The Devil You Know

Snatching up my coat, I crossed the room in Scrub’s broad wake. I had to fight against the bitter bile that was coming up in my throat. I kept it down. I wished I could do the same with the crawling tide of images and impressions that was still washing around inside my brain. I swore to myself that I was never coming here again, even if that hairy-eyed bastard sent the French Foreign Legion to pick me up.

The weasel man, Arnold, was now sitting at the desk in the foyer. Scrub muttered the words “Two ton” as he walked by, then took up his station on the pavement outside. I found it hard to believe that his presence would encourage the passing trade, although the club didn’t seem to be having any trouble in that regard. The rain had slackened off now, and the evening was once again fresh and blustery. Maybe that helped.

Arnold paid me out in fives and tens with silent, laborious concentration, his lips moving as he counted. I took it in silence and stuffed it into my back pocket. I’m not averse to dirty money, up to a point, but I wasn’t feeling very happy with myself right then. I came out onto the street, hoping but not expecting to see the BMW roll smoothly around the corner and pull up right in front of me. No such luck; there wasn’t the same urgency about getting me home as there had been about bringing me here. Scrub’s heavy hand fell on my shoulder.

I turned. He was looking down at me with a sort of ponderous calculation.

“You use music,” he pointed out, basso profundo.

I knew what he meant. “Yeah, I use music.”

“You play a little tune.”

“Right.”

He touched me lightly on the Adam’s apple with the tip of his forefinger.

“I could rip your throat out before you got to the second note.”

His point made, he lumbered back inside.

I headed off into the night, the chill wind cutting into me and a writhing nest of worms inside my head. I was restless, I was wet, and I was a long way from home. Okay, not geographically, maybe, but psychologically. The weird encounter with Damjohn had got to me and unsettled me—the contents of his head clinging to me like half-dried vomit. In pure self-defence, I pulled my thoughts around to the situation at the Bonnington. That didn’t make me any happier, but at least it exercised my mind in a different way.

I was down to the last knockings of the Russian collection, and if I came up blank, I’d have nothing to cover my embarrassment. Could I be wrong about the ghost being linked to those documents? I’d taken a few swipes with Occam’s razor, and that was what I’d ended up with, but that didn’t make it so. I really didn’t want to have to retreat and regroup with Peele and Alice breathing down my neck on either side.

There were still those last few boxes, though. It was possible that Sod’s Law was operating, and that the ghost’s anchor was just going to turn out to be one of the documents at the very bottom of the stack.

I shrugged into my coat, slid my hand into the pocket by reflex, and felt the spiky, angular mass of Alice’s keys.

Ten

I GOT INTERESTED IN LOCKS BACK WHEN I WAS working up the magic act at university. I had the idea that I could build in some escapology as well, so I went down to London looking for a shop that would sell me a pair of handcuffs. I learned a lot from that exercise, but more about the outer limits of consensual sex than about escapology.

Then Jimmy, the barman at the Welsh Pony on Gloucester Green, mentioned a guy he knew: Tom Wilke, the Banbury Bandit, who’d just finished a two-year stretch for breaking and entering. “They did him on two dozen specimen counts, with about a hundred more taken into consideration. He’d be your man,” Jimmy said. “Any kind of lock. He says he can do them blindfolded.”

I was young enough to find the thought of chatting to a career criminal appealing, so I asked Jimmy for the guy’s address. Jimmy said he’d have to set it up first and left me to stew for about a week. I went in there every night to ask him if he’d seen Wilke and if he’d asked him, but the answer was always no.

Then one night, there was a different answer; it was sod off.

“Sorry, Fix,” Jimmy said apologetically. “He’s not himself since he got out of Bullingdon. He’s gone very quiet. Doesn’t want to talk to anyone or have anyone round. Maybe it’s just something he’s going through. I’ll ask him again in a few months.”

But I couldn’t wait that long; I had to be doing it now. I worked on Jimmy until he gave me Wilke’s address just to get rid of me, and I went round to see him myself.

Tom Wilke lived in a flat on some grubby estate off the ring road, three floors up with no lift. It was eerily silent, as if the whole place was empty: no kids on the stairs, no music blaring out of open windows, even though it was high summer. I knocked on the door and waited, knocked and waited some more. When it was clear that no one was going to answer, I turned around to leave.

Just as I got to the stairs, I heard a sound that made me turn.