The Furthest Station Read online

  “Stories?”

  I could hear the shrug in the voice.

  “Stories,” it said.

  The rougher voice said something.

  “The kind of stories that have power,” said the softer voice.

  A low snarl.

  “He’s here,” said the softer voice. “Laters.”

  I counted to ten and walked around the front of the train. Abigail was standing looking out over the tangles of metal rails and power junctions that stretched away to the edge of the depot. She had her headphones in and was nodding her head as if listening to music—a nice touch, that, I thought.

  “Who were you talking to?” I asked.

  She made a show of registering my presence and pulling one earpiece out before asking me “What?”

  “Who were you talking to just now?”

  “Nobody,” she said. “Are we finished?”

  “We are,” I said. “But for you the work has just begun.”

  All right, we took her home to sleep first. But I picked her up nice and early the next morning and introduced her to the control room at Finchley Road where, with Dwain’s help, she was going to match up the carriage numbers we’d gathered with CCTV footage. Starting with the carriage where Jaget had found what I’d tentatively identified as an eighteenth century Postboy.

  These used to run the post up and down the treacherous roads of Britain between the major cities, pausing only to change horses and rifle the contents of their bags. It was a lot like the Pony Express, except without the glamour, more rain and added highwaymen. This explained why our ghost was carrying an urgent letter and looking for “the postmaster.” But the question was whether he’d been what me and Abigail had taken to calling an entity, a simulacra or a looper. There are various old terms, some in Latin, for the various types of ghost but since none of them are consistent with each other we decided to make our own jargon up. Saved time all round.

  The first factor is intensity on a scale of one to ten annies—where one annie is that strange sensation that somebody is standing looking over your shoulder and ten annies, very rare, being when you only realise someone’s a ghost because they walk through a wall. You can boost a ghost’s intensity by feeding it magic and we’re pretty certain that most ghosts are powered by the accumulated vestigia in their environment. Of all the natural materials, stone retains vestigia the best, which is why all old houses tend to be haunted.

  The second factor is volition, which is broken down into three categories. Loopers are the most common type of ghost. They’re basically recordings where the ghost repeats a series of actions, painting the wall of a train tunnel, screaming for their lost baby, boarding a non-existent tram in Aldwych. The longest loop we’ve found in the records lasted sixty-seven hours and the shortest seven seconds.

  Entities are the other end of the spectrum. These are ghosts that talk and react as if they’re alive. You can have a conversation with them and they appear to display comprehension and even some theory of mind. Me and Abigail have arguments about whether this constitutes them being “alive”—I haven’t met one yet that I thought would pass the Turing Test. The literature is split between whether they are the souls of the departed trapped in the material plane or impressions left behind by the dead.

  Simulacra are the ghosts that lie between entities and loopers. To me and Abigail they appear like characters in a computer game. However skilfully programmed they are, their actions and speech quickly become repetitive and stereotyped.

  Intensity and volition appear to be unrelated, so that some daylight visible ghosts merely repeat themselves while you only find some of the chatty ones by accident, they are so faint in their presence. One very late Oxford professor scared me to death by popping into existence while I was casting a werelight in the tunnels under Kew Garden. One day, when they finally let me back in the place, I’ll see if I can find her again.

  These things run on a spectrum, of course, so the terminology can break down at the boundaries. But we’d tentatively identified the Postboy as a five annie simulacra. Mind you, I’ve never seen a ghost come apart the way the Postboy had the night before.

  “It was like it was disintegrating,” I told Nightingale over breakfast. “Literally losing cohesion in front of our eyes.”

  “Are you sure it was a ghost?” asked Nightingale.

  I’d had to think about that. There are other incorporeal things out there, rare but very real. Some of them eat ghosts and others can get into your head and twist your life out of shape.

  “It felt like a ghost,” I said. “It had that air of sadness you always feel around them.”

  Nightingale smiled at me over his coffee cup. “An aura of melancholy hardly constitutes empirical evidence—what would our Doctors Walid and Vaughan say?”

  Still, disassembling ghosts would have to wait because while Abigail was wading through CCTV I was cramming for my National Investigators Exam and committing to memory the many steps needed to ensure health and safety at a crime scene. That’s the health and safety of the police and associated law enforcement professionals. Obviously when you’re securing a murder you don’t have to worry about HSE complaints from the victim.

  Fortunately, when you grow up in a flat as small as my parents’ you learn how to do your homework in cafés and libraries.

  I was just wrestling with what exactly were the legal powers available to the police when securing a crime scene, and the vital question of whether to have another round of toast, when Abigail texted me that she had something to show.

  Not only had she found all the relevant footage, she’d edited out the boring bits, spliced it all together, added musical backing in the shape of Ella Henderson’s “Ghost” and transferred it to her laptop so we could watch it without interfering in the smooth operation of Dwain’s control room.

  I was fairly certain the CCTV footage was proprietary, so I checked with Dwain who said he didn’t even know it was possible to transfer it out like that.

  “You’re not going to report us, right?” I asked.

  “You’re kidding,” he said. “I’ve just hired her to optimise my home entertainment system.”

  I asked Abigail how much she was planning to charge.

  “Client confidentiality,” she said. “But if you want your stuff at the coach house fixed I can give you a quote.”

  We popped out of the station and round the corner to a dubious fried chicken stroke internet café where we could look dodgy and technological without drawing adverse attention. Abigail handed me a USB pen and I transferred the file over to my laptop where it nearly broke my player.

  “You want to get that upgraded,” said Abigail.

  The video started with a brief title sequence before opening on an interior shot of an S8 carriage, shot from the high, wide angle point of view of a ceiling-mounted CCTV camera.

  “This is the unit where you found the Postboy,” said Abigail.

  Titles crashed in with the opening chords of the song, starkly white against black—POSTBOY—and below that the unit serial number and a time stamp. Then the actual CCTV footage faded up to reveal a familiarly rammed carriage wall to wall with commuters and, judging by the light, running above ground in daylight.

  “Top left hand corner,” said Abigail.

  I saw it—a flicker of movement.

  “Can you…” I started, but Abigail told me to wait.

  The sequence repeated, only now in grainy close-up.

  “Sorry about the quality,” she said. “But I didn’t have any clean-up tools.”

  We didn’t need them, because even with the blur and grain it was easy to see the ripple amongst the passengers as they reacted to a patch of empty space. You didn’t need much of an imagination to insert the figure of Postboy working his way up the carriage.

  “Why can’t we see him?”

  “You’re asking me?” said Abigail.

  “We have photographs back at the Folly,” I said. “You can see the ghosts on
those.”

  Abigail said she was dubious about the collection of faded sepia prints we’d unearthed in the mundane library. She’d done her own experiments both with her phone and a vintage Leica camera she’d found inside one of the storage cupboards in the lecture theatre.

  “What were you even doing in there?” I asked.

  “Having a look around,” she said.

  “How did you get them developed?”

  “There’s a darkroom in the metal working lab.”

  And she’d taught herself photographic developing off the internet because of course she had.

  Her theory was that the visible aspect of the ghosts, the bit that reflected photons which could register on our eyeballs or London Underground’s CCTV, was very tenuous. Since they were manifesting in full daylight they were lost in the contrast.

  But people had reported seeing them even if the memories had quickly faded.

  “Maybe human eyesight is still better than the cameras?”

  I ran the sequence back and forth, watching the passengers reacting to a presence that wasn’t visible on screen.

  “Vestigia,” I said. “Our brains get additional information from non-corporeal aspects of the ghost and automatically uses that to fill in the gaps in the visual information.” Human visual perception often being more like educated guesswork than a camera recording.

  “Nice,” said Abigail. “Very plausible.”

  “Yeah, but just because it’s plausible doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “Testable?” asked Abigail.

  “You’ve been reading books again, haven’t you?”

  Abigail rocked the footage back and forth.

  “Testable?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.” And, before she could open her mouth to speak, “But not today. What else did you find?”

  Abigail ran her little fan film forward to reveal a number of other incidents including Jonathan Pickering and Amirah Khalil’s close encounters.

  “One incident every weekday for the last nine weekdays, most of them in the stretch between Wembley Park and Harrow on the Hill, and none closer in than Finchley Road. All of them travelling into London during the morning rush hour.”

  “Ghost commuter,” I said. “At least now we’ve narrowed down where to look.”

  1Note for Reynolds: that's a bit over the length of an American football pitch. Sorry, field. [back]

  Chapter 3:

  THE FRENCH

  LIEUTENANT'S

  COMMUTER

  It's hard to conduct an interview on a rush hour train, and normally we’d have gone somewhere quieter with hot and cold running coffee, but we didn’t know how long the woman’s memories would last. I didn’t even dare wait until we could bail at the next station. So Jaget used his uniformed presence to create a perimeter while I evicted a young white man with a shovel beard off an adjacent seat and sat down next to her.

  Likewise, you usually take down a few details to calm the witness down and reinforce the notion that you are an authority figure before taking a statement. But this time I just settled for her name—Jessica Talacre.

  “I thought he was French to start with,” said Jessica. “He sounded French, at least I think it was French. He was shouting at me and he seemed angry.”

  I asked if she could remember what the man had looked like, black or white or…

  “Mixed,” said Jessica. “But lighter than you, with curly hair in those things.” She raised her index finger to her scalp and made circular motions.

  “Ringlets?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That and his teeth were bad.”

  He was also wearing a long old-fashioned “Mr Darcy” coat in heavy material but not, unfortunately, in red. So not a match with our Neasden Depot ghost. Jessica seemed startled when I asked for details of his trousers but remembered enough to confirm that the ghost had been wearing breeches and white stockings—she hadn’t seen his shoes.

  I asked her if she could remember what the French had sounded like and she gave me a strange look.

  “What French?” she asked.

  I kept going, but it was too late. In less than five minutes from the end of the incident Jessica Talacre had lost all memory of it. I gave her my card and asked her to call me if she remembered additional details, but it was obvious that she thought I was bonkers.

  “Want to keep going?” asked Jaget as we wrote up our notes.

  “If Abigail’s right, then that’s our last sighting this morning,” I said.

  “And if she isn’t?” asked Jaget, because police and scientists have that in common.

  “Then hopefully she’ll spot it,” I said. Abigail was cheerfully playing Big Brother in Finchley Road’s control centre, which just went to show that when it came to London Underground’s regulations my friend Dwain hadn’t totally reformed.

  And, speaking of Abigail…

  “Let’s take a ride up to Amersham,” I said. “I want to check something out.”

  Amersham is well out of our manor, being in the County of Buckinghamshire and thus subject to the cool and professional attentions of the TVP, who are never referred to by their colleagues in the Met as the Chav Valley Police. So as we rode the train back up the line I called ahead and let them know we would be poking about, in full uniform, around their patch. They didn’t seem bothered, but they did want a firm commitment that we’d warn them before doing anything drastic.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  Like demolish any landmarks, said the Thames Valley Police.

  “Good one,” said I.

  They said they weren’t joking, but I’m almost a hundred percent certain they were.

  So, off to not-actually-very-historic Amersham we went. There is a medieval core that dates back to the tenth century but the railway station and the modern town sit on a plateau between two rivers—the Misbourne and the Chess. A quick follow-up call to Nightingale established that neither were known to possess genius loci.

  “Although you should remember, Peter,” he said, “that not every entity associated with the natural world is as garrulous as Mother Thames’s daughters. My mother once told me that the stream at the bottom of our garden had its own fairy guardian and even though I went as far as to construct a hide I never caught so much as a glimpse.”

  I wondered if there had really been a fairy guardian or whether his mum had been looking for a way of getting the youngest child of six out from under her feet.

  “Incidentally, why on earth are you visiting Amersham?” he asked.

  “There’s this house,” I said. “Used to sit all alone on a hill…”

  Back in 1929 a pair of likely lads made the first of many attempts to drag the English out of their cosy brick hobbit holes and ascend into the future borne aloft on gleaming cubes of white rendered concrete. Thus was High and Over House brought into being upon a hill overlooking the small but rapidly growing town of Amersham. The locals hated it—but I’ve got to say, if you have to build a monstrous flat-roofed modernist pile, then it might as well have decent proportions.

  Me and Jaget proceeded out of the train station down through the late Victorian and Edwardian shopping parades and terraces and then left up the hill through lines of faux Edwardian semi-detached houses until he practically stumbled on the entrance. The modernist splendour of High and Over now being largely hidden behind an enormous hedge and old-growth trees.

  The woman who answered the door gave a familiar little start when she saw us and hesitated before saying—“Ah. Yes.”

  We know that reaction well—it is the cry of the guilty middle-class homeowner.

  This sort of thing always create a dilemma since the scale of guilt you’re dealing with ranges from using a hosepipe during a ban to having just finished cementing your abusive husband into the patio.

  The trick to ascertaining whether it’s time to rush in or back away slowly is to say as little as possible while looming and adoptin
g a friendly grin that edges into the menacing. Asking ambiguous but leading questions can also help.

  “Good afternoon,” said Jaget. “Is this your house?”

  The women was white, late forties, brown hair cut in a bob, blue eyes, straight nose, pointed chin, narrow mouth, no dimples—it pays to remember these details in case you have to construct an e-fit later. She was wearing prefaded designer jeans and a white blouse with ruffles at the collar and wrists. No obvious dirt stains on her knees or blood stains on the blouse, so if there was a dead husband it had happened long enough ago for her to clean up.

  “This house?” asked the woman.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said. “This house.”

  She looked over her shoulder as if seeing the interior for the first time.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” she said. “And my husband of course, we own it, yes.”

  I know it sounds cruel, but nothing gladdens the heart of the police quite like the sight of a potential customer so off balance that one good nudge will get you a result.

  Jaget judged the pause perfectly, giving the woman enough time to almost relax before asking—“Is there something wrong?”

  “I just found them, okay?” she said. “I buried them because I didn’t know what else to do. But it wasn’t me who poisoned them.”

  “Poisoned who?” asked Jaget.

  She told us, and as she did I realised I’d been played good and proper.

  “You’d better show us, ma’am,” I said.

  The charnel pit was round the back, down a flight of white garden steps, to a sloping lawn and beyond the round swimming pool where the garden proper merged into the woods. I could see where the turfs had been cut and re-laid. The owner provided me with a shovel and I carefully stripped off the turf and the first ten centimetres of soil.

  “Damn,” said Jaget. “It’s a fox apocalypse.”