…”
“What are you waiting for, mate? Mate?” That was to Billy, at last. An officer was telling him just-courteously to fuck off. He joined the rest of the staff outside. They milled and muttered, congregating roughly by jobs. Billy saw a debate among directors.
“What’s that about?” he said.
“Whether or not to close the museum,” Josie said. She was biting her nails.
“What?” Billy said. He took off his glasses and blinked at them aggressively. “What’s the sodding debate? How big does something have to be before its nickage closes us down?”
“Ladies and Gents.” A senior policeman clapped his hands for attention. His officers surrounded him. They were muttering to and listening to their shoulders. “I’m Chief Inspector Mulholland. Thanks for your patience. I’m sorry to’ve kept you all waiting.” The staff huffed, shifted, bit their nails.
“I’m going to ask you to please not talk about this, ladies and gents,” Mulholland said. A young female officer slipped into the room. Her uniform was unkempt. She was speaking on some phone hands-free, muttering at nothing visible. Billy watched her. “Please don’t talk about this,” Mulholland said again. The whispering in the room mostly ceased.
“Now,” Mulholland said, after a pause. “Who was it found it gone?” Billy put up his hand. “You, then, would be Mr. Harrow,” Mulholland said. “Can I ask the rest of you to wait, even if you’ve already told us what you know? My officers’ll speak to you all.”
“Mr. Harrow.” Mulholland approached him as the staff obeyed. “I’ve read your statement. I’d be grateful if you’d show me around. Could you take me on exactly the route you did with your tour?” Billy saw that the young female officer had gone.
“What is it you’re looking for?” he said. “You think you’re going to find it…?”
Mulholland looked at him kindly, as if Billy were slow. “Evidence.”
Evidence. Billy ran his hand through his hair. He imagined marks on the floor where some huge perfidious pulley system might have been. Drying puddles of preserver in a trail as telltale as crumbs. Right.
Mulholland summoned colleagues, and had Billy walk them through the centre. Billy pointed out what they passed in a terse parody of his usual performance. The officers poked at bits and pieces and asked what they were. “An enzyme solution,” Billy said, or, “That’s a time sheet.”
Mulholland said: “Are you alright, Mr. Harrow?”
“It’s kind of a big thing, you know?”
That wasn’t the only reason Billy glanced repeatedly behind him. He thought he heard a noise. A very faint clattering, a clanking like a dropped and rolling beaker. It was not the first time he had heard that. He had been catching little snips of such misplaced sound at random moments since a year after he had started at the centre. More than once he had, trying to find the cause, opened a door onto an empty room, or heard a faint grind of glass in a hallway no one could have entered.
He had concluded a long time ago that it was his mind inventing these just-heard noises. They correlated with moments of anxiety. He had mentioned the phenomenon to people, and though some had reacted with alarm, many told some anecdote about horripilation or twitches when they were under pressure, and Billy remained fairly sanguine.
In the tank room the forensic team was still dusting, photographing, measuring tabletops. Billy folded his arms and shook his head.
“It’s those Californian sods.” When he returned to where most of the staff were waiting he joked quietly about rival institutes to a workmate outside the tank room. About disputes over preservation methodology that had taken a dramatic turn. “It’s the Kiwis,” Billy said. “O’Shea finally gave in to temptation.”
HE DID NOT GO STRAIGHT BACK TO HIS FLAT. HE HAD A long-standing arrangement to meet a friend.
Billy had known Leon since they had been undergraduates at the same institute, though in different departments. Leon was enrolled in a PhD course in a literature department in London, though he never talked about it. He had since forever been working on a book called Uncanny Blossom. When Leon had told him, Billy had said, “I had no idea you were entering the Shit Title Olympics.”
“If you didn’t swim in your sump of ignorance you’d know that title’s designed to fuck with the French. Neither word’s translatable into their ridiculous language.”
Leon lived in a just-plausible rim of Hoxton. He camped up his role as Virgil to Billy’s Dante, taking Billy to art happenings or telling him about those he could not