The Devil You Know

I cut in. I didn’t have any patience for this. “Tiler doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “When I found out about his thieving, I thought it might be relevant in some way. I suppose I wanted it to be relevant, because I’d just come up empty-handed from the Russian collection, and I was desperate for anything that might point me in the right direction. Then Tiler whacked me in the face with an electric torch and threw me headfirst down a sodding stairwell, so I had something of a stake in him being guilty. But he isn’t. As far as I can tell, what he does is just a weird hobby. He loves old documents. I’ve been inside his head, so I know. He’s papered his bloody bedroom with them.

“No, I know you didn’t steal anything, Rich. But you did kill somebody. How many nineteenth-century parish record books is that worth, karmically speaking?”

Rich had been gathering his strength for a big effort. He rolled to his left and made a break for the door. I’d seen it coming; I got my foot in between his legs and rammed him squarely in the back with my shoulder, adding my own momentum to his. He went down more heavily this time with a grunt of pain.

I hauled him to his feet while he was still limp and groggy from the impact, dragged him across the room, and shoved him hard against the paneled wall. He started to slump toward the floor again, but I kept him more or less upright by leaning my shoulder against him, at the same time helping myself to his keys. There was only one Chubb in the bunch. I put it into the lock and turned. The click was loud in the bare, silent room.

Hooking the door open with my foot, I took two handfuls of his shirt, around about chest height, and half pushed, half slid him onto the stairwell. He mewled in panic. “No! No! Not down there!” He fought against me, which was a bad decision on his part, because we were both off balance. Breaking free from my grip, he tumbled arse over tip down the stairs.

I lunged out and found the wall, which just saved me from falling down after him. I took a moment to get my breath back and slammed the upper door securely behind us before following him down at my leisure. So long as we had Rich’s keys, we could get out anytime we liked, and in the meantime, we wouldn’t be disturbed.

Rich had fetched up on his side, sprawled against the bottom edge of the mattress. Standing over him, I took a rectangular card out of my pocket, opened my fingers, and let it fall. It fluttered down to land next to his head. He stared at it woozily. The card read ICOE 7405 818.

“In case of emergency,” I translated. “You said it to me last Monday when you offered me a bottle of Lucozade from the fridge. Then you started to say it again the next day, but you stopped yourself, and I filled in the gap for you. It had slipped my mind, to be honest. I was still thinking ICOE must be somebody’s nickname or something. But then you offered me your hip flask today at the wedding, and it clicked.”

Rich levered his upper body groggily off the floor. He shook his head, said something that was impossible to make out through his painful, hitching breath.

“Not much in the way of hard evidence?” I interpreted. “No, you’re probably right, there. But you knew where to look, didn’t you, Rich? When I said there was a downstairs room, your eyes went right to the door. Only the door’s camouflaged against that foul wood paneling, so there was no way you could have known it was there. No clean way, anyway.”

I was warming up now—and I was also goading him to answer me. I wanted the story. I wanted to hear out of his own mouth what had been done down here.

“So that’s strike one and strike two, yeah? Then there’s the fact that you’re shit-hot at Eastern European languages, and the ghost speaks in Russian. Only you never heard her speak, did you, Rich? Everybody else in the place did, but you—the only guy who could have definitively identified the language and told us all what she was talking about—you were stricken magically deaf.

“But strike four is my favorite. That was when you sneaked into Peele’s office and tore a page out of the incident book. I was straining my brain trying to think about why that was done—what anyone could possibly have to gain from it. And I finally came up with an answer. I finally realized what it was that was missing.

“This girl died sometime around the tenth of September—maybe a day or so before, give or take, but certainly not after. And the first sighting of the ghost was on Tuesday the thirteenth. But it wasn’t the first sighting that had been ripped out of the book. That was still there, written out in agonizing detail. Because the ghost couldn’t be hidden, obviously—everyone was seeing her by then. So what was being hidden was something else, something that our mystery guest didn’t want to have associated with the ghost, if questions were asked later.”

“Nothing”—Rich managed, his voice coming out as a breathy grunt—“to do with . . . me.”