The Devil You Know

Rich lapsed into silence, twitching slightly from time to time, his head once more clasped in his hands. I thought through everything I already knew in the light of what he’d just told me. It seemed to fit. And the emotional commentary track that I’d accessed by gripping the back of Rich’s neck had agreed with the words on every major point. He was telling the truth, as far as he knew it and believed it.

“What about the documents?” I asked. “The Russian collection? Where did it really come from?”

He rubbed snot and tears away from his face with a hand that still shook.

“One of the girls—not Snezhna, one of the earlier ones—had that stuff in her flat. Family heirloom sort of thing. I saw it, and I thought—yeah, that lot’s worth something. I could sell it to the archive. So I said I’d bring it over for her and get it valued. I used one of Damjohn’s flats—a vacant one—as a postal address, and I set the whole thing up. I said I was liaising with this old man, but it was just me.”

That was something else I should have worked out sooner. Scrub and McClennan hadn’t turned up in Bishopsgate by accident. Rich had probably phoned Damjohn as soon as he’d hung up from talking to me.

“And Rosa?” I asked him. “Did you ever see her again?”

Rich shook his head miserably without looking up. “Damjohn wouldn’t let me. He told me not to go back into the club or any of his other places. And he’s only used me on the talent run once since then. He says I’m on probation. He says I’ve got to wait, and he’ll call me when he needs me.”

Bizarrely, after all I’d heard, it was then that my stomach chose to turn over. It’s not likely that I’d have felt much pity for Rich in any case, given what he’d done. But the fact that he’d been able to go back to his old routine of picking up girls put him outside the human race, as far as my categories went—into some other conceptual space that he shared with the likes of Asmodeus.

But I still needed him for one thing more.

“Listen to me, Rich,” I told him. “Rosa’s gone missing. Damjohn’s got her hidden somewhere, in case she talks to me and helps me to put two and two together. She knows that her sister’s dead. Maybe he told her, or maybe she found out in some other way—but she must know, because she attacked me with a knife, thinking that I’d exorcised Snezhna’s ghost. So she’s in the same boat as you—she knows enough to bring the police down on Damjohn. He’ll probably kill both of you once the dust has settled on all of this—and the only reason you’re running around free right now is because you disappearing would be too damn suspicious.

“So your only chance of coming out of this alive is to cooperate with me. Do you understand?”

He looked up slowly and nodded. “And you’ll keep it quiet?” he asked, his tone approaching a whine. “You won’t tell anybody about—”

I exploded with all the pent-up emotion of the past half hour. “Jesus, of course I won’t keep it quiet!” I shouted. “What, are you sick in the fucking head or something?” He flinched at the caustic contempt in my voice, shrank back against the wall. I brandished his keys in his face. “The only choice I’m giving you is between serving time for murder and hitting the wall right now. And make it fast, Rich. I’ve got other places to be.”

But Rich was shaking his head. I’d pushed him too far, and he was finally pushing back. “No,” he said. “No. I can’t do it. I can’t go to prison.”

“I think you’ll like it better than the other option,” I assured him grimly.

“I can’t!” he moaned, groveling on his hands and knees with his head bent under him, “I can’t!”

I stood back, realizing that I wouldn’t get any more sense out of him until he’d got over this whelming flood of panic. I was itching to get moving, only too aware of how much might hinge on me getting to Rosa before Damjohn’s nerve failed. But I had to contain myself. There was no way of applying any more pressure to Rich without him breaking altogether.

No way for me, anyway. At that moment, the darkness in the corners of the room began to stretch and flow. Rich hadn’t noticed, because he was incapable of noticing anything, but whatever was happening, he was the focus of it. The shadows ran toward him, circled him like water circles a drain, darkening and deepening. It didn’t look like her, but I’d been waiting for her to make her move for ten minutes or more, so I knew it when it came.

I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me. Okay, she’d been fighting against the pull of this room ever since she’d died, but Rich’s churning emotion was a beacon burning through the darkness and confusion of death. She had to come.

Only she didn’t come as herself. No woman stood over Rich as he rocked and moaned. It was just the darkness, curdling and thickening.