“Nothing”—Rich managed, his voice coming out as a breathy grunt—“to do with . . . me.”
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.
He was choked. Well, you would be, wouldn’t you? To see your contribution undervalued like that, the rights of your case set aside, and not even to get an explanation, still less an apology. Rich had gone in to see Jeffrey as soon as he’d heard and had lodged a formal protest. He was told that the decision had been taken at JMT level. They wanted someone with more of a managerial background. He indicated that it might be difficult for him to work on a team under someone who’d swiped a promotion from under his nose. Jeffrey said that if Rich felt that strongly, his resignation would be reluctantly accepted, and his reference would be very positive.
He was fucked, in other words.
So Rich became fairly cynical and embittered about the archive job. He still needed it for the regular salary, but he decided to give it no more of his time and energies than he could possibly help. And since the only way up was dead man’s shoes, he’d look for some other way to supplement his income and give him the lifestyle he felt he was owed.
“I never wanted to be a millionaire,” he protested, snuffling as he massaged his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I just didn’t want to be stuck in the same fucking hole for the rest of my life. You need a few luxuries, just to keep yourself sane.”
He’d been frequenting one of Damjohn’s brothels for as long as he’d lived in London—not Kissing the Pink, but another place out in Edmonton that made no bones about what it was and didn’t bother with niceties like liquor licences or twinkly neon lights. Damjohn himself put in an appearance every Thursday night to collect the takings, and the ice had broken between them when Rich had recognized Damjohn’s Serbian accent and had been able to tell him wassup, or the equivalent, in his native tongue.
Damjohn had been very interested in Rich’s language skills. He invited Rich out to dinner at a fancy hotel and put the moves on him. He had, he intimated, a possible opening for a handsome young westerner with a clean British passport who could talk Russian, Czech, and Serbian at need. It would be easy work, too—occasional, well paid, and not impossible to fit in around a regular job. Rich took the bait.
It was hard to say no, he told me. Damjohn’s personality was so intense and powerful, he just swept you along. Rich looked at me defiantly, as if I was about to disagree. “He’s not Serbian, you know,” he told me truculently. “He was part of all that Kosovo shit, but only because he was caught in the middle of it. His family were all Slovenes—and after Slovenia decided to fly solo, the Slovenes in Kosovo had almost as fuck-awful a time as the Albanians. But he was in Vlasenica when the Serbian army came through, and he was lucky enough to fall in with a colonel, Nikolic, who was trying to update the census records for the area. Nikolic didn’t know his arse from his elbow, so Damjohn helped him out. Told him where people lived and if they were still around.”
“People?” I echoed. “What people, Rich? Albanians? Muslims?”
Rich shrugged. “People,” he repeated stubbornly. “The point is that Damjohn was a survivor. He could have been rounded up himself, but instead he made himself useful. And then he made himself indispensable. When they set up the concent—the transit camp at Susica, he was on staff. He was actually on staff. A Slovene! They used him to handle initial interviews. Triage. Only he didn’t bother with interviews—he had a better way. When a new truckload came in, he’d go in and sit with them, as if he was just another sheep-shagger caught out by a Serbian patrol, and if anyone spoke to him, he’d just shrug—no speakee. Then he’d listen to them talking among themselves, and within a few minutes, he’d know exactly who was who and what was what. He had an agreed signal to give to the guards—when he was ready, he’d give them the wink, or whatever, and they’d take him out as if they were going to interrogate him. So then he could give them the lowdown on everyone else in the batch, and sometimes—depending on what he’d overheard—leads on other people who were still hiding out up in the hills. Fucking incredible. If the war had gone on for another year, he’d probably have been running the place.”