The Devil You Know

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.

“So are you going to—”

“Come and meet my landlady,” I said. “You’ll like her.”

Pen doesn’t cook much, but when she does, three things happen. The first is that the kitchen becomes a sort of domestic vision of Hell, complete with roiling smoke and acrid smells, in which pans have their bottoms burned out of them, glasses are shattered by casual immersion in boiling water, and gravel-voiced harpies (or Edgar and Arthur, anyway) mock the whole endeavor from the tops of various cupboards while Pen curses them with bitter imprecations. The second is that you get a meal that emerges from this Vulcanic stithy looking like a photo in Good Housekeeping and tasting like something Albert Roux would knock up to impress the neighbors. The third is that Pen herself is purged by the ordeal, refined in the fire, and radiates a Zen-like calm for hours or even days afterward.

Tonight’s effort—in Cheryl’s honor—was a lamb cassoulet. Hugely impressed, Cheryl worked her way through seconds and then through thirds.

“This is amazing,” she enthused. “You gotta give me the recipe, Pam!”

“Call me Pen, love,” said Pen warmly. “I’m afraid there isn’t a recipe. I cook holistically—and half pissed—so nothing ever comes out the same way twice.”

She refilled Cheryl’s glass. It was something Australian with an eagle on the label. The Aussies always seem to go for raptors rather than marsupials on their wine bottles; if it was me, I’d be pushing the unique selling point. I held out my own glass for a top-up. As a party piece, I can sometimes be persuaded to recite the whole of that Monty Python routine about Australian table wines. “A lot of people in this country . . .” The hard part is finding anyone to do the persuading.

“So you live with Felix?” Cheryl asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Not in the Biblical sense,” said Pen, shaking her head. “Although there is something a bit Old Testament about him, isn’t there?”

“Like, something out of Sodom and Gomorrah, you mean?”

“I am still sitting here, you know,” I interjected.

“No,” said Pen, ignoring me, “I was thinking Noah. Very fond of himself. Big, insane projects that he always drags everyone else into. Chasing after anything in a skirt . . .”

“I didn’t hear that about Noah.”

“Oh yeah, he was a horny old bugger. They all were. Never turn your back on a patriarch.”

For our unjust desserts, she wheeled out a supermarket chocolate torte. She also got the brandy out, but I wrested it from her hands and put it back in the boot locker where she keeps it. “We’re going to need clear heads for this next bit,” I admonished her.

“What next bit?”

“We’ve got work to do.”

“‘Big, insane projects,’” Cheryl quoted.

“I warned you,” Pen said, shaking her head. Cheated of her brandy, she poured herself another glass of wine.

I cleared all the dirty dishes to one end of the massive farmhouse table and spread open the plans that I’d copied at the town hall. Then I went and got the incident book, which had landed flat when Cheryl had bunged it out of the window and so had survived its fall without visible damage. I cracked it open at September 13, the missing page again making it easy to find.

“What are we gonna do?” Cheryl asked.

“Well, seeing as Jeffrey has gone to the trouble of specifying the time, place, and date for each of the ghost’s appearances, we’re going to plot them against the building plans.”

Cheryl’s expression said that wasn’t much of an answer. “Because I need to know what exactly it is that she’s haunting,” I explained. “I thought it was the Russian artifacts, but it isn’t. So it’s something else.”

“Does it have to be that specific?”

“No, but it usually is. Most ghosts have a physical anchor. It can be a place or it can be an object—from time to time it can even be another person. But there’s nearly always something. Some specific thing that they’re clinging to.”

Neither of them looked convinced. “This archive of yours counts as a place, doesn’t it?” Pen demanded. “Can’t she just be haunting the whole building?”