Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

Rich did his best, with mixed results. He was able to go back into the Bonnington the next day and get back to work—where everyone was very solicitous about him, because it was obvious that he was still a bit shaky after his illness. And he was able to put a brave face on it through the days that followed, even though he felt like a condemned man whose execution was going to be sprung on him as an impromptu party rather than being set for a fixed time and place.

When the worst happened and he finally met the ghost, not in a strong room but in the middle of a corridor, he pissed himself—literally, physically, with a great access of terror so pure that it made him forget who and where he was. When he could think again, he was sprawled on the floor behind a desk in an empty storeroom, his drenched trousers cold and clinging, his hands shaking so hard he couldn’t even pull himself upright.

As soon as he could walk, he got up and headed straight out of the building. He knew that if he met anyone and had to talk to them, he’d break into pieces.

In the evening, Rich went to see Damjohn at Kissing the Pink. To his horror, Damjohn found the whole situation vastly amusing. Oh, it had its serious side, of course: a woman in whom he’d already invested a certain amount of money and time was now dead, and he’d had to go to some degree of inconvenience in the resulting cleanup. But he was, he told Rich, a man who’d always believed that the punishment should fit the crime—and in this case, the fit was exquisite.

In short, he told Rich to live with it, and in passing he renewed the threats that Scrub had already made. If Rich found that he couldn’t live with it, there was another option that would serve just as well from Damjohn’s point of view.

“The man’s a sadist,” Rich moaned. “A fucking sadist. He liked it that I was scared. He was getting off on it.”

I didn’t comment. The sense of the ghost’s presence was palpable now, so intense that it was like a thickening of the air. Snezhna was here; she was listening. She was hanging around Rich like a shroud, and although she still hadn’t shown herself in visible form, I was amazed that he couldn’t sense her. The room was full of her.

“Where did Gabe McClennan come in?” I asked, and Rich bared his teeth in a panting snarl.

“McClennan! That bastard! That was just part of the joke, wasn’t it? I went back, and I kept my nose clean. I did everything Damjohn had fucking well told me to do. And I made it all the way through September. But can you imagine what it was like, Castor? I mean, Jesus Christ! Every time I turned around, she was there. I kept on seeing her. Everyone kept on seeing her. And whenever she showed up, she was saying the same thing: asking where Rosa was. Gdyeh Rosa? Ya potrevozhnao Rosa. Again and again and again, never fucking letting up.

“I told Damjohn he couldn’t let it carry on. She might name me. She might name him. He’d sorted out the body, but now he had to sort out—the rest. What was still left of her.

“And he agreed. And he brought McClennan in.” Rich twisted his head around to look up at me, his haggard face contorted into a look of half-insane appeal. “But McClennan didn’t exorcise her—he only put that ward on her, so she couldn’t talk. Damjohn was just protecting his own arse. He still wanted me to go on suffering!”

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.