by Mike Carey
Discretion is another virtue I’ve never really got the hang of, but I decided at that point that a breath of fresh air would do Rich and me a world of good. I untied him, hooked a hand under his arm, and pulled him, unprotesting, to his feet. I led him up the stairs, and he went as docile as a lamb. Just once his eyes half focused, and he looked at me, his gaze intensely troubled. He seemed to be about to speak, but evidently he couldn’t find the words or forgot what it was he had to say.
I stood the sofa upright again and sat Rich down on it. Then I picked up one of the remaining water bottles, unbuttoned my shirt, and slopped it over my chest, trying without much success to clean off some of the henna. It wouldn’t budge—that would take a lot of soap and water and a lot of time. In the meantime, I’d have to hope that my husky voice sounded sexy rather than just ridiculous.
I gave the sisters plenty of time, because what Rosa was doing had to be done right. I knew that better than anybody, because what she was doing was my job. It’s the other way to make a ghost move on from this place to wherever. You just give them what they want—tie up the loose ends for them, let them see that everything’s going to be okay after all.
My mind went back to Damjohn’s offer. I have knowledge that comes with a price many would consider too high. Yeah, way too high for me, sport. I’d find out in my own way. In my own time.
After half an hour or so, I went back down. I found Rosa sitting alone on the mattress, looking almost as spent and catatonic as Rich. I held out my hand, but she didn’t take it. She stood under her own steam.
“She’s gone,” she said, but with an inflection that might have made it into a question.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “She’s gone. She just needed to know that you were out of that shit-hole. Now she’s happy.”
Rosa didn’t seem convinced. She stared at me, a solemn frown on her face. “Where has she gone?” she asked with very careful emphasis.
“I’ll get back to you on that one,” I promised. “Sometime.”
Twenty-four
ONE OF THE REASONS WHY I NEVER GET UP-TO-DATE with my paperwork is that I can’t seem to find the kind of job where you can sign off and say it’s all done. Maybe it’s just me. Everything in my life has a more ragged shape than that, tapering off at the end into bathos, bullshit, and bittersweet absurdity.
The headlines were all variations on a theme, the Sun’s CHELSEA HARBOUR BLOODBATH being my personal favorite—although the Star came a close second with CHELSEA’S ORGY OF DEATH. The stories all leaned very heavily on Lucasz Damjohn’s dodgy reputation and suspected involvement in various kinds of organized vice for which, notwithstanding, he had escaped the indignity of even a single conviction. Now there had been some sort of gang war on board a yacht that was registered to him, a number of men were dead, and Damjohn himself had apparently gone to ground. They identified one of the corpses as a known associate of Damjohn’s—a man glorying (posthumously now) in the name of Arnold Poultney. That was Weasel-Face Arnold, presumably. The three remaining bodies belonged to John Grass, Martin Rumbelow, and a certain Mr. Gabriel Alexander McClennan, who was survived by a grieving widow and daughter.
That was a disturbing thought. I’d had no idea up until then that McClennan had ever married, let alone bred. There ought to be licensing laws that stop that sort of thing happening, but since there weren’t, I’d just torpedoed—along with the unregenerate bastard himself—an entire family unit. I considered blagging an address from Dodson, or more likely from Nicky, and going round to see them, but what the hell would I have said? I killed your husband, your dad, but it’s okay, because he deserved it? I chickened out. That was one last reckoning I wasn’t ready for just yet.
But leaving all the imponderables off to one side, there was a certain pleasure to be had in dumping the whole day’s papers down on Alice’s desk and telling her she could add them to the Bonnington collection. It was Alice’s desk, because Peele was already on secondment to the Guggenheim, who were so keen to get their hands on him that they were paying the Bonnington to let him work out his notice in their employ. And Alice was where she’d wanted to be all along—a happy ending that, by Cheryl’s account, had left hardly a dry eye in the place.
“This changes nothing,” Alice told me coldly. “The fact that nobody has seen the ghost since last Sunday doesn’t prove that she’s gone, or if she’s gone, that you exorcised her. By my reckoning, you still owe us three hundred pounds—and you can be grateful that I didn’t involve the police over the theft of my keys.”
I didn’t let any of this spoil my sunny disposition. “You’re right,” I said. “When you’re right, you’re right. I can’t prove I did the job. No witnesses. No physical evidence. That’s the nature of the beast, I suppose. Most of what I do doesn’t leave a trail.”
She was waiting for me to leave, with barely concealed impatience.
“No,” I went on, musing aloud. “For a good, solid trail, you need a good, solid crime. Now I know you caught up with Tiler because I made it my business to find out. You turned up on his doorstep with two solicitors and a gent from the cop shop, and you took possession of twenty-seven boxes full of miscellaneous documents, with no fuss and no charges brought. Then the next day, he gave his notice in.”
Alice was still looking like someone with a lot of better places to be. “And what’s your point?” she demanded.
I shrugged disarmingly. “Far be it from me to have a point. It’s best to do these things discreetly. Nothing gained by making a big noise about it. Okay, the screwy little fucker tried to kill me, but I know as well as anyone that there’s a greater good. Tell me, Alice, did you do what I asked you to? Did you go next door and have a look in that basement?”
She just stared at me for a moment or two.
“Yes,” she said at last—and I could hear the strain under the neutral tone she held so well. “I did.”
“Come to any conclusions about it?”
She nodded slowly. Very slowly. Again she took her time answering, making sure every word did what it was supposed to. “I took legal advice. Those premises never came into the possession of the archive in the first place. They remained with the Department of Social Security when the rest of the building was made over to us in the 1980s. So I let the police know that the rooms had been broken into and left it at that.”
“Of course you did. Was that you as in Acting-Chief-Administrator-of-the-Bonnington-Archive you, or private-citizen-cooperating-with-the-police-out-of-disinterested-sense-of-civic-duty you? I mean, did you leave a name or just ring them anonymously from a call box?”
She opened her mouth for an angry reply, but I hurried on. “Whichever,” I said, “I’m sure you made the point that you, Jeffrey, and Rich were in possession of keys to that door, and that therefore, any inquiries about possible unlawful imprisonment, rape, and/or murder ought to start with the three of you.”
There was a very long, very painful silence.
“I’ve checked my own and Jeffrey’s keys very thoroughly,” said Alice. “There are no keys to that door on either ring.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “I mean, I saw Rich letting himself into those rooms with his Bonnington key ring only a few short nights ago. It stands out in my mind because of the very vivid events it’s associated with. Now obviously, Rich is in a secure ward in the West Middlesex right now, sedated up to his eyeballs and consequently unable to speak up for himself. But I could maybe point the police in his direction in case he ever gets better.”
Alice’s conscience might have been bothering her, but she wasn’t in the mood to be pushed around. “Then maybe you should,” she said. “What you do is your own affair, Castor. Good-bye and good luck.”
“How about the Gug? Do you think we should put them in the loop, too?”
No answer at all. Alice had the slapped-in-the-face look of a little kid who’s just been told that there isn’t any Father Christmas. I laid my cards on the table. This wasn’t sadism,
it was just business.
“Apart from you,” I said, “Peele made three appointments during his time here. Cheryl’s solid gold, but out of the other two, one was stealing from the archive on an industrial scale, and the other has only managed to escape a murder investigation by going conveniently insane at the eleventh hour. That’s a great record, isn’t it? Something you might definitely expect to come up at the recruitment interview when the Guggenheim board formalize this temporary appointment of his.”
Alice still hadn’t found anything to say, so I just kept on going.
“Now I figure it this way. There was no reason not to throw the book at Tiler except a desire to let sleeping dogs lie. And you’ve tried to keep at least an arm’s length, if not a barge pole’s distance, between the Bonnington and the Snezhna Alanovich murder investigation, although you must be very well aware that it’s going on right next door to you. I believe the police even dropped in to ask you a few questions, but obviously I wasn’t privy to that conversation, so I can’t possibly tell what they asked you and what came up in the general chitchat.
“Probably you’ve come to the conclusion that whatever happened in that basement is none of your business. Possibly you’ve decided that Rich has already been punished for whatever he did and would never stand trial anyway, in the state he’s in. Maybe you’ve also reflected on the potential embarrassment to Jeffrey if he was dragged into not one but two criminal trials at a time when he’s anxious to build on his capital in the art history world and make a big forward move in an already impressive career.
“It would be a shame to have to drag him back, really. It’s impossible to tell when another opportunity like this one would come up again. For either of you. And on the other hand, I kept Rich’s set of keys—which ought to make an interesting contrast with yours and Jeffrey’s. Just a thought, Alice. Perjury being a crime, and all that.”
I gave her all the time she needed to think that speech over. I’d worked on it for a long time and practiced the delivery on Pen, and we both thought it had a lot of dramatic highlights. Alice got up and crossed to the door, which was just a little open. She closed it firmly. We looked at each other across the length of the room.
“You’re a real bastard, aren’t you?” Alice said, but with less rancor than I would have expected.
“I did the job,” I reminded her. “All coy bullshit aside, I did the job, and I almost got killed doing it. You owe me. I’m sorry I had to remind you about that.”
We haggled some, but it was pretty much plain sailing from then on. Alice agreed to give me the seven hundred that was owing on the original exorcism and another grand and a half as a finder’s fee for the stuff that Tiler had stolen. Under the circumstances, I didn’t think it was exorbitant. It was more or less exactly what Pen needed to pay off the debts on the house, so all I was doing was keeping a roof over my head. Business is business.
As I got to the door, though, I felt her stare on my back. I turned around, and we looked a question at each other across the room. Well, I looked a question, she looked an accusation, but it was the same thing going both ways.
“You saw her,” I said.
Alice started to speak and then didn’t. After a long moment’s silence, she nodded.
“I was playing her in instead of out.” I groped for words. “The tune was the tune that described her for me. The one I’d normally wrap around her if I was doing an exorcism, until she couldn’t get away again and had to fade when the music died. I think—I guess—the tune described her for you, too, so that you could see her this time. You won’t see her again, though. I can promise you she won’t be back.”
For whatever reason, that didn’t seem to help very much, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I consoled myself that Alice was a lady who would always get by.
On my way out, I stopped by the workroom, where Cheryl was toiling alone. She looked up from her keyboard, gave me a nod and a half smile.
“Thanks for everything,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m really sorry about your mum’s wedding.”
“Yeah. You said.”
A pause. I walked over to her, but she held out her hand quickly, emphatically, palm out, before I could touch her. I did as I was told and kept my distance.
It took her a long time to find the words. “I’m glad you did what you did,” she said. “I think it was cool. There’s got to be someone who’ll stand up for people like Sylvie—Snezhna, I mean—and make sure they get their justice. After all, there’s a million people out there protecting the living against the dead. Someone’s got to protect the dead against the living. There’s gotta be that balance, right? And I don’t think you even knew yourself, up until now, that that was what you were for.”
Cheryl blinked a few times, quickly, as if she might be about to cry. I could have been imagining that, though; it didn’t show in her voice, and she had no trouble looking me in the eye. “The thing is, Fix,” she said mournfully, “you lie too easily. You lied to yourself, all that time, about how ghosts were just things, not people. So you didn’t have to feel guilty about screwing them over. And then you lied to me when you didn’t even have to. When I would’ve helped you anyway, if you’d told me the truth. That’s a shitty basis for a relationship.”
“Relationship?” I said. “Hey, it was a good bang, and I like you and everything . . .”
She recognized her own words and laughed. But she got serious again.
“We can still be friends,” she said. “I’d like that. But I can’t—you know. I can’t open up to a man I don’t trust. It just doesn’t work for me.”
She let me kiss her once, very lightly, on the lips.
“Well, now you’ve tried it,” I said. “So you’ve got every right to say that you don’t like it.”
Just like with Alice. It was all I had, and I knew it wasn’t enough. The sound of Cheryl’s typing accompanied me down the corridor, but was lost in the vast coldness of the place as I descended the stairs.
Twenty-five
YOU MOVE ON. YOU MOVE BACK. ON BECAUSE YOU’RE always getting older, back because there’s always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.
Before that happened, or before it finished happening, I borrowed Pen’s car and drove over to the Charles Stanger Care Facility in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I parked up, skirted the front door, and walked on around into the formal gardens. The place was as quiet as it ever gets, at least from this perspective. No screams or weeping to be heard; no rushes, charges, or scuffles. Just the flowers waving in the moonlight, the furious barking of a distant dog, and an occasional moth trying unsuccessfully to immolate itself on a twenty-five-watt solar-powered garden light.
I chose a bench and sat down. Then, for a while, I just waited, letting the mood sink into me, and finding the closest approximation to it in the key of D. When I thought I knew what I was doing, I took out my whistle and started to play.
It was another Clarke that I held in my hands, but not an Original. For whimsical reasons connected with turning over a new leaf, I’d gone for a green Sweetone. I hadn’t trained my mouth to it yet, though, and I was also still stiff from the wound I’d taken to the shoulder when Juliet sank her claws into me on the Mercedes, so the rendition of “Henry Martin” I launched into probably sounded a little wobbly and wild, rough enough, in fact, so that I was afraid it might not work at all. I played it through all the way, careful not to raise my head until I’d reached “. . .and all of her merry men drowned.”
When I did finally look up, they were there—the three little ghosts with their pale, solemn faces, the oldest about thirteen, the youngest not more than ten. Two of them were neat and clean in 1940s school uniforms, berets and all. The third wore a torn blouse and rumpled skirt with stains like leaf moss across the front.
Now that I had their attention, I played a different tune, a quicker one with a jauntier and more
complex rhythm. It wasn’t a tune that had a name, particularly, or one that I’d ever heard before. It was a musical incision into reality, at a slightly different angle to the tunes I usually played. They listened silently and attentively.
When it was done, they exchanged a glance that cut me out entirely, as it cut out all the living. Then, all at the same time, as if at some signal I couldn’t hear, they ran. Across the gardens, through the boles of trees, through the distant wire mesh of the fence, over the eight lanes of the North Circular, and on out of sight.
I couldn’t do for them what Rosa had done for Snezhna because I didn’t know what it was, besides the fear and indignity of their deaths, that kept them tied to the Earth. But I could set them free to this extent, so that now they could at least choose what place they haunted.
Fuck knows, it was little enough.
And later still, I was back in Harlesden, sorting through the mail again—which, since it was a solstice thing, meant that about half a year had passed. Quiet outside, because it was after midnight. The breath of cherry blossom coming in through the open window, like news from another world. I was sitting with my feet up on the dwarf filing cabinet, a glass of whisky at my elbow, and a sense in my heart of what passes with me for peace.
The immediate trigger for that feeling wasn’t the whisky. It was a letter from Rosa Alanovich, now back in Oktyabrskiy and apparently doing very well for herself as the proprietor of a small grocery store. The payout she’d got from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board had been insultingly small, but only by British standards. In the wilds of Primorsk, it was serious stake money—and Rosa had hit the ground running.
So I was miles away, and my guard was so far down it was nonexistent. Then in an instant, the freshness of the cherry was cut wide open by a hot, miasmic stink of fox, which in another instant was refracted into a thousand shades of unbearable sweetness. My head came up, and my feet crashed down as though a celestial puppet master leaning forward out of the sky had tugged hard and sharp on my strings.
