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.
Rich didn’t think so, and he pleaded with Damjohn to change his mind. He didn’t much mind about the girls, but Jesus, the risk to him—if it was found out, he’d lose his job. He’d probably go to jail. “And where do you imagine you’d go if it came out that you’d been involved in people trafficking, Mr. Clitheroe?” Damjohn had asked him mildly. “Sex slavery? Grooming of underage girls for prostitution?” Rich had almost broken down at that point. He hadn’t even known that one of the girls he’d helped to reel in was under age. She’d lied to him and used a fake ID to get her passport. Now he saw the legal parameters of what he’d done and realized how bad it might look to an unsympathetic eye. He begged Damjohn to let him off the hook—to drop him from the books. He wanted to go back to what he knew and forget this other world, with its hidden depths and reefs.
He could have saved his breath. Damjohn had made up his mind, and it came to pass exactly as he’d said. It’s a nasty feeling to discover that you’re in over your head when you thought you were only paddling. Rich had cried himself to sleep that night. My heart pumped lumpy custard for him.
He’d made stipulations, of course—insisted that the rooms were only to be visited at night, and that only one girl at a time could stay there. And when Scrub and a couple of silent men with toolboxes had come in one night to refit the place, Rich had asserted the right to be there and look over their shoulders, bugging them with suggestions while they worked. The restraint ring cemented to the floor was his idea; all the soundproofing in the world wouldn’t do a damn bit of good if one of the girls got into the upstairs room and started banging on the street door.
The room went into regular use a month or two after that. Rich was only told afterward, when the first girl—a Croatian recruited by one of Damjohn’s other talent scouts—had already been installed. He’d suffered terribly at first just from knowing she was there. The fear had lessened a little with time, but he still found himself finding excuses to wander close to the inner wall that corresponded to the basement room on the Bonnington side (that was the blind corridor where I’d found such a thick, fetid concentration of unhappiness) and straining his ears to check that the soundproofing was working okay. He slept fitfully, woken often by gut-wrenching dreams of being arrested and thrown into a police cell that somehow became the basement room, with its bare mattress.
But the girl had only stayed for two weeks before being moved on to one of the flats. Damjohn had continued to send Rich off on new Eastern European jaunts. A second and then a third girl had been rotated through the secret rooms, and the sheer relentlessness of the routine took the edge off his unease, gradually acclimated him to the new setup.
It was the fourth time that brought the problems. It was the fourth time that had made everything unravel. If three times is a charm, four is a curse. Rich fell silent again, his mind pulling almost tangibly against the undertow of memory. His breathing became fast and shallow, and he started to shake worse than ever.
“What was her name?” I asked him softly. He didn’t answer, but at that moment I felt her arrival at the edges of my perception. Not in the room, not yet. But close, and getting closer. “What was her name, Rich?”
“There were two of them,” he mumbled, shrinking in on himself. “Sisters. Snezhna and Rosa. Two at once! I couldn’t believe my fucking luck. Oh God, I wish I’d never seen them! I wish to Christ—”
He’d been working for Damjohn for almost two years by this time. He was an old hand and such an integral part of the operation that he had his own bank accounts to draw on—one at a Czech bank, another at a Russian one. He’d honed his skills in Moscow, Vilnius, and St. Petersburg, and he’d learned by experience that country mice were easier to catch than town mice. So this time he’d gone farther afield than ever, to Vladivostok, home of the Siberian fleet and of the Far Eastern National University. He’d read about how the economy there was imploding, and he was expecting to find and tap rich seams of desperation.
But Vladivostok was scary. As soon as he stepped off the tourist routes, he was surrounded by gangsters and pimps a hell of a lot harder and more serious about their work than he was. It felt like a place where he might accidentally and insensibly toggle from predator to prey.
Rich debated with himself. He felt vulnerable and exposed, but he didn’t want to go back empty-handed—Damjohn didn’t like paying for trips that brought him no tangible returns. In the end, Rich took a bus ride into the much smaller town of Oktyabrskiy, and that was a different animal altogether. Here was the Siberia he’d been expecting—the shops all boarded up, the damp misery of the people who hadn’t been able to buy or fight or work their way out. True, a tourist blended in here about as well as a candy-striped hippopotamus, but most of the people he was looking at now were whipped dogs rather than sharks. This was a place where he felt it was safe for him to operate.
Oktyabrskiy was where he’d met Snezhna—not in a club or a bar but behind the counter in an all-night grocery shop. She was very pretty and had a sort of naive grace to her. Definitely the sort of girl who’d bring in the passing trade in one of Damjohn’s flats.
But at the same time, Rich had an uneasy suspicion that she wasn’t the sort of woman who was likely to fall for his usual spiel. She answered his casual questions with deadpan solemnity, failed to laugh at a single one of his little jokes, and wrapped parcels of groceries with a stolid precision that suggested she wasn’t in the habit of fantasizing about the possibility of doing anything else. Rich started in on the hard sell anyway, because another lesson he’d learned by this time was that you take your opportunities where you find them. Someone like Snezhna was wasted in Siberia, he told her. In the West, she could live a life of luxury, have anything she wanted, never have to worry about money again.