Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (2 page)

Lesley said we should check the timetables at least.

‘It’s Sunday,’ said Abigail. ‘They’re doing engineering works all day.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Lesley.

‘Because I checked,’ said Abigail. ‘Why did your face fall off?’

‘Because I opened my mouth too wide,’ said Lesley.

‘How do we get down there?’ I asked quickly.

There were council estates built on the cheap railway land either side of the tracks. Behind the 1950s tower block on the north side was a patch of sodden grass, lined with bushes, and behind these a chain-link fence. A kid-sized tunnel through the bushes led to a hole in the fence and the tracks beyond.

We crouched down and followed Abigail through. Lesley sniggered as a couple of wet branches smacked me in the face. She paused to check the hole in the fence.

‘It hasn’t been cut,’ she said. ‘Looks like wear and tear – foxes maybe.’

There was a scattering of damp crisp packets and coke cans that had washed up against the fence line – Lesley pushed them around with the toe of her shoe. ‘The junkies haven’t found this place yet,’ she said. ‘No needles.’ She looked at Abigail. ‘How did you know this was here?’

‘You can see the hole from up on the footbridge.’

Keeping as far from the tracks as we could, we made our way under the footbridge and headed for the concrete mouth of the tunnel under the school. Graffiti covered the walls up to head height. Carefully sprayed balloon letters in faded primary colours overlaid by cruder taggers using anything from spray paints to felt tip pens. Despite a couple of swastikas, I didn’t think that Admiral Dönitz would have been impressed.

It kept the drizzle off our heads, though. There was a piss smell but too acrid to be human – foxes I thought. The flat ceiling, concrete walls and the sheer width that it covered meant it felt more like an abandoned warehouse than a tunnel.

‘Where was it?’ I asked.

‘In the middle where it’s dark,’ said Abigail.

Of course, I thought.

Lesley asked Abigail what she thought she was doing coming down here in the first place.

‘I wanted to see the Hogwarts Express,’ she said.

Not the real one, Abigail was quick to point out. Because it’s a fictional train innit? So obviously it’s not going to be the real Hogwarts Express. But her friend Kara who lived in a flat that overlooked the tracks said that every once in a while she saw a steam locomotive – because that’s what you’re supposed to call them – which she thought was the train they used for the Hogwarts Express.

‘You know?’ she said. ‘In the movies.’

‘And you couldn’t watch this from the bridge?’ asked Lesley.

‘Goes past too fast,’ she said. ‘I need to count the wheels because in the movies it’s a GWR 4900 Class 5972 which is 4–6–0 configuration.’

‘I didn’t know you’re a trainspotter,’ I said.

‘I’m not,’ said Abigail and punched me in the arm. ‘That’s about collecting numbers while this was about verifying a theory.’

‘Did you see the train?’ asked Lesley.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I saw a ghost. Which is why I came looking for Peter.’

I asked where she’d seen the ghost and she showed us the chalk lines she’d drawn.

‘And you’re sure this is where it appeared?’ I asked.

‘
He
appeared,’ said Abigail. ‘I keep telling you it’s a he.’

‘He’s not here now,’ I said.

‘Course he isn’t,’ said Abigail. ‘If he were here all the time then someone else would have reported him by now.’

It was a good point and I made a mental note to check the reports when I got back to the Folly. I’d found a service room off the mundane library that contained filing cabinets full of papers from before World War Two. Amongst them, notebooks filled with handwritten ghost sightings – as far as I could tell ghost-spotting had been the hobby of choice amongst adolescent wizards-to-be.

‘Did you take a picture?’ asked Lesley.

‘I had my phone ready and everything for the train,’ said Abigail. ‘But by the time I thought of taking a picture he’d gone.’

‘Feel anything?’ Lesley asked me.

There’d been a chill when I’d stepped into the spot where the ghost had stood, a whiff of butane that cut through the fox urine and wet concrete, a Muttley-the-dog snigger and the hollow chest roar of a really big diesel engine.

Magic leaves an imprint on its surroundings. The technical term we use is
vestigia
. Stone absorbs it best and living things the least. Concrete’s almost as good as stone but even so the traces can be faint and almost indistinguishable from the artefacts of your own imagination. Learning which is which is a key skill if you want to practise magic. The chill was probably the weather and the snigger, real or imagined, originated with Abigail. The smell of propane and the diesel roar hinted at a familiar tragedy.

‘Well?’ asked Lesley. I’m better at
vestigium
than she is and not just because I’ve been apprenticed longer than her.

‘Something’s here,’ I said. ‘You want to make a light?’

Lesley pulled the battery out of her mobile and told Abigail to follow suit.

‘Because,’ I said when the girl hesitated, ‘the magic will destroy the chips if they’re connected up. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s your phone.’

Abigail pulled out last year’s Ericsson, cracked it open with practised ease and removed the battery. I nodded at Lesley – my phone has a manual switch I’d retrofitted with the help of one of my cousins who’s been cracking mobiles since he was twelve.

Lesley held out her hand, said the magic word and conjured a golf-ball-sized globe of light that hovered above her open palm. The magic word in this case was
Lux
and the colloquial name for the spell is a
werelight
– it’s the first spell you ever learn. Lesley’s werelight cast a pearly light that threw soft-edged shadows against the tunnel’s concrete walls.

‘Whoa!’ said Abigail. ‘You guys can do magic.’

‘There he is,’ said Lesley.

A young man appeared by the wall. He was white, in his late teens or early twenties with a shock of unnaturally blond hair gelled into spikes. He was dressed in cheap white trainers, jeans and a donkey jacket. He was holding a can of spray paint in his hand and was using it to carefully describe an arc on the concrete. The hiss was barely audible and there was no sign of fresh paint being laid down. When he paused to shake the can the rattling sound was muffled.

Lesley’s werelight dimmed and reddened in colour.

‘Give it some more,’ I told her.

She concentrated and her werelight flared before dimming again. The hiss grew louder and now I could see what it was he was spraying. He’d been ambitious – writing a sentence that started up near the entrance.

‘Be excellent to …’ read Abigail. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

I put my fingers to my lips and glanced at Lesley, who tilted her head to show she could keep up the magic all day if need be – not that I was going to let her. I pulled out my standard-issue police notebook and got my pen ready.

‘Excuse me,’ I said in my best policeman voice. ‘Could I have a word?’ They actually teach you how to do the voice at Hendon. The aim is to achieve a tone that cuts through whatever fog of alcohol, belligerence or randomised guilt the member of the public is floating in.

The young man ignored me. He pulled a second spray can from his jacket pocket and began shading the edges of a capital E. I tried a couple more times but he seemed intent on finishing the word EACH.

‘Oi sunshine,’ said Lesley. ‘Put that down, turn round and talk to us.’

The hissing stopped, the spray cans went back in the pockets and the young man turned. His face was pale and angular and his eyes were hidden behind a pair of smoked Ozzy Osbourne specs.

‘I’m busy,’ he said.

‘We can see that,’ I said and showed him my warrant card. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Macky,’ he said and turned back to his work. ‘I’m busy.’

‘What you doing?’ asked Lesley.

‘I’m making the world a better place,’ said Macky.

‘It’s a ghost,’ said Abigail incredulously.

‘You brought us here,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but when I saw him he was thinner,’ said Abigail. ‘Much thinner.’

I explained that he was feeding off the magic Lesley was generating, which led to the question I always dread.

‘So what’s magic, then?’ asked Abigail.

‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not any form of electromagnetic radiation. That I do know.’

‘Maybe it’s brainwaves,’ said Abigail.

‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘Because that would be electrochemical and it would still have to involve some kind of physical manifestation if it was going to be projected out of your head.’ So just chalk it up to pixie dust or quantum entanglement, which was the same thing as pixie dust except with the word quantum in it.

‘Are we going to talk to this guy or not?’ asked Lesley. ‘Because otherwise I’m going to turn this off.’ Her werelight bobbed over her palm.

‘Oi Macky,’ I called. ‘A word in your shell-like.’

Macky had returned to his art – finishing up the shading on the H in EACH.

‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘I’m making the world a better place.’

‘How are you planning to do that?’ I asked.

Macky finished the H to his satisfaction and stepped back to admire his handiwork. We’d all been careful to stay as far from the tracks as possible but either Macky was taking a risk or, most likely, he’d just forgotten. I saw Abigail mouth
Oh shit
as she realised what was going to happen.

‘Because,’ said Macky and then he was hit by the ghost train.

It went past us invisible and silent but for a blast of heat and the smell of diesel. Macky was swatted off the track to land in a crumple just the below the X in EXCELLENT. There was a gurgling sound and his leg twitched for a couple of seconds before he went quite still. Then he faded, and with him his graffiti.

‘Can I stop now?’ asked Lesley. The werelight remained dim – Macky was still drawing its power.

‘Just a little bit longer,’ I said.

I heard a faint rattle and looking back towards the mouth of the tunnel I saw a dim and transparent figure start spraying the outline of a balloon B.

Cyclical
, I wrote in my notebook,
repeating – insentient?

I told Lesley she could shut down her werelight and Macky vanished. Abigail, who had cautiously flattened herself against the wall of the tunnel, watched as me and Lesley did a quick search along the strip of ground beside the track. Halfway back towards the entrance I pulled the dusty and cracked remains of Macky’s spectacles from amongst the sand and scattered ballast. I held them in my hand and closed my eyes. When it comes to
vestigia
, metal and glass are both unpredictable but I caught, faintly, a couple of bars of a rock guitar solo.

I made a note of the glasses – physical confirmation of the ghost’s existence – and wondered whether to take them home. Would removing something that integral to the ghost from the location have an effect on it? And if removing it did damage or destroy the ghost, did it matter? Was a ghost a person?

I haven’t read even ten per cent of the books in the mundane library about ghosts. In fact I’ve mostly only read the textbooks that Nightingale has assigned me and stuff, like Wolfe and Polidori, that I’ve come across during an investigation. From what I have read it is clear that attitudes towards ghosts, amongst official wizards, have changed over time.

Sir Isaac Newton, founder of modern magic, seemed to regard them as an irritating distraction from the beauty of his nice clean universe. There was a mad rush during the seventeenth century to classify them in the manner of plants or animals and during the Enlightenment there was a lot of earnest discussion about free will. The Victorians divided neatly into those who regarded ghosts as souls to be saved and those who thought them a form of spiritual pollution – to be exorcised. In the 1930s, as relativity and quantum theory arrived to unsettle the leather upholstery of the Folly, the speculation got a bit excitable and the poor old spirits of the departed were seized upon as convenient test subjects for all manner of magical experiments. The consensus being that they were little more than gramophone recordings of past lives and therefore occupied the same ethical status as fruit flies in a genetics lab.

I’d asked Nightingale about this, since he’d been there, but he said hadn’t spent a lot of time at the Folly in those days. Out and about in the Empire and beyond, he’d said. I asked him what he’d been doing.

‘I remember writing a great many reports. But to what purpose I was never entirely sure.’

I didn’t think they were ‘souls’ but until I knew what they were, I was going to err on the side of ethical conduct. I scrapped out a shallow depression in the ballast just where Abigail had made her mark and buried the glasses there. I made a note of time and location for transfer to the files back at the Folly. Lesley made a note of the location of the hole in the fence but it was me that had to call in to the British Transport Police on account of her still, officially, being on medical leave.

We bought Abigail a Twix and a can of coke and extracted a promise that she’d stay off the railway tracks, Hogwarts Express or no Hogwarts Express. I was hoping that Macky’s ghostly demise would be enough to keep her away on its own. Then we dropped her off back at the flats and headed back to Russell Square.

‘That coat was too small for her,’ said Lesley. ‘And what kind of teenage girl goes looking for steam trains?’

‘You think there’s trouble at home?’ I asked.

Lesley jammed her index finger under the bottom edge of her mask and scratched. ‘This is not fucking hypoallergenic,’ she said.

‘You could take it off,’ I said. ‘We’re nearly back.’

‘I think you should register your concern with Social Services,’ said Lesley.

‘Have you logged your minutes yet?’

‘Just because you know her family,’ said Lesley, ‘doesn’t mean you’ll be doing her any favours if you ignore the problem.’

‘I’ll talk to my mum,’ I said. ‘How many minutes?’