The Devil You Know Read online

  What could I tell her? My own definition of life extended from cradle to grave, and what came after that I saw as something else. If you could find your way to Heaven or Hell, all well and good. If you couldn’t, you had no damn business hanging around the local chip shop or in your wife’s sock drawer. In other words, if there was a natural order at all, then I was part of it—a moving finger that never wrote anything down but was really good for canceling things out.

  “Try a priest,” I suggested again, all out of homespun wisdom. “Or just someone you love and trust. Try Jeffrey, maybe. Talk it through. Don’t run away from it. In my experience, there’s nowhere to run to.”

  I suddenly realized at that point that Alice was staring at me in a sort of pained bewilderment.

  “Jeffrey?” she said with an incredulous emphasis.

  “What?”

  “‘Try Jeffrey’? Is that what you said?”

  I thought about it, and it was.

  “I meant,” I tried again, “that you should talk to someone who—”

  “I know what you meant, Castor. I want to know why the hell you meant it. You think Jeffrey and I are attached? Romantically attached? Did I do or say anything that would lead you to that conclusion?”

  “You seem to have a good working relationship,” I temporized.

  “Bullshit.” Alice was really angry now. “Nobody has a good working relationship with Jeffrey. The relationship that I have with him is that I do the work, and he hides behind my skirt.”

  “Okay.” I spread my hands, offering surrender.

  It was rejected. “Not okay. Not okay at all. Some whingeing creep told you I slept my way into this job, right? I knew the rumor was circulating, but I didn’t know it had reached light speed. For the record, I’m senior archivist because I do the job really efficiently. And Rich isn’t, because nobody except him thought he could handle it.”

  “Okay,” I said again. I didn’t want to argue with her. It wasn’t like it was any of my business, after all.

  She stood up, glaring down at me. “In my opinion, it’s you that needs to have that talk, not me,” she said. “And I don’t mean with a priest or a rabbi. I mean with yourself. God helps those who help themselves, Castor. I suggest you start by taking a good, hard look at what you do for a living.”

  Alice grabbed her bag and left, not exactly storming out, but certainly leaving it clear that she didn’t want to be followed. And I sure as hell didn’t want to follow her right then. Even Good Samaritans will give up the habit if you smack them hard enough, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice in one evening—of doing the wrong thing because the right one wasn’t available.

  But as I got up, I noticed that she’d left something behind her. The heavy key ring had fallen out of her pocket onto the wooden bench, and she hadn’t noticed it in the near dark of the church’s interior. I picked it up, hefted the impressive weight of it. Alice wore it like a totem. She’d be really upset when she missed it—not least because it had her ID card attached to it by a bobble-chain, and she wouldn’t be able to open any of the doors at the archive without it. Changing my mind, I sprinted after her.

  No sign of anyone in the doorway or outside the church. By now, the drizzle had turned into steady rain. London in the wet smells like an incontinent dog, but in other ways, it’s not so endearing. I gave it up and just carried on walking down toward King’s Cross. I didn’t even know which direction she’d taken, and in any case, it wasn’t the end of the world. I’d just have to be there when the place opened the next morning to hand the keys back to her.

  As I was about to go down into the Underground by the steps outside King’s Cross Station, I passed a phone booth that was miraculously both intact and unused. Well, we do live in an age of signs and wonders, after all. Remembering the card in my pocket, I stopped and fished it out. I had just enough coins on me to feed the meter and get a dial tone.

  7405 818. I vaguely knew the code, and I had an idea that it was somewhere fairly central. Close to the West End, if not actually in it. I dialed, and the phone at the other end rang just once.

  “Hello?” A man’s voice, low and smooth—slightly bored. Music was playing in the background somewhere—louche synthetic jazz. Someone laughed loudly in a way that suggested there were a lot of other people hanging around whatever place the phone was in.

  “It’s me,” I hazarded. The only response this got was dead silence, punctuated by the complaint of a tenor sax at being inexpertly played. “From the archive,” I added for the hell of it.

  More silence. “Wait a moment,” the man murmured. I waited. The sax had been shut off now, which meant either there’d been a mercy killing or the guy had his hand over the phone receiver.

  That was all I got. He hung up.

  Discovering another few twenty-pence pieces in a trouser pocket, I made a follow-on call. This time around, nobody even answered. If there was a magic word, then “archive” wasn’t it. My next line was going to be “A ghost asked me to call you. Do you know why that might be?” So on the whole, it was probably all for the best.

  I got back to Pen’s house a little after seven and found it empty. Her basement rooms were locked up, and the first and second floors where she was meant to live but didn’t were as chill and damp as always. I went on up to my own room in the old house’s sprawling roof space.

  I was aware as I unlocked the door of a heavy, slightly musty smell. That should have alerted me that something was wrong, but then again, when you live with Pen and her magic menagerie, you have to accept that earthy smells are going to be frequent houseguests.

  I threw the door open.

  He was sitting on the bed, and he was heavy enough so that the springs bowed under him, making a broad hollow around his broad backside. It was the guy from the pub the night before—and he didn’t look any better from this close up. Worse, in fact. His face was so deeply lined that it looked as though it had been assembled from snap-together pieces, and his pale eyes had a watery gleam in them that looked somehow unhealthy. That didn’t make him any less scary, though. He might be diseased, but a diseased ox can do a lot of damage.

  I took a quick look around the room. The window was open a crack, but this was three flights up, and nobody of this guy’s heft had any business shinnying up a drainpipe. If he’d parachuted in from a passing plane, there should have been a hole in the ceiling. That left the obvious.

  “Pretty good,” I acknowledged. “But at the same time, strangely pointless. Or is this performance art? You break into people’s houses and then sit around waiting for a round of applause?”

  A slow, pained frown crossed his slow, pained face.

  “I’m Scrub,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I got a job.” His voice was so throaty a growl that it was barely audible at all. He sounded like he needed surgery—or maybe like he’d just had some and it hadn’t taken all that well.

  “That’s great.” I shrugged my coat off and threw it over the back of a chair. Ordinarily, I would have hung it up on the bed, but there wasn’t much room around the edges of this behemoth—and I suspected that the springs were already operating at the limits of their tolerance. “Let me guess. Ballet dancer? Manicurist? Jockey?”

  It wasn’t a small room, but between me and him, it definitely felt crowded. I walked around the bed to the rolltop desk that I use mainly as a liquor cabinet. I threw the top back, found a glass that wasn’t too grimy to see through, and poured myself a stiff whisky. It wasn’t that I really felt like drinking, it was to cut the smell, which now that I was inside the room was too strong to ignore. It was a smell of things rotten and sick and ripe, left out in the open long after they should have been buried. A smell you instinctively wanted to move a long way away from.

  “I got a job,” he expanded, getting garrulous now, “for you.”

  I slugged the whisky and let it swill around my mouth before swallowing.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for the though
t. You don’t look like you’ve got that many to spare.”

  This time the frown came quicker—the patented Castor mental workout was already bearing fruit.

  “That’s not polite,” Scrub said.

  “I tend more toward brutal honesty.”

  His face lit up like a baggy old armchair soaked in kerosene. “Brutal? Oh, I can do brutal.” He stood up, towering over me without having to make much of a big deal out of it. The look in his pale eyes was unnervingly cheerful all of a sudden. “Brutal’s what I like best. ’Specially with the likes of you.”

  I tallied up my options and got to two. I could play nice and save myself a spectacular beating, or I could bluff.

  It was unfortunate that I tallied them up in that order. There was nothing to counter the lingering echoes of my favorite word.

  “Listen, you big, thick bastard,” I said harshly, tilting my head back to keep eye contact with him. “You were following me all around the West End—last night, and again tonight. You just broke into my room. And you’ve probably fucked up my bed beyond all hope of unfucking just by dumping your big fat arse on it. So don’t think you can get away with threatening me, too. Say what you’ve got to say, and then sod off to the black pits of fucking Tartarus, okay?”

  It took a moment for Scrub to process this much information, but in the meantime, his default options kicked in. He reached out one ham-size hand and closed it on a big fistful of my shirt. Buttons popped and fabric tore as he lifted me off the ground.

  His strength was incredible. He didn’t even have to brace himself. My feet dangled, and my back arched involuntarily as he dragged me in close to his face. The bunched-up cloth of the shirt rode up into my armpits and pushed my arms away from my sides so that I looked as though I was trying to fly.

  “Which bits of you do you need?” he asked me, his voice rasping like a saw—which by coincidence was what his breath cut like, too. “To do your stuff, I mean?”

  “Every last one of them.” I got the answer out somehow, in a choking gasp, but it was a struggle to keep my debonair tone. “It’s a holistic thing. I lose one body part, and I’m out of tune.”

  “I could beat out a tune with you on that fucking wall,” Scrub growled, pointing with his free hand. Even in this embarrassing predicament, with my legs treading air and my lungs unable to fill because of the way my weight was lying on the impromptu yoke of my bunched-up shirt, I was amazed. He’d picked up my metaphor and elaborated on it. He was only as stupid as a bag full of spanners, not a hat full of arseholes.

  “Do it—myself—,” I wheezed with the last of my breath. I let the whistle drop out of my sleeve, where I’d palmed it when I took my coat off, and held it up in front of Scrub’s smirking, lumpy face.

  “Bluff” was the wrong word for it. It was an educated guess.

  He smacked the whistle out of my hand so fast and so hard that he almost took the hand with it. Then in one effortless wave of motion, he lifted me and slammed me down onto the rolltop desk, where his heavy hand, with his full weight bearing down on it, held me pinned. My head slammed against the wood, which was cherry with a brass inlay. I saw stars, bells, and tweeting baby birds. Scrub’s meaty forefinger prodded my cheek.

  “You ever,” he said with a calm that was a lot scarier than his earlier bluster, “raise that thing near me again, and you will live out your frigging life with nothing between your legs except a ragged hole.”

  “Just kidding,” I said when I could say anything. There was a ringing in my ears, and I couldn’t hear my own voice. “But now we know where we stand, eh? So what’s this job you were talking about?”

  “You fucking scumbag!” Scrub spat. But he lifted his hand away and took a step back, giving me room to haul myself off the desk and get on my feet again.

  “Yeah, right,” I agreed, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and finding that the warmth there was blood; I must have bitten my tongue when he threw me down. There was a sharp ache across my shoulders and a dull one in my head. To make a point, though, I turned my back on him and retrieved the whistle from where it lay against the far wall. I had him taped now, although in the process, I suspected I’d made an enemy for life. I couldn’t resist prodding the bruise one more time, though, for the sake of my self-respect. “What sort of a face did you have before this one, then, Scrub? And what sort of a name? Rover, was it?”

  I half expected him to hit me anyway and take the consequences later, but he didn’t. Just as well, because a punch from one of Scrub’s hands would end most fights before they’d even got started and probably lay me out for what was left of the night—assuming I ever woke up from it at all. I think that was what stopped him, to be honest. He had his orders, and he took them very seriously.

  “The gentleman who employs me wants some cleaning done,” he said at last, after a range of scary emotions had passed across his face. “Couple of hours’ work. Couple of ton in your hand.”

  “When and where?” I asked, pulling back the chair that went with the desk and sitting down—carefully, because of the pain in my upper back.

  “Down Clerkenwell. Now. He’s waiting.”

  “Not now,” I said. “Can’t be done. I’m finished for the night.”

  Scrub, in two giant steps, crossed the room.

  “You want to be finished, I’ll finish you,” he rasped. “Otherwise, you come now.”

  I’d taken it as far as I could, so I gave it up. Some men have greatness thrust upon them.

  Nine

  THERE WAS A CAR OUTSIDE ON THE STREET, WHICH I’d seen on my way in but hadn’t really registered. It was a squat, powerful BMW X5 in electric blue, with tinted windows and a showy, diamond-cut grille, so God knows I should have noticed it. I must have been wandering in and out of the afterlife, which isn’t exactly unusual for me.

  It was still raining. Scrub had given me about a tenth of a second to grab my coat before herding me down the stairs. I wished to Christ he’d stop long enough to let me put the bastard thing on.

  The big man threw open the BMW’s rear door and I climbed in, with a small assist from his mighty right arm. He climbed in after me, making even a car of this weight and build rock slightly on its wheelbase. There were two other men, both in the front of the car. The one in the passenger seat, who looked like he numbered weasels among his close relations, glanced round at me and gave me a nasty smile. The driver was a stolid blond with a face that looked a bit like Tom the cartoon cat’s face after it’s been hit with a frying pan. He peeled away from the curb with a flick of his hand on the wheel and the breathless sigh of German engineering.

  They drove me back into town again, down through Stamford Hill and Dalston, then veering west through the back streets of Shoreditch—a meandering route that had us dipping down past Old Street only to swing back and cross it again, going north. Finally the car pulled up somewhere off Myddelton Square in Clerkenwell, in a street so narrow you could hardly get the doors all the way open.

  I stepped out into the rain, now a heavy downpour, with another encouraging push from Scrub to get me moving. The weasel from the front passenger seat alighted, too, and the car drove off again as soon as our feet hit the ground.

  We were standing in front of a club with blacked-out windows and a gaudy sign. KISSING THE PINK. The brickwork around the windows was painted dark blue, though, and there was a gilded eagle on a rock done in haut relief above the door—the universal secret sign of old Truman Hanbury pubs bought up on the dead-cat bounce and converted into strip joints—which, of course, was Clerkenwell’s boom industry these days.

  I glanced up at Scrub, who caught my look and nodded brusquely. We went inside.

  There was a foyer, of sorts. It was a corner room with walls slightly off the true, converging toward the street side. Polished bare boards bore the muddy paw prints of early-evening punters. A man sitting at a desk in a shallow recess off to the right glanced up as we walked in and then, seeing Scrub, ignored us completely. We passed thr
ough unmolested into the club.

  It was bigger than it looked from the street, with a semicircular stage against one wall, a bar opposite, and a dozen or so circular tables in between. There were also booths around three of the walls, the lighting carefully arranged to leave them in shadow so that from inside them, you could see without being seen.

  On the stage, a blonde woman who was more or less naked already was finding some tiny items of clothing she’d missed on an earlier pass and taking them off. A polished silver pole extending from stage to ceiling was her constant support and occasional stage property. A dozen or so guys in tailored suits, relaxing no doubt from a hard day in the City, and a half-dozen more, who looked like tourists, were staring at her gravity-defying breasts with a willing suspension of disbelief. Most were absorbed enough not to notice our passing, but a few who found themselves in or close to Scrub’s lumbering path drew their feet in hastily and then stared at me with a slight comic double take. I didn’t blame them—my torn shirt, now soaking wet, was sticking to my chest, and there was probably still a little blood on my face from where I’d bitten my tongue. I had the sartorial élan of Robinson Crusoe.

  Scrub was still pushing, so I kept on moving. We walked right across to the far side of the room, to one of the booths that I now realized was occupied. A short, heavy-featured man who looked to be in his early fifties was sitting there alone, facing us, reading and scribbling in a ring-bound notebook. As far as I could tell in this light, his complexion was both florid and pockmarked. His eyebrows were the heaviest I’d ever seen, and his eyes were scrunched up and tamped down underneath them like two miniature worlds with Atlas’s hairy arse-cheeks sitting right on top of them. He was wearing a royal blue suit over a shirt in some kind of paisley design, and his tie was as wide and as bright as a centurion’s shield. Having been watching Man from U.N.C.L.E. repeats on cable TV recently, I was inescapably reminded of Mr. Waverly.

  “So you’re an ass man?” he said to me, glancing up. The blunt words contrasted oddly with the smooth, cultured voice; it was a voice that ought to have been introducing guest speakers or proposing loyal toasts. But that suggests a certain po-faced solemnity, and this was also a voice that smiled at its own pretensions. There was the faintest hint of an accent in it—or rather, maybe, the complete absence of an accent that only comes with learning English from a book.