The Devil You Know

Alice opened the door not with one of the keys that she wore on her belt but with a card that she ran through a scanner to the left of the door, making a small, inset red light wink to green. She held the door open for me, and I stepped through into a corridor that was narrow and low-ceilinged. She closed the door again behind us, pushing against the slam guard until the lock clicked audibly, and then slid past me again—it required a little maneuvering—to lead the way.

There were doors on both sides of the corridor, all of them closed. Narrow glass panels crisscrossed with wire mesh showed me rooms lined with filing cabinets or full of bookshelves from floor to ceiling. In some cases, the windows had black sugar paper pasted up over them, graying with age.

“What does a senior archivist do?” I asked by way of polite conversation.

“Everything,” Alice said. “I’m in overall charge here.”

“And Mr. Peele?”

“He’s responsible for policy. And funding. And external liaison. I’m in charge when it comes to actual day-to-day running.” She was testy, seeming to resent being questioned. But like I said, it’s an automatic thing with me. You can only decide what’s useful information and what’s trivia when you see it in the rearview mirror.

So I pressed on. “Is the archive’s collection very valuable?”

Alice shot me a slightly austere glance, but this was clearly something she was more disposed to talk about. “That’s really not a question that has a meaningful answer,” she responded slightly condescendingly, the keys jingling at her waist. “Value is a matter of what the market will bear. You understand? An item is only worth what you can sell it for. A lot of the things we’ve got are literally priceless, because there’s no market anywhere where they could be sold. Others really have no value at all.

“We’ve got seventy-five miles of shelving here—and we’re eighty percent full. The oldest documents we hold are nine centuries old, and those don’t ever come out to the public except when we mount an exhibition. But the bulk of the collection consists of stuff that’s much more mundane. Really, they’re not the sort of thing that people pay a fortune for. We’re talking about bills of lading from old ships. Property deeds and company incorporation deeds. Letters and journals—masses of those—but most of them not written by anyone very famous, and in a lot of cases not even all that well preserved. If you knew what you were looking for, theoretically, you could steal enough to keep yourself very comfortably. But then you’d have a lot of trouble selling them on. You’d never get an auction house to take them, because they’re ours and they’re known. Any auction house, any dealer who cared about his reputation, they’d check provenance as a matter of course. Only fences buy blind.”

We turned a corner as she talked, and then another. The interior of the building had clearly gone through as baffling and messy a conversion as my office. It seemed we were detouring around rooms or weight-bearing walls that couldn’t be shifted, and after the austere splendor of the entrance hall, the shoddiness and baldness of all this made a bleak impression on the eye. We came at last to another staircase, which was a very poor relation to the one Alice had descended before. It was of poured concrete, with chevroned antitrip tape crudely applied to the edges of each step. Again, Alice hung back to let me go up first.

“You’ve seen the ghost?” I asked as we climbed.

“No.” Her tone was guarded, clipped. “I haven’t.”

“I thought everybody—”

She came abreast of me again at the top of the stairs, and she shook her head firmly. “Everybody apart from me. I always seem to be somewhere else. Funny, really.”

“So you weren’t there when she attacked your colleague?”

“I said I haven’t seen her.”

It seemed as though that was all I was getting. Well, okay. I’m pretty good, most of the time, at knowing when to push and when to fold. Another bend in the corridor, and now it joined a wider one that seemed to be more in the spirit of the original building. We followed this wider hallway for about twenty yards, until it passed the first open doorway I’d seen. It looked into a large room that was being used as an open-plan office: six desks, roughly evenly spaced, each with its own PC and its own set of shelves piled high with papers and files. One man and one woman glanced up as we went past—the man giving me a slighly grim fish-eye, the woman looking a lot more interested. A second man was on the phone, talking animatedly, and so he missed us.

The sound of his voice followed us as we walked on. “Yeah, well as soon as possible, to be honest. I’m not that great with the language, and I can’t—yeah. Just to establish authenticity, if nothing else.”

A few yards farther on, Alice abruptly stopped and turned to face me.

“Actually,” she said, “you’d probably better wait in the workroom. I’ll come and get you.”