The Devil You Know

Five

IT WAS A FRIDAY, RICH SAID, AND IT WAS ALREADY a quarter to six. His hours were from eight-thirty to five, and he didn’t get any overtime, but it was nothing special for him to be working late. Sometimes you just had a job to finish, and if you went home before it was done, then something you’d spent days or weeks putting together might fall through. In this case, he was finding and retrieving a whole stack of maps and plans on London’s hidden waterways for a group of primary-school kids who were going to be coming in on the following Monday.

“That’s part of business as usual, is it?” I asked. Just checking.

“Oh Jesus, yeah. We’re a public facility, don’t forget. Not many people wander in here off the street, but one of our official targets is throughput. We’ve got to make sure that the archive gets used by at least ten thousand people this year. And next year it’s twelve thousand, and so on. We’ve got two classrooms and an open-access library up on the third floor.”

“But taking the sessions is Jon Tiler’s job, not yours? I mean, he’s the teacher.”

“Interpretation officer. Yeah, too right—I wouldn’t take that job on for a big clock. But London rivers are one of my specialties, so I ended up doing some of the prep for this one. And there was a particular map that had it all—all the original tributaries superimposed on a surface map of the city. Only it was splitting right down the middle, on one of the folds, and I could see what was going to happen if Jon used it in that state. So I decided to fix it. I got sidetracked.

“Cheryl was up there, too, finishing off some bits and pieces of her own before the weekend. Alice was going over the next week’s schedules with Jon, and Faz—Farhat, I mean; she’s a part-timer—was doing some typing for Jon off in the corner. A worksheet or something.

“And I was more or less done. I mean, I’d found all the bits and pieces I’d set out to find, and all I had to do with the map was put a patch in it. It sounds dodgy, but that’s how we deal with splits and tears, unless the original is too precious to mess with. We paste in new material—unbleached Japanese paper and pH-neutral paste—and stain it the right color so it doesn’t look like a pig’s breakfast. I was cutting my patch to size. We’re meant to tear rather than cut, but I usually cut and then fray the edges with the edge of a scissor blade. Anyway, that’s where I’d got to.”

Rich took a long swig on the Lucozade bottle, wiped his mouth.

“And then the lights flickered. Just for a second. Alice said something about brownouts, and Jon turned that into a joke—I can’t remember what, just something crude. But then it happened again, and suddenly it was like we were at a disco and they’d turned on the strobes. I stood up—I was going to walk over and turn the lights on and off a few times, see if that did the trick.

“But I never got there. Something pushed me back down into the chair. There was a bang—like something heavy landing on the table in front of me—and the floor shook. The map, the stain pots, all the stuff I was using, it just went flying into the air. The lights went out altogether, then a second later they came back on again. And the scissors”—he lifted a hand to touch the bandage on his cheek—“they sort of twisted around in my hand. I could see it happening, but I couldn’t stop it. It hurt like a bastard, too. I managed to slip my finger out of the grip, but my thumb was still trapped, all twisted around.

“I was shit-scared, mate, I don’t mind saying. I shouted out something. ‘Fuck,’ or something like that. ‘Look what’s fucking happening.’ Cheryl came running over to help me, but the scissor blades were pulling me around by my own thumb—up and down and all over the place. I must have looked like Peter Sellers in that movie where he’s trying not to do a Nazi salute.

“The scissors were hacking at my body and my face, and the only way I could protect myself was to turn with them and keep ducking out of the way. I barged into Cheryl, and she went over on the floor. Christ knows where Jon and Alice were. Farhat just kept screaming and screaming, which was a sod of a lot of use. Then I got the idea of banging my hand against the edge of the desk. It took about five or six goes, but in the end I got my thumb free, and the scissors just fell to the floor. Cheryl was thinking more clearly than I was—she trapped them with her foot in case they got up again.

“I looked across at Cheryl. I was going to say something like, ‘Bloody hell, that was intense.’ But then I saw she was looking at my face, so I put my hand up and touched my cheek. And it was wet. There was blood pouring down out of this cut. Spattering all over the worksheet and the desk, all over everything.

“I think I fainted for a few seconds. The next thing I remember, I was sitting down again and Peele—Jeffrey—was in the room. Bit of a rarity in itself, that—like a visit from royalty. Everyone was shouting, arguing about what to do. Alice said she was going to call for an ambulance, but I said I was okay and I was going home. I’d deal with the cut myself. Jeffrey wasn’t happy about that because he thought there might be some sort of insurance angle to all this shit, but I more or less said bollocks to that and got out of there. I was shaking like a leaf and I felt sick—like I might really throw up. I just had to get out.

“I almost didn’t come back in on the Monday. The whole thing really shook me up. But this is my job, for fuck’s sake. What am I going to do, pull a sickie because I’m scared of ghosts?”

Rich took another belt of Lucozade, grimaced.

“Warm,” he explained, without much conviction, putting the bottle down on the table and shoving it away from him.

I didn’t say anything for a moment or two. What he’d said made some things easier to get a handle on, but it made others even murkier than they’d been before.

“You’re right-handed?” I asked him at last. It wasn’t a question, really. He’d been holding the phone in his right hand when I’d walked past the workroom earlier.

“Yeah. So?”

“But you were holding the scissors in your left hand, because it was your left cheek that got slashed.”

He looked at me, obviously impressed.

“You’re good at this, aren’t you? Yeah, that was what pissed me off more than anything, to be honest. I was using my left hand because my right one already had a big thick dressing on it from where I’d trapped it in the desk drawer a few weeks earlier. It was just starting to get better, and then I got my face opened up. Someone’s really got it in for me.”

“The desk drawer. Was that the ghost, again, or—”

Rich laughed sardonically.

“No, that was just me. It’s not like I need any help to mutilate myself. I’ve got a name for accidental self-immolation. It’s a good job I’m the bloody first-aid man.” He hesitated, nonplussed. “Mind you—it would have been around about the right time. Maybe it was her. I thought it was just me being cack-handed.”

I turned my attention back to the boxes on the table.

“Have you been working on these ever since August?” I asked.

He followed my gaze and blew out his cheeks. “On and off, yeah,” he answered, sounding a little defensive. “I’ve got other stuff going on as well, obviously. There’s a huge amount of material there, and it’s never been sorted. It was in a private collection somewhere over in Bishopsgate. Well, that’s what Jeffrey likes to say, anyway. But I was in on the whole deal, so I can translate that into English for you—he means it was stuck under someone’s bed next to the pisspot.”

“You were in on the deal?”

“Yeah, I found the stuff, and I acted as broker. I wasn’t allowed to claim a finder’s fee because I’m on salary here—you can only pay a fee when someone from outside has brought something to you. But I acted as a go-between and a translator, anyway. It made a change from routine. And as a reward I get to catalog the whole damn collection myself because I’m the only one here who can speak Russian.”

“Was that why the Bonnington hired you?” I asked him. “As a language expert?”

“I suppose it made a difference—but it was the classical education that was my unique selling point, not the Russian and Czech. The archive has got a load of old deeds and certificates written in medieval Latin.” Rich picked up one of the birthday cards, opened it, and read the message inside. “To be honest, I don’t mind doing this stuff, because I like to give myself a linguistic booster shot every now and then to make sure I don’t get too rusty. Normally I do it with a foreign holiday, but this is cheaper.”

“Is there a story attached to this collection?” I hazarded. “Or to how you got your hands on it?”

He looked blank and shrugged. “No, we just put in a bid for it and got it. But there’s no scandal or murder or anything, if that’s what you mean. Not that I heard about.”

“And you haven’t come across anything sensational or unusual in the documents themselves?”

By way of answer, Rich read aloud from the card he was still holding. “‘To Auntie Khaicha, from Peter and Sonia. With all our love and thanks. We hope to see you again before the baby arrives, God willing, and to hear news from our dear cousin.’”

He let it fall back into the box.

“That’s one of the racier ones,” he said resignedly.

Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. It was after midday when Rich and I got back up to the workroom. The archivists had all clocked off for lunch, leaving a note for Rich that they’d be at the Costella Café on Euston Road. He invited me along, but I wasn’t going to lose this opportunity to have the place to myself.

“Could you leave me your keys?” I asked him, thinking of the locked fire door.

He hesitated, and various thoughts passed visibly across his face. In the end, he shook his head. “I can’t,” he explained with a certain amount of embarrassment. “There’s only the three of us who are key-holders—me, Alice, and Peele himself. It’s a sacred trust sort of thing; they practically make you swear an oath. We’re supposed to keep them on us all the time. We can lend them out to the other people who work here, but there’s a form for it, and they’ve got to be timed out and timed back. If Alice sees you with my set, she’ll go for me like a bloody pit bull.”

“Is each set different, then?” I asked, looking down at the hefty collection of ironmongery. I wasn’t trying to get around him, I was just curious, because the keys were of so many different sizes and varieties. I take a keen interest in keys and locks—they’re somewhere between a hobby and an obsession with me.

Rich shook his head, following my gaze and still looking a little awkward—as though he’d disliked having to genuflect to the rules. “No, they’re all the same. And to be honest, we only ever use about half of them. Less than half. I bet some of the locks that these things open don’t even exist anymore—they just get added to, and nobody ever remembers to take anything off the ring.” He shrugged. “But there’s only three sets—or four, if you count the master set down in security. So it’s not like there’d be any doubt about it if I lent you mine. I’m sorry, Felix—if there’s anywhere you need to get into, Frank’s probably your man.”

“Yeah, no problem,” I assured him.

It occurred to me that Peele might not have joined his troopers for lunch, so I wandered along and knocked on his door. There was no answer, so I tried the handle. The door was locked. Alice’s door was open, though, and her office—neat, clean, monastically bare—was unoccupied.

Okay, so I wouldn’t be able to get back to the room where the Russian stuff was sitting. But the ghost had manifested in the workroom, too, so it was probably worth whistling up a tune in there.

In the end I went through several old favorites, but without getting anything in response. If the ghost was still there, I couldn’t feel it anymore.

Rich, Cheryl, and Jon got back from lunch dead on one, and Cheryl’s eyes lit up when she saw me. “You gonna do me now?” she demanded.

“Absolutely,” I said. “That’s what I’m sitting here waiting for.”

“You gonna use a drippy tap and a rubber truncheon?”

“I’m on a budget. You’ll just have to smack yourself around the face while I ask the questions.”

For the sake of privacy, Rich unlocked a room for us on the main corridor opposite the workroom. Cheryl sat on the edge of a table with her legs swinging, and I prepared to play one half of the nice-cop, nasty-cop double act. But she got her question in first.

“What if ghosts started to exorcise real people?” she demanded.

I was momentarily floored. “Sorry?” I asked.

“I was just thinking. If they started to fight back, they’d start with you, wouldn’t they? They’d take out the blokes who could do them some harm. Then they’d have the rest of us at their mercy.” She warmed to her theme. “You should probably train up an apprentice, like. And then when you die, the apprentice can track down the ghosts that did you in and get revenge for you.”

“Are you volunteering?” I asked.

Cheryl laughed. “I could do it,” she said. “I quite fancy it, to be honest. Can you do it as an evening class?”

“Correspondence course only. By Ouija board.”

She made a face. “Har har har.”

“How long have you been working here?” I asked her.

“Cheryl Telemaque. Catalog editor, first class. Mainframe log-in number thirty-three.”

“How long?”

She rolled her eyes. “Forever!” she said, with a rising pitch. “Four years in February. I only came in to do some indexing work. Three months, it was meant to be.”

“So being an archivist suits you?”

“I just got stuck, I suppose.” She sounded comically morose now. Her voice was performance art, and I found it hard not to laugh. “I was good at history, at school, so I did it for my degree—at King’s. That was pretty amazing in itself, you know? Not many kids from South Kilburn High going on to uni. Not from my year, anyway.

“But I didn’t really think I was going to end up doing it for a career, you know?” She gave me the look that a center forward gives the ref when he’s holding up the red card. “I mean, there aren’t any history careers. But I couldn’t get a job, and I was gonna do postgrad, only I already owed about twelve thousand quid on my BA, so they wouldn’t give me a loan. Then this job came up—for a catalog editor, not an archivist—and my stepdad said I should go for it.” Cheryl consulted her memory, frowning. “I think he was my stepdad by then. Anyway, it was Alex—my mum’s boyfriend. Then her third husband. Currently her ex.”

“Is that important?”

“I like to keep score. You know that thing Tracey Emin did—the bed with all her lovers’ names sewn into it? Well, if my mum did it, it’d have to be a circus big top.”

For someone who had a more methodical mind or a tighter time budget, I could see where talking to Cheryl could quickly lead to homicide or madness. For now, I was happy to roll with it, because I suspected that underneath all the clowning around, she’d asked me to question her because she had something to tell me.

“So you came here four years ago,” I pursued, deadpan.

She grinned at the memory. “Eventually, yeah. I’ve got a motto, right? You’ve got no right saying you don’t like something if you haven’t tried it. But this time I just didn’t fancy. We had a big row about it. I said I’d rather be on the game than work in a bloody library, then Alex said he was going to take his belt off to me.”

“And?”

“I told him I didn’t expect to get my first customer so quick.” The grin faded abruptly, and she became brusquely matter-of-fact. “Anyway, after that I really needed a job, because my mum chucked me out. So I applied for this, and I’m still here four bloody years later.”

“What does a catalog editor do?” I asked.

“Almost everything. Sorting new collections. Data input. User support. Most of the time, though, it’s bloody retroconversion.” Cheryl pronounced the word as if it was a kind of toxic waste. “Putting the old printed catalogs onto the database. See, lots of collections are still on these really nasty old printed lists that haven’t even been looked at for a million years. I copy them across. Hundreds of thousands of them. It’d drive you frigging well mad. Sylvie’s the only excitement we ever get around here.”

“Sylvie? Is she another part-timer?”

Cheryl laughed, short and loud. “No, you pillock. Sylvie’s the ghost.”

“That’s—”

“Just my name for her. Yeah. You’ve got to call her something, haven’t you?”

“Why? Does she talk to you?”

She shook her head, a frown appearing and then disappearing again on her expressive face. “Not anymore. She used to be nattering on all the time when she first come round. Now you don’t hear a peep out of her.”

I pricked up my ears. “What sort of thing did she talk about?” I asked, trying to keep my tone casual.

“I don’t know, do I?” Cheryl said, looking severe and slightly affronted. “I don’t speak the language. She talked in Russian or Swedish or German or something, and I didn’t understand a word of it. Except when she went on about roses. I got that.”

Russian or Swedish or German. Or something. Quite a wide range. “So you see a lot of her?” I pursued, giving that one up for now.

Cheryl nodded. “Oh yeah. I see her every day, more or less. I think I’m on her wavelength.”

“And you’re not afraid of her? Even after what happened to Rich?”

“Nah. She wouldn’t hurt me. You get a feeling if you’re safe with someone, and I feel safe with her. She just stands there and watches me work—for ages, sometimes. I’m the only one who doesn’t freak out about her, so I reckon she’s more comfortable with me. Or maybe she just doesn’t like men.”

Cheryl paused and thought for a moment, staring at me with a forbidding seriousness.

“I ought to hate you,” she said. “Because you’re coming in to get rid of her. That’s almost like murder, isn’t it? Like she’s already dead, and you’re killing her again.”

There was a long enough break that I thought she’d finished. “Well, obviously I don’t see it like—”

“But the truth is, I think she’s really, really sad.”

She traced a line on the desk with her fingertip and frowned at it, her expressive face solemn, almost somber.

“I think you’d be doing her a favor.”

Jon Tiler was almost as reluctant to talk to me as Alice was—but Alice had reappeared by this time, and she hypocritically told him that Peele had insisted on everyone’s full cooperation. I was taking against Alice, which was something I’d have to watch. I didn’t like the way she threw Peele’s weight about.

In the interview room, Tiler was terse and monosyllabic. But then he’d been terse and monosyllabic in the workroom, too. Had he been at the Bonnington long? No. Did he like it there? Sort of. Had he seen the ghost? Yes. Often? Yes. Did it scare him? No.

I was only doing this for the sake of form. I felt like I already had the beginnings of a handle on the ghost—or at least an idea of how it had come to be here—so I probably didn’t need any additional insights from Tiler. It just goes against the grain with me to leave stones unturned. I guess I am the anally retentive Ghostbuster, after all.

So I stirred up the pot a little.

“Do you have any idea,” I asked him, “what ghosts really are?”

“No,” Tiler answered with something like a sneer. “That’s your thing, isn’t it? Not mine.”

“Most of the time they’re not the spirits of the dead but emotional recordings of the dead. Imprints that just persist in the places where a strong emotion was felt for reasons that we don’t understand.”

I watched him for a moment or two, and he watched a spot on the ceiling somewhere behind my left shoulder. His expression was a glum deadpan.

“So you see,” I said, “I’d normally expect to find evidence of some kind of strong emotion associated with this ghost’s appearance at the archive. Something intense enough to leave a psychic echo.” Pause for effect. Still nothing. “And the only strong emotions I’ve experienced here so far are yours.”

Tiler’s eyes widened and his stare jerked back to meet mine.

“What do you mean?” he yelped. “That’s not true. I didn’t show any emotion at all. I didn’t do anything!”

“You radiate hostility,” I said.

“I don’t!” He was indignant. “I don’t like all this stuff going on around me, that’s all. I like to do my job and just”—he groped for words—“be left to get on with it. This is nothing to do with me. I just want it sorted.”

“Well, that’s what I’m here for,” I said. “And the more I can find out about the ghost, the quicker I’ll be done. So for starters, why don’t you tell me about your encounters with it? When was the most recent?”

“On Monday. As soon as I came in.” Tiler was still truculent, but something in him had loosened up. He went on without being prompted. “I was down in the stacks, and I felt her. I mean, you know, I felt she was there. And I was a bit rattled because of what had happened to Rich, so I got out of there fast. She was coming toward me, and it got—it felt cold, suddenly. Really cold. I could see my breath in front of me. I don’t know if that was because of her, or if it was just . . .” his voice tailed off. “I got out fast,” he repeated glumly, and his gaze flicked down to the floor.

“What does the ghost look like?” I asked him.

He looked at me again, surprised.

“She doesn’t look like anything,” he said. “Her face has gone. The top half of it, anyway. There’s nothing there.”

“When Mr. Peele described the ghost to me, he said that it wore a veil . . .”

Tiler snorted. “It’s not a veil. It’s just red. All her face except for her mouth is just red. She looks like one of those people who talk on TV programs and they want to stay anonymous so they get their heads blurred out. It’s just a big red blob with her real face hidden behind it.”

“And the rest of the body?”

He thought about this for a moment. “There’s only the top half of her. She’s all white. Shiny. You can see through her. And she sort of gets fainter the farther down you go, so from here”—he gestured vaguely at his own torso—“you can’t see her anymore.”

“Clothes?”

He shrugged. “She’s got a hood on. And she’s all in white. She keeps fading out. You can’t see much.”

After a few more questions, I let Tiler go. He didn’t seem to be holding out on me, but all the same, it was still like drawing teeth.

And after that I went for a wander. Every cubic inch of the building had been turned into usable space, but it had obviously been done piecemeal, with no overall plan, and with a willingness to punch a new door through any wall that got in the way or to build a corridor around or a staircase over anything that couldn’t be made to move. And it seemed that the work was ongoing; on the attic level, the rooms were mostly empty shells, and there was some builders’ stuff piled up on the stairwell. The balcony railings had been removed to allow a block and tackle to be put in, and several palletloads of bricks had already been hauled up.

My tour of the building took about an hour and fetched me up back at the first-floor room where the Russian collection was stacked up. Rich met me there by prior arrangement and let me in again. “You can just slam the door behind you,” he said. “When you’re ready to go, I mean. It will lock automatically, and you won’t be able to get back in. Happy trails, partner.” He headed for the door. There was something I wanted to ask him about, but for a moment I couldn’t remember what it was. Then it came to me just before he disappeared.

“Rich,” I called. “Did the ghost ever talk to you?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No, mate. She never says a word to me.”

“Cheryl said it used to talk a lot. Then it stopped.”

Rich nodded. “That sounds right. A few people said they heard her talk in the first couple of weeks. Now she just goes at people with scissors. Better than bottling it up, isn’t it?”

He let the door swing to behind him, and I was alone. That was annoying. If I was right about there being some kind of link between the ghost and this room, this collection, then she’d probably have been speaking Russian, and Clitheroe could have confirmed that. But if God had meant us to climb the mountain in a day, he would have put in a chairlift.

I tried a few more tunes to lure the ghost; it didn’t bite. There was an obvious alternative, but I was reluctant to start on that just yet. Searching through all those thousands of cards and letters for an elusive emotional footprint wasn’t a very attractive prospect. And it wouldn’t even work unless I got a more vivid sense of the ghost itself first. As things stood, even if I found what I was looking for, I probably wouldn’t recognize it.

Sometime after four o’clock, Alice came looking for me.

“Jeffrey wants to know how far you’ve got,” she said, remaining in the doorway. She seemed to like doorways—or perhaps that was only when I was in the room.

“I’m still doing the groundwork,” I said.

“Which means?”

“I’m trying to find out what exactly the ghost is haunting.”

Alice cocked her head, innocently inquiring. “I thought she was haunting us,” she said. “Did I get that wrong?”

I nodded, playing straight man. “It’s not that simple,” I said. “Not usually. I think it may have come in with these”—waving my hand over the cards and letters on the table—“but even if it did, it’s not going to be easy to find out exactly where its fulcrum is. It’s obviously wandering around the building a lot—but the first floor is its favorite stamping ground. That means we can probably assume that it’s tied to something down here. I’m trying to find out—”

“So can I tell him you’ve made some actual progress?” Alice broke in. “Or just that you’re still looking?”

“I’ve met the ghost,” I answered, and I was gratified to see her narrowed eyes widen slightly. “That’s a useful start, but it was a very brief contact, and I’ve only got the barest beginnings of a sense of her. Like I said, it’s still early days.”

She stepped into the room and put six fifty-pound notes down onto the table in front of me, along with a receipt for me to sign and a pen for me to sign it with.

“Enjoy,” she said sourly. “No one can say you haven’t earned it.”

I called it a day a little after half past five. The ghost was still being coy, and the building was getting colder by the minute; the heating was evidently on a timer, even if the staff weren’t.

Alice escorted me back through the maze to the lobby, where Frank liberated my coat from the rail where he’d stowed it that morning. He handed Alice a couple of FedEx packages, and she stopped long enough to sign her name in the mail book. As I was transferring my whistle back into its rightful place, the others came past in a huddle. Cheryl paused in passing.

“It was my birthday on Saturday,” she said.

“Many happy returns.”

“Cheers. So I’m standing drinks. D’you want to come?”

It seemed churlish to refuse, so I said yes. It was only after that that Cheryl seemed to notice Alice, still signing for her packages at the other end of the counter.

“Sorry, Alice,” she said. “You’re welcome, too, if you want to come.”

Even I could hear the insincerity. “No, thanks,” said Alice, her face setting into an inexpressive blank. “I’m going to be tied up here for an hour yet. Have a good time.”