The Devil You Know

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.