Ripper & Rayne - Episode 8: The Devil's Bargain
Some things are worth more when you sell them.
London, 1979
The broker’s name was Calloway, and he worked out of a photocopying shop in Farringdon. That was the cover, at least. His actual work was in a back room, behind a curtain the color of tea.
Judith Hall’s note had been brief.
Referral routed from Special branch. Reports of voluntary cognitive disruption. Consensual. No obvious crime. Investigate and advise.
Ethan read the note twice. Smiled. “No obvious crime,” he said. “That’s almost an invitation.”
Giles didn’t answer. He was looking at the street outside. The morning was flat and cold, grey that had set in for the day. He hadn’t slept much. Neither had Ethan, probably. Except Ethan had a way of wearing that lightly.
They’d walked here from the Tube. Not touching. Still close.
Calloway was in his late fifties. A frayed cardigan, the air of a man who had once been academic and had since made peace with being something else. He showed them in, friendly enough, and set the kettle on.
“I take them out,” he said, when Giles asked. “Mostly significant ones. People come in wanting to get rid of something. A marriage, a bereavement, a night they can’t stop replaying. I extract it. They leave lighter.” He fussed over mugs and milk. “Some people find that restful.”
“And the memories,” Giles said. “What do you do with them?”
Calloway smiled. “I usually find them good homes.”
There was a shelf along the back wall. Glass vials, dozens of them, ever so faintly luminescent. Not quite light, more the memory of it. Something preserved.
Ethan was already at the shelf, hands in his pockets, head tilted, leaning in to peer at the vials.
“Don’t,” Giles said, without turning around.
“I’m just looking.”
Calloway watched quietly.
Giles took the interview. Who commissioned him, how long, what volume, where the memories went. Calloway answered sometimes, and declines others. The line between those two things was carefully drawn.
Ethan wandered around. Poked at a junction box by the back door, bent down to examine the underside of a shelf. His attention was professional, Giles recognized. Ethan moved around a scene was its own form of analysis, tactile. Both reading the scene.
Ethan paused beside Calloway’s desk. Briefly still. Then he moved on.
Giles finished his questions. They left Calloway with his kettle and his vials and stepped back into the grey of Farringdon.
“He doesn’t know what they’re used for,” Giles said.
“No,” Ethan agreed. “But I’m fairly sure he suspects.”
“How can you tell?”
“He answered too quickly. Trying to hard to make it look like it didn’t matter.”
They walked. Giles had made a note in his notebook. Calloway’s main buyer, which had taken half an hour and all of his patience to extract.
“They’re buying emotional residue. They’re not just building from what spills over. Now they’re acquiring it.”
Ethan said nothing.
Giles stopped walking. “It’s shopping for sorrow.”
“Yes,” said Ethan. He turned to look at Giles. “You always go straight for the moral dimension,” he said, gently.
Giles looked at him.
“That’s a compliment, Rupert,” Ethan added.
“It didn’t sound like one.”
Ethan glanced away. “I’m more interested in how Calloway does it. The technique. The extraction.” He paused. “Neat piece of work.”
“A neat piece of work that’s helping someone hollow out the city.”
“Yes.” Said without any particular inflection. Not dismissive. Just factual.
Giles looked at the buyer’s name in his notebook. Then he put it away.
They found a pub on Saffron Hill for the debrief. A place somehow cosy and miserable at the same time.
Sticky carpet, a gas fire that worked on two of its three bars. The barman looked like he’d been there since the war. Quiet and discrete.
Ethan set two pints down and folded himself into the chair opposite. His coat was still damp from outside. He looked bright and easy. A talent he had in places other people found depressing.
“Calloway was keeping some memories back,” Ethan said. “Three or four on the shelf. Left side. Much older than the others. Whatever those are, he didn’t buy it. He brought them with him.”
Giles looked up. “You’re sure?”
Ethan nodded. “The charge was different. Felt more personal.” He wrapped both hands around his glass. “Sentimental.” A pause. “I wonder what he keeps it for.”
Giles watched him. “Do you wonder?”
Ethan glanced up. “What?”
“What’s worth keeping.” It was out before he could stop it. More weighted than he’d expected.
Ethan held his gaze for a moment. Something real moved across his face. Then he smiled. “I’m keeping this pint,” he said. “For as long as it takes me to drink it.” He lifted his glass. “Results pending.”
Giles looked down at his own drink.
The moment closed like water over a stone.
They didn’t bring it up again. They talked through the case, the buyer’s name, what it pointed to. Ethan made two sharp observations and one terrible joke. Giles wrote up his notes on a beer mat and transferred them to his notebook.
Under the name he’d extracted from Calloway was a second line. A property address in Southwark.
“That’s a start,” Ethan said, reading over his shoulder.
“A thread,” Giles said. “There’s a difference.”
Ethan was already pulling on his coat. “Then let’s pull it.”
He held the door, briefly - a small courtesy, the kind that was second nature and meant nothing. Except that his hand rested on Giles’ shoulder for a moment as he passed. Warm and there for a beat longer than needed. And then gone. Ethan already out into the grey street before Giles had finished feeling it.
Traffic, pigeons, a news vendor shouting something about Thatcher. Giles and Ethan made their own pace. The city received them.
Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.