by Mike Carey
I’m sure that Damjohn saw me tense. Up to now, I’d been feeling pretty much on top of this conversation, because I knew that there was nothing he could offer me that I’d want. Me and love—even me and sex—is a complicated equation, and you can wear empty pockets with a certain chic, like a badge of integrity. But answers? Oh yeah. I’d gone halfway around the fucking world looking for answers.
Damjohn smiled, and this time he meant it—not as an expression of any warm feelings toward me, but from the pure and simple pleasure of having found my weak point.
“And you’d know?” was all I could find to say. “How’s that, then? I heard that Jesus walked among the prostitutes, but that was a while ago now. You’re not telling me the two of you met?”
The smile curdled slightly, but Damjohn’s tone stayed light and relaxed. “No. I’ve not had that pleasure. But I have spoken to his opposite number, as it were. I have knowledge that comes with a price many would consider too high. Of course,” he glanced across at Gabe again, this time with undisguised contempt, “I’ve usually been able to persuade others to pay it on my behalf.”
He leaned forward, his stare spearing me. “I know where they come from, and I know where you send them to. I imagine that information would pique your curiosity. Am I wrong?”
The look on his face was the overintense benevolence of a man who’s just invited you into the deep woods to look at some puppy dogs. I stared back at him, my feelings for a moment in too great a turmoil to allow me to speak. While that moment lasted, I was a six-year-old boy again, the remains of my birthday cake still in a Tupperware box in the bottom of the fridge, screaming at my kid sister to get out of my bed because she was dead already and she was scaring me. I saw her fade into nothing, her sad face last of all like the fucking Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
“But you understand,” said Damjohn, sitting back, “the offer hasn’t been made. Not officially. Because the answer comes first.” He looked at me expectantly, really enjoying himself. McClennan was staring at me, too, with so pure and incandescent a hatred that he reminded me of one of those South American frogs that sweat venom. That wasn’t because I’d rifled his filing cabinet; it was because Damjohn was trying to seduce me instead of just getting some heavies in to make my arms and legs bend the wrong way.
And that made it easier, in a way. So did Katie, in another way, but that’s more than I can explain. I stood up.
“The offer hasn’t been made?” I repeated.
Damjohn shook his head reassuringly, imperturbably.
“Then I’m not telling you to shove it up your arse and tamp it in with a polo mallet. I’ll stick with the devils I know. Until next time, eh?”
I left my drink unfinished on the table. Gargling it and spitting it in Damjohn’s face would probably have counted as rude.
As I was walking through the foyer, heading for the street door, the phone rang in the little alcove, and the duty bouncer picked up. At the same time, a burst of louche jazz sounded from behind me and made a synapse connect somewhere in my memory.
It took only a second to try it out. I stepped outside and stood to one side of the door. On my mobile phone, I flicked through the last dozen calls or so until I found the number I was looking for: 7405 818. When I dialed, I got the engaged signal. I waited about thirty seconds; tried again.
From inside the club, I heard the phone ring. On my cell, I heard the gravelly voice of the bouncer. “Hello?”
“Wrong number,” I said. “Sorry.”
ICOE 7405 818. Someone at the Bonnington Archive had the number of a brothel in his Rolodex. Not sinister in itself, maybe—but given Damjohn’s touching interest in me, it was another link in the chain.
Then, when I was heading west toward the Bonnington, I made another connection. I’d been thinking about that missing page in the incident book, and suddenly I saw a way that the book could help me even in its maimed form.
So despite almost being carved up with a steak knife and failing to find hide or hair of Rosa, I was in a pretty good mood when I got back to the archive. I’d resisted temptation, discomfited my enemies, and started to put the pieces of this sad-ass puzzle together in a new order. All in all, I was feeling the smug satisfaction of a job well begun and therefore half done.
Right up until Alice told me I was fired.
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 balc
ony 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 troubl
e 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.
