they were co-opted. It was a matter of horses for courses, Rich explained morosely. In the West End and the City, you could charge a premium price for a premium product: beautiful girls with some personality and imagination who’d throw themselves into it—play games, dress up, talk the talk. The flats were a different approach for a different demographic: men who had very little in the way of disposable income, but who’d still pay for sex if the price point was low enough. In the clubs, the girls took 50 percent of whatever the john paid. In the flats, they worked for food. And they didn’t get to choose who they went with or what was on the menu. They just did what they were told.
Needless to say, the girls that Rich was recruiting couldn’t just be put to work as soon as they arrived in the UK. There was a certain amount of—not training, maybe, but conditioning—that had to be got through first. They had to be broken in, taught what was expected of them and what the rules were. Like never say no to anything. Never cry when you’re with a john. Never ask for help. And they needed to know the names of things—parts of the body, for example, and certain kinds of physical acts. After a little while, Rich got involved on that end of the operation, too. It wasn’t so glamorous—no exotic foreign travel, no expense account—but the perks were amazing.
His mind filled with images: flesh grinding against flesh like the cogs in a surreal and horrible machine.
“You got to screw them first,” I paraphrased.
He flinched. “No!” he protested. “Well, sometimes, yeah, but—if I wanted to, I could—I was mainly just talking them through it, but yeah, there were times. Jesus, Castor, they were prostitutes. The only difference was that with me, it was on the house. And it was a lot better if they did it with me than with Scrub, say. At least I didn’t hurt them.”
I didn’t want to argue about it. I was already deeper inside his head than I ever wanted to be. The thought of Scrub having sex with anybody was one I wished I could edit out of my brain forever. “You did hurt one of them,” I reminded him, and he groaned in anguish, squeezing his eyes tight shut.
Damjohn, it turned out, was a much better seducer than Rich would ever be. He’d reeled Rich in with the usual banal, irresistible inducements of money and sex and then worked systematically to compromise him to the point where he couldn’t say no to anything. Listening to Rich talk about it, I realized that there was nothing particularly personal about this; it was something Damjohn did automatically, partly because it was useful for business but mainly because it gave him pleasure. He’d even made a casual attempt to do it to me, just in passing, when he’d offered me time with the girls in lieu of cash money. And then once more, with feeling, when he’d offered me the same deal that Mephistopheles offered Faust. I wondered if it came from being an informer and agent provocateur in a former life. Maybe it helped you to feel good about yourself if you proved to your own satisfaction that every man had a price, and most had one that was lower than yours.
In Rich’s case, Damjohn had seen that the man’s true Achilles heel had more to do with security than with sex. Being a procurer of young girls for London brothels tickled Rich’s
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.
