The Devil You Know

Disconcerted, I relaxed my hold—and she jackknifed at the optimum moment, the back of her head slamming with sickening force into the bridge of my nose. I fell backward against the wall of the tunnel, and she was away. By the time I could see through my watering eyes, there was no sign of her.

With my head throbbing and my pride hurting a damn sight worse, I climbed the steps back up to street level and took a look in both directions. Nothing. Even in six-inch heels, the kid had a good turn of speed on her.

The pain in my head was getting worse, making my stomach churn with nausea. I sat down on a low wall to regroup and re-equip. Being beaten up by women seemed to be one of the hazards of this particular job. At least Cheryl had been gentle with me.

One thing surfaced through the throbbing ache and bobbed around on top of it, cheerful as only an abstract fact can be in a world of intense physical pain. She just kept saying roses, Farhat had told me when I had asked her about the ghost, going on and on about roses. And Cheryl had said the same thing, back in that first interview. But they were both wrong. I was willing to bet that what the ghost was talking about was Rosa.

I reviewed my options. There were some ideas I wanted to follow up at the archive now—ideas about plastic bags and flat roofs. And Rosa was suddenly looking like someone I needed to talk to urgently the next time I caught her without a kitchen implement in her hand. But the immediate priority was Nicky’s notes—and if I took them back to the Bonnington, I was risking a run-in with Alice.

So I took them down into the Underground instead. Not as good as Bunhill Fields, but it was a lot closer, and it did the same trick, to some extent. Fast-moving vehicles act as a kind of block or damper on my psychic antennae—so in spite of the engine noise, the vibration and the rocking, the nonexistent air-conditioning, the smell of used food and the proximity of other people’s armpits, for me the place has a haze of contemplative calm hanging over it like an angel’s protective wing. I often ride the Circle Line when I need to think long and deep.

Uncomfortably ensconced in a seat that had had one of its plastic arms ripped out at the root, and therefore sharing rather too deeply in the personal space of a burly guy in a Scissor Sisters T-shirt who smelled strongly of acetone, I took the notes out of my pocket and looked them over. There was a lot more there than I’d thought at first—about ten sheets of deceptively thin onionskin printout paper, all full of dense, unformatted type with the occasional “your guess is as good as mine” percentage sign. God alone knew where Nicky had dug this stuff up.

They were database entries for suspicious deaths, and they were made slightly impenetrable by the fact that the fields were all run together without headings or even spaces. The first entry began:

MARYPAULINEGLEESON2BROWNBLUE5BLUNTINSTRUMENTTRAUMAIMPACTED12NOTDETERMINED7SKULLCLAVICLELEFTHUMERUSPAVEMENTOUTSIDEOLDBARRELHEADPUBLICHOUSEYESWITNESSACCOUNT2253YES12MINMULTIPLESEEATTACHED1ST2ND3RD4TH5TH6TH7THSEEATTACHED8TH9TH10THSEEATTACHED11TH12THABRADEDCLEARABRADED

It went on for a long while in this grim, deadpan tone. Then there was a second name, KATHERINE LYLE, followed by another cascade of words and numbers. It occurred to me as I scanned it that I should probably make a point of never handling the original document; the black emotions locked up in it would probably clothesline me straight out.

In some ways the printout was completely impenetrable; in others, it told a lot of depressing variations on a bleak and familiar story. Mindful of my limitations, Nicky had included on some of the later sheets material of a different kind—downloads from news-agency summaries or other less telegraphically terse sources. With the help of these crib notes, I was able to work my way through the main list a lot more quickly.

It was mostly a case of weeding out the ones that were impossible, and after that, the ones that were possible but didn’t feel right. Straightforward accidents with lots of witnesses; domestic manslaughters where the victim lived in the area and would have far stronger links to her own home than to the Bonnington, which after all was only a refrigerated warehouse full of moldering paper; heart attacks and strokes and all the banal tragedies of human existence that normally let you slip into the afterlife without raising too much of a splash.

I got it down to a short list of three, but I realized that I’d need a bit more information to tell me which if any of the three was actually the archive ghost. And at that point, an inspiration equivalent in weight and momentum to a half brick neatly aimed hit me smartly at the base of the brain.

I had a contact, one I could bring in on this. He wouldn’t like it a whole lot, but that which doesn’t kill us makes us strong.