The Devil You Know

Twelve

I WAS IN AGONY. THE TERRIBLE HEAT WAS RUNNING through the rooms of my body like a monster too big to be contained in me, searching for doors and windows by which it could escape, looking to be joined with the greater heat that enveloped me. I tried to pull back from it, but it was as though I was welded into place: crucified on some twisted tree that wound around and around me and held me tight. I couldn’t even scream; my mouth was already open, but something was locked onto it, stifling me so that I couldn’t make a sound as I was devoured.

There are two ways in which pain can take you. Most times, if it’s bad enough, it will just throw your wits out of the window. But if you’re panicking already, then pain can be an anchor to cling to—something you can use to get yourself focused again. That’s how it was with me. The agony of the fire shrilled through me like an alarm bell, waking me out of the trance that the succubus had lulled me into.

That’s what she had to be, of course. Her black-on-black eyes and her natural perfume should have warned me, but I was inside her orbit before I knew what I was dealing with. After that, I was thinking only with my dick and no more capable of rationalizing what was happening to me than I was of dancing the cancan with my legs sewn together.

So I was going to die. And it was going to hurt.

Succubi consume your soul, and they take their time because—well, putting it as delicately as I can, because the orifice that they use for the job doesn’t have any teeth. I could already feel myself weakening, sliding away, and the hell of it was that the feeling was one of febrile, throbbing pleasure. She was killing me, and she was making me enjoy it.

But at least I was thinking again, thinking through the pain and the arousal, like trying to tune into my own voice on a radio through wave after wave of howling static. And because I was thinking, I saw that I had a chance—an outside chance, somewhere between slim and snowball-in-Hell.

My mind was saturated with the succubus’s subliminal scream of love, with the intoxicating, stupefying presence of her, expressed in smell and taste and texture, all urging me onward and inward. That was how she worked.

And as an exorcist, I could use that presence, that vivid, perfect sense of her. That was how I worked.

With my hands free and my whistle to my lips, it would have been easy. Well, it would have been three or four degrees farther away from impossible. With my whistle somewhere on the floor in the shredded remnants of my coat and my mouth locked tight against hers, I had to improvise.

I reached out with my left hand, flailed blindly for a moment, and then found a hard surface: the slatted cover of the rolltop desk. The pain was excruciating, and so was the pleasure, but I did my best to ignore them both. I started to tap out a rhythm.

It wasn’t a full cantrip, but it was the start of one. When I play the pipe, I use pitch and tempo and slur and every damn thing else to turn the endless involutions of what I’m seeing in my mind into something ephemeral floating in the air in front of me. Compared to that, what I was doing now was like trying to make a functioning revolver out of prechewed wood pulp, and then aim and fire it. All I had was the one ingredient to cook with, the one dimension to work in.

It was never going to dispel the succubus, but I was hoping it would throw her a curveball. It did. A tremor went through her as the rhythm built and hit, and then for a moment or two she froze, some of the terrible strength going out of her sinuous limbs. I used those moments to push my head back, against the pressure of her cupped hand, and get my mouth away from hers.

I gulped in a lungful of air. By contrast with the searing heat that raged through me, it felt like swallowing a bucket full of ice splinters. No time to dwell on the agony, no time to go for a second, deeper breath. Instead I started to whistle, in quick but halting counterpoint to the rhythm I was still beating out with my fingers.

The effect on Juliet was spectacular. Her implausibly perfect face convulsed, her features seeming for a blurred instant to melt and run into some other configuration. She screamed in rage, and it was such a terrible sound that I almost lost the tune. Her grip tightened on me, threatening to crush my chest, but only for a moment. The shrill staccato of the cantrip bit into her, and she let me go, staggering back against the wall.

As Juliet went down in a fetal crouch, I crashed to my knees on the floor. The impact jarred me enough to make the breath hiccup out of me, and although it was only for a moment, the succubus drew strength enough from the brief stammer of silence to recover and straighten up again. I caught the tune at the head of the next bar and quickened the rhythm. She froze in place again, glaring down at me.

That was when a metallic glint from under the bed caught my eye. I scrambled down on all fours and came up holding my whistle. Juliet’s eyes widened. Still whistling through my teeth, I set the mouthpiece of the tin whistle to my lips and came up on one knee in a Jon Anderson battle stance.

We were balanced on the cusp of a catastrophe curve. Freed from her suffocating embrace, I was able to get more range and more volume. But I didn’t dare to stop for an in-breath, and in spite of the chains of the exorcism tightening around her, Juliet was still managing to stay both on her feet and on the mortal plane. She was a demon, not a ghost, and as I’d found to my cost with Rafi, it takes more than “Sing Something Simple” to take one of these bastards out.

She took a step toward me—a step, and then another. Her arms were reaching out for me, and fuzzy flowers of darkness were opening behind my eyes. I was going to run out of oxygen, the music would stop, and then that would be that.

Then, in silent-comedy style, the door flew open, and Pen charged in. She was holding a rifle with a five-pointed sheriff’s star on the stock, which had the disastrous effect of making me laugh. I lost what was left of my wind, and the last breathy note of the cantrip dissolved into a whooping hiccup just as Pen aimed and fired.

She was a lousy shot. The first slug hit me in the shoulder, stinging like hell. The second went wide and blew a tiny, perfect hole in the lower left pane of the window. The third, fourth, and fifth hit the succubus in the stomach, chest, and forehead.

Juliet howled—a long, drawn-out bellow of agony and rage. Then she leaped over my head, and I heard the window smash into fragments, showering me with shards of broken glass and slivers of wood.

That was the last thing I remember, unless the quick fade to black counts as a memory in itself.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, I was vaguely aware of a voice intoning solemnly against my ear. Something about sin, something about light, then back to sin again. It made it hard to get any sleep, but then again, so did the tight band of pain across my chest and the ringing bells of agony in my head. I turned onto my other side, stifling a groan, and sank into the dark again.

The next thing I knew, there was a bright light pressing against my eyelids like a hot poultice and a less than gentle breeze on my face. Opening my gummed-shut eyes with a great act of will, I found myself staring straight up into the hundred-watt bulb of the antique Anglepoise next to my bed. I raised one hand—which was surprisingly hard because it seemed to weigh a lot more than usual—and pushed the lamp aside. When the afterimage faded out, I was looking at the gaping hole in the wall where the window had previously been and the moonless darkness beyond. The succubus had torn out the entire frame as she went through it and had even knocked loose a small section of the brickwork. I like rough sex as much as the next man, but Jesus, there has to be a limit.

I sat up slowly, taking care not to put too much strain on muscles that were already trembling and waving little flags of surrender.

“Good to have you back, Felix,” said a voice from very close by, on my right-hand side. “I hope you feel as bad as you look.”

With a sinking heart, I turned my head. The man sitting at the edge of the bed closed the book he was reading—a Bible, of course; I didn’t need to check the spine—and gave me a watery smile. He was wearing his professional blacks, but he was the sort of man who would have looked better in a suit of armor: like, for argument’s sake, Joan of Arc’s. Maybe that was because his midbrown hair had copper blond highlights in it, and his blue eyes flecks of paler, colder silver. Or maybe it was just the hard, combative set of his broad shoulders, which neatly gave the lie to the half smile on his handsome face. Suffer the little children to come unto me: the rest of you bastards I’ll get to later. He was five years older than me—five years and three months, to be more exact—and he never ever let me forget it. That was the root of his claim to know better than me where my life should be going, and the moral high ground was always his preferred battlefield.

“Hello, Matty,” I said, my voice coming out as an emasculated croak. “How’s the God business?”

“Better than the devil business, apparently,” my brother answered dryly. “Do you know what day it is?”

“What day it—”

“The day of the week, Felix. Where are we in the week?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake!” I protested weakly, but Matt was implacable. “It’s Wednesday night,” I said at last, giving up because my head was hurting and because giving up was easier than arguing about it. “Unbelievably, and appallingly, it is still Wednesday fucking night. I mean, unless I was out for twenty-four hours. Queen Elizabeth is on the throne, Posh and Becks are on the skids, and it’s a rollover week in the National Lottery. Succubi go for the balls, not the brains.”

Matt nodded. “In your case, though,” he said austerely, “it would be easy to aim for the one and hit the other.”

I opened my mouth for an equally smart-arsed rejoinder, but by now, some of the empty windows in my memory were filling up with very unpleasant images. I examined my hands, which were shaking slightly, my forearms, and then (wincing as the movement of my neck made the headache come back full force) my chest. There was no damage that I could see, despite my very vivid memories of being consumed in flames.

“Soul fires,” said Matt. Lucky guess, I told myself, irritated as always by his ability to read my mind. “The succubus’s heat is of the spirit, not the body. You’re bruised all over, there’s a bullet hole in your shoulder, and you’ve got scratches in some very intimate places, but you’re not burned.”

I nodded. It was what the textbooks said, but I’d never met a succubus in the flesh (I remembered Juliet’s flesh with a reminiscent tremor of horror and arousal) or felt that kind of pain before. God knows, it had seemed real enough at the time, like turning on a rotisserie over a barbecue pit while the devil pricked my crisping skin to let out the juices.

The rest of the last twenty-four hours was swimming back into focus now, and none of it looked much better than the fiasco it had ended on. The ghost’s snapshots of life and death and Gabriel McClennan; the intruder at the archive and my forestalled attempt to take a long walk off a short stairwell; a day spent chasing my own tail in various scenic locations in North London; and then an unlikely encounter with a predatory demon who was cruising the lower end of Charing Cross Road looking for a square meal and a bed—not necessarily in that order.

I looked at my watch. Just after three o’clock, which meant I’d been unconscious for more than two hours. I felt a sudden, almost physically painful sense of urgency: a feeling that I had a lot to do, and it was already almost too late to start. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I could even walk, but if you don’t try, you never find out. I threw the covers aside and swung my legs off the bed.

“You’ll need to rest,” Matt said, a slight edge of warning in his voice. “Your system has taken a huge shock. And if you could bring yourself to pray—”

I waved away that suggestion. I was trying to stand, but my body wasn’t cooperating.

“What are you even doing here?” I demanded irritably. “Did the Holy Spirit come and wag its tail at you to tell you there was a soul in danger?”

Matt frowned. “Your landlady called me. When she tried to wake you up and couldn’t get any response, she became afraid. And since she knew that what had fled out of that window was something other than human, she chose to put her faith in an agency that is itself more than human.” I didn’t answer; I was still trying to get my legs under me and my balance straight. I was naked apart from my socks, which somehow is a lot more undignified than being all the way there, and my body was marked all over with shallow cuts that looked as though they could spell out a hidden message in Mandarin Chinese. “You ought to be grateful,” Matt went on. “To her, if not to me. Without the holy water and the blessings I put on you, you’d be sinking into coma by now.”

I gave a humorless laugh, but it was a straw in the wind. Annoyingly, the church’s armory of waters, oils, and sing-alongs did have some efficacy over ghosts and demons—only sometimes, and only if they were wielded with genuine faith, but Matty had that in spades. I couldn’t deny that he’d probably saved me from much worse damage. After Pen had come riding to my rescue like Davy Crockett and . . .

I put a hand to my shoulder. There was a small, raised welt there with a perfectly circular wound in the center of it. The mark left by Pen’s rifle. Except that it wasn’t a rifle at all. It was a kid’s air gun, and I realized abruptly what it was that it had been loaded with—what it was that had made the succubus fuck and run like a traveling salesman in a bad old joke.

“Rosary beads,” I muttered with mixed admiration and disgust. Rosary beads filed down to the size of BB shot. She’d said she was worried about me—and that Rafi had given her a warning. Evidently it had been a fair bit more circumstantial than the one he’d given to me.

Matt stood up and walked around the bed to stand over me. He looked down at me, his mouth set into a stern line. “Felix,” he said quietly, “you can’t go on like this. You’ve turned a gift from God into a stock-in-trade—and it’s a debased trade at that—one you can’t follow with a clear conscience. Exorcism is the Church’s business, not a game for amateurs or a get-rich-quick scheme.”

“Do I look rich?” I demanded, throwing out my arms to indicate my modest surroundings—more modest than ever, now that they’d been trashed by the demon. “Or were you thinking of the seven-figure deal I’m going to sign for my memoirs?”

Matt didn’t give an inch; he wasn’t capable of it. “You can’t banish ghosts without shriving them,” he pointed out with the same dogged calm. “Otherwise you could be sending innocent souls to Hell. You don’t understand what any of this is about. You’re like a blind man wandering down a busy street and firing a handgun at random into the crowd—except that the harm you’re doing is enormously, incomparably greater.”

With the help of the bedpost I did manage to get on my feet this time, so our faces were only a few inches apart as I gave him my answer, with as much quiet dignity as I could manage given the whole stark-bollock-naked thing.

“Thanks for the sermon, Matty. But you’ll have to bear in mind that I don’t believe in Heaven, or Jesus, or papal infallibility. And all that stuff about fighting the good fight and serving God instead of mammon—well, it’s inspiring, but let’s be honest. Your crowd are no better at poverty than they are at chastity, are they?”

Matt was silent for a moment, but not because my eloquence had struck him dumb. He just wanted to make sure that he didn’t talk back in anger; that would probably be a sin.

“You don’t believe in anything, Felix,” he said at last, composing his face into an absolute deadpan. “And that’s precisely why you shouldn’t have anything to do with the final disposition of human souls. You don’t know where you’re sending them, or by what authority, or how the power that God has placed in your hands works.”

“Whereas you’d like to slot it into a convenient schematic that has unbaptised babies going to Hell,” I shot back. “You’re in a pyramid-selling scheme—the biggest one in history. And maybe a thousand million people bought into it, but that doesn’t make you right.”

“Limbo,” said Matt. “Unbaptised babies go to Limbo. But you knew that.” He turned his back on me and crossed to the gaping window; Matt never did like staring contests. “Nobody in this world can know whether or not they’re right,” he murmured. “We see as through a glass, darkly. We can only do our best. But when the choice is between doing nothing and doing harm, surely nothing is the wiser option?”

I took a step after him, which was almost a serious mistake; I was still weak enough to need the bedpost’s support and solidarity. “The Gospel according to Cool Hand Luke? Sweet, Matty—and low-down. Because the alternative to freelance exorcism isn’t nothing. I mean, what your people do, that’s a sod of a long way from nothing, isn’t it?” I saw his shoulders tense slightly at that. “You think I don’t know that the Church has got its own exorcists? You think I don’t know there’s a recruitment drive on? Sorting out the sheep from the ghosts on behalf of Mother Church—I wouldn’t call that nothing. And the ones who meet your stringent quality standards—well, I assume they get the blessing, the whistle, and the wave. Fuck knows what you do with the others, but I’ve heard some ugly rumors, and it’s obvious you don’t want anyone to see you doing it. At least with me it’s one size fits all. I don’t pretend to be God—or to be on first-name terms with the bastard.”

I didn’t realize how loud my voice had got until I saw Pen standing in the open doorway—this time holding a tea tray with a single mug on it, and so looking less like Annie Oakley, more like one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s busty waitresses. In the sudden silence, Matt turned to face me, and there was a gleam in his eyes that could almost have been called threatening if my brother hadn’t been above such unworthy emotions.

“One size fits all is what the devil says, Felix,” he said in a tone of mild and sad reproof. “One size only fits all if you’ve got nothing to measure by. But you do have something to measure by. If you remember nothing else, remember dear Katie, God rest her. And your poor friend Rafi. Remember what you did to him. You see how dangerous it is when good intentions—”

The contents of the mug hit Matt full in the face. From the smell of it, it was gunpowder green tea laced with something herbal and potent. It was warm rather than hot, though, and it didn’t do much damage. The tray did; it smacked edge-on into his nose and made him stagger back. He turned to stare at Pen in absolute astonishment. She was standing with the tray gripped tightly in both hands, clearly ready to deal out more retribution as soon as he opened his mouth again.

Two thick trickles of blood were oozing from Matt’s nostrils to combine on his upper lip. He felt the bridge of his nose gingerly with one slightly shaky hand, still staring at Pen. She lowered the tray, suddenly self-conscious as the berserker moment passed. “Sorry, Fix,” she mumbled. “I’ll make you up some more.” She went out of the room, and a moment later, I heard her footsteps stomping heavily down the stairs.

I found that Pen’s act of cathartic violence had purged my own anger at Matt pretty effectively. “You shouldn’t talk about Rafi when she’s around,” I told him. “She was his—” I hesitated. There wasn’t an easy way to describe the way Rafi and Pen had circled each other, the intricacies of their sometime-never mating dance. “She loved him,” I said. “She still does.”

“And does she know what you did to him?” Matt snapped back, cradling his nose. It was already beginning to swell, the skin at the bridge not yet bruised but flushed dark red.

“Pretty much,” I said. “Yeah.”

Matt shot me one last look of exasperation, then followed Pen out of the room.

I got dressed, which was a complicated operation, because every move I made caused another set of muscles to report in unfit for duty. Mournfully consigning the remains of my many-pocketed greatcoat to the wastebasket, I shrugged on an antique trench coat that gave me an entirely misleading air of retro-chic.

I felt sick and sore, but also restless and uneasy. I couldn’t leave it alone, but I couldn’t make it go anywhere useful. Raising a succubus wasn’t an easy thing to do, or a safe one. Okay, it was true that she didn’t need to have been called and bound for any one particular purpose; it could just be coincidence. I tried that idea on for size. The thing that called itself Juliet had picked me at random from the slow-moving river of unaccompanied men that flowed through the West End of an evening. She didn’t know who I was, and she didn’t care.

Yeah, it was possible. Obviously, it was possible. She belonged to a predatory species, and although they lived somewhere else, they were known to use the Earth as a hunting ground. But Asmodeus had warned me—and warned Pen, too, telling her enough so that she could arm herself in advance. You’re going to take this case, and it’s going to kill you. Unless there were even worse horrors waiting in the wings, Juliet had to be what he was talking about—and this attack had to be related in some way to the archive ghost.

I found Pen down in the basement, which was where I expected her to be. She was feeding Arthur and Edgar when I knocked and came in. The birds ate liver, which Pen bought in industrial-size freezer packs and thawed one piece at a time. Her hands were stained red brown with watery blood. She looked around, then nodded her head at a fresh mug of milkless tea that was steaming on the mantelpiece. I picked it up and took a long slug; I knew enough about Pen’s herbal remedies to take it with fervent gratitude.

“Where’s Matty?” I asked, my voice still creaking slightly.

“He left,” she said, sliding another sliver of meat into Arthur’s clashing beak as Edgar cawed loudly for parity. “I’m sorry I hit him. Especially after he came out in the middle of the night to make sure you were all right. It was just—I think I was on edge after”—the pause stretched—“after seeing that thing.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “My brother believes in the mortification of the flesh. He should have thanked you.”

She made no answer.

“And I am,” I added. “Thanking you, I mean. When you barged in and did your Reservoir Dogs number, I was running out of breath. A few moments later, and I’d probably have been running out of internal organs, too.”

Pen was staring at me with troubled eyes.

“I’ll pay for the window,” I went on, conscious of the fact that I was only speaking to fill up the silence. “I’m wrapping up a job right now, so I’ll have seven hundred quid coming through in a day or so. That should more or less cover it, wouldn’t you say?”

She shook her head, but it wasn’t an answer to my question. “Fix,” she said woefully, “what the fuck have you got yourself into?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know what I’ve got myself into. But I’d like to start finding out.”

“It’s just a straight exorcism, isn’t it? What’s the problem?”

I opened my empty hands—a minimalistic shrug. “I think it got personal.”

“Oh Christ, don’t say that!” Pen looked genuinely unhappy, and I could guess what she was thinking.

“Not like with Rafi,” I said. “It’s just—I almost fell down forty feet of stairwell last night, only this ghost waded in to stop me.”

“The ghost—”

“Right. And tonight, some bastard lets a succubus off the leash and gives it my scent. I want to know what I’m doing and who I’m doing it to. I want to know what else is at stake here.”

She nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. “I can understand that.”

I pressed my advantage. “Pen, I hate to ask this, but would you be up to driving me somewhere? I don’t think I’d be safe behind a wheel right now.”

The discreet door on Greek Street was closed and locked, but there was a light on in a third-floor window. Right now, at four in the morning, someone was doing a photo shoot, or having their head massaged, or being spiritually healed. There’s a whole lot of sterling work that goes on while the city sleeps.

“And this Gabe McClennan is an exorcist,” Pen demanded. “Like you?”

“He’s an exorcist,” I allowed. “The rest of what you just said was actionable slander.”

In fact, in a profession not much known for its ethical probity or compassion, McClennan stood out as a twisting, weaseling, backstabbing bastard. I knew two or three guys from whom he’d stolen clients, money, or equipment, and half a dozen stories about people he’d screwed over. Someone even told me once that Gabe took a huge wad of cash from Peckham Steiner, the sanity-deficient granddaddy of all Ghostbusters, just before he died, on the pretext of building him a “safe house” where ghosts wouldn’t be able to touch him. But Steiner is likely to turn up sooner or later in any story that exorcists tell. I don’t normally listen to tattletale stuff like that unless I’ve got some personal experience to weigh it up against, so I’d been professionally courteous toward Gabe the first few times we’d met—and on one job, he’d actually sought me out because I had firsthand experience of a factory in Deptford he’d been asked to disinfect.

I’d agreed to help him and had offered him a thirty-seventy split, which he’d cheerfully accepted. Bearing the stories in mind, I asked for cash on the nose, and he counted it out into my hand underneath the green and yellow overpass at the Queen Mary’s end of the Mile End Road. Then we walked off in opposite directions, and before I’d gone a hundred yards, I was jumped and rolled by two guys who came at me from behind. They might have had nothing at all to do with McClennan, but it sure as hell looked like he was renegotiating the deal on the fly. At any rate, that was the last time we ever collaborated.

“Wait for me here,” I told Pen. “With the doors locked. Keep the keys in the ignition, and drive away if anybody comes.”

“Anybody but you, you mean?”

I gave her a solemn nod. “You’re on the ball, chief,” I said. “I like that in a woman.”

“After tonight, Felix, I think I know more than I ever wanted to know about what you like in a woman.”

I let that one pass. It was too close for comfort.

“What are you going to do if he’s not there?” she demanded.

By way of answer, I showed her the balding black velvet bag that held my lock picks. She shook her head in tired disapproval, but said nothing. She knows all about Tom Wilke and how I obtained my indefensible skills. She fervently disapproves, but right then I could see that it paled into insignificance next to all the other murky shit that was flying around.

I got out of the car and crossed the street. There were three bells over on the left-hand side of the door that roughly corresponded with the three signs. I pressed the one marked MCCLENNAN. Nobody answered. I pressed again and looked around me as I waited.

Greek Street is an after-midnight kind of place, but most of the nightlife had already rolled over and turned out the lights; we were only a couple of hours away from dawn.

But after a few moments, I heard footsteps from inside, accompanied by the atonal creak of badly warped floorboards. A bolt was drawn, then another, then a key turned, and the door opened a crack. Gabe McClennan, in his shirtsleeves and with a heavy stubble on his face, stood in the gap.

He stared at me for a few moments, looking totally nonplussed. It was clear that I was the last person he expected to see on his doorstep at four in the morning. Actually, it was one step beyond nonplussed, into the related domain of baffled and hacked-off.

“Castor,” he muttered. “What the fuck?”

“I wanted to consult with you on a job I’m doing, Gabe.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Well, since you’re still up . . .”

He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Castor,” he said again. He laughed and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “Yeah, whatever. Come on in.”

McClennan turned and walked back inside, and I followed. The light on the third floor clearly wasn’t anything to do with Gabe; the door he opened was right off the first-floor landing, next to a doorless cupboard full of electric meters and half-bald mops lying drunkenly against the wall.

Despite the shabby frontage and the dubious location, Gabe’s office was a hell of a step up from mine. It was dominated by a huge antique desk with ball-and-claw feet that was big enough to split the room in two. His filing cabinet had four drawers, a cherrywood veneer, and a vase full of chrysanthemums on top. He even had a diploma on the wall, although Christ only knew what it said. Two-hundred-meter swimming certificate, most likely.

“So what can I do for you?” he demanded as he walked around the desk. It wasn’t just the stubble; he was looking pretty rough in other ways, too. The bags under his eyes were so dark, it looked as though someone had given him a combination punch when he had his guard down, and if his shirt had had a map of the Lake District on it, the sweat stains under his armpits would have been Windermere and Coniston Water. It was an unusual sight. McClennan has an aquiline face, a spare build, and a thick bow wave of snow-white hair that he wears in a style intentionally reminiscent of Richard Harris. Normally he has a style that can best be described as dapper. Tonight—like me—he’d clearly been overworking.

He rummaged in his pockets, ignoring me for a moment until he’d found a small pill bottle that was about half full. He shook out two black tabs and popped them. Then, in the expansiveness of the hit, he remembered his manners and held the bottle out to me. “Mollies,” he explained unnecessarily. “You want some?”

I shook my head. A lot of exorcists have an amphetamine habit, occasional or chronic. They say—or some of them do, anyway—that it makes them more sensitive to the presence of the dead: lets them receive on a wider range of frequencies. There’s something in that, too, but I’ve always found I lose as much on the comedown as I gain on the rush. So usually I pass.

“The Bonnington Archive,” I said, parking myself on the edge of the desk. I didn’t want to take the client’s chair; it would only give Gabe an unwarranted sense of power and authority.

“Never heard of it,” he shot back, quick and easy. I glanced at his face, but he was looking down right then—searching in his desk drawers this time. Then he found what he was looking for and hauled it out—a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label, about two-thirds empty.

“You sure about that?”

McClennan stared at me, then shrugged; all ease and edges now that the mollies had kicked in.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Ghost-toasting may be easy money, Castor, but I don’t do it in my sleep. Why? What’s the skin?”

“Nothing, probably. But I’m doing a burn there, and your name came up.”

He was opening the drawers on the other side of the desk, bent over again so I was just getting the top of his head.

“My name came up? How? Who mentioned me?”

“I don’t even remember,” I lied. “But someone said you’d been there. Or maybe I saw your name on a receipt or something. So I just wanted to touch base with you, see what you made of the place.”

He slammed a drawer shut and straightened up. He looked the same as he’d looked when he’d opened the door—half blitzed with exhaustion, but not particularly fazed by anything I’d said.

“You didn’t see my name on any receipt,” he said, “because I was never there. If someone mentioned me, then I must have worked for them somewhere else.”

“Yeah,” I said, sounding regretful. “That must be it. Just my luck. It’s a tough nut, and I wanted to bounce some ideas off you.”

“You can still do that,” said Gabe. “Why not? We’re both professionals, right? I stroke your dick, you stroke mine. Shit, I can’t find any glasses. Give me a second, will you?”

He came back around the desk, past me, and on out of the room. I leaned forward so I could look through the open doorway and saw him heading up the stairs. Maybe he was going to borrow some crockery from the Indian head masseuse.

In the meantime, the devil finds work for idle hands to do. I crossed to the filing cabinet and gave the top drawer a tug. Locked. But three quick steps took me round to the driver’s side of the desk, where Gabe had left the top drawer open. It was full of the usual strata of desk-drawer shit, and I could have excavated for five minutes without finding anything more useful than pencil shavings and paper clips. But I got lucky. A small ring with two identical keys was lying against the bottom right-hand corner of the drawer, where it would always be ready to hand in spite of the apparent chaos.

I went back to the filing cabinet and tried one of the keys. It turned, and the drawer slid open with only the smallest squeal of reproach.

A to something or other: Gabe filed his cases in alphabetical order, and most of them even had file tags attached, all written out with the same sputtery black biro.

Armitage

Ascot

Avebury

Balham

Beasley

Bentham

Brooks

Damn. I went back and checked again, but there was nothing there. No Bonnington file, no smoking pistol.

But there were no footsteps on the stairs, either, and I suddenly noticed that the file right at the back of the drawer was a D: Drucker. I don’t even know where the inspiration came from, but I backtracked from there through Dimmock, De Vere, Dean, Dascombe . . . Crowther.

Two strikes. Damn again.

I wasn’t expecting anything now, but for the hell of it, I slid a finger in between Dascombe and Crowther and pushed them apart. There was another folder hanging in between them that had no file tag. Instead, the name DAMJOHN was written on the inside edge in black felt-tip. Gabe must have run out of the little plastic tag holders.

The wonderful thing about a Russian army greatcoat is that you can carry a Kalashnikov, a samovar, and a dead pig underneath it without making any noticeable bulge. It’s not so easy with a trench coat, because it’s a thinner and more figure-hugging sort of garment. But it was a thin file, and it just about fit in. I slid the drawer closed and made it back to the desk just as I heard Gabe’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

“You okay taking it straight?” he asked, setting two cut-glass tumblers down on the desktop. “I don’t have any soda.”

“Straight is fine,” I said. He poured me a stiff measure, another for himself.

“So tell me about the case,” he said.

I turned the glass in my hand, watched the facets catch the light. “Ghost takes the form of a young woman with most of her face hidden behind a red veil. Multiple sightings, persistent over time—about three months, give or take—but spread out over the building, so there’s no locus where I can easily read her from.”

Gabe shrugged with his eyebrows. “So you hang around until she shows up. Doesn’t sound like she’s particularly shy.”

“No, she’s not,” I admitted. “To be honest, I think I’ve got a hook halfway into her already. That’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?”

I took a tentative sip of the whisky, swirled it on my tongue. “The furniture,” I said—furniture being exorcists’ slang for any aspect of a haunting that’s not directly tied in to the ghost itself.

Gabe snorted. “Spend too long looking at the furniture, you’ll end up tripping over your own feet. Didn’t you tell me that?”

“No. Can’t say I did.”

“Well, it’s true anyway. Just do the job and draw your pay. Fuck do you care?”

“I’m starting to care.” I put the glass down. Whatever cheap-ass generic whisky Gabe had decanted into it, the only time Johnny Walker had seen that bottle was if he ever used it to piss in. “And I’m starting to see complications. Did you ever meet a man named Lucasz Damjohn?”

Not a flicker. Gabe consulted his memory, then shook his head. “Nope. Don’t think so. Does he work at this archive place?”

“He runs a strip joint off Clerkenwell Green. With a different kind of establishment over the top, in case fancy begotten in the eyes wants to take a quick stroll elsewhere.”

Gabe looked a question. I ask you, what’s the point of an Oxford education if nobody gets your Shakespearean references? “He’s a pimp,” I clarified.

“Okay. So how is he connected to your ghost?”

“I’m not sure yet. I think maybe he killed her.”

Gabe’s jaw dropped. Only for a second, then he reeled it in again and tried to look unconcerned, which was interesting to watch. “How do you even know you’ve got a murder?” he asked. “What, is she wearing wounds or something?”

“Or something,” I said. Then I glanced casually at my watch, did a double take, and stood quickly. “Oh shit, Gabe, this is going to have to wait. I just realized I’ve got to meet someone at five.”

“You’ve got to meet someone?” Gabe repeated. “What, you set up appointments in the middle of the night? Sit. Have another drink. I can’t help you unless you tell me the whole thing.”

He tried to refill my glass, which was already mostly full. I moved it out of his reach. “I’ll catch you another time,” I said, and headed for the door.

He jerked to his feet. It was clear that some idea of stopping me was going through his mind. But I kept on going, out into the hall and then into the street, crossing over to where Pen was parked. Seeing me coming, she threw open the passenger door and started the engine.

As we drove away, I saw McClennan standing in his doorway, watching us go. For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder what he had been doing to get himself so wasted.

“Take a left,” I directed Pen. “Then another.” While she drove, I opened the file and took a look inside.

The contents were meager. There was a letter, not from Damjohn but from a firm of solicitors, discussing the terms on which Gabriel McClennan would be placed on retainer to Zabava Ltd., “a company incorporated in the United Kingdom for the provision of leisure facilities in the Central London area.” A copy of the contract was stapled to the letter. It said that McClennan would provide “services of exorcism and spiritual prophylaxis” to all of Zabava’s premises for a fixed fee of a grand a month. The contract was signed by McClennan and by someone named Daniel Hill.

Then there was a sheet of paper with a list of addresses on it—most of them in the East End—and another with dates printed on it in columns (all except the last one had been checked through with yellow marker), a scrawled note on half of a torn sheet of A4, which read Change to Friday 6:30, and a matchbook from Kissing the Pink, the club where I’d met Damjohn the other night. Very tastefully done—the name of the club was balanced on either side by the silhouette of a woman’s upper body, in profile so that her erect nipples were given the prominence the designer thought they deserved.

I was hoping for a smoking pistol. This didn’t even qualify as a spud gun.

Pen had us heading back to Soho Square now. I told her to pull over, kissed her lightly on the cheek, and dived out of the car. “I’ll see you later,” I promised.

“You bloody well be careful, Fix,” she called after me, but I was already sprinting for the corner and back around onto Greek Street. I walked about a third of the way along, then, when I was about twenty yards from Gabe’s place on the other side of the street, I found a doorway to loiter in.

It didn’t take as long as I thought it would—but then I guess there’s not much traffic at that time of night. About ten minutes later, a car pulled up outside Gabe’s door—an electric blue BMW X5. Arnold the Weasel Man climbed out of the front passenger door, and a huge, shapeless object wearing a suit edged and wedged its way out of the back. Scrub—there couldn’t be two like him in the whole damn world. He held the door open, and Damjohn himself stepped out after him. Must have been a tight fit. Damjohn led the way inside, Scrub followed, and Arnold brought up the rear, pulling the door to with a decisive slam.

So it was official. They were all in it together. I just wished I had the faintest clue what “it” actually was.