differently. For him. For all of us.”
“There’s no room for a tin whistle in a hardcore band,” I parried ineptly. But she was talking about the photo now, and her words took me back, unwillingly, to the memory I’d been avoiding.
It wasn’t just a party, it was a May Ball. Overprivileged kids playing at being decadent adults, but with none of the poise and probably not enough of the cynicism. Pen had Rafi on one arm, me on the other, all three of us aroused way past our safety limits by alcohol and close dancing and teenage hormones. Rafi, with his characteristic chutzpah, suggested a three-way. Pen smacked him down. She was a good Catholic girl, and she didn’t put it about. But she countersuggested. We could race across the quad and back to her. The first one to touch her . . .
“How did the party go?” Pen asked, bursting the bubble.
I stared down at her like a rabbit caught in headlights.
“Fine,” I lied. “It went fine. But the guy—Mr. Serious Crimes Squad—paid me by check. I’ll give you the money tomorrow.”
“Brilliant!” said Pen. “And I’ll show you what the beads are for. Also tomorrow. Fair exchange, Fix.”
“The motto of all good landlords in this world and the next,” I agreed.
“Thank God one of us is earning, anyway,” Pen muttered, grimacing around another swig of whisky. “If I don’t get some money in the bank, I’m going to lose this place.”
She said it lightly, but for Pen that was like saying “I’m going to lose an arm.” I knew damn well how much she loved the house. No, more than that—how much she needed it, because she was the third Bruckner woman to live there, and three was a magic number. The devotional stuff she did, the rituals and incantations—her bizarre post-Catholic version of wicca—they depended on 14 Lydgate Road. She couldn’t do them anywhere else.
“I thought the mortgage was paid,” I said, trying to match her off-the-cuff tone.
“The first one is,” she admitted. “There’ve been other loans since. The house is the collateral for all of them.”
Pen only likes to talk about her get-rich-quick schemes on the upswing. The fact that they always leave her poorer than she was when she started is a truth that she finds unpalatable.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“I need a couple of grand before the end of the month,” she sighed. “When the money starts to come in from the party bookings, I’ll be fine. But right now, every little bit helps.”
I know when I’m beaten. I kissed her goodnight, went upstairs to my own room, and threw myself down, exhausted, on the bed. Something in my trouser pocket dug into my thigh, so I arched my back, rummaged for it, drew it out into the light. It was a blank playing card.
“You bastard,” I muttered.
I flicked the card away into the corner of the room. Turned out the light and went to sleep still dressed. The number of the Bonnington Archive was in the book, and I still had the envelope with Peele’s home number on it; but there was no point in calling anyone before the morning.
Four
THERE’S A SPRAWL OF STREETS BETWEEN REGENT’S Park and King’s Cross that used to be a town. Somers Town, it was called, and still is called on most maps of the area, although that’s not a name that many of the residents tend to use very much.
It’s one of those places that got badly fucked over by the Industrial Revolution, and it never really recovered. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was still mostly fields and orchards, and rich men built their estates there. A hundred years later, it was a pestilential slum and a thieves’ rookery—one of the places that got Charles Dickens salivating and sharpening his nib. St. Pancras Station sits in the middle of it like a great, overblown wedding cake, but it was Somers Town as a whole that got sliced up, by roads and railways and freight yards and warehouses and the cold, commercial logic of a new age. It’s not a slum anymore, but that’s mainly because it isn’t a place anymore. It’s more like the stump of an amputated limb—every street you walk down is sliced off clean by a railway cutting or an underpass, or a blank wall that usually turns out to be part of the gray, moldering hide of Euston Station.
The Bonnington Archive was on one of those truncated avenues, off the main north-south drag of Eversholt Street, which connects Camden Town with Bloomsbury. The rest of the street was mainly warehouses and office spaces and discount print shops, with dust-blinded windows and the occasional exoskeleton of scaffolding; but in the distance, on the far side of the railway lines, there was a block of flats of 1930s vintage, all brown brick and rust-burned wrought iron, its crumbling balconies set with lines of drying knickers like flags of surrender—and bizarrely enough, bearing a white stone virgin and child just above the portico of the main entrance, the name of the block being Saint Mary’s.
The Bonnington Archive itself stood out from the low-rise concrete monstrosities around it like a spinster among sprawling drunks. It looked to be early nineteenth century, in dark brick, four stories high, with meticulous patterns set into the brickwork underneath each row of windows, like vertical parquet. I liked it. It had the look of a palace that had been built at the whim of some senior civil servant who wanted a fiefdom, but then had died, like Ferdinand the First before he could walk across the threshold of his Belvedere. Close up, though, it was clear that this palace had long ago been divided and conquered: one of the first-floor windows was covered by a nailed-up slab of hardboard, and a doorway close by was choked with rubbish and old, sodden boxes. The real entrance to the archive, although it looked to be part of the same building, was twenty yards farther on.
The four-paneled double doors were made of varnished mahogany, liberally scarred with dents and scuff marks at the bottom, but obviously real and solid all the same. There was a brass plate beside the door that proclaimed with serifed formality that this was the Bonnington Archive, maintained by the Corporation of London and affiliated to the Joint Museums and Trusts Commission. There were opening hours listed, too, but this didn’t look like the sort of place that had the world beating a path to its door.
I stepped through into a very large and very impressive entrance hall.
Maybe I was a decade or so out in my estimation of how old this place was—the stark black and white tiling on the floor had the moral seriousness of Her black-and-white Majesty, Victoria. There was a countertop on my left-hand side made of gray marble, currently unoccupied, but as long and as impregnable as the wall of wood at Rorke’s Drift and looking as if it came from the same school of defensive fortification. Behind it, though, there were half a dozen wardrobe rails where rows of coat hangers clustered thickly. They were all empty, but at least this showed willing. The comfort and convenience of any rampaging hordes that might come through here had already been taken into account. There was an inner office farther back, on the other side of the desk, with a sign that bore the single word SECURITY. In conjunction with the deserted desk, that struck me as slightly ironic.
On my right-hand side, there was a broad, gray-flagged staircase, and above my head, a vaulted skylight with an impressive stained-glass rose emblazoned on it, struggling to shine through dust and pigeon shit. At the foot of the stairs, there were three modern office chairs covered in bright red fabric, that looked badly out of place.
I stood very quiet and still in that tired, grimy light, waiting, listening, feeling. Yes. There was something there—a gradient in the air, so subtle it took a few moments to register. My eyes defocused as I let the indefinable sense that I’ve honed through a couple of hundred exorcisms slowly open itself to the space that surrounded me.
But before I could begin to focus on the fugitive presence, a door slammed loudly on my left, making it skitter out of reach. I turned to look over my shoulder as a uniformed guard came through from the security office. He looked the business, despite being somewhere in his fifties: a hard man with mud brown hair that wasn’t so much receding as fleeing across his forehead and a nose that had been broken and reset at some point in his career. He straightened his tie like a man walking away intact from a nasty bit of rough-and-tumble. For a moment, I thought he was going to ask me to assume the position.
But as soon as he smiled, you could see that it was all show. It was a puppy-dog smile, a smile that wanted to be friends.
“Yes, sir?” he said, briskly. “What’ll it be?”
