Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“Frank stowed your coat on one of the racks,” Alice said, ignoring me completely. “Then he needed to leave the desk, so he decided to put it up in a locker, where it would be safer. When he folded it up, these fell out of the pocket.”

She brandished her keys in my face.

Shit. I’d had a fuzzy half memory of transferring the damn things to my trouser pocket. That probably didn’t count as extenuating circumstances, though.

“You left them behind in the church the other night,” I said. “I was going to give them back to you, but it slipped my mind.” Come to think of it, that didn’t sound a whole lot better.

“Did it?” she inquired with biting sarcasm. “Castor, the first conversation we ever had was about the value of the collection and how seriously we take our security. Since then, you’ve been in and out of here for the best part of a week, having to be swiped through card readers, having to wait while doors were unlocked for you and then locked again behind you. I find it hard to believe that none of that made any impression on you. That it all just . . . slipped your mind.”

“Is all of this aggression intended to cover your embarrassment at losing the things in the first place?” I asked.

If I thought candor would disarm Alice, I was wrong. She unleashed a torrent of profanity that surprised me not so much by its vehemence as by its breadth. Her face flushed first deep pink, then red, and although she wasn’t entirely coherent, a few key points did stand out of the rushing tide of invective. One, I was a thief; two, I’d compromised the archive’s security; three, Peele had agreed I shouldn’t be allowed back inside the building.

“You’re out!” she yelled at me. “You’re out of here, Castor. Now! And we’ll expect our deposit back tomorrow. Otherwise, we’ll get it back through the courts! Get him out of my bloody sight, Frank.”

Frank gestured toward the door—an action that fell a long way short of pitching me out on my ear and probably left Alice feeling a certain sense of coitus interruptus. But there was no getting around it, all the same.

I made one last try. “I think your ghost is a murder victim,” I told her, laying my cards on the table. “I also think you’ve got a thief on the staff. Someone who’s been systematically pilfering stuff from the collection over months, or maybe years. If you’ll just let me—”

Alice turned her back on me and walked away. Frank touched my shoulder very lightly, but his face was set hard. “We don’t want any trouble, do we, Mr. Castor?” he said.

“No,” I answered with glum resignation. “We don’t. But it’s a hell of a thing, Frank. We always seem to get it anyway.”

“You’ve got everyone well pissed off with you, Felix,” Cheryl said cheerfully as she threw herself down on the seat opposite me in the Costella Café. She tossed a lick of hair back from her forehead, stifling her broad grin with some difficulty. “Sorry, I know it’s not funny. I just can’t help laughing when Alice loses it like that. It’s like seeing Nelson get down off his column to have a punch-up with a cabbie.”

“You were watching from the balcony when she chewed me out,” I accused her.

“Yeah, I was—and I could’ve sold seats, easy. She’d been after you all day. When she asked me if I’d seen you, I lied and said I thought you’d left already—then it turned out you had. If I had your mobile number, I would’ve warned you. But you’ve got some other jobs lined up, yeah?” By the end of this speech, she was managing to sound solicitous rather than on the verge of giggles.

Instead of answering, I took her hand in mine. “Cheryl,” I said, staring solemnly into her eyes, “there’s something very important I want to ask you.”

That made her lips quirk in alarm. “Hey, it was a good bang, Felix, and I like you and everything. But you don’t want to get the wrong idea . . .”

“I want you to steal something for me.”

Cheryl’s face lit up. “Black ops! You star! What do you need?”

“The incident book. Peele keeps it in his desk drawer.”

The light went out again. “Don’t be stupid! How am I gonna get it out past Frank? If I get caught, I’ll be out on my arse—and probably on a charge, too. I thought you meant secret information or something.”

I nodded. “I do mean information—but I need the hard copy, as they say. And you don’t bring it out past Frank.”

“There’s only one way out of the—”

“You wrap it in a plastic bag and throw it out of the window of that room where we had our brief encounter this morning—just like someone else is doing. I’ll climb up and get it later on tonight.”

Cheryl blinked. “Someone’s stealing from the archive?”

“Yes. That’s what was inside the bag. A whole bunch of letters and papers and at least one bound book. Some of it comes from the Russian collection—but there’s a fair bit that looks older. A lot older.”

She stared at me hard. “Why haven’t you called the police?” she asked.

“Because I’ve still got a job to do, and there’s a lot more at stake here than a few old papers. I want to find out how Sylvie died and what her connection to the archive is. Calling in a load of plods who’ll lock the place down will just make that harder. Plus, if Alice has her way, they’ll arrest me, too. No, I’ll go to the cop shop when I’m good and ready.”

“And in the meantime, you want to knock some stuff off on your own account.”

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Look, Cheryl, I’m onto something. Something a lot bigger than stolen papers—big enough that whatever happened to Sylvie was just collateral damage. But I need that book. I was about to ask Peele to lend it to me when Alice put the boot in.”

Cheryl looked puzzled now. “So you’re pitching for Sylvie now?”

“Pitching. Batting. Fielding. Working the scoreboard.”

“But you’re supposed to disappear her. That’s why they brought you in, isn’t it?”

I hated saying it; I knew damn well how ridiculous it sounded. “She saved my life the other night, so I sort of owe her one.”

“One you can’t exactly pay back to a dead person,” Cheryl observed, widening and then narrowing her eyes at me in a way that conveyed a world of meaning. “You lead a fucking weird life, Felix.”

“It’s Fix. Everyone who can stand me calls me Fix.”

She looked at her watch. “Frank will still be around,” she mused. “I could say I needed to go back up for my purse.”

I waited, watching a big psychomachia play itself out on her face: duty versus mischief. It was enthralling theater, and I would have enjoyed it for its own sake if I’d had less at stake.

“Yeah, all right,” she said at last. “I’ll give it a go.”

Twenty minutes later, I was standing in the alley to the side of the Bonnington, more or less invisible in the early-evening gloom, and I saw the bag come sailing out of the attic window, flying wide. There was a muffled thud as it hit the flat roof. I climbed up onto the wheely bin again and hiked myself up with my arms. This was getting to be a habit. I retrieved the bag and got down again as quickly as I could. I wasn’t overlooked from the Bonnington, but there were buildings on all sides, behind whose dust-smeared windows there could be any number of prurient onlookers.

Cheryl met me at the corner of the street, and we walked on together.

“I’m an accomplice now,” she observed.

“That’s right. You are.”

“I could lose my job if anyone finds out.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“So I get to know what’s going on. That’s fair.”

“That is fair.”

A silence fell between us, expectant on her side, deeply thoughtful on mine.