The Devil You Know (25 page)

“You saw one of my ads,” I suggested.

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

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

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

“This was an old copy, right?”

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

It made sense, but I was still suspicious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m still waiting,” she said.

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

“Waiting for what?” I asked her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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