The Furthest Station Read online

  It was no use pointing out that we were actually policemen, not just gentlemen, because Nightingale has a very clear idea where one ends and the other begins. One day, I’m hoping, he’ll show me where that line is.

  I know Abigail goes out and gets herself into trouble when our backs are turned. I’m pretty certain she was mixed up somehow with a couple of teenaged mispers last summer. And she seems to have picked up protection from a senior civil servant at the Home Office—although Lady Ty swears blind that it’s nothing to do with her.

  “On the Metropolitan Line,” said Abigail using her serious voice, “we have a bunch of public domain hauntings and some verified ghosts, three of which were reported expunged.” The Folly had done a lot less expunging of ghosts than you might expect. In the eighteenth century they were more interested in studying them, and the Victorians were worried they might truly be the souls of human beings and left that sort of thing to the Church. Abigail was of the opinion that if your average vicar had ever truly exorcised a ghost it was only by accident. But there’d been a number of practitioners who were also parsons. Apparently being a country parson was a cushy living up until the late nineteenth century and had involved remarkably little in the way of actual religion.

  “There’s the ghost of Anne Naylor at Farringdon,” said Abigail. “Thirteen-year-old girl murdered in 1758, known as the Screaming Spectre.” There was a pause for some more possibly-not-banana cake. “Then the famous phantom footprints between Baker Street and St Johns Wood and Boudicca’s burial site at Kings Cross—remember that?”

  We’d done it as a field trip—Platform 10 at Kings Cross, which was reputedly the last resting place of the woad-wearing warrior woman. We hadn’t found anything, but it had led to a lively discussion about the practicalities of attaching blades to the wheels of your chariot. We got so carried away that a posh middle-aged white woman, no doubt waiting for a train, congratulated me on being an excellent father and for fostering an interest in British history in my daughter.

  “Well done you,” she’d said.

  There were a couple of verified ghosts of the “full torso repeating manifestation type” at Finchley Road, but they only manifested when someone fed them some magic. Which we’d done one wet Sunday when Abigail had been particularly restive and I was too lazy to come up with something better.

  “I think we should go have a look,” said Abigail.

  So I called Jaget and asked him to inform the relevant station control rooms that we’d be out and about that evening. Then we procured a packed supper from Molly and walked up to Kings Cross to hop on the Metropolitan Line.

  We’d timed it to miss the worst of the rush hour, but it was still packed all the way up to Wembley where we hopped off and waited for a southbound train. We started at the far end of the platform so Abigail had plenty of time to note the train number as it pulled in. The S8 Bombardier rolling stock is a walkthrough train, so there’s no fiddling about with doors from carriage to carriage. Being able to see or move down the whole length of the train easily increases capacity and is a boon to police officers, fare dodgers and pickpockets alike. We walked up its length during the long run back from Wembley Park to Finchley Road feeling for any vestigia and trying not to look too much like weirdos.

  We got off at Finchley Road, waited for the next train, and repeated the process on the way to Baker Street where we turned around and did it again back up to Wembley. We did the journey a couple more times before stopping off at Finchley to eat our suppers.

  Which turned out to be steak and kidney pasties, still warm, with a recycled jam jar full of pickled onions staring out at us like so many eyeballs. We ate the pasties but we both figured that eating the pickles in a public place would constitute a nuisance under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014.

  There had been a ton of vestigia on the trains, but it had all been the routine noise that we’d taken to calling “engineering background”—random sensations involving bits of metal banging together, the smell of oil and sweat and steam, chips and vinegar, topless pin-ups and rolling tobacco.

  Nothing that said “agitated spirit” to either of us.

  We were considering whether to do another couple of runs or not when a voice called my name.

  A short black man in a blue London Underground shirt was striding down the platform towards us. He was built like brick shithouse, with broad shoulders and short muscular legs—he also walked with the familiar bantam strut, and that’s what I recognised before his face, which had acquired a pair of Malcom X specs and a conservative fade cut that couldn’t disguise his receding hairline. His name was Dwain Fletcher and he may have looked older than me, but we’d been in the same year at school. We hadn’t been friends exactly, but we’d got along and the last time I’d seen him he was disappearing under a pile of police outside the Camden Palace. We’d been fifteen, and I’d heard later that he’d ended up in a young offenders institution or emigrated to Canada, or something equally dire.

  I stood up to meet him and he hugged me briefly.

  “Bruv,” he said. “Remember me?”

  I said I did but that I’d heard he’d “gone away,” which I felt covered all the bases.

  “Nah, man,” he said. “I’m respectable.”

  He was in fact a station manager for London Underground, currently covering a colleague on maternity leave at Finchley Road. He’d heard that I’d be on his stretch, so he’d kept an eye on the CCTV.

  I asked him what he’d been up to, because I didn’t want to have to run a PNC check to find out. He’d manage to avoid a spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but his mum had sent him back to Jamaica in the strange belief this might straighten him out. Which it did, but not for the reason his mum thought.

  “They’re mad there,” he said. “So I came back and went to college.”

  And got a job with the Underground and a wife and two kids and a semi in Redbridge. He got out his phone and showed me pictures. His wife was mixed race and had a serious face. The children were six and four years old and looked like trouble, but in a good way.

  I told him that they seemed like brilliant kids while Abigail made gagging motions behind his back.

  He asked if we were really ghost hunting, and I said we were.

  “What, like officially?”

  “Officially secret,” I said because discretion is supposed to be, if not our middle name, at least a nickname we occasionally answer to when we remember.

  “You want to be looking further up,” he said. “At Pinner. That’s where all the ghostly stuff is.”

  “Who says?”

  “You know,” he said. “Track walkers, engineers, superstitious folk.”

  I expressed polite scepticism, but Dwain insisted that it was true. I said we’d look into it, and we exchanged numbers and promises to come round for supper and meet the missus before me and me and Abigail hopped the next train back to Kings Cross.

  As we travelled Abigail consulted her notebooks.

  “There’s got to be a better way to check the trains,” she said.

  “It would probably be easier if we waited for them to all parked up,” I said. “You know—like in a depot or something.”

  Chapter 2:

  THE NEASDEN

  POSTBOY

  At peak capacity the Metropolitan Line runs twenty-two trains per hour, and at the end of the day those units—because that’s the technical term—have to be stored somewhere. That’s fifty-eight trains, each one about one hundred and twenty metres long1, so the depots have to be a bit on the largish side. You catch a glimpse of this enormity as you swish past on your way to Wembley Park, but you don’t appreciate the sheer fuck-off size of the place until you walk in and see a couple of thousand tons of rolling stock laid out in ranks in the marshalling yard.

  “That’s a lot of trains,” I said.

  The depot management weren’t happy about us being there, and only agreed to let us in because we had Jaget with us an
d agreed to wear hard hats and reflective jackets and not wander off unaccompanied. It took a bit of fast talking on Nightingale’s part to explain that we needed a bit of privacy to work properly. It ended up being a messy compromise and it didn’t help that Jaget hadn’t wanted to come out and play in the first place.

  “It’s fish and chip night tonight,” he said, and scowled.

  Fish and chip night was a Kumar family tradition that dated back to when Jaget was courting his wife and they used to meet in the last white English-owned fish and chip shop in Wembley on the basis that none of their relatives would go in there.

  “It was proper fish and chips too,” Jaget had said, although of course they’d had to smuggle in a few condiments to take the edge off the blandness. “They closed down years ago—it’s a Pret now I think.”

  I’d asked why their relatives might have objected to them going out. Jaget said it wasn’t like that at all. “Our families were seriously intertwined at the Aunty level, and when they found out they practically died of happiness. We just wanted a bit of time and privacy before our families steamrollered us into the temple.”

  So every month they palmed off the kids onto their—still presumably ecstatic—families, cooked fish and chips and spent the rest of the evening in. Mrs Kumar was not going to be happy.

  “Now you’ve made me hungry,” said Abigail, whose parents had become remarkably relaxed about her late night ghost-hunting jaunts.

  “We’ll grab an Ethiopian on the way over,” I said.

  But we got a Kurdish instead and finished it off while waiting for all the stock to arrive.

  The Underground works all day and all evening, which means the brave men and women in high-visibility orange who keep it running have to work all night. The depot is so full of people banging bits of metal together and scraping things to make sparks that if you squinted you’d swear they were about to launch a last desperate attack against the Death Star.

  Fortunately Abigail had a list of trains that had been running in the relevant area and a sombre-looking engineer called Hiran to point us in the right direction. In proper Scooby Gang fashion we split up, with me and Jaget taking one side of the depot while Nightingale and Abigail took the other. We got the third rail safety lecture first, even though the sidings we’d be checking were powered down.

  “Always assume the power is on,” Jaget said. “Because you don’t want to find out the hard way.”

  And since the power was off we had to climb in through the driver’s emergency access door at the front of the train. Hiran warned us again to be on our best behaviour and went off, sensibly, to keep an eye on Abigail.

  With only the amber yard lights filtering through the windows on one side and no power it was amazingly dark and still. Tube trains are like clubs—they’re well creepy with no people and without the hum of the motors and air conditioning.

  “What are we looking for anyway?” asked Jaget.

  “Just see if you can feel anything strange,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like something that doesn’t belong,” I said. “But isn’t your imagination.”

  “How do you tell the difference?”

  “Practice,” I said.

  Not that we got any practice in that train.

  We went back to the front where, as we had been strictly instructed, we waited for Hiran to come back and escort us to the next train along.

  Which was darker, stiller and emptier.

  It wasn’t until the fifth train that we found something. Three carriages down Jaget pointed at one of the transverse seats near the end and said—“There.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Something.”

  And it was something. I knew that once I got within half a metre. The smell of horse sweat and the sound of distant shouting. I told Jaget he was right and he nodded sagely.

  “I’m getting the hang of this, aren’t I?” he said.

  I told him he was, but asked him not to ever do anything magical without checking with me first. I called Nightingale and told him I was going to do some magic and asked him to see if he could watch for a wider reaction. Then we switched our phones and airwaves off and I conjured up a werelight.

  I opened my palm and let the light hover. Jaget had assured me that all the power systems on the train were off so there was no chance of my wrecking five million quid’s worth of rolling stock.

  Normally when you feed a ghost it appears all in one mass, taking on the illusion of solidity as it noms up the magic. This one was like a glitch in a computer game, its torso bent over backwards at the waist, legs pumping spasmodically, arms outstretched, head held vertically on the end of an obscenely elongated neck. Despite the contortion, we could see that he was a young man dressed in a red eighteenth century riding jacket and knee breeches. His mouth moved and formed words but they were hard to catch, like when someone is trying to talk over loud music in a club.

  “Where is the postmaster?” he said.

  I checked my werelight, which was burning yellow. This was odd, because they usually turn red as the ghost sucks up the power.

  “I have a letter,” he said, the voice wavering in and out. “An urgent letter.”

  His head twisted on the neck, so that it faced us, and both me and Jaget unconsciously bent sideways to keep it right way up.

  “But I can’t find the postmaster,” he said. “And I have a letter.”

  “Who is the letter from?” I asked.

  “It’s from the palace. Where is the postmaster? Where is the magistrate? I have a letter for the magistrate.”

  “Give me the letter,” I said. “I can deliver it to the magistrate.”

  The ghost frowned and for the first time his eyes focused on us.

  “Are you his servants?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “You can trust us.”

  The ghost’s right arm twitched in our direction as if he was trying to reach for us, but couldn’t get control of his limbs. His eyes closed in resignation.

  “Alas,” said the ghost. “I have run my course.” And with that his head fell off, just dropped off his shoulders and straight through the floor of the carriage. And, before we could react to that, his arms and legs separated from his torso and fell away. For a moment his torso hung on its own and I could see the chest moving as if he was still breathing, before it too dropped out of sight.

  “Okay,” said Jaget after a pause. “That’s the second most freakiest thing you’ve ever shown me.”

  I snapped off the werelight.

  “That was really odd,” I said.

  “Yeah, even by your standards of odd that was odd,” said Jaget. “What next?”

  I opened my notebook. “We record it,” I said. “And then we move on.”

  That’s one of the golden rules of police work—just because you’ve found one body doesn’t mean there isn’t a second a couple of metres further on. Finish whatever search you started even if it’s just so you don’t have to come back and do it all again later.

  I turned my phone back on and told the engineer that we were ready to board the next train, which turned out to be a bust, as did the next two. In the fourth I felt not one but two separate hot spots at opposite ends of the train. I gave both the werelight treatment, but neither responded. We dutifully made a note of the carriage and moved on.

  In our whole line of trains I only found one more ghost—that of a plump white woman in a low-cut Jane Austen dress. Even with me pumping up the werelight she remained so transparent I couldn’t tell you what colour the dress was. She appeared aware of us and her mouth moved, but there was no sound. She only lasted thirty seconds before, scowling and with her fists bunched in frustration, she shattered, falling to pieces as if she’d been made of porcelain.

  Once we’d written her up and checked the last of our trains I turned on my mobile and called Nightingale. It went straight to voicemail, so we jumped down and Hiran walked us across t
he yard towards the side Nightingale and Abigail were supposed to be working.

  We found Nightingale under a raised floodlight by the hangar-sized maintenance building, jotting down notes.

  “Where’s Abigail?” I asked.

  Nightingale pointed down the side of the building.

  “She popped off down there,” he said.

  “To do what?” I asked. Nightingale is often aghast—his word—at the restrictions we put on young people and he feels modern adults are far too overprotective. But even given that background, he still had way more faith in Abigail’s common sense than I did.

  “She’s up to something clandestine, I’m sure,” he said.

  I left Jaget with Nightingale and stalked off to find out what Abigail had got into now. There was a raised platform running the length of the workshop. Hiran had told us that we were fine as long as we stayed on these and I hoped Abigail hadn’t wandered off.

  I walked the length of the platform, and as I reached the end I heard Abigail speaking.

  “I can’t talk now,” she said and I guessed she was tucked out of sight at the front of the train.

  I heard another voice, high pitched, breathy but too quiet for me to make out the words. Nosiness is practically a professional requirement in the police, so I had no qualms about quietly easing myself closer so I could eavesdrop.

  “Because Peter is here,” said Abigail, then a pause. “You’re the ones that don’t want him to know.”

  The other speaker either laughed or had a coughing fit.

  “I should tape you and sell it to Fox Watch,” said Abigail.

  “There’s a house,” said a different voice, with the same breathy texture, only crisper and better enunciated. “It sits out on a hill at the end of the line. It used to stand alone but now it’s crowded round—there are stories and ghosts.”