The Devil You Know

I didn’t know the building well enough yet to pinpoint the room where the Russian stuff was being kept, but the first floor as a whole seemed to have been made over according to a crude but workable plan. Each of the original rooms had been split down the middle, so every second wall was a new plasterboard partition. The original doors, too wide for the new, smaller rooms, had been bricked in, and new, narrower doorways had been put through. A secondary staircase that showed on the original plans had been torn down, the space cannibalized to make small cubicles that were probably toilets or store cupboards. At the same time, the cramped stairways that I’d seen in situ had been created, wedged into the new ground plan wherever there was a gap too narrow to become an actual room. The overall effect was really depressing—it was like reading the tactical projections for the rape of a corpse.

From Mill Hill overground, I walked the rest of the way—but then I overshot and found myself walking past the grounds of the Metropolitan Police Training Academy, which were filled with primary-school kids learning how to ride bikes. A young woman was looking wistfully through the chain-link fence at all the children zooming and zigzagging through a maze sketched out in orange plastic bollards. She turned to look at me; there was an unhealthy bloom to her skin, and I caught the faint sweet-sour whiff of decay wafting off her. She was one of the returned. Her mud-stained jeans and sweatshirt and the occasional strand of dry grass in her hair gave a fairly clear indication of where she’d slept last night.

“I’m still waiting,” she said.

I should have just walked on by, but her face had that Ancient Mariner quality. I was the one in three.

“Waiting for what?” I asked her.

“For the children. I said I’d be here when they got back.” A spasm passed across her slack face—annoyance, or unease, or maybe something purely physiological. “Mark said something about a car. There was a car. They didn’t get the number.” A leaden pause. “I told them I’d wait here.”

With the sound of happy shouts and laughter ringing in my ears, I trudged on my way. I looked back once. She was staring through the fence again, her arms hanging at her sides, her face a solemn mask, trying to read the runes of a life that wasn’t hers anymore.

Two minutes later, I entered the cathedral-like silence of the Newspaper Library, which smells like a worldful of armpits and is illuminated by five-watt strip lights guaranteed not to damage old newsprint by allowing it to be read.

I was probably wasting my time here, but I needed to rule out the obvious before I started looking for more esoteric answers. If the Bonnington Archive was built on an old Indian burying ground, or if someone had slaughtered the entire staff in an obscene necromantic ritual back in the 1960s, when that stuff counted as hip, I’d feel pretty damn stupid to have missed it.

You can get most of this material from other, more salubrious places now, but the Colindale Library has still got the fullest index of anywhere I know and a stack of old papers on microfiche that goes way back into the mists of antiquity—probably to headlines like ONE IN THE EYE FOR HAROLD.

But Churchway, Somers Town, hadn’t made the headlines once in all those many years. It seemed to be a place where nothing much had ever happened. No penny dreadfuls. No Victorian melodramas. No threads to follow, which only helped insofar as it offered no more blind alleys for me to walk down—and threw me back on my own resources. That was okay. I still had some.

When I came back out onto the sunlit street, blinking in a brightness that seemed somehow unreal after that half-lit world, the risen woman I’d met on my way in was loitering on the well-tended patch of lawn just outside the library’s side door. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were working silently.

I had to pass her, but I gave her a wide berth this time; I didn’t want to get sucked into her private world of unresolved crises and suspended time. I got about ten yards farther down the street.

“Felix.” The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I spun round. Nothing in the zombie’s expression or posture had changed. It might not even have been her voice; one congealed mumble sounds much like another.

But then her eyes flicked open. She looked up and around, fixed me with a slightly dazed stare.

“He says you’re closer now than you were,” she whispered. “Even though you think you’re lost. He says this is where it starts getting hot.”

Another spasm crossed her sallow face. Her eyes closed again, and she went back to her silent recital. There was nothing to say, so I didn’t say it.

One more stop to make, and it wasn’t exactly on my way.