And someone had raised a succubus to burn me out—an exotic and dangerous weapon, but one that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow with the police or anyone else, given what I did for a living. What had I done that was worth that kind of attention? Or what was I doing now?
Answers on a postcard. None of it made any sense at all, and the more you looked at it, the more it fell apart. Pretty much the only thing I was certain of was that I wasn’t going to be playing any tunes at the Bonnington until I had some answers.
I gave it up at last. Whatever power Bunhill Fields normally exerts on my highly suggestible mind, it wasn’t working right then. I was feeling as though my eyeballs had been scooped out, roughly polished with a sanding wheel, and then shoved back more or less into their right places. My head was full of gray cheese instead of brains. If I’d had brains, I would have gone back home to Pen’s, boarded up the window with yesterday’s Independent, and slept for twelve hours.
Gray cheese took me to the Bonnington instead.
Frank looked at me with grave concern. “You look rough,” he said as I dumped my coat down on the counter—and his face as he said it was slightly awestruck. “What happened to you?”
“You should see the other guy,” I said, falling back on cliché.
“Was he a professional wrestler?”
“No, he was a girl. Where’s Jeffrey?”
“I believe Mr. Peele is in his office. I’ll call him and tell him you’re—”
“I prefer to come as a surprise,” I said, and walked on toward the stairs. Frank could have stopped me, but he didn’t. I guess having been chewed up, spat out, and left for dead had some sort of meaning in his moral framework. Cheers, Frank. I owe you one.
I made a point of looking in at the workroom. Rich, Jon, and Cheryl and a couple of people I didn’t know all glanced up as I appeared in the doorway—glanced, and then kept looking.
“Mate, you should be in bed,” Rich said after a pause so heavy it wasn’t just pregnant but ready to break its waters and deliver.
“Yeah,” Cheryl agreed. “A hospital bed. You look like you picked your teeth with a chainsaw, man.”
Jon Tiler said nothing, but he suddenly seemed to be sitting very still. He’d been reaching for a pen; now both of his hands were flat on the desk, and he was just staring at my face. He looked unhappy. I opened a mental file drawer and dropped that look right into it.
“I used to juggle chainsaws,” I said conversationally. “It looks dangerous, but you just have to keep at it. Rich, have you got a pen and paper?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. He found the pen in his desk tidy and a sheet of scrap lying next to his printer. He pushed them across the desk to me. Taking the pen, I wrote down the symbols that the ghost had shown me in that remembered image—scrawled on the torn-out page of a book and held up to the inside of a car window. .
I reversed it and pushed it back across to Rich.
“That’s Russian?” I asked.
He stared at it, his eyes widening slightly. “Yeah,” he said.
“What does it mean?”
He looked up at me—a puzzled, searching look. “SOS,” he said. “It means ‘Help me.’”
“Thanks. That’s what I needed to know.”
I gave them all a nod and walked back out, then on down the hall to Peele’s office.
Peele was on the phone when I walked in, talking about productivity and different ways of defining it. I sat down opposite him and stared at him in silence as he went on. The stare and the silence did their job; he wasn’t looking directly at me, of course, but a good stare communicates itself by means other than sight. After less than a minute, he made a clumsy excuse and said that he’d call back. Then he hung up and shot me an exasperated microsecond glare.
“You’ve got a problem,” I said. “And I think it might be a different problem from the one you think you’ve got.”
“Mr. Castor!” he blurted. “That was the Joint Museums Trust! I was taking an important—I was engaged on”—words momentarily failed him, and he almost met my stare—“I don’t appreciate you coming in here unannounced and simply presuming on my time!”
“Well, I’m really sorry,” I said with nothing in my voice that could be read as sincerity. “I assumed you’d want an update on the ghost situation.”
If I thought that would stop his mouth, I was wrong. Peele was full of indignation, and it needed to find a vent.
“This isn’t proceeding as I expected,” he said, sounding near-terminally agitated. “Jon Tiler was in here yesterday morning, determined to file a formal complaint against you after the damage you caused on Tuesday night. I persuaded him not to, but it was a very unpleasant interview. I hope you have some positive progress to report.”
“No,” I said. “But I do have some negative progress to report—in other words, I’ve been able to rule a few things out. You see, I was operating under some mistaken assumptions about your ghost. Like that she had to be tied to the Russian collection in some way. But that’s not true, is it?”
Now Peele really did look at me—for the barest fraction of a second, then his gaze fell to his desktop again. “Isn’t it?” he asked, after a pause long enough to count to three in.
“No, it isn’t. She dates from a much later period—viz the present day—and that puts a whole new complexion on her being here. I’m looking for a different kind of explanation now.”
That was meant to sound vaguely threatening and maybe to sweat some additional information out of Peele, if there was anything there to be sweated. But as strategies go, it sort of blew up in my face. His lips set in a tight line. “Mr. Castor,” he demanded, “why are you looking for an explanation at all?”
I tried to parry that question rather than answer it. “I’m a professional,” I said, deadpan. “I don’t just come in and clean up. I have to understand the context for—”
Peele cut across me. “You made no mention of context when I took you on,” he pointed out coldly. “You promised to carry out a specific service, and now you’re making caveats that seem to me to have nothing to do with the matter in hand. I also have to ask, since you raise the issue of professional standards, whether your objectivity has been compromised in some way.”
It was my turn to look blank. “My objectivity?” I repeated. “Do you want to explain that?”
“Certainly. On every occasion up to now, when we’ve talked about ghosts, you have used the impersonal pronoun—‘it’—to refer to them. This has been consistent and at times almost aggressive—as though you felt a need to establish a point of some kind. Now, overnight, the ghost you’re meant to be exorcising for us here has become a ‘she.’ I have to ask why that is.”
Damn. Fairly caught. I could dodge the kick, but the stable door was already down—and I hadn’t even realized it until I saw the splinters.
“You’re an academic,” I said in a good imitation of offhand. “Words matter a lot to you; they’re part of your stock-in-trade. I don’t have the leisure to look for nuances like that. I just get the job done.”
“That, Mr. Castor,” Peele answered scathingly, “is what I should very much like to see.”
I leaned across the desk. The best defence is a good smack in the face. “Then work with me,” I snapped. “You can start by showing me your incident book again. If the ghost didn’t come in with the Russian stuff, then where did she come from? What else was happening back in early September that could explain her popping up here?”
Peele didn’t answer for a moment. It was clear that he was asking himself the same question and not getting any good answers.
“And finding this out will help you to complete the exorcism?” he demanded at last.
“Of course,” I said, not even flinching at the flat lie. I wasn’t about to explain that I could do the exorcism right there and then—probably while standing on my head and juggling three oranges.