Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“Jeffrey wants to know how far you’ve got,” she said, remaining in the doorway. She seemed to like doorways—or perhaps that was only when I was in the room.

“I’m still doing the groundwork,” I said.

“Which means?”

“I’m trying to find out what exactly the ghost is haunting.”

Alice cocked her head, innocently inquiring. “I thought she was haunting us,” she said. “Did I get that wrong?”

I nodded, playing straight man. “It’s not that simple,” I said. “Not usually. I think it may have come in with these”—waving my hand over the cards and letters on the table—“but even if it did, it’s not going to be easy to find out exactly where its fulcrum is. It’s obviously wandering around the building a lot—but the first floor is its favorite stamping ground. That means we can probably assume that it’s tied to something down here. I’m trying to find out—”

“So can I tell him you’ve made some actual progress?” Alice broke in. “Or just that you’re still looking?”

“I’ve met the ghost,” I answered, and I was gratified to see her narrowed eyes widen slightly. “That’s a useful start, but it was a very brief contact, and I’ve only got the barest beginnings of a sense of her. Like I said, it’s still early days.”

She stepped into the room and put six fifty-pound notes down onto the table in front of me, along with a receipt for me to sign and a pen for me to sign it with.

“Enjoy,” she said sourly. “No one can say you haven’t earned it.”

I called it a day a little after half past five. The ghost was still being coy, and the building was getting colder by the minute; the heating was evidently on a timer, even if the staff weren’t.

Alice escorted me back through the maze to the lobby, where Frank liberated my coat from the rail where he’d stowed it that morning. He handed Alice a couple of FedEx packages, and she stopped long enough to sign her name in the mail book. As I was transferring my whistle back into its rightful place, the others came past in a huddle. Cheryl paused in passing.

“It was my birthday on Saturday,” she said.

“Many happy returns.”

“Cheers. So I’m standing drinks. D’you want to come?”

It seemed churlish to refuse, so I said yes. It was only after that that Cheryl seemed to notice Alice, still signing for her packages at the other end of the counter.

“Sorry, Alice,” she said. “You’re welcome, too, if you want to come.”

Even I could hear the insincerity. “No, thanks,” said Alice, her face setting into an inexpressive blank. “I’m going to be tied up here for an hour yet. Have a good time.”

RICH AND JON WERE ALREADY WAITING OUT ON the street, and they fell into step with us. Jon didn’t react to my being there, but I didn’t imagine he was thrilled at the prospect.

We went to a free house on Tonbridge Street that didn’t seem to know quite what its freedom was for, at least if the choice of beers was anything to go by. I opted for a pint of Spitfire, which shone out from among the otherwise lackluster options.

Cheryl got the drinks in while Rich, Jon, and I found a table. It wasn’t hard; the after-work crowd were just starting to trickle in, only sluggishly drawn to the plastic gilt and the sandwich menu, and completely indifferent to the two ranks of fruit machines giving their synchronized salutes off in the far corner.

“What do you think of the Bonnington?” Rich asked with a sardonic grin.

I think he was hoping for an extreme response—one that he could savor. I temporized. “Well, it’s an office,” I said. “The more you see of them, the more they come to look alike.”

“Have you ever worked in one?” Tiler asked pointedly.

“I’ve always done what I do now,” I said, glossing over the fact that for the past year and a half, I hadn’t been working anywhere. “So apart from the odd vacation job back when I was a student, no. But I’ve been called into a fair few.”

“Well, I’ve seen loads,” said Rich. “But I’ve never seen anything like this place.”

“It’s a bit of a swamp of fear and loathing,” I allowed. “What’s with Alice? Is she always like that?”

He raised his eyebrows. “No. She’s always been a bit of a bitch, but now she’s fallen out with Jeffrey, hasn’t she? She probably hasn’t had breakfast in bed all week.”

“So she and Peele are knocking boots?”

The quaint euphemism made Rich grin and Tiler purse his lips. “Yeah,” Rich said. “Exactly. But only because Jeffrey is the CA. If they made a new post of Executive Big Bastard over the Chief Administrator, Alice would roll up her mattress and move on down the corridor. Whoever’s in the boss’s chair, there are some women who’ll always be under the desk bobbing for apples in his crotch.”

This was said with a certain amount of bitterness. Alice was younger than Rich, I realized. But he was her junior in the pecking order. No telling what sort of hatchets were buried there, or how shallowly.

“What did Peele and Alice fall out about?” I asked, trying to stay with the subject without responding directly to what he’d said. I thought he might be wrong about Alice. I didn’t like her, but she didn’t seem like the sort of person who’d give a pole dance in exchange for a pole position.

“I don’t think this is something we should be talking about,” Tiler said a little prissily. “It’s just gossip, anyway. No one even knows if they—”

“About you,” Rich interrupted, as if he was surprised that it needed saying. “You and the ghost. Jeffrey was all in favor of getting someone in to deal with it back when it first turned up. But Alice dug her heels in—said we were all just hallucinating, and there was nothing there. God, she was smug back in October, when the sightings stopped. But then they started up again, and I got this.” He touched his bandaged face. “And Jeffrey said right, we’ll have to deal with it now. But Alice still said no. And in the end, he went ahead and got you in without even asking her.”

“That must have been upsetting for her,” I allowed.

Rich nodded vigorously, looking as if he was enjoying the memory. “Yeah, you could say that. I mean, basically, she rules the roost while Peele hides in his office. And if he gets this Bilbao job he’s going for, she’s tipped for the big chair. So for him to disagree with her . . . well, it made her look stupid in front of the rest of us. Especially since he did it just by calling you up out of the blue, rather than by telling her to her face that she was wrong. He can only stand up to her behind her back, you see.”

I remembered that Peele had mentioned Bilbao to me—something about a trip that he was about to take out there. I asked Rich what that was all about.

“He’s been greasing up to the Guggenheim,” said Rich with absolute scorn. “If he’s an art historian, I’m the archbishop of Canterbury. But he loans himself out to them for lectures, and he’s really cosy with the trustees there now. So they’ve called him over for a little chat tomorrow, which he’s hoping is really a recruitment interview. And so is Alice, because then she walks into Peele’s job.”

“I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” said Jon.

“I do,” Rich replied, bleakly deadpan. “It’s always looked like a racing certainty from where I’m—”

Cheryl came back with the drinks then, and Rich stopped fairly abruptly to help her unload the glasses from the tray she was carrying.

“So you reckon you’ve got her in your sights?” he asked me as he settled down with his bottle of Beck’s.

“Alice?”

“The ghost.”

Cheryl handed me my pint with practiced hands that didn’t spill a drop.