again, and he’d be back where he started.
Finally, maybe an hour or two hours later, Rich began to pull himself together and think beyond the miasmic terror of the present moment. He had to tell Damjohn. It couldn’t be hidden, and there was nowhere he could run where he wouldn’t be found. Trying not to look at the ruined thing on the bed, he cleaned himself up as best he could with the blanket and then limped up the stairs, so oppressed by fear still that he thought he might faint and go tumbling all the way down again.
He called Damjohn at the strip club—the ICOE number. Well, if anything qualified as an emergency, this did. He made a halting, stumbling confession, which was met neither by fury nor by indulgence but by a cold, clinical pragmatism. Damjohn wanted the details. Where was the body now? What state was it in? How had the girl actually died? Had Rich remembered to lock the door behind him when he left? Had he ejaculated inside her? Had he used a condom? Had he brought his keys out of the room or left them with the body?
The catechism had a sobering effect. Rich was able to get a handle on what he’d done by describing it in such objective terms. By the time he’d finished talking, he was calm. Damjohn told him to go home and clean himself up—seriously clean himself up, with special attention to fingernails and what was under them. He should also soak his keys in bleach overnight, then boil them in a saucepan. His clothes had to be burned, but not in the backyard with the neighbors watching. The best option, Damjohn said, was to take them out to some waste ground in the middle of the night, soak them in kerosene, drop a match on them, and stay long enough to make sure that they were entirely reduced to ash.
Rich did as he was told. Having a program to work to helped, and so did the feeling that someone else was making the decisions now. When he’d raped and murdered Snezhna, it had felt as though he’d jumped the tracks of his life and was hurtling through empty space. Now he felt like he’d landed on the far side of a ravine, and things might be starting to make sense again.
All the same, the weekend was nastily surreal. He wandered around his flat, afraid to go out, afraid to be seen by anybody, afraid even to use the phone. His hand, which he’d gashed with one of the keys when he was hitting Snezhna, throbbed hypnotically and swelled up to agonizing tautness. He soaked it in antiseptic and popped cocodamol like Smarties.
There’s a T. S. Eliot poem about a guy who murders a girl, keeps her in his bathroom in a bathful of Lysol, and ends up getting confused about whether it’s him or the girl who’s actually dead. That was sort of the way it was for Rich, or so he said—and the anguish that squirmed in his mind as he said it gave some weight to the words.
Scrub dropped in on the Saturday afternoon to deliver a message from Damjohn: it was all sorted. Rich was by no means to go to the secret rooms. They were out of bounds for him now. But the body was taken care of, so nobody would ever connect it to him. And now he owed Mr. Damjohn a big, big favor, which he could bet his bottom dollar would someday be called in. In the meantime, he should go to work on Monday as if nothing had happened. Mr. Damjohn would take a grim view of it if Rich drew attention to himself by pulling a sickie, bursting into tears in public, failing in his professional duties, or whatever.
It was ironic, Rich said with a sobbing laugh. He was suddenly like one of the girls in the flats: told what to do and what to say and how to behave; having to choke down his own emotions and put on a performance that he thought might actually tear him apart.
But he forced himself to do it—to shower, shave, get dressed, go to work. He felt as though he was walking through some kind of fucked-up hallucination based on his own previous life, but nobody looked at him twice or seemed to sense anything odd about him. He went down to the reading room at lunchtime and went through the papers from cover to cover—nothing about a female body with a ruined face being found in Somers Town or anywhere else in London.
As always, normality began to work its healing spell on Rich. He got through the day with no slipups, no sign that he was anything other than himself. He even managed to enact a fake “accident” with a drawer that would explain his injured hand and allow him to keep it bandaged until it healed. He was keeping it together: riding out the waves of insane discontinuity that the murder had set off in his life.
At five-thirty (half an hour’s overtime—safely within the usual parameters), he went home, ate, watched TV, and drank a beer. Okay, he flaked out at about ten, exhausted by the emotional intensity of the eventless day, but still, he’d made it. If he could do it once, he could do it as many times as he had to.
Then, on the Tuesday, his world fell apart again. One of the part-timers came up screaming from one of the basement strong rooms. She’d seen a ghost: a woman without a face. When Rich heard those words, he fled to the gents’ toilet and threw his guts up. It was half an hour before he dared to venture out again, and he spent the rest of that day staying at the edges of all the eager discussions about the ghost, all the lurid speculation. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep the mask up if he had to talk about it. He had to pretend to keep an austere distance from such a childish subject.
On the Wednesday, he did call in sick. He just couldn’t face the thought of meeting Snezhna in the stacks: coming face to face, or rather face to not-a-face-anymore, with her in some dark, narrow space where no one could hear him scream. He told Alice that he had gastric flu. Then he drew the curtains and hid.
Somehow, Damjohn found out. Rich got another visit from Scrub, and it was a lot more painful than the first one. Scrub wanted Rich to understand that Mr. Damjohn expected high standards of professionalism from his employees, particularly in the area of doing what they were fucking told. He made the point imaginatively, using everyday objects from Rich’s kitchen to illustrate what would happen if Rich let Mr. Damjohn down in this respect. He also reminded Rich that if he didn’t pull himself together, he’d end up facing a murder charge. He had—in Scrub’s vivid phraseology—a big bastard sod of a lot to lose.
Rich did his best, with mixed results. He was able to go back into the Bonnington the next day and get back to work—where everyone was very solicitous about him, because it was obvious that he was still a bit shaky after his illness. And he was able to put a brave face on it through the days that followed, even though he felt like a condemned man whose execution was going to be sprung on him as an impromptu party rather than being set for a fixed time and place.
When the worst happened and he finally met the ghost, not in a strong room but in the middle of a corridor, he pissed himself—literally, physically, with a great access of terror so pure that it made him forget who and where he was. When he could think again, he was sprawled on the floor behind a desk in an empty storeroom, his drenched trousers cold and clinging, his hands shaking so hard he couldn’t even pull himself upright.
As soon as he could walk, he got up and headed straight out of the building. He knew that if he met anyone and had to talk to them, he’d break into pieces.
In the evening, Rich went to see Damjohn at Kissing the Pink. To his horror, Damjohn found the whole situation vastly amusing. Oh, it had its serious side, of course: a woman in whom he’d already invested a certain amount of money and time was now dead, and he’d had to go to some degree of inconvenience in the resulting cleanup. But he was, he told Rich, a man who’d always believed that the punishment should fit the crime—and in this case, the fit was exquisite.
In short, he told Rich to live with it, and in passing he renewed the threats that Scrub had already made. If Rich found that he
“The man’s a sadist,” Rich moaned. “A fucking sadist. He liked it that I was scared. He was getting off on it.”
I didn’t comment. The sense of the ghost’s presence was palpable now, so intense that it was like a thickening of the air. Snezhna was here; she was listening. She was hanging around Rich like a shroud, and although she still hadn’t shown herself in visible form, I was amazed that he couldn’t sense her. The room was full of her.
“Where did Gabe McClennan come in?” I asked, and Rich bared his teeth in a panting snarl.
“McClennan! That bastard! That was just part of the joke, wasn’t it? I went back, and I kept my nose clean. I did everything Damjohn had fucking well told me to do. And I made it all the way through September. But can you imagine what it was like, Castor? I mean, Jesus Christ! Every time I turned around, she was there. I kept on seeing her. Everyone kept on seeing her. And whenever she showed up, she was saying the same thing: asking where Rosa was.
“I told Damjohn he couldn’t let it carry on. She might name me. She might name him. He’d sorted out the
