The Devil You Know

But before I could begin to focus on the fugitive presence, a door slammed loudly on my left, making it skitter out of reach. I turned to look over my shoulder as a uniformed guard came through from the security office. He looked the business, despite being somewhere in his fifties: a hard man with mud brown hair that wasn’t so much receding as fleeing across his forehead and a nose that had been broken and reset at some point in his career. He straightened his tie like a man walking away intact from a nasty bit of rough-and-tumble. For a moment, I thought he was going to ask me to assume the position.

But as soon as he smiled, you could see that it was all show. It was a puppy-dog smile, a smile that wanted to be friends.

“Yes, sir?” he said, briskly. “What’ll it be?”

I fought the urge to say a pint of heavy and a packet of crisps. “Felix Castor. I’m here to see Mr. Peele.”

The guard nodded earnestly and pointed a finger at me as if he was really glad I’d brought that up. Rummaging for a moment under the counter, he came up with a black Bic biro and nodded me toward a large daybook that was already out on the countertop. “If you’d like to sign in, sir,” he said, “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

As I signed, he picked up a phone and tapped the hash key, then three others. “Hello, Alice,” he said, after a brief pause. “There’s a Mr. Felix”—he glanced down at the daybook—“Castro down at the front desk. Yes. Fine. All right. I’ll tell him.” Alice? I’d remembered Peele’s first name as Jeffrey.

The guard put the phone down and waved expansively in the direction of the chairs—the same gesture that actors use when they want you to applaud the orchestra. “If you’d like to take a seat, sir, someone will come along and see to you shortly.”

“Cheers,” I said. I went and sat down, and the guard invented things to do at the desk in a transparent effort to look busy and purposeful. I closed my eyes, shutting him out, and tried to find that teasing presence again—but there was nothing doing. The small noises of the guard’s movements were enough to shake my fragile concentration.

A minute later, there were footsteps on the stairs. I opened my eyes again and looked up at the woman who was coming down to meet me.

She was something to look at. As I sized her up, I slid my professional detachment into place like a visor over my eyes. I’d have put her in her late twenties, but she could have been older and just wearing it well. She was on the tall side and very slim—wiry, workout slim, rather than just slim-built—with straight blonde hair drawn back into a tight bun, which in other company might have been called a Croydon face-lift. Not here, though. She was well dressed—even immaculately dressed—in a gray two-piece that consciously and stylishly mocked a man’s business suit. Her shoes were gray leather with two-inch heels, plain except for a red buckle on the side of each, the red being picked up by a handkerchief in her breast pocket. At her waist, looped around a gray leather belt, was a very large bunch of keys. With that detail, and with the stern haircut, she looked like the warden in the kind of immaculate women’s prison that only exists in Italian pornography.

Then she spoke and, just as it had with the security guard, her voice made all the other details break apart and come together in a new pattern. The timber was deep enough to be thrilling, but the cold tone checked that effect and put me firmly back in my place. “You’re the exorcist?” she asked. I had a momentary flashback, without the benefit of acid, to James Dodson saying, “You’re the entertainer?” There wasn’t an inch or an ounce to choose between them.

I’m used to this. Cute and fetching though I am in my own right, the job casts its ineluctable pall over the way people perceive me and deal with me. I looked this high-gloss vision right in the eyes, and I saw exactly what she was seeing—a snake-oil salesman offering a dubious service at a premium rate.

“That’s me,” I agreed amiably. “Felix Castor. And you are?”

“Alice Gascoigne,” she said. “I’m the senior archivist.” Her hand came out automatically as she said it, like a cuckoo when the clock hits the hour. I took the hand and gave it a firm, lingering shake, which in theory gave me a chance to add a little more depth to those first impressions. I’m not psychic, at least not the kind with all the ribbons and bells, the kind who can read people’s thoughts as easily as picking up a newspaper or get newsflashes from their possible futures. But I am sensitive. It goes with the job. I’ve got my antennae out on wavelengths that other people don’t use all that much or don’t consciously monitor, and sometimes skin contact gets me tuned in strongly enough to take an instant reading of mood, a flash of surface thought, an elusive flavor of personality. Sometimes.

Not from Alice, though. She was sealed up tight.