The Devil You Know

Fourteen

WE SAT UP IN THE ATTIC IN A COMPANIONABLE POSTcoital languor, leaning against the bare wall. We’d already made ourselves decent again, and anyone clattering up the bare stone stairs would announce themselves from a good way off, so we didn’t have to worry about being caught in a compromising position.

“You never suggested using a condom,” I commented.

“Have you got a condom?”

“No.”

“There you go, then.”

“Are you always this happy-go-lucky?”

“I got carried away. So did you. But I’m on the pill. Are you saying I should still be worried?”

I shook my head. I steer clear of relationships. I’ve always been afraid of someone I love turning up dead, and then—having to live with that or having to deal with it. Having to face the choice. So although I’m not entirely celibate, I think I count as chaste.

“And no more should you. Word. Let’s change the subject.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “Can we talk shop?”

“Sure. Go on.”

“Have you ever heard of a strip club called Kissing the Pink?”

Cheryl laughed; she had a dirty laugh that I liked very much. “I’m glad we’re talking shop now,” she said. “I’d hate to think you were gonna ask me out on a date. No, I don’t know it. I’ve never been in a strip club in my life. I saw the Chippendales once, if that’s any good.”

“Have you ever met a man named Lucasz Damjohn?”

“Nope.”

“Or Gabriel McClennan?”

“Nope again. Felix, what’s any of this got to do with my Sylvie? You’re sounding like a private detective.”

“It’s all tied together somewhere,” I said, aware of how lame that sounded. “Cheryl, what about these rooms? Do they ever get used for anything?”

“Not yet. We’re gonna expand into them eventually. Some bits of stuff get stored up here, but not much. Why?”

Instead of answering, I got up, breaking what was left of the drowsy, intimate mood. I crossed to the window and looked out. Then down. Three floors below was the flat roof of the first-floor extension. A plastic bag lay on the gray roofing felt, the wind making it jerk and flurry, but not shifting it.

“What’s underneath us on this side of the building?” I called over my shoulder.

“Strong rooms,” said Cheryl.

“Just strong rooms?”

“Yeah, just strong rooms.”

“With no windows?”

“Right. Why d’you want to know? What’s going on?”

“I thought I heard someone up here,” I told her, going for a half truth. “When there shouldn’t have been anyone.”

“That’d be Frank, then,” said Cheryl.

“Sorry?” I said, turning back to face her. “Why would it?”

“He does his meditating up here. Jeffrey said he could.”

“Frank meditates?”

She grinned. “How’d you think he got that laid-back? We’ve got the only Zen security guard in London. Only he’s really a butterfly dreaming he’s a security guard.”

“This was at night. When the archive was closed.”

“Yeah?” She blinked. “Okay, I take it back, then. Frank only comes up in his lunch hours. But—what were you doing up here after the place was shut?”

“Long story,” I said. “Would you mind keeping it a secret for now?”

“You’ll have to buy my silence.”

“With what, exactly?”

She waggled her eyebrows suggestively.

“I’m just a plaything to you, aren’t I?” I complained with mock bitterness.

“Too right, boy. Let’s say six o’clock tonight—give me time to get out of here. I’ll meet you at Costella’s. You’re gonna have to work hard to keep me happy.”

“Will I get time off for bad behavior?”

“We’ll see. Depends how bad you can be, I suppose.”

“Cheryl, is there an alley off to the side of the new annex?”

“Yeah, that’s where the wheely bins are. Why?”

“I’m going to go down there and shinny up on that flat roof.”

“As an aftermath to sex? A lot of people would just smoke a cigarette or something.”

I kissed her on the lips. “Smoking’s bad for you,” I pointed out.

“So am I, boy. I’ll do your back in.”

“I’m looking forward to it. Wait for me—I’ll only be a minute.”

I left her there and descended the stairs. Frank gave me an amiable nod as I went by. For the first time, there was a second guard on duty with him—a younger man with a military crew cut who gave me a fish-eyed stare. I smiled a smile of good-natured idiocy and kept on going.

The alley was a cul-de-sac, lined on both sides as Cheryl had said with the wheely bins of the adjacent buildings—each standing black plastic coffin bearing a number in white paint that had dripped while it was drying.

Everything looked different from ground level. Judging the spot as best I could, I climbed on top of a Dumpster and then used the horizontal bar of a closed steel gate. It was an easy climb, which didn’t surprise me in the least. Someone at the archive was doing it on a regular basis, after all. But I was too far over, and I was looking into a builder’s yard. The flat roof of the Bonnington annex ended ten feet to my left. I tightrope-walked along the wall until I got to the roof. I could see the plastic bag lying close to the sheer wall of the main building—which, apart from the attic skylights at the very top, was an eyeless cliff face.

I went over to the bag and picked it up. Good Food Tastes Better at Sainsbury’s, it said. But whatever was inside it, it wasn’t food. It was heavy and rectangular. I tore open one corner and looked inside.

The words looked back at me, but that was a coincidence. More than half the letters and documents in the bag were in English.

A whistle made me look up. Cheryl was leaning out of the attic window. She waved at me, and I waved back. I mimed “stay there,” palm out like a policeman’s stop sign. She nodded.

I went back inside and headed for the attic, but she met me halfway.

“What was in the bag?” she asked.

“A selection of good wholesome produce at reasonable prices,” I said. “Cheryl, will you let me into the Russian room again?”

“I thought you said it was a dead end. What was in the bag?”

“Stuff. I did say that, and I might even be right. But there’s something I want to take a look at.”

Everything in the strong room was just as I’d left it the other night. The boxes were still stacked up on the floor, Rich’s laptop was still on the table, and the place still had the same sour, dispiriting smell as it’d had the first time I’d walked in, four days ago now.

“Six o’clock,” Cheryl reminded me.

“I’ll be there,” I promised.

We kissed and parted.

As soon as she’d left, I turned the computer on. Then, while it warmed up, I went looking for the other thing I needed. It should have been on the table, but since it wasn’t, I must have shoved it into one of the boxes along with an armload of papers.

It took me about ten minutes to find it, but at least it was still there: the ring-bound reporter’s notebook with Rich’s handwritten notes in it. Armed with that, I opened the database program on the computer and tried to figure out which end of it was up. There was a file named RUSSIAN1, which seemed to be a reasonable place to start. The program said it contained about 4,800 records.

I opened a few at random. Like the boxes, there wasn’t a lot to choose between them.

LETTER. 12/12/1903. SENDER MIKHAIL S. RECIPIENT IRINA ALEXOVNA. PERSONAL. RUSSIAN.

LETTER. 14/12/1903. SENDER MIKHAIL S. RECIPIENT PETER MOLINUE. PERSONAL. ENGLISH.

LETTER. 14/12/1903. SENDER MIKHAIL S. RECIPIENT RUSSIAN EMBASSY “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.” BUSINESS/FORMAL. RUSSIAN.

I flipped through the pages of the notebook, looking for something that would be a bit more distinctive. In the end I settled for a Valentine’s Day card and typed in some of the search fields that Rich had jotted down. RECIPIENT CARLA. DESIGN HEART WITH WINGS.

Yeah, there it was: item number 2838. The next document I tried, a birth certificate, was number 1211. The third was a book of wedding photos, and it showed up as number 832.

It was no use. Even if I was right, it could take me days to find what I was looking for. There had to be another way of doing this. I thought about it for a long while. Then I picked up the phone and placed a call to Nicky.

He answered in his usual guarded way—making sure he knew who I was before he owned up to being who he was. Normally I take that in my stride, but not today. “Nicky, enough of the bullshit,” I said testily, cutting him off. “I need another favor. If it comes to anything, I’ll buy you a whole crate of that overpriced French mouthwash. Meet me at Euston Station. At the Burger King on the main concourse, okay? That way, you’ll be able to see me from a hundred yards away, and you’ll know it’s me, rather than some weird branch of the government pulling a sting. It’s goddamn urgent, okay? Someone’s trying to kill me, and I’d like to know why.”

Taking that kind of tone with Nicky was a high-risk strategy. I waited to see if he’d cave in or tell me to go fuck myself. He did neither. “Trying to kill you with what?” he demanded tersely.

“A stairwell. And then a succubus.”

That got a response, at any rate. “Holy shit. A fuck-demon? What did it look like? Did you get pictures?”

“Did I get pictures? Nicky, I was lucky to get out with my wedding tackle still attached. No, I didn’t get pictures.”

“Then what was its name? Was it one of the steganographics?”

“I’m not an expert. She said her name was Juliet. She had black hair and black eyes.”

“Anything else? Markings? Nonhuman features? What were her sexual organs like? Any teeth down there?”

“Nicky, for the love of Christ—they were like a woman’s—she was normal. Stupendously high-end normal.” Something popped up in my mind, like conceptual toast. “Except for her breasts.”

“Which were?”

“She didn’t have any areolae around her nipples. All of her skin was pure white.”

“Got you. Okay, I’ll do some looking around.”

“That’s not what I want you to do.”

“I’ll do it anyway. The hell-kin fascinate me.”

“Just meet me, okay?”

“Euston Station. I’ll be there—but twenty minutes is all you’re getting, and you can pay for the taxi.”

I went looking for Rich. I found him in the public reading area, watching over a florid, preoccupied woman who was leafing through what looked like the catalog from some ancient exhibition of chamber pots and toilet furniture. He looked up when I came in and gave me a nod.

“Alice is looking for you,” he said. “She didn’t look happy.”

“I’d probably be more worried if she did. Listen, Rich, there was something I wanted to ask you about.”

“Go on.”

“The first week in September. Maybe the last week in August. Do you remember anything out of the ordinary happening around then?”

He looked blank.

“Can you give me a hint?” he asked. “What kind of anything?”

“The kind of anything that would end up being written into the incident book.”

“So . . . an accident? Or a breakage? Someone going home sick?”

“Sounds like the right sort of territory, yeah.”

Rich frowned thoughtfully, but I suspected that was just to show willing. “Nothing that springs to mind,” he admitted. “The trouble is, those things happen all the time. Unless you’ve got something to pin it to—something that definitely happened at the same time—you don’t remember it well enough to say when it was.”

“The first appearance of the ghost,” I said. “It was almost exactly at that time. Does that help?”

He shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, mate.”

“Never mind. It was a long shot. If you do come up with anything, though, let me know. Ask Cheryl, too. And any of the part-timers you see.”

“And Jon?”

I had to mull that one over for a moment. “Yeah, and Jon,” I said at last. “Anyone you bump into. It doesn’t do any harm to ask.”

“Doesn’t do any good either, most of the time,” he observed cynically.

“I’m noticing that, brother,” I admitted. “But hope springs eternal, eh?”

I slipped out of the archive at lunchtime and crossed the road to Euston Station. I’ve never liked the place; it looks like a scaled-up model of something run up by a Blue Peter presenter out of the slatted interiors of fruit boxes. But it teems with people around the clock, which made it an ideal place for a private meeting. Feeling guilty and hunted because of what I was carrying under my shirt, I glanced around behind me. The crowds parted for a moment, and a female figure ten paces or so behind me turned and took a sudden interest in a newspaper display. I wasn’t sure, but again I thought I recognized her as Damjohn’s girl. Rosa. I hesitated. I had to meet Nicky, and I knew he wouldn’t wait, but I was in a maze, and any Ariadne would do. I took a few steps toward her, but then a few more clusters of people eddied past, and when I got to the newsstand, there was no sign of her.

With a grimace of annoyance, I moved on to the Burger King. It doesn’t have any doors; it just opens out directly onto the concourse, which was why I’d chosen it. Nicky likes to have a clear field of vision in all directions.

As soon as I sat down in the coffee shop, he was pulling out a chair and slipping in next to me. He must have been circling around for a while, waiting for me to show, but it would go against the grain for him to sit down first. I felt the chill coming off him; he’d be wearing freezer packs under his bulky fleece, and probably a thermos of dry ice somewhere to freshen them up. Unlike most of the risen dead, Nicky was always pragmatic and prepared.

From his pocket he produced a thin sheaf of A4 pages, folded in half and then in quarters. He handed them to me, and I looked a question.

“Dead girls,” he said. “The stuff you were asking about.”

“Quick work,” I said, impressed.

“Easy work. But like I said, you gave me a sloppy brief; there’s a lot of stuff there. You’ve still got your work cut out. Now, what’s today’s crisis?”

I took the small but heavy bundle out of my shirt and slid it across the table to him: hard, rectangular, wrapped in newsprint from that morning’s Guardian. He unwrapped it and stared at it as though he’d never seen one before.

It had taken a lot of nerve to walk past Frank with that stuffed up my shirt. I’d thought of asking him for my coat, but I didn’t want to risk drawing any more attention to myself. “I need it looked at,” I told Nicky. “Looked at properly. Dissected, autopsied, and written up in excessive detail. The file you’re particularly looking at is called RUSSIAN1. It’s a database file. I want to know if it’s been tampered with—if anything unusual has been done to it anywhere along the line.”

“This is somebody’s laptop,” Nicky said.

“Yeah.”

“Not yours?”

“No.”

“Stolen, Castor?”

“Borrowed. It’ll get back to its rightful owners in due course.”

“And you’ve got the brass balls to pass it on to me?”

“Sure, Nicky. They’re already out to get you, remember? And you’re dead. You don’t have a damn thing to lose.”

Nicky wasn’t amused. “The work I do,” he muttered, glaring at me, “I try to keep it as low profile as I can. I try not to disturb the grid. Because the grid”—he gestured with his hands, fingers spread—“is like a great, flowing river. And along the banks of the river, a whole army of guys are sitting on folding chairs with rods and lines all set up. Everything you touch, Castor—everything you touch is a hook. There are people out there who want to know everything there is to know about you. So they can control you. So they can neutralize you. So they can kill you whenever they want to. You think I don’t know that paranoia is a clinical condition? I know better than anyone. But you embrace it when it becomes a survival trait.”

“And the scariest thing is that you’re making sense to me,” I observed sourly. “Listen. I swear to you, your name never gets mentioned. Nothing you do for me goes any further—even to the guy who hired me. I just use it to corroborate what I already know or think I know. And afterward, I’ll owe you a favor. A really big one.”

Nicky nodded slowly, more or less satisfied. “I like people owing me favors,” he said. “Okay, Castor, I’ll shag your laptop.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to tell if someone’s doctored that file?”

He laughed mirthlessly at that. “Are you joking? I’ll be able to tell if anyone farted in the same room as this machine. And what they ate beforehand. I’ve got my methods, Castor—and my resources. Your succubus, by the way, she’s been around for a while.”

The body swerve left me standing. “What?”

“There are descriptions of her in some of the grimoires. The black eyes. The dead white skin. The name.”

“Juliet?”

“Ajulutsikael. She is of Baphomet the sister and the youngest of her line, though puissant still and not easily to be taken with words or symbols of art. But with silver will you bind her and with her name, anagrammatized, appease her.”

“How do you know she’s the one?”

“Because she used a name that’s made up out of some of the letters of her real name. She always does. Don’t ask me why. I guess it’s just a demon thing. Was she wearing silver, by the way?”

“A chain. On her ankle.”

“There you go. You’re lucky to be alive, Castor. She’s fast and she’s mean. Gerald Gardner—Crowley’s old mate—talks about someone he knew who summoned her to impress his friends at a stag party. She played all coy, got him to put one foot over the edge of his magic circle, then she ripped off his cock and balls and ate them. Not quite the hot oral action he was hoping for, I’m guessing.

“Oh, and she doesn’t give up. That’s the other thing the occultist crowd all insist on. Once she’s got your scent, she keeps coming. Watch your back.”

There was no answer to that apart from the involuntary wince I gave. “Thanks, Nicky,” I said. “I was feeling bad about the whole thing, but not nearly bad enough, obviously. You’ve raised my game.”

“Sorry. I thought you should know.”

I got up.

“ASAP for this, Nicky,” I said, pointing down at the laptop. “Call me today, if you can. I need to get that back before anyone notices it’s gone.”

“I’ll be in touch,” he said. Then, as I turned to leave, he stopped me with a raised hand. “You’re aware you’ve got a shadow?” he said.

“What, still? I saw her as I was coming in, but—”

“She’s walked past three times. Checking you out. Waiting for you to leave, maybe.”

I was impressed by the sensitivity of his radar—and happy to have the corroboration. “Yeah, I’m aware.”

“Is she anybody I need to know about?”

“No, she’s strictly personal.”

“You’re kidding.” Nicky looked disgusted. “She’s too young for you, Fix. She’s too young for anybody.”

“Call me,” I said.

I headed back across the concourse and out through one of the many sets of doors that lead through to the bus station. There was a flight of concrete steps ahead of me, going down into an underpass that crossed the Euston Road. I took it. At the bottom, I turned a corner. Then I waited.

I heard her before I saw her: clip-clapping clumsily down the steps on tall, precarious heels. She turned the corner and almost ran straight into me. Her brown eyes, made pandalike by inexpertly applied makeup, opened wide with shock. It was Rosa. Now that I saw her full-on, there was no mistaking.

“Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?” I asked her.

I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t what I got. Rosa reached into her coat and pulled out a steak knife; it looked alarming and incongruous in this setting.

A moment later, it looked a whole lot worse as she lunged forward and tried to embed it in my chest. I leaped back, and the blade sliced empty air in front of me. Rosa almost overbalanced, but recovered and took another swipe.

“You did it to her!” she shouted in a thick accent that sounded Czech or Russian. “Again! You did it to her again! It was you! He told me it was you!”

On the third pass I tried to grab her wrist, but she twisted free and almost caught me with a backhanded slash that came out of nowhere. She was so thin! My hand had closed for a moment around her forearm, and there was almost nothing there. But the hate she was obviously feeling for me had given her a hectic strength, and she closed in again with a scream of anger.

This time, I didn’t try to hold her. I just knocked the knife out of her hand with a vertical swipe of my arm. I hadn’t meant to hurt her, but she gave a gasping sob and staggered back, clutching her wrist. I kicked the knife away to the other side of the tunnel and then threw my arms out, fingers spread and palms up, to indicate that I didn’t mean her any harm.

“I didn’t do anything to anybody,” I said. “But I’d love to know what it is I’m supposed to have done. And who told you I did it. If you explain that to me, maybe we’ll know where we stand.”

She glared at me, still clutching her wrist. She cast one longing glance at the knife, then sprinted for the stairs. I caught her in two steps, my hands around her waist. I leaned to the side as she flailed and kicked, because I needed to keep my legs out of the way of those deadly heels.

“Please,” I said. “Rosa. Just tell me what you’re so angry about. Tell me what I’m being accused of.”

She froze suddenly and then went limp in my arms. She half turned, her head lolling sideways onto my shoulder. At the same time she gave a trembling sob of exhaled breath. She slumped against me, making me take her weight as her body pressed against mine.

Disconcerted, I relaxed my hold—and she jackknifed at the optimum moment, the back of her head slamming with sickening force into the bridge of my nose. I fell backward against the wall of the tunnel, and she was away. By the time I could see through my watering eyes, there was no sign of her.

With my head throbbing and my pride hurting a damn sight worse, I climbed the steps back up to street level and took a look in both directions. Nothing. Even in six-inch heels, the kid had a good turn of speed on her.

The pain in my head was getting worse, making my stomach churn with nausea. I sat down on a low wall to regroup and re-equip. Being beaten up by women seemed to be one of the hazards of this particular job. At least Cheryl had been gentle with me.

One thing surfaced through the throbbing ache and bobbed around on top of it, cheerful as only an abstract fact can be in a world of intense physical pain. She just kept saying roses, Farhat had told me when I had asked her about the ghost, going on and on about roses. And Cheryl had said the same thing, back in that first interview. But they were both wrong. I was willing to bet that what the ghost was talking about was Rosa.

I reviewed my options. There were some ideas I wanted to follow up at the archive now—ideas about plastic bags and flat roofs. And Rosa was suddenly looking like someone I needed to talk to urgently the next time I caught her without a kitchen implement in her hand. But the immediate priority was Nicky’s notes—and if I took them back to the Bonnington, I was risking a run-in with Alice.

So I took them down into the Underground instead. Not as good as Bunhill Fields, but it was a lot closer, and it did the same trick, to some extent. Fast-moving vehicles act as a kind of block or damper on my psychic antennae—so in spite of the engine noise, the vibration and the rocking, the nonexistent air-conditioning, the smell of used food and the proximity of other people’s armpits, for me the place has a haze of contemplative calm hanging over it like an angel’s protective wing. I often ride the Circle Line when I need to think long and deep.

Uncomfortably ensconced in a seat that had had one of its plastic arms ripped out at the root, and therefore sharing rather too deeply in the personal space of a burly guy in a Scissor Sisters T-shirt who smelled strongly of acetone, I took the notes out of my pocket and looked them over. There was a lot more there than I’d thought at first—about ten sheets of deceptively thin onionskin printout paper, all full of dense, unformatted type with the occasional “your guess is as good as mine” percentage sign. God alone knew where Nicky had dug this stuff up.

They were database entries for suspicious deaths, and they were made slightly impenetrable by the fact that the fields were all run together without headings or even spaces. The first entry began:

MARYPAULINEGLEESON2BROWNBLUE5BLUNTINSTRUMENTTRAUMAIMPACTED12NOTDETERMINED7SKULLCLAVICLELEFTHUMERUSPAVEMENTOUTSIDEOLDBARRELHEADPUBLICHOUSEYESWITNESSACCOUNT2253YES12MINMULTIPLESEEATTACHED1ST2ND3RD4TH5TH6TH7THSEEATTACHED8TH9TH10THSEEATTACHED11TH12THABRADEDCLEARABRADED

It went on for a long while in this grim, deadpan tone. Then there was a second name, KATHERINE LYLE, followed by another cascade of words and numbers. It occurred to me as I scanned it that I should probably make a point of never handling the original document; the black emotions locked up in it would probably clothesline me straight out.

In some ways the printout was completely impenetrable; in others, it told a lot of depressing variations on a bleak and familiar story. Mindful of my limitations, Nicky had included on some of the later sheets material of a different kind—downloads from news-agency summaries or other less telegraphically terse sources. With the help of these crib notes, I was able to work my way through the main list a lot more quickly.

It was mostly a case of weeding out the ones that were impossible, and after that, the ones that were possible but didn’t feel right. Straightforward accidents with lots of witnesses; domestic manslaughters where the victim lived in the area and would have far stronger links to her own home than to the Bonnington, which after all was only a refrigerated warehouse full of moldering paper; heart attacks and strokes and all the banal tragedies of human existence that normally let you slip into the afterlife without raising too much of a splash.

I got it down to a short list of three, but I realized that I’d need a bit more information to tell me which if any of the three was actually the archive ghost. And at that point, an inspiration equivalent in weight and momentum to a half brick neatly aimed hit me smartly at the base of the brain.

I had a contact, one I could bring in on this. He wouldn’t like it a whole lot, but that which doesn’t kill us makes us strong.

I looked up at the electronic display strip on the wall of the carriage: THE NEXT STATION IS MOORGATE, it read. The train had almost finished its circuit of the Circle Line. After Moorgate came the Barbican and then Farringdon, from where it was an easy step to Damjohn’s club. Two stops after that and I’d be back in Euston Square, at the archive. But Alice was gunning for me at the archive—according to Rich, anyway. And I didn’t really have anything I could usefully do there until Nicky finished interrogating the laptop and got back to me.

So Kissing the Pink was where I went first. The idea in my head was that I’d make my peace with Rosa and find out how she was connected to the archive ghost. I was pretty vague on details after that, but I hoped that something would present itself.

As I was walking there, I took out my mobile phone, which for once I’d remembered to recharge, and placed a call to a Hampstead number. I got through on the first try. James Dodson wasn’t happy to hear from me again, and when he heard that I wanted to come over and visit, it pretty near spoiled his day. I had to insist. Things might have got ugly if we’d been talking face to face. But that was a treat I still had to look forward to.

There was no sign of Rosa in the downstairs area of the club, and my courage failed me at the thought of questioning the whores upstairs. I did ask one of the waitresses, though. Yes, Rosa had been around earlier in the day, but her shift was finished now. She might possibly come in again tomorrow; she usually did on a Friday. I bought myself an overpriced gin and tonic and drank it slowly in the club area downstairs, staring glumly at a parade of beautiful, naked, emphatically alive women who somehow seemed a lot less real and tangible to me right then than a single dead one.

There was a small, decorous commotion over to my right as two men were settled at one of the tables by a very deferential waitress. I squinted into the half dark and without any surprise at all identified the pair of them by their build: the squat, hairy-browed Damjohn and the tall, patrician Gabe McClennan.

They were oblivious to the room, continuing some intense conversation that had already been under way when they sat down. Intense on Gabe’s part, anyway—he was talking with his hands as much as with his mouth, and his face was working with anger and frustration. Damjohn responded with imperturbable calm, or perhaps with the very mildest irritation.

I’d already made up my mind that I’d bail out if Damjohn showed up; there wasn’t anything to be gained by letting him know that I was looking for Rosa, and it might even get her into trouble. But somehow retreat seemed like a very unpalatable option right then—and sometimes whacking the nest with a stick is the best way of finding out what kind of insect you’re dealing with—the downside being that sometimes you get stung.

So without consciously thinking about it or making anything that would count as a decision, I found myself crossing the room, putting my half-finished drink down on their table, and pulling out a chair in between the two of them.

“Afternoon, gents,” I said. “Mind if I join you?”

Gabe stared at me as if he’d just bitten into an apple and found me squirming around inside it. Damjohn’s expression was impassive for the space of about two seconds and then broke into a smile that you couldn’t have told from the real thing with aqua regia.

“Mr. Castor,” he said. “Of course not. Please, sit.” He gestured expansively, and I dumped myself down with an exaggerated sigh of satisfaction. McClennan looked like he was going to choke.

“How’s business, Gabe?” I asked, flashing him a smile.

“You stole from me, you little fuck!” His voice was a low, venomous snarl. “You came into my office with your bullshit story and then you—” Damjohn stopped him dead with a raised hand—a neat trick that I almost felt like applauding.

“We were just talking about you,” he clarified blandly, turning to me.

I bowed my head coquettishly. “Only good things, I hope.”

“A mixture of good and bad. But then, I wouldn’t expect a man in your profession to be an angel. I have, I must tell you, been surprised by your—resilience. Your unimpressive frame and build belie you, Mr. Castor. They give a false impression of vulnerability.”

“I’m a weed,” I said amiably. “The more poison you put down, the more I spring up again.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ll fucking poison—”

“McClennan,” Damjohn said, “if you speak again, I’ll become aggravated with you. Do you really want that to happen?”

Gabe left that question hanging, and Damjohn went on as if he hadn’t been interrupted by either of us. “In point of fact,” he mused, giving me a thoughtful stare, “I believe you may have the right skills and the right temperament to fit in well in one of my little enterprises.”

“You’re offering me a job?” I had to ask, because I didn’t believe what I was hearing. Bribery was the last thing I’d been expecting.

“These things are never offered unless they’ve already been accepted, Mr. Castor. I’m sure you understand. Are you looking for a permanent position?”

Gabe was going a very scary color, fetchingly set off by his snow-white hair. It looked as though the effort of not speaking was going to cost him a major blood vessel.

“You’ve already got an exorcist,” I pointed out with a nod in his direction.

“My table is long and wide. It’s all a question of what good things you bring to it.”

“And that’s where I stick,” I said. “I mean, all I can do are the basics. I can’t raise demons, for example.”

“No.” Damjohn’s eyes flicked over to Gabe for the merest instant. “But for dangerous and marginal activities of that nature, one uses the reckless and the stupid. For you I’d have other tasks.”

I shook my head, not in refusal but in lingering disbelief. This was surreal. Damjohn was between me and the stage; from where I was sitting, a hugely pneumatic redhead was spreading her legs right behind his head, giving him a most unusual—but somehow appropriate—halo. “How much would you be looking to pay?” I asked, just for something to say.

“As a starting salary? Let’s say two thousand pounds a month. With a lump sum to cover moving expenses and any possible friction on the more tender areas of your conscience. And it goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that any of my girls would be delighted to receive a visit from you at any time. More than delighted—because you’d be coming to them as my personal friend and associate. If you have any unusual needs of a sexual kind, they would be well catered for.”

Damjohn looked at me shrewdly, and I got the feeling that I was being weighed and assessed by a very skilled fisher of men. “I can see,” he said, “that I’ve still failed to find the measure of you, Mr. Castor. But I do have one other inducement to offer you.”

He stopped and waited for a response. I shrugged to indicate that I was still listening. On the stage, the redheaded woman was gone. In her place, a sax player was laying down some very lazy and half-hearted licks to a recorded backing, no doubt making the sex tourists feel like real urban sophisticates.

“You must have wondered—a man who does what you do for a living and who has been gifted by nature as you have would have to wonder—what conceivable scheme of things would allow the dead both to return as they do, in the forms that they do, and then to be sent away again by the likes of yourself and Mr. McClennan here. You must, in other words, have questions about the structure and logic of the invisible world—its geography, for want of a better word. You must have asked yourself what it all means.”

I’m sure that Damjohn saw me tense. Up to now, I’d been feeling pretty much on top of this conversation, because I knew that there was nothing he could offer me that I’d want. Me and love—even me and sex—is a complicated equation, and you can wear empty pockets with a certain chic, like a badge of integrity. But answers? Oh yeah. I’d gone halfway around the fucking world looking for answers.

Damjohn smiled, and this time he meant it—not as an expression of any warm feelings toward me, but from the pure and simple pleasure of having found my weak point.

“And you’d know?” was all I could find to say. “How’s that, then? I heard that Jesus walked among the prostitutes, but that was a while ago now. You’re not telling me the two of you met?”

The smile curdled slightly, but Damjohn’s tone stayed light and relaxed. “No. I’ve not had that pleasure. But I have spoken to his opposite number, as it were. I have knowledge that comes with a price many would consider too high. Of course,” he glanced across at Gabe again, this time with undisguised contempt, “I’ve usually been able to persuade others to pay it on my behalf.”

He leaned forward, his stare spearing me. “I know where they come from, and I know where you send them to. I imagine that information would pique your curiosity. Am I wrong?”

The look on his face was the overintense benevolence of a man who’s just invited you into the deep woods to look at some puppy dogs. I stared back at him, my feelings for a moment in too great a turmoil to allow me to speak. While that moment lasted, I was a six-year-old boy again, the remains of my birthday cake still in a Tupperware box in the bottom of the fridge, screaming at my kid sister to get out of my bed because she was dead already and she was scaring me. I saw her fade into nothing, her sad face last of all like the fucking Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.

“But you understand,” said Damjohn, sitting back, “the offer hasn’t been made. Not officially. Because the answer comes first.” He looked at me expectantly, really enjoying himself. McClennan was staring at me, too, with so pure and incandescent a hatred that he reminded me of one of those South American frogs that sweat venom. That wasn’t because I’d rifled his filing cabinet; it was because Damjohn was trying to seduce me instead of just getting some heavies in to make my arms and legs bend the wrong way.

And that made it easier, in a way. So did Katie, in another way, but that’s more than I can explain. I stood up.

“The offer hasn’t been made?” I repeated.

Damjohn shook his head reassuringly, imperturbably.

“Then I’m not telling you to shove it up your arse and tamp it in with a polo mallet. I’ll stick with the devils I know. Until next time, eh?”

I left my drink unfinished on the table. Gargling it and spitting it in Damjohn’s face would probably have counted as rude.

As I was walking through the foyer, heading for the street door, the phone rang in the little alcove, and the duty bouncer picked up. At the same time, a burst of louche jazz sounded from behind me and made a synapse connect somewhere in my memory.

It took only a second to try it out. I stepped outside and stood to one side of the door. On my mobile phone, I flicked through the last dozen calls or so until I found the number I was looking for: 7405 818. When I dialed, I got the engaged signal. I waited about thirty seconds; tried again.

From inside the club, I heard the phone ring. On my cell, I heard the gravelly voice of the bouncer. “Hello?”

“Wrong number,” I said. “Sorry.”

ICOE 7405 818. Someone at the Bonnington Archive had the number of a brothel in his Rolodex. Not sinister in itself, maybe—but given Damjohn’s touching interest in me, it was another link in the chain.

Then, when I was heading west toward the Bonnington, I made another connection. I’d been thinking about that missing page in the incident book, and suddenly I saw a way that the book could help me even in its maimed form.

So despite almost being carved up with a steak knife and failing to find hide or hair of Rosa, I was in a pretty good mood when I got back to the archive. I’d resisted temptation, discomfited my enemies, and started to put the pieces of this sad-ass puzzle together in a new order. All in all, I was feeling the smug satisfaction of a job well begun and therefore half done.

Right up until Alice told me I was fired.