The Devil You Know

Eleven

OVER THERE,” WHISPERED JOHN GITTINGS. “IN THE corner, behind the hedge.”

I looked where he was pointing and saw nothing. But then a second later, the leaves of the box hedge rustled again, although there wasn’t the slightest breath of wind. One of the keepers raised his rifle, and I pushed it right back down again.

“You don’t even know what you’d be hitting,” I muttered. “You’d look pretty bloody stupid if it was a peacock.”

John and I exchanged a glance as the keeper shipped his rifle again with obvious resentment. “Pincer movement?” John asked.

“Makes sense,” I said. “I’m going to go around the zebra house and use the back wall for cover. You come in along the line of the hedge on this side, but don’t get in too close. When I round that corner, we should see each other. I’ll give you the high sign, and we both start playing at once.”

John nodded tersely. I turned to the head keeper, a guy named Savage. He wasn’t carrying a rifle, and he seemed to be the only one of the zoo staff who didn’t want to play Buffalo Bill. “The music should drive him out toward you,” I said. “He won’t be able to stick to the hedge because he’ll be hurting too much. If we’re lucky, he’ll just break across the grass, and you can pop him at your leisure.”

“That seems easy enough,” Savage acknowledged.

“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Only if we hit the wrong key, he’ll turn around and tear our throats out.”

“He” was a loup-garou, and I was moonlighting. John’s call had come in at seven in the morning, when I was just surfacing from shallow sleep and another set of very nasty dreams. Pen had relayed the message, expecting me to say some pithier equivalent of “No, thank you”—and was amazed when I passed back the answer that I’d be there inside of an hour.

It’s a character flaw, I know. When I’m unhappy about something, I pick a fight, and that morning, I was in such a lousy mood, I’d have taken a swing at John “The Quietman” Ruiz. So all things considered, the other John’s invitation to come and help him corner a werewolf at Dunstable Zoo had come as something of a relief.

Were-something, anyway. They didn’t know exactly what they had, because all they’d seen were the savaged carcasses of five animals: three wallabies, a zebra, and most recently a lion. So we were talking about something vicious and fast that didn’t care what it killed, and now they thought they had it cornered in a stand of trees at the back of the site between the rhino enclosure and a high wall that backed onto the main A-road beyond. The keepers had closed in with tranquilizer guns, but they couldn’t flush the loup-garou, and they didn’t want to go in blind.

So here I was. It was therapy, really—a way of keeping busy without facing the things that were really bugging me. If it left me alive and in one piece, I’d be laughing.

I skirted the back of the zebra house, staying in close. I wasn’t worried that he’d see me—there wouldn’t be any line of sight until I got to the corner—but the rank zebra-shit smell ought to hide my scent from him while I got in closer.

When I got to the corner, I peered cautiously around it, scanning the distant line of the hedge. After a moment or two, I made out Gittings; he was padding silently along, zeroing in on the area where we’d seen the suspicious rustling of leaves.

I waved to him, and he waved back. But when I started the countdown on my raised fingers, he made a negative sign with his left hand, the right gripping his tabor. John’s a music man, like me: strictly percussion, but it still puts us close enough in our exorcism technique that we can work well together. Now he was signaling that he wanted to get in closer. I shook my head emphatically. We were only trying to flush the beast with generalized psychic static, not to exorcise the spirit that was animating whatever flesh we had here. We didn’t need to be right on top of the damned thing.

But John had other ideas, obviously. Ignoring my vote of no confidence, he took another few steps forward along the hedge. Then he went down on one knee, pointed to me, and indicated that he’d do the countdown himself. I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t have any choice. I shrugged and nodded.

On zero, I started to pipe. I opened low and soft, let the wind pick it up, and then started to layer in the dips and rises that ought to get the loup-garou’s ghost-passenger hurting.

For a minute, and then a minute more, nothing. But patience was the key. I glided up and down the scale, confident that sooner or later, I was going to hit a nerve. John knelt, nodding encouragement to me, his left hand dancing like a conductor’s baton. But he still hadn’t started to play.

There was movement in the box hedge: branches trembling, then bending, seemingly only a foot away from where John was kneeling.

I was expecting something to burst out of the hedge. The thing leapt over it and hit the ground already running—running toward me. Rifles popped, but the keepers had been aiming low to the ground; I could actually see the scatter and swirl of leaves as most of the darts ripped harmlessly into the hedge.

The beast was a nightmare. Even now that it was out in the daylight, I couldn’t see what animal it had been. The ghost inside it had bulked out the torso and the legs and turned the gape-mouthed head into a tooth-bristling, mythical obscenity. Of course it didn’t help that I was seeing it full-on; teeth filled most of my line of sight.

Gittings was standing now, and his fingers on the tabor made a loud, rapid stutter of sound like machine-gun fire. The beast didn’t slow, and it was coming in so quickly, it would be on me in seconds. I had two choices: run and be brought down from behind, or stand my ground and get my throat ripped out.

I went for option C. Since the thing could jump like a flea, that was probably what it was going to do. When its upper body came down low to the ground, tensing for the spring, I dropped and rolled forward. Its flying leap took it over me while I finished my roll on my back and got in a lucky kick that caught its hind leg and made a mess of its landing trajectory.

Didn’t do me much good, though. Okay, I was up and running before it could get all its legs in their right places again and turn around, but the bastard thing went from zero to sixty in three seconds. With me these days, it’s more like three weeks’ notice and a friendly push-start. The thing’s whole weight hit me solidly in the middle of the back, and my feet went out from under me. I hit the ground heavily, face slamming hard into the grass. Stenching furnace breath billowed over me, and I ducked and covered only just in time to hear massive jaws snapping closed an inch from my ear.

They only closed once, I’m happy to say. Five sharp cracks sounded closely enough together to be mistaken for one, and the thing collapsed on top of me. A moment later, the keepers were hauling me out from underneath the loup-garou’s stinking, slumbering mass.

God, it was even worse this close up. The basic shape was canine, but the claws were recurved like sickle blades, and there were additional spurs of bone at elbows and haunches. Splotchy fur like a hyena’s covered its overmuscled shoulders, but its hind quarters were bare and leprous. It must have massed about two hundred and fifty pounds.

“Old soul,” said Savage with something like respect. He meant that this was a ghost that had been around the track a few times and had picked up some neat tricks where the molding of its host flesh was concerned. Even now, it was impossible to tell what kind of dog this monster had started out as.

“Have you got a cage to put it in?” I asked.

He shot me a glance; shook his head. “We couldn’t keep this here. The smell of it would make the other animals run mad. No, this goes to Professor Mulbridge down in London. And good riddance.”

Gittings came up panting. “Sorry, Fix,” he said. “I thought this way would work better.”

I gave him a high-octane glare. “What way is that?” I demanded. “You sit on your hands, I lose my head?”

“No. I wanted you to get its attention and then, while it was focused on you, I thought I’d have time to do a full exorcism. That’s why I got in so close. Rip the ghost out of the flesh, and you’ve just got an animal, after all. Much easier to deal with.”

I poked him in the chest. “Don’t change the plan on the ground when it’s me that’s in the line of fire, John. Next time, you find another piece of raw meat to dangle, okay?”

He was contrite. “Sorry, Fix. You’re right. It just seemed like a good idea.”

I simmered down. It had been a bad call, but it wasn’t really Gittings that was jangling my nerves, and taking it out on him wouldn’t make me feel any better.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Breakfast’s on me,” said John recklessly. But my churned-up stomach wouldn’t let me eat, so that was a really cheap round.

Driving back into London, I thought about the various reversals that last night had brought. I asked myself why the hell I was out in the Bedfordshire sticks doing a good impersonation of live bait instead of in the Bonnington, whistling the faceless lady back to her grave.

And the only answer I could come up with was that I was still unhappy.

Pen needed the car, so I dropped it back around to her. Walking down Turnpike Lane, I called Peele to tell him I had some things to do that would keep me away from the archive for most of the day.

“What’s left of the day, you mean,” he corrected me prissily. “It’s almost noon now.”

Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. “I had some other matters to attend to,” I said.

“Other matters?” He was suitably scandalized. “You mean you’re taking on more commissions before you’ve finished here?”

“No, I went to the zoo.”

“Very amusing, Mr. Castor. The things that you’re doing today, can you honestly tell me that they relate to us? To our problem here?”

“Yes,” I said, which was true enough. “A lot of it is about getting more background information. I’m on the case. I feel like I’m really moving forward.” And now I was stretching the truth more or less to breaking point. “But if I can use a military metaphor, Mr. Peele, sometimes when you move forward too fast, you leave your flanks exposed. I just want to make sure that I’m not missing something.”

He gave in sullenly and indicated that there was a conversation that needed to be had about an incident in the workroom the day before. I told him I’d be at his disposal either later that day or first thing tomorrow. Then, before he could hang up, I hit him with the little sting in the tail I’d been holding back all this time.

“Oh, just one more thing before you go, Mr. Peele,” I said like Columbo’s understudy. “Why didn’t you tell me I was the second name on your list?”

“I’m sorry?” Peele sounded surprised and coldly affronted—as if I’d accused him of marital infidelity.

I rephrased. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d already used another exorcist? Gabriel McClennan has been in the Bonnington, and he’s met your ghost. I like to know if I’m unpicking someone else’s work rather than doing a job from scratch.”

There was a long silence. “I don’t understand,” Peele said at last. “Who told you that? Nobody else has been at the archive. I came to you first.”

He sounded sincere, but I couldn’t let it go. I knew what I’d seen when the ghost was flashing pictures into my head. “You came to me first. Okay. Why was that, exactly? You said it was a personal referral. Who from?” I should have asked him before. Nothing to plead in my own defence there except ego, because it was an obvious question.

“I did say that,” Peele admitted, sounding annoyed now. “I’m afraid it was an overstatement. What I meant to say was that I’d done the research myself—chosen you on the basis of my own efforts, rather than—”

“You saw one of my ads,” I suggested.

“Yes.” Reluctantly, with a slightly sullen undertone—the voice of an honest man who’s been caught out in a trivial lie. “I believe it was in the classified section of the Hendon Times . . .”

My ad had been in the Wembley Times, but all of the North London free sheets are basically the same paper with a different masthead. After what had happened with Rafi, though, I’d never renewed the standing order. The ad wouldn’t have been in there for over a year.

Bachelor flat. Stack of newspapers getting taller and taller in a corner of the kitchen or a hall cupboard.

“This was an old copy, right?”

“Perhaps. I looked through several issues, but more or less at random.”

It made sense, but I was still suspicious.

“My office is in Harlesden. This other man, Gabriel McClennan, he’s local talent. You’ve probably walked past his office on your way to work—”

“I told you, I’ve never heard of an exorcist named McClennan!” Peele sounded irritated and indignant now—and it didn’t have the hallmarks of the anger you use to cover up a lie, with which I’m more than familiar. But I couldn’t have mistaken that face. The archive ghost had met Gabe McClennan at close quarters. Another exorcist had already worked the place, and yet she was still there. So if it wasn’t Peele, somebody else was trying to exorcise the ghost. Now why would that be?

“Okay, skip it,” I told Peele brusquely. I’d follow up in my own sweet time, but it didn’t look as though I was going to find out any more right then—and I knew better than to clutch at straws purely so that I could flog dead horses with them. “How did your meeting in Bilbao go?” I asked to change the subject.

Peele was aware of the discontinuity but unable to resist the red herring. “Very well, thank you. Very successfully indeed. I hope to hear good news within the next few days—news that will strengthen the links between the Bonnington and the Guggenheim Museum and be good for both institutions. But Mr. Castor, I need to know more about the progress you’ve made. Alice says—”

“Excellent progress, Mr. Peele. Better than I’d expected. In fact, I’ve just been able to eliminate a false trail that might have tied up a lesser exorcist for two whole days. Sorry to disrupt your morning. I’ll check in with you later on.”

“A false trail?” he echoed, bemused. But I hung up before he could shape that into an actual question.

The cloud had set in again thicker than ever, stone gray buttresses hanging over the city like masonry suspended in midfall. I took the Tube to Leicester Square and then headed up Charing Cross Road before turning west into Soho.

There was something going on at the archive that I was being kept in the dark about—I didn’t like that much. And I’d been pulled back from the brink of a broken neck, or worse, like a toddler wandering in traffic—I liked that even less.

Worst of all, I knew what it was that had saved me. And that was a pill so bitter, I almost couldn’t get it down.

Gabe McClennan has an office on Greek Street, and he calls it that with a straight face. The signs at street level read NEW MODEL IN TOWN, INDIAN HEAD MASSAGE, and gabriel p. mcclennan, spiritual services. The street door was open, so I went in, but Gabe’s door was locked, and there was a damp, heavy silence. The model and masseuse probably did most of their work on the night shift, but Gabe’s shingle ought to be open now if it ever was. On the other hand, let him who keeps regular office hours cast the first stone. I knocked a few times just in case, but got no answer.

Later, then. Because I was damn well going to finish this jigsaw off now that I’d started it—even if I had to knock some of the pieces into place with a ball-peen hammer. Yeah, I could just have played the tune and taken the money, like the Pied Piper, but I guess I’m not as pied as I make myself out to be. In any case, and for reasons I wasn’t keen to explore, it had suddenly become important for me to get at least some idea of what the hell I was dealing with here. Call it professional pride. Or call it what you like.

I had three places on my itinerary, and I’d budgeted the whole day. That may sound a bit pessimistic, given that they were all in North London, but my first port of call was the Camden Town Hall planning department. You don’t exactly abandon hope, but you certainly slip it into a back pocket.

Back at King’s Cross again; it felt like I’d never left. The town hall building looks like a set from an old Doctor Who episode, and to some extent, that gives a fair impression of the experience you’re likely to have when you go in there: meeting strange, not-quite-human creatures, burning your way through vast swathes of time, that sort of thing. I went in through the Judd Street entrance and was sent straight back out again; planning was at the other end of the building and was entered via Argyle Street. The gods of local government would be angry if I walked straight through, and I’d end up with my resident’s parking permit revoked and a council-tax bill for seven grand and my immortal soul.

Actually, the system worked surprisingly well, at least to begin with. I knew I was being set up for a fall, but I took it for what it was worth. The planning department had partly gone over to computerized records. There were half a dozen terminals set up in the foyer where you could just sit down, type in an address, and get a planning history. Thinking about Cheryl, I spared a brief moment of pity for whoever was sitting in the bowels of the building, retroconverting.

“You won’t get everything,” I was told by an arrogant, acned young clerk who looked less like a Doctor Who villain and more like the kid in a teen gross-out comedy who doesn’t get the girl but does lose his trousers at the graduation ceremony. “There’ll only be an entry where there’ve been changes to the building since the late 1940s—that’s when the planning-application system came in. If you don’t know your dates, you could be here for a long time.”

But I wasn’t choosy, and it turned out that there were a whole fistful of documents on file for 3 Churchway, Somers Town, one of them going all the way back to 1949. That one was an application to repair bomb damage to the roof, frontage, and right exterior wall. Back then, the building was listed as belonging to the war office, but by the mid-1950s, when an application was put in to extend it to the rear, it had become an “annex to the British Library.” Then nothing until 1983, when there was a further extension and a change-of-use certificate; now number 23 was going to come under local authority control and house an unemployment claims office and a job center. Well, that was the Thatcher era—unemployment was a growth industry. One final application, from 1991, was for interior works. I suppose that was when they put in all the bare, brutalist staircases, the fake walls, and the dead ends. Nothing on file for the work that was going on now, but maybe current work was filed elsewhere.

That was as far as I could get online. Now I had to fill in some request slips and hand them in at a small counter in the main planning office. This was a large room on the second floor, cut in two by a long Formica counter, and it was as busy as a cattle auction. Most of the people there were men in overalls who were looking to get official stamps on hastily scrawled documents, but there was also a leavening of clerks from other parts of the building filing forms or retrieving forms or maybe just exchanging pheromones like worker ants.

I waited for almost an hour and a half before a stern, middle-age lady with a face out of a Far Side cartoon came back with a package for me. It was a set of photocopies of the oldest plans they had for 23 Churchway—the ones that had been filed back in 1949—and the newest ones from the 1990s. I figured that with those fixed points to work from, I could fill in the gaps.

So far so good. I genuflected to the dark gods and got out of there fast. My next stop was the British Newspaper Library, out in Colindale. A Thameslink train from King’s Cross took me to Mill Hill, and on the way out there, I took a look at the building plans. As I’d expected, the ones from 1991 had all the new staircases and corridors and fire doors marked in and were so small and so complicated, they looked like a maze in a kids’ puzzle book: help Uncle Felix get from the office to the haunted strong room—but look out for that nasty Mr. Peele. By contrast, the 1949 plans were austere and simple and clear, and showed fewer than half as many rooms. The place had grown and mutated to the point where the original architect would probably need the plans just to find the street door.

I didn’t know the building well enough yet to pinpoint the room where the Russian stuff was being kept, but the first floor as a whole seemed to have been made over according to a crude but workable plan. Each of the original rooms had been split down the middle, so every second wall was a new plasterboard partition. The original doors, too wide for the new, smaller rooms, had been bricked in, and new, narrower doorways had been put through. A secondary staircase that showed on the original plans had been torn down, the space cannibalized to make small cubicles that were probably toilets or store cupboards. At the same time, the cramped stairways that I’d seen in situ had been created, wedged into the new ground plan wherever there was a gap too narrow to become an actual room. The overall effect was really depressing—it was like reading the tactical projections for the rape of a corpse.

From Mill Hill overground, I walked the rest of the way—but then I overshot and found myself walking past the grounds of the Metropolitan Police Training Academy, which were filled with primary-school kids learning how to ride bikes. A young woman was looking wistfully through the chain-link fence at all the children zooming and zigzagging through a maze sketched out in orange plastic bollards. She turned to look at me; there was an unhealthy bloom to her skin, and I caught the faint sweet-sour whiff of decay wafting off her. She was one of the returned. Her mud-stained jeans and sweatshirt and the occasional strand of dry grass in her hair gave a fairly clear indication of where she’d slept last night.

“I’m still waiting,” she said.

I should have just walked on by, but her face had that Ancient Mariner quality. I was the one in three.

“Waiting for what?” I asked her.

“For the children. I said I’d be here when they got back.” A spasm passed across her slack face—annoyance, or unease, or maybe something purely physiological. “Mark said something about a car. There was a car. They didn’t get the number.” A leaden pause. “I told them I’d wait here.”

With the sound of happy shouts and laughter ringing in my ears, I trudged on my way. I looked back once. She was staring through the fence again, her arms hanging at her sides, her face a solemn mask, trying to read the runes of a life that wasn’t hers anymore.

Two minutes later, I entered the cathedral-like silence of the Newspaper Library, which smells like a worldful of armpits and is illuminated by five-watt strip lights guaranteed not to damage old newsprint by allowing it to be read.

I was probably wasting my time here, but I needed to rule out the obvious before I started looking for more esoteric answers. If the Bonnington Archive was built on an old Indian burying ground, or if someone had slaughtered the entire staff in an obscene necromantic ritual back in the 1960s, when that stuff counted as hip, I’d feel pretty damn stupid to have missed it.

You can get most of this material from other, more salubrious places now, but the Colindale Library has still got the fullest index of anywhere I know and a stack of old papers on microfiche that goes way back into the mists of antiquity—probably to headlines like ONE IN THE EYE FOR HAROLD.

But Churchway, Somers Town, hadn’t made the headlines once in all those many years. It seemed to be a place where nothing much had ever happened. No penny dreadfuls. No Victorian melodramas. No threads to follow, which only helped insofar as it offered no more blind alleys for me to walk down—and threw me back on my own resources. That was okay. I still had some.

When I came back out onto the sunlit street, blinking in a brightness that seemed somehow unreal after that half-lit world, the risen woman I’d met on my way in was loitering on the well-tended patch of lawn just outside the library’s side door. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were working silently.

I had to pass her, but I gave her a wide berth this time; I didn’t want to get sucked into her private world of unresolved crises and suspended time. I got about ten yards farther down the street.

“Felix.” The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I spun round. Nothing in the zombie’s expression or posture had changed. It might not even have been her voice; one congealed mumble sounds much like another.

But then her eyes flicked open. She looked up and around, fixed me with a slightly dazed stare.

“He says you’re closer now than you were,” she whispered. “Even though you think you’re lost. He says this is where it starts getting hot.”

Another spasm crossed her sallow face. Her eyes closed again, and she went back to her silent recital. There was nothing to say, so I didn’t say it.

One more stop to make, and it wasn’t exactly on my way.

Nicky’s current place of residence is the old EMD cinema in Walthamstow. That gives him loads of room—more than he actually needs, if he’s honest. The place has been closed and boarded up since 1986. Entrance is via a second-floor window, but that’s less inconvenient than it sounds, because there’s a shed at the back of the building with a flat roof. It’s just a case of shinnying up a drainpipe, which, if you’ve learned it as a kid, is a trick you never really forget.

Nicky was in the projection room, as always, at his computer, as always. And, as always, the cold bit into me right through my tightly buttoned-up coat. The air-conditioning units are standard industrial ones, but Nicky has been over them himself, taken them to pieces and rebuilt them to his own more exacting specifications. The blast they put out now is like a wind sweeping off the South Pole across the Larsen B ice shelf.

Nicky was pleased to see me, because I usually bring him something to feed two of his three addictions—say, a bottle of some really good French red and a couple of jazz singles of 1940s vintage. Today I was short-changing him slightly; I only had the wine. All the same, he was cordial. He’d noticed some new pattern in the ephemeral ripples that stir the surface of the material world, and he wanted someone to bounce it off.

“Here, Fix,” he said eagerly, swiveling his monitor to face me. “Check this out. Look where it spikes.”

With his Mediterranean tan and his extensive (if largely shoplifted) wardrobe, Nicky doesn’t look like a walking corpse; he looks like a fashion model who’s hit hard times. That’s a tribute to his absolute dedication—his obsessive attention to detail. Most of the dead who’ve risen in the body tend to wander around in an unhappy and aimless way, getting further and further past their sell-by date, until the battle between decomposition and willpower shifts inexorably past a certain balance point. Then they fall down and don’t get up. In rare cases, the spirit freed from its flesh-house will find another vacant cadaver and start all over again. Mostly they just give up the ghost, as it were.

But that wasn’t Nicky’s style. Back when he was still alive—which was when I’d first met him—he’d been one of the most dangerous lunatics I’d ever met outside of a secure institution, and what made him dangerous was his ability to focus on one idea and squeeze it until it bled. He was a tech-head conspiracy theorist who cut open the Internet to read its entrails; a paranoiac who thought every message ever sent, every word ever written was ultimately about him. He thought of the world in terms of a web—a communal web devised by a great agglomeration of spiders. If you were a fly, he said, the only way to stay alive was to avoid touching any of the sticky threads, to leave no trail that anyone could follow back to you. Of course, he wasn’t alive anymore—a heart attack at the ripe young age of thirty-six had taken care of that—but his opinions were unchanged.

“Right. What am I looking at?” I demanded, stalling for time as I looked at the graph on his computer monitor. There was a red line, and there was a green line. There was a horizontal axis, marked out in years, and a vertical axis not marked at all. The two lines did seem to be in rough synchrony.

“This is the FTSE 100 share index,” Nicky said, tracing the green line with the tip of his finger. His fingernail was caked with black dirt. It was probably oil; he had his own generator, which he’d half-inched from a building site. He didn’t like drawing power directly from the national grid for reasons given above. In Nicky’s world, invisibility is the great, maybe the only, virtue.

“And the red line?” I asked, setting down the bottle of Margaux I’d picked up for him at Oddbins. Nicky doesn’t drink the wine. He doesn’t manufacture any stomach enzymes anymore, so he wouldn’t be able to metabolize it. He says he can still smell it, though—and he’s built up a nose for the expensive stuff.

He shot me a slightly defensive look. “The red line is a bit of an artifact,” he admitted. “It plots the first and final readings of pro-EU legislation, or a statement by any government front-bencher in favor of greater European integration.”

I bent low to get a better look. Nicky smelled of Old Spice and embalming fluid—not of decay, because his body was not so much a temple as a fortress, and no crack in a fortress can be considered small. All the same, I liked it better when he had his rig set up down in the cinema’s main auditorium, which has better through-drafts.

“Okay,” I said. “The red line is a little out of phase. It spikes earlier.”

“Earlier, right, right,” Nicky agreed, nodding excitedly. “Two to three days earlier in most cases. Up to a week, sometimes. If you plot the recession line, the correspondence is even closer. Every time, Fix. Every fucking hail-Mary-full-of-grace time.”

I tried to get my head around this. “So you’re saying—”

“That there’s a causal link. Obviously.”

I frowned, trying to look like I was giving this serious thought. Nicky was watching me, hairy-eyed and eager. “How does that work?” I asked.

He was only too happy to explain. “It works like this. Satan is in favor of federalism, because that’s his preferred method of working. It’s like, you know”—he gestured vaguely but emphatically—“engineering the Fall of Man just by corrupting Adam and Eve. The more the nations of the world are brought under one rule, the easier it is for the infernal powers to assert direct control over the whole show—just by attacking and subduing one soul. Or a couple of hundred souls, if we’re talking about the EU Council of Ministers. So when the government pushes a European agenda, it’s because they’re in thrall to Satan and they’re doing his will.”

I chewed this over. “And the share prices?”

“That’s their reward from Satan for obeying orders. Whenever they push the whole plan forward, he makes their shares go up in value. He gives them the earthly paradise he’s always promised his servants.”

He was still looking at me, waiting for a reaction. “I don’t know, Nicky,” I said, temporizing. “The FTSE—that’s a composite figure, isn’t it? You’ve got a lot of companies there, with their own chief execs and their own business plans. And you’ve got a lot of investors with their own axes to grind . . .”

Nicky was disgusted. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Fix. Of course it’s a composite figure. I’m not saying that Satan can just wave his hand and make the share index go up and down. Obviously he works through human proxies. That’s why the lag time varies. If it was a perfect, frictionless system, it would be immediate, wouldn’t it? You’re proving my point.”

“I hadn’t thought it through that far,” I said cautiously. I sat down on the table where the printer rested; it was a heavy, old-fashioned laser jobbie, and I had to balance my buttocks precariously on about an inch of free space. “Nicky, I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

“With what?” He was instantly suspicious. He knows I don’t come around just to sniff wine and swap gossip, but he hates the fact that our relationship is mutually abusive. Like all conspiracy nuts, he’s a romantic at heart.

“A job I’m doing.”

“What kind of job?”

“The usual kind.”

Very pointedly, Nicky picked up the bottle of wine and examined the label. It was a ’97, and it wasn’t anything like cheap.

“Thought you’d given up that ghost-toasting shit,” he observed.

“I’m back.”

“Obviously.” The wine had mollified him, but only up to a point. “I’ll need another two of these,” he said. “And you mentioned some guy in Portobello Road who had Al Bowlly and Jimmy Reese together on some old Berliner hard rubber?”

I winced. “Yeah, I did say that, Nicky, but I’m not in the government, and Satan isn’t sexing up my share options just yet. The wine or the disk—not both.”

Nicky played hard to get. “Tell me what you’re looking for,” he said.

“A young woman. In her early twenties, most likely. Dark-haired. Possibly Russian or East European. The area around Euston Station. Murder or accident, could’ve been either, but violent. And sudden.”

“Time frame?”

“I don’t really know. Maybe summer. July or August.”

He snorted. “Congratulations, Fix. That’s probably the vaguest brief you’ve ever given me. Toss me a bone, here. Eye color? Complexion? Distinguishing marks?”

I thought about the blurry red veil that stood in for the ghost’s face. “That’s all I’ve got,” I said. And then, more to myself than to him, “Maybe . . . maybe her face was injured in some way.”

“The disk.”

“What?”

“I’ll go for the Berliner disk. But it better be fucking genuine. And it better be fucking Al Bowlly, not Keppard doing an Al Bowlly impression. I’ll know.”

“It’s the real thing,” I assured him. They were just names to me; my tastes run to classical, home-grown punk, and the raw end of alt dot country. I’ve got exactly enough savvy about jazz to know what to look for when I’m in need of a bribe.

“You know what your sin is, Fix?” Nicky asked me, already tapping some terms into a nameless metasearch engine that displayed in black on dark gray. “The particular thing you’ll go to Hell for?”

“Self-abuse?” I hazarded.

“Blasphemy. The last days are coming, and He writes it in the Heavens and on the Earth. The rising of the dead is a sign—I’m a sign, but you don’t want to read me. You don’t even want to accept that there’s a point to all this. A plan. You treat the Book of Revelation as if it’s a book of police mug shots. That’s why God turns His face from you. That’s why you’ll burn, in the end.”

“Right, Nicky,” I said, already walking away. “I’ll burn, and you’ll tan. For so it is written. Call me if you get anything.”

I think I was in a fairly somber mood as I walked back along Hoe Street. Something about Nicky’s tirade had brought another recent memory to the surface of my mind—Asmodeus, telling me that I was going to miss the boat because I wasn’t asking the right questions.

Everyone’s a fucking critic.

Suddenly I was dragged out of my profitless thoughts. Passing a shop, I caught my own reflection in the window, at an odd angle, and someone else was moving behind me—someone I thought for a moment that I recognized. But when I turned, she was nowhere in sight. It had looked like Rosa—the girl at Damjohn’s club, Kissing the Pink, for whom Damjohn had sent because he thought I’d like to admire her backside. Pretty unlikely that she’d be here, I had to admit, but the impression had been a really strong one all the same.

Visiting Nicky is dangerous. You can catch paranoia as easily as you can catch a cold.

By the time I got back into Central London, it was the gloomy, smoky dog-end of the afternoon. Thus runs the day away. I tried Gabe McClennan’s office again, but this time even the street door was locked.

Well then, that encounter was postponed—but not canceled. And I was left full of a restless impatience that had me striding down Charing Cross Road as though there was actually somewhere I needed to be. If it had been a few months before, I would have taken a cab over to Castlebar Hill—to the Oriflamme, which for exorcists in London is home away from home. But the Oriflamme had burned down a while back when some cocky youngblood had tried to demonstrate tantric pain control in the main bar and had set fire to himself and the curtains. There was talk of reopening elsewhere, but for the time being, it was just talk.

So I retired to a pub just off Leicester Square that used to be the Moon Under Water and was now something else, where I downed a pint of 6X and a whisky chaser to fuel my righteous wrath. Nothing was adding up here—and a job that should have been textbook-simple was developing the sort of baroque twiddles that I’d come to loathe and mistrust.

The ghost was recent. She’d lived and died in a world that already had factories, cars, and wristwatches. Okay, in theory, that could still have placed her at the turn of the century, but that wasn’t the impression I’d got. The interior trim of that car had looked very modern and very luxurious, and watches with stainless-steel bands probably didn’t even exist before the 1940s. So she didn’t come into the archive with the Russian collection. And so the thing that tied her to the building in Churchway was something different—something I’d missed in the general rush to judgment.

Of course, I didn’t really need to know who she was or who she had been—not to do the job I was being paid for. All I needed was enough of a psychic snapshot to form the basis of a cantrip, and after last night’s adventures, I already had that. So why wasn’t I breaking out the méthode champenoise round at Pen’s instead of brooding in a loud bar in Soho?

Because I was being played for an idiot—and I never did learn to take to that.

If Gabe McClennan had been at the archive, this ghost had a history that I wasn’t being told about. And if someone was scampering around the building after hours, it seemed a fair bet that they were there to keep tabs on me. Either that, or it was somebody conducting some kind of business that they didn’t want daylight to look upon. I chased my thoughts around in decreasing circles for a while before getting back to the point—which I’d been avoiding pretty strenuously.

I’d told Peele that I’d do the exorcism by the end of the week. That gave me two more days, not counting today. But I had a strong enough fix on the ghost now to weave a cantrip anytime I wanted to. The job was effectively done. I could go in tomorrow, whistle a few bars, and walk away with the rest of that grand in my pocket.

And I’d be alive and in one piece and able to do this only because the ghost had stepped in to stop me before I made that fatal misstep in the dark.

There’s a good reason why I don’t think too much about the after-life, and it’s not squeamishness. Or at least, it’s not the kind of squeamishness that would make you swerve aside from thinking about your brakes failing when you’re driving down a one-in-three cliff road—or shut off thoughts of sharks when you’re bathing in the sea off Bondi Beach.

It’s my job. Can I put it any simpler than that? It’s what I do. I send ghosts on to whatever comes next. Which means that if there’s a Heaven, say, then I’m doing a good thing, because I’m opening the door to their eternal reward. And on the other hand, if there’s no world after this one—nothing at all aside from the life we know—then I’m just erasing them. I’ve always had my own way of getting around the problem, which is by refusing to think of the ghosts themselves as human. If they’re just psychic recordings—the residues of strong emotions, left on play-and-repeat in the places where they were first experienced—then where’s the harm?

Now I could feel that particular defence crumbling and water leaking through more holes than I had fingers to plug them with.

I nursed the whisky for half an hour, then ordered another and brooded on that. And I was about to order a third when a glass appeared in front of me. It was black sambuca, and it had been served in that showy way that normally annoys the hell out of me—set on fire, with a coffee bean floating on the top—but when the woman eased herself in on the stool next to mine and leaned forward to blow out the flames, I forgot all about that.

The phrase “drop-dead gorgeous” is overused, in my opinion. Did you ever seriously look at a woman and think that your heart would stop? That the sheer intensity of her beauty threatened to burn a hole through your skull so that your brains would bleed out?

I was looking at her now.

She was tall and statuesque, where normally I go for petite and cute, but you could tell at one glance that she was the sort of woman that categories would crash and founder on. Her hair was a coal black waterfall, and her eyes were of a matching color, so intensely dark that they seemed to be all pupil. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, then her soul had an event horizon. She would have looked good with a Lady d’Arbanville snow-white pallor—good but Gothic. She was every shade in white’s spectrum, which I’d never appreciated before. Her skin was the palest ivory, her lips a darker and richer color, like churned cream. The black shirt she wore seemed to be made of many layers of some almost-sheer material, so that as she moved, it offered microsecond glimpses of the flesh beneath. By contrast, her black leather trousers showed nothing but surface contours and talked to me entirely in terms of textures. A silver chain, entirely plain, decorated her left ankle, which was crossed over her right. Black stilettos sheathed her feet.

But it was her smell that was having the strongest effect on me. For a moment, when she first sat down, it had hit me as a hot wave of rankness like the stink of a henhouse after a fox has been busy in there. Then a second later I realized I was wrong, because the smell had opened up into a thousand shades of meaning: subtle harmonies of musk and cinnamon and dew-wet summer air overlaid on sweet rose; heavy, seductive lily; and undisguised human sweat. There was even a hint of chocolate in there, and those hot, sticky boiled sweets called aniseed twists. The total effect was indescribable—the smell of a woman in heat lying in a pleasure garden that you had visited as a child.

Then those astonishing eyes blinked, slowly and languorously, and I realized that my appraisal had taken several seconds—seconds in which I had just been staring at her with my mouth slightly open.

“You had a certain look about you,” she said, as if to explain the free drink and her presence. Her voice was a deep and husky contralto; the equivalent in sound of her face. “Like a man who was reliving the past—and not really getting a lot out of it.”

I managed a shrug and then raised the sambuca in a salute. “You’re good,” I admitted, and took a long sip. The rim of the glass was still hot, and it burned into my lower lip. Good. That gave me some point of contact with reality.

“Good?” she repeated, seeming to give that a moment’s thought. “No, I’m not. Not really. You can take that as a warning.”

She’d brought her own drink over with her, too—something in a tall glass and bright red that could have been a Bloody Mary or plain tomato juice. She clinked glasses with me now and drank off half of it in one gulp.

“Given how short life is likely to be,” she said, setting the glass down and favoring me with another high-octane stare, “and how full of pain and loss and uncertainty, it’s my opinion that a man should live for the moment.”

If this was a chat-up line, it was a new one on me. I took another mouthful of her smell; I was disconcerted to find that I had an erection.

I groped for a bantering tone. “Yeah, well, normally I do. Most of the moments I’ve had today haven’t been up to all that much.”

She smiled. “But now I’m here.”

Her name was Juliet. More than that she wasn’t interested in telling me, except that it came out that she wasn’t from London. I could have told that from her accent; or rather—as with Lucasz Damjohn—her lack of one. She spoke with a kind of diamond-edged clarity, as though she was setting syllables down next to one another in line with a pattern she’d already memorized. It might have made her sound like a Eurovision Song Contest presenter, but when did Eurovision ever make you stand inside your pants?

She wasn’t interested in finding out about me, either, which was great. The less I talked shop right then, the more I liked it. Whatever the hell we did talk about, I don’t remember it now. All I remember was the absolute certainty that we were going to walk out of that bar and find somewhere where we could fuck like demented rabbits.

In the meantime, another glass of black booze arrived, and then another, and another. I drank them all without tasting them. Everything seemed to be black when you looked at it properly; Juliet’s eyes were black kaleidoscopes that stole the world away from you and then gave it back again translated into subtle, midnight shades.

We tumbled out of the bar into the black night, lit by the thinnest sliver of moon, and then into a black cab that drove away without needing to be told where we were going. Or maybe I did mention a destination, some part of my brain still trying to deal with the mundane realities while I groped at Juliet’s shadowy curves and she fended me off without effort.

“Not here, lover,” she whispered. “Take me somewhere no one can see.”

Then the cab was receding into the distance, and we were standing on the pavement outside Pen’s house. The windows all black except for one; Pen was in the basement, and I remembered vaguely that I hadn’t seen her for two days. It didn’t seem important right then; nothing was important except getting into my room with Juliet and locking the door. Once that was done, the whole damn world could end, and I wouldn’t care.

I couldn’t get the key into the lock. Juliet spoke a word, and the door sprang open of its own accord. What a useful trick! She was leading me by the hand up the stairs, and there was a bubble of perfect silence around us, so that when I spoke her name in a drunken slur, I couldn’t even hear it myself. She looked around at me and smiled, a smile full of almost unbearable promise.

My own door opened just as easily as the street door. She drew me inside and closed it behind us. “Oh Jesus, you’re so—” I blurted, but she shushed me with a finger on my lips. This wasn’t the sort of occasion where you had to flatter and cozen your partner with clumsy words that didn’t even fit. Her blouse fell away without her touching it; so did her trousers and her shoes. Her flesh was uniformly pale, a dazzling contrast to her dark hair and eyes. Even her nipples, and the area around them, were all as pure and perfectly white as if they were carved from bone. Naked except for the slender chain tinkling out its seductive, silvery tune on her ankle, she pressed me to her, and her lips sought mine, one strong hand on the back of my neck, holding me in place.

“Now,” she growled. “Give it to me. All of it.”

She was tearing at my clothes with her other hand, and it didn’t surprise or alarm me that her long nails shredded cloth like paper, making deep lacerations in my flesh along the way. She fumbled briefly between my thighs, until with her help, I tore free of what was left of my trousers and pants. Our mouths fused, then our groins. We merged at last, Juliet holding the contact as she drew the breath from my lungs into hers, and heat expanded from my heart and crotch to fill the world.

I thought it was true love. But then the heat grew more intense, went in an instant from blood-warm to blistering, and, opening my eyes, I saw that the two of us were wreathed in red fire that hid the room from my sight.