"Jack swears there was an archivist on staff in the 1920s, but I spent a bit of time down there yesterday, and I can't see any evidence of them." Ianto murmured softly to Lisa's sleeping form. "Everything is just tossed in there all higgledy-piggledy, and if there was ever some method of sorting in there, it has completely disappeared."
He shook his head in mild disbelief. "They've managed to keep a record of everything they pick up, at least as far as a vague description and where and when they found it, but apparently extending that record system to where they put it in the archive is beyond them."
He could imagine the indulgent smile Lisa would have been giving him in the past if she'd heard him bitch like this; the same smile she had always given him when he complained about the utter stupidity sometimes displayed by his superiors in London.
If he closed his eyes, he could almost feel her arms slipping around his waist, her lips brushing his ear as she whispered into it. He could almost hear the words she'd have said, urging him to go easy on whoever it was had frustrated him.
Give them a break, they've been very busy…
"I know," he said quietly, answering his own imagined entreaty. "But still. They must at least know the alphabet. Even if they didn't sort out the old archives, they could have kept their own additions in some sort of system. Instead, it looks like files and artefacts were just stuffed wherever there happened to be a space, and now we can't find anything."
He'd spent a few hours the previous day looking in the archives for the item Tosh had remembered. Armed only with the knowledge that item 02-135 had been picked up just over three years ago in Butetown and that it was a dull silver cuboid with a collection of connectors, he'd known the chances of just finding it were slim.
After several hours of unsuccessful searching, he'd come to a depressing conclusion.
"I didn't really want to do it, but it could help really you, and for that, I'll do anything, my cariad," he whispered, drawing a knuckle very softly down Lisa's dark cheek.
"I volunteered to sort out the archives."