“Fine,” I said, after a moment. She nodded curtly, her point established, and her lines drawn. I followed her out to the workroom, and the door closed on Peele, no doubt to his immense relief.
It wasn’t fine; it was thick, lumpy bullshit. But the cardinal fact hadn’t changed—I still needed the money.
Back in the workroom, I gave the Exorcism 101 speech again, with minor modifications, for the benefit of Rich and Cheryl, who ate it up, and Jon, who pretended I wasn’t happening.
“So I’ll be asking all of you to tell me what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced,” I wound up. “You, and any other colleagues who’ve been involved in all this. And I’ll start with what happened to you, Rich, because that’s obviously the most extreme incident and probably the one that will give me the best launch point for what I need to do. First off, though, I was wondering if someone could show me the Russian stuff that came through in August. Letters from émigrés, that kind of thing?”
Rich gave me a double thumbs-up. “We can do both things at the same time,” he said. “It’s me that’s cataloging all that stuff.”
“What about me?” Cheryl demanded, pretending to be hurt at being left out. “When are you gonna interview me?”
“Straight afterward,” I promised. “You’re second on my list.”
She brightened. “Go to hell, copper. I won’t talk.”
“I’ll make you talk,” I promised. I wondered if all conversations with Cheryl had this surreal edge.
Rich glanced at Alice as if for permission, and she made a gesture that was the hybrid offspring of a shrug and a nod. “Don’t take all day about it,” was all she said.
The building was even more of a maze than I’d thought. Our route to the storeroom where the Russian materials were being kept led us back down the rough-and-ready cement staircase, but then up another and through a fire door held shut by a spring hinge stiff enough to constitute a serious risk to outlying body parts. After a minute or so of similar twists and turns, I felt like a country mouse being given the runaround by a London cab driver.
“Is there a shortcut?” I asked, slightly out of breath.
“This is the shortcut,” Rich called out from up ahead of me. “See, we’re going to the new annex. The other way is back out through the entrance hall and around.”
He stopped and pointed in through an open door. Inside, I saw when I joined him, there was another open-plan space, a fair bit smaller than the workroom I’d already seen, and made more cramped still by half a dozen library trolleys parked along one wall. A carrot-haired man who looked to be still in his teens wheeled one of these trolleys past us, getting up a good turn of speed so that we had to stand aside smartly or be run down. In among some shelf units at the back of the room, two other figures, indistinct in the half gloom, were transferring books and boxes from shelf to trolley or vice versa, exuding an air of focused haste. They didn’t look up.
“SAs,” said Rich. “Services Assistants. The keepers of the Location Index. They’re the ones who collect all the stuff that’s been requested and take it up to the reading room—then put it back again afterward. It’s a bastard of a job. Will you want to talk to them, too?”
I shrugged. “Maybe later,” I said. I didn’t want to make this any more complicated than it already was. I was just looking for a clue as to where I should start fishing for the ghost—so that I didn’t waste my time sitting in the wrong room, on the wrong floor, while Peele was watching the meter and waiting for results.
We moved on, and it was clear that we were now in a different sort of space. The doors here were all steel-faced, and the temperature had dropped by more than a few degrees. I pointed that out to Rich, and he nodded. “British Standard 5454,” he said. “That’s what we work to. When you’re storing valuable documents, you want less than fifteen percent humidity and a temperature that’s kept as stable as you can get it within a range of fourteen to nineteen Celsius.”
“And the light?”
“Yeah, there are limits for that, too. Can’t remember what those are.”
Finally, Rich stopped in front of a door no different from any of the others, swiped with his ID card, and then unlocked it with one of the keys from his belt. He held the door open for me to enter. A sharp smell of must came out to greet us.
“Is this where it happened?” I asked him.
He shook his head vigorously. “The attack? Jesus, no. That was upstairs, in the workroom—where we just were. If it had happened while I was down here on my own, I would’ve shit myself.”
I went into the room. It was warehouse size, slaughterhouse cold. My eyes flicked from the mostly bare shelves around the walls to the collection of FedEx boxes piled up on the two tables and the floor. One box was open, and it seemed to be filled with old birthday cards. A spiral-bound reporter’s notebook sat open beside it, one page half filled with scribbled notes. On the other table there was what looked to be a laptop computer connected up to an external monitor and mouse.
I turned back to face Rich, who had followed me into the room.
“This is?” I asked.
“One of the new strong rooms. One we haven’t expanded into yet—so we use it for sorting and short-term storage. This”—he indicated it with a wave of his hand—“is the Russian collection. I’m about a third of the way through it.”
I took another look around, second thoughts often being best.
“Are both the laptop and the scribble pad yours?” I asked.
“Yeah. When you’re cataloging new stuff, you start by just jotting down everything that comes into your head. Then you decide what goes into the item description and what the catalog headers should be. Some people enter it all directly into the database, but I find it’s best to go through the two stages.”
“Do you mind if I have five minutes alone in here?” I asked him. “Maybe you could go and make yourself a cup of coffee, and then come back down.”
Rich seemed a little startled, but he rolled with it. “Sure,” he said. “I don’t drink coffee, though. Here.” He squatted beside the nearest table and reached under it. I tilted my head and noticed what I’d missed—a portable fridge, about the size of one of the courier boxes. He took two bottles of Lucozade isotonic out of it, handed one to me, and put the other into his jeans pocket.
“In case of emergency,” he said with a grin, “break glass. If you don’t tell BS 5454, I won’t.”
He went out and closed the door. Nice guy, I thought. One of nature’s gentlemen. But then again, the ghost had tried to part his hair about six inches too low. I was the Seventh Cavalry, as far as he was concerned.
Putting the bottle down on the edge of the table, I reached into the box and gingerly took a handful of whatever was in there. They were just what they’d looked like from the door—birthday cards in antiquated designs. The printed greetings were in English, but the writing inside was in a dense Cyrillic script that I knew from nothing.
I screwed my eyes tight shut and listened to the cards with my hands, but they weren’t talking. After a minute or so, I opened my eyes again and took a closer look at the boxes. There were about three dozen of them, and each of them could probably hold anything up to a couple of hundred documents. They wouldn’t all be cards, of course; letters and photographs could be a lot smaller, so the total might be that much higher.
Even if the ghost was anchored to something in this room, the chances of me finding that something on a quick pass like this were close enough to zero that it wasn’t a viable option. But if the ghost itself was here now or anywhere close by, then I ought to be able to get a trace of it.
I sat down on the floor and slid the tin whistle out of my belt. Unhurried, emptying my mind as much as I could of other thoughts, I played “The Bonny Swans” right through from start to finish. This wasn’t a cantrip; I wasn’t trying to snare the ghost or even to drive it out of cover. This was just one of the tunes I used to help me focus. My own thoughts flowed out of me, riding on the music, and took a little stroll around the room, taking in textures and sounds and smells, poking their tiny, irresponsible fingers into every nook and cranny.