The Devil You Know

I couldn’t tell what was going on in Peele’s mind, but he’d become quite animated now. He risked another glance at me, no longer than the first one. “This is a crucial time for us in many ways, Mr. Castor,” he said. “I have a meeting in Bilbao tomorrow—at the Guggenheim Museum. A very important meeting for the archive and for me. I need to know that matters here are in train—that I’m not going to come back to chaos and recriminations. If you’re free to start now, today, then I think that’s what we should do.”

The tone of his voice was merely fretful and peevish, but the fear underneath seemed genuine. He was out of his depth, he expected dire consequences if he screwed up, and he wanted an expert to take the whole thing off his hands and make it go away.

Well, here I was. I just wished to Christ he’d look at me or acknowledge me in some way. This relentless cold shoulder reminded me disturbingly of a passive-aggressive girlfriend I’d once had. Was he autistic?

Peele seemed to guess what was going through my mind.

“You’re probably finding my body language a little disturbing,” he said. “Perhaps you’re even wondering if I have a psychological or neurological condition of some kind.”

“No, I wasn’t—”

“The answer is that I do. I’m hyperlexic. It’s a condition similar in some ways to high-functioning autism.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Perhaps not. If you’re mentally classifying me as somebody with a debilitating disease, then you don’t see. Not at all. I could read at the age of two and write just after my third birthday. I can also memorize complex texts after a single reading, even if I’m not familiar with the language they’re written in. Hyperlexia is a gift, Mr. Castor, not a curse. It does, though, make me react in unusual ways to other people’s social signals. Eye contact in particular is very uncomfortable for me. I’m sorry if you’re finding this interview disorienting or unpleasant as a result.”

“It’s fine,” I said. Embarrassed and slightly thrown, I overcompensated and spoke just to fill the silence. “In fact, it fills a hole in the jigsaw. I can understand now why you laid so much emphasis on the way the ghost stares at you. That’s probably more upsetting for you than for the rest of the staff here.”

Peele nodded. “Very perceptive,” he said without warmth. “Another aspect of my condition is that I find most metaphors . . . opaque. Confusing. Such as your reference to me as a jigsaw puzzle, for example. I hear it, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. If you could avoid metaphors when you’re speaking to me, I’d be very grateful.”

“Right.” I decided the best bet was to pull the discussion back onto a strictly business basis. “Let me just check the timetable with you again,” I said. “The sightings started in September, is that right?”

“I believe so, yes. At least, that’s the first time anything was said to me about it, and so that’s the first entry in the incident book. I didn’t see her myself for a few weeks after that.”

“Do you have an exact date? For the first sighting, I mean?”

“Of course.” Peele seemed slightly affronted at the question. He opened his desk drawer and took out a double-width ledger with a marbled hardboard cover, put it down on the blotter in front of him, and started to leaf through it. I’d assumed that “incident book” was a quaint, archaic title for a database file, but no, here was a real book with real writing in it. Maybe working in a place like this gave you an exaggerated respect for tradition.

“Tuesday, September the thirteenth,” he said. He reversed the book and offered it to me. “You can read the entry, if you like.”

I glanced down at the page. The entry for September 13 ran to most of a side, and Peele’s handwriting was very small and very dense. “No, that’s fine,” I assured him. “It’s unlikely I’ll need to refer to it in detail. In any case, the attack on Mr. Clitheroe—Rich?—happened a lot more recently?”

“Yes.” He turned the book back around to face himself and consulted it again. “Last Friday. The twenty-fifth.”

I pondered this for a moment. Active versus passive is one of the ways I tend to classify ghosts—with passive making up more than 95 percent of the total. The dead keep themselves to themselves, most of the time; they scare us just by being there, rather than by actually going out of their way to harm us. But what was even rarer than a vicious ghost was one that had started out docile and then turned.

Well, let that lie for now. What I needed more than anything was a place to start from.

“Go back to September,” I said. “Did you bring in any big acquisitions in the days or weeks before that first sighting? What else was happening in late August or early September? What else that was new?”