Her smile was more like a grimace, there and gone. “I followed you, and you didn’t have any idea, did you? Man like you, hiding away in this old place, you’re not streetwise. I bet there’s all sorts of things I can help you with. Maybe we can come to an arrangement.”
When she had entered my house, squeezing past me at the door, I had taken the opportunity to pick the pocket of her hooded top. I placed her mobile phone and travel card on the table, and said, “You don’t live as long as I do without learning a few tricks necessary for survival.”
“I knew you took those,” she said, but could not quite hide her twitch of alarm, and clearly did not know what I had done to her mobile phone, for otherwise she would not have put it straight in her pocket.
“You think that I am old-fashioned, which in a way is true enough, but it does not mean that I am out of touch with the world. And there is a good, practical reason why I do not have electricity here, nor a telephone nor any of the paraphernalia of modern life. Electricity attracts imps and other nuisances. You must know this. Look at any street lamp at night, and you will see more than moths whirling around the light.”
“You didn’t know who that the bloke who talked to you last night was. And I bet you don’t know who Donny Halliwell works for these days, do you?”
“I am sure that I can find that out without your help. I have extensive resources, and a man who is able break my wards will be well known in the circles in which I move.”
Miranda rose to my bait. “My mum knows all about him, and I bet she doesn’t move in those ‘circles’. “
“You wish to make a bargain, is that it? You will help me, and I will help you, turn and turn about.”
“Shake on it,” Miranda said, and stuck out her hand.
I smiled at her boldness and took her hand and shook it, knowing that the bargain meant nothing to either of us.
Miranda told me that Donny Halliwell had met a pop star while he was in prison. The pop star, Rainer Sue, had been serving a short sentence for possession of a variety of Class A drugs; Donny Halliwell had been coming to the end of a longer sentence for extracting money with menaces from restaurants in North London. When he had been freed, he’d gone to work for Rainer Sue, now a recluse in his house in Cheyne Walk, one of Chelsea ’s most exclusive addresses, as a bodyguard and a general fixer.
“How do you know so much about these people?”
“My mum was keen on old Rainer when she was my age, back in the 1980s. But he ain’t done nothing in years and years except go to parties and film premieres and like that. My mum, she comes home with a few inside her or she sees his picture in Hello! or whatever, and she puts on one of his CDs and goes all smoochy. It’s real bad stuff though, tinny synthesizers and like a drum machine and saxophones. Bad as in shit, not like in good.”
“I know what bad means.”
“I bet you don’t. Anyway, that’s why I know about Donny Halliwell, and about the Jag too.”
“The Mark I Jaguar.”
Miranda pretended to be surprised.
“I do try to keep up,” I said.
“Has personalized number plates, doesn’t it? RA 1 NR. I see that straight away, and know who owns it. Anyway, the thing about Rainer Sue is that he’s famous for being into weird shit. He wasn’t exactly a Goth back in the day, but he dressed like Christopher Lee in those old Dracula movies, had skulls and coffins and lots of candles on stage, shit like that, yeah? I suppose he found out about you, thought you had something he wanted, is that it?”
“He wished to purchase a book that I own.”
“Yeah? Like a book of spells?”
“In a way. The Stenographia is the masterwork of a monk and magician who called himself Trithemius, and contains codes and conjurations and various prayers which its author claimed could cause angels to act on behalf of those deploying them. My copy is not of the much corrupted edition that was published long after Trithemius’s death, in 1676, but one of only five volumes printed in 1504, the year before he was summoned before Maximillian I and interrogated on matters of faith. Mr Halliwell — or the man for whom he works — probably traced it through the records of the auction house where I purchased it some twenty years ago.”
“Ever tried any of those spells out?” Miranda tried to sound casual, but her eyes were shining.
“Of course not. If you were in possession of a bomb, would you try to detonate it to see if it worked?”
“ ‘Course I would. And I wouldn’t leave it in a house with an unlocked door, neither.”
“The house was protected by more than mere locks, as you well know, but I will admit that you have a valid point.”
“He had a briefcase,” Miranda said. “Donny Halliwell, I mean. The kind City gents take to work with them. My mate Wayne nicked one once, thinking he was on to a good thing, and all he found in it was a sandwich from Pret A Manger. Couldn’t even sell the briefcase, ‘cause he broke the locks getting it open.”
“You saw Mr Halliwell walk into the house.”
Her gaze was bold and unflinching. She really did possess an admirable faculty for untruths. “He burned a piece of paper on the front step first. It went off like a firework, made a sort of greenish smoke. Then he walked in, and about two minutes later he walked out. Got in the car, and off he drove.”
“He was, I presume, still carrying the briefcase.”
“With your book inside it. So now we have to get it back before he does something bad with it.”
“I have to get it back, Miranda. You have already done more than enough.”
“No problem, Mr Carlyle. You got to do what you got to do.”
She met my gaze boldly, and I saw the glint of triumph in her eyes. She believed that she had succeeded in fooling me, but it was not yet time to disabuse her.
After Miranda left, I slept for a few hours, breakfasted in a cafe, and walked against the swelling tide of commuters to the Thames and followed the path beside it upriver, towards Chelsea. Public transport is so thickly infested with imps and other revenants that I am forced to walk everywhere, and these days even the streets are so crowded with remnants of moments of frustration and anger that at times it is like plunging head first into the mephitic smuts and fumes of a factory chimney.
Ordinarily, I would have waited and watched before acting. I would have consulted various contacts. I would have made sure that I knew as much as possible about my enemy before making the first move. But this was no time for temperate contemplation. My house had been violated; one of my most precious possessions had been stolen; my temper had been roused. And I feared that the stolen book would be put to immediate use — why else would Donny Halliwell’s boss have resorted to such desperate measures to obtain it? I did make one stop along the way, however, to use (after spending a good five minutes clearing it of the residue of its previous occupants) one of the few public telephone kiosks that still accepted coins to call my old friend, Chief Superintendent Rawles. He had recently retired from the Metropolitan Police, but told me that he could find out the answers to my questions easily enough.
“I will telephone you again, in an hour or so,” I said, and hung up the receiver before he could ask any questions of his own.
I reached Chelsea just after midday, hot, footsore, and beginning to feel a pinching anxiety about the task ahead of me. I found refuge in a public house, bought a Ploughman’s Lunch and a half-pint of beer, and, after the usual chore of cleansing it, used the public telephone to call Rawles.
He told me what he had found out about Miranda, confirmed what she had told me about Donny Halliwell, gave me Rainer Sue’s address, and asked if I was in trouble again.