What Abigail Did Tha Summer Read online

  He’s having a laugh, of course. But part of the trick to managing your elders is making them think they’re managing you.

  We arrange for him to drop off some books from the Folly library, and he promises to ask my mum if I can go there for lessons. She’s probably going to say yes, because the Folly is close to the hospital, and she’s bound to need some help with Paul sooner or later. After making me promise, again, that I wasn’t going to do anything reckless without telling him first, Nightingale leaves.

  I grab a Supermalt from the fridge and sit back down to see what’s on Sky.

  ‘Well, that could have been worse,’ says Indigo from behind the sofa.

  ‘Bad enough,’ I say as she slinks into the space beside me and plonks her head in my lap. I scrunch the soft fur around her neck and she makes little squeaky sounds.

  ‘You didn’t see him when he found out that Simon’s mother had let you go back in,’ says another voice from behind the sofa. ‘I thought he was going to terminate the female with extreme prejudice.’

  ‘How many of you are there?’ I ask, as Sugar Niner jumps up onto the back rest. ‘You better not have made a mess.’

  ‘Real talk, Abi,’ says Sugar Niner. ‘The air went greasy and the Nightingale blew a hole in the pavement. I was bare prang and no mistake.’

  ‘Believe it, fam,’ says Indigo.

  40

  Ghost Hunter, Fox Whisperer, Troublemaker

  It’s a rainy Wednesday morning in November and I’m standing in front of the house, which is still hidden behind a wooden construction barrier. Above the level of the shield I can see that the scaffolding has been replaced by structural timbers and acrow props. The plastic sheeting, which I’ve learnt is actually called Monarflex, hangs in shreds. It looks untidy, old, derelict.

  The rain is spattering on the pink umbrella I borrowed from Great Ormond Street after visiting Paul there. My mum thinks I headed straight home, but I stayed on the 46 all the way up to Hampstead so I could check on the house. Sugar Niner, who’s leading the surveillance team, has climbed up onto my shoulder to get out of the rain. He smells of wet fur and the Chanel No. 5 I think he stole from my bathroom.

  ‘There’s a lot of shouting and swearing,’ he says around a mouthful of the croissant I’ve brought him. ‘They’ve had to bring in additional structural supports to hold it up, but the one you identified as probably the architect doesn’t think they can save the house.’

  ‘Charles is vexed,’ I say. ‘He’s bringing it down out of spite. You’re sure no kids have gone in?’

  ‘Not while we’re watching, although Lucifer warns he can’t justify this operational tempo forever,’ says Sugar Niner.

  There’s a crash from inside the house, followed by shouting and swearing.

  ‘That ain’t going to be a problem for much longer,’ I say.

  ‘Come look at this,’ says Indigo from down the street.

  I prise Sugar Niner off my shoulder and he scuttles off into a nearby front garden. I stroll down to where Indigo is looking at a mark in the pavement.

  There is a hole in a paving stone the size of my fist, with cracks zigzagging out all around. The edges of the hole are rounded as if they’ve been worn down or melted, and I can feel the vestigia tick-tocking away like a faraway clock.

  ‘Your friend the wizard did that,’ says a voice behind me.

  I turn and it’s Simon’s mum walking up the road towards me. She has a huge shaggy German shepherd on one of those leads that attaches to a harness around the dog’s chest. She don’t look that comfortable holding the lead, so I’m guessing this is not her dog.

  Indigo and the other foxes have booked out so fast you’d think they’d be leaving vortices in the air behind them. Which is probably what the dog is for, but I know right away that neither me or Simon’s mum are going to mention this.

  ‘How’s Simon?’ I ask, and not just to throw his mum off her balance.

  ‘Thriving,’ she says, and gives me a funny little nod of acknowledgement. ‘That was a good suggestion. I appreciate it.’

  She wants something, I think. Things are looking up.

  ‘In fact, I was wondering if you might consider doing some consulting for me,’ she says. ‘Not too often – nothing that would interfere with your schoolwork.’

  ‘Consulting?’

  ‘There are situations where I think your insight might be useful,’ she says.

  I ain’t lying, ’cause if she’s offering what I think she’s offering, I get a little thrill. So we’ll see.

  ‘What’s in it for me?’ I ask.

  ‘What you want,’ she said, ‘I can’t give you – nobody can.’

  I stay silent. I hate it when people know things they shouldn’t know.

  ‘But I can pull strings,’ she says. ‘Make sure things go smoothly with the red tape around your family. Plus excitement and adventure and really wild things.’

  ‘And what do you get?’

  ‘I get a girl who can go places I can’t go, talk to people who won’t talk to me and see things I don’t even know are there,’ she says. ‘Someone smart and brave who I can trust.’

  ‘I’m not spying on the Folly for you,’ I say.

  ‘That goes without saying.’

  ‘And I want money,’ I say, and she’s so surprised that it actually shows on her face.

  When she asks how much, I tell her what I want and that I want it in a secure trust fund in my name that I get to access when I’m seventeen.

  ‘Why not eighteen?’ she asks.

  ‘In case I go to uni early.’

  She nods and agrees a basic scale, a little bit too speedily . . . making me think I could have gone higher. But I make sure we ain’t talking war zones, reh-teh-teh, and we shake hands. I get a good grip and say –

  ‘You swear now on Simon’s life and the Union Flag that you’re going to be straight with me. Because I ain’t going to be your side girl – right?’

  She hesitates, which is good ’cause I want her deeping what I’m saying.

  ‘I swear on my oath, my office and my son, I will be straight with you,’ she says.

  So that’s how that happened.

  And as I walk back over the Heath, Indigo starts humming a tune from some old TV show that I’ve never heard of. She swears that it’s like a classic spy theme, but I reckon I’ve got to get these foxes something up to date in the way of entertainment.

  Acknowledgements

  It may take a village to raise a child but it takes a medium-sized industrial park to publish a book on four continents. So, starting with the agents, John Berlyne and Stevie Finegan at Zeno. Then onto my fellow writers Andrew Cartmel and James Swallow for support, editorial advice and occasionally lunch.

  Onto production with Katie Espiner (big boss), Emad Akhtar (editor and anecdote provider), Paul Stark (audio-meister), and William O’Mullane (media guru) at Orion, Steve O’Gorman (defiantly freelance copyeditor), and everyone at Subterranean Press.

  In the research department we find Kirsty Potter (Northumbria Police Forensic SOCO), Clive Hall (architect), and classicist Penny Goodman from the University of Leeds. Not to mention several hundred people on Twitter who provided emergency research.

  Penultimately, there are the people I lean on outrageously to insulate me from the dreadful travails of the world – Anne Hall, Genn McMenemy, Sara Baladi and Andy Ryan.

  And finally my son Karifa, for his continued tolerance of my bad habits when writing (not to be confused with my bad writing habits).

  Credits

  Ben Aaronovitch and Gollancz would like to thank everyone at Orion who worked on the publication of What Abigail Did That Summer in the UK.

  Editorial

  Emad Akhtar

  Brendan Durkin

  Copy editor

  S
teve O’Gorman

  Proof reader

  Jane Howard

  Audio

  Paul Stark

  Amber Bates

  Contracts

  Anne Goddard

  Paul Bulos

  Jake Alderson

  Design

  Lucie Stericker

  Tomas Almeida

  Joanna Ridley

  Nick May

  Editorial Management

  Charlie Panayiotou

  Jane Hughes

  Alice Davis

  Finance

  Jennifer Muchan

  Jasdip Nandra

  Afeera Ahmed

  Elizabeth Beaumont

  Sue Baker

  Marketing

  Brittany Sankey

  Production

  Paul Hussey

  Operations

  Jo Jacobs

  Sharon Willis

  Lisa Pryde

  Lucy Brem

  Publicity

  Will O’Mullane

  Sales

  Jen Wilson

  Esther Waters

  Victoria Laws

  Rachael Hum

  Ellie Kyrke-Smith

  Frances Doyle

  Georgina Cutler

  Also by Ben Aaronovitch

  Rivers of London novels

  Rivers of London

  Moon Over Soho

  Whispers Under Ground

  Broken Homes

  Foxglove Summer

  The Hanging Tree

  Lies Sleeping

  False Value

  Rivers of London novellas

  The Furthest Station

  The October Man

  Rivers of London graphic novels

  Body Work

  Night Witch

  Black Mould

  Cry Fox

  Water Weed

  Action at a Distance

  The Fey and the Furious

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Gollancz

  an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

  London ec4y 0dz

  An Hachette UK Company

  Copyright © Ben Aaronovitch 2021

  The moral right of Ben Aaronovitch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 22436 0

  Typeset by Input Data Services Ltd, Somerset

  www.gollancz.co.uk