That was all I got. He hung up.
Discovering another few twenty-pence pieces in a trouser pocket, I made a follow-on call. This time around, nobody even answered. If there was a magic word, then “archive” wasn’t it. My next line was going to be “A ghost asked me to call you. Do you know why that might be?” So on the whole, it was probably all for the best.
I got back to Pen’s house a little after seven and found it empty. Her basement rooms were locked up, and the first and second floors where she was meant to live but didn’t were as chill and damp as always. I went on up to my own room in the old house’s sprawling roof space.
I was aware as I unlocked the door of a heavy, slightly musty smell. That should have alerted me that something was wrong, but then again, when you live with Pen and her magic menagerie, you have to accept that earthy smells are going to be frequent houseguests.
I threw the door open.
He was sitting on the bed, and he was heavy enough so that the springs bowed under him, making a broad hollow around his broad backside. It was the guy from the pub the night before—and he didn’t look any better from this close up. Worse, in fact. His face was so deeply lined that it looked as though it had been assembled from snap-together pieces, and his pale eyes had a watery gleam in them that looked somehow unhealthy. That didn’t make him any less scary, though. He might be diseased, but a diseased ox can do a lot of damage.
I took a quick look around the room. The window was open a crack, but this was three flights up, and nobody of this guy’s heft had any business shinnying up a drainpipe. If he’d parachuted in from a passing plane, there should have been a hole in the ceiling. That left the obvious.
“Pretty good,” I acknowledged. “But at the same time, strangely pointless. Or is this performance art? You break into people’s houses and then sit around waiting for a round of applause?”
A slow, pained frown crossed his slow, pained face.
“I’m Scrub,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I got a job.” His voice was so throaty a growl that it was barely audible at all. He sounded like he needed surgery—or maybe like he’d just had some and it hadn’t taken all that well.
“That’s great.” I shrugged my coat off and threw it over the back of a chair. Ordinarily, I would have hung it up on the bed, but there wasn’t much room around the edges of this behemoth—and I suspected that the springs were already operating at the limits of their tolerance. “Let me guess. Ballet dancer? Manicurist? Jockey?”
It wasn’t a small room, but between me and him, it definitely felt crowded. I walked around the bed to the rolltop desk that I use mainly as a liquor cabinet. I threw the top back, found a glass that wasn’t too grimy to see through, and poured myself a stiff whisky. It wasn’t that I really felt like drinking, it was to cut the smell, which now that I was inside the room was too strong to ignore. It was a smell of things rotten and sick and ripe, left out in the open long after they should have been buried. A smell you instinctively wanted to move a long way away from.
“I got a job,” he expanded, getting garrulous now, “for you.”
I slugged the whisky and let it swill around my mouth before swallowing.
“Thank you,” I said, “for the thought. You don’t look like you’ve got that many to spare.”
This time the frown came quicker—the patented Castor mental workout was already bearing fruit.
“That’s not polite,” Scrub said.
“I tend more toward brutal honesty.”
His face lit up like a baggy old armchair soaked in kerosene. “Brutal? Oh, I can do brutal.” He stood up, towering over me without having to make much of a big deal out of it. The look in his pale eyes was unnervingly cheerful all of a sudden. “Brutal’s what I like best. ’Specially with the likes of you.”
I tallied up my options and got to two. I could play nice and save myself a spectacular beating, or I could bluff.
It was unfortunate that I tallied them up in that order. There was nothing to counter the lingering echoes of my favorite word.
“Listen, you big, thick bastard,” I said harshly, tilting my head back to keep eye contact with him. “You were following me all around the West End—last night, and again tonight. You just broke into my room. And you’ve probably fucked up my bed beyond all hope of unfucking just by dumping your big fat arse on it. So don’t think you can get away with threatening me, too. Say what you’ve got to say, and then sod off to the black pits of fucking Tartarus, okay?”
It took a moment for Scrub to process this much information, but in the meantime, his default options kicked in. He reached out one ham-size hand and closed it on a big fistful of my shirt. Buttons popped and fabric tore as he lifted me off the ground.
His strength was incredible. He didn’t even have to brace himself. My feet dangled, and my back arched involuntarily as he dragged me in close to his face. The bunched-up cloth of the shirt rode up into my armpits and pushed my arms away from my sides so that I looked as though I was trying to fly.
“Which bits of you do you need?” he asked me, his voice rasping like a saw—which by coincidence was what his breath cut like, too. “To do your stuff, I mean?”
“Every last one of them.” I got the answer out somehow, in a choking gasp, but it was a struggle to keep my debonair tone. “It’s a holistic thing. I lose one body part, and I’m out of tune.”
“I could beat out a tune with you on that fucking wall,” Scrub growled, pointing with his free hand. Even in this embarrassing predicament, with my legs treading air and my lungs unable to fill because of the way my weight was lying on the impromptu yoke of my bunched-up shirt, I was amazed. He’d picked up my metaphor and elaborated on it. He was only as stupid as a bag full of spanners, not a hat full of arseholes.
“Do it—myself—,” I wheezed with the last of my breath. I let the whistle drop out of my sleeve, where I’d palmed it when I took my coat off, and held it up in front of Scrub’s smirking, lumpy face.
“Bluff” was the wrong word for it. It was an educated guess.
He smacked the whistle out of my hand so fast and so hard that he almost took the hand with it. Then in one effortless wave of motion, he lifted me and slammed me down onto the rolltop desk, where his heavy hand, with his full weight bearing down on it, held me pinned. My head slammed against the wood, which was cherry with a brass inlay. I saw stars, bells, and tweeting baby birds. Scrub’s meaty forefinger prodded my cheek.
“You ever,” he said with a calm that was a lot scarier than his earlier bluster, “raise that thing near me again, and you will live out your frigging life with nothing between your legs except a ragged hole.”
“Just kidding,” I said when I could say anything. There was a ringing in my ears, and I couldn’t hear my own voice. “But now we know where we stand, eh? So what’s this job you were talking about?”
“You fucking scumbag!” Scrub spat. But he lifted his hand away and took a step back, giving me room to haul myself off the desk and get on my feet again.
“Yeah, right,” I agreed, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and finding that the warmth there was blood; I must have bitten my tongue when he threw me down. There was a sharp ache across my shoulders and a dull one in my head. To make a point, though, I turned my back on him and retrieved the whistle from where it lay against the far wall. I had him taped now, although in the process, I suspected I’d made an enemy for life. I couldn’t resist prodding the bruise one more time, though, for the sake of my self-respect. “What sort of a face did you have before this one, then, Scrub? And what sort of a name? Rover, was it?”
I half expected him to hit me anyway and take the consequences later, but he didn’t. Just as well, because a punch from one of Scrub’s hands would end most fights before they’d even got started and probably lay me out for what was left of the night—assuming I ever woke up from it at all. I think that was what stopped him, to be honest. He had his orders, and he took them very seriously.
“The gentleman who employs me wants some cleaning done,” he said at last, after a range of scary emotions had passed across his face. “Couple of hours’ work. Couple of ton in your hand.”
“When and where?” I asked, pulling back the chair that went with the desk and sitting down—carefully, because of the pain in my upper back.
“Down Clerkenwell. Now. He’s waiting.”
“Not now,” I said. “Can’t be done. I’m finished for the night.”
Scrub, in two giant steps, crossed the room.
“You want to be finished, I’ll finish you,” he rasped. “Otherwise, you come now.”
I’d taken it as far as I could, so I gave it up. Some men have greatness thrust upon them.
