The Devil I Know Read Online Free Page B

‘It is one year since my last drink.’
    The circle clapped as I stood there in disgrace. An act of supreme paradox, applauding my shame. My face burned and I sat back down.
    *
    Night had fallen by the time the meeting was called to a close. I stood on the kerb and waited for a taxi. None arrived. I checked my phone. No missed calls. No instructions from M. Deauville . I had missed the late flight.
    I gave it another twenty minutes before making my way to the ribbed stone columns of the castle entrance for the first time in twelve years. The street lights ended at the public road and the avenue beyond lay in darkness. It was not how I had envisaged my return.
    An outbreak of barking erupted from the gate lodge. A small white form came barrelling out of the shrubbery and lunged at my ankles. I kicked out and it veered past, all scrabbling claws on the tarmac. ‘Toddy!’ called a voice from the past and I caught my breath.
    The dog beat a retreat. A figure was limping straight off the storybook pages of my childhood, a crooked man who walked a crooked mile. He edged up to see what had tripped his trap, pausing about six feet shy of me to peer into my face. I couldn’t quite make out his. My eyes had yet to adjust to the dark.
    ‘Is it the young master?’
    ‘Larney?’ I said in amazement. ‘You’re still alive?’ I had to keep from blurting, gauging that he must be over a hundred by now, for Larney had been an old man when I was a boy, and a young man when Father was a boy, having served our family since he himself was a boy.
    He ventured another step towards me, sidling crablike as ever, his body as twisted as an old vine. I had watched him once when he thought himself unobserved. I was on my way home from school when I came upon him in the woods. No limp. He looked almost normal, a working man from the village. ‘Ha!’ I had cried, plunging out from the trees, ‘caught you!’ Larney had reverted into his hobble and raised his hands to shield his head from a beating. The panic on his face had sent me backing off uncertainly, for I was just a child, and so, I realised, was he.
    He drew up alongside me, head cocked like a bird, his upper body thrust forward and bobbing slightly. ‘You’re home, so, are you?’
    Though I could make out his white teeth, the rest of his features remained dim. He was smiling wildly. I knew better than to mistake this for joy at my return. Larney always smiled wildly. It was an act of ingratiation, a plea not to inflict pain.
    ‘Yes, ahm . . . That would appear to be the case.’
    The voltage of the smile did not waver. Indeed, he registered no surprise whatsoever at my appearing out of the blue, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that I should pitch up unannounced in the night like this. As if nothing had changed in the intervening years. As if there had been no intervening years.
    ‘All is well with himself up above,’ he offered, although I had not enquired after my father’s health. He had not enquired after mine.
    ‘Right.’
    The smile guttered at my tone but it quickly lit up again. ‘I have a riddle for you, Master Tristram. What begins and has no end, and what is the ending of all that begins?’
    ‘I don’t know, Larney. What begins and has no end, and what is the ending of all that begins?’
    ‘Death.’
    ‘Death,’ I repeated.
    His smile hovered in the seething darkness, just his smile, as if his skin were black around it. ‘Yes, death,’ he said. ‘Everyone thinks you are dead.’
    ‘That was another Tristram St Lawrence,’ I informed him, and hurried away with a curt goodnight.
    The avenue was longer than I recalled, and steeper too. Graveyard ivy clotted the orchard walls in grotesque guises – cut-throats, hanged corpses, ghouls. I am a troubled man. I have a troubled mind. I see things in the dark. For a panicked moment I thought I had lost my phone and clapped a hand to my heart, but no, there it was in my pocket. Finally, the