Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“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 thought. 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.”