The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Also by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  The Devil’s Detective

  Collections

  Strange Gateways

  Quiet Houses

  Lost Places

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Front cover images: (flames) plyapongrot / Shutterstock; (gun) Sami Sarkis / Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Unsworth, Simon Kurt.

  The Devil’s evidence : a novel / Simon Kurt Unsworth. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  Sequel to: The Devil’s detective.

  ISBN 978-0-385-53936-4 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-53937-1 (ebook) 1. Private investigators—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6121.N795D48 2016

  823'.92—dc23

  2015031479

  ebook ISBN 9780385539371

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: Remains

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two: Flowers

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Three: War

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Rosie, who makes me whole and who owns my heart now and forever.

  For Ben, my dude serious, my son, fellow watcher of Doctor Who and by far and away the best thing I will ever have a hand in creating.

  For Mily, stepdaughter the elder and all-around cool girl.

  For Lottie, stepdaughter the younger, who’s still happily living in the la-la land that only she understands.

  The four of you are my life, and wherever you are is home and is where the world feels safest and best. Without you, there would be no stories worth telling, and this book is for you with all the love I have.

  PROLOGUE

  It was a building, and it had burned.

  “How many does this make it?”

  Fool ignored the question, lifting his hands to his face and rubbing, and the skin of his palms smelled of soot and scorched flesh.

  “I don’t know,” he said eventually, dropping his hands from the exhaustion that his head had become. How many fires have there been in the previous days and weeks? he wondered, and then stopped wondering and tried to remember. I should know, he thought, I’m an Information Man. I should act like one and not like the Fool I was. So, how many? Certainly five, when he sifted through his mind he found that many, but possibly more. Almost certainly more. He was tired, the images in his head jumbling, blurring together, at least five but more, definitely more. Six, maybe seven, or even eight. Buildings, burned and damaged.

  “It’s eight,” said Marianne at his side, and Fool turned to her, focusing, pulling himself back to now, looking at her with his officer’s eyes. She was young, only several months old despite her adulthood, freshly harvested from Limbo and made into one of the new Information Men, and she was already beginning to understand her role. She was already good.

  “Eight, yes,” he said, “this is the eighth. And the links between them?”

  “Fire,” Marianne replied immediately, “obviously. Fires that have been set, that haven’t happened accidentally.”

  “And?” It was unfair, really. Fool didn’t have any great insight; even after the previous seven investigations, he was simply hoping that her eyes might have seen the ground differently than his own. She was smart and sharp, and only rarely did she act around him as the other human Information Men did, with that irritating deference. Now, however, she looked at him without speaking, unable to answer, shoulders hunching slightly into a shrug. Sighing, he turned away from her and looked at the burned thing at his front and thought back, over the whole fucking smoking mess of the investigation. Eight fires, eight things burned to soot and spindle and ragged chaos, and what did he know?

  Mr. Tap crouched in the corner and watched, impassive.

  Fool’s officers, his troops as the Bureaucracy now insisted on calling them, were distracting him, pushing and poking and talking. Each time he tried to focus on the details the sound of them shifted his attention, or one of them would amble into his eye line and he would lose the threads that were starting to form behind his eyes. They weren’t helping, weren’t finding clues, assuming there were any to find; they were simply creating more chaos, more disorder, blurring the narrative the building was trying to tell him. “Out,” he said finally, waving his hand at the door.

  “Sir?” asked one of the demons, its black uniform hanging awkwardly over a body that appeared to be formed solely of twists and kinks. Fool could hear the disgust in its voice. This little demon, part of a lineage of the infliction of pain and suffering, was taking orders from a human, and it hated it; hated it. Never mind, it would learn, or it would be taken away. That was how things were now.

  “Out,” said Fool again, this time more loudly, jabbing his finger at the doorway. “All of you. Wait outside.”

  Fool watched as his Men left, their feet and claws leaving puffs of ash behind them, weapons and bags clanking, until they were finally gone and an almost-silence seeped back in around him. Only Mr. Tap remained, still in the corner, still crouched and watching. Its skin seemed slick in the hazy light, its mouth open and tasting the air. Fool, as instructed, tried to ignore it and turned back into the dead structure and tried to read its corpse.

  The problem now was the same as that first time, when he had been sent to an outbuilding burned away to shadow and grime. He saw it, it was there around him and in front of him, but the fires made things jumbled and he didn’t know how to investigate them; he’d never had to before. There was little or no information here, nothing to link the burned places besides the fires themselves. Fool understood, to some degree anyway, how to investigate the deaths of humans and even the deaths of demonkind, but the burning of buildings? He didn’t know where to start.

  Maybe that’s the trick, little Fool, he thought. Treat this not as something new, something separate, but as a variation of what you know, what you learned investigating the Fallen. Treat it not as a burning building but as simply another death, the death of a building where the weapon was not claw or rock or tooth, but fire. The death of
a building, its murder. He could investigate murder, had learned that trick over the last months, his understanding of the how and the why growing as he became more skilled. This is murder, he thought. Look at it that way, little Fool, and see it with an investigator’s eyes. So, what could this new Fool, born over the previous months out of death and pain and loss, see?

  The fire had been set by humans. Fool had seen enough flame from demon and angel to know that those fires were different, they were either directed and specific or all-encompassing, and this was not. It had spread evenly, he thought, starting in the far corner where the damage was most severe and reaching around almost to here, by the door, before petering out. It had moved constantly, burning hard but slow, sinking its teeth through to the center of the wooden walls and posts carefully and patiently and worrying at the building until it came apart.

  Fool walked to the corner where the fire had started. Pieces of the roof lay scattered on the floor, all but consumed. He kicked them aside, revealing a pile of greasy ash in the corner. Kneeling down, he sifted through it with a sliver of wood, working his way slowly into its still-warm heart. What few fragments he could identify were the remains of twigs and branches, piled together to create a womb for the fire’s first stuttering breaths. This was a fire created and tended by a man or woman, fed fuel and brought to life with patience and care.

  Clever Fool, he thought, working out where it started. What use is that? And the answer was, as ever, No use at all.

  He went through to the rear room, to the bodies.

  There were four of them, lying under the room’s only window. All four were long dead, their bodies charred into brittle, black memories by the heat. The flames had pulled them into fetal curls, clenching their arms in front of them and drawing their legs up into tight-kneed angles, their skin split and re-split. Fool crouched over the first corpse, feeling the sick warmth still radiating from it, and as he watched some internal flame still cooking through the dead body’s flesh escaped, splitting away a flap of skin across one of its shoulder blades and flickering briefly before dying. The flap was curved like a smile, its edges crusting away, and it breathed out a tiny puff of air that smelled of the roasting meat they were sometimes served for their meals as it yawned to reveal muscles and fat that had been dried out to the consistency and color of old leather.

  “They couldn’t escape,” said Marianne from behind him, her voice toneless. She had returned, unable to keep away, the officer in her overcoming the orders he had given.

  “No. The fire was set at the front of the house; it must have been burning fiercely by the time these poor bastards realized what was happening.” It was impossible at first to tell if the bodies were of men or women, so badly damaged were they. It was only when he rolled one over that he saw the victim was male, which meant they were all male; men and women didn’t live in the same houses in Hell.

  “It must be an awful way to die,” said Marianne. Fool, who had seen enough terrible death in Hell to understand that there was little to decide between various types of awfulness, said nothing.

  “Why didn’t they run?” asked Marianne, her voice still toneless but now brittle and hopeless and starting to crack. He looked at her, slim in her black uniform, hair shaved close to her head so that the shape of her skull shone through her stubble like a secret inner reality. He reached out, intending to put a hand on her shoulder, to try to reassure, but dropped it. What could he say that would make this better? Nothing. Better to take refuge in facts, and the trail that facts opened out before them.

  “By the time they realized things were burning, I’d imagine it would have been too late, that the flames already had the house in their grip.” He thought of thick, clinging smoke filling the rooms, and his lungs clenched in a little itch of sympathy. The fire had eaten the workers as surely as any demon might, leaving nothing Fool could use.

  “They came here but it was too late, the glass was too thick to break or they were too weak to break it. They died together.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Do? We look around. We see what’s here and what’s not, we see if it points anywhere. We investigate.” But not using the bodies, he thought, not this time. There was no point in sending these corpses for questioning, there simply wasn’t enough left for Hand or Tidyman to talk to.

  By the end of the day he had to accept that there was nothing new, no trails or clues, there was simply Fool and Marianne and the other Information Men moving around a murdered building holding in its heart murdered men, and Fool was again their witness and the recorder of their fate even though he still had no idea why he had been sent to investigate this particular crime. It was how Hell worked, even now, layer upon layer and each reshaping what was above and below; the Bureaucracy gave instruction, not explanation, and expected him to fill the gaps in a structure whose outlines he could rarely see. All he could do was look and guess and report, and hope that the patterns of Hell, the language he was supposed to understand, might become clear to him at some point.

  The murder of four humans, and the murder of another building, and still he understood so little.

  He knew one thing, though, from the earlier fires, the ones they had arrived at while they were still burning: fire had a voice, it talked in a constant bitter mutter, the sound of something chewing its own teeth, a one-sided conversation that babbled as the flames burrowed deep into wooden frames around now-glassless windows and ate warping doors buckling in their mounts. And as the fire talked and drew itself on, it cleaned, leaving no spore or trail that Fool could track or read, and in doing so it became for him a thing of frustration and anger. Its glowing red heart beat in a rhythm Fool could see but had no way to understand, and as he stood in this latest burned place he thought, I will make sense of you soon, and hoped he wasn’t lying to himself.

  “Is this how it always is?” asked Mr. Tap, finally straightening up, standing. It was tall, its head scraping against the low beams of the ragged building, its skin a mess of ridges and furrows in which the drifting ash had caught. Tiny worms wriggled along the furrows and gnawed on the ash.

  “Sometimes,” replied Fool.

  “I came to observe the great Fool,” said Mr. Tap, “so I might learn how to be an investigator, but now I wonder if you have anything to actually teach me?”

  “Note it all,” Fool said to Marianne, ignoring the jibe, and started out of the building. Mr. Tap followed, kicking thick clouds of ash up as it walked.

  “Perhaps, Fool, you aren’t as good as I’ve been led to believe.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Fool. Don’t respond except with deference, don’t rise, don’t argue. Fool had no idea why he had been told to take Mr. Tap with him; the instruction had been in the canister that morning along with the details of the fire and deaths. It was another of Hell’s jobs, another task, to take this tall, skinny demon with its warped and melted face and uneven eyes with him and to answer any questions it might have.

  “And will you make any arrests today? Or possibly shoot any of my brethren?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure, Fool? You have a reputation for that, after all. Fool the demon killer, I’ve heard you called, Fool the slaughterer.”

  “I’m sure.” Voice still flat and uninflected.

  “And you know nothing?”

  “Nothing useful, not at this point.”

  “Then perhaps I can help, yes?” Mr. Tap stopped and bent, scooped up a clawful of burned material, and placed it in its mouth. Chewing, it spoke through the black mess that dripped around its teeth.

  “It doesn’t taste like demon, Fool,” the demon said and then stopped. When it resumed chewing, it did so more slowly, and when it spoke again its voice was also slower, more thoughtful. Fool had the sudden idea that it had originally intended to condescend to him, to prove its superiority, but had then found something unexpected.

  “It’s human but it tastes strange, Fool. Sharper, bitterer. Why is that?”

&n
bsp; “I don’t know, I don’t eat the crime scenes, I’m not sure how they should taste,” said Fool and immediately regretted the flippancy.

  “Perhaps you should,” said Mr. Tap and grinned, revealing row after row of crooked teeth like warped nails. Wet ash like black mud spilled from its mouth and fell to the ground, smearing its chest as it fell. More of those tiny bugs burrowed into the mess, so that the demon’s chest rippled slightly as they ate. It leaned in close to Fool and whispered, breath burned and sour, “All these fires, Fool, and you haven’t got a thing to tell us. You aren’t anything, Fool, are you? You have this position bought by the slaughter of demons, you think you are important, but you are not, Fool, and you should watch. Watch carefully, Fool, because I am coming.”

  With that the demon strode past Fool and left the remains of the building. Fool followed after a moment, trying to ignore the looks on the faces of the Information Men outside as he emerged. They had all heard Mr. Tap, of course; the demon’s whisper had been a staged one, loud enough to cut the air on blades of sibilance and threat. Fool was now the Commander of the Information Office of Hell, in charge of all the new Information Men, but the demon Information Men still looked at him like he was shit to be eaten or scraped off their feet, and most of the human Men still looked at him as though he was something unclear, to be deferred to or stared at in equal measure.

  Nothing changes, he thought as he walked away, Marianne following. Above them the spires of Heaven gleamed in Hell’s sky, clouds swirling around the white towers, their light falling to the earth in glimmering waves like delicate rain. Fool looked up at the city, thinking of angels that fell and demons that walked in his shadow and crouched in the corners, and felt small and alone and weighed down.