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
“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
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.
