I got out of the car and crossed the street. There were three bells over on the left-hand side of the door that roughly corresponded with the three signs. I pressed the one marked MCCLENNAN. Nobody answered. I pressed again and looked around me as I waited.
Greek Street is an after-midnight kind of place, but most of the nightlife had already rolled over and turned out the lights; we were only a couple of hours away from dawn.
But after a few moments, I heard footsteps from inside, accompanied by the atonal creak of badly warped floorboards. A bolt was drawn, then another, then a key turned, and the door opened a crack. Gabe McClennan, in his shirtsleeves and with a heavy stubble on his face, stood in the gap.
He stared at me for a few moments, looking totally nonplussed. It was clear that I was the last person he expected to see on his doorstep at four in the morning. Actually, it was one step beyond nonplussed, into the related domain of baffled and hacked-off.
“Castor,” he muttered. “What the fuck?”
“I wanted to consult with you on a job I’m doing, Gabe.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Well, since you’re still up . . .”
He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“Castor,” he said again. He laughed and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “Yeah, whatever. Come on in.”
McClennan turned and walked back inside, and I followed. The light on the third floor clearly wasn’t anything to do with Gabe; the door he opened was right off the first-floor landing, next to a doorless cupboard full of electric meters and half-bald mops lying drunkenly against the wall.
Despite the shabby frontage and the dubious location, Gabe’s office was a hell of a step up from mine. It was dominated by a huge antique desk with ball-and-claw feet that was big enough to split the room in two. His filing cabinet had four drawers, a cherrywood veneer, and a vase full of chrysanthemums on top. He even had a diploma on the wall, although Christ only knew what it said. Two-hundred-meter swimming certificate, most likely.
“So what can I do for you?” he demanded as he walked around the desk. It wasn’t just the stubble; he was looking pretty rough in other ways, too. The bags under his eyes were so dark, it looked as though someone had given him a combination punch when he had his guard down, and if his shirt had had a map of the Lake District on it, the sweat stains under his armpits would have been Windermere and Coniston Water. It was an unusual sight. McClennan has an aquiline face, a spare build, and a thick bow wave of snow-white hair that he wears in a style intentionally reminiscent of Richard Harris. Normally he has a style that can best be described as dapper. Tonight—like me—he’d clearly been overworking.
He rummaged in his pockets, ignoring me for a moment until he’d found a small pill bottle that was about half full. He shook out two black tabs and popped them. Then, in the expansiveness of the hit, he remembered his manners and held the bottle out to me. “Mollies,” he explained unnecessarily. “You want some?”
I shook my head. A lot of exorcists have an amphetamine habit, occasional or chronic. They say—or some of them do, anyway—that it makes them more sensitive to the presence of the dead: lets them receive on a wider range of frequencies. There’s something in that, too, but I’ve always found I lose as much on the comedown as I gain on the rush. So usually I pass.
“The Bonnington Archive,” I said, parking myself on the edge of the desk. I didn’t want to take the client’s chair; it would only give Gabe an unwarranted sense of power and authority.
“Never heard of it,” he shot back, quick and easy. I glanced at his face, but he was looking down right then—searching in his desk drawers this time. Then he found what he was looking for and hauled it out—a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label, about two-thirds empty.
“You sure about that?”
McClennan stared at me, then shrugged; all ease and edges now that the mollies had kicked in.
“Yeah, I’m sure. Ghost-toasting may be easy money, Castor, but I don’t do it in my sleep. Why? What’s the skin?”
“Nothing, probably. But I’m doing a burn there, and your name came up.”
He was opening the drawers on the other side of the desk, bent over again so I was just getting the top of his head.
“My name came up? How? Who mentioned me?”
“I don’t even remember,” I lied. “But someone said you’d been there. Or maybe I saw your name on a receipt or something. So I just wanted to touch base with you, see what you made of the place.”
He slammed a drawer shut and straightened up. He looked the same as he’d looked when he’d opened the door—half blitzed with exhaustion, but not particularly fazed by anything I’d said.
“You didn’t see my name on any receipt,” he said, “because I was never there. If someone mentioned me, then I must have worked for them somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” I said, sounding regretful. “That must be it. Just my luck. It’s a tough nut, and I wanted to bounce some ideas off you.”
“You can still do that,” said Gabe. “Why not? We’re both professionals, right? I stroke your dick, you stroke mine. Shit, I can’t find any glasses. Give me a second, will you?”
He came back around the desk, past me, and on out of the room. I leaned forward so I could look through the open doorway and saw him heading up the stairs. Maybe he was going to borrow some crockery from the Indian head masseuse.
In the meantime, the devil finds work for idle hands to do. I crossed to the filing cabinet and gave the top drawer a tug. Locked. But three quick steps took me round to the driver’s side of the desk, where Gabe had left the top drawer open. It was full of the usual strata of desk-drawer shit, and I could have excavated for five minutes without finding anything more useful than pencil shavings and paper clips. But I got lucky. A small ring with two identical keys was lying against the bottom right-hand corner of the drawer, where it would always be ready to hand in spite of the apparent chaos.
I went back to the filing cabinet and tried one of the keys. It turned, and the drawer slid open with only the smallest squeal of reproach.
A to something or other: Gabe filed his cases in alphabetical order, and most of them even had file tags attached, all written out with the same sputtery black biro.
Armitage
Ascot
Avebury
Balham
Beasley
Bentham
Brooks
Damn. I went back and checked again, but there was nothing there. No Bonnington file, no smoking pistol.
But there were no footsteps on the stairs, either, and I suddenly noticed that the file right at the back of the drawer was a D: Drucker. I don’t even know where the inspiration came from, but I backtracked from there through Dimmock, De Vere, Dean, Dascombe . . . Crowther.
Two strikes. Damn again.
I wasn’t expecting anything now, but for the hell of it, I slid a finger in between Dascombe and Crowther and pushed them apart. There was another folder hanging in between them that had no file tag. Instead, the name DAMJOHN was written on the inside edge in black felt-tip. Gabe must have run out of the little plastic tag holders.
The wonderful thing about a Russian army greatcoat is that you can carry a Kalashnikov, a samovar, and a dead pig underneath it without making any noticeable bulge. It’s not so easy with a trench coat, because it’s a thinner and more figure-hugging sort of garment. But it was a thin file, and it just about fit in. I slid the drawer closed and made it back to the desk just as I heard Gabe’s footsteps coming down the stairs.
“You okay taking it straight?” he asked, setting two cut-glass tumblers down on the desktop. “I don’t have any soda.”
“Straight is fine,” I said. He poured me a stiff measure, another for himself.
“So tell me about the case,” he said.
I turned the glass in my hand, watched the facets catch the light. “Ghost takes the form of a young woman with most of her face hidden behind a red veil. Multiple sightings, persistent over time—about three months, give or take—but spread out over the building, so there’s no locus where I can easily read her from.”