The Devil You Know (29 page)

I found Pen down in the basement, which was where I expected her to be. She was feeding Arthur and Edgar when I knocked and came in. The birds ate liver, which Pen bought in industrial-size freezer packs and thawed one piece at a time. Her hands were stained red brown with watery blood. She looked around, then nodded her head at a fresh mug of milkless tea that was steaming on the mantelpiece. I picked it up and took a long slug; I knew enough about Pen’s herbal remedies to take it with fervent gratitude.

“Where’s Matty?” I asked, my voice still creaking slightly.

“He left,” she said, sliding another sliver of meat into Arthur’s clashing beak as Edgar cawed loudly for parity. “I’m sorry I hit him. Especially after he came out in the middle of the night to make sure you were all right. It was just—I think I was on edge after”—the pause stretched—”after seeing that thing.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “My brother believes in the mortification of the flesh. He should have thanked you.”

She made no answer.

“And I am,” I added. “Thanking you, I mean. When you barged in and did your
Reservoir Dogs
number, I was running out of breath. A few moments later, and I’d probably have been running out of internal organs, too.”

Pen was staring at me with troubled eyes.

“I’ll pay for the window,” I went on, conscious of the fact that I was only speaking to fill up the silence. “I’m wrapping up a job right now, so I’ll have seven hundred quid coming through in a day or so. That should more or less cover it, wouldn’t you say?”

She shook her head, but it wasn’t an answer to my question. “Fix,” she said woefully, “what the fuck have you got yourself into?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know what I’ve got myself into. But I’d like to start finding out.”

“It’s just a straight exorcism, isn’t it? What’s the problem?”

I opened my empty hands—a minimalistic shrug. “I think it got personal.”

“Oh Christ, don’t say that!” Pen looked genuinely unhappy, and I could guess what she was thinking.

“Not like with Rafi,” I said. “It’s just—I almost fell down forty feet of stairwell last night, only this ghost waded in to stop me.”

“The ghost—”

“Right. And tonight, some bastard lets a succubus off the leash and gives it my scent. I want to know what I’m doing and who I’m doing it to. I want to know what else is at stake here.”

She nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. “I can understand that.”

I pressed my advantage. “Pen, I hate to ask this, but would you be up to driving me somewhere? I don’t think I’d be safe behind a wheel right now.”

The discreet door on Greek Street was closed and locked, but there was a light on in a third-floor window. Right now, at four in the morning, someone was doing a photo shoot, or having their head massaged, or being spiritually healed. There’s a whole lot of sterling work that goes on while the city sleeps.

“And this Gabe McClennan is an exorcist,” Pen demanded. “Like you?”

“He’s an exorcist,” I allowed. “The rest of what you just said was actionable slander.”

In fact, in a profession not much known for its ethical probity or compassion, McClennan stood out as a twisting, weaseling, backstabbing bastard. I knew two or three guys from whom he’d stolen clients, money, or equipment, and half a dozen stories about people he’d screwed over. Someone even told me once that Gabe took a huge wad of cash from Peckham Steiner, the sanity-deficient granddaddy of all Ghostbusters, just before he died, on the pretext of building him a “safe house” where ghosts wouldn’t be able to touch him. But Steiner is likely to turn up sooner or later in any story that exorcists tell. I don’t normally listen to tattletale stuff like that unless I’ve got some personal experience to weigh it up against, so I’d been professionally courteous toward Gabe the first few times we’d met—and on one job, he’d actually sought me out because I had firsthand experience of a factory in Deptford he’d been asked to disinfect.

I’d agreed to help him and had offered him a thirty-seventy split, which he’d cheerfully accepted. Bearing the stories in mind, I asked for cash on the nose, and he counted it out into my hand underneath the green and yellow overpass at the Queen Mary’s end of the Mile End Road. Then we walked off in opposite directions, and before I’d gone a hundred yards, I was jumped and rolled by two guys who came at me from behind. They might have had nothing at all to do with McClennan, but it sure as hell looked like he was renegotiating the deal on the fly. At any rate, that was the last time we ever collaborated.

“Wait for me here,” I told Pen. “With the doors locked. Keep the keys in the ignition, and drive away if anybody comes.”

“Anybody but you, you mean?”

I gave her a solemn nod. “You’re on the ball, chief,” I said. “I like that in a woman.”

“After tonight, Felix, I think I know more than I ever wanted to know about what you like in a woman.”

I let that one pass. It was too close for comfort.

“What are you going to do if he’s not there?” she demanded.

By way of answer, I showed her the balding black velvet bag that held my lock picks. She shook her head in tired disapproval, but said nothing. She knows all about Tom Wilke and how I obtained my indefensible skills. She fervently disapproves, but right then I could see that it paled into insignificance next to all the other murky shit that was flying around.

I got out of the car and crossed the street. There were three bells over on the left-hand side of the door that roughly corresponded with the three signs. I pressed the one marked
MCCLENNAN
. Nobody answered. I pressed again and looked around me as I waited.

Greek Street is an after-midnight kind of place, but most of the nightlife had already rolled over and turned out the lights; we were only a couple of hours away from dawn.

But after a few moments, I heard footsteps from inside, accompanied by the atonal creak of badly warped floorboards. A bolt was drawn, then another, then a key turned, and the door opened a crack. Gabe McClennan, in his shirtsleeves and with a heavy stubble on his face, stood in the gap.

He stared at me for a few moments, looking totally nonplussed. It was clear that I was the last person he expected to see on his doorstep at four in the morning. Actually, it was one step beyond nonplussed, into the related domain of baffled and hacked-off.

“Castor,” he muttered. “What the fuck?”

“I wanted to consult with you on a job I’m doing, Gabe.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Well, since you’re still up . . .”

He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Castor,” he said again. He laughed and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “Yeah, whatever. Come on in.”

McClennan turned and walked back inside, and I followed. The light on the third floor clearly wasn’t anything to do with Gabe; the door he opened was right off the first-floor landing, next to a doorless cupboard full of electric meters and half-bald mops lying drunkenly against the wall.

Despite the shabby frontage and the dubious location, Gabe’s office was a hell of a step up from mine. It was dominated by a huge antique desk with ball-and-claw feet that was big enough to split the room in two. His filing cabinet had four drawers, a cherrywood veneer, and a vase full of chrysanthemums on top. He even had a diploma on the wall, although Christ only knew what it said. Two-hundred-meter swimming certificate, most likely.

“So what can I do for you?” he demanded as he walked around the desk. It wasn’t just the stubble; he was looking pretty rough in other ways, too. The bags under his eyes were so dark, it looked as though someone had given him a combination punch when he had his guard down, and if his shirt had had a map of the Lake District on it, the sweat stains under his armpits would have been Windermere and Coniston Water. It was an unusual sight. McClennan has an aquiline face, a spare build, and a thick bow wave of snow-white hair that he wears in a style intentionally reminiscent of Richard Harris. Normally he has a style that can best be described as dapper. Tonight—like me—he’d clearly been overworking.

He rummaged in his pockets, ignoring me for a moment until he’d found a small pill bottle that was about half full. He shook out two black tabs and popped them. Then, in the expansiveness of the hit, he remembered his manners and held the bottle out to me. “Mollies,” he explained unnecessarily. “You want some?”

I shook my head. A lot of exorcists have an amphetamine habit, occasional or chronic. They say—or some of them do, anyway—that it makes them more sensitive to the presence of the dead: lets them receive on a wider range of frequencies. There’s something in that, too, but I’ve always found I lose as much on the comedown as I gain on the rush. So usually I pass.

“The Bonnington Archive,” I said, parking myself on the edge of the desk. I didn’t want to take the client’s chair; it would only give Gabe an unwarranted sense of power and authority.

“Never heard of it,” he shot back, quick and easy. I glanced at his face, but he was looking down right then—searching in his desk drawers this time. Then he found what he was looking for and hauled it out—a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label, about two-thirds empty.

“You sure about that?”

McClennan stared at me, then shrugged; all ease and edges now that the mollies had kicked in.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Ghost-toasting may be easy money, Castor, but I don’t do it in my sleep. Why? What’s the skin?”

“Nothing, probably. But I’m doing a burn there, and your name came up.”

He was opening the drawers on the other side of the desk, bent over again so I was just getting the top of his head.

“My name came up? How? Who mentioned me?”

“I don’t even remember,” I lied. “But someone said you’d been there. Or maybe I saw your name on a receipt or something. So I just wanted to touch base with you, see what you made of the place.”

He slammed a drawer shut and straightened up. He looked the same as he’d looked when he’d opened the door—half blitzed with exhaustion, but not particularly fazed by anything I’d said.

“You didn’t see my name on any receipt,” he said, “because I was never there. If someone mentioned me, then I must have worked for them somewhere else.”

“Yeah,” I said, sounding regretful. “That must be it. Just my luck. It’s a tough nut, and I wanted to bounce some ideas off you.”

“You can still do that,” said Gabe. “Why not? We’re both professionals, right? I stroke your dick, you stroke mine. Shit, I can’t find any glasses. Give me a second, will you?”

He came back around the desk, past me, and on out of the room. I leaned forward so I could look through the open doorway and saw him heading up the stairs. Maybe he was going to borrow some crockery from the Indian head masseuse.

In the meantime, the devil finds work for idle hands to do. I crossed to the filing cabinet and gave the top drawer a tug. Locked. But three quick steps took me round to the driver’s side of the desk, where Gabe had left the top drawer open. It was full of the usual strata of desk-drawer shit, and I could have excavated for five minutes without finding anything more useful than pencil shavings and paper clips. But I got lucky. A small ring with two identical keys was lying against the bottom right-hand corner of the drawer, where it would always be ready to hand in spite of the apparent chaos.

I went back to the filing cabinet and tried one of the keys. It turned, and the drawer slid open with only the smallest squeal of reproach.

A
to something or other: Gabe filed his cases in alphabetical order, and most of them even had file tags attached, all written out with the same sputtery black biro.

Armitage

Ascot

Avebury

Balham

Beasley

Bentham

Brooks

Damn. I went back and checked again, but there was nothing there. No Bonnington file, no smoking pistol.

But there were no footsteps on the stairs, either, and I suddenly noticed that the file right at the back of the drawer was a
D:
Drucker. I don’t even know where the inspiration came from, but I backtracked from there through Dimmock, De Vere, Dean, Dascombe . . . Crowther.

Two strikes. Damn again.

I wasn’t expecting anything now, but for the hell of it, I slid a finger in between Dascombe and Crowther and pushed them apart. There was another folder hanging in between them that had no file tag. Instead, the name
DAMJOHN
was written on the inside edge in black felt-tip. Gabe must have run out of the little plastic tag holders.

The wonderful thing about a Russian army greatcoat is that you can carry a Kalashnikov, a samovar, and a dead pig underneath it without making any noticeable bulge. It’s not so easy with a trench coat, because it’s a thinner and more figure-hugging sort of garment. But it was a thin file, and it just about fit in. I slid the drawer closed and made it back to the desk just as I heard Gabe’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

“You okay taking it straight?” he asked, setting two cut-glass tumblers down on the desktop. “I don’t have any soda.”

“Straight is fine,” I said. He poured me a stiff measure, another for himself.

“So tell me about the case,” he said.

I turned the glass in my hand, watched the facets catch the light. “Ghost takes the form of a young woman with most of her face hidden behind a red veil. Multiple sightings, persistent over time—about three months, give or take—but spread out over the building, so there’s no locus where I can easily read her from.”

Gabe shrugged with his eyebrows. “So you hang around until she shows up. Doesn’t sound like she’s particularly shy.”

“No, she’s not,” I admitted. “To be honest, I think I’ve got a hook halfway into her already. That’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?”

I took a tentative sip of the whisky, swirled it on my tongue. “The furniture,” I said—furniture being exorcists’ slang for any aspect of a haunting that’s not directly tied in to the ghost itself.

Gabe snorted. “Spend too long looking at the furniture, you’ll end up tripping over your own feet. Didn’t you tell me that?”