“Hello there,” said the man who’d been on the phone before. “You must be Castor.” He was about my age or slightly older—midthirties, free-falling toward the big four-oh. He had a fading tan, made more uneven by freckles, and light brown hair that was as wild as if he’d just woken up. He was dressed down, to put it politely: torn jeans, a Damageplan T-shirt, and flop-top trainers. But the bundle of keys he carried at his belt was as big as Alice’s own. On his left cheek, there was a square surgical dressing.
He gave me an affable grin and held out his hand. I shook it and read a certain tension behind the smile—tension and perhaps expectation. He wasn’t sure how to take me yet, but he had hopes that I could live up to my billing. Of course, this was the guy who had the most reason to want the ghost cleared out of here.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Clitheroe,” I said. Behind me, the woman whistled appreciatively and then hummed the opening bars of the X-Files theme tune. Clitheroe laughed.
“It’s just Rich,” he said. “You knew because of the bandage, right? I mean, that wasn’t some sort of—emanations from the ectoplasm—kind of thing?”
“Who you gonna call?” the woman drawled. “Gho-o-ostbusters!”
I turned to face her, and Rich made the introduction on cue. “This is Cheryl. Cheryl Telemaque—our IT specialist.” Cheryl was very compact, very striking, and very dark-skinned—the shade of brown that can legitimately be called black. She looked to be in her early twenties, and her taste in clothes clearly ran to rhinestone-studded Von Dutch tops and a weight of chunky jewelry that skirted the glittery borders of bling.
“Which one are you?” she demanded with a cheerfully piss-taking grin. “The nerdy one, the cute one, or the anally retentive one?”
“I’m amazed you have to ask,” I said. Again, I shook hands. Her grip was firm and strong, and I got an instantaneous flash of warmth and amusement and mischief—Cheryl was a real live wire, clearly. Exact voltage yet to be determined.
“Do you have to use pentagrams and candles and stuff?” she asked me eagerly.
“Not usually. A lot of that palaver is just for window dressing. I skip the candles and pass the benefits on to the customer.”
“And this is Jon Tiler,” said Rich. I turned again. Rich’s arm was thrown out to indicate the other man—the one who’d followed me with a cold-eyed stare when I walked past earlier. The youngest of the three, I guessed, and the least prepossessing physically—he was five six in height, overweight by about forty pounds or so, and his flushed face was replete with burst blood vessels. He wore a short-sleeve shirt with some kind of floral design on it in shades of orange and pink and green—as if he was dressed for jungle operations in a fruit salad.
“Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. He gave me a curt nod, but he didn’t take the hand, and he didn’t speak.
“Jon teaches all the little kiddies,” said Cheryl, in a tone that—though jokey—seemed slightly loaded.
“I’m the interpretation officer,” said Jon with a sullen emphasis.
The soft answer turneth away a whole heap of wrath and makes people take you for a pliable idiot into the bargain. “Interpreting what, exactly?” I asked.
“The collection,” Jon said. “People come in. I do sessions for them. And it’s not just kids, Cheryl. We lay on plenty of programming for adults, too.”
“Sorry, Jon,” said Cheryl, casting her gaze down like a chidden schoolgirl.
Rich jumped into the pause that followed before it could get awkward. “We’ve got a remit from the Education Department,” he said. “They’re one of our funding streams, and they set us targets. We’re supposed to run one-day courses for kids in National Curriculum stages two, three, and four, and outreach sessions for adult learners. Alice oversees, Jon delivers. With help from a couple of the part-timers.”
Jon went back to what he’d been doing, which was photocopying pages from a book on an oversized and slightly antiquated printer/copier. He turned his back on me fairly pointedly, and I wondered what it was about me he objected to so strongly. A possible answer suggested itself at once, and I made a mental note to check it out when I got the chance—assuming that I was still on the job after my interview with Peele.
There was still no sign of Alice, so I decided there was no harm in starting to collate a bit of information.
“Rich,” I said, “if you don’t mind talking about it, how did you come to get hurt?”
Cheryl jumped in before he could answer. “I’ve got the film rights,” she said cheerfully. “He signed them over to me on a beer mat, so you’re too late.”
Rich grinned, a little sheepishly. “It was really weird. I was just wrapping up for the night, right? Three-quarters of an hour late, as per usual.”
“Who else was around to see this?”
He thought about that for a moment. “Everyone,” he said. “Cheryl. Jon. Alice. Farhat must have been around, too, because Friday’s the day when she comes in. She’s one of Jon’s assistants.”
“Alice?” I repeated. “Alice saw what happened?”
“Oh yeah.” He gave a short laugh. “It was hard to miss. Everyone saw it—and heard it, too. Cheryl reckons I screamed like a—”
“Mr. Castor,” said Alice. “Would you like to come through?”
Quite an impressive display of ninja stealth. She was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, and Rich tailed off when he saw her. For a moment I thought of asking her to clarify the mystery: she said she wasn’t there; Rich said she was. But it might come across badly to bring it out in public—like a challenge or a taunt. It was probably better to let that one keep for now. “Well, I look forward to hearing the whole story,” I said blandly. “Go over it in your mind; the more detail you can give me, the better. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“Sure, man,” said Rich.
Nodding to the pair of them, I joined Alice and she led the way down the corridor, around another odd bend. The doors here were open, all but one, and some even had windows onto the corridor. At the same time there was a subtle change in the background feel of the place, like the silence when a fridge cuts out, making you aware for the first time that you were hearing a sound. I suspected that we’d just passed into the new annex.
Just beyond the bend in the corridor there were two doors. One was tersely labeled SENIOR ARCHIVIST, and the other had Peele’s name on it, above the emblazoned words CHIEF ADMINISTRATOR.
“He’s very busy,” Alice said, making it sound almost like an accusation. “Please keep this as short as you can.” She knocked on the door, then walked in.
The name plaque on Peele’s door may have been impressive, but his office was barely wide enough to fit his desk into. You’d have thought a man with that big a title could have finagled himself a bit more elbow room.
Peele himself was sitting not exactly behind the desk—because this was a corner room with some odd angles to it, and the desk was against a wall—but in as commanding a position as logistics allowed. He looked up as I came in and closed a window on his computer’s desktop. Probably Minesweeper, judging by how hastily and jerkily he did it.
The man who swiveled his chair toward me was in his late forties; tall and cadaverous in build, with a great ruddy hawk bill of a nose spoiling what would otherwise have been the handsome and ascetic face of a Methodist minister. He had red worry-marks on either side of his nose, but he wasn’t wearing spectacles. His thinning hair was brown grizzled with gray, and his suit, which was dark blue, shimmered with a faint and incongruous two-tone effect.
I say he swiveled his chair toward me. Actually, he only made it through a few degrees of arc, and when he stopped, he was still only three-quarters on to me. His gaze made contact with mine for all of a second, then darted back down to the desk.
“Please sit down, Mr. Castor,” he said. He waved toward the other chair, which had been positioned so far away from his own that it was only just inside the room. I took it. Alice stayed standing.