The weasel man, Arnold, was now sitting at the desk in the foyer. Scrub muttered the words “Two ton” as he walked by, then took up his station on the pavement outside. I found it hard to believe that his presence would encourage the passing trade, although the club didn’t seem to be having any trouble in that regard. The rain had slackened off now, and the evening was once again fresh and blustery. Maybe that helped.
Arnold paid me out in fives and tens with silent, laborious concentration, his lips moving as he counted. I took it in silence and stuffed it into my back pocket. I’m not averse to dirty money, up to a point, but I wasn’t feeling very happy with myself right then. I came out onto the street, hoping but not expecting to see the BMW roll smoothly around the corner and pull up right in front of me. No such luck; there wasn’t the same urgency about getting me home as there had been about bringing me here. Scrub’s heavy hand fell on my shoulder.
I turned. He was looking down at me with a sort of ponderous calculation.
“You use music,” he pointed out, basso profundo.
I knew what he meant. “Yeah, I use music.”
“You play a little tune.”
“Right.”
He touched me lightly on the Adam’s apple with the tip of his forefinger.
“I could rip your throat out before you got to the second note.”
His point made, he lumbered back inside.
I headed off into the night, the chill wind cutting into me and a writhing nest of worms inside my head. I was restless, I was wet, and I was a long way from home. Okay, not geographically, maybe, but psychologically. The weird encounter with Damjohn had got to me and unsettled me—the contents of his head clinging to me like half- dried vomit. In pure self-defence, I pulled my thoughts around to the situation at the Bonnington. That didn’t make me any happier, but at least it exercised my mind in a different way.
I was down to the last knockings of the Russian collection, and if I came up blank, I’d have nothing to cover my embarrassment. Could I be wrong about the ghost being linked to those documents? I’d taken a few swipes with Occam’s razor, and that was what I’d ended up with, but that didn’t make it so. I really didn’t want to have to retreat and regroup with Peele and Alice breathing down my neck on either side.
There were still those last few boxes, though. It was possible that Sod’s Law was operating, and that the ghost’s anchor was just going to turn out to be one of the documents at the very bottom of the stack.
I shrugged into my coat, slid my hand into the pocket by reflex, and felt the spiky, angular mass of Alice’s keys.
Ten
I GOT INTERESTED IN LOCKS BACK WHEN I WAS working up the magic act at university. I had the idea that I could build in some escapology as well, so I went down to London looking for a shop that would sell me a pair of handcuffs. I learned a lot from that exercise, but more about the outer limits of consensual sex than about escapology.
Then Jimmy, the barman at the Welsh Pony on Gloucester Green, mentioned a guy he knew: Tom Wilke, the Banbury Bandit, who’d just finished a two-year stretch for breaking and entering. “They did him on two dozen specimen counts, with about a hundred more taken into consideration. He’d be your man,” Jimmy said. “Any kind of lock. He says he can do them blindfolded.”
I was young enough to find the thought of chatting to a career criminal appealing, so I asked Jimmy for the guy’s address. Jimmy said he’d have to set it up first and left me to stew for about a week. I went in there every night to ask him if he’d seen Wilke and if he’d asked him, but the answer was always no.
Then one night, there was a different answer; it was sod off.
“Sorry, Fix,” Jimmy said apologetically. “He’s not himself since he got out of Bullingdon. He’s gone very quiet. Doesn’t want to talk to anyone or have anyone round. Maybe it’s just something he’s going through. I’ll ask him again in a few months.”
But I couldn’t wait that long; I had to be doing it now. I worked on Jimmy until he gave me Wilke’s address just to get rid of me, and I went round to see him myself.
Tom Wilke lived in a flat on some grubby estate off the ring road, three floors up with no lift. It was eerily silent, as if the whole place was empty: no kids on the stairs, no music blaring out of open windows, even though it was high summer. I knocked on the door and waited, knocked and waited some more. When it was clear that no one was going to answer, I turned around to leave.
Just as I got to the stairs, I heard a sound that made me turn.
A sob. Somebody crying. I listened for a minute or so and it came again, from behind the door I’d just knocked on. A heartbroken, strangled sob.
I went back and tried the door. It opened. Fortune favors the pure of heart and the brassy of bollock.
Inside, a hallway just two steps wide, then an open door that led through into a poky living room—cramped despite the fact that there was almost no furniture there. A middle-age man with a shock of white hair and a build so spare he looked malnourished was sitting in a spavined G-plan chair by the light of a bare bulb, with tears running down his cheeks.
I thought at first that the curtains were drawn, but they weren’t. It was just that the windows were covered in smeary black ash so thick that even the light from a streetlamp right outside could barely filter through them. Floor, walls, furniture—everything else in the room except for the man himself was all similarly covered.
Tom Wilke was so drunk that he couldn’t even stand up, and when I knelt down next to the chair, his eyes could barely focus on me. He had no idea who I was, but my sudden appearance didn’t seem to faze or anger him. He pleaded with me, his free hand pawing at my sleeve. In the other hand he was gripping a bottle of Grant’s with about a quarter of its contents left. His breath stank like a distillery.
“I always lock the door,” he said, “so they don’t notice I’ve been. Takes them longer. Always lock the door . . .”
Since his own door hadn’t been locked or bolted, that puzzled me for a moment. Then I realized he wasn’t talking about his own door.
“Never hurt anyone,” Wilke was mumbling now, shaking his head in pained disbelief. “Never carry a knife, a gun, anything. Colin said keep five quids’ worth of change in a sock. Tap them on the head if they get bolshie. No. Never did it. Never needed to. In and out, me. Every time.”
I ran my hand along the arm of the chair, which was as greasily filthy with ash as everything else in the room. Then I looked at the tips of my fingers. Clean.
I went and made some coffee, but it was for me, not for Wilke. He finished off the whisky, and I pieced together the story from his stop-start ramblings, although sometimes his tears made him completely incomprehensible.
One of the houses he’d done, just before he’d gone inside, had been a semi down on Blackbird Leys. A shabby-looking place, but a mate who worked for UPS had told him the bloke who lived there took orders for his hi-fi shop at home sometimes. There was a chance of a good take, and he’d borrowed a van for the night.
It took Wilke ages to find the place. It was on one of those godforsaken estates that seem to be built on some sort of fractal system, with endless identical streets opening off each other and feeding into each other so that you’re lost before you start.
But he found it at last, and getting inside was a piece of cake. It would have been sweet as a nut after all, except that there was nothing there; not just no hi-fi kit, nothing worth taking at all. In one of the bedrooms, a kid in a cot, heavily asleep all by itself—no jewelry, no money, no portable electronic stuff. Even the TV had a cracked casing, so nobody was going to touch it.
So he left again, as quietly as he’d come, pissed off and bitter and rehearsing the words he was going to have with this UPS wallah. He was basically running on automatic. He locked the front door behind him, forgetting that it had been unlocked when he arrived. He wrote the night off. He went home. He went to bed.
The next morning, in the
