The Devil You Know

Caroline Beck was even younger, but her death was just as brutal and arbitrary. She died of a methadone overdose at a party, three streets away from the Bonnington in the evocatively named Polygon Road. That would have been par for the course if she’d been a user, but she wasn’t; some high-as-a-kite arsehole had come up to her while she was dancing and injected her before she even knew what was going on. He’d just wanted to spread the good vibes, but since he chose the carotid artery and since she’d never injected before, the effect was spectacularly enhanced. The girl had died about half an hour later, when her muscles went into spasm, and her breathing stopped.

Both of those sounded plausible enough to me—the sort of fucked-up, messy deaths that leave a little piece of your spirit trapped in the mesh of agonizing, unresolved emotions. But when I turned to number three, I knew I’d found my ghost.

Unlike the other two, she didn’t have a name—just a case number and a clinical description. One hundred and fifty-nine centimeters in height; hair brunette; eyes brown; build slender; age approximately mid-twenties. Naked, but a T-shirt found near the body provided samples of her blood and sloughed skin cells when tested. She’d been found in a skip on a builder’s yard in the hinterland beyond the Ampthill Estate, dead for at least three days. The date on the incident report was Wednesday, September 14—the day after the ghost was first sighted at the Bonnington Archive.

The details were grim. The girl had been sexually assaulted, both vaginally and anally, with traces of semen only in the vagina but trauma to both areas consistent with rape. Her face had been extensively slashed with some sharp and irregular metal implement that had caused massive laceration and blood loss. The police pathologist had spent a lot of time cataloging those facial injuries: “a multitude of shallow, irregular cuts and gouges, widely varied in depth and profile,” he noted, deadpan, before going on to list the position and extent of each and every one of them. “The instrument used in the attack had a number of different surfaces and edges that moved independently of each other,” he concluded. But the cause of death was asphyxiation—that T-shirt, jammed tight down into her throat until she couldn’t breathe around it.

The facial injuries were a dead giveaway. So was the T-shirt. In the photo you could clearly read the motif. I had no idea what it meant, but even I could tell that it was Cyrillic. And it wasn’t a T-shirt, as such; it was a white, sleeveless hoodie.

In among the rest of the documentation, I found a photograph of the girl’s head and shoulders. The dry description of those wounds did nothing to convey the reality, and I flinched as I stared at the bloodied scrape of raw flesh that was all that was left of her upper face. I knew the first time I saw her that it wasn’t a veil she was wearing; I just hadn’t wanted to think too much about what it really was.

So it’s you, I thought. Somebody raped you. Somebody murdered you. Somebody tied your soul up in a magical straitjacket.

And then they brought me in to finish you off.

Anger bubbled up from my chest into my throat, sublimed out from between my clenched teeth. It took some of the edge off the horror and helplessness, so I welcomed it. But something odd happened to it when it reached the atavistic lumber rooms of my brain. The face of my sister, Katie, kept coming in between me and the ravaged face in the photo, and I was momentarily blinded by tears. Not tears of blood, just the ordinary variety, but they felt hot enough to scald. Grief and bitter shame filled me. I didn’t try to analyze either emotion; I just endured them until they subsided and I could see the shape of the rage again under that dead black pall.

Someone was going to pay. It helped a little to be able to say that to myself and mean it. Someone was going to pay with extortionate, punishing interest.