The Devil You Know

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.”