CHAPTER THREE

 

The next afternoon saw Vikram standing in Holywell Street.

He’d never been there before but he knew of it: a sordid little street that ran parallel to the Strand between St. Mary le Strand and St. Clement Danes. People called it the Backside of St. Clement’s, and from all he’d heard, it lived up to the promise of that nickname. This was where one came to buy pornographic and obscene works, a thing Vikram had never done in his life.

He had no idea if he could pick up Sunil’s trail simply by asking around, based on a perfectly innocent photograph. It seemed unlikely in the extreme, but he had to do something with the memory of Arabella’s tug on his sleeve and hopeful eyes on his face. He was fairly sure he could intimidate dealers in illicit wares into giving him some sort of answer. Not that they’d have anything useful to tell him if Sunil had fallen into the Thames or under the wheels of a cab, but it was something to do, so he would do it.

That had brought him along the Strand to here. The Strand was a wide thoroughfare with imposing tall frontages, fit for the capital of empire; Holywell Street was its disreputable, drink-sodden uncle with his trouser buttons undone. It was narrow and lined with sagging Jacobean or even Elizabethan houses, their black timbers barely showing against soot-darkened plaster, with pointed gables and overhanging storeys that conspired together to block out what little daylight there was. The cobbles underfoot were slimy, crusty, and slippery with deposits of soot and mud, worse filth too. There was a pervading scent of urine. A couple of shop-soiled women in dresses that had once been bright lounged against a wall looking at him with an unconvincing show of interest.

It wasn’t poor, though. Vikram knew the East End and the docks; he knew the places where people slept twenty to a room in houses rotting away over cesspools that nobody ever paid to empty. He knew what poverty looked like, and it wasn’t shops with plentiful goods in the windows, steps free of hollow-faced children and dead-eyed women. Holywell Street’s decay was deliberate, if he was any judge. It would rather wallow freely in its filth than bow to other people’s ideas of cleanliness.

Twenty years ago, the street would have proclaimed its illegal wares without shame. These days, since the law had put down its heavy foot, the shops just looked shabby and unremarkable. Vikram decided he would start at one end and work his way up and down until he had an answer, or at least somewhere else to look, for the sake of a boy lost in the city and a little sister who missed him.

That was the plan. Within fifteen minutes, it started feeling more like an embarrassment.

Vikram had tried three shops by then. The first proprietor had barely looked at the image before denying all knowledge of Sunil, obscene publications, or the existence of the photographic art. Evidently he’d smelled trouble. Vikram opened negotiations in the second shop by asking about purchase of illicit photographs, but unfortunately, he’d never had a talent for acting. The shopkeeper had denied everything, and threatened to “summons a pleeceman”. Vikram took that threat for what it was worth, since he was quite sure the fellow wouldn’t want the law in here, but there was no point insisting in the teeth of such obduracy.

He decided to attempt a more conciliatory approach in the third shop. Unfortunately, he was not feeling conciliatory. Also unfortunately, though predictably, as he came in an urchin came scurrying out past him, shooting up a defiant glance, and the shopkeeper was already waiting with his arms folded.

Of course the people of Holywell Street were more interested in their own skins than the fate of a lost youth. It was only to be expected they would lie and deny and band together to fend off enquiry. It still rankled, and Vikram’s intention to appeal to the man’s humanity and better nature was rapidly forgotten when the shopkeeper told him to piss off for a nark. Vikram shared his opinion of pigs rolling in the sewer of human degradation, and stalked out of the shop in a raging temper.

This was a waste of time. What he ought to do was hire an investigator, someone used to asking questions. Or let the matter go, curse it. What was one more vanished youth in the great abyss of London? Would it not make more sense for Vikram to do the work he knew, and help the people he could?

But that meant giving up, and Vikram hated giving up. More, it meant accepting defeat of a kind that tasted like poison.

It was absurd. There were so many children lost in London all the time, and many of them lost in plain sight, condemned to misery from birth without the love and caring Sunil had obviously known. This one boy wasn’t special, except in the way that any human being was special. It was simply that Vikram felt the Guptas’ gaping, frightening loss, because he knew it.

That was the problem. He knew how it felt when someone didn’t come back, when you demanded why and never had an answer, when you looked around to share a joke or a smile and remembered he wasn’t there, when you were still doing it years later because there had been no letter, no funeral, no reason. Vikram had looked at Sunil’s picture, just sixteen, and seen his own loss, and it had hurt so much all over again.

He stood there in this disgusting street of disgusting men, under drizzle hardening into rain, staring at the filth-encrusted cobbles under his feet for a moment. Then he took a deep breath and set his shoulders. He would not give up the search for Sunil; he would find someone who would give him some sort of answer, or place to look. He would, in the name of all the lost people, and in memory of Gil.

Vikram squinted up under his hat-brim at the next shop-sign, and almost fell over.

Gilbert Lawless Bookseller

The sign hung there, once red and gold, now dusted by soot and streaked by rain, but the words were quite legible.

Gilbert Lawless. Gil.

It couldn’t be, Vikram thought, with an odd roaring in his ears. There must be dozens of other boys—men, now—with that name. Of course there were; it was only the reawakened memories that were making him imagine otherwise. This could not be his Gil Lawless, because his Gil Lawless was missing, vanished, almost certainly dead. This couldn’t possibly be Gil, alive and well and...running an obscene bookshop in London’s most ill-reputed street...

The appalling plausibility of that dawned on him along with the awareness that if this was truly, really Gil Lawless alive, Vikram was going to kill him.

He shoved open the door. The interior of the shop was very small and cluttered, with the counter in the middle of the room, and behind it a door to a back room and a flight of wooden steps leading up. The walls were lined with books, cheap card-bound editions available to browsers, leather-bound sets of evident quality behind the counter. The gas was lit against the encroachment of dusk, and the chilly air felt at once dusty and damp.

Gil was leaning on the counter.

He’d changed. That was Vikram’s first thought; on its heels came the awareness that he would have known him, even without the name on the shop front. He’d have known him anywhere.

Gil at sixteen had already been filling out into manhood, and Gil at almost thirty was not dramatically bigger. He hadn’t grown particularly tall, so that Vikram had the advantage of him by a good four inches, and he was of no more than medium build, sinew rather than muscle. His face was longer and leaner, interestingly high-cheekboned now he’d lost his boyish roundness; he had a day’s black scruff on his chin. His hair had been kept cropped almost to the scalp at school; it now grew up and out in tight curls for an inch or so. His coat was shrugged on as his clothes had always been, his cuffs and elbows dusty. In fact, he looked exactly as Vikram would have imagined him, if he’d ever imagined the swine was still alive.

Gil was wearing a purely professional smile, which faded as he saw Vikram staring at him. His brows drew together, warily. “Yes, sir? Can I help you?”

They hadn’t seen one another since Gil had disappeared from school part-way through summer term thirteen years ago. Vikram had been bewildered, then afraid, then more alone than he’d ever imagined possible. And there had been nothing more, ever: no letter to the school or Vikram’s home, no response to the pleas Vikram had sent to Wealdstone House, no result from the search he’d paid for when he’d come down from Oxford. Not one single indication that he wasn’t dead. Vikram had made himself accept that his childhood friend, the person he’d been closest to in his whole life, was gone and he would never even have a chance to say goodbye. And all the time Gil had been in London, running a shop a stone’s throw from Lincoln’s Inn, as though Vikram hadn’t spent the last thirteen years alone.

It was typical. It was absolutely typical Gil Lawless, the idle, flippant swine. Of course he wouldn’t have considered something as trivial as his best friend’s terror for him. He’d doubtless moved on and forgotten, shrugging the past off as he’d always shrugged off the insults and abuses Vikram couldn’t ignore, and he didn’t even know who Vikram was now.

Bloody, bloody, bloody Gil.

“Nothing,” Vikram heard himself say, and turned away. He would just leave, walk out, abandon this ill-fated quest—

“Hold on,” Gil said sharply. “Hoi! Stay there!” A scuff of feet and a thump, as if he’d vaulted the counter, and then Gil’s fingers were closing around Vikram’s forearm, tugging him round. “Vikram? Vikram. You are.”

There was astonishment on his face which gave way for a second to something almost like alarm, and then his face split in a smile of delight that made Vikram think he must have imagined that fleeting look. “Vik. Bugger me.”

“Gil,” Vikram said, and couldn’t find anything else.

“But—” Gil opened his hands. “Vik. I don’t know what to say. What are you doing here?”

“You’re surprised?” Vikram said. “You’re surprised? I thought you were dead!”

Gil’s mouth opened slightly, then broke into the grin Vikram had never forgotten. “What, me? Wouldn’t be seen dead in a coffin.”

That was it? That was the sum total of his apology for the way he’d vanished and left Vikram alone and bereft in that miserable hellhole of a school? Vikram found himself speechless, and as he searched for words to convey his outrage, Gil grabbed his hand.

“It’s damned good to see you. It really is.” His grip was warm and tight. It was a man’s hand, calloused at the bases of the fingers, large and strong-boned, but Vikram still felt that old, absurd reaction. As though Gil was going to tug him along to some adventure, some secret, some escape that he’d never find alone.

Gil was right here, alive, and as much as Vikram wanted to wring his neck, he couldn’t hold back a smile.

“You’re alive,” he said, pointlessly obvious.

“Never better. What are you up to? Do you have time for tea? Let me lock the front and come upstairs. I’ve a fire, and there’s no trade to speak of on a miserable day like this. Come on.”

He lifted the counter hatch and pushed Vikram through it, towards the stairs, just as though he were still the larger of the two of them, and Vikram found himself no more able to resist than he ever had been. Gil went to the door, bolted it, and turned the sign to show he was closed, then came past and led the way upstairs. Vikram followed him into a small room, which appeared to be at once living space and storehouse, piled as it was with books, bound and unbound, papers, piles of loose photographs, bundles of manuscript, and boxes. There was a blazing fire, which was welcome, and by it a pair of faded but comfortable-looking upholstered chairs, one covered in papers and topped with a black fur stole.

Gil slid a hand under the fur and tossed it up and sideways. It sprouted legs and a very bushy tail, hit the floor lightly, and stalked resentfully away. Gil ignored the cat’s annoyance, turfing the papers onto the floor with a casual disregard for their order that made Vikram’s teeth hurt.

“Here you go. I don’t often have people up here.” That was, it seemed, Gil’s entire apology for the chaos. “Tea?” He put the kettle on the fire without further consultation, as Vikram hung up his coat and hat on the stand in the corner, and took the chair.

“Well.” Gil sat back in his own chair, crossing his legs. “So. How’ve you been?”

Vikram steepled his fingertips to prevent himself clenching his fists. “How have I been? You mean, in the thirteen years since you vanished out of my life as though you’d never existed?”

“Well. Yes.”

“What do you mean, yes?” Vikram demanded. “I came back from double Latin and you were gone! Your clothes were gone, your chest, nobody would tell me anything, nobody answered my letters, you never got in touch once, and I didn’t have a word from you from that day to this! What the devil happened?”

There was a silence, long enough for Vikram to feel his anger undermined by a current of doubt as to whether he’d sounded quite as calm and unemotional as he’d have liked, then Gil let out a breathy whistle. “Right. You’re not taking life any more lightly, I see.”

“No, I am not!” Vikram shouted. “Of course I’m not! What do you expect me to—to—”

Quite suddenly, he felt dizzy and airless, as though this were a dream and he’d just become aware of the implausibility of it all. His face was cold and clammy, his hands tremulous. He decided that he could not possibly do anything so weak as to put his head between his knees, and then realised that the alternative might be passing out.

“Jesus,” Gil said. “Are you all right?”

“Very well,” Vikram said, muffled. “Just give me a moment.”

A light hand touched his shoulder. “Breathe, mate. Take your time. Here, I’ll make the tea.”

Vikram breathed, attempting to force the blood back to his brain by sheer willpower. He sat up after a few moments to see Gil sitting opposite, holding out a chipped, steaming mug.

“I put sugar in it. Feeling better?”

Vikram sipped the brew and grimaced. “I’m perfectly well. I was just taken dizzy, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I saw. So you didn’t come here looking for me?”

“Of course I didn’t. I thought you were dead.”

“I can see why it came as a shock to say good afternoon.” Gil made a face. “Sorry about that.”

Sorry. Vikram shook his head and concentrated on the syrupy tea. Gil must have put half the sugar bowl into it.

“You look like you’re doing well,” Gil said after a moment. “Very smart. What is it, the law? Barrister?”

“Solicitor. I didn’t choose to take silk.”

“As long as it suits. What else? Married?”

“No.”

“How are the old folk?”

“At the same address,” Vikram said. “If you were interested in their well-being, a letter would have found them, or me.”

“Right. Any use to say I was busy?”

“For thirteen years?”

Gil’s face stilled. It wouldn’t have stood out to most people, but Vikram had known him better than anyone once upon a time, and he recognised a man taking a second to gather himself when he saw one.

It was only a second, then Gil smiled again, this time somewhat sardonically. “About two minutes before you walked in I had a boy come from number ten to warn me there was some swell wandering around, asking awkward questions about goods that could get a fellow a spell in chokey. I assume that was you, Mr. Solicitor?”

Vikram swallowed a mouthful of tea. “Yes.”

“Yes. This is my shop. My name on the sign, right here in the middle of Holywell Street.” Gil’s smile had entirely faded now. “Do you want to think again about whether you’d have liked me writing to your mother?”

“You didn’t always do this,” Vikram said. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Oh, I did. I really did.”

“What—” Vikram wasn’t sure he wanted to ask. He didn’t want to think of Gil in this grimy, illicit business. “What do you do?”

“What happens if I tell you? Do I get the peelers round? Society for the Suppression of Vice?”

“Oh, come on. That’s not fair.”

“Let’s not be sentimental. You went your way and I went mine, and you wouldn’t have thanked me for turning up at your door any time in the last few years, so don’t give me a hard time that I kept my troubles to myself, all right?”

“No!” Vikram said furiously. “It is not all right. Whatever you’ve been doing, you were sixteen, and you vanished, and I was afraid, damn you. I don’t know what you did to be expelled—”

“But you think I did something.” Gil leaned back. “Right.”

“I wasn’t even allowed to ask! I was put in detention for demanding answers. That was what they did when fellows were sacked for stealing, or—unmentionable things.” The old slang tasted oddly on his tongue.

Gil smiled tightly. “Of course they did. Hang a dog and then give him a bad name.”

“Isn’t it the other way around?”

“Hardly matters now. What are you doing asking awkward questions in Holywell Street?”

He’d clean forgotten. Vikram drained the tea, looked around for any reasonable surface on which to place the mug, and gave up, putting it carefully on the floor. As he sat back, the cat took the opportunity to leap into his lap, anchoring itself with claws. He yelped.

“Satan, you arse,” Gil said. “Shove him off.”

“Your cat is called Satan?”

“He’s not my cat. He just lives here.”

Vikram pushed cautiously and ineffectually at the mass of fur. The cat gave him a malevolent look, kneaded his thigh in a threatening manner, and wrapped itself up to sleep as though Vikram had nothing else to do but supply a lap. “Oh, for— Do something with it, will you?”

Gil grinned. “Don’t look at me. Not my responsibility, are you, Satan?”

“That is an appalling name for a cat.”

“Accurate, though. You were going to tell me what you’re up to.”

“As you said, asking awkward questions.” Vikram took a deep breath. “I’m trying to find a boy.”

Gil’s brows slanted. “Any particular boy?”

Vikram tried to stand. The cat, without opening its eyes, extended its claws in a way that suggested it would not be removed without violence. “Damn this creature. Will you pass me my briefcase?”

Gil handed it over. Vikram extracted the framed photograph but held it facing him. “This is a little difficult. I should explain, I offer legal advice to Indians and others at the Shad Thames Eastern Association House.”

“You lawyer in Shad Thames?” Gil said. “You’re looking better than I’d think on that.”

“My office is in Lincoln’s Inn. I work pro bono in Shad Thames. It’s a damned disgrace, the way poor Indian workers are treated. Paid a pittance and discarded without compunction.” Gil wore the very familiar expression of a man who didn’t see that this was his concern. Vikram pushed the irritation down. “The result is that I have all sorts of problems brought to my door.”

“And what sort of problem brings you to Holywell Street?”

Vikram needed help; Gil was in a position to help him, appalling though that was to consider. The question was whether his obviously flexible morality was sufficiently flexible for this. Vikram had seen too many criminals outraged over other people’s transgressions to take that on trust.

But he couldn’t really believe Gil would play the righteous man, and in truth he had little choice.

“A boy aged sixteen has vanished,” he said. “It seems that he was keeping company with older men.”

“Ah.”

“He disappeared three weeks ago. Perhaps just an accident, but...”

“Got you.”

“And he had had this picture taken,” Vikram said. “Obviously expensive, no studio name, and his parents told me that he had been working as a photographer’s model.”

“I see why you came to Holywell Street.”

“Nobody else did,” Vikram muttered.

Gil snorted. “Nobody’s going to start telling the truth to a passing swell. Are you trying to find the photographer or the gentleman friends?”

“Either, or both. Whatever I can.”

“And why are you doing this?”

“His parents have no means to find him, and they can’t go to the police under the circumstances.”

“No, but what I mean is, why do you care what happens to some lad gone mollying?”

Vikram shook his head. It was almost funny. Almost. “If you understood what it is to have someone for whom you care disappear, if you had any idea how it feels not to know, you would not ask me that.”

Gil’s smile died on his lips. His eyes were on Vikram, intent, and there was something at once achingly familiar and very different in their look. All of him was familiar and different, and it occurred to Vikram, irrelevantly but forcibly, that his old friend had grown up a very handsome man.

“Vik,” Gil said. “Mate...”

He leaned forward. Without conscious volition, Vikram did the same. The cat’s weight shifted with his movement, and a set of claws dug savagely into his thigh. “Ow! Damn it!”

“Chuck him off,” Gil recommended, sitting back. “Ah, hell. All right, let’s see your picture.”

Vikram held out the photograph as best he could without incurring further attack. “Here. His name’s Sunil Gupta.”

“Indian. Right,” Gil said, frowning at it. “That should...help... I’ve seen him. I swear I’ve seen him.”

“You know him?”

“Know? No. Look, Vik, joking aside, you understand what I sell here?”

Vikram wanted to say yes, of course he did. Gil had always been the worldly one, initiating his naive friend into the mysteries of life. Vikram had no desire to resume that relationship. He was an experienced professional man, and his work had left him well acquainted with sordor, crime, and degradation.

But, undeniably, this was a form of sordor, crime, and degradation that up till now, he had managed to avoid.

“Not entirely,” he said. “That is, I’m well aware of this street’s reputation but not familiar with the, uh, goods themselves.”

“Goods.” Gil grinned briefly. “Yes, well. What you get round here, under the counter as it were, is literature tending to deprave or corrupt. Obscene publications. Books mostly, but also photographs. Anything that’s unfit to print.”

“Why?” Vikram demanded. “You had brains, you were better than this.” He saw Gil’s face close over, but he couldn’t or didn’t stop himself. He dealt with exploitation every day in its many and varied forms—men exploiting women, white exploiting brown and black, rich exploiting poor, anyone above treading on whoever was below. The sale of poor bodies for the entertainment of the rich was enraging; the idea of Gil involved in it was sickening. He needed it not to be true. “Why would you take up this filthy business?”

“Money,” Gil said. “And why not? People must be amused, like the man said, and this is how they like to amuse themselves. The law says people shouldn’t fuck and mustn’t fuck and oughtn’t think about fucking. Well, you tell them that. If they didn’t want it, they wouldn’t come and buy it.”

“People want a number of things that aren’t good for them.”

“That’s their problem.”

Gil’s voice was flat. Vikram reminded himself that he needed help. “We will have to disagree, but in any case, I interrupted you. Go on.”

“Well. Some of the things people want, the law doesn’t allow ’em to have, or do. So if you’re going to take a high moral tone, or call the Society for Suppression of Vice down on me as an act of Christian charity—”

“I’m not a Christian.”

“Figure of speech.”

“No, it isn’t. I am not a Christian,” Vikram repeated. “Had you forgotten that?”

“You aren’t, are you. And that makes a difference, being Hindu?”

“By being an entirely different philosophy?” Vikram suggested, not restraining the sarcasm. “My religion holds that mutual affection and pleasure are a good thing, an aim of human life.”

“You want to get some missionaries out round here, mate. I can see that catching on.”

“I don’t mean at the expense of decency. And this is a digression. I intended only to say that I am not nearly so concerned by the...the acts committed, as the fact that people are forced to them. I do not care whether Sunil sold himself to a man or a woman; I care that he had to sell himself at all, and that he may have died for it. That is what I am here for, and nothing more, and you know very well I will not report you to the authorities for anything you tell me.”

“Do I?”

Vikram’s breath caught in his throat with outrage and hurt. He inhaled sharply in order to embark on a furious response, but the rueful look on Gil’s face stopped him before he started. “Yes, I do. Sorry, Vik. That was uncalled for.”

“Yes, it was,” Vikram snapped. “But if you want my word of honour, you have it.”

Gil nodded acknowledgement, his lips already curving into a smile again. “Good to know. Though you can’t blame a man for thinking you aren’t a natural lawbreaker. All right, let me see if I can find this picture, and I’m not making promises it’s the same boy. I could be wrong.” He hauled himself out of the chair, went to the desk, and picked up a small sheaf of photographs through which he began to sort. Vikram looked into the fire, waiting, unsettled. After a few moments, he became aware that he was stroking the cat. It would doubtless leave hair all over his trouser legs. He didn’t even like cats.

Gil returned to the fireside, holding out a photograph. “Here it is. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Vikram looked at the image, and couldn’t hold back the flinch.

It showed a young Indian man, naked but for socks and suspenders. He was adolescent, with a swagger in his stance despite his exposure, and he looked very like the framed picture of Sunil.

“Yes. I think this is him. And again there’s no studio mark on the back. Would you say the photograph looks recent?”

Gil leaned on the edge of Vikram’s chair. He smelled of paper and ink and dust, the scent of books, with a lower note of…not quite musk. Maleness. “Well, the print’s in good condition. And he looks about the same in both, and boys change fairly quick at his age. How old’s your picture?”

“He gave it to his parents a month ago.”

“Right.” Gil chewed his lip. “So here’s your lad who’s had a gentleman friend, or several, for a while?”

“At least a year.”

“But also—or instead of?—he’s doing poses plastiques, quite recently.”

“Maybe he fell out with his gentleman friend, and he needed a new way to bring the money in,” Vikram suggested. “Maybe he posed for the photographs and the gentleman wasn’t happy when he found out.”

Gil shrugged. “Maybe the gentleman was the one who arranged the pictures and was pleased as Punch to see them.”

“Is that likely?”

“Why not? There’s plenty of people who like looking at pictures.”

“Do you know who takes these things?”

“Any fool with a camera. Well, and a dark-room and some willing lads or ladies, but those aren’t hard to come by.”

Vikram nodded. “Where did you get this one?”

“Believe it or not, my half-brother.”

“Your— Matthew?”

Vikram had never met Matthew Lawes. He’d never met Gil’s father either, or been to Wealdstone House, since the old man’s acknowledgement of his bastard hadn’t extended to having his friends come to visit.

“Oh, yes,” Gil said. “Turns out he had a taste for literature tending to deprave or corrupt. Apparently it runs in the family. Most of what’s in here was his, the books and such.”

Vikram looked around at the heaps. “Are you serious?”

“No joke. The family asked me to get rid of it after he died. I was going through it to price it up when I noticed Sunil.”

“That’s something of a coincidence.”

“Well, you don’t see that many people of our colour, that’s why I remembered. I could have flicked past any number of missing white boys. There’s at least one murdered lad in there.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A boy I knew. He was killed a few weeks ago, on the street, skull stoved in. It’s a dangerous game, and people get hurt. The police won’t help, and you’re mostly on your own.” Gil grinned briefly. “Last time I saw him, Errol was talking about setting up a trade union, to stop the workers being ripped off.”

“Good for him,” Vikram said absently. “When was this unfortunate killed?”

Gil frowned, counting on his fingers. “I heard on a Monday morning with the delivery so... The twenty-third, Saturday evening. He was killed that night, and found the next morning. Why?”

Between the fire and the cat on his lap, Vikram was almost uncomfortably warm, but he nevertheless felt a cold sensation along his spine. “Sunil left his home for the last time on the morning of the twenty-third.”

They looked at one another.

“How big a world is this?” Vikram asked. “Would one young man who posed for these pictures have been likely to know another?”

“Maybe.” Gil rapped his knuckles against the side of the chair. “Might’ve.”

“I wonder if I now take this to the police.”

Gil made a face. “Eh. It’s not the safest profession. You expect unnatural deaths in this line now and again.”

“Which line? The photographs?”

“Renting. Which is to say, boys with gentlemen friends. Errol had plenty of them.”

“How do you know?” Vikram asked, then felt his cheeks flame. “I mean... No, damn it, how do you know?” He heard the harshness in his own voice and, quite clearly, so did Gil.

“How’d you think?” Gil moved away from the chair with a twist of his body that drew Vikram’s attention unavoidably to his lean hips, and folded his arms. “I sell filth, mate, and a fair bit of it’s for men who like men. I know what’s what.”

Vikram had no idea how to respond to that. He didn’t even know why he’d asked. He shouldn’t have asked, because now there were a dozen other things he wanted to ask, all worse. A pulse ticced in his jaw, a distracting throb of sensation.

Gil went on. “Both boys were in the same line of work, and it’s not a safe one. That seems to me the only connection that counts. Yes, my half-brother had photographs of them both, but he had a lot of photographs.”

“When did Matthew die?”

“The first of November.” Gil’s brows slanted comically. “I like your thinking, but it’s no go. He had a stroke on the twenty-first, never regained consciousness.”

His tone didn’t suggest condolences would be welcome. “Right. Nevertheless, for one boy to die and one disappear on the same date—”

“Maybe. But if you go to the police with nothing more than this, all that’ll happen is they’ll do me for obscene publications, and pick up a lot of other fellows who never did any harm.”

“This is harm,” Vikram said, dropping the photograph on the arm of the chair. The cat stirred on his lap. “This is not what young men—or women either—should be doing.”

“You give ’em another way to keep their bellies full and clothes on their backs and I’m sure they’ll take it.”

That was true enough. Vikram took a steadying breath. “I wonder whether your half-brother’s collection has any more secrets. I understand that he had a lot of pictures, but even so. Did he keep them in any order?”

“They’re mostly in albums.” Gil jerked a thumb. “I haven’t looked at those yet. There are a lot of loose ones too, but if they were in order before, they aren’t now. I didn’t pay attention when I packed the boxes up.”

“Mph.” Vikram tapped his fingers against his lips, thinking, and saw a grin dawn on Gil’s face. “What is it?”

“You always did that.” Gil imitated the gesture—forefingers steepled together, other fingers interlaced, tapping them against his own lips. “Whenever you were coming up with something.”

“I wish I were.” Vikram disengaged his fingers with some self-consciousness. “Have you looked through all his pictures?”

“Not yet. I only got them yesterday.”

“Perhaps you should start there.”

“Start what?”

“Well, looking of course,” Vikram said, a little impatiently. “For this Errol, and Sunil. For anything that might identify the photographer.” He was tapping his lips again, dammit. He lowered his hands hastily. “We’ll need to go through that in detail, and also to ask about other missing young men. Can you enquire within your, uh, circle of acquaintance, and see—”

“Whoa there,” Gil said. “This isn’t my problem.”

It was like a splash of cold water to the face. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve got a business to take care of, and not one that’ll be improved if I go around pretending to be a peeler.”

“But there’s a boy dead. Another missing. Someone has to look into this, and I don’t have the faintest idea how to find out about—” He gestured at the piles around them.

“Good. You don’t want to start snouting around in this business.”

“What else am I to do?” Vikram demanded hotly. “I can’t go to the police!”

“Nor can I,” Gil snapped. “Not to ask about a renter, and not to talk about the roomful of illegal pictures I ‘inherited from my brother’.” He pantomimed a policeman’s incredulity as he spoke. “I need to get this lot off my hands, and that’s all I want to do.”

“And what about Sunil?”

“What about him?”

Vikram drew in an angry breath, and saw Gil’s expression flicker, just slightly. “Are you serious?”

“Why shouldn’t I be? What’s it to do with me? You chase after stray trade if you like, but I’ve work to do.”

This wasn’t right. Not the hard edge to his voice, not the hard shell of not caring. This ought not be what Gil had become. Vikram loathed it, and that loathing pushed him to spit, “Selling pictures of people selling themselves.”

“If I choose to,” Gil said. “That’s my trade. You don’t like it, you know where the door is.”

“No, I don’t like it.” Vikram had to shove the cat twice, violently, to detach it from his lap, and felt thread give way under its resisting claws. He stood, unreasonably but ferociously angry. “I don’t like exploitation in any form. But what I really don’t like is that you don’t seem to give a damn for what appears to be a highly suspicious set of circumstances, and a young man missing, and the people who miss him.”

Gil jabbed a finger at his own chest. “Bookseller. Not enquiry agent. You want one of those, there’s a firm in Robin Hood Yard. What the devil do you think I can do?”

“I thought—”

I thought you might help me. It sounded absurd; it was absurd. As if Gil should drop everything to pursue Vikram’s investigation as a matter of course. As if there were a reason to treat this man as anything more than a stranger. As if Gil would help Vikram now, when he hadn’t so much as written a single line to get in touch.

Vikram should never have come to Holywell Street.