by KJ Charles
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.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Vikram was not sure this was a good idea.
They had settled on the floor of Gil’s upstairs room, since there was nowhere sensible to sit. Gil had thick rugs, at least, so Vikram’s trousers would, he hoped, not be too ingrained with dust. Gil put three large leather-bound albums in front of him; Vikram squared his shoulders, and opened the first.
“Great Caesar’s ghost,” he muttered. “People buy these?”
The woman depicted had her legs up so her ankles were around her ears and was holding her private parts open with two fingers. It was not anything Vikram would have called erotic. Forbidden, without doubt, so forbidden that he had a queasy, nervous sensation looking at it, as he’d always had when Gil had dragged him into some piece of rulebreaking. But what he’d always been informed was the secret jewel of a woman’s intimacy seemed to be, well, just hair and an asymmetrical sort of opening. People risked gaol to buy and sell this?
“Vik?” Gil was giving him a rather sardonic look. “We have a few of those to get through yet.”
Vikram leafed through the album—all women—without comment and reached for the next. This one began with the image of a mostly naked man, still wearing socks and gaiters, as Sunil had been. He stood, skin ghostly pallid against what looked like a cloth backdrop, member hard and jutting and slightly darker than the rest of him. Flushed with blood, presumably. Vikram hadn’t seen a white erection since his schooldays, and couldn’t remember what they looked like in person.
“Got something?” Gil asked.
“No. Just... Nothing.”
Gil cocked a meaningful brow. Vikram glared. “You can’t expect me to take this sort of thing in my stride. Really, Gil, why do you do it?”
“What, sell this stuff? Money.”
“There are other things to sell.”
“Yeah, books,” Gil said. “To be honest, that’s mostly my line. I’m not a photogra
ph man, certainly not on this scale.”
That was something of a relief. Pornographic books would still incur gaol time, but he’d rather know Gil traded in imagination than images. “But why this business in general?” Vikram asked. “What happened? You were doing perfectly well at school, and then your father died, and then you were gone!”
“They really didn’t say?”
“Nothing!” Vikram’s voice betrayed the outrage he still felt to an embarrassing degree. “Nobody told me anything. You vanished, with all your things. The masters said you’d been withdrawn from school, and refused to tell me why. I wrote to Wealdstone House a dozen times and never had a reply.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.” Gil leafed through a few more pictures, as though that was all there was to say, and then sat back on his heels. “All right, you want to know? Well, my father died. I was sent back to school after the funeral while they did the legal business and Matthew got his feet under the table. And then he wrote to the school, told them he wanted me removed right away. And he was head of the family and paid the bills, so out I went.”
“But why?”
“Because he didn’t like my face,” Gil said flatly. “He didn’t even tell me in person that he’d be kicking my feet from under me, just sent his man of business, Vilney, to the school to do it. ‘You’re sixteen years old and have lived on the family’s generosity long enough,’ he said. ‘It’s time for you to take responsibility for yourself. Oh, and if you show your face at Wealdstone House again, Mr. Lawes will have you whipped.’ And there I was.”
“But did your father not leave you anything to live on?”
“Oh, yes. He left me ten pounds.”
“What?”
“Vilney gave me a banknote,” Gil said, with a sour smile. “He said that was the last I’d see of Lawes money, that I’d leeched off the estate long enough.”
Vikram stared at him. “But... Ten pounds? Your father—” His throat closed. He knew stories like that, every solicitor did. People could be astonishingly cruel, or thoughtless, in their wills. But Gil had adored his father. The compulsory letter home had been a pleasure for him each week, not a chore, and my father says had been his clincher to any argument. Vikram had always believed the love to be reciprocated. He didn’t want to imagine the pain of that callous blow, how much it would hurt even now, what the little sardonic smile on Gil’s face must cost him.
“Dear heaven, Gil. I don’t know what to say. But what did you do?” He was gripping the photograph album tightly, he realised. He set it on the rug. “Where did you go? Why didn’t you write?”
“Yes, well.” Gil shrugged carelessly, but he wasn’t meeting Vikram’s eyes. “Look, one moment I had a father, and the next he was dead and it turned out he hadn’t given a damn for me. Hadn’t thought me worth looking after, didn’t care if I lived or died. And I’d always known my brother loathed me but to find out he wouldn’t even let me finish my schooling, or at least find somewhere to go first, that he wanted me beggared—” His words were accelerating now, tumbling out. “And I’d been at that school seven years, boarding, living there more than half the damned year, and the headmaster told me to pack my trunk in half an hour and be off the premises. I asked him where I was to go—I was crying, Vik, I couldn’t stop, I was so afraid—and he looked at his hands and muttered about it not being his concern.”
“Gil—”
“I was in a history lesson that morning, and on the road with a ten-pound note to my name that night. By the next morning I’d been robbed of everything but the clothes I slept in. I went from schoolboy to vagrant in one day, and nobody on earth cared. Nobody cared.”
“I did,” Vikram said hoarsely. “My parents would have helped if I’d asked them. I’m sure of it.”
“Yes, and I was sure my father would have left me something to live on, but that didn’t happen either, did it? I was sixteen. My father was dead, my whole life had been turned—not even upside down, worse than that. Thrown on the dustheap. I couldn’t think what to do; I couldn’t think at all for the shock. And maybe if I’d had a bit of time to come to grips with everything I might have gone back to school, found a way to send in a note to you or suchlike, but— Well. That didn’t happen.”
Vikram didn’t like the note in his voice. “What did happen?”
Gil shrugged again. “Like I say, I got robbed. I had nothing to eat and one thing to sell.”
Vikram didn’t understand that for a moment, and then he felt a chill of unpleasant anticipation. “What do you mean?” he made himself ask.
“If you must know, I was sucking pricks for shillings within a couple of days.”
Vikram tried to control his expression. He obviously failed because Gil’s chin went up. “It was that or stealing and I was a bit obvious for that out in the countryside, even if I’d had any knack for it. Whereas I probably got a bit of extra business off gentlemen by being a novelty. Like your lad Sunil.”
Vikram felt nausea rise. “You shouldn’t have had to do that. You shouldn’t.”
“Yeah, well.” Gil jerked a hand at the photographs in front of him. “You don’t like these pictures? I can tell you, a warm dry studio is a lot more fun than a wet alley, and easier on the knees.”
“Stop.”
“It’s what happened. It’s what Matthew reduced me to, just another bit of dirt on the streets, like he thought I always was. And if you’re going to tell me that I should have run to your parents, turned up in rags at their beautiful clean house and asked to live there—well. Maybe they’d have welcomed me with open arms, but nobody else was doing that, so why would I think they might?”
“Dear heaven. I don’t know what to say.”
“Start with ‘Matthew Lawes was a lying cunt’,” Gil said. “My father left me five hundred pounds down and fifty a year for life. My brother cheated me out of my inheritance.”
“What?” Vikram almost shouted.
“I didn’t know that then, of course. Didn’t begin to suspect. That fucker Vilney could lie his way through a brick wall.”
“But—”
“Illegal, fraud, I know. Let me get this damn fool story finished first, will you? I made my way to London the best I could, and it wasn’t much of a laugh for a couple of years trying to keep afloat. There’s a lot of people trying to make a crust in this city. And then I met a bloke who put me in the way of a bit of work for William Dugdale. Ever hear of him?”
“I suppose you don’t mean the seventeenth-century antiquary.”
“I mean the pornographer. Sold more dirt than a nightsoil company. He was a dodgy swine, always in and out of gaol, and a rotten plagiarist as well, but he offered me a bit of work fetching and carrying, and then once he realised I had a decent education, he gave me more to do. Sorting books, selling ’em, then writing. I learned the ropes, and helped keep things running when he got hauled off to chokey for the last time. He died in sixty-eight in the Clerkenwell House of Correction, poor bastard. They wouldn’t let him have books or writing materials in there, and it sent him off his rocker. He didn’t even recognise his daughter at the last. Anyway, he was dead, and I was just wondering what to do next when Percy caught up with me.”
“Percy— Percival Lawes? Your cousin?” Vikram remembered a younger, eager boy, all enthusiasm and hero-worship.
“He’d started as a clerk at Somerset House, where they do the public records. He looked up Pa’s will one day, out of idleness. Matthew had told him that I hadn’t been left anything, but there it was in black and white. Percy tracked me down to tell me.”
Vikram nodded, feeling the bitter stab of self-rebuke, almost resentment. If Percival Lawes, who was in his recollection entirely negligible, had found Gil, Vikram could have done the same. If he had looked, if he hadn’t given up after that last search and accepted Gil was dead rather than endure the pain of him missing, he might have been there when Gil had needed him.
“Good old Percy,” he said as sincerely as he could. “Goo
d man.”
“He’s all right. Better than the rest of them. Not hard to be better than Matthew, mind you.”
“And then what? Did you prosecute?”
Gil shook his head. “Matthew said he and Vilney would swear in court that I’d refused the money, and he’d fight it all the way. I didn’t think it was worth trying.”
“He committed a crime!”
“And nobody ever gets away with that.” Gil scrubbed a hand in his hair. “Maybe I could have prosecuted, but I didn’t think I could risk losing in court and being stuck with solicitor’s fees. I got him to hand over my lump sum and start paying the fifty a year from then on. No interest or the missed payments, though, he wouldn’t admit to owing that.”
“You should have had it.”
“I should have, yes, when I needed it. And I shouldn’t have needed it. If Matthew hadn’t set out to make me go away, I don’t suppose I’d be in Holywell Street now. But there you are. I could have ended up a lawyer in a good suit if things had been different—Lawless and Pandey or whatever—and I could have ended up like Errol, and there’s no point thinking about it, because none of that’s going to change.”
“But once you had the lump sum, once you had financial independence, you nevertheless decided to stay in this line?”
“Why not? It was what I knew. And...” He paused for long enough that Vikram wondered if he’d go on at all, then spoke quietly. “Matthew took my father from me. I was sixteen and my pa was dead, and Matthew told me he’d never given a damn for me, and I believed it. Years, I believed it. Everything I had to do to survive because Pa hadn’t cared about me, all the time I’d spent thinking the sun shone whenever he spoke and he hadn’t cared a bit—I hated my father for that, Vik. I hated him more than I hated Matthew. And it wasn’t true. It was a miserable lie, but I believed it for so long that it still feels true. I can’t forget what I felt. I said Matthew had turned my life upside down, didn’t I? Well, finding out he was a liar didn’t turn it the right way up again. It didn’t make things better.”
“No. I see.”
