“Thank you, Alice,” Peele said over my head.
Alice read that right, but she didn’t take the hint. “I think I should probably stay,” she said. “I’ll need to know how we’re going forward with this.”
“I’ll discuss the situation with Mr. Castor and then let you know,” said Peele, sounding almost petulant.
I counted five seconds before the door closed behind my back, not with a bang but with a whimper, or rather a complaining whoof of displaced air. There was something a little off-kilter in that whole exchange, but I didn’t know either of them well enough to tell what it was.
“I’m pleased you reconsidered,” Peele went on, sounding if anything a bit irritated. “But I confess, after our conversation last night, I was expecting to hear from Professor Mulbridge.”
My own fault. I’d talked up option B too much and made myself look like the stand-in instead of the main event.
“Well, that’s still a possible way forward, Mr. Peele,” I allowed. “But I found myself with some free time after all, and I thought time was a factor here. If you’re prepared to wait a little while, I can certainly refer your problem to the professor. I should be seeing her next week. Or the week after, maybe.”
He grimaced. As I’d hoped, he swallowed this suggestion with a definite lack of relish. “No,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “We couldn’t possibly wait that long. After the attack on Richard, I think the staff are looking to me to act—to resolve this problem. If I can’t, then . . . well, morale will suffer; it will certainly suffer. I really can’t have it said that I didn’t act. And the archive is hosting a public function on Sunday. No, it needs to be settled. The whole business needs to be settled.”
I couldn’t tell what was going on in Peele’s mind, but he’d become quite animated now. He risked another glance at me, no longer than the first one. “This is a crucial time for us in many ways, Mr. Castor,” he said. “I have a meeting in Bilbao tomorrow—at the Guggenheim Museum. A very important meeting for the archive and for me. I need to know that matters here are in train—that I’m not going to come back to chaos and recriminations. If you’re free to start now, today, then I think that’s what we should do.”
The tone of his voice was merely fretful and peevish, but the fear underneath seemed genuine. He was out of his depth, he expected dire consequences if he screwed up, and he wanted an expert to take the whole thing off his hands and make it go away.
Well, here I was. I just wished to Christ he’d look at me or acknowledge me in some way. This relentless cold shoulder reminded me disturbingly of a passive-aggressive girlfriend I’d once had. Was he autistic?
Peele seemed to guess what was going through my mind.
“You’re probably finding my body language a little disturbing,” he said. “Perhaps you’re even wondering if I have a psychological or neurological condition of some kind.”
“No, I wasn’t—”
“The answer is that I do. I’m hyperlexic. It’s a condition similar in some ways to high-functioning autism.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Perhaps not. If you’re mentally classifying me as somebody with a debilitating disease, then you don’t see. Not at all. I could read at the age of two and write just after my third birthday. I can also memorize complex texts after a single reading, even if I’m not familiar with the language they’re written in. Hyperlexia is a gift, Mr. Castor, not a curse. It does, though, make me react in unusual ways to other people’s social signals. Eye contact in particular is very uncomfortable for me. I’m sorry if you’re finding this interview disorienting or unpleasant as a result.”
“It’s fine,” I said. Embarrassed and slightly thrown, I overcompensated and spoke just to fill the silence. “In fact, it fills a hole in the jigsaw. I can understand now why you laid so much emphasis on the way the ghost stares at you. That’s probably more upsetting for you than for the rest of the staff here.”
Peele nodded. “Very perceptive,” he said without warmth. “Another aspect of my condition is that I find most metaphors . . . opaque. Confusing. Such as your reference to me as a jigsaw puzzle, for example. I hear it, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. If you could avoid metaphors when you’re speaking to me, I’d be very grateful.”
“Right.” I decided the best bet was to pull the discussion back onto a strictly business basis. “Let me just check the timetable with you again,” I said. “The sightings started in September, is that right?”
“I believe so, yes. At least, that’s the first time anything was said to me about it, and so that’s the first entry in the incident book. I didn’t see her myself for a few weeks after that.”
“Do you have an exact date? For the first sighting, I mean?”
“Of course.” Peele seemed slightly affronted at the question. He opened his desk drawer and took out a double-width ledger with a marbled hardboard cover, put it down on the blotter in front of him, and started to leaf through it. I’d assumed that “incident book” was a quaint, archaic title for a database file, but no, here was a real book with real writing in it. Maybe working in a place like this gave you an exaggerated respect for tradition.
“Tuesday, September the thirteenth,” he said. He reversed the book and offered it to me. “You can read the entry, if you like.”
I glanced down at the page. The entry for September 13 ran to most of a side, and Peele’s handwriting was very small and very dense. “No, that’s fine,” I assured him. “It’s unlikely I’ll need to refer to it in detail. In any case, the attack on Mr. Clitheroe—Rich?—happened a lot more recently?”
“Yes.” He turned the book back around to face himself and consulted it again. “Last Friday. The twenty-fifth.”
I pondered this for a moment. Active versus passive is one of the ways I tend to classify ghosts—with passive making up more than 95 percent of the total. The dead keep themselves to themselves, most of the time; they scare us just by being there, rather than by actually going out of their way to harm us. But what was even rarer than a vicious ghost was one that had started out docile and then turned.
Well, let that lie for now. What I needed more than anything was a place to start from.
“Go back to September,” I said. “Did you bring in any big acquisitions in the days or weeks before that first sighting? What else was happening in late August or early September? What else that was new?”
Peele frowned, visibly rummaging through the interior archives of his memory. “Nothing that I can think of,” he said, slowly. But then he looked up—as far as my chin, anyway—as a mild inspiration struck him. “Except for the White Russian materials. I believe they came in August, although we were expecting them as far back as June.”
My ears pricked up. White Russians? A female ghost who wore a monastic hood and a white gown? It sounded like a link worth clicking on.
“Go on,” I prompted him.
Peele shrugged. “A collection of documents,” he said. “Quite extensive, but it’s hard to tell how much of it is going to be of any use. They’re letters, mostly, from Russian émigrés living in London at the turn of the century and just after. We were very pleased to get them because the LMA—the London Metropolitan Archive, over in Islington—was showing an interest, too.”
“Where are they kept?” I asked.
“They’re still in one of the storerooms on the first floor. Until they’re fully referenced and indexed, they won’t be added to the rest of the collection.”
“I’d like to go down there and see them later, if that’s okay.”
“Later?” Peele seemed perturbed by this concept. “Is there some reason why you can’t do the exorcism straight away?”
And here we were again. But he didn’t know, of course, how closely he was echoing his senior archivist. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, there is. Mr. Peele, let me explain to you how this is going to work—what you’ll get if you decide to hire me. I’d like to go through it in a bit of detail, because it’s important to me that you understand what’s likely to happen. Is that all right?”