The Devil You Know (12 page)

“I was shit-scared, mate, I don’t mind saying. I shouted out something. ‘Fuck,’ or something like that. ‘Look what’s fucking happening.’ Cheryl came running over to help me, but the scissor blades were pulling me around by my own thumb—up and down and all over the place. I must have looked like Peter Sellers in that movie where he’s trying not to do a Nazi salute.

“The scissors were hacking at my body and my face, and the only way I could protect myself was to turn with them and keep ducking out of the way. I barged into Cheryl, and she went over on the floor. Christ knows where Jon and Alice were. Farhat just kept screaming and screaming, which was a sod of a lot of use. Then I got the idea of banging my hand against the edge of the desk. It took about five or six goes, but in the end I got my thumb free, and the scissors just fell to the floor. Cheryl was thinking more clearly than I was—she trapped them with her foot in case they got up again.

“I looked across at Cheryl. I was going to say something like, ‘Bloody hell, that was intense.’ But then I saw she was looking at my face, so I put my hand up and touched my cheek. And it was wet. There was blood pouring down out of this cut. Spattering all over the worksheet and the desk, all over everything.

“I think I fainted for a few seconds. The next thing I remember, I was sitting down again and Peele—Jeffrey—was in the room. Bit of a rarity in itself, that—like a visit from royalty. Everyone was shouting, arguing about what to do. Alice said she was going to call for an ambulance, but I said I was okay and I was going home. I’d deal with the cut myself. Jeffrey wasn’t happy about that because he thought there might be some sort of insurance angle to all this shit, but I more or less said bollocks to that and got out of there. I was shaking like a leaf and I felt sick—like I might really throw up. I just had to get out.

“I almost didn’t come back in on the Monday. The whole thing really shook me up. But this is my job, for fuck’s sake. What am I going to do, pull a sickie because I’m scared of ghosts?”

Rich took another belt of Lucozade, grimaced.

“Warm,” he explained, without much conviction, putting the bottle down on the table and shoving it away from him.

I didn’t say anything for a moment or two. What he’d said made some things easier to get a handle on, but it made others even murkier than they’d been before.

“You’re right-handed?” I asked him at last. It wasn’t a question, really. He’d been holding the phone in his right hand when I’d walked past the workroom earlier.

“Yeah. So?”

“But you were holding the scissors in your left hand, because it was your left cheek that got slashed.”

He looked at me, obviously impressed.

“You’re good at this, aren’t you? Yeah, that was what pissed me off more than anything, to be honest. I was using my left hand because my right one already had a big thick dressing on it from where I’d trapped it in the desk drawer a few weeks earlier. It was just starting to get better, and then I got my face opened up. Someone’s really got it in for me.”

“The desk drawer. Was that the ghost, again, or—”

Rich laughed sardonically.

“No, that was just me. It’s not like I need any help to mutilate myself. I’ve got a name for accidental self-immolation. It’s a good job I’m the bloody first-aid man.” He hesitated, nonplussed. “Mind you—it would have been around about the right time. Maybe it
was
her. I thought it was just me being cack-handed.”

I turned my attention back to the boxes on the table.

“Have you been working on these ever since August?” I asked.

He followed my gaze and blew out his cheeks. “On and off, yeah,” he answered, sounding a little defensive. “I’ve got other stuff going on as well, obviously. There’s a huge amount of material there, and it’s never been sorted. It was in a private collection somewhere over in Bishopsgate. Well, that’s what Jeffrey likes to say, anyway. But I was in on the whole deal, so I can translate that into English for you—he means it was stuck under someone’s bed next to the pisspot.”

“You were in on the deal?”

“Yeah, I found the stuff, and I acted as broker. I wasn’t allowed to claim a finder’s fee because I’m on salary here—you can only pay a fee when someone from outside has brought something to you. But I acted as a go-between and a translator, anyway. It made a change from routine. And as a reward I get to catalog the whole damn collection myself because I’m the only one here who can speak Russian.”

“Was that why the Bonnington hired you?” I asked him. “As a language expert?”

“I suppose it made a difference—but it was the classical education that was my unique selling point, not the Russian and Czech. The archive has got a load of old deeds and certificates written in medieval Latin.” Rich picked up one of the birthday cards, opened it, and read the message inside. “To be honest, I don’t mind doing this stuff, because I like to give myself a linguistic booster shot every now and then to make sure I don’t get too rusty. Normally I do it with a foreign holiday, but this is cheaper.”

“Is there a story attached to this collection?” I hazarded. “Or to how you got your hands on it?”

He looked blank and shrugged. “No, we just put in a bid for it and got it. But there’s no scandal or murder or anything, if that’s what you mean. Not that I heard about.”

“And you haven’t come across anything sensational or unusual in the documents themselves?”

By way of answer, Rich read aloud from the card he was still holding. “‘To Auntie Khaicha, from Peter and Sonia. With all our love and thanks. We hope to see you again before the baby arrives, God willing, and to hear news from our dear cousin.’”

He let it fall back into the box.

“That’s one of the racier ones,” he said resignedly.

Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. It was after midday when Rich and I got back up to the workroom. The archivists had all clocked off for lunch, leaving a note for Rich that they’d be at the Costella Café on Euston Road. He invited me along, but I wasn’t going to lose this opportunity to have the place to myself.

“Could you leave me your keys?” I asked him, thinking of the locked fire door.

He hesitated, and various thoughts passed visibly across his face. In the end, he shook his head. “I can’t,” he explained with a certain amount of embarrassment. “There’s only the three of us who are key-holders—me, Alice, and Peele himself. It’s a sacred trust sort of thing; they practically make you swear an oath. We’re supposed to keep them on us all the time. We can lend them out to the other people who work here, but there’s a form for it, and they’ve got to be timed out and timed back. If Alice sees you with my set, she’ll go for me like a bloody pit bull.”

“Is each set different, then?” I asked, looking down at the hefty collection of ironmongery. I wasn’t trying to get around him, I was just curious, because the keys were of so many different sizes and varieties. I take a keen interest in keys and locks—they’re somewhere between a hobby and an obsession with me.

Rich shook his head, following my gaze and still looking a little awkward—as though he’d disliked having to genuflect to the rules. “No, they’re all the same. And to be honest, we only ever use about half of them. Less than half. I bet some of the locks that these things open don’t even exist anymore—they just get added to, and nobody ever remembers to take anything off the ring.” He shrugged. “But there’s only three sets—or four, if you count the master set down in security. So it’s not like there’d be any doubt about it if I lent you mine. I’m sorry, Felix—if there’s anywhere you need to get into, Frank’s probably your man.”

“Yeah, no problem,” I assured him.

It occurred to me that Peele might not have joined his troopers for lunch, so I wandered along and knocked on his door. There was no answer, so I tried the handle. The door was locked. Alice’s door was open, though, and her office—neat, clean, monastically bare—was unoccupied.

Okay, so I wouldn’t be able to get back to the room where the Russian stuff was sitting. But the ghost had manifested in the workroom, too, so it was probably worth whistling up a tune in there.

In the end I went through several old favorites, but without getting anything in response. If the ghost was still there, I couldn’t feel it anymore.

Rich, Cheryl, and Jon got back from lunch dead on one, and Cheryl’s eyes lit up when she saw me. “You gonna do me now?” she demanded.

“Absolutely,” I said. “That’s what I’m sitting here waiting for.”

“You gonna use a drippy tap and a rubber truncheon?”

“I’m on a budget. You’ll just have to smack yourself around the face while I ask the questions.”

For the sake of privacy, Rich unlocked a room for us on the main corridor opposite the workroom. Cheryl sat on the edge of a table with her legs swinging, and I prepared to play one half of the nice-cop, nasty-cop double act. But she got her question in first.

“What if ghosts started to exorcise real people?” she demanded.

I was momentarily floored. “Sorry?” I asked.

“I was just thinking. If they started to fight back, they’d start with you, wouldn’t they? They’d take out the blokes who could do them some harm. Then they’d have the rest of us at their mercy.” She warmed to her theme. “You should probably train up an apprentice, like. And then when you die, the apprentice can track down the ghosts that did you in and get revenge for you.”

“Are you volunteering?” I asked.

Cheryl laughed. “I could do it,” she said. “I quite fancy it, to be honest. Can you do it as an evening class?”

“Correspondence course only. By Ouija board.”

She made a face. “Har har har.”

“How long have you been working here?” I asked her.

“Cheryl Telemaque. Catalog editor, first class. Mainframe log-in number thirty-three.”

“How long?”

She rolled her eyes. “Forever!” she said, with a rising pitch. “Four years in February. I only came in to do some indexing work. Three months, it was meant to be.”

“So being an archivist suits you?”

“I just got stuck, I suppose.” She sounded comically morose now. Her voice was performance art, and I found it hard not to laugh. “I was good at history, at school, so I did it for my degree—at King’s. That was pretty amazing in itself, you know? Not many kids from South Kilburn High going on to uni. Not from my year, anyway.

“But I didn’t really think I was going to end up doing it for a career, you know?” She gave me the look that a center forward gives the ref when he’s holding up the red card. “I mean, there aren’t any history careers. But I couldn’t get a job, and I was gonna do postgrad, only I already owed about twelve thousand quid on my BA, so they wouldn’t give me a loan. Then this job came up—for a catalog editor, not an archivist—and my stepdad said I should go for it.” Cheryl consulted her memory, frowning. “I think he was my stepdad by then. Anyway, it was Alex—my mum’s boyfriend. Then her third husband. Currently her ex.”

“Is that important?”

“I like to keep score. You know that thing Tracey Emin did—the bed with all her lovers’ names sewn into it? Well, if my mum did it, it’d have to be a circus big top.”

For someone who had a more methodical mind or a tighter time budget, I could see where talking to Cheryl could quickly lead to homicide or madness. For now, I was happy to roll with it, because I suspected that underneath all the clowning around, she’d asked me to question her because she had something to tell me.

“So you came here four years ago,” I pursued, deadpan.

She grinned at the memory. “Eventually, yeah. I’ve got a motto, right? You’ve got no right saying you don’t like something if you haven’t tried it. But this time I just didn’t fancy. We had a big row about it. I said I’d rather be on the game than work in a bloody library, then Alex said he was going to take his belt off to me.”

“And?”

“I told him I didn’t expect to get my first customer so quick.” The grin faded abruptly, and she became brusquely matter-of-fact. “Anyway, after that I really needed a job, because my mum chucked me out. So I applied for this, and I’m still here four bloody years later.”

“What does a catalog editor do?” I asked.

“Almost everything. Sorting new collections. Data input. User support. Most of the time, though, it’s bloody retroconversion.” Cheryl pronounced the word as if it was a kind of toxic waste. “Putting the old printed catalogs onto the database. See, lots of collections are still on these really nasty old printed lists that haven’t even been looked at for a million years. I copy them across. Hundreds of thousands of them. It’d drive you frigging well mad. Sylvie’s the only excitement we ever get around here.”

“Sylvie? Is she another part-timer?”

Cheryl laughed, short and loud. “No, you pillock. Sylvie’s the ghost.”

“That’s—”

“Just my name for her. Yeah. You’ve got to call her something, haven’t you?”

“Why? Does she talk to you?”

She shook her head, a frown appearing and then disappearing again on her expressive face. “Not anymore. She used to be nattering on all the time when she first come round. Now you don’t hear a peep out of her.”

I pricked up my ears. “What sort of thing did she talk about?” I asked, trying to keep my tone casual.

“I don’t know, do I?” Cheryl said, looking severe and slightly affronted. “I don’t speak the language. She talked in Russian or Swedish or German or something, and I didn’t understand a word of it. Except when she went on about roses. I got that.”

Russian or Swedish or German. Or something. Quite a wide range. “So you see a lot of her?” I pursued, giving that one up for now.

Cheryl nodded. “Oh yeah. I see her every day, more or less. I think I’m on her wavelength.”

“And you’re not afraid of her? Even after what happened to Rich?”

“Nah. She wouldn’t hurt me. You get a feeling if you’re safe with someone, and I feel safe with her. She just stands there and watches me work—for ages, sometimes. I’m the only one who doesn’t freak out about her, so I reckon she’s more comfortable with me. Or maybe she just doesn’t like men.”

Cheryl paused and thought for a moment, staring at me with a forbidding seriousness.