Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

I flipped through the pages of the notebook, looking for something that would be a bit more distinctive. In the end I settled for a Valentine’s Day card and typed in some of the search fields that Rich had jotted down. RECIPIENT CARLA. DESIGN HEART WITH WINGS.

Yeah, there it was: item number 2838. The next document I tried, a birth certificate, was number 1211. The third was a book of wedding photos, and it showed up as number 832.

It was no use. Even if I was right, it could take me days to find what I was looking for. There had to be another way of doing this. I thought about it for a long while. Then I picked up the phone and placed a call to Nicky.

He answered in his usual guarded way—making sure he knew who I was before he owned up to being who he was. Normally I take that in my stride, but not today. “Nicky, enough of the bullshit,” I said testily, cutting him off. “I need another favor. If it comes to anything, I’ll buy you a whole crate of that overpriced French mouthwash. Meet me at Euston Station. At the Burger King on the main concourse, okay? That way, you’ll be able to see me from a hundred yards away, and you’ll know it’s me, rather than some weird branch of the government pulling a sting. It’s goddamn urgent, okay? Someone’s trying to kill me, and I’d like to know why.”

Taking that kind of tone with Nicky was a high-risk strategy. I waited to see if he’d cave in or tell me to go fuck myself. He did neither. “Trying to kill you with what?” he demanded tersely.

“A stairwell. And then a succubus.”

That got a response, at any rate. “Holy shit. A fuck-demon? What did it look like? Did you get pictures?”

“Did I get pictures? Nicky, I was lucky to get out with my wedding tackle still attached. No, I didn’t get pictures.”

“Then what was its name? Was it one of the steganographics?”

“I’m not an expert. She said her name was Juliet. She had black hair and black eyes.”

“Anything else? Markings? Nonhuman features? What were her sexual organs like? Any teeth down there?”

“Nicky, for the love of Christ—they were like a woman’s—she was normal. Stupendously high-end normal.” Something popped up in my mind, like conceptual toast. “Except for her breasts.”

“Which were?”

“She didn’t have any areolae around her nipples. All of her skin was pure white.”

“Got you. Okay, I’ll do some looking around.”

“That’s not what I want you to do.”

“I’ll do it anyway. The hell-kin fascinate me.”

“Just meet me, okay?”

“Euston Station. I’ll be there—but twenty minutes is all you’re getting, and you can pay for the taxi.”

I went looking for Rich. I found him in the public reading area, watching over a florid, preoccupied woman who was leafing through what looked like the catalog from some ancient exhibition of chamber pots and toilet furniture. He looked up when I came in and gave me a nod.

“Alice is looking for you,” he said. “She didn’t look happy.”

“I’d probably be more worried if she did. Listen, Rich, there was something I wanted to ask you about.”

“Go on.”

“The first week in September. Maybe the last week in August. Do you remember anything out of the ordinary happening around then?”

He looked blank.

“Can you give me a hint?” he asked. “What kind of anything?”

“The kind of anything that would end up being written into the incident book.”

“So . . . an accident? Or a breakage? Someone going home sick?”

“Sounds like the right sort of territory, yeah.”

Rich frowned thoughtfully, but I suspected that was just to show willing. “Nothing that springs to mind,” he admitted. “The trouble is, those things happen all the time. Unless you’ve got something to pin it to—something that definitely happened at the same time—you don’t remember it well enough to say when it was.”

“The first appearance of the ghost,” I said. “It was almost exactly at that time. Does that help?”

He shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, mate.”

“Never mind. It was a long shot. If you do come up with anything, though, let me know. Ask Cheryl, too. And any of the part-timers you see.”

“And Jon?”

I had to mull that one over for a moment. “Yeah, and Jon,” I said at last. “Anyone you bump into. It doesn’t do any harm to ask.”

“Doesn’t do any good either, most of the time,” he observed cynically.

“I’m noticing that, brother,” I admitted. “But hope springs eternal, eh?”

I slipped out of the archive at lunchtime and crossed the road to Euston Station. I’ve never liked the place; it looks like a scaled-up model of something run up by a Blue Peter presenter out of the slatted interiors of fruit boxes. But it teems with people around the clock, which made it an ideal place for a private meeting. Feeling guilty and hunted because of what I was carrying under my shirt, I glanced around behind me. The crowds parted for a moment, and a female figure ten paces or so behind me turned and took a sudden interest in a newspaper display. I wasn’t sure, but again I thought I recognized her as Damjohn’s girl. Rosa. I hesitated. I had to meet Nicky, and I knew he wouldn’t wait, but I was in a maze, and any Ariadne would do. I took a few steps toward her, but then a few more clusters of people eddied past, and when I got to the newsstand, there was no sign of her.

With a grimace of annoyance, I moved on to the Burger King. It doesn’t have any doors; it just opens out directly onto the concourse, which was why I’d chosen it. Nicky likes to have a clear field of vision in all directions.

As soon as I sat down in the coffee shop, he was pulling out a chair and slipping in next to me. He must have been circling around for a while, waiting for me to show, but it would go against the grain for him to sit down first. I felt the chill coming off him; he’d be wearing freezer packs under his bulky fleece, and probably a thermos of dry ice somewhere to freshen them up. Unlike most of the risen dead, Nicky was always pragmatic and prepared.

From his pocket he produced a thin sheaf of A4 pages, folded in half and then in quarters. He handed them to me, and I looked a question.

“Dead girls,” he said. “The stuff you were asking about.”

“Quick work,” I said, impressed.

“Easy work. But like I said, you gave me a sloppy brief; there’s a lot of stuff there. You’ve still got your work cut out. Now, what’s today’s crisis?”

I took the small but heavy bundle out of my shirt and slid it across the table to him: hard, rectangular, wrapped in newsprint from that morning’s Guardian . He unwrapped it and stared at it as though he’d never seen one before.

It had taken a lot of nerve to walk past Frank with that stuffed up my shirt. I’d thought of asking him for my coat, but I didn’t want to risk drawing any more attention to myself. “I need it looked at,” I told Nicky. “Looked at properly. Dissected, autopsied, and written up in excessive detail. The file you’re particularly looking at is called RUSSIAN1. It’s a database file. I want to know if it’s been tampered with—if anything unusual has been done to it anywhere along the line.”

“This is somebody’s laptop,” Nicky said.

“Yeah.”

“Not yours?”

“No.”

“Stolen, Castor?”

“Borrowed. It’ll get back to its rightful owners in due course.”

“And you’ve got the brass balls to pass it on to me?”

“Sure, Nicky. They’re already out to get you, remember? And you’re dead. You don’t have a damn thing to lose.”

Nicky wasn’t amused. “The work I do,” he muttered, glaring at me, “I try to keep it as low profile as I can. I try not to disturb the grid. Because the grid”—he gestured with his hands, fingers spread—“is like a great, flowing river. And along the banks of the river, a whole army of guys are sitting on folding chairs with rods and lines all set up. Everything you touch, Castor—everything you touch is a hook. There are people out there who want to know everything there is to know about you. So they can control you. So they can neutralize you. So they can kill you whenever they want to. You think I don’t know that paranoia is a clinical condition? I know better than anyone. But you embrace it when it becomes a survival trait.”