The Devil You Know

Ten

I GOT INTERESTED IN LOCKS BACK WHEN I WAS working up the magic act at university. I had the idea that I could build in some escapology as well, so I went down to London looking for a shop that would sell me a pair of handcuffs. I learned a lot from that exercise, but more about the outer limits of consensual sex than about escapology.

Then Jimmy, the barman at the Welsh Pony on Gloucester Green, mentioned a guy he knew: Tom Wilke, the Banbury Bandit, who’d just finished a two-year stretch for breaking and entering. “They did him on two dozen specimen counts, with about a hundred more taken into consideration. He’d be your man,” Jimmy said. “Any kind of lock. He says he can do them blindfolded.”

I was young enough to find the thought of chatting to a career criminal appealing, so I asked Jimmy for the guy’s address. Jimmy said he’d have to set it up first and left me to stew for about a week. I went in there every night to ask him if he’d seen Wilke and if he’d asked him, but the answer was always no.

Then one night, there was a different answer; it was sod off.

“Sorry, Fix,” Jimmy said apologetically. “He’s not himself since he got out of Bullingdon. He’s gone very quiet. Doesn’t want to talk to anyone or have anyone round. Maybe it’s just something he’s going through. I’ll ask him again in a few months.”

But I couldn’t wait that long; I had to be doing it now. I worked on Jimmy until he gave me Wilke’s address just to get rid of me, and I went round to see him myself.

Tom Wilke lived in a flat on some grubby estate off the ring road, three floors up with no lift. It was eerily silent, as if the whole place was empty: no kids on the stairs, no music blaring out of open windows, even though it was high summer. I knocked on the door and waited, knocked and waited some more. When it was clear that no one was going to answer, I turned around to leave.

Just as I got to the stairs, I heard a sound that made me turn.

A sob. Somebody crying. I listened for a minute or so and it came again, from behind the door I’d just knocked on. A heartbroken, strangled sob.

I went back and tried the door. It opened. Fortune favors the pure of heart and the brassy of bollock.

Inside, a hallway just two steps wide, then an open door that led through into a poky living room—cramped despite the fact that there was almost no furniture there. A middle-age man with a shock of white hair and a build so spare he looked malnourished was sitting in a spavined G-plan chair by the light of a bare bulb, with tears running down his cheeks.

I thought at first that the curtains were drawn, but they weren’t. It was just that the windows were covered in smeary black ash so thick that even the light from a streetlamp right outside could barely filter through them. Floor, walls, furniture—everything else in the room except for the man himself was all similarly covered.

Tom Wilke was so drunk that he couldn’t even stand up, and when I knelt down next to the chair, his eyes could barely focus on me. He had no idea who I was, but my sudden appearance didn’t seem to faze or anger him. He pleaded with me, his free hand pawing at my sleeve. In the other hand he was gripping a bottle of Grant’s with about a quarter of its contents left. His breath stank like a distillery.

“I always lock the door,” he said, “so they don’t notice I’ve been. Takes them longer. Always lock the door . . .”

Since his own door hadn’t been locked or bolted, that puzzled me for a moment. Then I realized he wasn’t talking about his own door.

“Never hurt anyone,” Wilke was mumbling now, shaking his head in pained disbelief. “Never carry a knife, a gun, anything. Colin said keep five quids’ worth of change in a sock. Tap them on the head if they get bolshie. No. Never did it. Never needed to. In and out, me. Every time.”

I ran my hand along the arm of the chair, which was as greasily filthy with ash as everything else in the room. Then I looked at the tips of my fingers. Clean.

I went and made some coffee, but it was for me, not for Wilke. He finished off the whisky, and I pieced together the story from his stop-start ramblings, although sometimes his tears made him completely incomprehensible.

One of the houses he’d done, just before he’d gone inside, had been a semi down on Blackbird Leys. A shabby-looking place, but a mate who worked for UPS had told him the bloke who lived there took orders for his hi-fi shop at home sometimes. There was a chance of a good take, and he’d borrowed a van for the night.

It took Wilke ages to find the place. It was on one of those godforsaken estates that seem to be built on some sort of fractal system, with endless identical streets opening off each other and feeding into each other so that you’re lost before you start.

But he found it at last, and getting inside was a piece of cake. It would have been sweet as a nut after all, except that there was nothing there; not just no hi-fi kit, nothing worth taking at all. In one of the bedrooms, a kid in a cot, heavily asleep all by itself—no jewelry, no money, no portable electronic stuff. Even the TV had a cracked casing, so nobody was going to touch it.

So he left again, as quietly as he’d come, pissed off and bitter and rehearsing the words he was going to have with this UPS wallah. He was basically running on automatic. He locked the front door behind him, forgetting that it had been unlocked when he arrived. He wrote the night off. He went home. He went to bed.

The next morning, in the Oxford Mail, he read that a two-year-old had burned to death in a house on Blackbird Leys. The address, which he’d spent so long trying to find the night before, jumped out at him from the page. There couldn’t be any possibility of a mistake.

“They couldn’t get in,” Wilke mumbled, his rambling despair going on and on in an endless loop. “They came back, and the house was on fire. How the fuck? Nothing. Don’t understand it. I didn’t touch anything, did I? They couldn’t get in. Door was locked, and nobody had the key. When they got there, it was all burned down . . .”

He whined like a wounded animal. The whisky bottle fell out of his hand and rolled across the floor as Wilke covered his eyes and rocked and moaned through clenched teeth.

It was about a week—maybe as long as two—before it started to happen. He wasn’t even in his own place the first time; he was at a café, eating a bacon sandwich and talking to a couple of likely lads about a possible warehouse job. Pretending it was business as usual, when inside he kept hearing a kid crying in an empty house, and he couldn’t concentrate on what anyone was saying for more than a sentence or two at a time.

Black ash began to settle on the table, on his plate, on the men he was talking to. He jumped up with a shouted curse, which made the two men he was dealing with stare at him as if he was insane. He responded aggressively—were they blind or something?—and things got unpleasant. Wilke realized that nobody except him could see the ash. Then he ran a hand through it and realized why that was.

The haunting had continued ever since. He’d never seen an actual ghost. It was just that wherever he was, the ash would start to fall, and the longer he stayed anywhere, the thicker it got. It was even in his dreams, so that avenue of escape was barred.

After a few weeks, he was thinking about suicide. After talking to a priest, he gave himself up instead. He provided the police with a list of the houses, offices, and warehouses he’d burgled, with the Blackbird Leys address at the top of the list. He told them everything they needed to know to bring a case, and when they did, standing in the dock in a rain of ash that nobody else could see, he pleaded guilty on all counts.

Wilke thought it would stop then. He thought he’d done enough to atone. But nothing changed. He knew now that nothing ever would. He was using alcohol to blunt the horror, and when alcohol stopped working, he’d probably go back to option A and top himself.

My emotions as I listened to this were ricocheting around like rubber bullets inside a Dumpster. What the man had done was horrendous. Unforgivable. Everything he’d suffered he’d deserved, ten times over. But he hadn’t set out to kill anybody. He’d just done something stupid and then tried his best to pay for it, only to discover that he was facing a life sentence without appeal. I stood over him and judged him—guilty, then innocent, then guilty again—before finally reaching the only conclusion I could: that it wasn’t my call.

“I think there’s another way out of this, Tom,” I told him. “I think we can help each other.”

It took about a week of sleeping on his floor and sitting in his death-dark room every day before I finally got a scent of the little ghost that was hiding in all that sifting ash. Such a huge weight of fear and despair from such a tiny source. I caught its attention with nursery rhymes: “The Grand Old Duke of York,” “The Old Woman Tossed Up in a Basket,” “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.” After that, it was easy. The light broke through the ash as I played, and the room resumed its normal colors. When I finished, all that greasy, granular pain was gone. A scream that had addressed itself to the eye instead of the ear had stopped echoing at last.

I felt exhausted. I felt compromised, and sleazy, and black with ash that couldn’t be seen anymore. I got up to go, but Wilke wouldn’t let me. He was in my debt, and with gratitude as extreme as his earlier grief, he insisted on paying. He took me through every kind of lock there was, starting with simple levers and wards, then working through every kind of tumbler, pin, wafer, and disc, before finishing off with ultramodern master-keyed systems that are about as relevant to normal escapology as depleted uranium shells are to the game of darts.

I lapped it up. I was the best pupil he ever had. And the first, and the last; he got religion after that and took holy orders. I never saw him again.

I mention all this only to make a point, and the point is this: I didn’t need Alice’s keys. With enough time and with the tools I’d inherited from Tom Wilke, I could have got into any room in the archive. No, what I needed was Alice’s ID card, because the locks were all wired up to the readers on each door. A key alone would open them, but would also sound an alarm. This way, I could slip in and out with nobody the wiser. I hoped.

The place felt different at night.

I mean that in a literal sense; it had a different set of resonances, a different tonality. And since it was empty—since there was no other human presence there to dilute the effect with feelings and associations of its own—I felt the full weight of it as I walked through the darkened corridors.

It was a sad weight, even a sinister one. There was a flavor in the air like cruelty and pointless anger. Obviously, unless you’re in the business, you’ll have to just imagine that those things have flavors—for me they do.

I found my way to the Russian room, swiped myself in as Alice Gascoigne, and got stuck into the boxes again. There were only seven left, so a couple of hours at most would see me through to the end. I turned one bank of lights on; the strong room had no windows, so there was no chance of being seen from the street. After a minute or so of treading water, I got back into the flow, and time soon became suspended again in the murky laminations of the past.

On some level I was aware of a motorcycle driving by in the street outside, setting up a sympathetic vibration in the floor beneath my feet. Then there was silence again, even deeper for having been broken.

I was back in the rhythm of the psychic trawl, my fingers flicking across the papers, tapping out a pianissimo signature that nobody but me could disentangle. I took it slowly, very slowly, because as I neared the bottom of the stack, I was lingering longer over each sprawl of papers, more and more reluctant to take no for an answer.

But I got to the final handful at last, and I had to admit it to myself.

Nothing. Nothing at all. Not one out of all these voices speaking faintly through faded ink and yellowed paper was the voice of the Bonnington ghost.

I stared at the last clutch of documents in dumb chagrin. I’d been so certain that the thread would be there for me to pick up; the logic of it was so clear. But logic had let me down.

For a moment I thought about going back and starting again. It was a grisly prospect, but I had no other leads to pick up. If the ghost wouldn’t appear to me directly, I’d have to rely on something it had touched while it was still alive. Something that still held the imprint of its mind and personality . . .

Sometimes I miss a trick that’s so obvious, I wonder if there’s any hope for me at all. I came bolt upright in the chair, swearing at my own stupidity. Then I reached across for my coat and started to rummage in the pockets.

I didn’t have anything that the ghost had touched during its lifetime. But I had one thing that it had definitely touched since.

I pulled out the crumpled Rolodex card and held it up to examine it in the none-too-bright BS 5454 light.

I’d never tried this before, but there was no reason why it shouldn’t work. Okay, a ghost throwing its weight around isn’t quite the same proposition as a living human being touching something, but on the other hand, the trail was that much more recent. At any rate, it had to be worth a try.

Gripping the card firmly in both hands, I closed my eyes and listened with my mind. There was nothing there, but since this was the turning after the last-chance saloon, I held on. Still nothing. But after a long, strained moment, in the dead center of the nothing, a different kind of nothing opened up—the pregnant pause of dense, focused attention. It was as though I was holding a telephone receiver and I’d made a weak connection. Now someone on the other end was waiting for me to speak.

It wasn’t what I was expecting, but like I’ve always said, if life gives you lemmings, jump off a cliff.

“Hello,” I said.

No answer. I wasn’t really expecting any; I was just showing willing. But if the link that had opened up between me and the ghost wasn’t verbal, there had to be some other way to use it.

For a while I just waited, hoping that something might come into my mind without me reaching for it—some idea or emotion flowing from the ghost into me, bringing with it the pinpoint fix that I needed for the cantrip. But it seemed like the ghost was waiting, too.

I’m not sure where inspiration came from, but it came suddenly, and in spite of the sheer ludicrousness of the idea, I went for it: twenty questions. In that game, you zero in on the answer by asking broad, general questions first and then getting more and more specific. Maybe I could coax the ghost into playing a quick round with me.

I let my mind go blank, my emotions drift back down to neutral—like tapping a compass with your thumbnail to make sure the needle is floating free.

Then I started to think without thinking.

I’d like to say that this was an eastern discipline I’d picked up in an ashram in Puna, but the truth is that I’d first learned how to do it back at Alsop Comprehensive School for Boys, when I’d been introduced to acid. I used to think of it then as turning my mind into a slide projector; I’d just allow images to form behind my eyes and watch them glide past in sequence, accompanied by whatever feelings the drug high was giving me.

The beauty of it was that I didn’t have to select the images. Once I’d got the process started, they just kept coming. Actually, it was less like a slide show, more like a DVD in fast-forward, giving microsecond stills extracted from the continuous flow of memory. They weren’t random; nothing with a human mind as the operating system ever can be. But they were random enough.

Flick. Flick. Flick. No sound, no movement, no idea, no context. Just pictures, forming and fading in my mind so quickly that I could barely identify them myself in the brief time that each one was there in front of me.

Pictures of London first: Marble Arch, the Jerusalem Tavern, a back street in Soho where I’d been mugged. And parts of places: a door I didn’t recognize, with green paint peeling from bleached wood; an aerial view of two large Dumpsters with some kid sitting in between them, sniffing glue out of a Waitrose bag; the tracks of two tires on a gravel drive, like waves in a Zen garden. Then people: faces, hands, shoulders, smiling and snarling mouths, the curve of a thigh with a hand (my hand?) touching it—abstract flesh against abstract fabric.

It was working—or at least it seemed to be. The needle turned, and the ghost was the force that pulled it. I surrendered totally to that pull, letting the images that the ghost responded to linger just that bit longer in my mind, and letting each of those pull the next picture along behind it in a sort of themed cascade. The bare thigh became a man’s chest, a well-muscled arm, an erect cock, and then, inexplicably, the wheel arch of a car against a curb, with fat raindrops sitting on it. More cars, on roads, on driveways, in garages full of junk, their wheels up on makeshift brick pilings.

Roads. Cities. Houses. Rooms. Another pull from the ghost, stronger this time. It didn’t like the rooms so much, so the pictures veered back out into daylight: parks, trees, a bench in some garden, the outhouse behind a pub.

The link was flowing now with frictionless ease, and with it came a sense of being a machine in someone else’s hands. If my mind was a projector, the ghost was holding the remote and clicking me on. I let it happen: no resistance, no recoil. More pub scenes, men laughing, men puking, men talking shit with messianic fervor. Another tug: take me somewhere else.

A pavement by the Thames, just down from the Oak; postpub stations of the cross in Soho, Covent Garden, Bounds Green, Spitalfields, the Albert Dock, Porte d’Orléans, Mala Strana under Prague Castle. A huge tug on that one, and now I was seeing a bridge with snow on it, spotless except for the clear double line of my footprints; an open-air smithy in some town square I’d wandered through in northern France, the owner dipping a slender ingot of red-hot metal into black, oil-slicked water; a dirt road in some place I couldn’t put a name to, wet with new rain and a little blood.

A shed door, seen from the inside, the wood splintered and torn in vertical lines as though an animal had been clawing at it; a man’s arm, gripping a shot glass and raised in salute; a piece of paper, held up to the window of a car by a much smaller and slimmer hand, and almost transparent because of the condensation on the glass, so I could see the smudged writing on the other side: .

I wasn’t feeding into this process at all anymore, and these weren’t any memories of mine. Somewhere along the way, the ghost had taken my slides out of the projector and slipped in some of its own. I didn’t know what she was getting out of it, but for me it was working—helping me to triangulate on that weak trace and build it up into a clear sense of her that I could use in an exorcism.

Meanwhile, the images kept coming. A frozen lake with the chimneys of some kind of factory rising behind it. A room with no windows and no furniture except for a shapeless sofa covered in a bright orange fabric with suspect stains on it. The curve of a woman’s shoulders and back, the woman turned away from me, her hand up as though to hide her face from my eyes. A book with a page torn out of it, held in the heavy grip of a man’s hand, his finger tracing the tear, the herringbone tracks of a stainless-steel watchband written in red across his wrist. The edge of some kind of patterned fabric, red and yellow check. A row of plastic bottles, some empty, some full of clear liquid, standing at the foot of a wall. A man’s face, cold and hard, behind his back a snowcapped mountain, one hand raised beside his head with the fingers spread wide.

That was the one that did it for me, because I knew that face—knew it better than I wanted to. My body arched backward, and the shift in balance was enough to topple the chair I was sitting in. I went crashing to the floor, and a second later, the sound was echoed in another crash from somewhere far above me.

I was so groggy and dazed for a moment as I came up from the half trance that I didn’t realize what that meant. But a single thought cut through the shit and fog that filled my brain. I’d lost her again. I’d been so close that another few seconds would have been enough to nail her down for good, and then I’d jolted myself out of the receptive state and lost her.

Then a second thought dropped into place next to the first.

There was someone else as well as me in the building.

I mean, someone else who was still alive.

Further thoughts crowded in on those first two, muddying the waters. There were any number of explanations for the noise. It could just have been the echo of my own fall or a sound from the street outside that had bounced in a weird way and come back to my ears from inside the building. And if it was another live human being, five would get you plenty it would only be Jon Tiler popping back in for his bag again, even later than last night.

My mind was pulled back to the images that had just flicked through it. They were still vividly there, hanging in front of my eyes in the dark—vivid enough to obliterate my dim surroundings if I let them. The car, the factories, the wristwatch—these were things from the modern world, so they shot to pieces any idea that the ghost was a turn-of-the-century Russian whose spirit had become entangled in some old love letters or a promissory note.

And with that realization came another. Bare arms with a hood? The ghost wasn’t wearing any kind of full-length cloak or ecclesiastical robe; it was most likely to be a hoodie. Like I said, sometimes I’m so corkscrew sly and subtle that I miss what’s right in front of my face.

But it was the last image that had left me reeling. Like I said, I knew the man, and if he’d been here at the archive before me, then I needed to have words with Peele sooner than soon—some of which would be of the kind that you’re not liable to read in the Bible.

I pulled myself together, which took a bit of an effort. Wherever I went next, I was all done here. The room didn’t have any more revelations to offer me, because the ghost had nothing to do with any of the stuff in these boxes. In the chagrin and frustration of that moment, my thoughts went back to the crash, which was a welcome diversion from the clutter and confusion that the rest of my mind was now filled with.

There was another explanation for that sound. It could be the ghost itself, stirred up by our little two-handed game and throwing another tantrum. If it was, then I might have a chance of collecting the last coffin nail, the last tiny sliver of her psychic fingerprint that would allow me to do my stuff. Something to report to Alice—besides “I’ve been barking up the wrong tree and now I’ve got splinters”—would be very useful.

Well, I sure as hell had nothing to lose. I picked myself up off the floor, stepped out of the room, and headed on down the hallway. I’d been through this maze a few times now, but in the dark, I still managed to miss my way. Somehow when I should have come to the bottom of the first set of stairs, I came to a dead end instead and had to retrace my steps. Strange. That blind-ended corridor had the worst vibes of all: a headache-inducing sludge of sorrow. Something really unpleasant must have happened there once, or maybe it was just that the tumble I’d taken had bent my psychic tuning fork all out of shape.

Second time lucky. I found my way to the stairs and walked up quickly, my footsteps filling the unpeopled silence like the marching of a clumsy ghost army. Up, down, in, out. I threaded my way through the nearly dark corridors by feel, with the occasional help of a patch of dirty yellow white light from the street outside. I passed the workroom, which was silent and empty, Alice’s office, then Peele’s. Everything here was silent, dark, and deserted. If it was the ghost who’d made the sound, it seemed she was taking a breather.

I walked on until I came to the main stairwell—the stone one that led down to the lobby—and there I stopped and listened. This place was an echo chamber; if anything moved in the building, my best chance of hearing it was probably from right there.

But there was nothing to hear except for the blood drumming in my own ears. Perhaps I’d got it wrong in the first place; that thunderous bang that had followed the sound of my chair falling over could have come from almost anywhere. I was about to give up on it when suddenly there was a quick rustle of movement from the dark above me, instantly stilled. I waited, but nothing followed on from this flurry of sound. Interesting. There’s a kind of silence that just has the overwhelming feel of someone trying desperately not to break it, and that was the kind of silence I was breathing in right then. From my earlier wanderings, I remembered that the fourth floor was mainly additional office space and nonsecure storage, and above that there were the empty shells of rooms where the building work was still going on.

I climbed up the next flight of steps slowly, with laborious stealth. There was no sign of anyone or anything there. I waited for another long, uneventful while and was rewarded by another microscopic fragment of sound from just above my head: a floorboard protesting as someone shifted his weight. I climbed again, into the attic level, where the palletloads of bricks waited in the dark like the ghosts of strong rooms yet to be born. I trod carefully here; the ropes of the block and tackle hanging down into the stairwell had reminded me that the railings had been removed from the top landing. One foot out of place, and I’d be doing a vertical quick step.

The building got less extensive horizontally the farther up you went; most of the extensions had been to the first and second floors. Up here in the roof space, there was a single straight corridor with half a dozen rooms leading off it, three to each side. The great rose window was directly over my head here, and through it I could see a few stars breaking cover as a mass of black cloud shifted off westward. They did nothing to relieve the darkness, though; it was even more dense and opaque up here than it had been on the floor below. I squinted down the corridor. Nothing to see, but that didn’t mean there was nothing there.

I walked down the corridor, trying each door in turn. They all opened, and they all gave onto empty rooms. Those on the right-hand side were completely bare, just dusty floorboards and nailed-up plasterboard, without even electric sockets or lights. Those on the left were in a more finished state, but turned out, when I flicked on the shadeless lights, to hold nothing more interesting than a few boxes and stacks of old papers.

But the last door on the left was already slightly ajar. I pushed the door fully open and scanned the room from the corridor without trying to walk in. I found the light switch to the right of the door and pressed it. Nothing happened. Either the bulb had given out already, or more likely nobody had bothered to put one in the socket yet. It was too dark to see much, but the room seemed to be little more than a cupboard; shelves extended from floor to ceiling on the wall facing me, which was only about six feet away. More box files and stacked papers: a smell of sour, unbreathed air.

I took a single step forward, over the threshold. I just about had time to take a paranoid glance behind the door before someone barged me hard from behind, sending me staggering forward into the room. I slammed painfully into the shelving before I could even fall. One of the shelves tipped under my weight, but I got my balance back and turned around.

The light from a torch dazzled me momentarily—and then the torch itself, wielded in a more blunt-instrument kind of way, smacked me on the side of the head. But since the light of the torch telegraphed the movement, I was moving with it; instead of being brained, I just got a clip to the side of the head, and then I was up and fighting.

Fighting someone who seemed a fair bit more solid than me and who took my body punch in his stride. He hit me again, with his fist this time instead of the torch, and I went down on my back.

I heard the door slam to; that got me up again fast. If my attacker had a key, I could be locked in here. I got both hands around the door handle and leaned down and in. I pulled, and he pulled back against me. I braced myself with one foot on the wall, the other on the floor, and pulled harder.

When the door flew inward, I staggered back and almost went down again—but for the second time I hit the shelves and managed to stay upright. As my attacker’s footsteps retreated along the corridor, I was out of the door and after him. I couldn’t see him up ahead, but I could hear him, his feet crashing on the bare boards. I came out onto the landing at a flat run, registering about a second too late that those pounding footfalls had stopped.

I just about caught a blur of movement from off to my right-hand side, and I started to turn. His shoulder hit me midchest, knocking the breath right out of me and sending me backward in a drunken, flailing stagger. One step, two . . . I would probably have managed to get my balance back if there’d been anything under me on step three. Instead, my trailing foot stepped out into nothingness, and I tipped and fell without a sound off the edge of the landing.

I’m too introspective, maybe, to make a good man of action. Certainly on that short fall, I didn’t have enough time even to react to what was happening. I remember throwing out my arms as if there might be something conveniently placed for me to catch hold of. Only empty air rushed through my fingers, and I closed my eyes, bracing myself—metaphorically speaking—for a solid chunk of marble tiling to rush through my head.

But something writhed out of the shadows to one side of me like the business end of a lash, thwacking solidly against my chest and the side of my head and then snaking around me once, twice, three times. Along the line where it touched me, fire ate its way inward from my skin to my core, and I opened my mouth to scream.

The sickening jolt as I stopped falling turned the scream into a voiceless bullet of breath that shot through my clenched teeth and ricocheted away into the darkness. I dangled for a moment like the bob on the end of a pendulum telling borrowed time. Then the rope loosened and unraveled from around me, and I fell the remaining few feet to the ground.

I landed heavily on the cold tiles, unable for a moment even to suck breath back into my lungs. Someone ran past me, and I got a blurry view of his back as he sped through the open door.

By the time I could get back on my feet and stagger to the door, there was no sign of anybody out on Churchway. A sudden gust of cold wind blew newspaper pages and Styrofoam burger boxes along the pavement, and that was the only movement. After a few moments to get my breath back to normal, I went back inside and climbed the stairs back up to the attic. This time, though, I turned on the lights—so this time, I saw the short dogleg at the end of the corridor, off to the left, that I’d missed the first time around.

There was another door there, too, off the end of the dogleg, and so on the same line as the other left-hand rooms, but maybe slightly smaller. This was where my attacker had hidden—after pushing open another door on the main corridor so that I’d be that bit more likely to turn my back on him before I reached him. Clever guy. Clever and scared and just a bit desperate. Someone who had taken advantage of the archive being open after hours to slip back inside and . . . well, and what?

I tried the door. It opened like all the others, and there was a functional light switch just inside. It showed me a room no different from any of the ones I’d already seen. No shelves this time, but a big bundle of flat-packed storage boxes tied with string stood propped against one wall. On the floor there was a roll of brown parcel tape and a plastic supermarket bag that, on inspection, proved to be stuffed with a great many other plastic supermarket bags. No big revelations here. Maybe the guy had just retreated in front of me as I came up the stairs until he ran out of space to retreat into and came out fighting. They say you ought to be careful when you corner rats.

But there was a cupboard. I only saw it as I turned to leave, because it was a low, squat sort of cupboard, and it was completely hidden behind the door. I pulled on the handle: locked. I probably had the key that would open it sitting right there on Alice’s key ring, but my hands were shaking from my recent air-miss, and it could take me a long time to find it—with the risk that someone down below would see the light where no light should be and draw the wrong conclusion. All in all, it was probably better to wait.

I went downstairs, let myself out, and locked up. I was about to post Alice’s keys and ID card back through the mail slot, but I yielded to a wicked temptation and put them back in my pocket instead. You never knew.

I was intending to go home, but somehow I found myself heading south instead of north. Just down from Russell Square, I found a late-night bar that was still open, went in, and ordered a whisky sour.

I was bone weary, and I wasn’t thinking all that straight, but coming to the archive by night had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. It wasn’t some freak accident that had tangled me up in the ropes of the builders’ pulley. It wasn’t the air that had held me and stopped me from falling. It was her. And in wrapping herself around me like that, she’d come in so close that I couldn’t possibly fail to get what I needed. I had her now, had her mapped out in my mind in many dimensions—a vivid sensory snapshot of her essence and her parameters that was untranslatable except into music and that I could no more forget than I could forget my own name.

I toasted myself in silence. They think it’s all over, said Ken Wolstenholme’s voice from deep within the dusty archive of my head.

Well, it is now.