YOU’RE LOADING UP YOUR SIX-GUNS, AREN’T YOU?” Pen said, standing in the doorway of my room. A chill wind was blowing around the plastic sheeting she’d nailed across the splintered, gap-toothed window frame, like a reminder that winter was on its way. I didn’t need reminding, and I didn’t appreciate it much.
“Yeah,” I said tersely. “I think it’s going to be a bad one.”
I was rummaging through the top shelf in my wardrobe, looking for a spare whistle. There should have been at least one there—older than the little beauty I’d just destroyed, and brassy rather than black in color, but in the same key and with something of the same feel to hand and mouth. I was damned if I could see it, though. The best I could come up with was a cone-bore flute. I’d almost forgotten my brief flirtation with that well-mannered instrument. It hadn’t done the job for me at all—something about the tone, maybe, or the tapering body. It shouldn’t have made that big a difference, because tin whistles have a conical bore, too, but every pattern I tried to weave on it got screwed up and thrown out somewhere along the line. Still, it was better than nothing by some small but measurable margin.
“Maybe you should get some help, then,” Pen suggested. “John Gittings?”
“Never again.”
“Pac-Man?”
“Still in jail. He doesn’t get out until next October.”
“Me?”
I turned to stare at her. “Usual strictures apply,” I said, sounding colder than I meant to; and then, more gently, “I don’t have any idea how this is going to come out, Pen. But I do know it will leave you with dirty hands— by your definition and probably even by mine.”
Pen looked very unhappy, but she didn’t try to argue anymore. I slipped a couple of new batteries into the Walkman, wrapped the flex around the two tiny speakers, and stuffed the whole bundle into my pocket. Then I reached into the back of the wardrobe and took down a single silver handcuff that was hanging on a hook there. Pen blanched when she saw it.
“You weren’t kidding, were you?” she asked bleakly.
“It’ll probably be fine,” I lied. “When you take out car insurance, it doesn’t mean you’re planning to drive off a cliff.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Planning to drive off a cliff.”
“No. I’m looking to push someone else off. The insurance is in case he keeps hold of me on the way down.”
I headed for the door, which she was still blocking. She hugged me briefly but fiercely. “Rafi had another message for you,” she muttered, her voice not quite level.
“Rafi?”
“All right. Asmodeus, then.”
“Go on.”
“Ajulutsikael. He said it’s not personal with her—it’s the very opposite of personal. But it’s not just because they’re making her do it, either. What was it he said?” Pen frowned, delving into her memory. “‘She hates a proud man more than a humble one. A strong man more than a weak one. A master more than a slave.’”
“He should write fortune cookies,” I said and kissed her on the cheek. “He’s about as much fucking use.”
She stood aside and let me pass.
This was going to be complicated. There were so many things that had to fall right, and the first one might not fall at all. In which case all my preparations were going to be unnecessary, the ghost’s unfinished business was going to stay unfinished, and I was probably going to be dead in short order—either succubus fodder or just organic landfill.
But I preferred to look on the bright side. I was going to make a hell of a noise on the way down.
Rich had called at nine, having come home from the reception, taken a shower, and thought long and hard about whether he was going to call me at all.
“What the fuck were you thinking of, Castor?” he asked me, sounding genuinely mystified. “The ghost didn’t just turn up, did she? You brought her. Cheryl said she’ll split you if she ever sees you again, and Alice—well, you don’t want to know. She’s going to get the police in, she said. The only reason she didn’t do it today was because she didn’t want to spoil what was left of the occasion.”
I let him wind down, and then I told him that I’d cracked the whole thing.
“What thing?” The puzzlement was turning into annoyance. “You were just supposed to get rid of the ghost, weren’t you? What’s to crack?”
“How she got that way,” I said tersely.
Rich digested that for a few seconds.
“All right,” he said at last. “How did she?”
“Not now. Meet me at Euston, okay? On the concourse outside the station, at the Eversholt Street end. Eleven o’clock should be okay. And I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Why me?” The obvious question. I was surprised it had taken him so long to get to it.
“Because there were two crimes committed at the Bonnington,” I told him. “One of them was a theft, and since you were the victim, I thought you might want to hear about it.”
Rich played hard to get for a little while longer, then said he’d be there. I hung up and started to get my shit together.
So here I was, ten minutes early. The concrete piazza outside the station was as quiet as it ever gets, and it was easy to make sure that neither of us had been followed—or at least not by enthusiastic amateurs. Ajulutsikael was a different kettle of fish altogether; she had my scent now, and I had to assume that she could track me without ever coming in close enough for me to see her.
I found a secluded corner and loitered with intent. A phone kiosk and an advertising hoarding gave me a certain amount of cover, but left my line of sight clear both to the main exit from the station and to the stairs that came up from the Underground. There was almost nobody there: a small party of Japanese students with oversized backpacks, clustered just outside one set of automatic doors and taking turns to look anxiously at their watches; a homeless guy clutching a huge grubby sports bag and drinking White Lightning out of a can that he’d just broken from a four-pack; a couple of girls in pink tracksuits, too young to be out that late, sitting on a bench right across from me, back to back, sharing the one pair of headphones. None of them looked like part of an ambush, but I kept an open mind. I was clearly drifting into Nicky territory here:
Rich came up the steps at a quarter past eleven, looked around, and didn’t see me. He’d changed out of his wedding gear and was dressed in black jeans, a Quiksilver sweatshirt, trainers.
I stepped out of hiding and started walking toward him. He turned, saw me, came to meet me halfway.
“Have you got your keys?” I asked him without any preamble.
“My what?” He was startled.
“Your keys to the archive. Do you have them on you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I brought them.” He stared straight at me, looking wary and tense—a man who wanted it to be known that he’d need some convincing before he went along with any funny business. “What’s this about?”
“It’s about a lot of things, Rich. But for starters, let’s say it’s about a kleptomaniac who’s not averse to the occasional White Russian.”
Rich’s lips quirked downward, almost comically hangdog.
“Fuck,” he said, nonplussed. “You mean . . . you know, I thought once or twice that—fuck.”
“The Head of Steam’s still open,” I said. “Let me lay it all out for you.”
He followed me docilely across the concrete arena to the bizarre little theme pub they’ve squeezed into a corner there, but we’d missed the towel by five minutes and sat down dry. I took the laptop out of my pocket and pushed it across to him. Rich stared at it, then at me. “You’re one to watch, aren’t you, Castor?” he said a little grimly. “I was shitting bricks over this. Half the entries on here haven’t even been uploaded to the system yet. I was still trying to figure out how to break the news to Alice without catching the edge of her temper myself.”
He pulled the loosely wrapped package over to his own side of the table, as if he felt the need to assert his ownership of it.
