The Devil You Know

A sob. Somebody crying. I listened for a minute or so and it came again, from behind the door I’d just knocked on. A heartbroken, strangled sob.

I went back and tried the door. It opened. Fortune favors the pure of heart and the brassy of bollock.

Inside, a hallway just two steps wide, then an open door that led through into a poky living room—cramped despite the fact that there was almost no furniture there. A middle-age man with a shock of white hair and a build so spare he looked malnourished was sitting in a spavined G-plan chair by the light of a bare bulb, with tears running down his cheeks.

I thought at first that the curtains were drawn, but they weren’t. It was just that the windows were covered in smeary black ash so thick that even the light from a streetlamp right outside could barely filter through them. Floor, walls, furniture—everything else in the room except for the man himself was all similarly covered.

Tom Wilke was so drunk that he couldn’t even stand up, and when I knelt down next to the chair, his eyes could barely focus on me. He had no idea who I was, but my sudden appearance didn’t seem to faze or anger him. He pleaded with me, his free hand pawing at my sleeve. In the other hand he was gripping a bottle of Grant’s with about a quarter of its contents left. His breath stank like a distillery.

“I always lock the door,” he said, “so they don’t notice I’ve been. Takes them longer. Always lock the door . . .”

Since his own door hadn’t been locked or bolted, that puzzled me for a moment. Then I realized he wasn’t talking about his own door.

“Never hurt anyone,” Wilke was mumbling now, shaking his head in pained disbelief. “Never carry a knife, a gun, anything. Colin said keep five quids’ worth of change in a sock. Tap them on the head if they get bolshie. No. Never did it. Never needed to. In and out, me. Every time.”

I ran my hand along the arm of the chair, which was as greasily filthy with ash as everything else in the room. Then I looked at the tips of my fingers. Clean.

I went and made some coffee, but it was for me, not for Wilke. He finished off the whisky, and I pieced together the story from his stop-start ramblings, although sometimes his tears made him completely incomprehensible.

One of the houses he’d done, just before he’d gone inside, had been a semi down on Blackbird Leys. A shabby-looking place, but a mate who worked for UPS had told him the bloke who lived there took orders for his hi-fi shop at home sometimes. There was a chance of a good take, and he’d borrowed a van for the night.

It took Wilke ages to find the place. It was on one of those godforsaken estates that seem to be built on some sort of fractal system, with endless identical streets opening off each other and feeding into each other so that you’re lost before you start.

But he found it at last, and getting inside was a piece of cake. It would have been sweet as a nut after all, except that there was nothing there; not just no hi-fi kit, nothing worth taking at all. In one of the bedrooms, a kid in a cot, heavily asleep all by itself—no jewelry, no money, no portable electronic stuff. Even the TV had a cracked casing, so nobody was going to touch it.

So he left again, as quietly as he’d come, pissed off and bitter and rehearsing the words he was going to have with this UPS wallah. He was basically running on automatic. He locked the front door behind him, forgetting that it had been unlocked when he arrived. He wrote the night off. He went home. He went to bed.

The next morning, in the Oxford Mail, he read that a two-year-old had burned to death in a house on Blackbird Leys. The address, which he’d spent so long trying to find the night before, jumped out at him from the page. There couldn’t be any possibility of a mistake.

“They couldn’t get in,” Wilke mumbled, his rambling despair going on and on in an endless loop. “They came back, and the house was on fire. How the fuck? Nothing. Don’t understand it. I didn’t touch anything, did I? They couldn’t get in. Door was locked, and nobody had the key. When they got there, it was all burned down . . .”

He whined like a wounded animal. The whisky bottle fell out of his hand and rolled across the floor as Wilke covered his eyes and rocked and moaned through clenched teeth.

It was about a week—maybe as long as two—before it started to happen. He wasn’t even in his own place the first time; he was at a café, eating a bacon sandwich and talking to a couple of likely lads about a possible warehouse job. Pretending it was business as usual, when inside he kept hearing a kid crying in an empty house, and he couldn’t concentrate on what anyone was saying for more than a sentence or two at a time.