With obvious reluctance, Peele opened his desk drawer and took out the ledger that I’d seen a few days previously. He started leafing through the pages himself, but I reached over and blocked him by putting a hand on the cover and closing the book again.
“You’d better let me,” I said. “I may not know what I’m looking for, but I’ve got more chance of recognizing it if I see it for myself.”
Peele handed me the book with a look on his face that said he was keen to get rid of it—that he was sick of the entire subject of the haunting. Funny. For me, now that someone was apparently trying to kill me because of it, it was starting to develop a visceral fascination.
The book fell open at Tuesday, September 13, which I took to be just a happy coincidence. That was the date of the first sighting, I remembered. And I also remembered how long the entry had looked when I’d last seen it. It looked even longer now, and Peele’s tiny handwriting even more impenetrable. To put off the moment, I flicked ahead through the pages to the most recent entry, which of course was only two days old; it concerned Jon Tiler’s complaint about the indoor tornado I’d whipped up when I’d tried to use Rich’s blood to raise the ghost.
Going back through November, there seemed to be an entry for every day—most of them fairly terse. “Richard Clitheroe saw the ghost in stack room 3.” “Farhat Zaheer saw the ghost in the first-floor corridor.” Nothing in October after the first week, though; there was a lull, Peele had said. There was a lull and then when she came back, she didn’t talk anymore.
But as I continued to flick through the pages, I saw the pattern start up again: dozens of sightings, scarcely a day without at least something, going all the way back through September to the thirteenth. Okay, not everything that was going on was ghost-related. On September 30, there’d been a leak in the women’s toilet: “Petra Gleeson slipped in the water but seems not to have been injured.” And on September 21, someone named Gordon Batty had had “another migraine headache.”
I was so lost in this fascinating saga of everyday life among archiving folk that when I got to the dense block of text for September 13, I carried on turning the pages. That was when I realized why the book had fallen open at that particular page in the first place—it was because the previous one had been torn out.
I reversed the book and showed the gap to Peele.
“Did you make a blot?” I asked.
He stared in astonishment at the mismatched dates and then at me.
“That’s impossible,” he protested, bemused. “I’d never take a page out of the incident book. It’s an official record. It’s audited every year by the JMT. I don’t know how this could possibly have happened . . .”
Better try to rule out the obvious, in any case. I pulled the book open in the center of a signature and showed Peele that they were stitched in already folded. “Sometimes with a book that’s stitched like this, you tear a page out from the back to write a note or something, and then its partner falls out from the front a while later. Could that have happened here?”
“Of course not,” he insisted a little shrilly. “I would never do that. Not from the incident book. It would show up the next time—”
“—the next time the auditors did their rounds. It’s okay, Mr. Peele, I’m not accusing you of anything. I just wanted to make sure we weren’t dealing with a random accident. Assuming we’re not, the other working hypothesis is that someone came in here and tore the page out on purpose, to remove some reference that he or she didn’t want to become common knowledge.”
“But if I wrote it up in the book, it was already common knowledge!”
“Then perhaps what they wanted to avoid was someone drawing a link between two things that happened around the same time.”
“Such as?”
“Such as I have to say I don’t have the faintest idea.” I looked at the point where the incident book’s dry narrative line was broken. The last entry that was present in full was for July 29; August must have been a slow month. Then the dates resumed with a brief entry for September 12 (Gordon Batty’s first migraine, chronologically speaking), followed by the epic details of September 13.
“Something in August,” I prompted Peele. “Or it could have been around the start of September. Maybe even just a few days before the ghost was first seen. What else was happening then? Does anything stick in your mind?”
“August is slow,” Peele said, ruminating. “The school visits stop altogether, so all we do is collate, repair, catalog new acquisitions . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t remember anything. Nothing that stands out.”
“Well, do you mind if I question your staff again?”
He flared up again. “Yes, Mr. Castor. To be honest, I do. Why would that be necessary?”
“Like I said—to establish a context for the haunting.”
Peele thought for a while, then shook his head firmly.
“No. I’m sorry, but no. I don’t want any further disruption to the running of the archive. If you can do your job without getting in the way of the people who actually work here, then do it. If you can’t, then give me back the deposit I’ve already paid you, and I’ll bring in somebody who can do it.”
“The deposit is nonrefundable, Mr. Peele.”
“Now see here, Castor—”
“Those were the terms you agreed to. But I don’t think the issue here is whether or not you get your money back. You’ve got a dead woman in your archive, and she didn’t die all that long ago. You need to know why she’s here and why she’s so full of rage and misery that she’s attacking the living. If you don’t get answers to those questions, exorcising her could be just the start of your problems.”
“I don’t understand the logic of that statement.”
“Then think about it. It’ll come to you.”
I left him fulminating. There seemed no point in staying. In fact, the longer I hung around, the bigger the risk that he might actually talk himself into throwing me out. And I wasn’t ready to go, not yet.
I stuck my head into the workroom. “Peele wants someone to open doors for me,” I said. “Any volunteers?” This lying thing—once you got into it, it was really a fantastic labor-saving device.
Rich opened his mouth to speak, but Cheryl got there first. “I’ll go,” she said. “Sign the keys over, Rich.” Rich closed his mouth again and shrugged. There was a brief transaction in which Cheryl swapped her signature for a turn with the big key ring. Then we headed for the door.
I walked on down the corridor, and Cheryl fell in beside me. “The Russian room?” she asked.
“No. The attic.”
“The attic? But there’s nothing up there.”
“I know. My brother says nothing can be a real cool hand.”
Two nights ago, dressed in opaque shadows, the attic had looked numinous and threatening. By daylight, it just looked empty.
We went to the end room, and Cheryl followed me inside. I pointed to the cupboard.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
Cheryl shook her head. “I haven’t got a clue,” she confessed. “Why?”
“I’m just curious. Would there be a key to that cupboard on Rich’s ring?”
Cheryl flashed me a wicked grin. “Hey, smutty innuendo aside, if it’s got a hole, Rich has got a key.”
She went down on one knee and squinted at the lock on the cupboard door. Then she nodded, satisfied, and started to sort through the heavy ring of keys. “Silverline 276,” she said. “It’s the same as the ones downstairs. Here you go.”
She slid a key into the lock, turned it, and pulled the door open with a flourish.
The cupboard was empty.
“Maybe it’s got a false bottom,” said Cheryl without much conviction. She bent over to examine it, and I found myself staring at hers—which was indisputably real. My body reacted of its own accord; blood rushed to my face and to other outlying parts. Arousal exploded in me like a signal flare.