The Devil You Know

Harlesden isn’t the best place in the world to put up your shingle. You have to park your car out on the main road if you want to have an even chance of it being there when you get back to it. The Yardie boys tout coke out on the street and stare you down hard if you accidentally make eye contact. And the beggars who sit exhausted in the doorways, their hollow-eyed stares spearing you like the Ancient Mariner’s as you walk by, are mostly the risen-again. Not ghosts, I mean, but those who’ve come back in the body—zombies, for want of a less melodramatic word. They’re a sad bunch, on the whole, but that doesn’t stop your flesh from crawling slightly as you walk by.

But tonight, everything was pretty quiet. Even the sign over my door was holding up pretty well. Sometimes the kids from the Stonehouse Estate come by with their airbrushes and turn the sign into something whimsical and baroque, obliterating in the process the simple, dignified face I present to the world. But tonight the words F. CASTOR ERADICATIONS stood out in all their austere clarity.

Grambas, the proprietor of the kebab house next door, was leaning in his doorway, enjoying a roll-up cigarette whose heavy smoke hung around him like a shroud. He grinned at me as I unlocked the street door, and I shot him a wink. We’ve got an understanding: he’s promised me that he won’t lay ghosts or bind demons so long as I don’t serve greasy fried food and overmatured salads.

My office is actually above the kebab house. Once inside the door, there’s a narrow flight of awkwardly high stairs that leads up, with a sharp, right-angled bend, to my second-floor premises. Pen says the stairs are high because the conversion was a weird one, swapping between three stories and four, depending on which of the original residents sold out and which ones stayed. I reckon the builders were working on margin; twenty high steps are quicker to throw up than thirty normal-size ones.

I scooped up a thick handful of mail and headed on up. Even if you’re fit, you get to the top of those steps a little breathless. I’m not fit. I kicked open the office door, breathing like a dirty phone call, and flicked on the light.

It’s not much of an office, even by Harlesden standards. Being over a kebab shop—while it has its advantages in terms of daily sustenance—tends to lend a greasy miasma to the walls, the furniture, and the air you breathe. And Pen had never made good on her promise to get me some decent furniture (although her offer still stood if I ever got even on the rent), so all I had was a Formica-topped self-assembly desk and two tubular steel chairs from IKEA. The filing cabinet was a two-drawer midget that also served as a table to hold the kettle and tea things. By way of decoration, I had six framed illustrations from Little Nemo in Slumberland, which I’d got from IKEA on the same expedition that brought me the chairs. They made clients feel relaxed and receptive. Also, they weighed in at less than four quid each.

Yes, it was pathetic. But it was mine.

Or, at least, it had been.

I sat down in one of the chairs, put my feet up on the filing cabinet, and started to flick through the post. For each piece of real mail, there were two curry-house fliers and a great investment opportunity, which made progress fairly fast; not many envelopes actually needed to be opened before making the fall of shame into the already-overflowing wastepaper basket. An electricity bill, black, and a phone bill, red . . . these colors change with the seasons and are a gentle reminder of time’s passing.

I stopped short. The next envelope in the stack was pale gray and bore a return address that I recognized: the Charles Stanger Care Facility, Muswell Hill. My name was written on the front of the envelope in a pained, cramped hand in which curved lines were approximated by collections of short, angular jags. It was fractal handwriting; looking at it, you imagined that under a microscope, every stroke of the pen would open up into a thousand angled flecks of tortured ink.

Rafi. Nobody else wrote like that. Nobody sane could write like that.

I opened the envelope carefully, peeling back the gummed flap rather than just tearing off one end and running my finger along. Rafi had caught me with a razor blade once, taped into the corner of the envelope. I’d almost lost the top joint of my thumb. This time, though, there was nothing except a single sheet of paper torn from a notepad. On it, in very different handwriting from that which had addressed the envelope (but still Rafi’s hand—he had several), there was a message that, if nothing else, was admirable in its brevity.

YOURE GOING TO MAKE A MISTAKE YOU NEED TO TALK TO ME BEFORE YOU MAKE A MISTAKE YOU NEED TO TALK TO ME NOW