The Devil You Know

Eighteen

SUNDAY. THE DAY OF REST. BUT AS SOME CLEVER bastard once wittily remarked, there’s no rest for the wicked—which must make me a very nasty piece of work indeed.

I don’t know where policemen go to unwind and spend their precious limited leisure time. You can sort of picture it, though. Some bar where everyone checks the pint line on their glass before they take a sip, where you can leave your coat on the back of the chair when you go to take a piss, and where Paki jokes never go out of fashion.

For obvious reasons, that wasn’t where James Dodson arranged to meet me. He chose Bar Italia on Old Compton Street instead, and he was sitting at the far end when I arrived, trying hard to blend in with the decor. As soon as I sat down, cinnamon latte in hand, he slapped a manila folder down on the bar top and stood up.

“Everything you need is in there,” he said. “Now, unless drinking with you is a deal-breaker, I’m leaving. And I’m keeping you to your word, Castor. If I ever hear from you again—if I ever even see your face—I’ve got some friends who’ll be only too happy to make you cry tears of blood.”

I shot him a pained glance, the cliché offending me more than the threat. “Yeah, but then I’d just die, Dodson, and I’d have to come back and haunt you. Better quit while you’re behind.”

He stalked out, either deciding that I wasn’t worth the effort of verbal swordplay or remembering that he’d come out unarmed. I turned my attention to the folder.

Like the man said, it had everything I needed. The cinnamon latte went cold and formed an unhealthy-looking skin like a badly healed wound while I dived deep into the phantasmagoria of signed and sealed plodology that Dodson had dredged up for me.

You can say what you like about our police force, but their paperwork is immaculate. Autopsy reports were cross-referenced to X-ray prints, path results, explanatory diagrams, and in one case even a T-shirt—or at least a photograph of a T-shirt. That was included because some fibers from the shirt were found down the throat of the woman in question, indicating some attempt to asphyxiate her “after her clothing had been removed at an earlier stage in the assault.”

Being what I am makes me morbidly sensitive in a lot of ways, obnoxiously hard-assed in others. On this occasion, it was the first trait that was dominant, and I had to work to keep my breathing regular as I pieced together the nightmare circumstances in which these three women’s lives had hit the buffers.

Jenny Southey was a hit-and-run victim, but it hadn’t been clean or quick. She was a prostitute working the streets around King’s Cross. Barely eighteen. A car had crushed her against a wall, breaking her pelvis and rupturing her liver. The accompanying file notes said they’d brought in a suspect, and he’d made an incoherent confession. The whole thing seemed to be an accidental result of overenthusiastic curb-crawling with a vast amount of alcohol thrown in. Whatever sentence they eventually gave the guy, I wished him a lifetime’s supply of brewer’s droop to go along with it.

Caroline Beck was even younger, but her death was just as brutal and arbitrary. She died of a methadone overdose at a party, three streets away from the Bonnington in the evocatively named Polygon Road. That would have been par for the course if she’d been a user, but she wasn’t; some high-as-a-kite arsehole had come up to her while she was dancing and injected her before she even knew what was going on. He’d just wanted to spread the good vibes, but since he chose the carotid artery and since she’d never injected before, the effect was spectacularly enhanced. The girl had died about half an hour later, when her muscles went into spasm, and her breathing stopped.

Both of those sounded plausible enough to me—the sort of fucked-up, messy deaths that leave a little piece of your spirit trapped in the mesh of agonizing, unresolved emotions. But when I turned to number three, I knew I’d found my ghost.

Unlike the other two, she didn’t have a name—just a case number and a clinical description. One hundred and fifty-nine centimeters in height; hair brunette; eyes brown; build slender; age approximately mid-twenties. Naked, but a T-shirt found near the body provided samples of her blood and sloughed skin cells when tested. She’d been found in a skip on a builder’s yard in the hinterland beyond the Ampthill Estate, dead for at least three days. The date on the incident report was Wednesday, September 14—the day after the ghost was first sighted at the Bonnington Archive.

The details were grim. The girl had been sexually assaulted, both vaginally and anally, with traces of semen only in the vagina but trauma to both areas consistent with rape. Her face had been extensively slashed with some sharp and irregular metal implement that had caused massive laceration and blood loss. The police pathologist had spent a lot of time cataloging those facial injuries: “a multitude of shallow, irregular cuts and gouges, widely varied in depth and profile,” he noted, deadpan, before going on to list the position and extent of each and every one of them. “The instrument used in the attack had a number of different surfaces and edges that moved independently of each other,” he concluded. But the cause of death was asphyxiation—that T-shirt, jammed tight down into her throat until she couldn’t breathe around it.

The facial injuries were a dead giveaway. So was the T-shirt. In the photo you could clearly read the motif. I had no idea what it meant, but even I could tell that it was Cyrillic. And it wasn’t a T-shirt, as such; it was a white, sleeveless hoodie.

In among the rest of the documentation, I found a photograph of the girl’s head and shoulders. The dry description of those wounds did nothing to convey the reality, and I flinched as I stared at the bloodied scrape of raw flesh that was all that was left of her upper face. I knew the first time I saw her that it wasn’t a veil she was wearing; I just hadn’t wanted to think too much about what it really was.

So it’s you, I thought. Somebody raped you. Somebody murdered you. Somebody tied your soul up in a magical straitjacket.

And then they brought me in to finish you off.

Anger bubbled up from my chest into my throat, sublimed out from between my clenched teeth. It took some of the edge off the horror and helplessness, so I welcomed it. But something odd happened to it when it reached the atavistic lumber rooms of my brain. The face of my sister, Katie, kept coming in between me and the ravaged face in the photo, and I was momentarily blinded by tears. Not tears of blood, just the ordinary variety, but they felt hot enough to scald. Grief and bitter shame filled me. I didn’t try to analyze either emotion; I just endured them until they subsided and I could see the shape of the rage again under that dead black pall.

Someone was going to pay. It helped a little to be able to say that to myself and mean it. Someone was going to pay with extortionate, punishing interest.

I went back to the records that Dodson had given me. None of the later file notes indicated that the dead woman had been identified at any stage in the investigation. In fact, “investigation” was probably too grandiose a word for it. The police had done a little doorstepping to see if anyone had heard anything, despite the pathologist’s clear note that there was “no evidence of trauma or sexual congress in situ.” They’d taken a statement from the site manager, who’d confirmed that the skip was unused and unattended for at least a week before the body was found. They’d done a little tiptoe through the missing-persons list, put in a routine information request to Interpol, then sat back and brewed up. It was immaculate autopilot policing; nobody cared, and nobody was going to chase their own tails over some Eastern European whore found naked and used up on a building site. Even with the immigration quotas down, it was still a case of some for everyone, and more coming.

I paid for the coffee I hadn’t touched, left the café, and headed off down Old Compton Street. I was still missing something, but I sort of knew the shape of it now. I could fill it in by looking at the pieces that surrounded it.

Damjohn was a pimp. He ran strip clubs and brothels in the Clerkenwell triangle, and someone at the Bonnington knew him well.

Gabe McClennan was an exorcist. He’d been to the archive, but whatever he went for, he’d been firing blanks that day. He’d silenced the archive ghost, but he hadn’t killed her.

Rosa was a whore. She worked for Damjohn. Damjohn had gone out of his way, it seemed now, to make sure I got to see her—and then she’d tried to kill me with a steak knife because of something she thought I’d done to some other woman.

The ghost was from somewhere in Eastern Europe—probably Russia, since Russian seemed to be her native language. But she’d died in Somers Town, raped and murdered, and her spirit was trapped in the basement of a public building where she had no compelling reason to be in the first place.

Some one thing joined all of these things together and made sense out of them. But the closest I had was the card the ghost had given me on my second day at the archive, with its cryptic inscription ICOE 7405 818. The more I chewed it over, the less it seemed to mean.

Under the circumstances, the last thing I was in the mood for was a wedding. But that was where I was going to go.

The Brompton Oratory, immortalized in song by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, which was another set of associations I could have done without. But I had to admit, speaking as an atheist, that it was a hell of a place of worship—all vertical vistas and baroque flounces. If you got married here, you wouldn’t need a wedding cake.

Three white limousines were parked out in front of the building, the lead one decked out with white ribbons. Two ushers in immaculate morning suits standing in the portico stared aghast at my trench coat and my general air of walking in out of a storm. They were a matched pair in one respect only—they both had exactly Cheryl’s complexion. But one was a barge pole stood on its end, while the other was both an inch shorter than me and six inches broader—muscle, from the look of it, not fat. It was this handy-looking gentleman who rolled into my path, like one of those kids’ trucks that Tonka used to make out of stainless steel, that you could drop off a cliff without even scratching the paintwork. I warned him off with an admonitory raised finger. “I’m on the bride’s side,” I told him. “Let’s not do anything to spoil the mood.”

“We’re on the bride’s side,” the barge pole said sternly, stepping up on my other side. “Let’s see your invitation.”

I made a show of going through my pockets, hoping that some other late arrival would roll up and distract their attention. No such luck.

“It’s here somewhere,” I offered. “Can I go in now and show it to you later?”

“What’s the name of the bride?” Barge Pole demanded by way of a compromise.

Bugger. “I’ve always called her by a nickname,” I hedged.

“What nickname?” Tonka Toy getting in on the act now.

I tried to think of a nickname. His fist closed hard on a handful of my shirt, and his face creased in a stern frown. Inspiration struck just in time to stop me going arse over tip down the steps.

“Oh, I remember now,” I said, smacking my brow to punish my brain for its erratic performance. “Cheryl’s got my invitation. Cheryl Telemaque. My fiancée.”

“Fiancée?” The barge pole sounded appalled, and the burly guy looked stricken enough to make me wonder if he was carrying a torch for Cheryl himself. Either way, that seemed to do the trick. I slipped between them and was in through the door before they could react. Neither of them followed me.

Inside, I found Herbert Gribble’s great masterwork of devotional plagiarism filled to bursting with rows of people wearing suits and dresses that were probably mortgaged rather than bought outright, all sitting docilely and waiting for the bride to show. The groom was up at the altar, looking as cool and collected as a man tied to train tracks and hearing the distant whistle.

Cheryl was in the fifth row back, dressed to match the architecture in a beige dress with enough lacy froth to make “baroque” seem an appropriate word for her, too. Her cream leather shoes with nickel silvered roses on them fitted in with the Italianate charm of the place. Farther away I could see Alice Gascoigne and Jeffrey Peele, side by side, and Jon Tiler looking like a partially trained orangutan in a suit that had been made to measure. For a chimp.

I sat down next to Cheryl. She glanced up, away, back, her eyes widening in horror—a double take worthy of Norman Wisdom.

“Felix!” she whispered hoarsely. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood.”

She wasn’t amused, and I didn’t blame her. “I don’t mind you coming, but you look like something the cat dragged in. Are you mad?” She waved agitated hands at my shirtfront. “Look, you’ve not even ironed your shirt. You’re all crumpled up like you’ve been rolling on the ground.”

“That was the ushers outside,” I said as a meager gesture toward self-defense. “They were going to rough me over. Where the hell did you dig them up from?”

“They’re my cousin Andrew and my cousin Stephen,” she snapped. “And they’re really, really, nice so don’t you say another bloody word.”

Time to find a less loaded subject, perhaps. “I thought you grew up rough in Kilburn,” I said, looking around at all the silk and silver.

“Yeah, I did,” she said, flashing me a grim look. “And I can still do rough if the need arises.”

“I don’t doubt it. But where does your mum get the chops to swing a gig like this?”

People were turning to look at us. Cheryl blushed a richer, darker brown that clashed with the dress and made me want to take it off her. “It’s not my mum,” she muttered fiercely. “It’s my Aunt Felicia. She’s a member of the order.”

“The order?”

“The Catholic Oratorians. They own this place, yeah? Now, what are you bloody well doing here? Stop changing the subject.”

“I want an invite.”

“You’ve just invited your sodding self, haven’t you?”

“Not to this. To the reception. It’s at the Bonnington, isn’t it? Can you get me in through the door?”

She just stared at me for a moment, nonplussed. “Are you gonna cause trouble at my mum’s wedding?” she demanded.

Time to duck again. “It’s about Sylvie,” I said.

Cheryl was still suspicious; she had good Castor-radar already, despite having known me for less than a week. “What about her?”

“I know who she was. I know what was done to her. She was raped and murdered, and her body was dumped in a skip. I owe it to her not to let go of this.”

That gave Cheryl pause. Quite a long pause, as it turned out. Before she spoke again, she blinked three times, staring at me with wounded, tearful eyes.

“Murdered?”

“Gouged in the face with something sharp and jagged. Choked with her own—”

“Don’t!”

“I’m not going to cause a ruckus, Cheryl. I promise you. I won’t be any bother. But I have to try this.”

More heads were turning in our direction. Our hissed conversation was now causing as much of a stir as my scruffy casuals and giving the lie to my promise to be discreet.

“Try what?” Cheryl asked weakly, like someone who knows they’re in a fight that they’re going to lose.

“The laying on of hands.”

First she didn’t get it. Then she did, and she was appalled.

“What, you think it was someone at the archive who did it?”

“No. I’m a hundred percent certain it was.”

“And what, you’re gonna go around feeling people up to see if any of them’s a murderer? Not at my mum’s effing wedding reception, you’re not!”

“Everyone shakes hands at a wedding. Nobody will even notice.”

The organist broke into “Here Comes the Bride,” and all heads turned.

Cheryl’s mum looked very much like Cheryl, only taller and more statuesque. Her dark face under the white veil was austerely beautiful, and she walked like an empress. It was something of a revelation—if heredity counted for anything, Cheryl was going to grow old very gracefully indeed.

The bride proceeded up the aisle in stately fashion, and various elderly women on both sides of the aisle made good use of their handkerchiefs. Alice Gascoigne kept hers firmly in its holster; she’d seen me by now, and she was staring at me with an expression like the one Banquo’s ghost must have used on Macbeth.

“You said she was sad,” I reminded Cheryl. “Now you know why. Do you want the bastard who did that to her to get away with it?”

She didn’t answer.

Cheryl’s mum was making her vows now. They sounded as though she’d run them up herself, because they went from “With my body I thee worship” into some pretty explicit subclauses.

Cheryl looked away. “Okay,” she said, sounding miserable and flat. She opened her purse, which was made of cream-colored leather and just about big enough to hold a handkerchief and a tampon. By some alchemy she took out of it a large rectangle of card with a gold border. She handed it to me without a word. It began You are cordially invited to the wedding of Eileen Telemaque to Russell Clarke, on Sunday, November 27, 2005. With a whispered thanks to Cheryl, I shoved it into my pocket.

More vows from the groom, who sounded as though he was reading from a crib sheet and seeing some of them for the first time. Well, if you don’t read the small print, you haven’t got a leg to stand on.

“When does the reception start?” I whispered to Cheryl.

“At three. It’s on the invite. Felix, don’t fuck this up, okay? Don’t do something awful.”

I went through some hurried mental calculations. There was some stuff I needed to do first. I squeezed Cheryl’s hand and slid back along the pew. “Catch you later,” I promised.

“You’re gonna catch something,” Cheryl prophesied bitterly.

It’s hard to leave a wedding discreetly while it’s still in progress. The ushers glared at me as I strolled past them and out the door, trying to look as though I’d only popped in to read the gas meter. Behind me, the swelling organ chords worked their way through to a very impressive diapason that hung in the air like floating furniture.

I got to the Bonnington first, broke into the secret rooms all over again, and did what I had to do. The atmosphere down in the basement room was so oppressive, I felt as though I was sipping the dank air rather than breathing it. I took care not to touch McClennan’s ward of silence with my bare skin again. To be honest, I could barely bring myself to look at it. It struck me right then as the most purely evil thing I’d come across in a long and eventful life.

When I was finished, there was nothing left for me to do but loiter. I let myself back out onto the street, locked up carefully behind myself, and retired to the Rocket on Euston Road. One side of the pub looks out toward Ossulston Street, which is where those sleek white limousines would turn to go into the one-way system before parking out in front of the Bonnington. I’d have plenty of warning and plenty of time in the meantime to sink a pint and steady my nerves.

I hadn’t lied to Cheryl. Not exactly. But I hadn’t told her the whole truth, either. There was no point at all in me shaking hands with the archive staff if all they were thinking about was the cost of the canapés and how big the bride’s arse looked. I had to get their emotions stirred up and their thoughts turning toward the dead woman. Well, I’d come up with a way of doing that. And it was going to make Mrs. Telemaque’s fourth wedding one that everyone would remember.

The cars rolled up about half an hour later. I gave them a quarter of an hour after that and then went sauntering along after them.

The doors of the Bonnington were open. No sign of the ushers from the Oratory, but an MC in a red tux gave me a welcoming smile that congealed into something a lot less cordial when he saw how I was dressed. I flashed the invite at him and walked on by.

There was no receiving line, so when I got up to the reading room, my entrance went unnoticed. I looked around at a scene of untrammeled joy and innocent celebration; it made me feel just a little bit awkward about what I was going to do next.

Some trestle tables had been set up at one end of the room and draped with long white tablecloths that trailed to the floor. Champagne cocktails were being served, and waitresses dressed in vaguely period black and white were tacking around the room with silver trays full of elegant finger foods. All very refined. More annoyingly, the shelving units and the librarians’ station had all been pushed back against the wall and camouflaged with white sheeting; there was no natural cover that I could use for the next stage of the proceedings, which was the truly fiddly one.

It didn’t help that I stuck out like a rabbi at a hoedown. The only reason nobody had noticed me so far was because there was a speech going on, and all eyes were turned on the man—a complete stranger to me—who was giving it. I scanned the crowd, saw Rich dressed in an immaculate gray morning suit with a sky blue waistcoat, talking with Jon Tiler off at the edge of the crowd on the far side of the room from me. Cheryl was up at the front, her arm linked in her mother’s. After a little casting around, I located Alice and Jeffrey by the drinks table, Alice holding out her champagne flute to be refreshed while Jeffrey talked to a fat woman in a voluminous red dress. His face set in a tight, pained smile, he looked like a man trying hard to have a good time at his own lynching party.

I looked around for somewhere I could play undisturbed, but nothing much suggested itself. Just as the speech wrapped up to loud applause, I ducked behind a pillar that at least would shield me from a casual glance. I slipped my whistle out of my pocket and put it to my lips.

Right here in the heart of her territory, my sense of the ghost was as sharp and as clear as it was ever going to be, but this still wasn’t going to be easy. Too much going on, too many competing sounds and stimuli. I closed my eyes to block out at least one source of distraction and tried to focus only on the feel of her in my mind—the sense that for me was more like hearing than anything else, but still impossible to dissect or describe.

The groom was speaking now, and all other conversation in the room had stilled. I waited, seething with impatience, for the background hum to start up again. He talked for what seemed like an hour—about what a difference Eileen had made to his life, about how lucky he was, about how much he was looking forward to being a father to Cheryl. I wondered if he’d seen the job description.

When the applause came again, I squeezed out the first notes. I tried to keep it low, and I managed at first, but the tune goes where it wants to go. If you push it into a different pattern, you get a different result.

My mind narrowed to the succession of notes, the inscape of the ghost’s music. Part of it was “The Bonny Swans,” but most of it was new, hers and nobody else’s, the sound that was the space she occupied in the world, the song that sang her.

Suggestive gaps in the skein of voices from around me told me that the guests closest to me had heard the music now. They were probably looking around for its source. I carried on playing, not hurrying, not slowing—I was tied to the wheel now, and I had to go where it took me.

The silence spread, and footsteps were coming toward me, but it was almost done. A few more bars would take me there. A hand clamped on my shoulder. Eyes tight shut, I ignored it, wound down through a plaintive diminuendo to a single note, which bounced up again into an unexpectedly defiant closing trill.

The whistle was snatched out of my hand. I opened my eyes to find myself staring into the eyes of the Tonka Toy—the burly one of Cheryl’s two cousins. He held the whistle up in front of me, his face a scowling mask. Other faces clustered behind him, looking at me curiously or resentfully.

“Is this a joke?” the thickset man demanded aggressively.

“No,” I answered. “It’s an invitation.”

There were gasps from the back of the crowd and then a scream. All heads turned in that direction, including the Tonka Toy’s. As he gawped along with the rest of them, I took my whistle back from his hand and pocketed it carefully. All hell was about to break loose, so I wanted the instrument safely stowed.

The archive ghost was walking through the center of the room and through the people in the room, who scrambled to get some distance from her. Ghosts may be fairly common phenomena now, but some ghosts have more presence than others, and the faceless woman had a grimness of purpose about her that saturated the room.

She stopped and stared about her without eyes. She was more solid now, and you could see that the white garment she wore ended at the waist. From the waist down, she wore a plain black skirt, and her arms were bare.

“Gdyeh Rosa?” she said with a keening, complaining emphasis. “Ya nye znayo gdyeh ona. Vi dolzhni pomogitye menya naiti yeyo.”

At various points in the crowd, people cried out.

“Ya potrevozhnao Rosa.”

I shoved the usher aside and plunged into the crowd, my head darting from side to side as I went. It had to be now, while the shock of the ghost’s speaking aloud was still fresh and raw in people’s minds. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to set this up, and I was damned if I was going to let it go to waste.

Alice and Jeffrey were still over by the drinks table, but they were heading for the door as quickly as they could without Jeffrey actually being forced to touch somebody. Alice was leading the way, savagely determined, with Peele enclitically lodged just behind her. I stepped into their path, and she came to an abrupt halt, staring at me in affronted astonishment.

“Now this is what I call a party,” I said with bumpkin jocularity.

“Castor,” Alice said, and there was a hard catch in her voice that took me by surprise—a look in her eye that was something like hatred.

I put out my hand and took hers, and though she pulled back sharply, I kept hold. The first time I’d touched her, I’d listened pretty hard, but I hadn’t picked up a damn thing. But this was different. She was angry and shaken, and any guard she had was down. If I couldn’t get a reading from her now, I never would.

“You’re looking radiant, Alice,” I said, squeezing her hand and smiling inanely into her face. “You must be pregnant.”

FLASH. I felt the stab of her fury and indignation, followed by an all-but-submerged twinge of real fear. Fear of the ghost, certainly, but another fear rising out of that so steeply that all perspective was lost. Alice really didn’t want to be pregnant. And she really didn’t want me pawing at her. As she wrestled to get her hand free, I saw in quick succession within her mind a child’s-eye view of a huge, looming man shaving at an oval mirror; a dead daffodil in a slender rose vase, the last inch of water turned to brown ullage; her desk at the archive, pristine and empty, the mail trays lined up hospital-corner fashion with the desk’s far right-hand edge. It took me a moment to realize that although it was her desk, it was in Peele’s narrow, oddly shaped office. The boss’s desk, in other words, but with her name on the door instead of his.

Alice got her hand free from mine with some effort. I thought she was going to use it to slap me, but she only swore at me under her breath—a word I wouldn’t have expected her to know, the last two syllables of which were “bubble.” I ignored her and lunged past her at Jeffrey.

Being autistic, Jeffrey had a much stronger and more deeply rooted objection to being touched by me than Alice did. Where she was merely fastidious, he was pathological. So I didn’t have to do anything to raise the emotional temperature. He stiffened as I grabbed his wrist, and then he actually jumped, his feet leaving the ground momentarily.

“Don’t!” he yelped. “Mr. Castor!”

FLASH. I got a microsecond glimpse of a corridor in the archive—the ghost standing there, sideways on but with her face turned toward him—before raw, flaring panic obliterated all images and left his mind pure white: the white of white noise.

Peele was physically struggling to get away from me, and people were staring at us in amazement. I let go too suddenly, and he stumbled backward, crashing into the people behind him and sending them sprawling. Alice did slap me now—a stinging backhander that would probably leave a visible mark. Jon Tiler loomed up out of nowhere to help Jeffrey get back on his feet. As he reached forward, I intercepted him and grabbed both his wrists, making him stop and stare at me in astonishment.

A moment later, I arced backward like an epileptic suffering from a grand mal seizure. I hit the ground like a badly packed sack of ballast.

I hadn’t touched Tiler at all on my first day at the archive. It was probably just as well. He was a supersender—an emotional foghorn—and I would have made a bad first impression, losing control of my limbs in front of a whole lot of people I’d only just been introduced to.

I fell heavily but somehow managed to keep one hand in contact with Tiler’s wrist as I hit the ground and jackknifed. The images and impressions I was getting were sluicing and scouring their way through my mind as though they’d come from a high-pressure hose. I couldn’t keep them out, and I couldn’t sort them. Visions of the ghost came through strongest, in all the rooms and hallways where he’d seen her—but the floodgates were open, and the rising tide of recollection broke over them, washed them away. I saw most of Tiler’s childhood, got to know his mother from a baby’s-eye view (his interest at that age had centered mainly on her left breast), relived potty training and bedtime stories and an abusive relationship with the family cat, and Christ knew what else. It wasn’t chronological, though. I saw him sitting in a cinema, crying at Gone With the Wind; at home, pouring boiling water into a Pot Noodle; and at the archive, carefully swathing an old leather-bound book in bubble wrap. It was a parish register, labeled March to June 1840. He looked over his shoulder as he worked to make sure nobody saw. He protected the corners with cardboard brackets, laboriously cut out and taped together. He knew what he was doing; he’d done it a thousand times before, always with the same warm tingle in his lower abdomen. It was like ascending toward an orgasm that never came—and that feeling, that endless rising scale, was the anchor of his life.

“I think he’s dead.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jon. He just fainted.”

“Yeah, but did you hear that crack when his head hit the ground?”

“That wasn’t his head. It was a metallic sound. It was something in his pocket.”

“Tin whistle. Look. It’s bent into an L shape.”

Oh no. No fucking way. A cold gust of sorrow and remorse brought me the rest of the way up into full consciousness. My whistle. My sword and my shield through all the half-arsed vicissitudes of life. It was the same as a million others, and it was absolutely unique. And all that was left of it now was the jagged pain in my side where the broken end of it was digging into my third rib.

I opened my eyes halfway and found myself staring up into a wide range of startled, suspicious, and resentful faces. Cheryl’s was right in the middle of them, and although she looked relieved to see me conscious again, I could tell from the hard set of her mouth that her membership in the Felix Castor fan club had lapsed forever. That was two body blows inside of twenty seconds.

A silver hip flask was pressed into my hand. Feeling numb and cold and strangely removed from myself, I took a swig without checking what it was and found myself coughing noisily on some raw but excellent bourbon. A lot of it went down the front of my coat, but the rest of it did the trick. I turned to see who it was I had to thank; Rich Clitheroe was looking down at me with a surreptitious eyebrow flash of sympathy and solidarity. I handed the flask back to him with a nod, flashing back to his secret stash of Lucozade in the traveling fridge down in the strong room. Well, “Be Prepared” is the Boy Scouts’ marching song, and some things just stay with you. But that wasn’t the phrase he’d used in any case; it was something like that, only different.

In case of emergency . . .

Domino nudged domino nudged domino, and everything fell into a pattern that had been there all along, unseen. I sat up, feeling an odd sense of weightlessness. I was like a thrown ball at the top of its arc, when it’s stopped rising but hasn’t begun to fall—freed from gravity, freed from the necessity of choice. Cheryl helped me to my feet, and our gazes met, furiously accusing on her side, God only knew what on mine. There was no sign of the ghost now. The summons I’d sent out to her would have broken when I lost consciousness, and there was nothing to keep her in this confusing, exposed, overbright space.

“I’m sorry,” I told Cheryl, leaning in close so that nobody else could hear.

She didn’t bend. “I bet you always are, afterward. I bet it even works sometimes.”

“I hope it will work with Sylvie,” I murmured. “I owe her the biggest apology of all.”

Other voices were breaking in now, and other hands were taking hold of me. Jeffrey Peele was saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and Alice was interjecting comments like “It’s all right” and “You’re fine now” without any noticeable effect. Someone else—a woman—was asking whether she should call the police, and one of the ushers—the barge pole this time—muscled in between me and Cheryl to suggest that I might want to go out into the street and get some fresh air. His nose wrinkled, no doubt smelling the booze.

I let myself be shepherded away toward the door with his hand gripping my collar, but then I stopped again before he could get any real momentum going. I turned back, found Rich in the crowd. He stared at me, a little startled, as I made the universally recognizable gesture that meant he should phone me. I pointed to Jeffrey, meaning that Jeffrey had my phone number.

Rich hesitated for a moment—probably trying to work out what the hell I was trying to say—then nodded. The thickset usher loomed up on my other side, hooked one hand under my arm, and I was off, my feet barely touching the floor as I went.

It was probably just as well. I get all emotional at weddings.