The Devil You Know

“Yeah, I was—and I could’ve sold seats, easy. She’d been after you all day. When she asked me if I’d seen you, I lied and said I thought you’d left already—then it turned out you had. If I had your mobile number, I would’ve warned you. But you’ve got some other jobs lined up, yeah?” By the end of this speech, she was managing to sound solicitous rather than on the verge of giggles.

Instead of answering, I took her hand in mine. “Cheryl,” I said, staring solemnly into her eyes, “there’s something very important I want to ask you.”

That made her lips quirk in alarm. “Hey, it was a good bang, Felix, and I like you and everything. But you don’t want to get the wrong idea . . .”

“I want you to steal something for me.”

Cheryl’s face lit up. “Black ops! You star! What do you need?”

“The incident book. Peele keeps it in his desk drawer.”

The light went out again. “Don’t be stupid! How am I gonna get it out past Frank? If I get caught, I’ll be out on my arse—and probably on a charge, too. I thought you meant secret information or something.”

I nodded. “I do mean information—but I need the hard copy, as they say. And you don’t bring it out past Frank.”

“There’s only one way out of the—”

“You wrap it in a plastic bag and throw it out of the window of that room where we had our brief encounter this morning—just like someone else is doing. I’ll climb up and get it later on tonight.”

Cheryl blinked. “Someone’s stealing from the archive?”

“Yes. That’s what was inside the bag. A whole bunch of letters and papers and at least one bound book. Some of it comes from the Russian collection—but there’s a fair bit that looks older. A lot older.”

She stared at me hard. “Why haven’t you called the police?” she asked.

“Because I’ve still got a job to do, and there’s a lot more at stake here than a few old papers. I want to find out how Sylvie died and what her connection to the archive is. Calling in a load of plods who’ll lock the place down will just make that harder. Plus, if Alice has her way, they’ll arrest me, too. No, I’ll go to the cop shop when I’m good and ready.”

“And in the meantime, you want to knock some stuff off on your own account.”

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Look, Cheryl, I’m onto something. Something a lot bigger than stolen papers—big enough that whatever happened to Sylvie was just collateral damage. But I need that book. I was about to ask Peele to lend it to me when Alice put the boot in.”

Cheryl looked puzzled now. “So you’re pitching for Sylvie now?”

“Pitching. Batting. Fielding. Working the scoreboard.”

“But you’re supposed to disappear her. That’s why they brought you in, isn’t it?”

I hated saying it; I knew damn well how ridiculous it sounded. “She saved my life the other night, so I sort of owe her one.”

“One you can’t exactly pay back to a dead person,” Cheryl observed, widening and then narrowing her eyes at me in a way that conveyed a world of meaning. “You lead a fucking weird life, Felix.”

“It’s Fix. Everyone who can stand me calls me Fix.”

She looked at her watch. “Frank will still be around,” she mused. “I could say I needed to go back up for my purse.”

I waited, watching a big psychomachia play itself out on her face: duty versus mischief. It was enthralling theater, and I would have enjoyed it for its own sake if I’d had less at stake.

“Yeah, all right,” she said at last. “I’ll give it a go.”

Twenty minutes later, I was standing in the alley to the side of the Bonnington, more or less invisible in the early-evening gloom, and I saw the bag come sailing out of the attic window, flying wide. There was a muffled thud as it hit the flat roof. I climbed up onto the wheely bin again and hiked myself up with my arms. This was getting to be a habit. I retrieved the bag and got down again as quickly as I could. I wasn’t overlooked from the Bonnington, but there were buildings on all sides, behind whose dust-smeared windows there could be any number of prurient onlookers.

Cheryl met me at the corner of the street, and we walked on together.

“I’m an accomplice now,” she observed.

“That’s right. You are.”

“I could lose my job if anyone finds out.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“So I get to know what’s going on. That’s fair.”

“That is fair.”

A silence fell between us, expectant on her side, deeply thoughtful on mine.

“So are you going to—”

“Come and meet my landlady,” I said. “You’ll like her.”

Pen doesn’t cook much, but when she does, three things happen. The first is that the kitchen becomes a sort of domestic vision of Hell, complete with roiling smoke and acrid smells, in which pans have their bottoms burned out of them, glasses are shattered by casual immersion in boiling water, and gravel-voiced harpies (or Edgar and Arthur, anyway) mock the whole endeavor from the tops of various cupboards while Pen curses them with bitter imprecations. The second is that you get a meal that emerges from this Vulcanic stithy looking like a photo in Good Housekeeping and tasting like something Albert Roux would knock up to impress the neighbors. The third is that Pen herself is purged by the ordeal, refined in the fire, and radiates a Zen-like calm for hours or even days afterward.

Tonight’s effort—in Cheryl’s honor—was a lamb cassoulet. Hugely impressed, Cheryl worked her way through seconds and then through thirds.

“This is amazing,” she enthused. “You gotta give me the recipe, Pam!”

“Call me Pen, love,” said Pen warmly. “I’m afraid there isn’t a recipe. I cook holistically—and half pissed—so nothing ever comes out the same way twice.”

She refilled Cheryl’s glass. It was something Australian with an eagle on the label. The Aussies always seem to go for raptors rather than marsupials on their wine bottles; if it was me, I’d be pushing the unique selling point. I held out my own glass for a top-up. As a party piece, I can sometimes be persuaded to recite the whole of that Monty Python routine about Australian table wines. “A lot of people in this country . . .” The hard part is finding anyone to do the persuading.

“So you live with Felix?” Cheryl asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Not in the Biblical sense,” said Pen, shaking her head. “Although there is something a bit Old Testament about him, isn’t there?”

“Like, something out of Sodom and Gomorrah, you mean?”

“I am still sitting here, you know,” I interjected.

“No,” said Pen, ignoring me, “I was thinking Noah. Very fond of himself. Big, insane projects that he always drags everyone else into. Chasing after anything in a skirt . . .”

“I didn’t hear that about Noah.”

“Oh yeah, he was a horny old bugger. They all were. Never turn your back on a patriarch.”

For our unjust desserts, she wheeled out a supermarket chocolate torte. She also got the brandy out, but I wrested it from her hands and put it back in the boot locker where she keeps it. “We’re going to need clear heads for this next bit,” I admonished her.

“What next bit?”

“We’ve got work to do.”

“‘Big, insane projects,’” Cheryl quoted.

“I warned you,” Pen said, shaking her head. Cheated of her brandy, she poured herself another glass of wine.

I cleared all the dirty dishes to one end of the massive farmhouse table and spread open the plans that I’d copied at the town hall. Then I went and got the incident book, which had landed flat when Cheryl had bunged it out of the window and so had survived its fall without visible damage. I cracked it open at September 13, the missing page again making it easy to find.

“What are we gonna do?” Cheryl asked.