The Devil You Know

Fifteen

I JUST NEED ANOTHER DAY,” I SAID, AMAZED TO HEAR a tone in my voice that sounded like pleading. “Honest to God. One more day will do it. Peele said I could have until the end of the week.”

Alice’s stony face didn’t soften by so much as a muscle. She was holding my trench coat in her hands, and now she thrust it back at me.

“Is this yours?” she demanded in an overemphatic, “this is for the record” voice.

“Yeah. It’s mine. Look, Alice, I’m serious. All I need to do now is nail down a few more bits and pieces. I’m there. Really.”

“Frank stowed your coat on one of the racks,” Alice said, ignoring me completely. “Then he needed to leave the desk, so he decided to put it up in a locker, where it would be safer. When he folded it up, these fell out of the pocket.”

She brandished her keys in my face.

Shit. I’d had a fuzzy half memory of transferring the damn things to my trouser pocket. That probably didn’t count as extenuating circumstances, though.

“You left them behind in the church the other night,” I said. “I was going to give them back to you, but it slipped my mind.” Come to think of it, that didn’t sound a whole lot better.

“Did it?” she inquired with biting sarcasm. “Castor, the first conversation we ever had was about the value of the collection and how seriously we take our security. Since then, you’ve been in and out of here for the best part of a week, having to be swiped through card readers, having to wait while doors were unlocked for you and then locked again behind you. I find it hard to believe that none of that made any impression on you. That it all just . . . slipped your mind.”

“Is all of this aggression intended to cover your embarrassment at losing the things in the first place?” I asked.

If I thought candor would disarm Alice, I was wrong. She unleashed a torrent of profanity that surprised me not so much by its vehemence as by its breadth. Her face flushed first deep pink, then red, and although she wasn’t entirely coherent, a few key points did stand out of the rushing tide of invective. One, I was a thief; two, I’d compromised the archive’s security; three, Peele had agreed I shouldn’t be allowed back inside the building.

“You’re out!” she yelled at me. “You’re out of here, Castor. Now! And we’ll expect our deposit back tomorrow. Otherwise, we’ll get it back through the courts! Get him out of my bloody sight, Frank.”

Frank gestured toward the door—an action that fell a long way short of pitching me out on my ear and probably left Alice feeling a certain sense of coitus interruptus. But there was no getting around it, all the same.

I made one last try. “I think your ghost is a murder victim,” I told her, laying my cards on the table. “I also think you’ve got a thief on the staff. Someone who’s been systematically pilfering stuff from the collection over months, or maybe years. If you’ll just let me—”

Alice turned her back on me and walked away. Frank touched my shoulder very lightly, but his face was set hard. “We don’t want any trouble, do we, Mr. Castor?” he said.

“No,” I answered with glum resignation. “We don’t. But it’s a hell of a thing, Frank. We always seem to get it anyway.”

“You’ve got everyone well pissed off with you, Felix,” Cheryl said cheerfully as she threw herself down on the seat opposite me in the Costella Café. She tossed a lick of hair back from her forehead, stifling her broad grin with some difficulty. “Sorry, I know it’s not funny. I just can’t help laughing when Alice loses it like that. It’s like seeing Nelson get down off his column to have a punch-up with a cabbie.”

“You were watching from the balcony when she chewed me out,” I accused her.

“Yeah, I was—and I could’ve sold seats, easy. She’d been after you all day. When she asked me if I’d seen you, I lied and said I thought you’d left already—then it turned out you had. If I had your mobile number, I would’ve warned you. But you’ve got some other jobs lined up, yeah?” By the end of this speech, she was managing to sound solicitous rather than on the verge of giggles.

Instead of answering, I took her hand in mine. “Cheryl,” I said, staring solemnly into her eyes, “there’s something very important I want to ask you.”

That made her lips quirk in alarm. “Hey, it was a good bang, Felix, and I like you and everything. But you don’t want to get the wrong idea . . .”

“I want you to steal something for me.”

Cheryl’s face lit up. “Black ops! You star! What do you need?”

“The incident book. Peele keeps it in his desk drawer.”

The light went out again. “Don’t be stupid! How am I gonna get it out past Frank? If I get caught, I’ll be out on my arse—and probably on a charge, too. I thought you meant secret information or something.”

I nodded. “I do mean information—but I need the hard copy, as they say. And you don’t bring it out past Frank.”

“There’s only one way out of the—”

“You wrap it in a plastic bag and throw it out of the window of that room where we had our brief encounter this morning—just like someone else is doing. I’ll climb up and get it later on tonight.”

Cheryl blinked. “Someone’s stealing from the archive?”

“Yes. That’s what was inside the bag. A whole bunch of letters and papers and at least one bound book. Some of it comes from the Russian collection—but there’s a fair bit that looks older. A lot older.”

She stared at me hard. “Why haven’t you called the police?” she asked.

“Because I’ve still got a job to do, and there’s a lot more at stake here than a few old papers. I want to find out how Sylvie died and what her connection to the archive is. Calling in a load of plods who’ll lock the place down will just make that harder. Plus, if Alice has her way, they’ll arrest me, too. No, I’ll go to the cop shop when I’m good and ready.”

“And in the meantime, you want to knock some stuff off on your own account.”

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Look, Cheryl, I’m onto something. Something a lot bigger than stolen papers—big enough that whatever happened to Sylvie was just collateral damage. But I need that book. I was about to ask Peele to lend it to me when Alice put the boot in.”

Cheryl looked puzzled now. “So you’re pitching for Sylvie now?”

“Pitching. Batting. Fielding. Working the scoreboard.”

“But you’re supposed to disappear her. That’s why they brought you in, isn’t it?”

I hated saying it; I knew damn well how ridiculous it sounded. “She saved my life the other night, so I sort of owe her one.”

“One you can’t exactly pay back to a dead person,” Cheryl observed, widening and then narrowing her eyes at me in a way that conveyed a world of meaning. “You lead a fucking weird life, Felix.”

“It’s Fix. Everyone who can stand me calls me Fix.”

She looked at her watch. “Frank will still be around,” she mused. “I could say I needed to go back up for my purse.”

I waited, watching a big psychomachia play itself out on her face: duty versus mischief. It was enthralling theater, and I would have enjoyed it for its own sake if I’d had less at stake.

“Yeah, all right,” she said at last. “I’ll give it a go.”

Twenty minutes later, I was standing in the alley to the side of the Bonnington, more or less invisible in the early-evening gloom, and I saw the bag come sailing out of the attic window, flying wide. There was a muffled thud as it hit the flat roof. I climbed up onto the wheely bin again and hiked myself up with my arms. This was getting to be a habit. I retrieved the bag and got down again as quickly as I could. I wasn’t overlooked from the Bonnington, but there were buildings on all sides, behind whose dust-smeared windows there could be any number of prurient onlookers.

Cheryl met me at the corner of the street, and we walked on together.

“I’m an accomplice now,” she observed.

“That’s right. You are.”

“I could lose my job if anyone finds out.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“So I get to know what’s going on. That’s fair.”

“That is fair.”

A silence fell between us, expectant on her side, deeply thoughtful on mine.

“So are you going to—”

“Come and meet my landlady,” I said. “You’ll like her.”

Pen doesn’t cook much, but when she does, three things happen. The first is that the kitchen becomes a sort of domestic vision of Hell, complete with roiling smoke and acrid smells, in which pans have their bottoms burned out of them, glasses are shattered by casual immersion in boiling water, and gravel-voiced harpies (or Edgar and Arthur, anyway) mock the whole endeavor from the tops of various cupboards while Pen curses them with bitter imprecations. The second is that you get a meal that emerges from this Vulcanic stithy looking like a photo in Good Housekeeping and tasting like something Albert Roux would knock up to impress the neighbors. The third is that Pen herself is purged by the ordeal, refined in the fire, and radiates a Zen-like calm for hours or even days afterward.

Tonight’s effort—in Cheryl’s honor—was a lamb cassoulet. Hugely impressed, Cheryl worked her way through seconds and then through thirds.

“This is amazing,” she enthused. “You gotta give me the recipe, Pam!”

“Call me Pen, love,” said Pen warmly. “I’m afraid there isn’t a recipe. I cook holistically—and half pissed—so nothing ever comes out the same way twice.”

She refilled Cheryl’s glass. It was something Australian with an eagle on the label. The Aussies always seem to go for raptors rather than marsupials on their wine bottles; if it was me, I’d be pushing the unique selling point. I held out my own glass for a top-up. As a party piece, I can sometimes be persuaded to recite the whole of that Monty Python routine about Australian table wines. “A lot of people in this country . . .” The hard part is finding anyone to do the persuading.

“So you live with Felix?” Cheryl asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Not in the Biblical sense,” said Pen, shaking her head. “Although there is something a bit Old Testament about him, isn’t there?”

“Like, something out of Sodom and Gomorrah, you mean?”

“I am still sitting here, you know,” I interjected.

“No,” said Pen, ignoring me, “I was thinking Noah. Very fond of himself. Big, insane projects that he always drags everyone else into. Chasing after anything in a skirt . . .”

“I didn’t hear that about Noah.”

“Oh yeah, he was a horny old bugger. They all were. Never turn your back on a patriarch.”

For our unjust desserts, she wheeled out a supermarket chocolate torte. She also got the brandy out, but I wrested it from her hands and put it back in the boot locker where she keeps it. “We’re going to need clear heads for this next bit,” I admonished her.

“What next bit?”

“We’ve got work to do.”

“‘Big, insane projects,’” Cheryl quoted.

“I warned you,” Pen said, shaking her head. Cheated of her brandy, she poured herself another glass of wine.

I cleared all the dirty dishes to one end of the massive farmhouse table and spread open the plans that I’d copied at the town hall. Then I went and got the incident book, which had landed flat when Cheryl had bunged it out of the window and so had survived its fall without visible damage. I cracked it open at September 13, the missing page again making it easy to find.

“What are we gonna do?” Cheryl asked.

“Well, seeing as Jeffrey has gone to the trouble of specifying the time, place, and date for each of the ghost’s appearances, we’re going to plot them against the building plans.”

Cheryl’s expression said that wasn’t much of an answer. “Because I need to know what exactly it is that she’s haunting,” I explained. “I thought it was the Russian artifacts, but it isn’t. So it’s something else.”

“Does it have to be that specific?”

“No, but it usually is. Most ghosts have a physical anchor. It can be a place or it can be an object—from time to time it can even be another person. But there’s nearly always something. Some specific thing that they’re clinging to.”

Neither of them looked convinced. “This archive of yours counts as a place, doesn’t it?” Pen demanded. “Can’t she just be haunting the whole building?”

“I’m talking more specific than that, Pen. Within the building, or maybe close by, there should be an area that’s uniquely hers. An area that she associates herself with and that she hangs around in most of the time. Or a particular thing that she owned in life, maybe, and still has strong feelings for.”

“How is that gonna help you?” asked Cheryl.

“Because once I know what it is, I may have a better idea who she was and how she died.”

Cheryl nodded. She got it. So now I could tell her the bad news.

“And you’re going to have to put the crosses in, because you’re the resident expert.”

I handed her a magic marker. It took two tries, because she didn’t want to take it. She was looking at the plans with a deeply pained expression. “I suck at this stuff,” she wailed. “This is almost maths. I’m a humanities graduate, yeah?”

“We’ll work it out together,” I promised. “Pen, you read aloud from the book. Not all the entries—just the ones that mention the ghost.”

“Should I add voices?” Pen asked hopefully.

“There’s just the one voice. Think of Sourdust from Titus Groan, and you’ll be on the right lines.”

That seemed to appeal to her. “I can do that,” she said approvingly.

“Then let’s go.”

We made a start, but Cheryl was right—it wasn’t easy. The building had changed so damn much over the years, and the plans—even the recent ones—looked so different from the baroque, three-dimensional maze that the archive had become. But on the other hand, Peele’s notes were meticulous, and he always gave chapter and verse. I felt a grudging respect for the man. After two dozen ghost sightings, a lot of people would have started using ditto marks, but not Jeffrey. Every damn time, he recorded the when and the where and the who in the same amount of rich, unnecessary detail.

And one by one, we plotted them out on the plans.

As we worked, I thought about that missing page—a blank space surrounded by information—information that up to now I hadn’t even tried to use. But there was a pattern hidden in the random flux of things going bump in the tail end of the afternoon. There had to be. And the incident book was still the key.

Every sighting became a cross, and the plans slowly took on a fly-specked appearance as Cheryl marked each one down. Basement. First floor. Second floor. Basement. First floor. Third. Fourth. She’d almost never shown up on the fourth floor—only twice in eighty or so appearances—and never in the attic. Visits to the third floor were rare, too, and they were always in strong room K or the corridor outside. On the second floor, she’d turned up in half a dozen rooms and in the corridor, and on the first floor and in the basement, she was even more ubiquitous.

We sat back, staring at the fruits of our labors. The silence was the silence of revelations not arriving. In droves.

“She’s all over the place,” said Cheryl.

“Yeah,” I agreed in a slightly dead tone. “She is.”

“No, she’s not.” Pen’s voice was a little slurred, but there was a weight of certainty in it. We both looked at her.

She shrugged. “She’s on a running rope.”

“Explain,” I said.

Pen bent over the plans. “Okay,” she said, “suppose this cross here was a bit farther over—I mean, suppose she was in the corner of this room, not out in the middle. And this one—she could easily have been ten yards or so farther down the corridor.”

She rubbed out two of the crosses as she spoke; drew in two more. A third she moved only half an inch or so, to place it closer to a cluster that was already there. She looked at me expectantly.

“Straight lines,” I said. “She works in straight lines.”

Pen tutted. “They’re not straight, Fix. They’re curved!”

I started to feel a tingling in the back of my neck as my hairs rose—not from a ghostly visitation but from the gathering, inescapable sense of something opaque becoming obvious.

“Fuck me sideways,” I murmured.

Cheryl was looking from one of us to the other and back again. “Is someone gonna tell me the news?”

My eyes flicked backward and forward, from basement, to first floor, to second floor, third, fourth.

“Okay,” I said, “so I’m an idiot. I don’t have a good visual imagination. It’s like—the Milky Way.”

“It’s like what?” Cheryl demanded. But Pen was nodding excitedly.

“The Milky Way. We see it as a line in the sky because we’re looking at it from the wrong angle. But it’s not a line, it’s a disc. And these aren’t lines, either. Put the vertical dimension back in, and it’s right there. It’s—”

“—a running rope,” Pen finished.

“I’m gonna sulk,” Cheryl warned.

I put the plans one on top of another and held them up to show her. She squinted at them doubtfully. Now that I’d seen what Pen was driving at, I couldn’t believe that Cheryl was still missing it.

“Look—on each floor, she turns up in a whole lot of different places, but they make a rough circle. A really big circle in the basement, then a slightly smaller one on the first floor. Smaller still on the second, but still with more or less the same center. On the third floor, you’ve just got a scattering of points, all very close together. But suppose you mapped all of this in three dimensions. What would you get?”

“A headache,” said Cheryl bitterly.

“You’d get a hollow hemisphere.”

“The higher she gets in the building,” I said, pointing, “the less room she’s got to move in horizontally. Don’t you get it? Think of a dog on a leash. If its owner beats it with a stick, what’s it going to do?”

“Run away,” said Cheryl. “I think I’m being patronized now.”

“No, you’re not. Just see it in your mind. The dog will run away as far as the leash will let it. And then it will keep running, but it will only be able to go in a circle, right? A circle with the owner—and the stick—right in the middle.”

“Okay.”

“But suppose it was a space dog. With a jet pack. It would still go out to the full extent of the leash, but it wouldn’t be a circle anymore—because the dog would be free to move up and down and all around . . .”

“So it’d be a sphere.”

“Exactly!”

Cheryl looked again at the overlaid plans. The black crosses showed clearly through: concentric circles, narrowing as they went up through the building.

“There is a fixed place,” I said. “A tether of some kind—but she’s not haunting it. She’s getting as far away from it as she can. She’s running on the end of a leash.”

“And the man with the stick—”

“Is at the center. The place where she doesn’t want to go. The place where she’s never been seen.”

Cheryl took the plans from me and laid them down on the table again. “It’s got to be on the first floor,” she murmured. Then she glanced at Pen and me to double-check her logic. “The first floor or the basement. I mean, she’ll have the widest circle where she’s on the same level as . . . the thing. The place. Whatever.”

Pen nodded emphatically. “So where is it?” I asked. “What’s at the center of the sphere?”

Cheryl traced the line of the main corridor, muttering to herself. “That’s the front desk. These are the first-floor strong rooms. A, B, C. Ladies’ toilet . . .”

She tailed off into silence, but her fingers still moved over the map. Finally she looked up at me, her face a picture of bemusement. “It doesn’t work,” she said. “You’re wrong.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Well, this room here—that’s the dead center, right? That’s smack in the middle of the circle, in the basement. That’s what she’s avoiding. It’s called SECOND CONFERENCE ROOM on here.”

“Yes? So?” I pressed her with a slight sense of unease. “What’s it called now?”

“It’s not called anything now, Felix.” Cheryl’s tone was flat. “Because it isn’t bloody there.”