The Devil You Know

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.