Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“There,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”

To do her justice, she wasn’t. Snezhna’s faceless ghost emerged from the floor like Venus from the waves, the red fringes of her ruined face waving like a silk scarf in a wind we couldn’t feel. But Rosa stood her ground, her eyes filling with tears.

When Snezhna got to ground level—or a few inches above it—she stopped, and the two women faced each other across a gap of about ten feet. The tears were rolling freely down Rosa’s face now. She said something in Russian. Snezhna nodded, then answered. Rosa shook her head in wonder.

Discretion is another virtue I’ve never really got the hang of, but I decided at that point that a breath of fresh air would do Rich and me a world of good. I untied him, hooked a hand under his arm, and pulled him, unprotesting, to his feet. I led him up the stairs, and he went as docile as a lamb. Just once his eyes half focused, and he looked at me, his gaze intensely troubled. He seemed to be about to speak, but evidently he couldn’t find the words or forgot what it was he had to say.

I stood the sofa upright again and sat Rich down on it. Then I picked up one of the remaining water bottles, unbuttoned my shirt, and slopped it over my chest, trying without much success to clean off some of the henna. It wouldn’t budge—that would take a lot of soap and water and a lot of time. In the meantime, I’d have to hope that my husky voice sounded sexy rather than just ridiculous.

I gave the sisters plenty of time, because what Rosa was doing had to be done right. I knew that better than anybody, because what she was doing was my job. It’s the other way to make a ghost move on from this place to wherever. You just give them what they want—tie up the loose ends for them, let them see that everything’s going to be okay after all.

My mind went back to Damjohn’s offer. I have knowledge that comes with a price many would consider too high. Yeah, way too high for me, sport. I’d find out in my own way. In my own time.

After half an hour or so, I went back down. I found Rosa sitting alone on the mattress, looking almost as spent and catatonic as Rich. I held out my hand, but she didn’t take it. She stood under her own steam.

“She’s gone,” she said, but with an inflection that might have made it into a question.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “She’s gone. She just needed to know that you were out of that shit-hole. Now she’s happy.”

Rosa didn’t seem convinced. She stared at me, a solemn frown on her face. “ Where has she gone?” she asked with very careful emphasis.

“I’ll get back to you on that one,” I promised. “Sometime.”

ONE OF THE REASONS WHY I NEVER GET UP-TO-DATE with my paperwork is that I can’t seem to find the kind of job where you can sign off and say it’s all done. Maybe it’s just me. Everything in my life has a more ragged shape than that, tapering off at the end into bathos, bullshit, and bittersweet absurdity.

The headlines were all variations on a theme, the Sun ’s CHELSEA HARBOUR BLOODBATH being my personal favorite—although the Star came a close second with CHELSEA’S ORGY OF DEATH. The stories all leaned very heavily on Lucasz Damjohn’s dodgy reputation and suspected involvement in various kinds of organized vice for which, notwithstanding, he had escaped the indignity of even a single conviction. Now there had been some sort of gang war on board a yacht that was registered to him, a number of men were dead, and Damjohn himself had apparently gone to ground. They identified one of the corpses as a known associate of Damjohn’s—a man glorying (posthumously now) in the name of Arnold Poultney. That was Weasel-Face Arnold, presumably. The three remaining bodies belonged to John Grass, Martin Rumbelow, and a certain Mr. Gabriel Alexander McClennan, who was survived by a grieving widow and daughter.

That was a disturbing thought. I’d had no idea up until then that McClennan had ever married, let alone bred. There ought to be licensing laws that stop that sort of thing happening, but since there weren’t, I’d just torpedoed—along with the unregenerate bastard himself—an entire family unit. I considered blagging an address from Dodson, or more likely from Nicky, and going round to see them, but what the hell would I have said? I killed your husband, your dad, but it’s okay, because he deserved it? I chickened out. That was one last reckoning I wasn’t ready for just yet.

But leaving all the imponderables off to one side, there was a certain pleasure to be had in dumping the whole day’s papers down on Alice’s desk and telling her she could add them to the Bonnington collection. It was Alice’s desk, because Peele was already on secondment to the Guggenheim, who were so keen to get their hands on him that they were paying the Bonnington to let him work out his notice in their employ. And Alice was where she’d wanted to be all along—a happy ending that, by Cheryl’s account, had left hardly a dry eye in the place.

“This changes nothing,” Alice told me coldly. “The fact that nobody has seen the ghost since last Sunday doesn’t prove that she’s gone, or if she’s gone, that you exorcised her. By my reckoning, you still owe us three hundred pounds—and you can be grateful that I didn’t involve the police over the theft of my keys.”

I didn’t let any of this spoil my sunny disposition. “You’re right,” I said. “When you’re right, you’re right. I can’t prove I did the job. No witnesses. No physical evidence. That’s the nature of the beast, I suppose. Most of what I do doesn’t leave a trail.”

She was waiting for me to leave, with barely concealed impatience.

“No,” I went on, musing aloud. “For a good, solid trail, you need a good, solid crime. Now I know you caught up with Tiler because I made it my business to find out. You turned up on his doorstep with two solicitors and a gent from the cop shop, and you took possession of twenty-seven boxes full of miscellaneous documents, with no fuss and no charges brought. Then the next day, he gave his notice in.”

Alice was still looking like someone with a lot of better places to be. “And what’s your point?” she demanded.

I shrugged disarmingly. “Far be it from me to have a point. It’s best to do these things discreetly. Nothing gained by making a big noise about it. Okay, the screwy little fucker tried to kill me, but I know as well as anyone that there’s a greater good. Tell me, Alice, did you do what I asked you to? Did you go next door and have a look in that basement?”

She just stared at me for a moment or two.

“Yes,” she said at last—and I could hear the strain under the neutral tone she held so well. “I did.”

“Come to any conclusions about it?”

She nodded slowly. Very slowly. Again she took her time answering, making sure every word did what it was supposed to. “I took legal advice. Those premises never came into the possession of the archive in the first place. They remained with the Department of Social Security when the rest of the building was made over to us in the 1980s. So I let the police know that the rooms had been broken into and left it at that.”

“Of course you did. Was that you as in Acting-Chief-Administrator-of-the-Bonnington-Archive you, or private-citizen-cooperating-with-the-police-out-of-disinterested-sense-of-civic-duty you? I mean, did you leave a name or just ring them anonymously from a call box?”

She opened her mouth for an angry reply, but I hurried on. “Whichever,” I said, “I’m sure you made the point that you, Jeffrey, and Rich were in possession of keys to that door, and that therefore, any inquiries about possible unlawful imprisonment, rape, and/or murder ought to start with the three of you.”