The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,74

taller than he was. She crossed her arms and looked worried. “There are several paths to the Archive of Solutions,” she said, “but most will be too dangerous.” She pushed her chair aside and lifted an edge of the frayed blue rug. A trapdoor was beneath. “This passage is reserved for the use of the chief clerks. I don’t think anyone but the three of us remembers it’s here.”

She lifted a brass ring and pulled the trapdoor open. A stairwell spiraled downward into the gloom.

“Thank you,” he said.

Miss Benjamin took a step closer to him. With the shutters over the window, the air in the booth had grown warmer, and now Unwin found it difficult to breathe, especially when each breath carried with it the sweet aroma of the whiskey on Miss Benjamin’s lips.

She said, “I do know a thing or two about detectives, Mr. Unwin. I know that with a few words you could have won my heart. But you’re one of the noble ones, aren’t you?”

Unwin did not contradict her, though he doubted that even the Manual would contain the few words—whatever they were—to which Miss Benjamin was referring.

“What about the third archive?” he said. “You didn’t tell me about Miss Palsgrave.”

Miss Benjamin stepped back. “I won’t,” she said. “This is Mysteries, after all, and Miss Palsgrave’s work is her own.”

Unwin put on his hat and started down the stairs. Miss Benjamin had seemed tall to him, and now, waist-deep in the floor, he looked up and found her terrible and magnificent, a towering, sulky idol in a brown wool skirt. “Good-bye, Miss Benjamin.”

She capped her silver flask and sighed. “Watch out for the ninth step,” she said, and Unwin had to duck as she kicked the trapdoor closed over his head.

THE STAIRS WERE LIT only by dim lamps that flickered as though to relay a coded message. There was no banister. The wooden steps creaked underfoot, and Unwin felt each with the toe of his shoe before stepping down. Was it a trick of the whiskey, that the walls of the passage seemed to narrow as Unwin descended? Or had he always been a claustrophobe and only needed an experience like this to find out?

The ninth step appeared as sturdy as the others, but he skipped it as Miss Benjamin advised. Unwin found it difficult to stop counting anything once he had begun. Counting sheep, in fact, was his surest route to insomnia—by morning he could fill whole pastures with a vast and clamorous flock. Now he counted steps, and by the twentieth he felt certain the walls really were narrowing, and the ceiling was getting lower, too. How deep did the stairway go? Maybe Miss Benjamin had tricked him into an oubliette. She could have locked the trapdoor and sent a message to Detective Screed by now—but then, perhaps Mr. Duden already had.

The lamps were fewer in number here, and dimmer. He hoped Edwin Moore had known what he was talking about. Could the old man’s memory be trusted at all? Unwin had to bend low to take the last several steps. The fifty-second was the last.

Here was a plain wooden door no more than four feet tall. From beyond it came a sound—a wild, incessant clattering, as of many people typing without pause. Unwin felt for a doorknob but could not find one. When he pushed, the door swung open on silent hinges. He ducked through and had to remain crouched on the other side because the ceiling was so low.

The room was barely larger than the desk in his own office, though finished all in dark wood that gleamed in the light from a chandelier. Where Unwin had expected a legion of underclerks, he saw one tiny woman, her silvery hair pinned in a mound atop her head, seated at a desk at the center of the room. He stooped over her, an uncouth giant in a too-small cave, but she did nothing to acknowledge his presence. Her typing was the quickest Unwin had ever seen—quicker than Emily’s, quicker, even, than the man with the blond beard’s. The sound of one key-clap was indiscernible from the next, and the carrier bell never ceased to reverberate, chiming the end of each line in rapid succession.

“Miss Burgrave?” Unwin said.

The woman stopped typing and peered at him, the wrinkles at the edges of her mouth and eyes fixed in severe concentration. She wore red lipstick, and her cheeks, soft and sagging, were the pink of pink roses.