vent.
“This isn’t proceeding as I expected,” he said, sounding near-terminally agitated. “Jon Tiler was in here yesterday morning, determined to file a formal complaint against you after the damage you caused on Tuesday night. I persuaded him not to, but it was a very unpleasant interview. I hope you have some positive progress to report.”
“No,” I said. “But I do have some
Now Peele really did look at me—for the barest fraction of a second, then his gaze fell to his desktop again. “Isn’t it?” he asked, after a pause long enough to count to three in.
“No, it isn’t. She dates from a much later period—viz the present day—and that puts a whole new complexion on her being here. I’m looking for a different kind of explanation now.”
That was meant to sound vaguely threatening and maybe to sweat some additional information out of Peele, if there was anything there to be sweated. But as strategies go, it sort of blew up in my face. His lips set in a tight line. “Mr. Castor,” he demanded, “why are you looking for an explanation at all?”
I tried to parry that question rather than answer it. “I’m a professional,” I said, deadpan. “I don’t just come in and clean up. I have to understand the context for—”
Peele cut across me. “You made no mention of context when I took you on,” he pointed out coldly. “You promised to carry out a specific service, and now you’re making caveats that seem to me to have nothing to do with the matter in hand. I also have to ask, since you raise the issue of professional standards, whether your objectivity has been compromised in some way.”
It was my turn to look blank. “My objectivity?” I repeated. “Do you want to explain that?”
“Certainly. On every occasion up to now, when we’ve talked about ghosts, you have used the impersonal pronoun—‘it’—to refer to them. This has been consistent and at times almost aggressive—as though you felt a need to establish a point of some kind. Now, overnight, the ghost you’re meant to be exorcising for us here has become a ‘she.’ I have to ask why that is.”
Damn. Fairly caught. I could dodge the kick, but the stable door was already down—and I hadn’t even realized it until I saw the splinters.
“You’re an academic,” I said in a good imitation of offhand. “Words matter a lot to you; they’re part of your stock-in-trade. I don’t have the leisure to look for nuances like that. I just get the job done.”
“That, Mr. Castor,” Peele answered scathingly, “is what I should very much like to see.”
I leaned across the desk. The best defence is a good smack in the face. “Then work with me,” I snapped. “You can start by showing me your incident book again. If the ghost didn’t come in with the Russian stuff, then where did she come from? What else was happening back in early September that could explain her popping up here?”
Peele didn’t answer for a moment. It was clear that he was asking himself the same question and not getting any good answers.
“And finding this out will help you to complete the exorcism?” he demanded at last.
“Of course,” I said, not even flinching at the flat lie. I wasn’t about to explain that I could do the exorcism right there and then—probably while standing on my head and juggling three oranges.
With obvious reluctance, Peele opened his desk drawer and took out the ledger that I’d seen a few days previously. He started leafing through the pages himself, but I reached over and blocked him by putting a hand on the cover and closing the book again.
“You’d better let me,” I said. “I may not know what I’m looking for, but I’ve got more chance of recognizing it if I see it for myself.”
Peele handed me the book with a look on his face that said he was keen to get rid of it—that he was sick of the entire subject of the haunting. Funny. For me, now that someone was apparently trying to kill me because of it, it was starting to develop a visceral fascination.
The book fell open at Tuesday, September 13, which I took to be just a happy coincidence. That was the date of the first sighting, I remembered. And I also remembered how long the entry had looked when I’d last seen it. It looked even longer now, and Peele’s tiny handwriting even more impenetrable. To put off the moment, I flicked ahead through the pages to the most recent entry, which of course was only two days old; it concerned Jon Tiler’s complaint about the indoor tornado I’d whipped up when I’d tried to use Rich’s blood to raise the ghost.
Going back through November, there seemed to be an entry for every day—most of them fairly terse. “Richard Clitheroe saw the ghost in stack room 3.” “Farhat Zaheer saw the ghost in the first-floor corridor.” Nothing in October after the first week, though; there was a lull, Peele had said. There was a lull and then when she came back, she didn’t talk anymore.
But as I continued to flick through the pages, I saw the pattern start up again: dozens of sightings, scarcely a day without at least something, going all the way back through September to the thirteenth. Okay, not everything that was going on was ghost-related. On September 30, there’d been a leak in the women’s toilet: “Petra Gleeson slipped in the water but seems not to have been injured.” And on September 21, someone named Gordon Batty had had “another migraine headache.”
I was so lost in this fascinating saga of everyday life among archiving folk that when I got to the dense block of text for September 13, I carried on turning the pages. That was when I realized why the book had fallen open at that particular page in the first place—it was because the previous one had been torn out.
I reversed the book and showed the gap to Peele.
“Did you make a blot?” I asked.
He stared in astonishment at the mismatched dates and then at me.
“That’s impossible,” he protested, bemused. “I’d never take a page out of the incident book. It’s an official record. It’s audited every year by the JMT. I don’t know how this could possibly have happened . . .”
Better try to rule out the obvious, in any case. I pulled the book open in the center of a signature and showed Peele that they were stitched in already folded. “Sometimes with a book that’s stitched like this, you tear a page out from the back to write a note or something, and then its partner falls out from the front a while later. Could that have happened here?”
“Of course not,” he insisted a little shrilly. “I would never do that. Not from the incident book. It would show up the next time—”
“—the next time the auditors did their rounds. It’s okay, Mr. Peele, I’m not accusing you of anything. I just wanted to make sure we weren’t dealing with a random accident. Assuming we’re not, the other working hypothesis is that someone came in here and tore the page out on purpose, to remove some reference that he or she didn’t want to become common knowledge.”
“But if I wrote it up in the book, it was
“Then perhaps what they wanted to avoid was someone drawing a link between two things that happened around the same time.”
“Such as?”
“Such as I have to say I don’t have the faintest idea.” I looked at the point where the incident book’s dry narrative line was broken. The last entry that was present in full was for July 29; August must have been a slow month. Then the dates resumed with a brief entry for September 12 (Gordon Batty’s first migraine, chronologically speaking), followed by the epic details of September 13.
“Something in August,” I prompted Peele. “Or it could have been around the start of September. Maybe even just a few days before the ghost was first seen. What else was happening then? Does anything stick in your mind?”
“August is slow,” Peele said, ruminating. “The school visits stop altogether, so all we do is collate, repair, catalog new acquisitions . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t remember anything. Nothing that stands out.”
“Well, do you mind if I question your staff again?”
He flared up again. “Yes, Mr. Castor. To be honest, I do. Why would that be necessary?”
“Like I said—to establish a context for the haunting.”
Peele thought for a while, then shook his head firmly.
“No. I’m sorry, but no. I don’t want any further disruption to the running of the archive. If you can do your job without getting in the way of the people who actually work here, then do it. If you can’t, then give me back the
