Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“Well, then that isn’t a problem for us. I’ll arrange for someone to meet him there. Clitheroe, listen to me. Stay where you are. Scrub will come and collect you and bring you out here to the boat. Until we’ve sorted the Castor situation out, which will be soon, this is the safest place for you.”

Rich looked both wistful and tragic. “I can’t do that right now,” he mumbled, his eyes filling with tears.

“You can, and you will. Stay there, and Scrub will come.”

We played charades again. I pointed to him and then waved the matchbook from Kissing the Pink, which had been in my pocket all this while. Rich nodded to show that he understood. “I’ll meet you at the club,” he said.

“What?” Damjohn didn’t sound happy at all at this show of defiance.

“I’ll meet you at the club. It’s more central. I’m—I want to be where there are lots of people, okay?”

“You don’t trust me, Clitheroe?” You could have used the edge in Damjohn’s voice to shave, if you were into cutthroat razors.

“I just want it to be somewhere public. I told you, I’m scared. I don’t want to go all that way out there, in the dark, and—”

“The club, then. You’re closer, so you’ll get there first. Wait for me.” And Damjohn hung up. Rich turned to me for further instructions.

“What’s the boat?” I demanded.

“It’s a yacht. He’s got a yacht.”

“Where does he keep it?”

Rich gave me a look in which a pathetic spark of defiance flared and died. “You think he ever invited me?”

No, that would have been too easy, wouldn’t it? But one idea came to me, even as I was cursing. I turned to Rich again, fizzing and crackling with impatience.

“When he was wining and dining you,” I snapped, “where did he take you?”

“What?”

“The snazzy hotel. Where was it?”

“Oh.” He frowned for a second, then fished it up from somewhere in his memory. “The Conrad, out in Chelsea.”

Bingo.

But it was still only a best guess. And since I was working against the clock, I had to get moving. I pointed to the phone, and Rich held it out to me, which meant that when I swung with the handcuff, he couldn’t get his arm down to block in time. I caught him full in the stomach, putting all my weight into it. He hit the wall and slithered down it, his eyes wide and his mouth gaping. While he was still dazed, I got his hands behind his back and tied a double reef knot around them with the rope that was lying so conveniently to hand.

“Wh—what was that for?” he gurgled when he could swallow enough breath to speak. “Castor, what are you doing? I said everything you told me to!”

“I know,” I agreed, passing another loop of rope over his head and starting on another knot. He kicked a little, but I had the leverage, and he was still weak from the sucker punch. “But I’ve got some errands to run now, and the last thing I want is for you and Damjohn to get together and patch up your differences.” I passed the free end of the rope through the steel ring in its concrete mooring and made it fast. Rich was on his stomach and didn’t see me, but he guessed a second or two too late what I was going to do and rolled over frantically, struggling to get to his feet. No use. There was only about eighteen inches of play on the rope. He could get into a kneeling position, but that was all.

“Castor, no!” he screamed, the expression in his eyes coming close to madness now. “Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me here with her!”

Retrieving the phone from the floor, I stood up. I stared down at him without pity, without any feeling at all except premature relief that I was going to be able to get out of his company soon.

“You’ll be fine, Rich,” I assured him insincerely. “She doesn’t even like this room. She remembers what you did to her here. She’s spent every night since she died fighting against the pull of this place, trying not to be brought back here, but not able to get away from it. You see, she’s got unfinished business. And tonight, I’m going to be doing my bit to finish it. In the meantime, the best advice I can give you is to try to stay calm. Heightened emotion is what’s most likely to bring her.”

Rich was still screaming at me as I went up the stairs, locked the door at the top, and crossed the upper room. I paused at the door and listened. I could just about make out his voice, but only because I knew it was there. The soundproofing really was excellent.

The outer door slammed behind me with the finality of a coffin lid.

Considering it used to be a coal wharf for London’s various railway lines, Chelsea Harbour has done pretty well for itself. Location, location, location, as they say; it didn’t hurt that it was a coal wharf stuck in the middle of some of the most upwardly mobile real estate in the whole of London. In the late 1980s, some smart developers moved in and built a marina, and then the Conrad Hotel went up a couple of years after that. It’s not Henley, but you could think of it as a sort of miniature, portable Henley that’s more convenient for Harrods and Harvey Nicks.

I approached it cautiously, because I’m not the sort of element that the Conrad and the Design Centre and the Belle Époque are strenuously trying to bring in. The taxi dumped me at the top of Lots Road, at the entrance to a maze of gated communities from where it was easier and quicker to walk.

Five past midnight. It had taken me just over an hour to get here from the Bonnington, with one stop along the way to pick up some bolt cutters and a crowbar from Pen’s garage. I was only going to get one crack at this, and time was going to be tight, so I needed to make sure I was ready for anything. As it was, sixty minutes gone meant that Damjohn was probably already looking at his watch and wondering where Rich had been held up. I probably didn’t have much of a window before he realized that Rich wasn’t coming and started to wonder where he’d gone instead. That might lead to a general desire to tie up loose ends before they unraveled for good and all. I quickened my pace as I walked past the antiques shops, furniture importers, and bijoux residences.

Circling the great, elegant spike of the Conrad itself, I came to the marina’s entrance. There was a security hut, but the florid, uniformed guard inside was talking on the phone and didn’t particularly register me as I walked on in. I was guessing that this was where Damjohn’s yacht was berthed, because it was barely ten minutes’ walk from the pub where Scrub, Arnold, and McClennan had met up the day before. And then when Rich had confirmed that Damjohn had brought him here to eat, it gave me just enough confidence to bet Rosa’s life on it. In any case, looking at the whole thing another way, if the boat wasn’t here, then it wasn’t anywhere where I could find it, and I was stuffed before I started.

Most of the berths fronted onto the main marina, which was where I soon found myself. It’s a broad basin shaped like three-quarters of a circle, with a gap of about ten yards between the outreaching arms, beyond which lay the Thames. I looked around for somewhere to start, hoping vaguely that there might be a list of vessels that I could read through, looking for inspiration. But there was nothing like that.

I walked on along the planking—which was probably sun-bleached in Ostia before being shipped here in individual packages and reassembled—looking at the name of each boat in turn. All I had to go on was what Scrub had said to Rosa in Jasmine’s hazy recollection: “It’s the nice lady for you.” None of the ships had a female name except for the Boadicea . That would be a bit of a stretch, I thought.

On the far side of the marina, past the harbor entrance, the berths continued around the outer face of the harbor wall. I took that direction now, still glancing at each boat as I went by. There were a few empty berths here. Presumably, the farther you got from Lots Road and its swinging night life, the less desirable the space was. Another woman’s name: the Baroness Thatcher . No. Surely an even less likely candidate for the title of “nice lady” than Boadicea .