“I didn’t have too many options,” I said. “I knew something odd was going on, but I couldn’t prove it. I needed to pass this on to a friend of mine who I thought might have a better chance of nailing it all down for me.”
“And?”
“It’s Jon Tiler,” I said.
Rich just laughed. “No way,” he protested.
“Way,” I insisted, deadpan. “He uses a wireless media pad to get around the fact that he can’t use his own keyboard on your machine.”
“What, a media pad? You’re joking.” Rich was still incredulous. “That’s just a remote for DVDs and stuff. It doesn’t even have full alphanumerics.”
“He’s not adding in any data or amending it. Only deleting.”
He absorbed this in silence, a number of expressions following each other across his face. When he finally spoke, it was terse and to the point.
“The bastard!”
“You get it?”
“Of course I get it. If he deletes my records before I upload, there’s no system entry to cross-check against. Nobody would ever know there was anything missing.”
“And that’s probably what tempted him to swipe so many items in such a short space of time.”
“
“A couple of thousand, give or take.”
Rich winced. “That’s taking the piss,” he muttered. Then another thought visibly occurred to him; two thoughts, as it turned out. “But how’s he getting the stuff out of the archive? And what’s any of this got to do with the ghost?”
“I’m going to duck that second question for now. As to the first one, an ounce of bare-arsed cheek is worth a ton and a half of cunning. He’s just taking it up to the attic and dropping it out of the window onto the flat roof. Then I presume he comes around sometime in the night and collects it. All the strong rooms are on that side of the building, so there are no windows below the attic that overlook that area.”
“Jesus.” Rich’s expression was torn between annoyance and admiration. “I thought you were going to say he had a hollow wooden leg or something. Frank’s going to be sick. When Jeffrey starts looking for someone to blame, he’s going to start right at the front desk.”
“Wait, there’s more. I said the Russian collection tempted him to up his game, but he’s been doing this for three years. Whenever anything new comes into the archive, he skims a little something off the top. When did Tiler start work at the Bonnington, by the way?”
Rich laughed hollowly. “2002,” he said. “Fairly late in the year, I think, because they timed his appointment to start with the school year.” He shook his head. “Son of a bitch.”
I stood up, hands in pockets, and he looked up at me quizzically.
“Feel a burning desire for justice?” I asked.
He blew out his cheeks and thought about it. “Not really,” he said. “You’ll tell Jeffrey, right? And it’ll all get sorted. I mean, I’m pissed off, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not really any of my business. Not especially.”
“I don’t work for Peele anymore. I was sacked, remember? Yeah, I could go straight to the police—but to be honest, there’s another question I want answered first. There’s something I’d like to show you. And I’d like you to see it cold. Okay?”
It took him a while to make up his mind, but in the end he nodded and got up. I led the way out of the bar, back across the concourse, and out onto the street. We crossed the road, Rich still trailing me by about three steps. It was obvious where we were heading for.
“There’s no way we can go inside at this time of night,” Rich said, sounding anxious. “The alarms will be on.”
“Only the strong room doors are alarmed. But we’re not going into the archive, anyway. Not technically speaking.”
We turned onto Churchway. “You never explained about the ghost,” Rich said.
“You’re right. I didn’t. That’s what I want to show you.”
We stopped at the other door—the door that looked like it didn’t lead anywhere much at all, let alone to one of the gates of Hell.
“What’s this?” Rich asked.
I climbed the three steps and pointed to the locks in their cutaway box. “This is why I asked you to bring your keys,” I told him.
He looked confused and a little scared. “But—my keys are for the archive.”
“Take a good look through the bunch. You’re looking for one that has a picture of a bird on the fob and a big, squared-off barrel. And another that says Schlage. Take your time. They’ll be there.”
Rich hauled out the big key ring and started sorting through it. In the dim light, it must have been hard for him to see what any of the keys looked like. It took him close to two minutes, but eventually he found them: first the Falcon, then the Schlage.
“Try them in these locks,” I said.
He slid the Falcon in first, turned it. We both heard the click. Then he tried the Schlage. No sound this time, but the door, loose in its frame, slid inward an inch or so under its own weight.
“I don’t get it,” said Rich, turning his head to stare at me with a guarded, questioning look.
“All the key rings are the same, right? All of them handed down from archivist to archivist through the colonnades of time? You, Alice, and Jeffrey—everyone holding a full set, and nobody using more than half of them. That’s what you told me the first day I came here.”
“Yeah, that’s true, but—”
“Take a look inside,” I suggested. “Someone’s been using these two fairly recently.”
He pushed open the door, stepped over the threshold. I followed and turned on the light. Rich cast his gaze around the squalid little room, now carpeted with shards of glass and colder than ever because of the broken windows.
“Christ on a bike,” he said. Then he sniffed and winced at the acrid smell.
“You’re not telling me Tiler keeps the stuff down here?” he asked, his voice tight. “It smells like”—his voice faltered.
“Like what?”
“Like—I don’t know.”
I walked past him into the center of the room, turned to face him. His face was pale. “This is going to sound incredible,” I said. “Crazy, crazy story. Crazy and sick. A woman died here. Not accidentally. Murdered. Before that, she was kept here for a long time—days, maybe even weeks.”
Rich’s stare went from left to right, measuring. “But this is—” he said.
“Yeah. It’s a chunk of the Bonnington, hived off maybe forty or fifty years ago. Nobody even remembers it’s here or knows who owns it. It’s not part of the real world anymore; it’s virtual geography. Terra incognita.”
Rich’s face had gone beyond pale into ashen.
“I can’t believe someone died here,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“Not here, exactly. In the downstairs room.”
His eyes flicked left, toward the wooden paneling. An instant later, they flared with alarm and looked back toward me.
The handcuff isn’t really silver; it’s ordinary stainless steel with a silver coating. It was sold as a sex toy in Hamburg, but when I use it (not all that often, thank God), I use it as a knuckle-duster. I caught Rich on the point of the chin with it—a really satisfying punch that made an audible smack, hooked him an inch into the air, and made him jackknife from the hips so that he landed heavily on his back with an impact that knocked what was left of his breath out of him.
He tried to get up, but fell back.
“Yeah,” I said grimly. “Made you look.”
