“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.”
Six
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
