But I’d always timed my visits for when Jenna-Jane was away from the unit on one of her lecture tours, or scaring up funds from charities with loosely worded charters. Tonight, I knew from my moles on the inside, she was on-site; so tonight the only way to get to Rosie was to go through J-J.
And the first problem was getting to see her. The place was looking more like a fortress than ever, with an actual guard post now on the main doors where I had to state my business and then wait for authorisation to come down from on high. Then, as I walked along the hallways with their familiar smell of long-departed urine, I noticed that there were alarm buttons labelled with short alphanumeric strings. A notice alongside each one reminded all passersby that a failure to observe containment protocols would result in immediate dismissal, and that in the event of a containment breach floating security staff should converge on the site where the alarm was given while all other personnel went directly to their assigned assembly points. It all sounded like the worst of my memories of Butlin’s Skegness, only with slightly less razor wire.
Jenna-Jane was in the smaller of her two offices – the one that overlooked the open-plan work area of the unit the way a signalman’s hut overlooks the engine sidings.
As I walked up here I’d been mulling over how to phrase my request. Not too long ago, I’d just have been able to drop in on Rosie and say hi without any palaver: but then J-J had caught one of the visitors carrying out messages for Rosie and she’d tightened up the whole operation by a couple of notches. She had a lot of other prizewinning acts in her freak show now, but Rosie was the first and still the jewel in the crown: a ghost still extant on Earth after more than five hundred years. So J-J watched over all of Rosie’s inputs and outputs with a jealous eye which, like Rosie’s, never closed.
I knocked on the door, and J-J looked up from a thick sheaf of papers that she was working through. She gave me a smile – a dazzling, meaningless smile that said she was beside herself with delight to see me. It said that, but it lied through its all too visible teeth.
‘Felix,’ she said warmly, and she stood up and came around the desk. I tried to avoid the pressing of flesh but she wasn’t having any of that. She kissed me on the right cheek, and then on the left for good measure, Continental style. That meant I got a momentary glimpse through my sixth sense of the snake-pit of her mind. It was something I could really have done without right then.
Someone had told me once that J-J’s real name was Müller rather than Mulbridge and that she’d been born in the ruins of Essen while the Third Reich was still thrashing itself to pieces in its death throes. If that was true, she had the best imitation of a tweedily harmless, upper-middle-drawer-decayed-minor-aristocracy-but-let’s-not-talk-about-it English accent I’d ever heard. Like most things about Jenna-Jane, it was a feint that was designed to bring you in close enough for knife-work.
She hadn’t changed by a micrometre: still petite, and neat, and agelessly sweet. She had to be about sixty now, but her body seemed to have decided that mid-forties was a good look for her, and it had held on to it. Her hair was grey, but then it always had been: and on her it seemed less a sign of age than what you see when you scrape the paint off the side of a battleship. And like a battleship, her surface was bland and smooth and impenetrable. She affected a surgical white coat, but underneath it I saw jeans and a plaid shirt. J-J knew how to stand on ceremony when there was something to be gained from it: the rest of the time she was just good plain folks.
‘You never come to see us any more,’ she went on, gently reproachful. ‘It must be two years!’
She sat me down, in a way that was impossible to resist, and then went and sat back down again herself on the other side of the desk. She handled nuance like a ninja: the greeting had been friendly and personal, but once I was sitting down this was a formal visit too and she could appeal to the book – regretfully, full of apologies – whenever she had to.
‘I’ve dropped in a few times,’ I said, ‘but you’re never around.’
She nodded, still smiling. ‘Yes, I heard. I was beginning to wonder if you were avoiding me on purpose. But here you are.’
Yeah. Here I was.
‘So how’s it all going?’ I asked, on the grounds that ‘I need to talk to Rosie, so hello and goodbye’ might have seemed a little on the abrupt side.
Jenna-Jane shrugged modestly. ‘The unit’s still growing,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a fine faculty now. A lot of genuine high-fliers who’ve graduated from the European schools and come here to find out how it’s really done. I don’t think you’d recognise the names, because you’ve never been all that interested in the literature, but believe me when I say there are university proctors in Germany and America who spit when they hear my name.’
‘I believe you, J-J,’ I assured her, meaning it.
She made a sour face.
‘Please don’t use that nickname, Felix,’ she said. ‘You know how I feel about it. So yes, things here are excellent. It’s such a strong team now, we’ve got to the point where they won’t be needing me any more.’ Her eyes gleamed as she said this: even as a joke, she couldn’t quite get that one out without an edge to it. As if she’d ever let go of her little empire without a good sprinkling of blood and hair on the walls.
‘On the acquisitions side,’ she went on smoothly, ‘we’ve got three loup-garous – including one who’s able to possess and shape insect hosts. The identical-twin zombies from Edinburgh are with us now: that was quite a battle, but I was able to prove to the hospital board that we could offer them a higher standard of care. We can also chart their decay molecule by molecule with the CAT imagers and see how far it follows a parallel course in the two different cadavers.’
‘Unless the Dead Rights Bill gets through its third reading,’ I said. I couldn’t resist: it was too pat a straight line.
J-J didn’t go for the stick, though. She passed her hand through the air in front of her face, pushing the unwelcome topic effectively to the sidelines. ‘I know a lot of people in Westminster, Felix,’ she told me. ‘There’s no way the bill is going to pass. Not in this form, and not in this session. It would be chaos. Oh yes, eventually some measure of legal status will be accorded to the dead. There’s already talk of bringing me in as a consultant on the next bill, after this one hits the rocks.’
I almost laughed at that. Could we consult you on this sheep problem, Professor Wolf? Instead, I said, ‘So you think it’ll be voted out?’
‘Timed out,’ said J-J, with just a hint of malevolent satisfaction. ‘They’ve only set aside two days for the debate, and there are forty-seven amendments coming down from the Lords. The government won’t invoke the Parliament Act for something this contentious, so they’ll run out of time and shelve it until the winter session. And then the process will begin again with even less momentum. Trust me, this will run and run. And when they do finally agree some form of legislation, it will be drafted in a form that allows us to carry on with our work without fear of legal challenges. That, in fact, will be one of the primary desiderata of any act: the government doesn’t want anything to tie their hands at this point.’
‘Which point would that be, Jenna-Jane?’
‘The point where the dead have begun to rise in uncountable numbers, and when it’s starting to look as though the demons of Hell are herding them.’
I shrugged. It was a theory, like any other: I’d heard them all in my time. ‘I thought the demons went wherever they got a whiff of fresh food.’
‘I know what you think, Felix. We’ve discussed it on several occasions. You have a dangerous tendency – in my view – to underestimate the potential threat that the dead pose. In the past, that tendency was tempered by your professionalism: your ability to ignore all irrelevant avenues while you were working on a specific task. From what I hear, though, there’s been a certain . . . erosion of that quality in recent months.’