The Devil You Know (11 page)

“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.

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.