The Devil You Know (48 page)

I heard Damjohn’s breath hissing between his teeth.

“Killing someone while you’re trying to rape them doesn’t count as an accident, Clitheroe,” he said with icy calm. “Even on a manslaughter plea, you’d draw down twenty years and end up serving at least ten of them. That’s what you’re facing if you can’t keep your nerve. Rosa isn’t talking to anyone, and neither are you.”

I made a winding-up motion with my index finger—get to the point—and Rich nodded, showing me he understood.

“Where is she?” he repeated.

“What?” Damjohn’s tone was pained.

“Where’s Rosa? I want to talk to her.”

“I’ve already told you that that’s impossible.”

Rich’s voice rose an octave or so. “That was before Peele called in his own fucking exorcist, man. I’m sweating this. I’m sweating it. Okay, maybe I don’t need to talk to her. But I want to make fucking sure nobody else can. You’ve got her out of the way, right? I mean, she’s not still turning tricks? Castor could just walk right in there and—”

“She’s here with me,” Damjohn snapped. “At the boat. I’m looking at her right now. And she’ll stay here until Castor is dealt with. How long ago did he leave you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe a bit longer.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Where?”

Rich blinked twice, on the spot, realizing that he’d painted himself into a corner. I made the “it’s a book” sign from charades. “To the—back to the archive,” Rich stammered. “I think. I think that’s what he said.”

Another pause. “It’s Sunday,” Damjohn pointed out, his tone gentle but precise. “Isn’t the archive closed now?”

“No, there’s a function on there today. A wedding.”

“At midnight?”

“He—he’s got my keys.”

A longer pause. “You let him take your keys?”

“It’s all right,” Rich blurted. “I already took the keys to the safe room off the ring. He’s only got the archive keys.”

“Well, then that isn’t a problem for us. I’ll arrange for someone to meet him there. Clitheroe, listen to me. Stay where you are. Scrub will come and collect you and bring you out here to the boat. Until we’ve sorted the Castor situation out, which will be soon, this is the safest place for you.”

Rich looked both wistful and tragic. “I can’t do that right now,” he mumbled, his eyes filling with tears.

“You can, and you will. Stay there, and Scrub will come.”

We played charades again. I pointed to him and then waved the matchbook from Kissing the Pink, which had been in my pocket all this while. Rich nodded to show that he understood. “I’ll meet you at the club,” he said.

“What?” Damjohn didn’t sound happy at all at this show of defiance.

“I’ll meet you at the club. It’s more central. I’m—I want to be where there are lots of people, okay?”

“You don’t trust me, Clitheroe?” You could have used the edge in Damjohn’s voice to shave, if you were into cutthroat razors.

“I just want it to be somewhere public. I told you, I’m scared. I don’t want to go all that way out there, in the dark, and—”

“The club, then. You’re closer, so you’ll get there first. Wait for me.” And Damjohn hung up. Rich turned to me for further instructions.

“What’s the boat?” I demanded.

“It’s a yacht. He’s got a yacht.”

“Where does he keep it?”

Rich gave me a look in which a pathetic spark of defiance flared and died. “You think he ever invited me?”

No, that would have been too easy, wouldn’t it? But one idea came to me, even as I was cursing. I turned to Rich again, fizzing and crackling with impatience.

“When he was wining and dining you,” I snapped, “where did he take you?”

“What?”

“The snazzy hotel. Where was it?”

“Oh.” He frowned for a second, then fished it up from somewhere in his memory. “The Conrad, out in Chelsea.”

Bingo.

But it was still only a best guess. And since I was working against the clock, I had to get moving. I pointed to the phone, and Rich held it out to me, which meant that when I swung with the handcuff, he couldn’t get his arm down to block in time. I caught him full in the stomach, putting all my weight into it. He hit the wall and slithered down it, his eyes wide and his mouth gaping. While he was still dazed, I got his hands behind his back and tied a double reef knot around them with the rope that was lying so conveniently to hand.

“Wh—what was that for?” he gurgled when he could swallow enough breath to speak. “Castor, what are you doing? I said everything you told me to!”

“I know,” I agreed, passing another loop of rope over his head and starting on another knot. He kicked a little, but I had the leverage, and he was still weak from the sucker punch. “But I’ve got some errands to run now, and the last thing I want is for you and Damjohn to get together and patch up your differences.” I passed the free end of the rope through the steel ring in its concrete mooring and made it fast. Rich was on his stomach and didn’t see me, but he guessed a second or two too late what I was going to do and rolled over frantically, struggling to get to his feet. No use. There was only about eighteen inches of play on the rope. He could get into a kneeling position, but that was all.

“Castor, no!” he screamed, the expression in his eyes coming close to madness now. “Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me here with her!”

Retrieving the phone from the floor, I stood up. I stared down at him without pity, without any feeling at all except premature relief that I was going to be able to get out of his company soon.

“You’ll be fine, Rich,” I assured him insincerely. “She doesn’t even like this room. She remembers what you did to her here. She’s spent every night since she died fighting against the pull of this place, trying not to be brought back here, but not able to get away from it. You see, she’s got unfinished business. And tonight, I’m going to be doing my bit to finish it. In the meantime, the best advice I can give you is to try to stay calm. Heightened emotion is what’s most likely to bring her.”

Rich was still screaming at me as I went up the stairs, locked the door at the top, and crossed the upper room. I paused at the door and listened. I could just about make out his voice, but only because I knew it was there. The soundproofing really was excellent.

The outer door slammed behind me with the finality of a coffin lid.

Considering it used to be a coal wharf for London’s various railway lines, Chelsea Harbour has done pretty well for itself. Location, location, location, as they say; it didn’t hurt that it was a coal wharf stuck in the middle of some of the most upwardly mobile real estate in the whole of London. In the late 1980s, some smart developers moved in and built a marina, and then the Conrad Hotel went up a couple of years after that. It’s not Henley, but you could think of it as a sort of miniature, portable Henley that’s more convenient for Harrods and Harvey Nicks.

I approached it cautiously, because I’m not the sort of element that the Conrad and the Design Centre and the Belle Époque are strenuously trying to bring in. The taxi dumped me at the top of Lots Road, at the entrance to a maze of gated communities from where it was easier and quicker to walk.

Five past midnight. It had taken me just over an hour to get here from the Bonnington, with one stop along the way to pick up some bolt cutters and a crowbar from Pen’s garage. I was only going to get one crack at this, and time was going to be tight, so I needed to make sure I was ready for anything. As it was, sixty minutes gone meant that Damjohn was probably already looking at his watch and wondering where Rich had been held up. I probably didn’t have much of a window before he realized that Rich wasn’t coming and started to wonder where he’d gone instead. That might lead to a general desire to tie up loose ends before they unraveled for good and all. I quickened my pace as I walked past the antiques shops, furniture importers, and bijoux residences.

Circling the great, elegant spike of the Conrad itself, I came to the marina’s entrance. There was a security hut, but the florid, uniformed guard inside was talking on the phone and didn’t particularly register me as I walked on in. I was guessing that this was where Damjohn’s yacht was berthed, because it was barely ten minutes’ walk from the pub where Scrub, Arnold, and McClennan had met up the day before. And then when Rich had confirmed that Damjohn had brought him here to eat, it gave me just enough confidence to bet Rosa’s life on it. In any case, looking at the whole thing another way, if the boat wasn’t here, then it wasn’t anywhere where I could find it, and I was stuffed before I started.

Most of the berths fronted onto the main marina, which was where I soon found myself. It’s a broad basin shaped like three-quarters of a circle, with a gap of about ten yards between the outreaching arms, beyond which lay the Thames. I looked around for somewhere to start, hoping vaguely that there might be a list of vessels that I could read through, looking for inspiration. But there was nothing like that.

I walked on along the planking—which was probably sun-bleached in Ostia before being shipped here in individual packages and reassembled—looking at the name of each boat in turn. All I had to go on was what Scrub had said to Rosa in Jasmine’s hazy recollection: “It’s the nice lady for you.” None of the ships had a female name except for the
Boadicea
. That would be a bit of a stretch, I thought.

On the far side of the marina, past the harbor entrance, the berths continued around the outer face of the harbor wall. I took that direction now, still glancing at each boat as I went by. There were a few empty berths here. Presumably, the farther you got from Lots Road and its swinging night life, the less desirable the space was. Another woman’s name: the
Baroness Thatcher
. No. Surely an even less likely candidate for the title of “nice lady” than
Boadicea
.

Finally I was left with only one boat to check on this side of the marina, and it was a long way out from the others. If I got no joy here, I’d have to retrace my steps and try the other arm. But from twenty feet away, when I was able to read the name painted on its side, I knew this was the one. It was called the
Mercedes
. Not only was that the Spanish word for “kindhearted,” it was also the name of the woman I’d seen in Damjohn’s mind when I’d shaken hands with him the first time we’d met—the woman of whom he had such bloody and such happy memories.

I approached more stealthily now, although there were no windows lit on the yacht, and it seemed deserted. From ten feet away, I got all the corroborative evidence I needed when I saw Scrub standing up on the top deck. He was leaning on the rail at the stern end, staring out across the river toward Battersea. He was facing away from me, but there was no way of mistaking Scrub for anybody else, particularly since he was lit up romantically by the yellow radiance of a Victorian streetlamp, complete with scrollwork and nonfunctional gas mantle. I already knew Scrub was strong and mean. I wouldn’t have expected running water to deter him, although it ought to make him itchy and irritable. But there was no sign of that in his absolute immobility, his air of dense, unfathomable calm.

I looked ahead down the walkway past the
Mercedes
: nothing to see there. The planking just ended about twenty feet farther on, where presumably there was a last, unoccupied berth. As setups went, it wasn’t perfect, because it was remote, and that dead end might turn out to be a problem for me if things went wrong. But you do your best with what you’ve got.

I retreated off the walkway into the shadow of the last boat I’d passed—the
Baroness Thatcher
. I wondered inconsequentially which Tory grandee owned it and what perverse fantasy had made him name his toy boat after the Iron Lady. On the other hand, maybe it was a former wet who got a nostalgic kick every time he leaned hard on the tiller and proved that she was for turning after all.

I took off my shoes and dumped most of my tools—the lock picks and the bolt cutters; the crowbar I kept hold of. My best chance of surviving this encounter was if Scrub didn’t see me coming. Someone once bullshitted me that there’s a Welsh martial art called Llap-Goch, where the key to victory is to take out your opponent before he even knows you exist. I can get my head around that.

I rummaged in my pockets, checked that I still had the handcuff where I could get to it, and then took out my secret weapon. No point setting it up here—too far away. I started to pad stealthily down the walkway toward the
Mercedes
, unwinding the tangled length of cable as I went. It was weighted at its ends, like a bolas, but it was something else entirely. Scrub still hadn’t turned, which with luck meant that he was lost in whatever passed with him for thought.

About twenty feet away from the boat, I stopped and knelt down. I put the disk-shaped payload down at the very edge of the planking, where it was less conspicuous. I paid out the cable to its full length and pressed the button. I’d given myself two minutes of lead-in. Two minutes ought to get me to where I needed to be, and after that, we’d see. With good timing, I might even come out of this with my head still attached to my shoulders.

Three more steps brought me to the
Mercedes
‘s gangplank. She was a big ship—Mercedes had been a big woman, God rest her soul. There were three decks, and on the lowest one—the one I could see from where I stood—there was a door that obviously led down into the cabins. I toyed with the idea of getting out my lock picks and taking a crack at that door; it looked ridiculously easy. But no. Scrub was a dangerous man to have at your back. There was no point in getting in there if he was still extant and blocking the way out—and in the meantime, my two minutes were ticking away.

So I climbed the companionway steps to the middle deck and kept on going to the top. The crowbar was reassuringly heavy in my hands, but I wasn’t pinning much of my faith to it. I was counting off the seconds in my mind, and forty had gone by already. I could see Scrub up ahead of me, still contemplating the iconic chimneys of the Battersea Power Station.

I took a few quiet steps toward him, the crowbar raised in my hand. Then, when I was about ten feet away, I let my foot fall heavily on the deck. The big man turned and saw me.