The Devil You Know

Four

THERE’S A SPRAWL OF STREETS BETWEEN REGENT’S Park and King’s Cross that used to be a town. Somers Town, it was called, and still is called on most maps of the area, although that’s not a name that many of the residents tend to use very much.

It’s one of those places that got badly fucked over by the Industrial Revolution, and it never really recovered. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was still mostly fields and orchards, and rich men built their estates there. A hundred years later, it was a pestilential slum and a thieves’ rookery—one of the places that got Charles Dickens salivating and sharpening his nib. St. Pancras Station sits in the middle of it like a great, overblown wedding cake, but it was Somers Town as a whole that got sliced up, by roads and railways and freight yards and warehouses and the cold, commercial logic of a new age. It’s not a slum anymore, but that’s mainly because it isn’t a place anymore. It’s more like the stump of an amputated limb—every street you walk down is sliced off clean by a railway cutting or an underpass, or a blank wall that usually turns out to be part of the gray, moldering hide of Euston Station.

The Bonnington Archive was on one of those truncated avenues, off the main north-south drag of Eversholt Street, which connects Camden Town with Bloomsbury. The rest of the street was mainly warehouses and office spaces and discount print shops, with dust-blinded windows and the occasional exoskeleton of scaffolding; but in the distance, on the far side of the railway lines, there was a block of flats of 1930s vintage, all brown brick and rust-burned wrought iron, its crumbling balconies set with lines of drying knickers like flags of surrender—and bizarrely enough, bearing a white stone virgin and child just above the portico of the main entrance, the name of the block being Saint Mary’s.

The Bonnington Archive itself stood out from the low-rise concrete monstrosities around it like a spinster among sprawling drunks. It looked to be early nineteenth century, in dark brick, four stories high, with meticulous patterns set into the brickwork underneath each row of windows, like vertical parquet. I liked it. It had the look of a palace that had been built at the whim of some senior civil servant who wanted a fiefdom, but then had died, like Ferdinand the First before he could walk across the threshold of his Belvedere. Close up, though, it was clear that this palace had long ago been divided and conquered: one of the first-floor windows was covered by a nailed-up slab of hardboard, and a doorway close by was choked with rubbish and old, sodden boxes. The real entrance to the archive, although it looked to be part of the same building, was twenty yards farther on.

The four-paneled double doors were made of varnished mahogany, liberally scarred with dents and scuff marks at the bottom, but obviously real and solid all the same. There was a brass plate beside the door that proclaimed with serifed formality that this was the Bonnington Archive, maintained by the Corporation of London and affiliated to the Joint Museums and Trusts Commission. There were opening hours listed, too, but this didn’t look like the sort of place that had the world beating a path to its door.

I stepped through into a very large and very impressive entrance hall.

Maybe I was a decade or so out in my estimation of how old this place was—the stark black and white tiling on the floor had the moral seriousness of Her black-and-white Majesty, Victoria. There was a countertop on my left-hand side made of gray marble, currently unoccupied, but as long and as impregnable as the wall of wood at Rorke’s Drift and looking as if it came from the same school of defensive fortification. Behind it, though, there were half a dozen wardrobe rails where rows of coat hangers clustered thickly. They were all empty, but at least this showed willing. The comfort and convenience of any rampaging hordes that might come through here had already been taken into account. There was an inner office farther back, on the other side of the desk, with a sign that bore the single word SECURITY. In conjunction with the deserted desk, that struck me as slightly ironic.

On my right-hand side, there was a broad, gray-flagged staircase, and above my head, a vaulted skylight with an impressive stained-glass rose emblazoned on it, struggling to shine through dust and pigeon shit. At the foot of the stairs, there were three modern office chairs covered in bright red fabric, that looked badly out of place.

I stood very quiet and still in that tired, grimy light, waiting, listening, feeling. Yes. There was something there—a gradient in the air, so subtle it took a few moments to register. My eyes defocused as I let the indefinable sense that I’ve honed through a couple of hundred exorcisms slowly open itself to the space that surrounded me.

But before I could begin to focus on the fugitive presence, a door slammed loudly on my left, making it skitter out of reach. I turned to look over my shoulder as a uniformed guard came through from the security office. He looked the business, despite being somewhere in his fifties: a hard man with mud brown hair that wasn’t so much receding as fleeing across his forehead and a nose that had been broken and reset at some point in his career. He straightened his tie like a man walking away intact from a nasty bit of rough-and-tumble. For a moment, I thought he was going to ask me to assume the position.

But as soon as he smiled, you could see that it was all show. It was a puppy-dog smile, a smile that wanted to be friends.

“Yes, sir?” he said, briskly. “What’ll it be?”

I fought the urge to say a pint of heavy and a packet of crisps. “Felix Castor. I’m here to see Mr. Peele.”

The guard nodded earnestly and pointed a finger at me as if he was really glad I’d brought that up. Rummaging for a moment under the counter, he came up with a black Bic biro and nodded me toward a large daybook that was already out on the countertop. “If you’d like to sign in, sir,” he said, “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

As I signed, he picked up a phone and tapped the hash key, then three others. “Hello, Alice,” he said, after a brief pause. “There’s a Mr. Felix”—he glanced down at the daybook—“Castro down at the front desk. Yes. Fine. All right. I’ll tell him.” Alice? I’d remembered Peele’s first name as Jeffrey.

The guard put the phone down and waved expansively in the direction of the chairs—the same gesture that actors use when they want you to applaud the orchestra. “If you’d like to take a seat, sir, someone will come along and see to you shortly.”

“Cheers,” I said. I went and sat down, and the guard invented things to do at the desk in a transparent effort to look busy and purposeful. I closed my eyes, shutting him out, and tried to find that teasing presence again—but there was nothing doing. The small noises of the guard’s movements were enough to shake my fragile concentration.

A minute later, there were footsteps on the stairs. I opened my eyes again and looked up at the woman who was coming down to meet me.

She was something to look at. As I sized her up, I slid my professional detachment into place like a visor over my eyes. I’d have put her in her late twenties, but she could have been older and just wearing it well. She was on the tall side and very slim—wiry, workout slim, rather than just slim-built—with straight blonde hair drawn back into a tight bun, which in other company might have been called a Croydon face-lift. Not here, though. She was well dressed—even immaculately dressed—in a gray two-piece that consciously and stylishly mocked a man’s business suit. Her shoes were gray leather with two-inch heels, plain except for a red buckle on the side of each, the red being picked up by a handkerchief in her breast pocket. At her waist, looped around a gray leather belt, was a very large bunch of keys. With that detail, and with the stern haircut, she looked like the warden in the kind of immaculate women’s prison that only exists in Italian pornography.

Then she spoke and, just as it had with the security guard, her voice made all the other details break apart and come together in a new pattern. The timber was deep enough to be thrilling, but the cold tone checked that effect and put me firmly back in my place. “You’re the exorcist?” she asked. I had a momentary flashback, without the benefit of acid, to James Dodson saying, “You’re the entertainer?” There wasn’t an inch or an ounce to choose between them.

I’m used to this. Cute and fetching though I am in my own right, the job casts its ineluctable pall over the way people perceive me and deal with me. I looked this high-gloss vision right in the eyes, and I saw exactly what she was seeing—a snake-oil salesman offering a dubious service at a premium rate.

“That’s me,” I agreed amiably. “Felix Castor. And you are?”

“Alice Gascoigne,” she said. “I’m the senior archivist.” Her hand came out automatically as she said it, like a cuckoo when the clock hits the hour. I took the hand and gave it a firm, lingering shake, which in theory gave me a chance to add a little more depth to those first impressions. I’m not psychic, at least not the kind with all the ribbons and bells, the kind who can read people’s thoughts as easily as picking up a newspaper or get newsflashes from their possible futures. But I am sensitive. It goes with the job. I’ve got my antennae out on wavelengths that other people don’t use all that much or don’t consciously monitor, and sometimes skin contact gets me tuned in strongly enough to take an instant reading of mood, a flash of surface thought, an elusive flavor of personality. Sometimes.

Not from Alice, though. She was sealed up tight.

“Jeffrey is in his office,” she said, taking her hand back at the earliest opportunity. “He’s actually busy with some month-end reports, and he won’t be able to see you. He says you should go ahead and do the job, and then you can send your bill in to him whenever it’s convenient.”

My smile took on a slightly pained tilt. We were really getting off on the wrong foot here.

“I think,” I said, picking my words with care, “that Jeffrey—Mr. Peele—may have a mistaken impression of how exorcism works. I am going to need to talk to him.”

Alice stood her ground, and her tone dropped a few degrees closer to zero.

“I’ve told you that won’t be possible. He’ll be tied up all day.”

I shrugged. “Then would you like to suggest a day that will be more convenient?”

Alice stared at me, caught between perplexity and outright annoyance.

“Is there some reason why you can’t just do the job right now?” she demanded.

“Actually,” I said, “there are a lot of reasons. Most of them are fairly technical. I’d be happy to explain them to you and then wait while you relay them to Mr. Peele. But that seems like a very roundabout way of doing things. It would be better if I could talk you both through it together—along with anyone else who needs to know.”

Alice considered this. I could see it didn’t sit well with her. Also—although this was just a guess—that her initial urge to tell me to sod off was tempered by the reluctant conclusion that she lacked the full authority to back it up.

“All right,” she said at last. “You’re the expert.” The emphasis on the last word fell a fraction of an inch this side of sarcasm.

She pointed toward the lockers opposite. “You’ll have to leave your coat here,” she said. “There’s a rule about personal effects. Frank, could you please take Mr. Castor’s coat and give him a ticket?”

“Okey-dokey.” The guard unhooked a hanger from one of the racks and laid it on the counter. I considered making an issue of it, but I could see I was going to have a bumpy enough ride with Alice as it was without going out of my way to make things difficult. I transferred my tin whistle to my belt, where it fits snugly enough, and handed the greatcoat over the counter to the guard. He’d been watching my exchange with Alice without any visible reaction, but he gave me a smile and a nod as he took the coat from me. He hung it up on the otherwise empty rack and gave me a plastic tag into which the number 022 had been die-cut. “Two little ducks,” he said. “Twenty-two.” I nodded my thanks.

Alice stood aside to let me walk up the stairs in front of her, no doubt mindful of how short her skirt was and of the consequent need to maintain the dignity of her station. I went on up with her heels clattering on the stone steps behind me all the way.

On the second floor there was a set of glass-paneled swing doors. Alice stepped past me to open them and walk through. I followed her into a large room that looked something like a public lending library, but with more sparsely furnished shelves. In the center of the space, there were about a dozen wide tables with six or eight chairs arranged around each. Most of the tables were empty, but at one of them a man was turning over the pages of what looked like an old parish register, making notes in a narrow, spiral-bound notebook as he went; at another, two women had spread a map and were laboriously copying part of it onto an A3 sheet; at a third, another, older man was reading The Times. Maybe The Times gets to jump the queue and become history straight away. Elsewhere there were shelves full of what looked to be encyclopedias and reference books, a few spinner racks loaded with magazines, a couple of large map chests, a bank of about eight slightly battered-looking PCs ranged along one wall, and at the end farthest away from us a six-sided librarians’ station, currently staffed by one bored-looking young man.

“Is this the collection?” I hazarded, prepared to be polite.

Alice gave a short, harsh laugh.

“This is the reading room,” she said with what seemed like slightly exaggerated patience. “The area that we keep open to the public. The collection is stored in the strong rooms, which are mostly in the new annex.”

She launched out across the room without bothering to look back and make sure I was still following. She was heading for an ugly steel-reinforced door that stood diagonally opposite us on the other side of the big open space. To either side of it there were two scanning brackets—the kind you get at the exits of large stores to discourage technologically challenged shoplifters.

Alice opened the door not with one of the keys that she wore on her belt but with a card that she ran through a scanner to the left of the door, making a small, inset red light wink to green. She held the door open for me, and I stepped through into a corridor that was narrow and low-ceilinged. She closed the door again behind us, pushing against the slam guard until the lock clicked audibly, and then slid past me again—it required a little maneuvering—to lead the way.

There were doors on both sides of the corridor, all of them closed. Narrow glass panels crisscrossed with wire mesh showed me rooms lined with filing cabinets or full of bookshelves from floor to ceiling. In some cases, the windows had black sugar paper pasted up over them, graying with age.

“What does a senior archivist do?” I asked by way of polite conversation.

“Everything,” Alice said. “I’m in overall charge here.”

“And Mr. Peele?”

“He’s responsible for policy. And funding. And external liaison. I’m in charge when it comes to actual day-to-day running.” She was testy, seeming to resent being questioned. But like I said, it’s an automatic thing with me. You can only decide what’s useful information and what’s trivia when you see it in the rearview mirror.

So I pressed on. “Is the archive’s collection very valuable?”

Alice shot me a slightly austere glance, but this was clearly something she was more disposed to talk about. “That’s really not a question that has a meaningful answer,” she responded slightly condescendingly, the keys jingling at her waist. “Value is a matter of what the market will bear. You understand? An item is only worth what you can sell it for. A lot of the things we’ve got are literally priceless, because there’s no market anywhere where they could be sold. Others really have no value at all.

“We’ve got seventy-five miles of shelving here—and we’re eighty percent full. The oldest documents we hold are nine centuries old, and those don’t ever come out to the public except when we mount an exhibition. But the bulk of the collection consists of stuff that’s much more mundane. Really, they’re not the sort of thing that people pay a fortune for. We’re talking about bills of lading from old ships. Property deeds and company incorporation deeds. Letters and journals—masses of those—but most of them not written by anyone very famous, and in a lot of cases not even all that well preserved. If you knew what you were looking for, theoretically, you could steal enough to keep yourself very comfortably. But then you’d have a lot of trouble selling them on. You’d never get an auction house to take them, because they’re ours and they’re known. Any auction house, any dealer who cared about his reputation, they’d check provenance as a matter of course. Only fences buy blind.”

We turned a corner as she talked, and then another. The interior of the building had clearly gone through as baffling and messy a conversion as my office. It seemed we were detouring around rooms or weight-bearing walls that couldn’t be shifted, and after the austere splendor of the entrance hall, the shoddiness and baldness of all this made a bleak impression on the eye. We came at last to another staircase, which was a very poor relation to the one Alice had descended before. It was of poured concrete, with chevroned antitrip tape crudely applied to the edges of each step. Again, Alice hung back to let me go up first.

“You’ve seen the ghost?” I asked as we climbed.

“No.” Her tone was guarded, clipped. “I haven’t.”

“I thought everybody—”

She came abreast of me again at the top of the stairs, and she shook her head firmly. “Everybody apart from me. I always seem to be somewhere else. Funny, really.”

“So you weren’t there when she attacked your colleague?”

“I said I haven’t seen her.”

It seemed as though that was all I was getting. Well, okay. I’m pretty good, most of the time, at knowing when to push and when to fold. Another bend in the corridor, and now it joined a wider one that seemed to be more in the spirit of the original building. We followed this wider hallway for about twenty yards, until it passed the first open doorway I’d seen. It looked into a large room that was being used as an open-plan office: six desks, roughly evenly spaced, each with its own PC and its own set of shelves piled high with papers and files. One man and one woman glanced up as we went past—the man giving me a slighly grim fish-eye, the woman looking a lot more interested. A second man was on the phone, talking animatedly, and so he missed us.

The sound of his voice followed us as we walked on. “Yeah, well as soon as possible, to be honest. I’m not that great with the language, and I can’t—yeah. Just to establish authenticity, if nothing else.”

A few yards farther on, Alice abruptly stopped and turned to face me.

“Actually,” she said, “you’d probably better wait in the workroom. I’ll come and get you.”

“Fine,” I said. With a curt nod, she walked on. I swiveled on my heel and went into the room that we’d just passed, and this time all three of its occupants gave me the once-over as I walked in.

“Hello there,” said the man who’d been on the phone before. “You must be Castor.” He was about my age or slightly older—midthirties, free-falling toward the big four-oh. He had a fading tan, made more uneven by freckles, and light brown hair that was as wild as if he’d just woken up. He was dressed down, to put it politely: torn jeans, a Damageplan T-shirt, and flop-top trainers. But the bundle of keys he carried at his belt was as big as Alice’s own. On his left cheek, there was a square surgical dressing.

He gave me an affable grin and held out his hand. I shook it and read a certain tension behind the smile—tension and perhaps expectation. He wasn’t sure how to take me yet, but he had hopes that I could live up to my billing. Of course, this was the guy who had the most reason to want the ghost cleared out of here.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Clitheroe,” I said. Behind me, the woman whistled appreciatively and then hummed the opening bars of the X-Files theme tune. Clitheroe laughed.

“It’s just Rich,” he said. “You knew because of the bandage, right? I mean, that wasn’t some sort of—emanations from the ectoplasm—kind of thing?”

“Who you gonna call?” the woman drawled. “Gho-o-ostbusters!”

I turned to face her, and Rich made the introduction on cue. “This is Cheryl. Cheryl Telemaque—our IT specialist.” Cheryl was very compact, very striking, and very dark-skinned—the shade of brown that can legitimately be called black. She looked to be in her early twenties, and her taste in clothes clearly ran to rhinestone-studded Von Dutch tops and a weight of chunky jewelry that skirted the glittery borders of bling.

“Which one are you?” she demanded with a cheerfully piss-taking grin. “The nerdy one, the cute one, or the anally retentive one?”

“I’m amazed you have to ask,” I said. Again, I shook hands. Her grip was firm and strong, and I got an instantaneous flash of warmth and amusement and mischief—Cheryl was a real live wire, clearly. Exact voltage yet to be determined.

“Do you have to use pentagrams and candles and stuff?” she asked me eagerly.

“Not usually. A lot of that palaver is just for window dressing. I skip the candles and pass the benefits on to the customer.”

“And this is Jon Tiler,” said Rich. I turned again. Rich’s arm was thrown out to indicate the other man—the one who’d followed me with a cold-eyed stare when I walked past earlier. The youngest of the three, I guessed, and the least prepossessing physically—he was five six in height, overweight by about forty pounds or so, and his flushed face was replete with burst blood vessels. He wore a short-sleeve shirt with some kind of floral design on it in shades of orange and pink and green—as if he was dressed for jungle operations in a fruit salad.

“Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. He gave me a curt nod, but he didn’t take the hand, and he didn’t speak.

“Jon teaches all the little kiddies,” said Cheryl, in a tone that—though jokey—seemed slightly loaded.

“I’m the interpretation officer,” said Jon with a sullen emphasis.

The soft answer turneth away a whole heap of wrath and makes people take you for a pliable idiot into the bargain. “Interpreting what, exactly?” I asked.

“The collection,” Jon said. “People come in. I do sessions for them. And it’s not just kids, Cheryl. We lay on plenty of programming for adults, too.”

“Sorry, Jon,” said Cheryl, casting her gaze down like a chidden schoolgirl.

Rich jumped into the pause that followed before it could get awkward. “We’ve got a remit from the Education Department,” he said. “They’re one of our funding streams, and they set us targets. We’re supposed to run one-day courses for kids in National Curriculum stages two, three, and four, and outreach sessions for adult learners. Alice oversees, Jon delivers. With help from a couple of the part-timers.”

Jon went back to what he’d been doing, which was photocopying pages from a book on an oversized and slightly antiquated printer/copier. He turned his back on me fairly pointedly, and I wondered what it was about me he objected to so strongly. A possible answer suggested itself at once, and I made a mental note to check it out when I got the chance—assuming that I was still on the job after my interview with Peele.

There was still no sign of Alice, so I decided there was no harm in starting to collate a bit of information.

“Rich,” I said, “if you don’t mind talking about it, how did you come to get hurt?”

Cheryl jumped in before he could answer. “I’ve got the film rights,” she said cheerfully. “He signed them over to me on a beer mat, so you’re too late.”

Rich grinned, a little sheepishly. “It was really weird. I was just wrapping up for the night, right? Three-quarters of an hour late, as per usual.”

“Who else was around to see this?”

He thought about that for a moment. “Everyone,” he said. “Cheryl. Jon. Alice. Farhat must have been around, too, because Friday’s the day when she comes in. She’s one of Jon’s assistants.”

“Alice?” I repeated. “Alice saw what happened?”

“Oh yeah.” He gave a short laugh. “It was hard to miss. Everyone saw it—and heard it, too. Cheryl reckons I screamed like a—”

“Mr. Castor,” said Alice. “Would you like to come through?”

Quite an impressive display of ninja stealth. She was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, and Rich tailed off when he saw her. For a moment I thought of asking her to clarify the mystery: she said she wasn’t there; Rich said she was. But it might come across badly to bring it out in public—like a challenge or a taunt. It was probably better to let that one keep for now. “Well, I look forward to hearing the whole story,” I said blandly. “Go over it in your mind; the more detail you can give me, the better. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

“Sure, man,” said Rich.

Nodding to the pair of them, I joined Alice and she led the way down the corridor, around another odd bend. The doors here were open, all but one, and some even had windows onto the corridor. At the same time there was a subtle change in the background feel of the place, like the silence when a fridge cuts out, making you aware for the first time that you were hearing a sound. I suspected that we’d just passed into the new annex.

Just beyond the bend in the corridor there were two doors. One was tersely labeled SENIOR ARCHIVIST, and the other had Peele’s name on it, above the emblazoned words CHIEF ADMINISTRATOR.

“He’s very busy,” Alice said, making it sound almost like an accusation. “Please keep this as short as you can.” She knocked on the door, then walked in.

The name plaque on Peele’s door may have been impressive, but his office was barely wide enough to fit his desk into. You’d have thought a man with that big a title could have finagled himself a bit more elbow room.

Peele himself was sitting not exactly behind the desk—because this was a corner room with some odd angles to it, and the desk was against a wall—but in as commanding a position as logistics allowed. He looked up as I came in and closed a window on his computer’s desktop. Probably Minesweeper, judging by how hastily and jerkily he did it.

The man who swiveled his chair toward me was in his late forties; tall and cadaverous in build, with a great ruddy hawk bill of a nose spoiling what would otherwise have been the handsome and ascetic face of a Methodist minister. He had red worry-marks on either side of his nose, but he wasn’t wearing spectacles. His thinning hair was brown grizzled with gray, and his suit, which was dark blue, shimmered with a faint and incongruous two-tone effect.

I say he swiveled his chair toward me. Actually, he only made it through a few degrees of arc, and when he stopped, he was still only three-quarters on to me. His gaze made contact with mine for all of a second, then darted back down to the desk.

“Please sit down, Mr. Castor,” he said. He waved toward the other chair, which had been positioned so far away from his own that it was only just inside the room. I took it. Alice stayed standing.

“Thank you, Alice,” Peele said over my head.

Alice read that right, but she didn’t take the hint. “I think I should probably stay,” she said. “I’ll need to know how we’re going forward with this.”

“I’ll discuss the situation with Mr. Castor and then let you know,” said Peele, sounding almost petulant.

I counted five seconds before the door closed behind my back, not with a bang but with a whimper, or rather a complaining whoof of displaced air. There was something a little off-kilter in that whole exchange, but I didn’t know either of them well enough to tell what it was.

“I’m pleased you reconsidered,” Peele went on, sounding if anything a bit irritated. “But I confess, after our conversation last night, I was expecting to hear from Professor Mulbridge.”

My own fault. I’d talked up option B too much and made myself look like the stand-in instead of the main event.

“Well, that’s still a possible way forward, Mr. Peele,” I allowed. “But I found myself with some free time after all, and I thought time was a factor here. If you’re prepared to wait a little while, I can certainly refer your problem to the professor. I should be seeing her next week. Or the week after, maybe.”

He grimaced. As I’d hoped, he swallowed this suggestion with a definite lack of relish. “No,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “We couldn’t possibly wait that long. After the attack on Richard, I think the staff are looking to me to act—to resolve this problem. If I can’t, then . . . well, morale will suffer; it will certainly suffer. I really can’t have it said that I didn’t act. And the archive is hosting a public function on Sunday. No, it needs to be settled. The whole business needs to be settled.”

I couldn’t tell what was going on in Peele’s mind, but he’d become quite animated now. He risked another glance at me, no longer than the first one. “This is a crucial time for us in many ways, Mr. Castor,” he said. “I have a meeting in Bilbao tomorrow—at the Guggenheim Museum. A very important meeting for the archive and for me. I need to know that matters here are in train—that I’m not going to come back to chaos and recriminations. If you’re free to start now, today, then I think that’s what we should do.”

The tone of his voice was merely fretful and peevish, but the fear underneath seemed genuine. He was out of his depth, he expected dire consequences if he screwed up, and he wanted an expert to take the whole thing off his hands and make it go away.

Well, here I was. I just wished to Christ he’d look at me or acknowledge me in some way. This relentless cold shoulder reminded me disturbingly of a passive-aggressive girlfriend I’d once had. Was he autistic?

Peele seemed to guess what was going through my mind.

“You’re probably finding my body language a little disturbing,” he said. “Perhaps you’re even wondering if I have a psychological or neurological condition of some kind.”

“No, I wasn’t—”

“The answer is that I do. I’m hyperlexic. It’s a condition similar in some ways to high-functioning autism.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Perhaps not. If you’re mentally classifying me as somebody with a debilitating disease, then you don’t see. Not at all. I could read at the age of two and write just after my third birthday. I can also memorize complex texts after a single reading, even if I’m not familiar with the language they’re written in. Hyperlexia is a gift, Mr. Castor, not a curse. It does, though, make me react in unusual ways to other people’s social signals. Eye contact in particular is very uncomfortable for me. I’m sorry if you’re finding this interview disorienting or unpleasant as a result.”

“It’s fine,” I said. Embarrassed and slightly thrown, I overcompensated and spoke just to fill the silence. “In fact, it fills a hole in the jigsaw. I can understand now why you laid so much emphasis on the way the ghost stares at you. That’s probably more upsetting for you than for the rest of the staff here.”

Peele nodded. “Very perceptive,” he said without warmth. “Another aspect of my condition is that I find most metaphors . . . opaque. Confusing. Such as your reference to me as a jigsaw puzzle, for example. I hear it, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. If you could avoid metaphors when you’re speaking to me, I’d be very grateful.”

“Right.” I decided the best bet was to pull the discussion back onto a strictly business basis. “Let me just check the timetable with you again,” I said. “The sightings started in September, is that right?”

“I believe so, yes. At least, that’s the first time anything was said to me about it, and so that’s the first entry in the incident book. I didn’t see her myself for a few weeks after that.”

“Do you have an exact date? For the first sighting, I mean?”

“Of course.” Peele seemed slightly affronted at the question. He opened his desk drawer and took out a double-width ledger with a marbled hardboard cover, put it down on the blotter in front of him, and started to leaf through it. I’d assumed that “incident book” was a quaint, archaic title for a database file, but no, here was a real book with real writing in it. Maybe working in a place like this gave you an exaggerated respect for tradition.

“Tuesday, September the thirteenth,” he said. He reversed the book and offered it to me. “You can read the entry, if you like.”

I glanced down at the page. The entry for September 13 ran to most of a side, and Peele’s handwriting was very small and very dense. “No, that’s fine,” I assured him. “It’s unlikely I’ll need to refer to it in detail. In any case, the attack on Mr. Clitheroe—Rich?—happened a lot more recently?”

“Yes.” He turned the book back around to face himself and consulted it again. “Last Friday. The twenty-fifth.”

I pondered this for a moment. Active versus passive is one of the ways I tend to classify ghosts—with passive making up more than 95 percent of the total. The dead keep themselves to themselves, most of the time; they scare us just by being there, rather than by actually going out of their way to harm us. But what was even rarer than a vicious ghost was one that had started out docile and then turned.

Well, let that lie for now. What I needed more than anything was a place to start from.

“Go back to September,” I said. “Did you bring in any big acquisitions in the days or weeks before that first sighting? What else was happening in late August or early September? What else that was new?”

Peele frowned, visibly rummaging through the interior archives of his memory. “Nothing that I can think of,” he said, slowly. But then he looked up—as far as my chin, anyway—as a mild inspiration struck him. “Except for the White Russian materials. I believe they came in August, although we were expecting them as far back as June.”

My ears pricked up. White Russians? A female ghost who wore a monastic hood and a white gown? It sounded like a link worth clicking on.

“Go on,” I prompted him.

Peele shrugged. “A collection of documents,” he said. “Quite extensive, but it’s hard to tell how much of it is going to be of any use. They’re letters, mostly, from Russian émigrés living in London at the turn of the century and just after. We were very pleased to get them because the LMA—the London Metropolitan Archive, over in Islington—was showing an interest, too.”

“Where are they kept?” I asked.

“They’re still in one of the storerooms on the first floor. Until they’re fully referenced and indexed, they won’t be added to the rest of the collection.”

“I’d like to go down there and see them later, if that’s okay.”

“Later?” Peele seemed perturbed by this concept. “Is there some reason why you can’t do the exorcism straight away?”

And here we were again. But he didn’t know, of course, how closely he was echoing his senior archivist. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, there is. Mr. Peele, let me explain to you how this is going to work—what you’ll get if you decide to hire me. I’d like to go through it in a bit of detail, because it’s important to me that you understand what’s likely to happen. Is that all right?”

He nodded curtly, his face saying louder than words that he really wasn’t interested in the traveling hopefully—only in the arrival. I ploughed on anyway. It would save time and tears later, assuming this wasn’t break point in itself.

“If you’ve ever thought about the act of exorcism at all,” I said, “you’ve probably thought of it as something that goes down in sort of the same way that weddings do. The priest, or the vicar, or whoever, says, ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife,’ and there you go; it’s done. By saying it, he makes it happen.”

“I’m not naive, Mr. Castor,” Peele interjected, in my opinion a little over-optimistically. “I’m sure that what you do is a very exacting discipline.”

“Well, it can be. But that’s really not the point I’m making. Sometimes I can just walk into a place, do the job, and walk out again. Mostly, though, it’s not that straightforward—or at least, it’s not that fast. I have to get a fix on the ghost—a sense of it. That comes first. Then, when I’ve got that sense really nailed down hard in my mind, I can call the ghost to me, and I can get rid of it. But there’s no telling how long that process will take. Exorcism isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. And if I’m going to do this job for you, I’m going to need to know right now that you won’t be drumming your fingers and looking for things to happen within an hour or a day. It will take as long as it takes.”

I waited for Peele to mull this over, but he changed the subject—I suppose as a delaying tactic while he weighed up what I’d just said. “And how much—”

“I charge a fixed price. Whether it takes me a day or a week or a month, you pay me a thousand pounds. Three hundred of that is up front.”

That “fixed price” stuff was outrageous crap, of course. I take the same approach to the prices I charge as I do to most other things, which is to say that I make it up as I go along. This time around, the main thing on my mind was the down payment; I needed some cash in hand, and three hundred was more or less the amount I needed to clear myself with Pen—plus a little danger money, since this ghost had shown that she liked to play rough.

But the opposition was stiffening. Peele didn’t like what he was hearing one bit.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Castor,” he said, his gaze making it as far as my lapels as he darted a quick glance at me, “but I’m not prepared to pay anything in advance for what seems to be such a precarious and ill-defined service. If you’re really saying that you could be here for—for as long as a month, disrupting our work, and that for all that time we’d still have to contend with the haunting, too . . . well, it’s just not acceptable. Not acceptable at all. I think I’d prefer you to work on the basis of payment by results. I think that’s the only kind of contract I’m prepared to enter into here.”

I blew out a loud breath, shook my head.

“Then I think we’re back to where we started,” I said, standing up and pushing my chair away from the desk. “I’ll let the professor know that you need a job done here, and she’ll get in touch with you at her convenience. Sorry I wasted your time.”

I headed for the door. It was only half bluff. What I’d told Peele about how I do the business was true enough, and it was also true that I needed the money now. If I’d set the bar too high, well, then that was too bad for me; but either way, he didn’t get to buy me on credit.

I got the door open, but he called out to me before I could walk through it. I turned on the threshold and looked back at him—indecisive, sullen, glaring at his desktop with bitter distaste, but obviously thinking that starting again with someone else would mean all the time he’d wasted already would just be sunk costs.

“Could it really take as long as a month?” he demanded.

“If it did, it would be a new world record. Most likely, I’ll run your ghost to ground inside of a couple of days and be out of your hair before you’ve had time to notice that I’m around. I’m not saying I’m slow, Mr. Peele—just that the work I do doesn’t proceed according to a fixed timetable.”

“Are there ways to make it proceed faster?”

That one set off a small carillon of alarm bells in my mind.

“Yes, there are,” I admitted. “But they’re not going to be my first options, because they’re—unpredictable.”

“Dangerous?”

“Potentially, yes. Dangerous.”

He nodded reluctantly. “Well, then. I presume you know your business, Mr. Castor. I think—I may have spoken too hastily before. Three hundred isn’t an unreasonable sum to ask for as a deposit. But if progress is slow, then perhaps we might consider using some of those other methods?”

“We can talk about that later,” I said firmly, wondering what I was letting myself in for here.

“Later,” Peele agreed. “Yes, very well. Perhaps you can come back at the end of the day and let me know how it’s all gone. Or tell Alice,” he amended, and he seemed to brighten at that second, better reflection. “And Alice can report back to me.”

I let it go. It was obvious I was going to have him breathing down my neck whatever I said. “Fine, I’ll do that. First, though, I’d like to talk to Rich Clitheroe about the incident where the ghost attacked him. And I’d also like to take a look at those Russian letters you were talking about—or rather, the room where you’re keeping them.”

“Certainly. Ah—I’ll have to get the money signed out of the safe, which means waiting until after lunch, when I do the financial review with Alice. But I hope you won’t wait until then to get under way?”

“Mr. Peele,” I assured him gravely, “I was under way as soon as I walked in the door.”

Peele didn’t go back into the workroom with me; he just picked up the phone and summoned Alice. I had to wonder if he was trying to distance himself from the decision to hire me—or was this just another aspect of his condition? Was he so uncomfortable around other people that he preferred to rule by proxy?

Peele broke the news that I’d be around for a while. Alice took it on the chin, but it was clear that she viewed this prospect with about as much enthusiasm as root-canal work. If I were sensitive about stuff like that, I could have got my feelings hurt. Before I let myself be led away, though, I decided to clear up one thing.

“The incident in which Rich Clitheroe was attacked,” I said, as Alice held the door open for me to walk on through. “You told me you weren’t present for that, right?”

“No.” Alice’s tone was exasperated. “That’s not what I said. I said I didn’t see the ghost. I saw what happened to Rich, but there wasn’t any ghost there. As far as I’m concerned, there never has been.”

“So you just saw the scissors—what? Levitate? Move themselves through the air?”

Alice shot a look at Peele before replying. He was staring at the desk, but seemed to be listening closely. I don’t know what cue she was looking for or what she got. “His hand twisted around,” she said. “The scissor blade scraped along his arm and then came up and grazed his face. You should be asking him about this, not me.”

“Yeah, well, I will ask him, of course. But I wanted to establish—”

Alice cut across my words, speaking past me to Peele. “Jeffrey,” she said. “If you give me a direct instruction to cooperate with this, then I’ll do it. If I’m free to refuse to be questioned, I’m going to refuse.”

There was a strained pause.

“Alice has strong feelings about this,” Peele said very quietly. He stared at his computer monitor as he said it, so the only clue I had that he was talking to me was that he referred to her in the third person.

“I can see,” I acknowledged.

“If you can work around her . . . it would probably be best. I’m sure everyone else will be happy to tell you what they know.”

I looked at Alice, who was glowering at me now, making no attempt to hide her resentment.

“Fine,” I said, after a moment. She nodded curtly, her point established, and her lines drawn. I followed her out to the workroom, and the door closed on Peele, no doubt to his immense relief.

It wasn’t fine; it was thick, lumpy bullshit. But the cardinal fact hadn’t changed—I still needed the money.

Back in the workroom, I gave the Exorcism 101 speech again, with minor modifications, for the benefit of Rich and Cheryl, who ate it up, and Jon, who pretended I wasn’t happening.

“So I’ll be asking all of you to tell me what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced,” I wound up. “You, and any other colleagues who’ve been involved in all this. And I’ll start with what happened to you, Rich, because that’s obviously the most extreme incident and probably the one that will give me the best launch point for what I need to do. First off, though, I was wondering if someone could show me the Russian stuff that came through in August. Letters from émigrés, that kind of thing?”

Rich gave me a double thumbs-up. “We can do both things at the same time,” he said. “It’s me that’s cataloging all that stuff.”

“What about me?” Cheryl demanded, pretending to be hurt at being left out. “When are you gonna interview me?”

“Straight afterward,” I promised. “You’re second on my list.”

She brightened. “Go to hell, copper. I won’t talk.”

“I’ll make you talk,” I promised. I wondered if all conversations with Cheryl had this surreal edge.

Rich glanced at Alice as if for permission, and she made a gesture that was the hybrid offspring of a shrug and a nod. “Don’t take all day about it,” was all she said.

The building was even more of a maze than I’d thought. Our route to the storeroom where the Russian materials were being kept led us back down the rough-and-ready cement staircase, but then up another and through a fire door held shut by a spring hinge stiff enough to constitute a serious risk to outlying body parts. After a minute or so of similar twists and turns, I felt like a country mouse being given the runaround by a London cab driver.

“Is there a shortcut?” I asked, slightly out of breath.

“This is the shortcut,” Rich called out from up ahead of me. “See, we’re going to the new annex. The other way is back out through the entrance hall and around.”

He stopped and pointed in through an open door. Inside, I saw when I joined him, there was another open-plan space, a fair bit smaller than the workroom I’d already seen, and made more cramped still by half a dozen library trolleys parked along one wall. A carrot-haired man who looked to be still in his teens wheeled one of these trolleys past us, getting up a good turn of speed so that we had to stand aside smartly or be run down. In among some shelf units at the back of the room, two other figures, indistinct in the half gloom, were transferring books and boxes from shelf to trolley or vice versa, exuding an air of focused haste. They didn’t look up.

“SAs,” said Rich. “Services Assistants. The keepers of the Location Index. They’re the ones who collect all the stuff that’s been requested and take it up to the reading room—then put it back again afterward. It’s a bastard of a job. Will you want to talk to them, too?”

I shrugged. “Maybe later,” I said. I didn’t want to make this any more complicated than it already was. I was just looking for a clue as to where I should start fishing for the ghost—so that I didn’t waste my time sitting in the wrong room, on the wrong floor, while Peele was watching the meter and waiting for results.

We moved on, and it was clear that we were now in a different sort of space. The doors here were all steel-faced, and the temperature had dropped by more than a few degrees. I pointed that out to Rich, and he nodded. “British Standard 5454,” he said. “That’s what we work to. When you’re storing valuable documents, you want less than fifteen percent humidity and a temperature that’s kept as stable as you can get it within a range of fourteen to nineteen Celsius.”

“And the light?”

“Yeah, there are limits for that, too. Can’t remember what those are.”

Finally, Rich stopped in front of a door no different from any of the others, swiped with his ID card, and then unlocked it with one of the keys from his belt. He held the door open for me to enter. A sharp smell of must came out to greet us.

“Is this where it happened?” I asked him.

He shook his head vigorously. “The attack? Jesus, no. That was upstairs, in the workroom—where we just were. If it had happened while I was down here on my own, I would’ve shit myself.”

I went into the room. It was warehouse size, slaughterhouse cold. My eyes flicked from the mostly bare shelves around the walls to the collection of FedEx boxes piled up on the two tables and the floor. One box was open, and it seemed to be filled with old birthday cards. A spiral-bound reporter’s notebook sat open beside it, one page half filled with scribbled notes. On the other table there was what looked to be a laptop computer connected up to an external monitor and mouse.

I turned back to face Rich, who had followed me into the room.

“This is?” I asked.

“One of the new strong rooms. One we haven’t expanded into yet—so we use it for sorting and short-term storage. This”—he indicated it with a wave of his hand—“is the Russian collection. I’m about a third of the way through it.”

I took another look around, second thoughts often being best.

“Are both the laptop and the scribble pad yours?” I asked.

“Yeah. When you’re cataloging new stuff, you start by just jotting down everything that comes into your head. Then you decide what goes into the item description and what the catalog headers should be. Some people enter it all directly into the database, but I find it’s best to go through the two stages.”

“Do you mind if I have five minutes alone in here?” I asked him. “Maybe you could go and make yourself a cup of coffee, and then come back down.”

Rich seemed a little startled, but he rolled with it. “Sure,” he said. “I don’t drink coffee, though. Here.” He squatted beside the nearest table and reached under it. I tilted my head and noticed what I’d missed—a portable fridge, about the size of one of the courier boxes. He took two bottles of Lucozade isotonic out of it, handed one to me, and put the other into his jeans pocket.

“In case of emergency,” he said with a grin, “break glass. If you don’t tell BS 5454, I won’t.”

He went out and closed the door. Nice guy, I thought. One of nature’s gentlemen. But then again, the ghost had tried to part his hair about six inches too low. I was the Seventh Cavalry, as far as he was concerned.

Putting the bottle down on the edge of the table, I reached into the box and gingerly took a handful of whatever was in there. They were just what they’d looked like from the door—birthday cards in antiquated designs. The printed greetings were in English, but the writing inside was in a dense Cyrillic script that I knew from nothing.

I screwed my eyes tight shut and listened to the cards with my hands, but they weren’t talking. After a minute or so, I opened my eyes again and took a closer look at the boxes. There were about three dozen of them, and each of them could probably hold anything up to a couple of hundred documents. They wouldn’t all be cards, of course; letters and photographs could be a lot smaller, so the total might be that much higher.

Even if the ghost was anchored to something in this room, the chances of me finding that something on a quick pass like this were close enough to zero that it wasn’t a viable option. But if the ghost itself was here now or anywhere close by, then I ought to be able to get a trace of it.

I sat down on the floor and slid the tin whistle out of my belt. Unhurried, emptying my mind as much as I could of other thoughts, I played “The Bonny Swans” right through from start to finish. This wasn’t a cantrip; I wasn’t trying to snare the ghost or even to drive it out of cover. This was just one of the tunes I used to help me focus. My own thoughts flowed out of me, riding on the music, and took a little stroll around the room, taking in textures and sounds and smells, poking their tiny, irresponsible fingers into every nook and cranny.

And there was something moving there, more or less out on the limits of what I could reach. Something very quiet; but whether that quietness was weakness or stealth or something different from either, I couldn’t really tell. I could barely sense it at all. That was strange. A violent ghost would usually stain the very air around it with its psychic spoor. They might be rare, but they were hard to miss.

I reached the last verse, reciting the words in my mind as the plangent music wailed out of the old whistle into the still air.

And yonder sits my false sister, Anne,

Fol de rol, de rally-o,

Who drowned me for the sake of a man . . .

The tenuous presence grew a little stronger, a little more vivid in my listening mind. But at the same time it grew stiller and more silent. I felt its attention slide over me like a ripple through cold water, breaking against my skin.

As if it was listening. As if the music had drawn it in, not because of any power I had but just because of something in the tune itself that it was responding to. But in any case, I knew it was close. I knew that that silence was the mark of its attention, a greedy silence swallowing the old tune and opening wide for more. Was it really going to be this easy? I let the last notes linger, drew them out into a tapering thread of sound like a fishing line, pulled gently, ever so gently . . .

. . . And she was gone. So abruptly, it was like the bursting of a soap bubble. One moment, the teasing sense of her, hovering over me, wrapping herself in the sweetness of the music. The next, nothing. Dead, empty, intransitive silence.

Skittish, I thought bitterly. I shouldn’t have reached out. Should have stayed passive and just let it happen. Fuck.

The door opened with a squeal of neglected hinges, and Rich looked in, cautious and solicitous.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“So-so,” I said flatly.