How to Make Friends with Demons Read online

  He looked at me. His idea for tidying up the street was in earnest. "Killed that girl, you know," he said to me. "Bumped her off, they did. It's known. Everybody knows."

  "Which girl, Seamus?"

  "Diana. Princess Di. Didn't want her marrying an Arab, did they? Lovely girl. Met her. Land mines thing. Got a thing about land mines, me."

  "Right," I said, nodding. I didn't know which way this thing was going. "Right."

  "You tell the Queen I need her down here. She needs to talk to me. Then if she winks at me, I'll know."

  "Know what, Seamus?"

  "That will be between me and the Queen. Queen don't wink, do she? So if she comes here and winks at me, I'll know all I need to know."

  It was gibberish. It didn't give us a handle. I was trying to think of something to say when Seamus twisted his features at me. There was a fierce glint in his eye. Hoar frost. He said, "Terrible isn't it? I'm trying to get a cup of tea."

  I was shocked. His words were an exact echo of what he said to me from the darkened doorway that time, the day I put him in a cab and sent him up to GoPoint. It was like I was suddenly back there for a moment, as if there had been a wrinkle in time.

  I heard Otto say, "No problem, mate, I'll fetch you a cup of tea."

  Otto winked at me. I don't think Seamus was supposed to have spotted the wink, but he did, and I saw him stiffen. Something passed across his face. He glanced between Otto and me as if we might be part of some conspiracy. I know it's a small thing, but I wished Otto hadn't winked at me like that.

  "No," said Seamus, "Let 'im fetch it. You stay here with me."

  I didn't mind being errand boy and I said so. "How do you like it, Seamus? Milk? Sugar?"

  "Milk and three sugars. Get a cup for Otto, will ya? He's been good to me, he has. Deserves a cup of tea. My old mucker. Here, take this. I don't want it any more."

  He handed me something that had been rolled into a cylinder. It was wrapped in a dirty red-and-white-chequered scarf: a traditional, tasselled Arab shemagh.

  "Don't look at it now," he said. "It's what I know. Put it in your pocket for later."

  I wasn't about to argue with him so I did as he instructed and made my way—slowly—out of the sandbagged area and back to the command point, where a huddle of police officers and Antonia watched my approach. I now saw they had marksmen in the shadows with high-velocity rifles trained on Seamus. It all seemed completely over the top. But I supposed there was the Queen to think about.

  The commander, Antonia and all the others looked at me without saying a word as I drew up beside the police Land Rover. I said, "He wants a cup of tea."

  Someone released a jet of air from between his teeth.

  "He wants three sugars," I said apologetically.

  "We can do that," said the police commander. He looked towards his junior ranks and someone went off to fix it. "We're here for days sometimes. So tea we have. Do you think he's wired?"

  "I couldn't tell," I confessed. "Otto doesn't think so. There's something under his coat but I've no idea what it is."

  I could hear an audio loop playing from behind the Land Rover. Seamus and Otto were talking. They had a video link, too. I realised they'd monitored every movement and every word when I'd been with Seamus. The tea arrived. Two plastic cups.

  "Keep him talking." The commander said. "That's all I want you to do."

  The tea was so hot it was burning my fingers through the thin plastic cups. I nodded and turned back towards the railings, trying not to spill the tea. Then I saw a white flash of light and was almost knocked backwards off my feet, spilling the tea every which way. A deafening bang sucked all subsequent sound out of the square and a twist of braided, black smoke funnelled up into the air.

  Electronic car alarms, triggered by the blast, squealed everywhere. From somewhere an old-fashioned hammer-bell was clanging and policemen were running in all directions. My knees had buckled under me. The air reeked of something like ammonia. I tried to get up but my knees seemed to turn to slush and I went sprawling.

  Antonia ran over to me, to help me up. We both looked back at the spot where Seamus and Otto had been. The railings where Seamus had chained himself were twisted horribly. A black ball-cloud hung over the spot, hardly seeming to move: it was like the air had been shocked into stillness. Antonia looked at me hard, searching, searching. Her own eyes were grey storms.

  Alarms were still warning, uselessly; police were still running to and fro; and people in the crowd behind the Victoria statue were screaming. For some reason I looked at the palace guard beyond the sandbags in his grey coat and bearskin hat.

  He'd moved. They're not supposed to move. But he'd moved.

  Chapter 12

  The police officers at the scene told us to stay exactly where we were, but it was Antonia who said to hell with that, and we slipped away in all the confusion. "If we don't go now," she'd said to me, "we'll be kept here and interviewed for hours."

  I admire that. I admire someone who can make a decision in a moment of universal panic.

  Antonia came home with me. She was anxious to see that I was all right. We walked back towards Pimlico where we managed to pick up a cab. When we got to my house, Antonia put the kettle on. But I said I'd had enough of tea for one evening and I opened a superior Pfeifer Vineyard Pinot Noir, guzzling it, which was ridiculous. I invited Antonia to have a glass before I drank it all myself, it being rather special.

  "I wouldn't know the difference," she said.

  "Of course you would," I said crossly. "People are always pretending not to know the difference between muck and brass."

  She smiled faintly and accepted a glass.

  "Why on Earth would he kill Otto, too?" I said.

  "You sure the thing wasn't detonated accidentally?"

  I looked hard at her. Antonia had moving crinkles, what people call laughter lines—rivulets made by tear-tracks more like—around her eyes. She also looked like she needed a good bath. I mean a real good soaking in hot, soapy water. She'd aggregated to herself the ingrained filth of the long-term homeless.

  That's what I wanted to do for Antonia: take off her clothes and soak her in my bath, and sponge her very gently and slowly until she would stand up and the water would run from her body and this crust, this carapace of dirt and twisted care and worn-out compassion would crack open and fall from her pink, naked body and I could put a towel around her and keep her with me, here, where we could turn our backs on all of it and she could join me in my retreat from life.

  Antonia got up and started inspecting my lounge, studying the prints hanging on the wall, sipping from her wine glass, touching objects around the room. "You live very well here, don't you?"

  Was this my big chance to ask her to come down off her cross and live with me? Antonia was not conventionally beautiful, but she was the light of the world. What a project, if I could steal her from the world, and keep her all to myself.

  "It's my hideaway."

  "What are you hiding from?"

  "Demons."

  "Ahh, yes. Those."

  "Don't mock. Seamus was crawling with them. They were like lice in his scalp. He detonated that bomb deliberately."

  "Let me tell you what he did. He deloused himself before he died. He shaved his head. He was a victim, William, not of demons, but of evil people who sent him to a hell of their making and told him he was doing good. He couldn't stand it when he found out they'd deceived him. That's why he killed himself."

  "But Otto was his best friend on Earth. He said as much himself. Why kill Otto?"

  "He was protecting Otto," she said, "from the world."

  "You're mad."

  "Many people think so."

  "Do you want to stay here? Stay the night? I have a spare room."

  "You want a madwoman in your house? I would stay, William, but not in your spare room. I'd want to fuck you, and I'd like that, but it would mean too much to you."

  I almost dropped my glass. "What?"
<
br />   "You're the sort of person who takes sex too seriously. It has a religious significance for people like you. You get too attached. So, no, I won't stay. I'm going to save you from yourself. Someone will come for you but it's not me."

  Antonia said she needed to get back to GoPoint. There would be all kinds of confusion and questions. She put down her glass, kissed me lightly and left. I went to the door and shouted after her to see if I could get her a cab, but she just waved and disappeared into the night. I was left standing there wondering who the heck had brought up the subject of sex, and who between us had just turned down whom.

  Women. You've got more chance of figuring out Minkowski's mathematical theorem of four-dimensional space.

  I went back indoors and flicked through the TV channels. Soon enough I found a live report from the scene of the explosion. Without being named, two men were pronounced dead at the scene. The cameras were at some distance and the police had taped off the blast area. Whatever remained of Otto and Seamus, there was nothing to see. I was slightly taken aback to see a tiny bit of footage of me when I was talking with Seamus. On the sequence shown I turned my body towards him in a way that fully shielded the moment when he handed something to me. In the commotion, I'd completely forgotten about whatever Seamus had passed on to me, but the footage reminded me with a start.

  I switched off the TV and went to my coat. There it was in my pocket: the cylindrical shape wrapped in the red-and-white Arab scarf. The scarf had been tied in a tight knot, but eventually I managed to tease it undone.

  It was an exercise book, like a child might use in school, rolled up tight. I flicked it open. On the first page was a sharply drawn pencil illustration of a kind of military coat of arms. It was stylized, like a tattooist's art. Three feathers inside a knot of rope, all crowned. Fancy scrollwork underneath the design simply read: Ich dien. I knew that to be German for I serve. It was a well-executed drawing. Underneath it was a drawing of a butterfly. Even though that too was executed in neat pencil strokes, I could see that it was meant to be a Red Admiral butterfly.

  But the rest of the exercise book was filled with tiny, cramped writing. Every line had been filled and on many pages the spaces between the lines had been filled, too. The writing was so small that it was almost impenetrable.

  I tried to read some of it, and though I could make it out it occurred to me that studying it would be a serious job, and that I might even need a magnifying glass of some sort to read it comfortably.

  It hadn't escaped me that the police would at some point want to talk to me. I had no idea whether they had seen the exercise book pass from Seamus to me, but as they had recorded every detail, they would surely study the footage and realize what had happened. Unless, of course, my body had shielded the transaction from the police cameras in the same way that it had from the news cameras.

  I did pause to ask myself why it mattered. After all, I could simply pick up the phone and tell the police that the man had passed me an exercise book filled with scrawl, and did they want to inspect it? But I didn't want to. For some reason that wasn't entirely plain even to me, I didn't want them to have it.

  When Seamus sent me away to fetch him a cup of tea he was making safe the contents of his exercise book. He didn't want a cup of tea at all. He knew exactly what he was doing and he knew exactly who I was: the city geezer who had sent him to GoPoint. He fully intended to take Otto with him when he detonated the explosives, but he did want to pass on his document. And he'd chosen at that moment, just before his death, to entrust the notebook to me.

  And I wanted to inspect the writings before I let anyone else see them.

  I'd converted the spare room of the house into a small home-working office years ago. I went there and spent almost two hours photocopying Seamus's journal. It wasn't easy. With the writing being so small, the quality of the print had to be very good and sometimes the definition wasn't up to muster. But finally I had it all. I filed away the photocopies in a drawer full of bank statements and prepared myself to have a good look at Seamus's journal.

  Before returning to the lounge I unearthed a high-spec magnifying glass I kept on hand for the book forgeries. I opened a second bottle of Pinot Noir, inserted a Kraftwerk CD into the player, switched on a reading lamp and settled into my armchair.

  The phone rang.

  It was the police. A woman from SO13, the Met's Anti-Terrorist Branch. Which meant of course that Seamus was being regarded as a terrorist, rather than the mentally ill old soldier that he really was. The woman on the line told me they had been trying to track me down since the incident. I pointed out that I'd been home for some hours, so they couldn't have been trying very hard. She ignored my remark. Someone would be along to speak with me, she said.

  "Can't it wait until the morning?" I asked.

  "I'm afraid it can't," she said. "We'd like you to remain where you are until we've debriefed you."

  Debriefed. That was her word. At least that suggested they didn't suspect me of any entanglement with Seamus.

  I hid the exercise book behind a row of paperbacks on my bookcase. Then I switched the TV on again to look for some more news while I awaited the knock on the door. The incident was still headlining. Though I knew it would only be hours before Seamus would become a casualty of the larger war of indifference.

  While waiting up I had a disgraceful thought: one of the buyers for my forgery was now dead. This made it imperative that we close the sale with Ellis. If he dropped out we would have to start looking for a buyer all over again—a process that might take months.

  I waited until one o'clock in the morning before going to bed. The knock on the door never came.

  Chapter 13

  I couldn't really go out the next day. I'd been instructed by the Police Terrorist Special Whatever Unit to wait for someone to come and interview me. It felt like house arrest. I had an attack of impatience in the middle of a bowl of Special Krunch cereal (having been rewarded for achieving middle age by occasional bouts of constipation, I was always impressed and heartened by Special Krunch) and put down my bowl to dial 1471. But of course, semi-secret agencies tend not to leave a call-back number.

  I'd wanted to find out when I might be visited. I could instead just go about my daily business but, preposterously, I felt that might somehow incriminate me. I reached down the telephone directory and found the standard number for the Met.

  "Hello," I said to the officer who answered, "can I speak to someone from the SO13 Anti-Terrorist Unit or whatever it's called. Please?"

  "Who is calling?"

  I had to give my name and my address and my telephone number all before being invited to explain what my call was about. I was then informed that my message would be passed on and that someone would call me back. No sooner had I finished my Special Krunch than the phone ring. A woman from SO13 told me that I would be visited before noon.

  "Noon?" I said. "I haven't heard anyone use the word 'noon' in quite a while. Normally people say 'mid-day.'"

  "Goodbye," she said.

  In the moment I put the receiver down my doorbell rang. When I went to the door, it was indeed a gentleman displaying an ID card and announcing that he was from SO13.

  "Hell, that was quick."

  "What?"

  "I was joking." Perhaps it was the crunchy cereal that was making me light and humorous in what were, after all, very serious circumstances. In any case the gentleman gave me a look which said, we don't do jokes in the Special Terror Whatever. "You'd better come in."

  He was a ginger, or more precisely a copperhead, with a trimmed beard and refreshing, unblinking blue eyes. He was very short, with a long raincoat that he refused to take off, even though I warned him that I had my central heating thermostat turned up high. He took out an old-style spiral-bound notepad and pen. We went through it all, how I knew Seamus, how I'd come to be there with Antonia, how I knew Otto. He particularly wanted to know what Seamus had said to me when Otto and I had been talking to him at t
he railings. I told him everything I could recall, all of it, right down to the Queen eating pie in the palace.

  "He said he had a secret he wanted to tell the Queen."

  "What secret? What was the secret?"

  I coughed. "I've no idea. There probably was no secret, unless it was something about you boys bumping off Princess Di. You didn't do that, did you? Are you sure you don't want to take your coat off? You look pretty hot sitting there."

  "How do you know there was no secret?"

  "Look, Seamus was a homeless dosser. Mentally disturbed."

  "Did he give you anything?"

  "No. Why would he give me anything?"

  "You are absolutely certain he didn't give you anything before you came back for the tea?"