The Devil Upstairs

by Anthony O'Neill

  ‘I see. I see.’ The clouds were so dark they were saturating all other colours by sheer contrast. ‘Then can you give me some idea what I have to do to see the full iceberg?’

  ‘Miss, you don’t want to see the full iceberg.’

  ‘Clearly you don’t know me very well.’

  Corneliussen studied her grimly, piteously, and seemed about to reveal something when a black four-wheel-drive breezed past on the road, the driver obscured by tinted windows. And he shook his head.

  ‘“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Corneliussen smirked. ‘Do you not know your Yeats?’ he said. ‘I’m telling you that I see little difference, sometimes, between the demon and the demon hunter. Between the devil and the exorcist.’

  ‘I’m still not sure . . .’

  ‘I’m saying that you’d have to be mad, dangerously mad, to pursue this. Because if you do, you’ll inevitably end up – as I did – in the throne room of Alistair Dunn. And you can’t defeat the King. No one can.’

  ‘The King?’

  ‘The King always wins. The house always wins. The darkness always wins.’ Corneliussen’s face was a picture of defeat. ‘Don’t delude yourself, young lady. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” That’s Shakespeare, you know. And he might well have been speaking about Edinburgh.’

  Then he threw open the car door and swung himself inside.

  ‘Mr Corneliussen—’ Cat tried, but he was already turning the ignition.

  He blurted off in a haze of diesel fumes, the Volvo coughing and backfiring as it rounded the bend.

  Hell is empty and all the devils are here . . .

  Cat stood on the edge of the pavement for a while, forlorn and unquenched, as the clouds rolled over and the crows wheeled home to roost. Then she started trudging back across town.

  * * *

  When Cat entered Dean Village she was surprised to find that the tourists had not yet departed. Despite the weather the little enclave seemed more popular than ever – many times more popular than when she had moved in – and it was becoming increasingly difficult just to cross its bridges without being bumped and jostled.

  When she reached the stair door she sensed that some of the tourists – they looked disturbingly familiar – had even followed her up the street, just it seemed to watch her go inside. A figure loomed over her shoulder and she was about to shoot him a dirty look when she realised with a jolt that it was Robin Boucher.

  ‘Just in time,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you were one of the tourists.’

  ‘Yeah, is it always this popular around here?’

  ‘Not until you arrived,’ she said – for the first time making the connection.

  They eased awkwardly into the building’s stairwell and checked the mail – a bill or something for Cat, nothing as usual for him – and then, with Boucher standing aside, they started the ascent of the spiral stairway.

  ‘I trust I didn’t offend you . . .’ he said behind her.

  ‘Offend me?’ Cat said. ‘About what?’

  ‘The invitation . . .’

  ‘Now why would that offend me?’ she asked. ‘I was about to slip a response under your door, as it happens.’

  ‘Then you’ll be joining me?’

  ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘Excellent,’ he said, sounding genuinely relieved. ‘Excellent.’

  They did the next two spirals in silence, Cat faintly amused by his schoolboy exuberance, before Boucher added, somewhat self-consciously, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve invited your friend along as well.’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘Agnes,’ he said, smiling. ‘Agnes Sampson.’

  Cat was almost speechless. ‘Agnes,’ she managed, struggling to appear unfazed. ‘What made you – well, how do you know Agnes?’

  ‘She works at your office, does she not?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘She came around here the other night, looking for you.’

  That didn’t sound right. The only time Cat had been absent from her flat was when she had followed Boucher himself to the Innocent Railway. ‘Did she really?’

  ‘Really she did. She seems very much the live wire.’

  ‘She sure is.’

  ‘And I thought you might like to have her along.’

  Cat couldn’t work out if Boucher was buying distance from her or if he’d somehow gotten it into his head, possibly owing to her delayed response, that she was the type of girl who’d prefer a chaperone.

  She settled on the latter and decided he was just being scrupulously considerate again.

  ‘Sounds fabulous,’ she said. ‘Fabulous.’

  ‘Excellent,’ he said again. ‘Well, the booking’s at seven-thirty so I’ll pick you up, so to speak, at six-thirty? I don’t think we need to drive – it’s difficult enough getting a car into that part of town – so we’ll just enjoy the walk, eh?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘And Agnes can find her own way there, I imagine? She lives not far from the Old Town, doesn’t she?’

  ‘In Newington, that’s right.’

  ‘Well, then, everything sounds perfect.’ With a serrated little grin.

  When Cat had got inside her flat and closed her multitude of locks, she felt a vibration from her phone.

  It was Maxine from downstairs, being cheeky:

  Wow! Sounds like you and Mr Smooth are getting along FAMOUSLY!!!

  The stairwell’s acoustics, as Cat had already discovered, meant that conversations were piped into every apartment in the building.

  She didn’t respond immediately, but when she got around to preparing a meal – a bok choy recipe she’d found in a supermarket handout – it occurred to her that, for all the developments in the internal fraud investigation, and all the more pressing matters that should have been occupying her attention, she was now worrying almost exclusively about the forthcoming dinner with Robin Boucher, and conjecturing feverishly about his mysterious connection with goddammed Agnes.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  La casa del fuego turned out to be a spacious and well-patronised establishment with baked tiles depicting leaping flames and stained-glass lanterns casting kaleidoscopic hues. It was deep in the Cowgate – a notorious street that Cat hadn’t seen Boucher enter on Tuesday evening – and, according to Agnes, whom they met in the foyer, was owned by ‘a friend’ of hers. In fact, Agnes, whose plunging purple frock exposed a staggering expanse of cleavage, claimed that she was the one who’d recommended it in the first place. Which only left Cat wondering how that chimed with Boucher’s claims in his written invitation.

  An oddly nervous waiter guided them through the crowd to a prominent table on the mezzanine, surrounded by volcanic imagery, where they enjoyed a magisterial view across the whole dining area. Boucher – who was wearing a corduroy jacket and plaid shirt which would have looked dorky on any other man, but on him seemed the height of retro chic – drew back the chairs for the two ladies before settling in and instructing them, ‘Order whatever you like, and don’t hold back.’ Small-talk and menu-perusing ensued until their drinks arrived – a tejuino for Cat and tequilas for the others – and a tipsy Agnes commenced her presumptuous campaign.

  ‘Cat never stops talking about you, you know.’

  ‘Well,’ said Cat.

  ‘No, really – she talks about you constantly.’

  Boucher, passing the menu back to the waiter, was courteously dismissive. ‘I suspect she was merely wondering why I moved in so quickly,’ he said, with a flicker of a smile at Cat. ‘And why I seem untroubled by the flat’s recent history.’

  ‘That’s a small part of it,’ Agnes admitted.

  ‘Well, the truth is that the area suits me perfectly. For professional reasons I need to be close to the facilities of a big city, yet I’ve always yearned for the peac
e and quiet of a sleepy little village. The Dean seemed to offer both.’

  ‘If you get the right flat,’ Cat put in.

  ‘And the right neighbours,’ Boucher said, with another indulgent little smile. ‘And as for the flat’s history, I leave it to others to be repulsed by such things. I can’t imagine there’s a property on this planet where some sort of grisly crime didn’t take place. And if it helps to lower the price, so much the better.’

  ‘It pays not to be superstitious,’ Cat noted.

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Boucher, as a fellow diner cackled wickedly in the background.

  Agnes forged on. ‘It’s more than that, though. Cat has been wondering about everything. And I mean everything.’ For a moment Cat thought she was about to say something unbearably crude. ‘Like what you actually do. I mean actually do for a living.’

  Boucher looked amused. ‘Have I really been the cause of that much speculation?’

  ‘How could you not?’

  ‘I suppose it makes sense,’ he said. ‘I can be damnably secretive at times, I admit that, and I can only imagine what it looks like to others. In fact, I’d be surprised if there weren’t a lot of misconceptions about me.’

  He paused to savour the tequila like a fine wine.

  ‘And?’ said Agnes.

  ‘And’ – Boucher affected a sombre expression – ‘well, I still can’t talk about it. What I do, who employs me – it’s going to have to remain a mystery. National security, you understand.’

  Silence for a few seconds – just the general hubbub and mariachi music from the speaker system – then Agnes said in a whisper, ‘So . . . what? You’re with MI6 or something?’

  ‘Would it bother you if that were true?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘And if I were involved in international skulduggery, you wouldn’t be concerned?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘If I had a licence to kill . . .?’

  ‘Well, do you? Do you?’

  Boucher maintained his gravely serious expression for a few seconds and then snorted, shot a sly wink to Cat and shed the mask of solemnity entirely.

  ‘No,’ he said, chuckling. ‘I’m not a spy. I’m not involved in counterespionage. I’ve nothing to do with national security at all. I wish I did, but I don’t.’

  Agnes kept glancing at Cat, as if to say, ‘What a card this guy is!’

  ‘I’m a chess player,’ he said.

  ‘A chess player!’

  ‘A professional chess player.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Agnes, with another approving glance at Cat. ‘As in tournaments and suchlike?’

  ‘Not quite. Everything I do is online. But I do have a significant clientele.’

  ‘Clientele?’

  ‘Stock market traders, hedge fund managers, retired billionaires, princes, sheikhs, captains of industry, even a former prime minister – they all pay for my services.’

  ‘Amazing,’ said Agnes, like a private fan club. ‘And we’re talking good money here?’

  ‘Enough to pay the bills. But some of my clients are rather unpleasant. Some of them take the game far too seriously. A few of them even make threats. It’s another reason I find a monkish existence in a garret so agreeable. And why I generally prefer not to talk about it.’

  To Cat this seemed highly unsatisfactory, even suspect, but she elected not to question him. ‘You’ll have to forgive us for being so inquisitive,’ she said. ‘It’s just that the last guy in your garret was as far from a monk as you can imagine. And I guess I’m just relieved you’re such a contrast.’

  ‘It never hurts to follow a bad act,’ he said.

  ‘If you can contrive it.’

  ‘If you can contrive it, indeed.’

  Agnes said, ‘You wouldn’t believe how much Cat hated that last guy – the bad act.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Cat protested. ‘I wouldn’t say hate . . .’

  ‘She dreamed of killing him. Actually killing him.’

  ‘It’s just human nature,’ Cat said, shifting. ‘It’s hard sometimes, when someone is particularly obnoxious, to stop the imagination from wandering . . .’

  ‘Oh, I agree entirely,’ said Boucher. ‘Every day, in fact, I kill probably a hundred people in my imagination.’

  ‘Just a hundred?’ Agnes joked.

  ‘I often dream, for a start, of travelling back through time to assassinate the inventor of the leaf blower.’

  ‘Before he could do any damage?’ Agnes said, laughing. ‘The inventor of the cream doughnut for me.’

  ‘It was only fear of God,’ Boucher went on, ‘that used to prevent people acting on such whimsies. Now it’s CCTV and CSI.’

  ‘The new gods,’ Agnes said, with an approving nod.

  ‘So I hope,’ Boucher said, looking in Cat’s direction, ‘that you didn’t experience any sort of remorse – for what happened to him?’

  ‘To the guy upstairs?’ Cat felt oddly exposed. ‘No, I don’t think so – why?’

  ‘Absurd as it is, people can sometimes experience guilt if they’ve wished ill upon someone who later suffers a misfortune. A sort of reverse Schadenfreude – the result, generally, of religious conditioning.’

  ‘No,’ Cat said, pointedly not looking at Agnes. ‘That presupposes some sort of supernatural agency, and that’s nothing more than magical thinking.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Boucher said mysteriously, and seemed about to elaborate when their meals arrived.

  They were adjusting themselves – spreading out napkins, shifting glasses, selecting cutlery – when Cat noticed other diners in the restaurant staring at them. Some even seemed to be making guarded comments. Agnes, finely tuned to her attentions, chipped in with an explanation: ‘They’re all looking at you two,’ she whispered. ‘At what a gorgeous couple you make.’

  Cat dearly hoped Boucher hadn’t heard – he was spooning sour cream over his fajitas – and quickly changed the subject. ‘Anyway,’ she said to him, ‘if I’m given to dark thoughts it’s partly because I’m paid to. Sometimes I need to think like a fraudster – like the criminal mind, in general – just to imagine where an investigation might lead.’

  ‘Cat cracked a big case in America that way,’ Agnes explained. ‘Organised crime, gangsters, the works.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And she’s got her teeth into something juicy here, too.’

  ‘Anything I can help you with?’ Boucher was lip-testing the heat of his meal. ‘I have a lot of high-profile clients in the financial sector, you know.’

  Cat started sawing into her spinach enchilada. ‘At the moment it’s just a credit cards issue. I suspect there’s corruption involved in that department. Well, not suspect – I’ve been told it, straight out, by a former employee. But as for the details, it’s still a matter of speculation.’

  ‘And what is your speculation?’

  She swallowed a bite. ‘Fraudulent card activation. Redirection of credit cards to criminal elements. Probably misdirected statements as well. All that is possible if the systems are manipulated and the ethics are loose. But apparently that’s just the tip of the iceberg.’

  ‘And you hope to uncover the rest of the iceberg?’

  ‘I’ll get there eventually – or do my damnedest trying, anyway.’

  Boucher ruminated for a moment, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and said, ‘Rewards points.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Rewards points. All those credit card accounts come with incentives attached, don’t they?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, what if they’re purposely misdirected?’

  Cat reached for her drink – the meal was excessively spicy – and shook her head. ‘Customers would notice if they’re not getting their points.’

  ‘I never bother checking mine,’ Boucher said. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t have any earthly idea if I was getting any at all.’

  ‘It only takes one . . .’

  ‘What about corpora
te accounts, then?’

  ‘Back-end software ensures that corporate accounts are ineligible.’

  ‘And what’s to stop that software being subverted? By someone inside? Considering the size of those accounts, the points involved would be massive, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘So massive that they’d be sure to draw attention.’

  ‘Then what if the points were distributed over scores of individual accounts? Small business accounts? And what if those accounts were further modified to look like personal accounts? That would be possible from the inside, right?’

  Cat was surprised by the depth of Boucher’s insight. ‘It’s possible, I guess. Why – have you heard something similar, from one of your clients?’

  Boucher returned to his meal. ‘Not so much from a client as from my own imagination. Sometimes the mind of a chess player wanders into dark places. Sometimes, when it’s particularly restless, it plots out complex scams and schemes – just to keep itself active and flexible.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Cat, taking another sip to cool down. ‘So you plotted that out all by yourself?’

  ‘In the middle of the night, trying to lull myself to sleep. Though of course I’ve never acted on it – or any of the other schemes I’ve dreamed up. Out of civic responsibility, you understand.’

  ‘Here’s to civic responsibility,’ Cat said, raising her tejuino.

  Boucher lifted his tequila. ‘And to those who are compelled to explore dark places.’

  They clinked glasses – forgetting, for a moment, that anyone else was present – and Agnes issued a hearty guffaw.

  ‘Look at you two. Just look at you. Fetch a fire extinguisher, someone! Phew! You’re practically in flames here!’ She fanned herself with her hands like a Victorian maiden.

  Cat had to resist the urge to kick her under the table. But Boucher himself was admirably discreet. ‘I hope you’re both enjoying the meal, anyway. Though I must say the food’s more embellished than I usually prefer.’

  And the company, Cat thought.

  At Boucher’s insistence they indulged in dessert – a crème brûlée for Cat, who couldn’t believe her own wickedness; churro bowls for the others – and then Boucher, who seemed to have mastered a multitude of languages (he had already addressed the waiter in fluent Spanish), regaled them with some other German words which he claimed ‘deserve to be as familiar as Schadenfreude’: Backpfeifengesicht, for a face that’s just begging to be slapped; Fuchsteufelswild – ‘fox devil wild’ – for maniacal rage; Weltschmerz, for despair at the state of the world in general; and Geborgenheit, for a feeling of such emotional intensity that nothing else matters.