The Devil You Know

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.

“I ought to hate you,” she said. “Because you’re coming in to get rid of her. That’s almost like murder, isn’t it? Like she’s already dead, and you’re killing her again.”

There was a long enough break that I thought she’d finished. “Well, obviously I don’t see it like—”

“But the truth is, I think she’s really, really sad.”

She traced a line on the desk with her fingertip and frowned at it, her expressive face solemn, almost somber.

“I think you’d be doing her a favor.”

Jon Tiler was almost as reluctant to talk to me as Alice was—but Alice had reappeared by this time, and she hypocritically told him that Peele had insisted on everyone’s full cooperation. I was taking against Alice, which was something I’d have to watch. I didn’t like the way she threw Peele’s weight about.

In the interview room, Tiler was terse and monosyllabic. But then he’d been terse and monosyllabic in the workroom, too. Had he been at the Bonnington long? No. Did he like it there? Sort of. Had he seen the ghost? Yes. Often? Yes. Did it scare him? No.

I was only doing this for the sake of form. I felt like I already had the beginnings of a handle on the ghost—or at least an idea of how it had come to be here—so I probably didn’t need any additional insights from Tiler. It just goes against the grain with me to leave stones unturned. I guess I am the anally retentive Ghostbuster, after all.

So I stirred up the pot a little.

“Do you have any idea,” I asked him, “what ghosts really are?”

“No,” Tiler answered with something like a sneer. “That’s your thing, isn’t it? Not mine.”

“Most of the time they’re not the spirits of the dead but emotional recordings of the dead. Imprints that just persist in the places where a strong emotion was felt for reasons that we don’t understand.”

I watched him for a moment or two, and he watched a spot on the ceiling somewhere behind my left shoulder. His expression was a glum deadpan.