by Mike Carey
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.