The Devil You Know (13 page)

“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.”

RICH
AND
JON
WERE
ALREADY
WAITING
OUT
ON the street, and they fell into step with us. Jon didn’t react to my being there, but I didn’t imagine he was thrilled at the prospect.

We went to a free house on Tonbridge Street that didn’t seem to know quite what its freedom was for, at least if the choice of beers was anything to go by. I opted for a pint of Spitfire, which shone out from among the otherwise lackluster options.

Cheryl got the drinks in while Rich, Jon, and I found a table. It wasn’t hard; the after-work crowd were just starting to trickle in, only sluggishly drawn to the plastic gilt and the sandwich menu, and completely indifferent to the two ranks of fruit machines giving their synchronized salutes off in the far corner.

“What do you think of the Bonnington?” Rich asked with a sardonic grin.

I think he was hoping for an extreme response—one that he could savor. I temporized. “Well, it’s an office,” I said. “The more you see of them, the more they come to look alike.”

“Have you ever worked in one?” Tiler asked pointedly.

“I’ve always done what I do now,” I said, glossing over the fact that for the past year and a half, I hadn’t been working anywhere. “So apart from the odd vacation job back when I was a student, no. But I’ve been called into a fair few.”

“Well, I’ve seen loads,” said Rich. “But I’ve never seen anything like this place.”

“It’s a bit of a swamp of fear and loathing,” I allowed. “What’s with Alice? Is she always like that?”

He raised his eyebrows. “No. She’s always been a bit of a bitch, but now she’s fallen out with Jeffrey, hasn’t she? She probably hasn’t had breakfast in bed all week.”

“So she and Peele are knocking boots?”

The quaint euphemism made Rich grin and Tiler purse his lips. “Yeah,” Rich said. “Exactly. But only because Jeffrey is the CA. If they made a new post of Executive Big Bastard over the Chief Administrator, Alice would roll up her mattress and move on down the corridor. Whoever’s in the boss’s chair, there are some women who’ll always be under the desk bobbing for apples in his crotch.”

This was said with a certain amount of bitterness. Alice was younger than Rich, I realized. But he was her junior in the pecking order. No telling what sort of hatchets were buried there, or how shallowly.

“What did Peele and Alice fall out about?” I asked, trying to stay with the subject without responding directly to what he’d said. I thought he might be wrong about Alice. I didn’t like her, but she didn’t seem like the sort of person who’d give a pole dance in exchange for a pole position.

“I don’t think this is something we should be talking about,” Tiler said a little prissily. “It’s just gossip, anyway. No one even knows if they—”

“About you,” Rich interrupted, as if he was surprised that it needed saying. “You and the ghost. Jeffrey was all in favor of getting someone in to deal with it back when it first turned up. But Alice dug her heels in—said we were all just hallucinating, and there was nothing there. God, she was smug back in October, when the sightings stopped. But then they started up again, and I got this.” He touched his bandaged face. “And Jeffrey said right, we’ll have to deal with it now. But Alice still said no. And in the end, he went ahead and got you in without even asking her.”

“That must have been upsetting for her,” I allowed.

Rich nodded vigorously, looking as if he was enjoying the memory. “Yeah, you could say that. I mean, basically, she rules the roost while Peele hides in his office. And if he gets this Bilbao job he’s going for, she’s tipped for the big chair. So for him to disagree with her . . . well, it made her look stupid in front of the rest of us. Especially since he did it just by calling you up out of the blue, rather than by telling her to her face that she was wrong. He can only stand up to her behind her back, you see.”

I remembered that Peele had mentioned Bilbao to me—something about a trip that he was about to take out there. I asked Rich what that was all about.

“He’s been greasing up to the Guggenheim,” said Rich with absolute scorn. “If he’s an art historian, I’m the archbishop of Canterbury. But he loans himself out to them for lectures, and he’s really cosy with the trustees there now. So they’ve called him over for a little chat tomorrow, which he’s hoping is really a recruitment interview. And so is Alice, because then she walks into Peele’s job.”

“I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” said Jon.

“I do,” Rich replied, bleakly deadpan. “It’s always looked like a racing certainty from where I’m—”