The Devil You Know

“The match was called,” she said at last, not quite managing the flippant tone she was aiming for. “Rain stopped play. Bloody hell, I wish I was rich. I wish you played the guitar, like Stoker.”

It was a standing joke that had started to lean over and fall down by this time. Mack Stoker—Mack the Axe, Mack Five—matriculated in the same year as us, and he dropped out of university, too, only he did it to become lead guitar with Stasis Leak, the thrash-metal band, and was so successful that he’d already been in rehab three times.

I managed a tired smile, which Pen didn’t return. She stared at me solemnly, then looked down at the saucer of beads, then back at me. “I worry about you, Fix,” she said. “I really do. I don’t want you to get hurt. I went to see Rafi last week, and he told me you were going to get yourself into trouble. In over your head.” After a moment’s silence, she went on, her voice a lot lower. “I wonder sometimes . . . if things could have turned out differently. For him. For all of us.”

“There’s no room for a tin whistle in a hardcore band,” I parried ineptly. But she was talking about the photo now, and her words took me back, unwillingly, to the memory I’d been avoiding.

It wasn’t just a party, it was a May Ball. Overprivileged kids playing at being decadent adults, but with none of the poise and probably not enough of the cynicism. Pen had Rafi on one arm, me on the other, all three of us aroused way past our safety limits by alcohol and close dancing and teenage hormones. Rafi, with his characteristic chutzpah, suggested a three-way. Pen smacked him down. She was a good Catholic girl, and she didn’t put it about. But she countersuggested. We could race across the quad and back to her. The first one to touch her . . .

“How did the party go?” Pen asked, bursting the bubble.

I stared down at her like a rabbit caught in headlights.

“Fine,” I lied. “It went fine. But the guy—Mr. Serious Crimes Squad—paid me by check. I’ll give you the money tomorrow.”

“Brilliant!” said Pen. “And I’ll show you what the beads are for. Also tomorrow. Fair exchange, Fix.”

“The motto of all good landlords in this world and the next,” I agreed.

“Thank God one of us is earning, anyway,” Pen muttered, grimacing around another swig of whisky. “If I don’t get some money in the bank, I’m going to lose this place.”

She said it lightly, but for Pen that was like saying “I’m going to lose an arm.” I knew damn well how much she loved the house. No, more than that—how much she needed it, because she was the third Bruckner woman to live there, and three was a magic number. The devotional stuff she did, the rituals and incantations—her bizarre post-Catholic version of wicca—they depended on 14 Lydgate Road. She couldn’t do them anywhere else.

“I thought the mortgage was paid,” I said, trying to match her off-the-cuff tone.

“The first one is,” she admitted. “There’ve been other loans since. The house is the collateral for all of them.”

Pen only likes to talk about her get-rich-quick schemes on the upswing. The fact that they always leave her poorer than she was when she started is a truth that she finds unpalatable.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“I need a couple of grand before the end of the month,” she sighed. “When the money starts to come in from the party bookings, I’ll be fine. But right now, every little bit helps.”

I know when I’m beaten. I kissed her goodnight, went upstairs to my own room, and threw myself down, exhausted, on the bed. Something in my trouser pocket dug into my thigh, so I arched my back, rummaged for it, drew it out into the light. It was a blank playing card.

After the final no, there comes a yes. And you’ll be getting to that before the night is out.

“You bastard,” I muttered.

I flicked the card away into the corner of the room. Turned out the light and went to sleep still dressed. The number of the Bonnington Archive was in the book, and I still had the envelope with Peele’s home number on it; but there was no point in calling anyone before the morning.

Four

THERE’S A SPRAWL OF STREETS BETWEEN REGENT’S Park and King’s Cross that used to be a town. Somers Town, it was called, and still is called on most maps of the area, although that’s not a name that many of the residents tend to use very much.