The two men in the vintage Jaguar had not yet found my house, but for the fourth night in a row, as I was making my way home after my unsatisfactory conversation with Miranda, they found me.
Their blood-red motor car was parked at a bus stop opposite Shoreditch Town Hall. As I approached it, ready to draw my blade, the passenger door opened and the man who had accosted me three times before climbed out. He was in his forties, tall and wide, with a seamed complexion and a boxer’s broken nose. His cream linen suit and mauve silk shirt looked expensive, but were rumpled and sweated through. He was beginning to get a beard, and had a dull, haggard expression. When I stepped around him, he walked after me. He did not quite dare lay hands on me — not yet.
“You’re a stubborn man,” he said, “but my boss is very patient.”
“Others might say he is foolishly persistent.”
“My boss wants that book very badly. He told me to do everything I can to make you see sense. You understand what I mean, Mr Carlyle?”
He spoke flatly and mechanically, as if reciting something he had memorized.
“You can tell him that he is wasting his time. The book is not for sale.”
I quickened my pace, but the man easily matched it. The Jaguar crawled alongside us. I glanced at the driver, but couldn’t see his face through the slick of light reflected from the windscreen.
“My boss is generous with my time,” the man said. “He’s altogether a very generous man. And as such, he’s prepared to consider any price you care to name. He told me to tell you that. I warned him, I said the man will rook you, but he doesn’t care. Money means nothing to him. Why don’t you get in the motor, Mr Carlyle? We can discuss this in comfort.”
“I think not.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Of course I do not trust you. Also, I find all modes of modern transport uncomfortable.”
“I noticed that you like to walk everywhere. Dangerous, that. Anything could happen.”
We had reached the junction with the A10, five lanes of newly laid tarmacadam as black as deep water. A handful of pale ghosts were spaced alongside it, like herons along a river bank. I stopped beside the traffic light, and the Jaguar stopped too. The light was green; a white van sounded its horn as it swerved past and shot across the junction.
“You live somewhere near here,” the man said. “Why don’t we go to your place and talk about it?”
“Why does your boss send a puppet to talk to me?”
The traffic light above us turned red, and I started across the A10, moving between the handful of vehicles that accelerated away from the junction, racing each other towards the City. The man started after me, but had to jump back when a black cab nearly ran him down. I stepped past another black cab into the diesel wind of an enormous trailer truck and gained the far side of the road.
The man had retreated, and was standing impotently beside the Jaguar. He shouted at me, his voice torn by the brute noise of the traffic. “We’ll find you where you live! My boss, he doesn’t give up!”
I could not resist lifting my Homburg in salute. I walked for another hour until the feeling of being followed finally slipped away, and I could turn at last for home.
I wasted the next evening in a fruitless search for Miranda. A few of my usual informants knew of a girl who was followed about by tame imps, but none knew where she lived. “She spends a lot of time down King’s Cross,” one of them said. “Chases off punters with those pets of hers. They cruise up in their motors, looking for some short-time fun and games, and she leans in and lets them have it. They’re all over the road when they drive off, crying and screaming.”
It seemed that she had been frightening away kerb-crawlers for several months. When I asked my informant why he hadn’t told me about her before, he gave the equivalent of a shrug and said that I hadn’t asked.
“You must know that I would be interested in someone like that.”
“Someone like you, you mean. I suppose so. But I see all kinds, Mr Carlyle, especially these days. Things are waking up that should be long gone. Hungry things. I try to keep myself to myself these days, but it isn’t easy, even here.”
We had met at the edge of a patch of waste ground. On the far side, three men sat at a little fire they’d built from scraps of wood and cardboard, passing around a bottle of jake.
“Poor sods,” my informant said. He was as thin as a wisp of smoke, and leaned at an angle, as if bent by a high wind. “They’ll be joining me soon enough.”
I made my ritual offer to put him to rest; he made his ritual refusal. “I’m still interested in what’s goin’ on, Mr Carlyle. Day I ain’t, then maybe I’ll call on your services and you can unmake me or whatever it is you do to make my kind vanish. But I ain’t by no means ready yet.”
I steeled myself to search the noisome streets of King’s Cross, had no luck, and walked up the hill to Islington. I failed to find Miranda there, either, and at last gave up and returned home. It was three in the morning. For once, there was no sign of the blood-red Jaguar, and when I reached the street where my house stood I knew why. I went carefully, as if walking barefoot on broken glass, to my house. All the wards I had set in place were broken, screaming in my mind like common burglar alarms. I had never felt the need to lock my front door in more than a century, but I locked it behind me after I had stepped into the familiar gloomy clutter of my hallway.
The three ghosts that shared the house with me were all in retreat. I drew out the Huguenot silkmaker, but he claimed not to have seen anything, and fled towards the attic as soon as I released him. I lit a candle and climbed the stairs after him. I was certain that I knew who had broken into my house; sure enough, several dozen books of my little library of esoterica had been swept from their shelves, and lay tumbled like the corpses of a flock of lightning-struck birds on the worn Turkish rug that covered most of the age-blackened oak floor. I lit the gas mantles and after a few minutes determined that only one book was missing.
It was the book that the man in the red Jaguar had wished to purchase, of course — the rarest, most valuable, and most dangerous of my collection. I had bought it at a public auction only twenty years ago, finally completing my recreation of the library which had been destroyed, with so much else, in the accident that had killed my parents.
My father had searched out and purchased most of the books in that library, but in most cases he had been carrying out my mother’s instructions. She had inherited from her mother my family’s interest and talent in the matter of the dead, and although he was as blind to revenants as any ordinary man, my father was happy to help her in any way he could. He was a small, neat man, and something of a dandy, famous for his crushed velvet suits and his elaborately carved pipes (I cannot pass the tobacconist shop on Charing Cross Road without pausing to breathe in the earthy odour that reminds me of him). Once I was old enough to accompany him on his rambles about Edinburgh, I quickly learned that he was on first-name terms with everyone from crossing sweepers to the Provost, and knew every obscure nook and cranny of the old town. Although he had many friends, none were close to him, and most believed him to be some sort of a poet. He was not, but he was a great writer of letters, and included Byron and Keats amongst his regular correspondents; almost every evening would find him in his favourite armchair, wrapped in a silk dressing gown, a tasselled cap on his head, scratching away at a letter on the writing board propped in his lap, a pipe hanging from one corner of his mouth, a glass of whisky at his elbow.