The Devil You Know (40 page)

“Does it happen often?” I asked. “Scrub taking the girls off for a talk with the boss? Does Damjohn give you a quarterly review or something?”

Another head shake. “If he needs to see us, he sees us here. But mostly he leaves it to Patty to sort out the girls. He takes care of the downstairs stuff.”

“Well, did Scrub say anything about why Damjohn needed to talk to Rosa?”

Jasmine didn’t answer at first, so I waited. Sometimes waiting works a lot better than asking again.

“He said—she’d been told before. She’d been warned. That was all. He didn’t say about what. Then she said she’d just been out for a walk. She hadn’t met anyone on the way, she just needed a walk.”

It seemed blindingly obvious that what Rosa had been warned about was tailing me. But she’d done it anyway—not to talk to me, but to take a swipe at me with a kitchen cleaver borrowed for the occasion.
You did it to her. You did it to her again.

“Did they leave in a car?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“A BMW?”

“I didn’t see. But I heard it pull away.”

“Do you have any idea where Damjohn lives?”

Jasmine laughed without a trace of humor. “A long way away from here, I’ll bet. No. Nobody knows where he lives. This is the only place where we ever see him.”

“He never takes a couple of the girls back home for some unpaid overtime? Droit du seigneur sort of thing.”

“No. Not that I’ve ever heard of. Carole reckons he’s gay.”

I didn’t agree. From my brief acquaintance with Damjohn—and especially from that unwanted flash of images and ideas when I’d shaken his hand—I suspected that he got his kicks in some other way that only touched on sex at an odd tangent.

“Nothing else?” I asked, just to make sure.

She thought hard, frowned, looked at me doubtfully.

“I think Scrub said—but it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Said what?”

“Well—what I heard was ‘It’s the nice lady for you.’”

“The nice lady?”

“Yeah. Or maybe ‘the kind lady.’ Something like that. I don’t know. It just sounded funny, so it stayed in my mind.”

“Thanks, Jasmine,” I said, meaning it. “Thanks for trusting me.”

She wasn’t much consoled, but this time, when I held out the twenty, she took it and slipped it into her stocking top. “Do you think you can find her?” she asked. Her professional polish had all faded away in the space of a minute; she looked close to tears now.

“I don’t know. But I’m going to try.”

“Will Scrub—will she be okay?”

There was no point in sweetening the pill; whores know self-deceiving bullshit better than priests do. “I don’t know that, either,” I admitted. “I think she might be okay for a while, at least. If there’s something Damjohn doesn’t want her talking about, there’s no point in going over the top to keep her quiet if it’s only going to come out another way.”

Jasmine didn’t ask what I meant by that, and I didn’t explain. She probably wouldn’t have understood in any case, but to me it was looking like one of those logic problems that end up with the proposition that all men are Socrates, and Socrates is a rubber chicken. Thesis: I was the one who was nosing around where he shouldn’t be and asking all the awkward questions. Antithesis: Rosa was only dangerous if she told me something I wasn’t supposed to know. Synthesis: They only needed to keep her out of circulation until they’d succeeded in nailing me.

Fucking wonderful.

It felt like a long day. I went back to Pen’s place around four and killed some time recording a tune on a Walkman I’d picked up at Camden Market last year. It’s an old one—cassettes only—but it comes with its own plug-in mike and speakers, which makes it handy in all sorts of ways. It took a while to get the tune exactly right, and I was far from sure that I’d ever need it, but I had nothing better to do until either Dodson or Nicky called me and gave me the green light. I had John Gittings’s pincer movement in my mind—it had nearly got me killed the first time we’d tried it, but that was no reason to ditch a good idea. I worked steadily for an hour and a half and got a certain amount of relief from my turbulent thoughts.

Nicky didn’t call in the end; he just appeared, out of nowhere, in the accepted conspiracy-theorist style. I went downstairs looking for coffee and realized as I was pouring a generous scoopful into the moka pot that he was there, behind me, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. He hadn’t moved at all since I came in. I could have gone right back out again without noticing him—and when I did notice him, I thought for a second that he was a visitant from some other plane entirely.

When I saw that it was just Nicky, I swore at him vehemently. He took the abuse with stoical indifference.

“I’ve done enough talking on the phone for one week,” he said quietly. “I work hard on my footprint, Felix. I keep it small for good reasons.”

“Your footprint?” I echoed sardonically.

“The traceable, recordable, visible part of my life,” he paraphrased, deadpan. “If I wanted to be visible, I’d sign onto the electoral register, wouldn’t I?”

“Whatever,” I said, giving it up. I pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him. “Have you got anything for me?”

He nodded and unfolded his arms, revealing the laptop sitting between them on the table. He pushed it across to me, and I took it.

“And—some kind of written summary?” I hazarded hopefully.

“No need for one. One folder—RUSSIAN; one file—RUSSIAN1; three thousand, two hundred records in an unbroken numerical sequence with the prefix BATR1038. Data entry in every case is by one user—the system gives him a handle of 017—and all amendments are by the same user. There’s only one conclusion a reasonable mind could draw.”

“And that is?”

“017 was the only man-slash-woman-slash-data-processing-entity to have any contact with this folder at any point.”

I absorbed this in silence, cast into momentary depression, until I saw the bolt-hole in Nicky’s wording. “You said a reasonable mind,” I pointed out.

He nodded. “Absolutely. A mind like mine, that welcomes paranoia as a way of maintaining a critical edge, comes out somewhere quite different.”

“Come on, Nicky,” I said. “Give me the punch line.”

“In a hundred and fifty-three cases, user 017 suddenly and for no apparent reason switches to a different data-input method. I found it in config.sys, because the log entry had actually been rewritten to allow it.”

“Layman’s English.”

“He ditched his keyboard and overwrote selected fields from a handheld Bluetooth keypad—probably that diNovo thing that Logitech were trailing in Houston a while back. The beauty of that is—well, I’m assuming that this is a dongle system. Keyboards are connected via an individually coded hardware key.”

“Right.”

“So a Bluetooth device wouldn’t physically connect to the computer at all. It wouldn’t have to fit the keyhole, because it wouldn’t be going in through the keyhole. It’s a completely wireless system.”

I chewed this over for a moment or two.

“But it was still user 017?” I said. “Same guy, different keyboard?”

Nicky grinned evilly. He was enjoying this. “It was someone telling the
system
he was user 017. But he had to use his own handle when he altered that config file. Even when you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you still cast a shadow. He’s user 020.”

“Got you, you bastard,” I muttered. “Nicky, that’s brilliant—thanks. I’ll be wrapping this up in the next day or so, and then you can expect Christmas to come early.”

Nicky took the praise as stoically as he’d taken the curses earlier; it would have been beneath his dignity to take a bow. But he didn’t move. “There’s one other thing, Felix,” he said.

“Go on.”

“While I was in there anyway, I took a look around some of the other folders. There were a couple of dozen of them, going back about six or seven years. The older ones are fine—no tampering, no anomalous entries. But for three years or so now, user 020 has been keeping really busy. The earliest Bluetooth-fed entry was last March. Before that, he was using an
IRF
widget, but the principle was the same—using the back door that the system keeps open so that you can dock your laptop or your Palm Pilot with your main machine and update address books and the like.”

He stood up.

“About two thousand records were affected,” he said. “On this drive, anyway. Assuming there are other self-contained input machines, there’s no saying what else Mr. Twenty has been getting up to.”

As he walked to the door, I called out after him, “Nicky, what’s he doing to the records? Just so I’m absolutely clear. What’s he falsifying?”

“You already know that, Felix,” Nicky chided me.

“He’s deleting them,” I said. “He’s wiping items off the system.”

“Exactly. Hey, I was never here, which is why you didn’t see me. Have a nice evening.”

SUNDAY
.
THE
DAY
OF
REST
.
BUT
AS
SOME
CLEVER
bastard once wittily remarked, there’s no rest for the wicked—which must make me a very nasty piece of work indeed.

I don’t know where policemen go to unwind and spend their precious limited leisure time. You can sort of picture it, though. Some bar where everyone checks the pint line on their glass before they take a sip, where you can leave your coat on the back of the chair when you go to take a piss, and where Paki jokes never go out of fashion.

For obvious reasons, that wasn’t where James Dodson arranged to meet me. He chose Bar Italia on Old Compton Street instead, and he was sitting at the far end when I arrived, trying hard to blend in with the decor. As soon as I sat down, cinnamon latte in hand, he slapped a manila folder down on the bar top and stood up.

“Everything you need is in there,” he said. “Now, unless drinking with you is a deal-breaker, I’m leaving. And I’m keeping you to your word, Castor. If I ever hear from you again—if I ever even see your face—I’ve got some friends who’ll be only too happy to make you cry tears of blood.”

I shot him a pained glance, the cliché offending me more than the threat. “Yeah, but then I’d just die, Dodson, and I’d have to come back and haunt you. Better quit while you’re behind.”

He stalked out, either deciding that I wasn’t worth the effort of verbal swordplay or remembering that he’d come out unarmed. I turned my attention to the folder.

Like the man said, it had everything I needed. The cinnamon latte went cold and formed an unhealthy-looking skin like a badly healed wound while I dived deep into the phantasmagoria of signed and sealed plodology that Dodson had dredged up for me.

You can say what you like about our police force, but their paperwork is immaculate. Autopsy reports were cross-referenced to X-ray prints, path results, explanatory diagrams, and in one case even a T-shirt—or at least a photograph of a T-shirt. That was included because some fibers from the shirt were found down the throat of the woman in question, indicating some attempt to asphyxiate her “after her clothing had been removed at an earlier stage in the assault.”

Being what I am makes me morbidly sensitive in a lot of ways, obnoxiously hard-assed in others. On this occasion, it was the first trait that was dominant, and I had to work to keep my breathing regular as I pieced together the nightmare circumstances in which these three women’s lives had hit the buffers.

Jenny Southey was a hit-and-run victim, but it hadn’t been clean or quick. She was a prostitute working the streets around King’s Cross. Barely eighteen. A car had crushed her against a wall, breaking her pelvis and rupturing her liver. The accompanying file notes said they’d brought in a suspect, and he’d made an incoherent confession. The whole thing seemed to be an accidental result of overenthusiastic curb-crawling with a vast amount of alcohol thrown in. Whatever sentence they eventually gave the guy, I wished him a lifetime’s supply of brewer’s droop to go along with it.

Caroline Beck was even younger, but her death was just as brutal and arbitrary. She died of a methadone overdose at a party, three streets away from the Bonnington in the evocatively named Polygon Road. That would have been par for the course if she’d been a user, but she wasn’t; some high-as-a-kite arsehole had come up to her while she was dancing and injected her before she even knew what was going on. He’d just wanted to spread the good vibes, but since he chose the carotid artery and since she’d never injected before, the effect was spectacularly enhanced. The girl had died about half an hour later, when her muscles went into spasm, and her breathing stopped.

Both of those sounded plausible enough to me—the sort of fucked-up, messy deaths that leave a little piece of your spirit trapped in the mesh of agonizing, unresolved emotions. But when I turned to number three, I knew I’d found my ghost.

Unlike the other two, she didn’t have a name—just a case number and a clinical description. One hundred and fifty-nine centimeters in height; hair brunette; eyes brown; build slender; age approximately mid-twenties. Naked, but a T-shirt found near the body provided samples of her blood and sloughed skin cells when tested. She’d been found in a skip on a builder’s yard in the hinterland beyond the Ampthill Estate, dead for at least three days. The date on the incident report was Wednesday, September 14—the day after the ghost was first sighted at the Bonnington Archive.

The details were grim. The girl had been sexually assaulted, both vaginally and anally, with traces of semen only in the vagina but trauma to both areas consistent with rape. Her face had been extensively slashed with some sharp and irregular metal implement that had caused massive laceration and blood loss. The police pathologist had spent a lot of time cataloging those facial injuries:
“a multitude of shallow, irregular cuts and gouges, widely varied in depth and profile,”
he noted, deadpan, before going on to list the position and extent of each and every one of them.
“The instrument used in the attack had a number of different surfaces and edges that moved independently of each other,”
he concluded. But the cause of death was asphyxiation—that T-shirt, jammed tight down into her throat until she couldn’t breathe around it.