by Mike Carey
“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.
“Like what?”
“Like—I don’t know.”
I walked past him into the center of the room, turned to face him. His face was pale. “This is going to sound incredible,” I said. “Crazy, crazy story. Crazy and sick. A woman died here. Not accidentally. Murdered. Before that, she was kept here for a long time—days, maybe even weeks.”
Rich’s stare went from left to right, measuring. “But this is—” he said.
“Yeah. It’s a chunk of the Bonnington, hived off maybe forty or fifty years ago. Nobody even remembers it’s here or knows who owns it. It’s not part of the real world anymore; it’s virtual geography. Terra incognita.”
Rich’s face had gone beyond pale into ashen.
“I can’t believe someone died here,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“Not here, exactly. In the downstairs room.”
His eyes flicked left, toward the wooden paneling. An instant later, they flared with alarm and looked back toward me.
The handcuff isn’t really silver; it’s ordinary stainless steel with a silver coating. It was sold as a sex toy in Hamburg, but when I use it (not all that often, thank God), I use it as a knuckle-duster. I caught Rich on the point of the chin with it—a really satisfying punch that made an audible smack, hooked him an inch into the air, and made him jackknife from the hips so that he landed heavily on his back with an impact that knocked what was left of his breath out of him.
He tried to get up, but fell back.
“Yeah,” I said grimly. “Made you look.”
Twenty
RICH TRIED TO GET UP, BUT HE DIDN’T MAKE IT VERY far, because his body wouldn’t cooperate. He gawped up at me, blood trickling down his chin from where he’d bitten his lip when the handcuff impacted on his jaw.
“F-fuck!” he protested thickly, saliva frothing out to join the blood.
“Don’t get up, Rich,” I advised him, meaning it. “If you get up, I’m only going to knock you down again. You might end up breaking something.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring at me with eyes that were having to work at the moment just to focus.
“You’re frigging insane,” he bubbled.
“Yeah, Cheryl thinks so, too. But Cheryl’s no expert on sanity—not coming from that family. And Cheryl doesn’t know you like I do, does she, Rich?”
He tried again, and this time he made it into a sitting position, one arm raised protectively in case I hit him again, exploring his thickening lower lip gingerly with fingers that seemed to be shaking. He shot me another look, scared but angrily defiant. “I didn’t steal anything,” he said. “Tiler was all on his own. If you think I’m in on his bloody pilfering—”
I cut in. I didn’t have any patience for this. “Tiler doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “When I found out about his thieving, I thought it might be relevant in some way. I suppose I wanted it to be relevant, because I’d just come up empty-handed from the Russian collection, and I was desperate for anything that might point me in the right direction. Then Tiler whacked me in the face with an electric torch and threw me headfirst down a sodding stairwell, so I had something of a stake in him being guilty. But he isn’t. As far as I can tell, what he does is just a weird hobby. He loves old documents. I’ve been inside his head, so I know. He’s papered his bloody bedroom with them.
“No, I know you didn’t steal anything, Rich. But you did kill somebody. How many nineteenth-century parish record books is that worth, karmically speaking?”
Rich had been gathering his strength for a big effort. He rolled to his left and made a break for the door. I’d seen it coming; I got my foot in between his legs and rammed him squarely in the back with my shoulder, adding my own momentum to his. He went down more heavily this time with a grunt of pain.
I hauled him to his feet while he was still limp and groggy from
the impact, dragged him across the room, and shoved him hard against the paneled wall. He started to slump toward the floor again, but I kept him more or less upright by leaning my shoulder against him, at the same time helping myself to his keys. There was only one Chubb in the bunch. I put it into the lock and turned. The click was loud in the bare, silent room.
Hooking the door open with my foot, I took two handfuls of his shirt, around about chest height, and half pushed, half slid him onto the stairwell. He mewled in panic. “No! No! Not down there!” He fought against me, which was a bad decision on his part, because we were both off balance. Breaking free from my grip, he tumbled arse over tip down the stairs.
I lunged out and found the wall, which just saved me from falling down after him. I took a moment to get my breath back and slammed the upper door securely behind us before following him down at my leisure. So long as we had Rich’s keys, we could get out anytime we liked, and in the meantime, we wouldn’t be disturbed.
Rich had fetched up on his side, sprawled against the bottom edge of the mattress. Standing over him, I took a rectangular card out of my pocket, opened my fingers, and let it fall. It fluttered down to land next to his head. He stared at it woozily. The card read ICOE 7405 818.
“In case of emergency,” I translated. “You said it to me last Monday when you offered me a bottle of Lucozade from the fridge. Then you started to say it again the next day, but you stopped yourself, and I filled in the gap for you. It had slipped my mind, to be honest. I was still thinking ICOE must be somebody’s nickname or something. But then you offered me your hip flask today at the wedding, and it clicked.”
Rich levered his upper body groggily off the floor. He shook his head, said something that was impossible to make out through his painful, hitching breath.
“Not much in the way of hard evidence?” I interpreted. “No, you’re probably right, there. But you knew where to look, didn’t you, Rich? When I said there was a downstairs room, your eyes went right to the door. Only the door’s camouflaged against that foul wood paneling, so there was no way you could have known it was there. No clean way, anyway.”
