The Devil You Know (30 page)

“No. Can’t say I did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THERE’S
A
PLACE
WHERE
I GO
SOMETIMES
TO retrench and regroup—to dredge up a bit of strength when I’m feeling weak and to find some silence in the city’s remorseless polyphonic shit-storm. Bizarrely enough, it’s a cemetery: Bunhill Fields, off the City Road close to Old Street Station. It ought to be the last place in the world I’d want to be, but somehow it suits me down to the ground—and then about six feet farther.

One factor is just that it’s old and disused. The last burial there was more than a century ago; all the original ghosts clocked off and headed elsewhere long before I ever found the place, and no newer spirits have come along to set up shop. There’s a quiet and a peace there that I’ve never found anywhere else.

And then again, there’s the fact that it’s not hallowed ground. It’s a dissenters’ graveyard, full of all the bolshie bastards who played the game by their own rules back when doing that could get you the pre-Enlightenment equivalent of cement overshoes. William Blake is dreaming of Jerusalem under that sod, and Daniel Defoe is probably dreaming about something a fair bit earthier. You’ve also got John Owen and Isaac Watts, the reservoir dogs of eighteenth-century theology. What can I tell you? I just feel at ease in their company.

So that’s where I was, and that’s why. I needed to think. When I walked back into the Bonnington, I wanted to feel that I wasn’t going in there completely naked, without any kind of a plan.

Disengage and reassess, I told myself. Go through what you already know, and see if it builds up into a picture of what you thought you didn’t.

I take on this job, and on the first day I’m already being followed by Scrub. Bearing in mind the toolbox that Lucasz Damjohn must have at his command, it said a lot that he’d pick out such a big and powerful item. Scrub must normally be reserved for putting the frighteners on rival whoremasters; applied to me, he was just overkill.

Damjohn then goes out of his way to get to meet me, but doesn’t try to lean on me in any way or even particularly pump me for information about what I’m doing.

Then it turns out that McClennan and Damjohn are old cronies.

And the archive ghost has met Gabe McClennan—a shit-hot exorcist, whatever else he might be. So why the hell is she still there?

That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I’d really started to sell myself on the idea that Damjohn might have something to hide, but that kite just wouldn’t fly. If McClennan had been sent in to burn the Bonnington ghost, she’d be toast. Like he said, he would have gone in, done the job, and drawn his pay. But he hadn’t, unless the job he’d been sent in to do was something different.

And someone had raised a succubus to burn me out—an exotic and dangerous weapon, but one that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow with the police or anyone else, given what I did for a living. What had I done that was worth that kind of attention? Or what was I doing now?

Answers on a postcard. None of it made any sense at all, and the more you looked at it, the more it fell apart. Pretty much the only thing I was certain of was that I wasn’t going to be playing any tunes at the Bonnington until I had some answers.

I gave it up at last. Whatever power Bunhill Fields normally exerts on my highly suggestible mind, it wasn’t working right then. I was feeling as though my eyeballs had been scooped out, roughly polished with a sanding wheel, and then shoved back more or less into their right places. My head was full of gray cheese instead of brains. If I’d had brains, I would have gone back home to Pen’s, boarded up the window with yesterday’s
Independent
, and slept for twelve hours.

Gray cheese took me to the Bonnington instead.

Frank looked at me with grave concern. “You look rough,” he said as I dumped my coat down on the counter—and his face as he said it was slightly awestruck. “What happened to you?”

“You should see the other guy,” I said, falling back on cliché.

“Was he a professional wrestler?”

“No, he was a girl. Where’s Jeffrey?”

“I believe Mr. Peele is in his office. I’ll call him and tell him you’re—”

“I prefer to come as a surprise,” I said, and walked on toward the stairs. Frank could have stopped me, but he didn’t. I guess having been chewed up, spat out, and left for dead had some sort of meaning in his moral framework. Cheers, Frank. I owe you one.

I made a point of looking in at the workroom. Rich, Jon, and Cheryl and a couple of people I didn’t know all glanced up as I appeared in the doorway—glanced, and then kept looking.

“Mate, you should be in bed,” Rich said after a pause so heavy it wasn’t just pregnant but ready to break its waters and deliver.

“Yeah,” Cheryl agreed. “A
hospital
bed. You look like you picked your teeth with a chainsaw, man.”

Jon Tiler said nothing, but he suddenly seemed to be sitting very still. He’d been reaching for a pen; now both of his hands were flat on the desk, and he was just staring at my face. He looked unhappy. I opened a mental file drawer and dropped that look right into it.

“I used to juggle chainsaws,” I said conversationally. “It looks dangerous, but you just have to keep at it. Rich, have you got a pen and paper?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. He found the pen in his desk tidy and a sheet of scrap lying next to his printer. He pushed them across the desk to me. Taking the pen, I wrote down the symbols that the ghost had shown me in that remembered image—scrawled on the torn-out page of a book and held up to the inside of a car window. !images/000001.jpg(art)!.

I reversed it and pushed it back across to Rich.

“That’s Russian?” I asked.

He stared at it, his eyes widening slightly. “Yeah,” he said.

“What does it mean?”

He looked up at me—a puzzled, searching look. “
SOS
,” he said. “It means ‘Help me.’”

“Thanks. That’s what I needed to know.”

I gave them all a nod and walked back out, then on down the hall to Peele’s office.

Peele was on the phone when I walked in, talking about productivity and different ways of defining it. I sat down opposite him and stared at him in silence as he went on. The stare and the silence did their job; he wasn’t looking directly at me, of course, but a good stare communicates itself by means other than sight. After less than a minute, he made a clumsy excuse and said that he’d call back. Then he hung up and shot me an exasperated microsecond glare.

“You’ve got a problem,” I said. “And I think it might be a different problem from the one you think you’ve got.”

“Mr. Castor!” he blurted. “That was the Joint Museums Trust! I was taking an important—I was engaged on”—words momentarily failed him, and he almost met my stare—”I don’t appreciate you coming in here unannounced and simply presuming on my time!”

“Well, I’m really sorry,” I said with nothing in my voice that could be read as sincerity. “I assumed you’d want an update on the ghost situation.”

If I thought that would stop his mouth, I was wrong. Peele was full of indignation, and it needed to find a vent.

“This isn’t proceeding as I expected,” he said, sounding near-terminally agitated. “Jon Tiler was in here yesterday morning, determined to file a formal complaint against you after the damage you caused on Tuesday night. I persuaded him not to, but it was a very unpleasant interview. I hope you have some positive progress to report.”

“No,” I said. “But I do have some
negative
progress to report—in other words, I’ve been able to rule a few things out. You see, I was operating under some mistaken assumptions about your ghost. Like that she had to be tied to the Russian collection in some way. But that’s not true, is it?”

Now Peele really did look at me—for the barest fraction of a second, then his gaze fell to his desktop again. “Isn’t it?” he asked, after a pause long enough to count to three in.

“No, it isn’t. She dates from a much later period—viz the present day—and that puts a whole new complexion on her being here. I’m looking for a different kind of explanation now.”

That was meant to sound vaguely threatening and maybe to sweat some additional information out of Peele, if there was anything there to be sweated. But as strategies go, it sort of blew up in my face. His lips set in a tight line. “Mr. Castor,” he demanded, “why are you looking for an explanation at all?”

I tried to parry that question rather than answer it. “I’m a professional,” I said, deadpan. “I don’t just come in and clean up. I have to understand the context for—”

Peele cut across me. “You made no mention of context when I took you on,” he pointed out coldly. “You promised to carry out a specific service, and now you’re making caveats that seem to me to have nothing to do with the matter in hand. I also have to ask, since you raise the issue of professional standards, whether your objectivity has been compromised in some way.”

It was my turn to look blank. “My objectivity?” I repeated. “Do you want to explain that?”

“Certainly. On every occasion up to now, when we’ve talked about ghosts, you have used the impersonal pronoun—’it’—to refer to them. This has been consistent and at times almost aggressive—as though you felt a need to establish a point of some kind. Now, overnight, the ghost you’re meant to be exorcising for us here has become a ‘she.’ I have to ask why that is.”

Damn. Fairly caught. I could dodge the kick, but the stable door was already down—and I hadn’t even realized it until I saw the splinters.