The Devil You Know (43 page)

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.

YOU’RE
LOADING
UP
YOUR
SIX-GUNS
,
AREN’T
YOU?” Pen said, standing in the doorway of my room. A chill wind was blowing around the plastic sheeting she’d nailed across the splintered, gap-toothed window frame, like a reminder that winter was on its way. I didn’t need reminding, and I didn’t appreciate it much.

“Yeah,” I said tersely. “I think it’s going to be a bad one.”

I was rummaging through the top shelf in my wardrobe, looking for a spare whistle. There should have been at least one there—older than the little beauty I’d just destroyed, and brassy rather than black in color, but in the same key and with something of the same feel to hand and mouth. I was damned if I could see it, though. The best I could come up with was a cone-bore flute. I’d almost forgotten my brief flirtation with that well-mannered instrument. It hadn’t done the job for me at all—something about the tone, maybe, or the tapering body. It shouldn’t have made that big a difference, because tin whistles have a conical bore, too, but every pattern I tried to weave on it got screwed up and thrown out somewhere along the line. Still, it was better than nothing by some small but measurable margin.

“Maybe you should get some help, then,” Pen suggested. “John Gittings?”

“Never again.”

“Pac-Man?”

“Still in jail. He doesn’t get out until next October.”

“Me?”

I turned to stare at her. “Usual strictures apply,” I said, sounding colder than I meant to; and then, more gently, “I don’t have any idea how this is going to come out, Pen. But I do know it will leave you with dirty hands—by your definition and probably even by mine.”

Pen looked very unhappy, but she didn’t try to argue anymore. I slipped a couple of new batteries into the Walkman, wrapped the flex around the two tiny speakers, and stuffed the whole bundle into my pocket. Then I reached into the back of the wardrobe and took down a single silver handcuff that was hanging on a hook there. Pen blanched when she saw it.

“You weren’t kidding, were you?” she asked bleakly.

“It’ll probably be fine,” I lied. “When you take out car insurance, it doesn’t mean you’re planning to drive off a cliff.”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Planning to drive off a cliff.”

“No. I’m looking to push someone else off. The insurance is in case he keeps hold of me on the way down.”

I headed for the door, which she was still blocking. She hugged me briefly but fiercely. “Rafi had another message for you,” she muttered, her voice not quite level.

“Rafi?”

“All right. Asmodeus, then.”

“Go on.”

“Ajulutsikael. He said it’s not personal with her—it’s the very opposite of personal. But it’s not just because they’re making her do it, either. What was it he said?” Pen frowned, delving into her memory. “‘She hates a proud man more than a humble one. A strong man more than a weak one. A master more than a slave.’”

“He should write fortune cookies,” I said and kissed her on the cheek. “He’s about as much fucking use.”

She stood aside and let me pass.

This was going to be complicated. There were so many things that had to fall right, and the first one might not fall at all. In which case all my preparations were going to be unnecessary, the ghost’s unfinished business was going to stay unfinished, and I was probably going to be dead in short order—either succubus fodder or just organic landfill.

But I preferred to look on the bright side. I was going to make a hell of a noise on the way down.

Rich had called at nine, having come home from the reception, taken a shower, and thought long and hard about whether he was going to call me at all.

“What the fuck were you thinking of, Castor?” he asked me, sounding genuinely mystified. “The ghost didn’t just turn up, did she? You brought her. Cheryl said she’ll split you if she ever sees you again, and Alice—well, you don’t want to know. She’s going to get the police in, she said. The only reason she didn’t do it today was because she didn’t want to spoil what was left of the occasion.”

I let him wind down, and then I told him that I’d cracked the whole thing.

“What thing?” The puzzlement was turning into annoyance. “You were just supposed to get rid of the ghost, weren’t you? What’s to crack?”

“How she got that way,” I said tersely.

Rich digested that for a few seconds.

“All right,” he said at last. “How did she?”

“Not now. Meet me at Euston, okay? On the concourse outside the station, at the Eversholt Street end. Eleven o’clock should be okay. And I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Why me?” The obvious question. I was surprised it had taken him so long to get to it.

“Because there were two crimes committed at the Bonnington,” I told him. “One of them was a theft, and since you were the victim, I thought you might want to hear about it.”

Rich played hard to get for a little while longer, then said he’d be there. I hung up and started to get my shit together.

So here I was, ten minutes early. The concrete piazza outside the station was as quiet as it ever gets, and it was easy to make sure that neither of us had been followed—or at least not by enthusiastic amateurs. Ajulutsikael was a different kettle of fish altogether; she had my scent now, and I had to assume that she could track me without ever coming in close enough for me to see her.

I found a secluded corner and loitered with intent. A phone kiosk and an advertising hoarding gave me a certain amount of cover, but left my line of sight clear both to the main exit from the station and to the stairs that came up from the Underground. There was almost nobody there: a small party of Japanese students with oversized backpacks, clustered just outside one set of automatic doors and taking turns to look anxiously at their watches; a homeless guy clutching a huge grubby sports bag and drinking White Lightning out of a can that he’d just broken from a four-pack; a couple of girls in pink tracksuits, too young to be out that late, sitting on a bench right across from me, back to back, sharing the one pair of headphones. None of them looked like part of an ambush, but I kept an open mind. I was clearly drifting into Nicky territory here:
you embrace paranoia when it becomes a survival trait.

Rich came up the steps at a quarter past eleven, looked around, and didn’t see me. He’d changed out of his wedding gear and was dressed in black jeans, a Quiksilver sweatshirt, trainers.

I stepped out of hiding and started walking toward him. He turned, saw me, came to meet me halfway.

“Have you got your keys?” I asked him without any preamble.

“My what?” He was startled.

“Your keys to the archive. Do you have them on you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I brought them.” He stared straight at me, looking wary and tense—a man who wanted it to be known that he’d need some convincing before he went along with any funny business. “What’s this about?”

“It’s about a lot of things, Rich. But for starters, let’s say it’s about a kleptomaniac who’s not averse to the occasional White Russian.”

Rich’s lips quirked downward, almost comically hangdog.

“Fuck,” he said, nonplussed. “You mean . . . you know, I thought once or twice that—fuck.”

“The Head of Steam’s still open,” I said. “Let me lay it all out for you.”

He followed me docilely across the concrete arena to the bizarre little theme pub they’ve squeezed into a corner there, but we’d missed the towel by five minutes and sat down dry. I took the laptop out of my pocket and pushed it across to him. Rich stared at it, then at me. “You’re one to watch, aren’t you, Castor?” he said a little grimly. “I was shitting bricks over this. Half the entries on here haven’t even been uploaded to the system yet. I was still trying to figure out how to break the news to Alice without catching the edge of her temper myself.”

He pulled the loosely wrapped package over to his own side of the table, as if he felt the need to assert his ownership of it.

“I didn’t have too many options,” I said. “I knew something odd was going on, but I couldn’t prove it. I needed to pass this on to a friend of mine who I thought might have a better chance of nailing it all down for me.”

“And?”

“It’s Jon Tiler,” I said.

Rich just laughed. “No way,” he protested.

“Way,” I insisted, deadpan. “He uses a wireless media pad to get around the fact that he can’t use his own keyboard on your machine.”

“What, a media pad? You’re joking.” Rich was still incredulous. “That’s just a remote for DVDs and stuff. It doesn’t even have full alphanumerics.”

“He’s not adding in any data or amending it. Only deleting.”

He absorbed this in silence, a number of expressions following each other across his face. When he finally spoke, it was terse and to the point.

“The bastard!”

“You get it?”

“Of course I get it. If he deletes my records before I upload, there’s no system entry to cross-check against. Nobody would ever know there was anything missing.”

“And that’s probably what tempted him to swipe so many items in such a short space of time.”

“
How
many, exactly?”

“A couple of thousand, give or take.”

Rich winced. “That’s taking the piss,” he muttered. Then another thought visibly occurred to him; two thoughts, as it turned out. “But how’s he getting the stuff out of the archive? And what’s any of this got to do with the ghost?”

“I’m going to duck that second question for now. As to the first one, an ounce of bare-arsed cheek is worth a ton and a half of cunning. He’s just taking it up to the attic and dropping it out of the window onto the flat roof. Then I presume he comes around sometime in the night and collects it. All the strong rooms are on that side of the building, so there are no windows below the attic that overlook that area.”

“Jesus.” Rich’s expression was torn between annoyance and admiration. “I thought you were going to say he had a hollow wooden leg or something. Frank’s going to be sick. When Jeffrey starts looking for someone to blame, he’s going to start right at the front desk.”

“Wait, there’s more. I said the Russian collection tempted him to up his game, but he’s been doing this for three years. Whenever anything new comes into the archive, he skims a little something off the top. When did Tiler start work at the Bonnington, by the way?”

Rich laughed hollowly. “2002,” he said. “Fairly late in the year, I think, because they timed his appointment to start with the school year.” He shook his head. “Son of a bitch.”

I stood up, hands in pockets, and he looked up at me quizzically.

“Feel a burning desire for justice?” I asked.

He blew out his cheeks and thought about it. “Not really,” he said. “You’ll tell Jeffrey, right? And it’ll all get sorted. I mean, I’m pissed off, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not really any of my business. Not especially.”

“I don’t work for Peele anymore. I was sacked, remember? Yeah, I could go straight to the police—but to be honest, there’s another question I want answered first. There’s something I’d like to show you. And I’d like you to see it cold. Okay?”

It took him a while to make up his mind, but in the end he nodded and got up. I led the way out of the bar, back across the concourse, and out onto the street. We crossed the road, Rich still trailing me by about three steps. It was obvious where we were heading for.

“There’s no way we can go inside at this time of night,” Rich said, sounding anxious. “The alarms will be on.”

“Only the strong room doors are alarmed. But we’re not going into the archive, anyway. Not technically speaking.”

We turned onto Churchway. “You never explained about the ghost,” Rich said.

“You’re right. I didn’t. That’s what I want to show you.”

We stopped at the other door—the door that looked like it didn’t lead anywhere much at all, let alone to one of the gates of Hell.

“What’s this?” Rich asked.

I climbed the three steps and pointed to the locks in their cutaway box. “This is why I asked you to bring your keys,” I told him.

He looked confused and a little scared. “But—my keys are for the archive.”

“Take a good look through the bunch. You’re looking for one that has a picture of a bird on the fob and a big, squared-off barrel. And another that says Schlage. Take your time. They’ll be there.”

Rich hauled out the big key ring and started sorting through it. In the dim light, it must have been hard for him to see what any of the keys looked like. It took him close to two minutes, but eventually he found them: first the Falcon, then the Schlage.

“Try them in these locks,” I said.

He slid the Falcon in first, turned it. We both heard the click. Then he tried the Schlage. No sound this time, but the door, loose in its frame, slid inward an inch or so under its own weight.

“I don’t get it,” said Rich, turning his head to stare at me with a guarded, questioning look.

“All the key rings are the same, right? All of them handed down from archivist to archivist through the colonnades of time? You, Alice, and Jeffrey—everyone holding a full set, and nobody using more than half of them. That’s what you told me the first day I came here.”

“Yeah, that’s true, but—”

“Take a look inside,” I suggested. “Someone’s been using these two fairly recently.”

He pushed open the door, stepped over the threshold. I followed and turned on the light. Rich cast his gaze around the squalid little room, now carpeted with shards of glass and colder than ever because of the broken windows.

“Christ on a bike,” he said. Then he sniffed and winced at the acrid smell.

“You’re not telling me Tiler keeps the stuff down here?” he asked, his voice tight. “It smells like”—his voice faltered.