The Devil You Know

Peele frowned, visibly rummaging through the interior archives of his memory. “Nothing that I can think of,” he said, slowly. But then he looked up—as far as my chin, anyway—as a mild inspiration struck him. “Except for the White Russian materials. I believe they came in August, although we were expecting them as far back as June.”

My ears pricked up. White Russians? A female ghost who wore a monastic hood and a white gown? It sounded like a link worth clicking on.

“Go on,” I prompted him.

Peele shrugged. “A collection of documents,” he said. “Quite extensive, but it’s hard to tell how much of it is going to be of any use. They’re letters, mostly, from Russian émigrés living in London at the turn of the century and just after. We were very pleased to get them because the LMA—the London Metropolitan Archive, over in Islington—was showing an interest, too.”

“Where are they kept?” I asked.

“They’re still in one of the storerooms on the first floor. Until they’re fully referenced and indexed, they won’t be added to the rest of the collection.”

“I’d like to go down there and see them later, if that’s okay.”

“Later?” Peele seemed perturbed by this concept. “Is there some reason why you can’t do the exorcism straight away?”

And here we were again. But he didn’t know, of course, how closely he was echoing his senior archivist. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, there is. Mr. Peele, let me explain to you how this is going to work—what you’ll get if you decide to hire me. I’d like to go through it in a bit of detail, because it’s important to me that you understand what’s likely to happen. Is that all right?”

He nodded curtly, his face saying louder than words that he really wasn’t interested in the traveling hopefully—only in the arrival. I ploughed on anyway. It would save time and tears later, assuming this wasn’t break point in itself.

“If you’ve ever thought about the act of exorcism at all,” I said, “you’ve probably thought of it as something that goes down in sort of the same way that weddings do. The priest, or the vicar, or whoever, says, ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife,’ and there you go; it’s done. By saying it, he makes it happen.”

“I’m not naive, Mr. Castor,” Peele interjected, in my opinion a little over-optimistically. “I’m sure that what you do is a very exacting discipline.”

“Well, it can be. But that’s really not the point I’m making. Sometimes I can just walk into a place, do the job, and walk out again. Mostly, though, it’s not that straightforward—or at least, it’s not that fast. I have to get a fix on the ghost—a sense of it. That comes first. Then, when I’ve got that sense really nailed down hard in my mind, I can call the ghost to me, and I can get rid of it. But there’s no telling how long that process will take. Exorcism isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. And if I’m going to do this job for you, I’m going to need to know right now that you won’t be drumming your fingers and looking for things to happen within an hour or a day. It will take as long as it takes.”

I waited for Peele to mull this over, but he changed the subject—I suppose as a delaying tactic while he weighed up what I’d just said. “And how much—”

“I charge a fixed price. Whether it takes me a day or a week or a month, you pay me a thousand pounds. Three hundred of that is up front.”

That “fixed price” stuff was outrageous crap, of course. I take the same approach to the prices I charge as I do to most other things, which is to say that I make it up as I go along. This time around, the main thing on my mind was the down payment; I needed some cash in hand, and three hundred was more or less the amount I needed to clear myself with Pen—plus a little danger money, since this ghost had shown that she liked to play rough.

But the opposition was stiffening. Peele didn’t like what he was hearing one bit.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Castor,” he said, his gaze making it as far as my lapels as he darted a quick glance at me, “but I’m not prepared to pay anything in advance for what seems to be such a precarious and ill-defined service. If you’re really saying that you could be here for—for as long as a month, disrupting our work, and that for all that time we’d still have to contend with the haunting, too . . . well, it’s just not acceptable. Not acceptable at all. I think I’d prefer you to work on the basis of payment by results. I think that’s the only kind of contract I’m prepared to enter into here.”

I blew out a loud breath, shook my head.

“Then I think we’re back to where we started,” I said, standing up and pushing my chair away from the desk. “I’ll let the professor know that you need a job done here, and she’ll get in touch with you at her convenience. Sorry I wasted your time.”

I headed for the door. It was only half bluff. What I’d told Peele about how I do the business was true enough, and it was also true that I needed the money now. If I’d set the bar too high, well, then that was too bad for me; but either way, he didn’t get to buy me on credit.