“All the key rings are the same, right? All of them handed down from archivist to archivist through the colonnades of time? You, Alice, and Jeffrey—everyone holding a full set, and nobody using more than half of them. That’s what you told me the first day I came here.”
“Yeah, that’s true, but—”
“Take a look inside,” I suggested. “Someone’s been using these two fairly recently.”
He pushed open the door, stepped over the threshold. I followed and turned on the light. Rich cast his gaze around the squalid little room, now carpeted with shards of glass and colder than ever because of the broken windows.
“Christ on a bike,” he said. Then he sniffed and winced at the acrid smell.
“You’re not telling me Tiler keeps the stuff down here?” he asked, his voice tight. “It smells like”—his voice faltered.
“Like what?”
“Like—I don’t know.”
I walked past him into the center of the room, turned to face him. His face was pale. “This is going to sound incredible,” I said. “Crazy, crazy story. Crazy and sick. A woman died here. Not accidentally. Murdered. Before that, she was kept here for a long time—days, maybe even weeks.”
Rich’s stare went from left to right, measuring. “But this is—” he said.
“Yeah. It’s a chunk of the Bonnington, hived off maybe forty or fifty years ago. Nobody even remembers it’s here or knows who owns it. It’s not part of the real world anymore; it’s virtual geography. Terra incognita.”
Rich’s face had gone beyond pale into ashen.
“I can’t believe someone died here,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“Not here, exactly. In the downstairs room.”
His eyes flicked left, toward the wooden paneling. An instant later, they flared with alarm and looked back toward me.
The handcuff isn’t really silver; it’s ordinary stainless steel with a silver coating. It was sold as a sex toy in Hamburg, but when I use it (not all that often, thank God), I use it as a knuckle-duster. I caught Rich on the point of the chin with it—a really satisfying punch that made an audible smack, hooked him an inch into the air, and made him jackknife from the hips so that he landed heavily on his back with an impact that knocked what was left of his breath out of him.
He tried to get up, but fell back.
“Yeah,” I said grimly. “Made you look.”
Twenty
RICH TRIED TO GET UP, BUT HE DIDN’T MAKE IT VERY far, because his body wouldn’t cooperate. He gawped up at me, blood trickling down his chin from where he’d bitten his lip when the handcuff impacted on his jaw.
“F-fuck!” he protested thickly, saliva frothing out to join the blood.
“Don’t get up, Rich,” I advised him, meaning it. “If you get up, I’m only going to knock you down again. You might end up breaking something.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring at me with eyes that were having to work at the moment just to focus.
“You’re frigging insane,” he bubbled.
“Yeah, Cheryl thinks so, too. But Cheryl’s no expert on sanity—not coming from that family. And Cheryl doesn’t know you like I do, does she, Rich?”
He tried again, and this time he made it into a sitting position, one arm raised protectively in case I hit him again, exploring his thickening lower lip gingerly with fingers that seemed to be shaking. He shot me another look, scared but angrily defiant. “I didn’t steal anything,” he said. “Tiler was all on his own. If you think I’m in on his bloody pilfering—”
I cut in. I didn’t have any patience for this. “Tiler doesn’t matter,” I snapped. “When I found out about his thieving, I thought it might be relevant in some way. I suppose I wanted it to be relevant, because I’d just come up empty-handed from the Russian collection, and I was desperate for anything that might point me in the right direction. Then Tiler whacked me in the face with an electric torch and threw me headfirst down a sodding stairwell, so I had something of a stake in him being guilty. But he isn’t. As far as I can tell, what he does is just a weird hobby. He loves old documents. I’ve been inside his head, so I know. He’s papered his bloody bedroom with them.
“No, I know you didn’t steal anything, Rich. But you did kill somebody. How many nineteenth-century parish record books is that worth, karmically speaking?”
Rich had been gathering his strength for a big effort. He rolled to his left and made a break for the door. I’d seen it coming; I got my foot in between his legs and rammed him squarely in the back with my shoulder, adding my own momentum to his. He went down more heavily this time with a grunt of pain.
I hauled him to his feet while he was still limp and groggy from the impact, dragged him across the room, and shoved him hard against the paneled wall. He started to slump toward the floor again, but I kept him more or less upright by leaning my shoulder against him, at the same time helping myself to his keys. There was only one Chubb in the bunch. I put it into the lock and turned. The click was loud in the bare, silent room.
Hooking the door open with my foot, I took two handfuls of his shirt, around about chest height, and half pushed, half slid him onto the stairwell. He mewled in panic. “No! No! Not down there!” He fought against me, which was a bad decision on his part, because we were both off balance. Breaking free from my grip, he tumbled arse over tip down the stairs.
I lunged out and found the wall, which just saved me from falling down after him. I took a moment to get my breath back and slammed the upper door securely behind us before following him down at my leisure. So long as we had Rich’s keys, we could get out anytime we liked, and in the meantime, we wouldn’t be disturbed.
Rich had fetched up on his side, sprawled against the bottom edge of the mattress. Standing over him, I took a rectangular card out of my pocket, opened my fingers, and let it fall. It fluttered down to land next to his head. He stared at it woozily. The card read ICOE 7405 818.
“In case of emergency,” I translated. “You said it to me last Monday when you offered me a bottle of Lucozade from the fridge. Then you started to say it again the next day, but you stopped yourself, and I filled in the gap for you. It had slipped my mind, to be honest. I was still thinking ICOE must be somebody’s nickname or something. But then you offered me your hip flask today at the wedding, and it clicked.”
Rich levered his upper body groggily off the floor. He shook his head, said something that was impossible to make out through his painful, hitching breath.
“Not much in the way of hard evidence?” I interpreted. “No, you’re probably right, there. But you knew where to look, didn’t you, Rich? When I said there was a downstairs room, your eyes went right to the door. Only the door’s camouflaged against that foul wood paneling, so there was no way you could have known it was there. No clean way, anyway.”
I was warming up now—and I was also goading him to answer me. I wanted the story. I wanted to hear out of his own mouth what had been done down here.
“So that’s strike one and strike two, yeah? Then there’s the fact that you’re shit-hot at Eastern European languages, and the ghost speaks in Russian. Only you never heard her speak, did you, Rich? Everybody else in the place did, but you—the only guy who could have definitively identified the language and told us all what she was talking about—you were stricken magically deaf.
“But strike four is my favorite. That was when you sneaked into Peele’s office and tore a page out of the incident book. I was straining my brain trying to think about why that was done—what anyone could possibly have to gain from it. And I finally came up with an answer. I finally realized what it was that was missing.
“This girl died sometime around the tenth of September—maybe a day or so before, give or take, but certainly not after. And the first sighting of the ghost was on Tuesday the thirteenth. But it wasn’t the first sighting that had been ripped out of the book. That was still there, written out in agonizing detail. Because the ghost couldn’t be hidden, obviously—everyone was seeing her by then. So what was being hidden was something else, something that our mystery guest didn’t want to have associated with the ghost, if questions were asked later.”