I’d exorcised Snezhna’s ghost. So she’s in the same boat as you—she knows enough to bring the police down on Damjohn. He’ll probably kill both of you once the dust has settled on all of this—and the only reason you’re running around free right now is because you disappearing would be too damn suspicious.

“So your only chance of coming out of this alive is to cooperate with me. Do you understand?”

He looked up slowly and nodded. “And you’ll keep it quiet?” he asked, his tone approaching a whine. “You won’t tell anybody about—”

I exploded with all the pent-up emotion of the past half hour. “Jesus, of course I won’t keep it quiet!” I shouted. “What, are you sick in the fucking head or something?” He flinched at the caustic contempt in my voice, shrank back against the wall. I brandished his keys in his face. “The only choice I’m giving you is between serving time for murder and hitting the wall right now. And make it fast, Rich. I’ve got other places to be.”

But Rich was shaking his head. I’d pushed him too far, and he was finally pushing back. “No,” he said. “No. I can’t do it. I can’t go to prison.”

“I think you’ll like it better than the other option,” I assured him grimly.

“I can’t!” he moaned, groveling on his hands and knees with his head bent under him, “I can’t!”

I stood back, realizing that I wouldn’t get any more sense out of him until he’d got over this whelming flood of panic. I was itching to get moving, only too aware of how much might hinge on me getting to Rosa before Damjohn’s nerve failed. But I had to contain myself. There was no way of applying any more pressure to Rich without him breaking altogether.

No way for me, anyway. At that moment, the darkness in the corners of the room began to stretch and flow. Rich hadn’t noticed, because he was incapable of noticing anything, but whatever was happening, he was the focus of it. The shadows ran toward him, circled him like water circles a drain, darkening and deepening. It didn’t look like her, but I’d been waiting for her to make her move for ten minutes or more, so I knew it when it came.

I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me. Okay, she’d been fighting against the pull of this room ever since she’d died, but Rich’s churning emotion was a beacon burning through the darkness and confusion of death. She had to come.

Only she didn’t come as herself. No woman stood over Rich as he rocked and moaned. It was just the darkness, curdling and thickening.

When he did finally realize that something was wrong, he looked up at me, startled, as if it was some trick that I was trying to pull on him. Then he raised his hands and tried to swat the shadows away. That was as futile as it sounds. He gave a little shriek and rolled away toward the wall. The darkness followed him, zeroed on his face, sank into and through him.

“Castor!” Rich screamed. “Get it—get it off—don’t—”

I didn’t make a move. There probably wouldn’t have been much I could have done in any case. Not now. The shadows sank into and through Rich’s skin, drawn in by some psychic osmosis. His scream became muffled, liquid, inhuman. His hands flailed, groping blindly at his own face.

Except that he didn’t actually have a face—not much of one, anyway. From forehead to upper lip was just a red, rippling curtain of flesh. Chestnut-brown hair hung in lank ringlets over it, and the mouth that gaped formlessly underneath was rimmed by blood-red lips.

The illusion—if that’s what it was—held for the space of a long-drawn-out breath. Then it was gone, as if someone had thrown a switch, and it was just Rich there again, screaming and babbling, his fingers gripping his face as if he was trying to tear it off his skull. I waded in and stopped him from blinding himself in his panic.

“I’ll help,” he promised, raising his hand as if to ward off a blow. “Please! I’ll help, Castor. I’ll cooperate! You can tell her I cooperated. Don’t let her touch me! Please!”

“That’s great, Rich,” I said. “But I’m going to need you to get your breath back first.”

That took a while. When his breathing was close enough to normal that I thought he might be able to talk, I took out my mobile phone and threw it into his lap.

“Make a call,” I told him. “There’s another emergency.”