by KJ Charles
“No joke. The family asked me to get rid of it after he died. I was going through it to price it up when I noticed Sunil.”
“That’s something of a coincidence.”
“Well, you don’t see that many people of our colour, that’s why I remembered. I could have flicked past any number of missing white boys. There’s at least one murdered lad in there.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A boy I knew. He was killed a few weeks ago, on the street, skull stoved in. It’s a dangerous game, and people get hurt. The police won’t help, and you’re mostly on your own.” Gil grinned briefly. “Last time I saw him, Errol was talking about setting up a trade union, to stop the workers being ripped off.”
“Good for him,” Vikram said absently. “When was this unfortunate killed?”
Gil frowned, counting on his fingers. “I heard on a Monday morning with the delivery so... The twenty-third, Saturday evening. He was killed that night, and found the next morning. Why?”
Between the fire and the cat on his lap, Vikram was almost uncomfortably warm, but he nevertheless felt a cold sensation along his spine. “Sunil left his home for the last time on the morning of the twenty-third.”
They looked at one another.
“How big a world is this?” Vikram asked. “Would one young man who posed for these pictures have been likely to know another?”
“Maybe.” Gil rapped his knuckles against the side of the chair. “Might’ve.”
“I wonder if I now take this to the police.”
Gil made a face. “Eh. It’s not the safest profession. You expect unnatural deaths in this line now and again.”
“Which line? The photographs?”
“Renting. Which is to say, boys with gentlemen friends. Errol had plenty of them.”
“How do you know?” Vikram asked, then felt his cheeks flame. “I mean... No, damn it, how do you know?” He heard the harshness in his own voice and, quite clearly, so did Gil.
“How’d you think?” Gil moved away from the chair with a twist of his body that drew Vikram’s attention unavoidably to his lean hips, and folded his arms. “I sell filth, mate, and a fair bit of it’s for men who like men. I know what’s what.”
Vikram had no idea how to respond to that. He didn’t even know why he’d asked. He shouldn’t have asked, because now there were a dozen other things he wanted to ask, all worse. A pulse ticced in his jaw, a distracting throb of sensation.
Gil went on. “Both boys were in the same line of work, and it’s not a safe one. That seems to me the only connection that counts. Yes, my half-brother had photographs of them both, but he had a lot of photographs.”
“When did Matthew die?”
“The first of November.” Gil’s brows slanted comically. “I like your thinking, but it’s no go. He had a stroke on the twenty-first, never regained consciousness.”
His tone didn’t suggest condolences would be welcome. “Right. Nevertheless, for one boy to die and one disappear on the same date—”
“Maybe. But if you go to the police with nothing more than this, all that’ll happen is they’ll do me for obscene publications, and pick up a lot of other fellows who never did any harm.”
“This is harm,” Vikram said, dropping the photograph on the arm of the chair. The cat stirred on his lap. “This is not what young men—or women either—should be doing.”
“You give ’em another way to keep their bellies full and clothes on their backs and I’m sure they’ll take it.”
That was true enough. Vikram took a steadying breath. “I wonder whether your half-brother’s collection has any more secrets. I understand that he had a lot of pictures, but even so. Did he keep them in any order?”
“They’re mostly in albums.” Gil jerked a thumb. “I haven’t looked at those yet. There are a lot of loose ones too, but if they were in order before, they aren’t now. I didn’t pay attention when I packed the boxes up.”
“Mph.” Vikram tapped his fingers against his lips, thinking, and saw a grin dawn on Gil’s face. “What is it?”
“You always did that.” Gil imitated the gesture—forefingers steepled together, other fingers interlaced, tapping them against his own lips. “Whenever you were coming up with something.”
“I wish I were.” Vikram disengaged his fingers with some self-consciousness. “Have you looked through all his pictures?”
“Not yet. I only got them yesterday.”
“Perhaps you should start there.”
“Start what?”
“Well, looking of course,” Vikram said, a little impatiently. “For this Errol, and Sunil. For anything that might identify the photographer.” He was tapping his lips again, dammit. He lowered his hands hastily. “We’ll need to go through that in detail, and also to ask about other missing young men. Can you enquire within your, uh, circle of acquaintance, and see—”
“Whoa there,” Gil said. “This isn’t my problem.”
It was like a splash of cold water to the face. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve got a business to take care of, and not one that’ll be improved if I go around pretending to be a peeler.”
“But there’s a boy dead. Another missing. Someone has to look into this, and I don’t have the faintest idea how to find out about—” He gestured at the piles around them.
“Good. You don’t want to start snouting around in this business.”
“What else am I to do?” Vikram demanded hotly. “I can’t go to the police!”
“Nor can I,” Gil snapped. “Not to ask about a renter, and not to talk about the roomful of illegal pictures I ‘inherited from my brother’.” He pantomimed a policeman’s incredulity as he spoke. “I need to get this lot off my hands, and that’s all I want to do.”
“And what about Sunil?”
“What about him?”
Vikram drew in an angry breath, and saw Gil’s expression flicker, just slightly. “Are you serious?”
“Why shouldn’t I be? What’s it to do with me? You chase after stray trade if you like, but I’ve work to do.”
This wasn’t right. Not the hard edge to his voice, not the hard shell of not caring. This ought not be what Gil had become. Vikram loathed it, and that loathing pushed him to spit, “Selling pictures of people selling themselves.”
“If I choose to,” Gil said. “That’s my trade. You don’t like it, you know where the door is.”
“No, I don’t like it.” Vikram had to shove the cat twice, violently, to detach it from his lap, and felt thread give way under its resisting claws. He stood, unreasonably but ferociously angry. “I don’t like exploitation in any form. But what I really don’t like is that you don’t seem to give a damn for what appears to be a highly suspicious set of circumstances, and a young man missing, and the people who miss him.”
Gil jabbed a finger at his own chest. “Bookseller. Not enquiry agent. You want one of those, there’s a firm in Robin Hood Yard. What the devil do you think I can do?”
“I thought—”
I thought you might help me. It sounded absurd; it was absurd. As if Gil should drop everything to pursue Vikram’s investigation as a matter of course. As if there were a reason to treat this man as anything more than a stranger. As if Gil would help Vikram now, when he hadn’t so much as written a single line to get in touch.
Vikram should never have come to Holywell Street.
CHAPTER FOUR
Gil woke up the next day feeling uncomfortable.
He wasn’t used to questioning his decisions. His life hadn’t allowed him a great deal of leeway in making them, and the choices he’d made tended to be the kind that stuck. If you went around regretting things you might curl up and cry for the lost hopes and the ruined dreams, and bugger that for a game of tin soldiers. He was where he was. He did not need moralising, and he wasn’t going to gaol.
That was not an option. He knew too much about the spirit-breaking pointless cruelty inflicted in Pentonvil
le or Clerkenwell. He wasn’t going to risk coming to the attention of the peelers for the sake of some boy he’d never met. Vikram could talk about the value of human life all he liked; he had education and wealth and doting parents to make his valuable. He could afford to care, and it was a bloody piece of cheek that he should ask Gil to do the same without a thought, as if it was the old days.
They’d initially palled up from sheer necessity as the only two dark-skinned boys in the form. It wasn’t as though they’d had anything else in common. Gil was a housemaid’s bastard, his mother’s parents hauled over the seas by some fleshmongering son of a bitch. Vikram was rich and well born, and his father had been a high-up adviser to the government. Gil well recalled Vikram in a towering fury of offended pride that had made him seem older than his thirteen years, informing the entire common room that he was descended from princes. It hadn’t been a good idea, as anyone could have advised him; he’d been dubbed ‘Tippoo Sultan’, not in a kindly spirit, ever after.
Vikram had always been proud. Probably no more so than the other boys, but a great deal more than most of them thought he had a right to be. He’d refused to be treated as second class, would not humble himself to be liked, and had paid the price in unpopularity.
He’d dropped the arrogance with Gil, though. Nobody could be alone all that time. They’d hidden themselves in dark corners of the school grounds, and Vik had huddled against him and talked, sometimes sobbed out the fears and unhappiness he couldn’t push away, and...
They’d been friends. Real, deep friends, even if they were chalk and cheese, even if Gil couldn’t see why Vik took everything so seriously and Vik couldn’t see why Gil didn’t. They’d been close, as close as it got.
And then Gil had left school that day in May, and he’d never seen Vikram again. He’d been busy, to say the least, learning to survive in a coldly hostile world, but he had still worried about his friend now and then. What will he do without me? he remembered thinking, as if he’d had time to worry about a clever, wealthy, beloved son. How will he get on?
Well, it looked like Vikram had got on just fine. Looked like he was making the world a better place, and was disappointed that Gil wasn’t doing the same. That was then, this is now. I run a dirty bookshop, mate, Gil told him mentally. What did you expect?
The sod-you attitude had been carefully honed over years to serve him well as a suit of armour against family, moralisers, the law. People could hurt you far worse if you believed in them, or trusted them, or cared what they thought, so he’d learned to stop doing those things. He found himself not greatly wanting to stop them with Vikram.
“Oh, fuck off,” he said aloud, to himself or whoever. He needed to forget about this whole thing, especially the angry, disappointed look in Vikram’s eyes, and get on with some work. This meant another chapter of his current opus, Miss Larch’s School of Discipline. Bums, whips, mock protests, schoolgirls, a young gentleman in a frock to tickle other fancies. He wanted to get that on sale before Christmas in a three-shilling edition.
Miss Larch was his priority, not a couple of tuppenny whores whose lives and deaths were none of his business. He repeated that to himself at twenty-minute intervals for the next two hours, slapped his pen down at last with a single scrawled sheet of uninspired vice to show for his time, and pushed his chair back with a snarl of, “Oh, all right.” He needed to finish with Matthew’s collection anyway, and get those bloody photographs off his hands.
Upstairs, Satan slept on the chair Vikram had briefly occupied. Furry fuckster, curling up on Vik’s thighs like he had a right to be there.
God, Vikram had got big. He’d been huge-eyed and slender that first day, when Gil had walked into the dormitory and seen the single brown-skinned boy staring back at him in the sea of pale faces, hostile or curious. He’d stayed awkward over the next seven years: gangly, thin-wristed, always hungry, as though he’d burned up the food with his intensity about everything under the sun. Even though he’d been starting to show a moustache by fourteen, he hadn’t really started growing by the time they’d parted. Gil had tugged him around by the hand and Vik had let himself be dragged along.
Not that he’d been weak. Gil remembered his temper well. Exploding at the bullying and torment inflicted as a matter of course by larger boys on smaller; exploding at the taunts and sneers directed at his race or mother country; exploding at more or less anything that struck him as wrong, and a lot of things had. Opinionated pain in the arse, that was Vik as a schoolboy, and it looked like nothing much had changed on the inside. But the outside, though...
Hell’s teeth, Vikram’s outside was worth looking at these days. Eyes of such deep brown, with thick, straight black brows over them. Thick black hair, too, with a slight wave to it. The features that had always seemed too big for his face were still big—a beaky nose, a full mouth—but on a grown man, the effect was magnificent. And he’d filled out impressively in the shoulders, the very nice arse, and the thighs that bloody Satan had helped himself to, lying face down on Vikram’s lap, when Gil could have cheerfully done the same.
Oh, Vikram grown up was a piece of work. And he was also a lawyer, and no matter what he said about his religion or philosophy, he was English by education. Gil would be well advised to keep within safe bounds. The last thing he needed was a moralising lawyer in his life, even one with thighs and eyes like those.
Gil wasn’t looking for trouble and he definitely wasn’t looking for Sunil as he sorted through Matthew’s photographs. Men and women, orifices and the various things that might be stuck into them, the usual business over and over while the fog dragged dirty fingers across his windows and he tried not to remember being lost and sixteen.
It wasn’t his problem, damn it. He’d never had Errol or wanted to. Gil didn’t like young ones. Either they had eyes full of hope and need, and there was nothing Gil liked less than other people’s need, or they’d had the optimism beaten out of them already, and that was just disheartening. He liked a man or woman who’d grown a thick skin with age, who was knocked down and got up and could laugh about it. Not people like, to pluck an example out of the air, Vikram, who cared so damn much about everything that it hurt to look at him, but those who could have a good time and not care and walk away unscathed. Because if you couldn’t do that, you were in trouble.
Errol wouldn’t be walking away, but there was nothing to be done for him now. The other one, Sunil, was probably dead too. These things happened. And just because they had maybe happened to two boys possibly on the same night...
It was none of his sodding business. Gil told himself that like a sensible purveyor of filth, but even so, once he’d finished going through the loose photographs, he decided he might as well take a look at the albums while he was at it.
By the time he’d got to the third one, he really was wondering about his half-brother.
Most people had their little ways, things they preferred—feet, or restraints, or floggers, or what-have-you. Matthew’s collection had them all, and plenty more, and he’d organised them by theme. Orgy pictures together, cunnilingus pictures together, flogger pictures together, with spaces left for gaps, as though a pornographer had collided with a librarian. Someone was going to pay a fortune for these as a set, Gil had no doubt, but the overall effect was deathly in its monotony. Had Matthew really found pleasure in this organised catalogue of vice?
He picked up an album that still had a newish smell to it, opened it, and said, “Ah, fuckery.”
It was Errol and Sunil. Of course it bloody was, in a run of six pictures of gamahuching and soixante-neuf. The photographic paper was clean and unblemished, and the prints sat in an album with an unfaded spine that a cursory flick showed to be two-thirds empty. These were very recent.
“Fuckery!” Gil said again, so loudly that Satan lifted his head and gave him a look of yellow-eyed hatred. “Well, now what?”
Satan yawned, revealing needlepoint teeth. Gil glared at him. “It’s all right for you. No
body’s putting you to the crank if the peelers take an interest.” Satan could fuck and murder as he pleased, and leave the bodies all over the shop floor too, frequently in pieces. Bloody cat.
What the devil was he to do now? He’d ignored a lot in his time. There was so much to ignore, after all, and if you went around caring about every beggar and every hungry child, you’d die of pity and do no good to anyone. He could ignore this: burn the pictures rather than risk questions, and searches, and a trip to gaol. Given Vikram’s look of contempt as he’d left, he’d probably expect Gil to do just that, and Gil found a kind of bitter pleasure in fulfilling people’s worst opinions. If they were going to judge him without knowing a damn thing about him, he might as well live down to their expectations. That had been a driving principle for years, and he wasn’t going to change it for the sake of a half-remembered schoolboy friendship, or the disappointment in Vikram’s eyes.
He was, therefore, really quite annoyed with himself as he stood in Vikram’s offices in Lincoln’s Inn an hour later, asking for Mr. Pandey.
Vik was wearing a black Newmarket coat over a pale grey waistcoat and dark grey trousers. He looked smart and decent and tired, and surprised. “Gil,” he said blankly.
“Me. Can I have a word?”
“Come in.”
Gil had never been in a law office before. It was very neat, dark wood and green leather, not at all the mess of Chancery papers he had in mind from reading Dickens.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” Vikram said. “I should probably apologise. I dare say I was unreasonable. I get caught up in things—well, you know that but—”
“I remember.” Vikram’s eyes were so bloody brown. Gil needed not to be lusting after a lawyer like this, let alone an old friend. “But, mate—”
“No, it wasn’t reasonable. I had no right to expect you to take an interest in my work or my obligations, which are not yours.”
That sounded like a well-used phrase. Possibly well used by someone else, to Vikram. “No, they aren’t, but you need to see this.”