The Devil You Know

I fought the urge to say a pint of heavy and a packet of crisps. “Felix Castor. I’m here to see Mr. Peele.”

The guard nodded earnestly and pointed a finger at me as if he was really glad I’d brought that up. Rummaging for a moment under the counter, he came up with a black Bic biro and nodded me toward a large daybook that was already out on the countertop. “If you’d like to sign in, sir,” he said, “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

As I signed, he picked up a phone and tapped the hash key, then three others. “Hello, Alice,” he said, after a brief pause. “There’s a Mr. Felix”—he glanced down at the daybook—“Castro down at the front desk. Yes. Fine. All right. I’ll tell him.” Alice? I’d remembered Peele’s first name as Jeffrey.

The guard put the phone down and waved expansively in the direction of the chairs—the same gesture that actors use when they want you to applaud the orchestra. “If you’d like to take a seat, sir, someone will come along and see to you shortly.”

“Cheers,” I said. I went and sat down, and the guard invented things to do at the desk in a transparent effort to look busy and purposeful. I closed my eyes, shutting him out, and tried to find that teasing presence again—but there was nothing doing. The small noises of the guard’s movements were enough to shake my fragile concentration.

A minute later, there were footsteps on the stairs. I opened my eyes again and looked up at the woman who was coming down to meet me.

She was something to look at. As I sized her up, I slid my professional detachment into place like a visor over my eyes. I’d have put her in her late twenties, but she could have been older and just wearing it well. She was on the tall side and very slim—wiry, workout slim, rather than just slim-built—with straight blonde hair drawn back into a tight bun, which in other company might have been called a Croydon face-lift. Not here, though. She was well dressed—even immaculately dressed—in a gray two-piece that consciously and stylishly mocked a man’s business suit. Her shoes were gray leather with two-inch heels, plain except for a red buckle on the side of each, the red being picked up by a handkerchief in her breast pocket. At her waist, looped around a gray leather belt, was a very large bunch of keys. With that detail, and with the stern haircut, she looked like the warden in the kind of immaculate women’s prison that only exists in Italian pornography.

Then she spoke and, just as it had with the security guard, her voice made all the other details break apart and come together in a new pattern. The timber was deep enough to be thrilling, but the cold tone checked that effect and put me firmly back in my place. “You’re the exorcist?” she asked. I had a momentary flashback, without the benefit of acid, to James Dodson saying, “You’re the entertainer?” There wasn’t an inch or an ounce to choose between them.

I’m used to this. Cute and fetching though I am in my own right, the job casts its ineluctable pall over the way people perceive me and deal with me. I looked this high-gloss vision right in the eyes, and I saw exactly what she was seeing—a snake-oil salesman offering a dubious service at a premium rate.

“That’s me,” I agreed amiably. “Felix Castor. And you are?”

“Alice Gascoigne,” she said. “I’m the senior archivist.” Her hand came out automatically as she said it, like a cuckoo when the clock hits the hour. I took the hand and gave it a firm, lingering shake, which in theory gave me a chance to add a little more depth to those first impressions. I’m not psychic, at least not the kind with all the ribbons and bells, the kind who can read people’s thoughts as easily as picking up a newspaper or get newsflashes from their possible futures. But I am sensitive. It goes with the job. I’ve got my antennae out on wavelengths that other people don’t use all that much or don’t consciously monitor, and sometimes skin contact gets me tuned in strongly enough to take an instant reading of mood, a flash of surface thought, an elusive flavor of personality. Sometimes.

Not from Alice, though. She was sealed up tight.

“Jeffrey is in his office,” she said, taking her hand back at the earliest opportunity. “He’s actually busy with some month-end reports, and he won’t be able to see you. He says you should go ahead and do the job, and then you can send your bill in to him whenever it’s convenient.”

My smile took on a slightly pained tilt. We were really getting off on the wrong foot here.

“I think,” I said, picking my words with care, “that Jeffrey—Mr. Peele—may have a mistaken impression of how exorcism works. I am going to need to talk to him.”

Alice stood her ground, and her tone dropped a few degrees closer to zero.

“I’ve told you that won’t be possible. He’ll be tied up all day.”

I shrugged. “Then would you like to suggest a day that will be more convenient?”

Alice stared at me, caught between perplexity and outright annoyance.

“Is there some reason why you can’t just do the job right now?” she demanded.

“Actually,” I said, “there are a lot of reasons. Most of them are fairly technical. I’d be happy to explain them to you and then wait while you relay them to Mr. Peele. But that seems like a very roundabout way of doing things. It would be better if I could talk you both through it together—along with anyone else who needs to know.”

Alice considered this. I could see it didn’t sit well with her. Also—although this was just a guess—that her initial urge to tell me to sod off was tempered by the reluctant conclusion that she lacked the full authority to back it up.

“All right,” she said at last. “You’re the expert.” The emphasis on the last word fell a fraction of an inch this side of sarcasm.

She pointed toward the lockers opposite. “You’ll have to leave your coat here,” she said. “There’s a rule about personal effects. Frank, could you please take Mr. Castor’s coat and give him a ticket?”

“Okey-dokey.” The guard unhooked a hanger from one of the racks and laid it on the counter. I considered making an issue of it, but I could see I was going to have a bumpy enough ride with Alice as it was without going out of my way to make things difficult. I transferred my tin whistle to my belt, where it fits snugly enough, and handed the greatcoat over the counter to the guard. He’d been watching my exchange with Alice without any visible reaction, but he gave me a smile and a nod as he took the coat from me. He hung it up on the otherwise empty rack and gave me a plastic tag into which the number 022 had been die-cut. “Two little ducks,” he said. “Twenty-two.” I nodded my thanks.

Alice stood aside to let me walk up the stairs in front of her, no doubt mindful of how short her skirt was and of the consequent need to maintain the dignity of her station. I went on up with her heels clattering on the stone steps behind me all the way.

On the second floor there was a set of glass-paneled swing doors. Alice stepped past me to open them and walk through. I followed her into a large room that looked something like a public lending library, but with more sparsely furnished shelves. In the center of the space, there were about a dozen wide tables with six or eight chairs arranged around each. Most of the tables were empty, but at one of them a man was turning over the pages of what looked like an old parish register, making notes in a narrow, spiral-bound notebook as he went; at another, two women had spread a map and were laboriously copying part of it onto an A3 sheet; at a third, another, older man was reading The Times. Maybe The Times gets to jump the queue and become history straight away. Elsewhere there were shelves full of what looked to be encyclopedias and reference books, a few spinner racks loaded with magazines, a couple of large map chests, a bank of about eight slightly battered-looking PCs ranged along one wall, and at the end farthest away from us a six-sided librarians’ station, currently staffed by one bored-looking young man.

“Is this the collection?” I hazarded, prepared to be polite.

Alice gave a short, harsh laugh.

“This is the reading room,” she said with what seemed like slightly exaggerated patience. “The area that we keep open to the public. The collection is stored in the strong rooms, which are mostly in the new annex.”

She launched out across the room without bothering to look back and make sure I was still following. She was heading for an ugly steel-reinforced door that stood diagonally opposite us on the other side of the big open space. To either side of it there were two scanning brackets—the kind you get at the exits of large stores to discourage technologically challenged shoplifters.

Alice opened the door not with one of the keys that she wore on her belt but with a card that she ran through a scanner to the left of the door, making a small, inset red light wink to green. She held the door open for me, and I stepped through into a corridor that was narrow and low-ceilinged. She closed the door again behind us, pushing against the slam guard until the lock clicked audibly, and then slid past me again—it required a little maneuvering— to lead the way.