Rosa turned to go, but Damjohn reached out a hand and touched her wrist with the tip of his index finger, which was enough to make her stop and turn back again, looking expectantly at him as if she was waiting for further orders.
“This is a very important guest we have here,” he said with heavy jocularity. “Mr. Felix Castor. In case you’ve never heard of him, Rosa, he’s a big man in the ghost business. An exorcist, I mean. An inspector of specters.”
Rosa’s gaze flicked to me, her face as inscrutable as a death mask. Damjohn looked over at me, too, as though somehow he was making this ham-fisted joke for my benefit. I stayed deadpan. God knew, I didn’t want to give him any encouragement.
“When we’ve finished our little chat, Felix will go upstairs and give our premises a thorough examination,” Damjohn continued after a pause that seemed significant in a way I didn’t quite get. “Tell the girls to keep their backs to the wall, please. You see, Felix is an ass man.”
He lifted his finger from the back of Rosa’s hand, and she left without a backward glance. Damjohn returned his attention to me—although to be honest, it seemed as though he’d been watching me all the time.
“So, as you will have gathered, I need to have the place cleaned,” he said. “You can do that, I presume? Put down the vermin? Caulk and seal, so that nothing untoward pops its head up and scares the girls when they ought to be working?”
I played stupid for the hell of it—and because I always like the client to spell out exactly what it is he wants. “Do you mean cockroaches, or—”
“Please,” Damjohn said with an impatient horizontal slash of his stubby hand—an erasure mark hanging in the air between us. “I mean ghosts, Felix. Ghosts. I’m perfectly capable of stamping on cockroaches without instruction or assistance.”
“And what makes you think you’ve got a haunting, Mr. Damjohn?” I asked, bedside manner kicking in again hard.
He grimaced disapprovingly. The woman on stage slid down the pole into a precarious position, sitting back on her haunches with her legs spread wide, and the scattershot applause forced a momentary silence on us. “I don’t believe I told you what I thought,” Damjohn said when the clapping had died down again and the woman had departed. Incongruously, a wide-screen TV slid down from the ceiling over the center of the stage area, showing highlights from what looked to be a Manchester City game. “But women,” Damjohn mused, “have a very delicate sensibility. A curtain blows open or a pipe gurgles, and they think they’ve received a message from the other side.” He tapped the spine of his book, frowning momentarily as if he was pursuing that thought a little further. “For my own part, I’ve never knowingly received a message of that kind. But then, it would be a matter of complete indifference to me if I ever did. Certainly I don’t think a vengeful ghost would intimidate me at all. If some man had a grudge against me, it would be my personal preference to have him dead rather than alive, you understand? I’d see that more as a convenience than as anything else.” He looked at me again, solemn-eyed. Eyebrows like that could provide a lot of solemnity.
“A convenience,” I echoed cautiously. “Right.” I was missing a lot here, enough so I was beginning to feel irritated and hard-done-by. Rosa came back with the drinks and set them in front of us. I watched her with a certain curiosity, but this time she kept her gaze fixed on her tray and walked away briskly as soon as she was done. She did have a cute bum, despite her slim build. But she wasn’t even close to being my type. I don’t go much for the “imagine me in a school uniform” look.
I took a sip of the whisky. Single malt, and good single malt, at that. I wished I’d passed on the water.
“So you just want me to inspect the premises and see whether I can find any sign of ghost or poltergeist activity,” I summed up.
“Yes.”
“Because the girls don’t like it.”
“Again, yes.”
“Then how do they cope with Scrub?” I asked, hooking my thumb over my shoulder at the big man, who was standing behind me as impassively as one of the guards at Buck House.
Damjohn gave me a look of puzzled innocence. “Scrub? You think that Scrub is a ghost, Felix? He looks solid enough to me.”
He evidently wanted me to tell him what he already knew. “Scrub is a
“It was a French scientist—Nicole David—who first nailed this, and that’s how come we use the French word for it. It’s sort of an open question how long the human shape can be maintained—depends on the strength of the ghost’s will, mainly—but the animal is always going to reassert itself whenever it can. Dark of the moon seems to be the time when the human side is weakest and the animal side is strongest. Hell of a thing. Once you’ve seen a
Damjohn had been watching me keenly all the way through this speech, and I was about halfway into it before I realized that Scrub was a sort of audition piece—a hurdle for me to jump. Well, I’d jumped it, and now I sat back and waited to see what my prize was going to be.
Damjohn smiled and nodded, visibly pleased.
“That was very good,” he said. “Very good indeed. I know another man in your line of business, and he didn’t make that identification straight away—or without prompting. I can see that you’re a man of some intellect, Felix.”
“Thank you, Lucasz.”
What was sauce for the goose came near to choking the gander. Damjohn’s eyes, already screwed up almost invisibly small, disappeared for a moment in their own intricate folds as he digested this small touch of warmth and familiarity. But he bounced back again and didn’t stoop so low as to make a whole thing out of it. He changed the subject instead. “In terms of remuneration,” he said, “I can offer you an arrangement that I think you’ll find to your liking.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. When you’ve previously heard a precise sum, and then you hear the words “an arrangement,” or “sweet deal,” or for that matter “undying gratitude,” in my experience, any movement you’re making is in the wrong direction. “The sum of two hundred pounds was mentioned,” I pointed out.
“Of course it was. It was I who mentioned it. But if you wanted to factor in some time with Rosa or one of my other girls, then that could also be arranged. Pari passu.”
So Damjohn was a pimp as well as a club owner. He had very refined manners for a pimp—but then a pimp with a public-school accent could have ended up as a lawyer; you had to give him credit for his moral integrity. I saw what he was doing, though, and I didn’t like it.
“Pari passu?” I repeated, sitting back. “And pro bono publico? Very laudable. But given that we only just met, we should probably keep this on a cash-and-carry basis.”
Damjohn’s manner became a little less cordial, but on the credit side, he didn’t bitch-slap me. “As you wish. But you’ll do the job? Now? Tonight?”
There’s a time and a place for the lecture that I gave to Peele, about how slow and steady wins the race. This wasn’t it. I could take a look around, and I could lay down some wards if it turned out they were necessary. If he had a real problem on his hands, we’d have to renegotiate. I shrugged. “Well, now that I’m here . . .”
“Good. Scrub, take Mr. Castor upstairs.”
My audience was over. Damjohn gave me a slightly austere nod and returned to his figures. Scrub lumbered forward as I stood up, then waited at my shoulder as I drained the whisky in a sacrilegiously quick swallow. He led the way, off to the far right, where an unmarked door stood open in a corner of the room, left strategically unlit. Like the main door that led from the foyer into the club, this one, too, had its own Saint Peter: a slab-face Saint Peter in a rumpled tux. He gave Scrub a respectful nod and stood aside to let him pass through. I followed in his wake.
