He nodded curtly, his face saying louder than words that he really wasn’t interested in the traveling hopefully—only in the arrival. I ploughed on anyway. It would save time and tears later, assuming this wasn’t break point in itself.
“If you’ve ever thought about the act of exorcism at all,” I said, “you’ve probably thought of it as something that goes down in sort of the same way that weddings do. The priest, or the vicar, or whoever, says, ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife,’ and there you go; it’s done. By saying it, he makes it happen.”
“I’m not naive, Mr. Castor,” Peele interjected, in my opinion a little over-optimistically. “I’m sure that what you do is a very exacting discipline.”
“Well, it can be. But that’s really not the point I’m making. Sometimes I can just walk into a place, do the job, and walk out again. Mostly, though, it’s not that straightforward—or at least, it’s not that fast. I have to get a fix on the ghost—a sense of it. That comes first. Then, when I’ve got that sense really nailed down hard in my mind, I can call the ghost to me, and I can get rid of it. But there’s no telling how long that process will take. Exorcism isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. And if I’m going to do this job for you, I’m going to need to know right now that you won’t be drumming your fingers and looking for things to happen within an hour or a day. It will take as long as it takes.”
I waited for Peele to mull this over, but he changed the subject—I suppose as a delaying tactic while he weighed up what I’d just said. “And how much—”
“I charge a fixed price. Whether it takes me a day or a week or a month, you pay me a thousand pounds. Three hundred of that is up front.”
That “fixed price” stuff was outrageous crap, of course. I take the same approach to the prices I charge as I do to most other things, which is to say that I make it up as I go along. This time around, the main thing on my mind was the down payment; I needed some cash in hand, and three hundred was more or less the amount I needed to clear myself with Pen—plus a little danger money, since this ghost had shown that she liked to play rough.
But the opposition was stiffening. Peele didn’t like what he was hearing one bit.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Castor,” he said, his gaze making it as far as my lapels as he darted a quick glance at me, “but I’m not prepared to pay anything in advance for what seems to be such a precarious and ill-defined service. If you’re really saying that you could be here for—for as long as a month, disrupting our work, and that for all that time we’d still have to contend with the haunting, too . . . well, it’s just not acceptable. Not acceptable at all. I think I’d prefer you to work on the basis of payment by results. I think that’s the only kind of contract I’m prepared to enter into here.”
I blew out a loud breath, shook my head.
“Then I think we’re back to where we started,” I said, standing up and pushing my chair away from the desk. “I’ll let the professor know that you need a job done here, and she’ll get in touch with you at her convenience. Sorry I wasted your time.”
I headed for the door. It was only half bluff. What I’d told Peele about how I do the business was true enough, and it was also true that I needed the money now. If I’d set the bar too high, well, then that was too bad for me; but either way, he didn’t get to buy me on credit.
I got the door open, but he called out to me before I could walk through it. I turned on the threshold and looked back at him—indecisive, sullen, glaring at his desktop with bitter distaste, but obviously thinking that starting again with someone else would mean all the time he’d wasted already would just be sunk costs.
“Could it really take as long as a month?” he demanded.
“If it did, it would be a new world record. Most likely, I’ll run your ghost to ground inside of a couple of days and be out of your hair before you’ve had time to notice that I’m around. I’m not saying I’m slow, Mr. Peele—just that the work I do doesn’t proceed according to a fixed timetable.”
“Are there ways to make it proceed faster?”
That one set off a small carillon of alarm bells in my mind.
“Yes, there are,” I admitted. “But they’re not going to be my first options, because they’re—unpredictable.”
“Dangerous?”
“Potentially, yes. Dangerous.”
He nodded reluctantly. “Well, then. I presume you know your business, Mr. Castor. I think—I may have spoken too hastily before. Three hundred isn’t an unreasonable sum to ask for as a deposit. But if progress is slow, then perhaps we might consider using some of those other methods?”
“We can talk about that later,” I said firmly, wondering what I was letting myself in for here.
“Later,” Peele agreed. “Yes, very well. Perhaps you can come back at the end of the day and let me know how it’s all gone. Or tell Alice,” he amended, and he seemed to brighten at that second, better reflection. “And Alice can report back to me.”
I let it go. It was obvious I was going to have him breathing down my neck whatever I said. “Fine, I’ll do that. First, though, I’d like to talk to Rich Clitheroe about the incident where the ghost attacked him. And I’d also like to take a look at those Russian letters you were talking about—or rather, the room where you’re keeping them.”
“Certainly. Ah—I’ll have to get the money signed out of the safe, which means waiting until after lunch, when I do the financial review with Alice. But I hope you won’t wait until then to get under way?”
“Mr. Peele,” I assured him gravely, “I was under way as soon as I walked in the door.”
Peele didn’t go back into the workroom with me; he just picked up the phone and summoned Alice. I had to wonder if he was trying to distance himself from the decision to hire me—or was this just another aspect of his condition? Was he so uncomfortable around other people that he preferred to rule by proxy?
Peele broke the news that I’d be around for a while. Alice took it on the chin, but it was clear that she viewed this prospect with about as much enthusiasm as root-canal work. If I were sensitive about stuff like that, I could have got my feelings hurt. Before I let myself be led away, though, I decided to clear up one thing.
“The incident in which Rich Clitheroe was attacked,” I said, as Alice held the door open for me to walk on through. “You told me you weren’t present for that, right?”
“No.” Alice’s tone was exasperated. “That’s not what I said. I said I didn’t see the ghost. I saw what happened to Rich, but there wasn’t any ghost there. As far as I’m concerned, there never has been.”
“So you just saw the scissors—what? Levitate? Move themselves through the air?”
Alice shot a look at Peele before replying. He was staring at the desk, but seemed to be listening closely. I don’t know what cue she was looking for or what she got. “His hand twisted around,” she said. “The scissor blade scraped along his arm and then came up and grazed his face. You should be asking him about this, not me.”
“Yeah, well, I will ask him, of course. But I wanted to establish—”
Alice cut across my words, speaking past me to Peele. “Jeffrey,” she said. “If you give me a direct instruction to cooperate with this, then I’ll do it. If I’m free to refuse to be questioned, I’m going to refuse.”
There was a strained pause.
“Alice has strong feelings about this,” Peele said very quietly. He stared at his computer monitor as he said it, so the only clue I had that he was talking to me was that he referred to her in the third person.
“I can see,” I acknowledged.
“If you can work around her . . . it would probably be best. I’m sure everyone else will be happy to tell you what they know.”
I looked at Alice, who was glowering at me now, making no attempt to hide her resentment.