The Devil You Know (16 page)

“I’m not a key-holder,” she said. “Sorry. I’m only a clerical assistant. I don’t have any access to the collection at all.”

I thanked her anyway, and we introduced ourselves. She, it turned out, was Faz, the part-timer who had the thankless task of helping out Jon Tiler. What did she think about that? “He’s a little bit strange,” she said cautiously. “Not very forthcoming, you know? Hard to read. But we don’t have that much to say to one another, really. I just get on with it, and he gets on with it, and when he doesn’t need me anymore—or when I can get him to admit it—I go and do something else. Like this. A change is as good as a rest.”

I remembered that Rich had listed Faz as being there when the ghost attacked him, and I asked her about that. She was very happy to talk about the ghost, but with everyone else crowding around, she hadn’t seen very much of the drama.

“I’ve seen her in the stacks, though,” she said with a little more enthusiasm. “Three times. Once very early on, and then twice last week—two days running. I’m in the sweepstakes, but I’ll need to pick up the pace a bit to be in with a chance. Elaine’s seen her six times, and Andy’s on eleven.”

I asked her the same questions I’d asked the archivists, about what the ghost looked like and what impression she’d got of it. Faz hit the same beats as everyone else, more or less, but she had a few ideas of her own, too.

“She’s young,” she said judiciously. “And I think she’s pretty, only you can’t see because she’s got that red misty stuff in front of her face. She just looks as though she’d have pretty features—I suppose because she’s got such a nice, neat little chin. I thought she might be in her wedding dress at first, because she’s all in white, but a wedding dress doesn’t have a hood—and anyway, her hair’s all wild. You’d do your hair up on your wedding day, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you mean, wild?” I asked, curious. This was a new slant. My own view of the ghost, from across the street and in the dark, hadn’t been clear enough for details like that.

“Like she’s been standing on a hill, and it’s been blown about a bit.” Faz thought about this. “Only she’s wearing a hood, so obviously it’s not that. But you know what I mean. Like she’s just woken up, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Did you ever hear her speak?”

Faz looked a little distressed. “Yeah,” she said, unhappily. “I did the first time. She just kept saying ‘roses.’ Going on and on about roses. And she held out her hand to me. It was like she was begging. She’s different now. Quieter. But I don’t think she had a happy life, poor thing.”

I changed the subject. Emotional outpourings about ghosts make me uncomfortable.

“What’s in the boxes?” I asked, pointing. “New acquisitions?”

Faz glanced down as if she’d forgotten the makeshift ramparts that had been piled up around her.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s bunting, I think.”

“Bunting?”

“And glasses, and cutlery, and stuff. For the reception on Sunday. Cheryl’s mum is getting married again.”

“So I hear,” I said. “I’m lucky to be here at a time of such joy and laughter.”

Faz looked sidelong at me to make sure I was being sarcastic, then grinned conspiratorially. “It doesn’t get any better,” she said in a low voice that wasn’t meant to carry. “Maybe it will when Mr. Peele goes off to work for the Gug. Maybe Rich Clitheroe will take over. I reckon he’d be a bit more human.”

“I heard Alice was the front-runner.”

Faz made a sour face.

“That’ll be it for me, then,” she said. “Enough is enough.”

I sat up in the workroom with my feet up on Tiler’s desk and waited for the meeting to break up. While I was waiting, I reached out with my mind and tried to get another whiff of the ghost—again with no results. I pondered that paradox without wringing any sense out of it; a ghost that had done the things that this one had ought to have left a stronger trail and be a hell of a lot easier to find.

Just before eleven, Cheryl ambled into the room. Her frankly lovely face lit up when she saw me. “Yo, Ghostbuster,” she called, pointing at me with both hands.

“Yo, Cheryl.”

She stood over me, made a comic business out of squaring up to me.

“I’m on Sylvie’s side,” she said. “You’ll have to take both of us on.”

“Necromantic troilism. That sounds like it might be fun.”

“I’ll smack you,” she warned, grinning all over her face.

“S&M, too? It gets better.”

The mild flirtation had to stop there, as everyone else filed in through the door—Rich, Tiler, Alice, and several other people I hadn’t met yet.

“That’s my desk!” Tiler protested indignantly. “Get your feet off it!”

I made a “mean you no harm” gesture and stood. He took possession with a warning glare.

“Alice,” I said, “I need to get back into the strong room where the Russian collection is being sorted.”

“Rich will take you,” she said, barely sparing me a glance. “I’ve got a lot on today. Assuming the job isn’t finished by the end of the day, you’d better come up and tell me what you’ve done and how it’s going. When Mr. Peele comes in tomorrow, he’ll want to know where things stand.”

Which was masterfully understated, I thought.

“You reckon that’s what it is, then?” Rich asked as he collected his keys. Cheryl waved good-bye with a cheeky grin. I waved back, but with professional gravitas. “That the ghost came in with that Russian stuff?”

“It’s the most likely scenario, yeah,” I said. “The ghost moves around a lot, but the biggest cluster of sightings is down on the first floor, which is in the right ballpark. It made its first appearance shortly after the Russian collection came in here, and it dresses in what you could loosely call a Russian style. I’m not ruling anything out, but that’s where I’m starting today, anyway.”

“Fair enough,” said Rich.

We walked up hill and down dale until we reached our destination, where Rich unlocked the door.

“There’s plenty of Lucozade in the fridge,” he said. “In case of emergency”—he paused and shrugged.

“—break glass,” I finished.

“Exactly.”

“Any vodka?”

He looked a question at me.

“More authentic,” I explained.

Rich grinned. “I’ll have to try that one on Jeffrey.”

I pulled up a chair. The massive task in front of me filled me with inertia. I glanced desultorily around the stuff that was already lying on the table, and I remembered what Cheryl had said about retroconversion. “Why the notebook?” I asked Rich, pointing. “Can’t you just enter everything up directly into the computer?”

He shook his head emphatically. “Some people do, but it’s a mug’s game. Better to make notes by hand first, until you know what you’re dealing with. Going through a load of database entries that you’ve already keyed in to change one piddling detail on all of them—I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Couldn’t you get someone else to do that? A catalog editor, maybe?”

Rich looked at me as though he suspected I might be taking the piss. “If I want Cheryl to stick her boot in my face, I’ll just ask her to,” he said. “Anyway, the records are stored in your own personal area while they’re being written up and messed about with. They don’t go to the general-access catalog until they’ve been signed off and approved by an A2—a senior archivist.” He scowled momentarily, probably at the injustices of the power structure and his own position in it. But he managed to keep his tone light when he spoke. “So what’s the program for today?”

My turn to scowl. “I’m going to go through every one of these letters and envelopes and birthday cards and laundry lists until I find one—or maybe more than one—that has some kind of psychic echo of your ghost. Then I’m going to use that to sharpen up the trace I’ve already got.”

Rich looked interested. “Like a sniffer dog?”

“That’s not very flattering, but yeah, like a sniffer dog—working from an object and following the trail from that object to someone who it used to belong to.”

“Cool. Is it worth watching?”

I gave a slightly sour laugh. “How many items are there in these boxes?”

“Er . . . four or five thousand. Probably more. We’re not that sure.”

“I leave you to imagine the thrilling and slightly depraved spectacle of me stroking and fondling every last one of them.”

“I’ll see you later, then.”

“Sure.”

He turned and left. I pulled the first box over and got started.

The spoor I get from touching an object isn’t the same as the instant hot news flash I get from touching a living person. It’s more subtle and less focused, and to be honest, it’s a whole lot less likely to be there at all. Think how many things you touch in the course of a day and how few of them mean anything to you. Now if someone happened to pick up a hammer, say, and used it to stave your skull in, it’s likely that the explosive charge of his anger and your agony would stay there in the wood or the vulcanized rubber of the hammer’s handle. Then, when someone like me comes along and touches the handle—bang. The charge goes off. I feel your pain, as the saying goes.

But most of the things you touch just don’t carry that same weight of significance—and to make matters worse, the same object will pass through other hands after yours. The older the thing you’re dealing with, the muddier and more smeared-out the psychic trail. And then, just for gravy, while an exorcist is trying to read the thing, his own emotions are adding yet another overlay to what’s already there. All in all, it’s like trying to take a fingerprint off a melting ice cube.

But in the right conditions, it’s something I’m pretty damn good at.

I transferred the contents of the box onto the desk and spread them out more or less evenly. Then I passed my left hand slowly over them, palm downward, as though my spread fingers were the steel loops at the business ends of five small metal detectors. I took my time over it, letting my hand wander backward and forward across the sprawled treasure trove of old letters and cards. Slowly a sense formed in my mind: a three-dimensional web, its vertical axis being time, of vague and formless feelings, bleached out and blended together almost to the point of illegibility; a tasteless soup of memory and emotion.

When I had that sense firmly in my mind, I brought my right hand into play. While the left hand still hovered, the right moved quickly, lightly touching first one sheet of paper and then another, tapping and jabbing into the stack at the points that looked most promising.

It’s not rocket science. I’d encountered the ghost twice now, and it had touched my mind both times, leaving an incomplete and fuzzy impression there. I was looking for something in this mass of documents that would match that impression so that I could complete and sharpen it. When I had a psychic fix on the ghost that was vivid enough and whole enough, I could take out my whistle and finish the job; the impression I form and hold in my mind while I play is the burden of the cantrip that I weave, and music is the medium that expresses it.

After maybe ten or fifteen minutes of this, I was more or less certain that there was nothing doing, so I carefully packed the contents of the first box away again and hauled a second box up onto the table. Once again, I unpacked and spread the old documents across the space in front of me and began to read them.

That was how I went on through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. At a steady pace, and with my own emotions carefully held in neutral, refusing to be hurried or frustrated—it’s hard enough anyway without raising that kind of static.

I lost track of time, not because of the endless repetition but because the impressions I was taking from the old papers, faint as they were, exerted a sort of hypnotic pull of their own. Floating in that fuzzy palimpsest, I found it hard to stay anchored in the chilly afternoon in November that had been my starting point. It was still there, and I was still there, but my awareness of it was dulled. Gradually, I stopped hearing the gurgling of pipes and the opening and closing of distant doors. I was somewhere else, somewhere outside the normal flow.

Just once I thought I had something; the image of a weeping woman came through to me very clearly when I touched a particular photograph. She was young, and she was heartbroken—but her face was intact, her hair was ash blonde, and most of all, she wasn’t here. This was just an afterimage, with no sense of presence behind it. The photo was of a street, presumably in the Eastern Bloc somewhere—a residential street in a small town, drab and anonymous and more or less timeless.

Half roused out of my trance by the effort of conscious thought, I was suddenly aware of the sound of dozens of shrill, piping voices all talking over each other and the vibrations under my feet of a beast with sixty or so short but serviceable legs. I pulled myself together—pulled myself out of the psychic web I’d been weaving and back into my own flesh—and rubbed my eyes. Then, as the noises got louder, I stepped to the door and looked out. The corridor was alive with children, all in blue blazers with red badges on the pockets, and all clutching crumpled sheets of paper in their hands. They seemed to be working in pairs and sticking very closely together, as though this was some kind of three-legged race that worked on an honor system. “That’s not a plaster molding!” one little blonde girl was shouting indignantly at the boy next to her, who had a shell-shocked air. “That’s just where they put the fire extinguisher! We’ve still got to find a plaster molding!”

They ebbed and flowed along the corridor, staring intently at walls, floor, ceiling; swept around a corner; and were gone, trailing a few stragglers as any stampede will. In the distance I heard Jon Tiler’s voice shouting, “No, stay on this floor! Stay on this floor! I’ll tell you when you can go up the stairs!” He sounded only a half inch away from hysteria.

One of the kids had dropped his sheet of paper, so I picked it up and examined it.
THE
BONNINGTON
ARCHIVE
ARCHITECTURAL
TREASURE
HUNT
, it said in a font that declared aggressively, “This is fun you’re having now—have some fun, damn you.” Underneath there was a list of architectural items, with the playful challenge
HOW
MANY
CAN
YOU
FIND?
DADO
RAIL
,
CEILING
ROSE
,
GABLE
,
WINDOW
BAY
, and so on. Next to each item was a box to tick. The first item, already ticked, was MY
PARTNER
.