I counted six just on the top layer—I don’t know enough about foxes to be sure, but there were at least two smaller specimens that may have been adolescents. None of them seemed large enough to be one of Abigail’s talking variety but, like I said, what do I know?
The woman found the first victim floating in her swimming pool a fortnight earlier. She assumed that it had fallen in and drowned.
“So I wrapped it a Waitrose bag,” she said. “One of those big ones with the handles that you’re supposed to buy because it’s greener.” She considered whether she could just pop it in amongst the rest of rubbish for collection, but thought she’d read somewhere that that it might damage the council’s incinerator. So she decided to pick out a pleasant spot in the woods to bury it.
“The woods were planted by the original owner,” said the current owner. “Bernard Ashmole, he was curator of the British Museum.”
“The foxes?” asked Jaget.
“I found the next two while I was carrying the first to its grave,” she said. “Ironically.”
Then another three along a line from the bottom of the garden to the pool.
“As if they were trying to reach the water,” she said. “Perhaps whatever killed them made them thirsty or, I don’t know, hot, feverish?”
I asked her if she had any ideas about who might be responsible.
“Oh, one of those lot.” She waved her hand airily at the ranks of dull-looking mid-sixties semis that rolled down the hill towards the old town. “They move out of the city but they want everything to be as nice and tidy and as convenient as living in London.”
Jaget coughed and banged his chest theatrically.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s all the clean air.”
I asked the woman if she had a tarpaulin or plastic sheeting and, while Jaget helped her fetch it, I called Thames Valley Police. They were happy to know that High and Over House, a Grade II* listed building I might add, was still standing and that the problem was something that the local CID could handle.
While we waited for the local Morse impersonators to turn up, the homeowner served us a rather nice tea on the lawn.
“I’m not in trouble am I?” she asked.
“Nah,” I said. “But whoever was poisoning those foxes should seriously consider moving abroad.”
We managed to get back to London before the rush hour started and I spent the last part of the afternoon compiling my notes for one of the demonstration investigations I’d have to present to my invigilator as part of the detective’s exam.
Meanwhile, Abigail had Latin with Nightingale, which I’m not going to say she enjoys exactly, but I think she gets more satisfaction out of it than I do.
Once we were both done and we’d had late tea I tackled her about the foxes.
“Serves you right for eavesdropping,” said Abigail. “Don’t it?”
The evening had turned warm and muggy and Bedford Way was full of traffic and exhaust fumes. I was running Abigail to her parents’ house because it’s part of the agreement, but also because I’d promised to pop in and see my mum. My parents live on the same estate as Abigail’s so I often combine both the chores.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” I said. “I was gathering intelligence. And you’re supposed to notify me when you talk to weird creatures.”
“But they’re not weird, are they?” said Abigail. “They’re just foxes—nothing more London than foxes.”
“Foxes that talk?”
“So, they’ve got a descended larynx and tongue,” said Abigail. “Big deal.”
“And bigger brains,” I said.
“That’s an assumption,” she said. “Some other mechanism could be involved.”
“But they only talk to you,” I said. “How come?”
“Maybe if you stopped rushing about and stayed still for five minutes you might spot all the stuff going on around you,” she said.
“And?” I asked, because there’s always an “and” with Abigail.
“I used to buy them kebabs,” she said.
“Kebabs?”
“Well, you can’t feed them stockfish can you?” she said. “It’s too spicy.”
“Obviously.”
“Because they’re English foxes, right?”
“So Nando’s is fine?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Abigail. “I can’t afford Nando’s.”
I was going to ask Abigail whether the foxes preferred their takeaway delivered or à la rubbish bin, but then I found myself thinking of Nightingale’s fairy spotting hide and decided that maybe Abigail was right. Maybe it was time to slow down and see if I couldn’t lure my railways ghosts out to me.
Only I figured I was going to need something a bit more mystical than a kebab.
So, when I got back from my parents’ I hunted out Nightingale who was shining his shoes in the kitchen. Molly had spread newspapers across the big oak farmhouse table and, I estimated, about a quarter of all Nightingale’s good shoes were arrayed along it like an exhibit from the Victoria and Albert Museum—men’s footwear; a history.
Nightingale was sitting at the end of the table dressed in a white dress shirt with silver and black sleeve garters and an Edwardian butler’s apron, attacking a wicked pair of Barker Alderney, which I supposed were there to represent the early 21st century.
Molly was in a seat beside him, polishing a parallel line of silverware. With her in her maid’s outfit, the pair of them looked like something from a Japanese manga—presumably they kept their weapons hidden under the table.
“I met a chap in India,” said Nightingale as he buffed up the toes, “who told me that a wise man takes time to pay attention to the things he uses in his everyday life. He believed that even inanimate objects had souls that responded to nurturing.”
“Was he a practitioner?” I asked.
“Good Lord no,” said Nightingale. “A street typist in Calcutta. He made a living typing legal documents and letters for people who didn’t own their own typewriter. The occasional love poem, too, I believe.”
He paused to examine the finish on the shoes and, satisfied he could use it as an emergency shaving mirror, replaced it on the table and picked up the next pair.
“The natives held a festival every year where they venerated their tools,” said Nightingale. His friend, he never did learn his proper name, would carefully clean his British Empire Model 12, daub it with turmeric paste, bedeck it with flowers and, on the day of the festival, worship it as if it were a household idol.
“And the moral of this story is?” I asked.
“I don’t think there is one,” said Nightingale. “Except that one should always look after one’s kit.”
“Is there a way to attract ghosts?” I asked.
“In what sense?” asked Nightingale.
I explained about our evidence that at least one ghost per day was riding down the Metropolitan Line each morning and then disintegrating messily. He’d never heard of ghosts “dying” in quite that fashion before.
“Odd,” he said. “Do you think their condition grew worse as a function of time or distance?”
“Impossible to tell,” I said, mentally giving him full marks for use of the word “function.” “Since they’ve all been travelling—it could be both.”
“So we’d really want to intercept them as early as possible.” Nightingale put down his brush and used a white linen cloth to clean excess polish off the edges of the soles. “Harrow on the Hill is the last stop before the line divides. Since we don’t know which branch they’re coming down, I suggest we establish our lure there.”
“So you can lure ghosts,” I said.
“You have yourself,” said Nightingale. “The ritual you used to summon Wallpenny at Covent Garden, remember?”
“I remember almost getting sucked into a pit,” I said. And then bouncing off a tree.
“That was a particularly difficult situation, and an oversight on my part,” said Nightingale. “I misapprehended
the nature of the threat. What we shall do tomorrow is literally child’s play.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Back at my old school,” he said. “During the summer term when it was light in the evenings.”
The younger boys would sneak off the grounds and into the adjacent woods, build a campfire and see what they could attract in the way of the local supernatural.
“And swap comics and tuck of course,” he said. “Everybody did it, and the masters must have been aware. Because there could be as many as five campfires going in the woods on some nights.”
Each one a group of boys from a different year. As they got older, the focus used to change—with the older boys drinking and smoking and occasionally playing pranks on the younger.
“Did it work?” I asked.
“Oh, undoubtedly,” said Nightingale. “Ballantine junior and I once managed to induce the whole of 3B to wet themselves by pretending to be werewolves. Matron was not pleased, and I was caned by the headmaster personally.” Which apparently was a great honour because the headmaster was known to have progressive views and to be against caning in principle. Although obviously not in practice.
“I meant attracting the supernatural,” I said.
Nightingale shook his hand from side to side.
“Mixed results there, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m sure Spotty was hoping for a wood nymph. And there were always rumours of giant spiders and centaurs. I would have liked to have met a centaur, still…” He caught my expression and quickly added, “But any number of ghosts. They must have been the best fed spirits in the whole of England.”
“You didn’t start this tradition, right?”
“Lord no,” said Nightingale. “Squirts had been out in the woods since the school was founded, and they were still at in 1939.”
When I had a spare moment there was definitely going to have to be a field trip with Toby and my surveying gear to what I suspected was the most magic-saturated spot in England.
“So bright and early tomorrow morning,” said Nightingale. “Might be an idea to bring a thermos. Do you think Sergeant Kumar can get us in there before the trains start?”
I said it would be no problem.
Nightingale glanced over to where Toby the wonder dog was asleep in his basket.
“When was your last set of detection experiments?”
“Last month.” It had been proving increasingly hard to persuade Toby to take part in any magic detecting. Since then I’d been trying to teach myself to use a spectrograph I’d discovered while cleaning up the lab.
Nightingale grinned.
“In that case,” he said, “it might be time to unleash the hounds.”
Chapter 4:
THE HARROW
SCHOOLGIRL
Or precisely “the hound” singular, or even more precisely “the yappy little terrier.” Who incidentally was as happy at being turfed out of his basket at four in the morning as I was. Me and Nightingale decided to leave Abigail to her beauty sleep and we picked up Jaget on our way through Wembley.
The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it’s been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built. As a result, your average shopper has only to spend ten minutes inside to be reduced to a state of quiet desperation. Primark has the right idea, being right by the entrance so that fleeing punters would grab the closest approximation to whatever it was they wanted before running screaming into the night.
I’m told that the rest of Harrow, apart from the posh bit on top of the hill, is your bog-standard leafy London outer suburb—if that’s what floats your boat. Jaget says that there’s some good Tamil restaurants, but we never got to find out because we never got further than the WH Smith’s across the road that day.
The station itself had been rebuilt in the 1920s with art deco waiting rooms with rounded ends like the gondolas on an airship. We set up at the south end of the station, which wasn’t ideal because coming in from the north there was a chance that any ghost passenger might only spot us on the way out. But we didn’t have any choice because the station control room and consequent electronics were at the north end by the transfer bridge and exits. After a couple of years of experiments I was pretty confident I could estimate where the area of magical effect was going to be, but it’s best not to take risks with major infrastructure assets.
Especially when the owners haven’t totally forgiven you for what happened at Oxford Circus, which was totally…never mind.
We arrived in pre-dawn before the first train. The maintenance engineers were coming off tracks in the half light—a mass of high-visibility jackets and tired faces. “Mr Nightingale sir,” called a voice and Mr Kamara, Abigail’s father, stepped out from the crowd and approached us.
“Good morning, Mr Kamara,” said Nightingale as they shook hands. “I didn’t know you were working this stretch.”
Mr Kamara was a short wiry man who had, according to my mum, been a dangerous midfielder in the terrifying Maradona2 mould back in Sierra Leone. The son of one of my Mum’s father’s other wives, he’d grown up poor and uneducated. He’d have probably spent the rest of his life as a subsistence farmer if the RUF hadn’t overrun his village and killed or mutilated most of his immediate family. According to family legend he taught himself to read from discarded newspapers while a refugee in Freetown before being brought to London by sympathetic relatives. Once here he caught up six years of missing schooling, got an apprenticeship and became a railway maintenance engineer.
This probably explained why he enthusiastically embraced Abigail’s extracurricular studies at the Folly—especially when he learnt that she’d be taking extra GCSE’s out of school…even if they were Latin and Greek.
“And it gets me out of the flat, don’t it,” Abigail had said. And when I asked her whether her dad might not be worried she’d take a degree in Classics rather than one of the African holy trinity of medicine, law or engineering, she told me, “Dad doesn’t know what Classics is, you know—he still has trouble with some of the big words. I have to help him fill in forms.”
He needn’t have worried anyway. Abigail was on course to get straight A-stars in maths, physics and chemistry. My old chemistry teacher, who was still teaching at the school, must have been well pleased.
“We go where we’re needed, don’t we,” said Mr Kamara to Nightingale. “Just like policemen.” He turned to me and asked what we were up to. Strangely enough, I didn’t say we were going to try and attract a ghost off a passing Tube train. I told him we were responding to reports of suspicious activity.
“You mean devils?” he asked. Devils being the Sierra Leonean term for anything spiritual and morally ambiguous.
“Not devils,” I said. “Ghosts.”
He gave me a grim smile.
“Why would you want to talk to ghosts?”
“We don’t want to talk to them per se,” said Nightingale. “It’s just that we’d like to ask them a few questions.”
“What can the dead say?” said Mr Kamara. “Besides that they don’t like being dead.”
Nightingale indicated that this was what we were here to find out. Before Abigail’s dad headed home I asked if I could borrow his orange high-viz waistcoat.
“I’ll drop in on my way back,” I said.
I tied Toby’s lead to a convenient lamppost just by where we planned to set up. He yawned, looked around at the grey dawn and give a resigned sigh before curling up and going back to sleep.
Nightingale looked up the platform to where Mr Kamara was striding up the stairs. “You understand that when the time comes to teach Abigail the forms and wisdoms we will, perforce, have to gain permission from her parents.”
“That’s something to look forward to,” I said. “Do we have to?”
“What do you think?”
I thought she was talking to unidentified fox-things behind our back, and that she’d definitely been out having adventures of her own last summer. Once you know something is possible, it’s so much easier to work out how it is done.
“I was hoping to wait until she was old enough to vote,” I said.
“Genius runs to its own schedule,” said Nightingale.
I didn’t want to think about the implications of that.
“I assume you acquired his jacket for a reason,” said Nightingale.
“If we string police tape across our end of the platform people will come over to see if there’s a body,” I said. “If we string some yellow and black hazard tape instead, nobody will pay any attention except to grumble.” I held up the high-visibility vest. “This sells the deal and renders me invisible.”
“You’ve been taking lessons from Guleed again,” said Nightingale. “Haven’t you?”
“Vestis virum reddit,” I said—clothes make the man.
Nightingale looked blank.
“Quintilianus,” I said.
“Of course,” said Nightingale. “Which reminds me, it’s about time we started you on your Greek.” My face must have betrayed my enthusiasm because he quickly added, “I think you’re going to find Marcus Aurelius particularly useful.”
“For what?” I asked.
Nightingale hesitated.
“Quoting, mainly,” he said. “And thus maintaining an air of erudition and authority.”
“Given the fact that we’re already working our arses off,” I said, “do you really think that’s an operational priority?”
“Undoubtedly,” said Nightingale. “How else will we keep Abigail’s respect?”
It was such a good plan, not exactly foolproof but you know, a solid, workmanlike, get-the-job-done sort of plan. It would have been nice if it hadn’t started to go wrong less then twenty minutes from when we started. The first southbound train was the very first train of the day and came in at about half five. By that time we were ready with our hazard tape and a stone that me and Nightingale had spent the previous evening imbuing with magic. We’d tried to keep the resultant vestigia as bland as possible but for some reason it smelt of coffee, stale beer and dusty curtains.