What Abigail Did That Summer Read online

  I am sitting in the Achieving Best Evidence suite in Holmes Road police station. Simon’s mum is glaring at me from one direction and DC Jonquiere is glaring at me from the other. Both of them are convinced that if the current rash of youth mispers isn’t directly my fault then I am, at the very least, indirectly responsible. Who knows . . . it might even be true.

  ‘He’s inside the house,’ I say.

  ‘Nobody is inside that house,’ says DC Jonquiere. ‘We’ve searched it.’

  ‘That’s the real ting house,’ I say, and then I almost add, Your mispers are trapped in the folds of a tertiary subspace manifold. But with olds you’ve got to lead them gently where you want them to go. ‘It’s a Falcon effect.’

  Falcon is the code word the police use when they need to talk about magic but don’t want to say it out loud. Peter says most police only know it as meaning ‘weird bollocks, bad news, send for the specialists’ – him and Nightingale being the specialists. He says as you go up the pay grades, people either know more or have access to certain files.

  DC Jonquiere frowns so I’m guessing she knows something.

  Simon’s mum looks really unhappy, which means I’m right and she knows bare more.

  ‘I’d like to have a private conversation with this young lady,’ she says without turning around.

  DC Jonquiere hesitates.

  ‘I’m afraid—’ she starts, but we never get to find out what she is afraid of because Simon’s mum turns on her. Which is a bit of a relief for me – I can tell you.

  ‘Do you like your current job?’ Simon’s mum asks her. ‘Would you like to continue in it?’

  DC Jonquiere glances at me over Simon’s mum’s shoulder and I give her a friendly smile to show it’s all right. She’s obviously making a rapid risk/benefit assessment, and then decides that I ain’t worth her career. She leaves. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but for now I just file her name away for later consideration because Simon’s mum has turned back to me. I reckon I’ve got maybe three sentences to sort her out.

  ‘I know you’ve looked up Nightingale by now,’ I say. ‘And Peter Grant and the Folly. So you know magic is real.’

  ‘I know the official position,’ she says.

  ‘So you know what a genius loci is,’ I say, and she nods. ‘Well, there’s one in that house and it can make pocket dimensions and put stuff in them that it wants to keep.’

  ‘Pocket dimensions?’

  ‘It’s probably more complicated than that,’ I say. ‘So when the Feds search the house, the kids are in there. Only sort of sideways – just out of reach. Do you get me?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I just bring in Nightingale right now?’ she asks. ‘Surely he’s more experienced than you.’

  ‘Because I’m the only one that can get Simon out of that house. And if Nightingale or Peter find out, they won’t let me go back in.’

  She’s not stupid. She wants to know why it has to be me, so I tell her. She doesn’t like the explanation, but she can see the logic the same as I can. House collects children – no adults allowed. She’s frowning at me and suddenly I think that maybe we’re the same – we both see the world the same way.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘What do you need from me?’

  ‘You’re a spy, right?’

  Simon’s mum is too cool to give anything away, even when she’s sick with worry, which to me just means she’s a good spy.

  ‘I’m a civil servant,’ she says.

  ‘So you can get information, right?’

  ‘What sort of information?’

  ‘Births, deaths, Land Registry, stuff from old newspapers – that sort of thing.’

  ‘What do you need it for?’

  ‘Rescuing Simon and Indigo,’ I say, and remember something Peter always says. You make a plan without intelligence – you might as well not have a plan at all.

  Simon’s mum snorts – it’s almost a laugh.

  ‘Is that it?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘You’ve got to get me out of here before Lady Fed calls Nightingale in herself or, worse, my mum.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And I need some stuff,’ I say.

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  I tell her and she nods at each point and it’s obvious she understands the logic because she doesn’t ask rubbish questions. I realise I like her more than I thought, and a little treacherous part of me wishes she was my mum – or at least like an aunty or something.

  Yeah, an aunty, the cool aunty – that way, I’d still get to be me and get all the cool stuff.

  ‘You can’t tell anyone you’re helping me,’ I say, and she gives me a funny look like she’s annoyed and amused at the same time. ‘If Nightingale or Peter find out you helped me get back inside, they’ll be seriously vexed.’

  ‘Let me worry about that,’ says Simon’s mum.

  32

  Going Equipped

  I’m inside Simon’s pop-up tent in his back garden, briefing Lucifer. Simon’s mum walked me out of Holmes Road and I came here while she got on with her jobs. Lucifer is fidgeting, which is bare wavy for her and a sign that she’s not taking Indigo’s loss at all well.

  ‘Nobody’s come out since I went in, right?’

  ‘Not that we know of,’ she says.

  According to Simon’s mum, some of the kids that had ‘returned home’ had gone missing again and then turned up again. I reckoned that a lot of the kids, Natali, Jessica, Nerd Boy and the rest, were only being possessed puppets part-time. Or at least part-time until now, because Simon’s mum said that Natali was missing again and had been overnight.

  ‘I think we set something off,’ I say. ‘I think it’s getting stronger.’

  ‘You say “we” but you mean “you”,’ says Lucifer.

  ‘Say it’s my fault if it makes you feel better,’ I say.

  ‘It definitely does.’

  ‘But I’m going to fix it for cert,’ I say. ‘I’m going to go in there and get Indigo, Simon and all the kids out.’

  ‘How?’ asks Lucifer, and I tell her.

  ‘Is this wise?’ she asks.

  ‘How should I know?’ I say. ‘You guys got all the wisdom.’

  *

  I have a nap and wake up to find Simon’s mum squatting in the doorway of the tent. Sugar Niner is curled up on my legs and Lucifer is pretending to be a cushion by my head. I watch as Simon’s mum’s eyes slide from one fox to the other, and then to me. I wait for her to say something, but she doesn’t. Instead she crooks her finger at me and beckons me out.

  It’s early evening and the Earth has turned so that half the garden is shadow and Simon’s climbing tree is lit up green and gold. I do some stretches while Simon’s mum briefs me on the house and its owners. The cuts on my arm ache, worse than when I first made them. My upper arm feels hot, swollen and constricted by the bandages the police doctor put on at Holmes Road.

  ‘They’re an eclectic bunch,’ says Simon’s mum. ‘Working backwards – the current owner is an offshore property company acting for Chinese investors. They bought it two years ago from Jan and Helena Dvorˇák, who inherited it from their parents Julias and Grace Dvorˇák.’

  I remembered being Grace and carrying the bowling ball that must have been one of the kids. There are fragments of somebody else’s memories still in my mind.

  ‘He was a pilot in the war – weren’t he?’ I ask.

  ‘Both of them were pilots,’ says Simon’s mum. ‘That’s how they met. She flew for the Air Transport Auxiliary – delivering planes to the front-line squadrons during the Battle of Britain. There was nearly a TV drama about it in the eighties, but it never got made.’

  Somewhere, I thought, in a room in a building by the river, a minion has spent an hour on Google digging that up. Probably not just Google and not just on
e minion either. I wonder if Simon’s mum told them why.

  She hands me a plain beige cardboard box with a dozen glass and plastic capsules stored in individual compartments.

  ‘They did take in Hungarian refugees in 1956. An old RAF friend of his who’d returned to Hungary after the war, his wife and their daughter.’

  ‘No son called Charles?’ I ask, and start distributing the capsules about my person.

  ‘Just the daughter,’ says Simon’s mum. ‘And be careful with those. They’re not jokes and they’re quite a bit stronger than what you asked for. They’ll be a hazard if you overuse them.’

  ‘How much of a hazard?’

  ‘Don’t deploy more than one in an enclosed space if you want to retain a sense of smell,’ she says, and goes back to her notes. ‘Grace, whose maiden name was Harnal, inherited the house from her father Edward Harnal, who in turn purchased it from one Wilfred Wright, eldest son of Henry Wright, who bought the house in 1870.’

  There’s a ton more stuff about Henry Wright, who had made a name for himself as one of the new breed of shopkeepers and wholesalers feeding and clothing the expanding urban population.

  Hackney boy made good, I think. Married a boujee wife and moved to Hampstead. It’s a tale as old as time.

  ‘He bought the house from the Brown family,’ says Simon’s mum. ‘And they appear to have owned the house from the time it was built, which was 1801.’

  ‘Any Charleses?’ I ask.

  ‘You asked that before,’ she says. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘Could be,’ I say.

  ‘There’s no record of a Charles living in the house that we could find, but they didn’t ask personal questions in the census until 1841,’ she says. ‘I’ve got people looking through parish records, but their name was Brown.’

  At least it wasn’t Smith or Jones, I don’t say.

  She shrugs and hands me a metal pole 30 centimetres long, with a double claw at one end and a horizontal spike at the other. There’s a twist grip in the middle – I turn it and the pole extends by another third.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s a hooley bar,’25 says Simon’s mum. ‘Firemen use them. You asked for a crowbar – this is better.’

  I give it an experimental swing and then collapse it and stow it in my backpack. She’s right. It’s definitely better.

  Simon’s mum hands me a water bottle made from impact-resistant plastic and a round of sandwiches wrapped in silver foil.

  ‘Cheese and pickle,’ she says. ‘It’s all I had time to make.’

  We stand facing each other – she doesn’t tell me to come back with Simon or not at all. I don’t tell her not to worry. She’s going to drive to the house and run interference with the Feds. I’m going to go out the garden door so I can sneak over the Heath and hit the house from the back.

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  *

  Here’s the thing that’s causing me grief. I was hoping that Simon’s mum would pull out some big fat fact that made the house make sense. There are lots of haunted houses, I’ve checked out a few myself, but a house with a genius loci powerful enough to suck in random teens? If it were just a matter of accumulating stories, then every house built before 1920 would have its own mad god. Peter did a case with a genius loci in a bookshop, and his theory about that was it formed because the shop was built into a former cockfighting ring. All that ritualised violence being the equivalent of a Gro-bag in a ganja farm when feeding the supernatural. But Simon’s mum found no record of any family annihilation, satanic rituals or any other murder most horrible – and the Victorians loved their horrible murders. If something had happened in the house, there would have been a lurid account of it in the papers.

  Kingsley, who was mad keen on this sort of stuff when he wasn’t away with the fairies and the water babies, said that such genii locorum ‘often form around a singular event much like a pearl forms around a single particulate’.

  I was missing something but real talk – sometimes you’ve got to go with what you’ve got.

  *

  I’m standing in the back garden of the house. Like a lot of houses built on hills, the garden is an artificial terrace on a level with the basement floor, with steps up to the kitchen door on the floor above. Not that I can see any of that because it’s hidden behind scaffolding and plastic sheeting.

  I reckon it’s time to phone Nightingale. Not even the Jag will get him here before I can breach the house.

  He picks up on the first ring. I was hoping for voicemail, but Peter’s been teaching him bad habits.

  ‘Abigail, where are you?’ he asks.

  I tell him where and why, but I leave out Simon’s mum.

  ‘Abigail,’ he says in his most old-fashioned voice, ‘I forbid this – it’s too dangerous.’ I can hear the ambience changing behind his voice.

  ‘It’s not going to let you in,’ I say. ‘It’s not going to let any grown-ups in, and you’re the oldest old that ever was.’

  ‘At least wait outside until I can join you,’ he says – he’s outside the Folly now.

  But I’m wise in the ways of grown-ups, and I know that once he’s here he’ll stop me – he has no choice.

  I’m tempted to tell him I’ll wait, but apart from my brother I think Nightingale is the only person I’ve never lied to.

  ‘If I’m not out in two hours,’ I say, ‘start taking the house apart.’

  In Nightingale’s background I hear the antique clunk of the Jag’s door closing, then its engine purring into life.

  ‘Why two hours?’ he asks, but I know he’s stalling and it’s too late because sometimes you’ve got to do stuff now and worry about the consequences later. Because what I didn’t tell him is that I’m worried that House is getting much stronger and that while right now it might be anchored to the bricks and mortar of the real ting house, it might soon be able to move all of itself to somewhere else.

  And then nobody is going home.

  25 Called a Halligan tool in North America.

  33

  The Bouncing Bed

  I am standing on the scaffolding four floors up, looking into what was probably a rear-facing bedroom through one of its two sash windows. It’s hot here in the gap between the glass and the polythene sheeting that shrouds the house from view. The air is still and smells of brick dust, old paint and damp plastic. The scaffolding itself is reassuringly solid, with wooden walkways and aluminium ladders between levels. Climbing up was easy, but my problem now is that it stops short of the attic. If my plan is going to work, I need to start at the top.

  There are two galdem in the bedroom, one is Natali and one is a thicc white girl with blonde hair that I don’t know. They are bouncing up and down and laughing like little kids on a bed. Only there’s no bed. The room looks stripped, the electrical sockets ripped out, layers of wallpaper and carpet torn away. I’m looking at the real ting house, but the girls’ feet stop half a metre above the bare floorboards.

  And they is bouncing as if there’s springs under them, or a mattress or a bouncy castle.

  If I go inside – which reality will I be in?

  From below I hear a sharp high-pitched bark, then two more – that’s the prearranged signal that the Feds, or worse, Nightingale, have reached the back garden. I step to one side and, careful to keep my arm clear of any scatter, smash the window with the hooley bar. Then I quickly scrape the top, the left and the right and then clear all the fragments from the bottom. From there it’s simple. You just check where you put your hands as you climb in, and ignore the somebody calling your name from the garden below.

  I slide across the top of a dressing table that wasn’t there before, dragging its blue and purple floral print cover and the oval wooden vanity mirror with me. We all tumble down onto a dusty-smelling rug in
green and yellow. I scramble up to find two young white girls standing on the bed and staring at me. Both are dressed in blue and white silk dresses with off-the-shoulder necklines, cinched waists and knee-length skirts. The one with dark hair has a flower pattern embroidered along the hem. Her blonde friend has a leaf pattern picked out in grass green and olive.

  ‘Who are you?’ they cry.

  I’m in what I reckon is Victorian times. At least it looks like a Dickens adaptation, not Jane Austen. My mum loves Jane Austen, so I’ve sat through a lot of them and anyway my English teacher is dead keen on putting our set books in historical context, so I know the difference between Regency and Victorian. I bet Ms Sylvestor would be well pleased to know that the classes we spent researching what it was like to be Martha Cratchit were actually coming in useful.

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask.

  ‘That’s rude,’ says the blonde child. ‘You should answer the question first.’

  ‘I’m Mary,’ says the one I think is Natali. ‘And this is Lizzie.’

  Lizzie turns on Mary.

  ‘Silly,’ she says crossly. ‘She should tell us her name first – it’s only polite.’

  Currently I’m not being sucked into whatever happy childhood memory this is, but I got that sick feeling in my stomach. The one you get when you’re balancing high up and don’t want to think about what happens if you slip.

  Like the gap between the trees where Simon nearly fell.

  But I’ve never been so far into one of these memories/ stories/whatever and still been one hundred per cent me. Never had a chance to ask questions.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I say. ‘My name is Abigail – do you live here?’

  The girls nod.

  ‘Our father is Mr John Brown,’ says Mary, and beams proudly at me.

  Little blonde Lizzie is frowning – she gives me a very sceptical look.

  ‘Why did you come in through the window?’ she asks – obviously the brains of the pair.

  ‘I work for the Window Inspector,’ I say, and risk a glance at the window I broke to get in. In this reality it’s still intact, and beyond it the world is white with snow under a grey sky. No wonder the kids are reduced to bouncing on their bed.