The Devil You Know

“This changes nothing,” Alice told me coldly. “The fact that nobody has seen the ghost since last Sunday doesn’t prove that she’s gone, or if she’s gone, that you exorcised her. By my reckoning, you still owe us three hundred pounds—and you can be grateful that I didn’t involve the police over the theft of my keys.”

I didn’t let any of this spoil my sunny disposition. “You’re right,” I said. “When you’re right, you’re right. I can’t prove I did the job. No witnesses. No physical evidence. That’s the nature of the beast, I suppose. Most of what I do doesn’t leave a trail.”

She was waiting for me to leave, with barely concealed impatience.

“No,” I went on, musing aloud. “For a good, solid trail, you need a good, solid crime. Now I know you caught up with Tiler because I made it my business to find out. You turned up on his doorstep with two solicitors and a gent from the cop shop, and you took possession of twenty-seven boxes full of miscellaneous documents, with no fuss and no charges brought. Then the next day, he gave his notice in.”

Alice was still looking like someone with a lot of better places to be. “And what’s your point?” she demanded.

I shrugged disarmingly. “Far be it from me to have a point. It’s best to do these things discreetly. Nothing gained by making a big noise about it. Okay, the screwy little fucker tried to kill me, but I know as well as anyone that there’s a greater good. Tell me, Alice, did you do what I asked you to? Did you go next door and have a look in that basement?”

She just stared at me for a moment or two.

“Yes,” she said at last—and I could hear the strain under the neutral tone she held so well. “I did.”

“Come to any conclusions about it?”

She nodded slowly. Very slowly. Again she took her time answering, making sure every word did what it was supposed to. “I took legal advice. Those premises never came into the possession of the archive in the first place. They remained with the Department of Social Security when the rest of the building was made over to us in the 1980s. So I let the police know that the rooms had been broken into and left it at that.”

“Of course you did. Was that you as in Acting-Chief-Administrator-of-the-Bonnington-Archive you, or private-citizen-cooperating-with-the-police-out-of-disinterested-sense-of-civic-duty you? I mean, did you leave a name or just ring them anonymously from a call box?”

She opened her mouth for an angry reply, but I hurried on. “Whichever,” I said, “I’m sure you made the point that you, Jeffrey, and Rich were in possession of keys to that door, and that therefore, any inquiries about possible unlawful imprisonment, rape, and/or murder ought to start with the three of you.”

There was a very long, very painful silence.

“I’ve checked my own and Jeffrey’s keys very thoroughly,” said Alice. “There are no keys to that door on either ring.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I mean, I saw Rich letting himself into those rooms with his Bonnington key ring only a few short nights ago. It stands out in my mind because of the very vivid events it’s associated with. Now obviously, Rich is in a secure ward in the West Middlesex right now, sedated up to his eyeballs and consequently unable to speak up for himself. But I could maybe point the police in his direction in case he ever gets better.”

Alice’s conscience might have been bothering her, but she wasn’t in the mood to be pushed around. “Then maybe you should,” she said. “What you do is your own affair, Castor. Good-bye and good luck.”

“How about the Gug? Do you think we should put them in the loop, too?”

No answer at all. Alice had the slapped-in-the-face look of a little kid who’s just been told that there isn’t any Father Christmas. I laid my cards on the table. This wasn’t sadism, it was just business.

“Apart from you,” I said, “Peele made three appointments during his time here. Cheryl’s solid gold, but out of the other two, one was stealing from the archive on an industrial scale, and the other has only managed to escape a murder investigation by going conveniently insane at the eleventh hour. That’s a great record, isn’t it? Something you might definitely expect to come up at the recruitment interview when the Guggenheim board formalize this temporary appointment of his.”

Alice still hadn’t found anything to say, so I just kept on going.

“Now I figure it this way. There was no reason not to throw the book at Tiler except a desire to let sleeping dogs lie. And you’ve tried to keep at least an arm’s length, if not a barge pole’s distance, between the Bonnington and the Snezhna Alanovich murder investigation, although you must be very well aware that it’s going on right next door to you. I believe the police even dropped in to ask you a few questions, but obviously I wasn’t privy to that conversation, so I can’t possibly tell what they asked you and what came up in the general chitchat.