CHAPTER FOUR

 

Gil woke up the next day feeling uncomfortable.

He wasn’t used to questioning his decisions. His life hadn’t allowed him a great deal of leeway in making them, and the choices he’d made tended to be the kind that stuck. If you went around regretting things you might curl up and cry for the lost hopes and the ruined dreams, and bugger that for a game of tin soldiers. He was where he was. He did not need moralising, and he wasn’t going to gaol.

That was not an option. He knew too much about the spirit-breaking pointless cruelty inflicted in Pentonville or Clerkenwell. He wasn’t going to risk coming to the attention of the peelers for the sake of some boy he’d never met. Vikram could talk about the value of human life all he liked; he had education and wealth and doting parents to make his valuable. He could afford to care, and it was a bloody piece of cheek that he should ask Gil to do the same without a thought, as if it was the old days.

They’d initially palled up from sheer necessity as the only two dark-skinned boys in the form. It wasn’t as though they’d had anything else in common. Gil was a housemaid’s bastard, his mother’s parents hauled over the seas by some fleshmongering son of a bitch. Vikram was rich and well born, and his father had been a high-up adviser to the government. Gil well recalled Vikram in a towering fury of offended pride that had made him seem older than his thirteen years, informing the entire common room that he was descended from princes. It hadn’t been a good idea, as anyone could have advised him; he’d been dubbed ‘Tippoo Sultan’, not in a kindly spirit, ever after.

Vikram had always been proud. Probably no more so than the other boys, but a great deal more than most of them thought he had a right to be. He’d refused to be treated as second class, would not humble himself to be liked, and had paid the price in unpopularity.

He’d dropped the arrogance with Gil, though. Nobody could be alone all that time. They’d hidden themselves in dark corners of the school grounds, and Vik had huddled against him and talked, sometimes sobbed out the fears and unhappiness he couldn’t push away, and...

They’d been friends. Real, deep friends, even if they were chalk and cheese, even if Gil couldn’t see why Vik took everything so seriously and Vik couldn’t see why Gil didn’t. They’d been close, as close as it got.

And then Gil had left school that day in May, and he’d never seen Vikram again. He’d been busy, to say the least, learning to survive in a coldly hostile world, but he had still worried about his friend now and then. What will he do without me? he remembered thinking, as if he’d had time to worry about a clever, wealthy, beloved son. How will he get on?

Well, it looked like Vikram had got on just fine. Looked like he was making the world a better place, and was disappointed that Gil wasn’t doing the same. That was then, this is now. I run a dirty bookshop, mate, Gil told him mentally. What did you expect?

The sod-you attitude had been carefully honed over years to serve him well as a suit of armour against family, moralisers, the law. People could hurt you far worse if you believed in them, or trusted them, or cared what they thought, so he’d learned to stop doing those things. He found himself not greatly wanting to stop them with Vikram.

“Oh, fuck off,” he said aloud, to himself or whoever. He needed to forget about this whole thing, especially the angry, disappointed look in Vikram’s eyes, and get on with some work. This meant another chapter of his current opus, Miss Larch’s School of Discipline. Bums, whips, mock protests, schoolgirls, a young gentleman in a frock to tickle other fancies. He wanted to get that on sale before Christmas in a three-shilling edition.

Miss Larch was his priority, not a couple of tuppenny whores whose lives and deaths were none of his business. He repeated that to himself at twenty-minute intervals for the next two hours, slapped his pen down at last with a single scrawled sheet of uninspired vice to show for his time, and pushed his chair back with a snarl of, “Oh, all right.” He needed to finish with Matthew’s collection anyway, and get those bloody photographs off his hands.

Upstairs, Satan slept on the chair Vikram had briefly occupied. Furry fuckster, curling up on Vik’s thighs like he had a right to be there.

God, Vikram had got big. He’d been huge-eyed and slender that first day, when Gil had walked into the dormitory and seen the single brown-skinned boy staring back at him in the sea of pale faces, hostile or curious. He’d stayed awkward over the next seven years: gangly, thin-wristed, always hungry, as though he’d burned up the food with his intensity about everything under the sun. Even though he’d been starting to show a moustache by fourteen, he hadn’t really started growing by the time they’d parted. Gil had tugged him around by the hand and Vik had let himself be dragged along.

Not that he’d been weak. Gil remembered his temper well. Exploding at the bullying and torment inflicted as a matter of course by larger boys on smaller; exploding at the taunts and sneers directed at his race or mother country; exploding at more or less anything that struck him as wrong, and a lot of things had. Opinionated pain in the arse, that was Vik as a schoolboy, and it looked like nothing much had changed on the inside. But the outside, though...

Hell’s teeth, Vikram’s outside was worth looking at these days. Eyes of such deep brown, with thick, straight black brows over them. Thick black hair, too, with a slight wave to it. The features that had always seemed too big for his face were still big—a beaky nose, a full mouth—but on a grown man, the effect was magnificent. And he’d filled out impressively in the shoulders, the very nice arse, and the thighs that bloody Satan had helped himself to, lying face down on Vikram’s lap, when Gil could have cheerfully done the same.

Oh, Vikram grown up was a piece of work. And he was also a lawyer, and no matter what he said about his religion or philosophy, he was English by education. Gil would be well advised to keep within safe bounds. The last thing he needed was a moralising lawyer in his life, even one with thighs and eyes like those.

Gil wasn’t looking for trouble and he definitely wasn’t looking for Sunil as he sorted through Matthew’s photographs. Men and women, orifices and the various things that might be stuck into them, the usual business over and over while the fog dragged dirty fingers across his windows and he tried not to remember being lost and sixteen.

It wasn’t his problem, damn it. He’d never had Errol or wanted to. Gil didn’t like young ones. Either they had eyes full of hope and need, and there was nothing Gil liked less than other people’s need, or they’d had the optimism beaten out of them already, and that was just disheartening. He liked a man or woman who’d grown a thick skin with age, who was knocked down and got up and could laugh about it. Not people like, to pluck an example out of the air, Vikram, who cared so damn much about everything that it hurt to look at him, but those who could have a good time and not care and walk away unscathed. Because if you couldn’t do that, you were in trouble.

Errol wouldn’t be walking away, but there was nothing to be done for him now. The other one, Sunil, was probably dead too. These things happened. And just because they had maybe happened to two boys possibly on the same night...

It was none of his sodding business. Gil told himself that like a sensible purveyor of filth, but even so, once he’d finished going through the loose photographs, he decided he might as well take a look at the albums while he was at it.

By the time he’d got to the third one, he really was wondering about his half-brother.

Most people had their little ways, things they preferred—feet, or restraints, or floggers, or what-have-you. Matthew’s collection had them all, and plenty more, and he’d organised them by theme. Orgy pictures together, cunnilingus pictures together, flogger pictures together, with spaces left for gaps, as though a pornographer had collided with a librarian. Someone was going to pay a fortune for these as a set, Gil had no doubt, but the overall effect was deathly in its monotony. Had Matthew really found pleasure in this organised catalogue of vice?

He picked up an album that still had a newish smell to it, opened it, and said, “Ah, fuckery.”

It was Errol and Sunil. Of course it bloody was, in a run of six pictures of gamahuching and soixante-neuf. The photographic paper was clean and unblemished, and the prints sat in an album with an unfaded spine that a cursory flick showed to be two-thirds empty. These were very recent.

“Fuckery!” Gil said again, so loudly that Satan lifted his head and gave him a look of yellow-eyed hatred. “Well, now what?”

Satan yawned, revealing needlepoint teeth. Gil glared at him. “It’s all right for you. Nobody’s putting you to the crank if the peelers take an interest.” Satan could fuck and murder as he pleased, and leave the bodies all over the shop floor too, frequently in pieces. Bloody cat.

What the devil was he to do now? He’d ignored a lot in his time. There was so much to ignore, after all, and if you went around caring about every beggar and every hungry child, you’d die of pity and do no good to anyone. He could ignore this: burn the pictures rather than risk questions, and searches, and a trip to gaol. Given Vikram’s look of contempt as he’d left, he’d probably expect Gil to do just that, and Gil found a kind of bitter pleasure in fulfilling people’s worst opinions. If they were going to judge him without knowing a damn thing about him, he might as well live down to their expectations. That had been a driving principle for years, and he wasn’t going to change it for the sake of a half-remembered schoolboy friendship, or the disappointment in Vikram’s eyes.

He was, therefore, really quite annoyed with himself as he stood in Vikram’s offices in Lincoln’s Inn an hour later, asking for Mr. Pandey.

Vik was wearing a black Newmarket coat over a pale grey waistcoat and dark grey trousers. He looked smart and decent and tired, and surprised. “Gil,” he said blankly.

“Me. Can I have a word?”

“Come in.”

Gil had never been in a law office before. It was very neat, dark wood and green leather, not at all the mess of Chancery papers he had in mind from reading Dickens.

“I didn’t expect to see you,” Vikram said. “I should probably apologise. I dare say I was unreasonable. I get caught up in things—well, you know that but—”

“I remember.” Vikram’s eyes were so bloody brown. Gil needed not to be lusting after a lawyer like this, let alone an old friend. “But, mate—”

“No, it wasn’t reasonable. I had no right to expect you to take an interest in my work or my obligations, which are not yours.”

That sounded like a well-used phrase. Possibly well used by someone else, to Vikram. “No, they aren’t, but you need to see this.”

Gil held out a photograph he’d extracted from the album. Vikram took it, and went rigid. “Sunil.”

“The thing is, the other one’s Errol,” Gil said. “The boy I told you about. The one who was murdered.”

“Is it. Is it indeed. Was this picture from your half-brother’s collection?”

“Yes. I hate to say this, but you might have a point about the connection. Well, it’s fishy as a six-day herring, but I still can’t go to the police. And you can’t take this to them and say where you got it, either.”

Vikram’s brows shot up. “Are you so concerned about your family name?”

“My name’s Lawless. I couldn’t give a monkey’s for the Lawes.”

“Then surely we can—”

Gil scrunched a handful of hair. “I could do time, Vik. You know that. There was this bloke had a shop a few doors down from mine, he got six months for sale of obscene publications. In Pentonville.” Gil tried to say that casually, but Vikram’s expression suggested he’d failed. Or maybe he just knew about Pentonville, and its solitary cells, and its silent system, and what it did to you as the endless weeks passed and you didn’t speak to another human soul. “He did five and a half months, and hanged himself in his cell with a fortnight to go because he couldn’t take another day.” Or at least, that was what Gil imagined his reason to have been; that was what he’d dreamed about on several sweaty-cold nights afterwards, waking in a tangle of blankets. He didn’t count himself a needy sort and, if asked, would have said he did fine on his own, but Pentonville gave him the screaming horrors.

“It doesn’t sound fun,” he said, not quite able to meet Vikram’s eyes, not sure if it would be worse to see pity or contempt. “I don’t fancy it myself.”

“But you sell—”

“Plenty of legal goods,” Gil cut in. “And nothing unlawful to people I don’t know. I’m careful. But I’m known to the law all the same, and I can’t just tell the police my half-brother left me a load of dirty pictures and expect them to take my word for it. It’s not like the family will back me up.”

“I understand.” Vikram’s brows were drawn together, forming a near-continuous thick black line. “But the provenance of the pictures might be important. I can’t conceal it. That would be withholding evidence.”

“Did you not hear me? If you say where you got these—”

“I heard you,” Vikram said testily. “Let’s compromise. I won’t take any of this to the police yet, or do anything beyond what I have already, which is to report Sunil missing and put out his description to the authorities. But I will, I must look into this, and I need you to help me. You know this world. And if we find evidence of murder, I will do my best to present it in a way that doesn’t involve you.”

“But I have to help you, do I?”

“I need to find what happened to Sunil.” Vikram’s voice had an edge that you could have shaved with. It made Gil’s skin prickle. “I will find that, with your help or that of the police. And don’t tell me you don’t care. You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t care.”

Gil wasn’t entirely prepared to agree with that, but he decided not to argue. He’d liked Errol, for what that was worth, and he wouldn’t mind spending a bit more time with Vik. So long as it was clearly understood he wasn’t doing this out of the goodness of his heart.

He propped his arse against some bit of expensive, well-polished furniture, bumping a few papers off the top of a pile and making Vikram wince. “Right. What’s your plan, then?”

“Just a moment. Can you give me a shilling?”

“What for?”

“You need to hire me as your solicitor. That way, I have professional privilege and I am not obliged to reveal anything you tell me. I don’t say I shan’t act on my own account if I see fit, of course.”

“Nice for some. All right, here’s your shilling.”

Vikram took the coin he fished out. “Very well, you have a legal representative. I suggest we begin with your brother’s collection. See if there are any other photographs of the boys and any indication of provenance. Who took them, who sold them.”

“That’ll take a while.”

“You’d better start, then.”

Gil broke out his best smile. “Going to give me a hand?”

“Looking at—?” Vikram’s eyes widened. “No.”

“You’re my lawyer, aren’t you? Don’t I get legal help?”

“Looking at obscene materials is not part of a solicitor’s obligations.”

“Got anything better to do?”

“You think I have nothing better to do than look through pornographic images?” Vikram demanded.

“Well, you’re here on a Saturday afternoon.”

“Yes. I’m working. What else should I be doing?”

“Looking for Sunil, which’ll be done twice as fast if you give me a hand. Oh, come on, we can catch up properly while we’re about it. I’ll buy you dinner.”

“From your ill-gotten gains?”

Gil blinked at Vikram’s tone. “Ah. That’s it, is it?”

“What is?”

“You’ve really got a problem with the pictures?”

“Of course I do,” Vikram snapped. “They’re illegal, immoral, and obscene.”

“Right, but what’s bad about them? Come on, Vik, they’re only pictures. People doing what people do.”

“Illegally.”

“You know I get magistrates in?” Gil said. “One fellow sent a bookseller on Wych Street downstairs for twelve months hard, and was in my place the week after, asking for flagellation stories. Law, my arse.”

“People are flawed. That doesn’t negate the rule of law.”

“If flawed people invent laws, and flawed people apply ’em, what sort of law do you think you get?” Gil retorted. “Anyway, that’s not the point. I’m not asking you to look at these for fun. I could use some help. And it would be good to catch up.”

“Yes, but—” Vikram made an exasperated noise in his throat. “All right, curse you. Show me your filth.”