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
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
