We stopped when we reached the station and then walked back a different route—just to be on the safe side. DS Transcombe had called his Inspector as soon as we’d left Brené McClaren’s house and he called back just as we reached where our cars were parked.
“My governor says we’re going to go all in,” said DS Transcombe. “We want to see if we can catch the late news, put it out as an alert on social media.”
They were going to start house to house first thing, canvass commuters on the footpath and at the station. Then interview the work mates and check on ex-boyfriends, male relatives and all the usual suspects that the police look for when a woman goes missing. The media strategy was going to be helped by the fact that Brené was a good-looking white woman in her late twenties, so coverage should be good and sightings numerous. Luckily it wasn’t going to be my job to process them.
I told DS Transcombe that we’d let them know if we dug up anything at our end.
“Not so fast,” he said with a grin. “My governor wants to see you first.”
I woke up to the smell of coffee and Abigail sitting on the end of my bed practically bouncing up and down with excitement.
“Guess what we found?” she said.
I blinked at Abigail and wondered where the coffee smell was coming from until I realised that Molly was standing right next to the bed and holding a breakfast tray. Only Molly can make breakfast in bed a sinister experience, but over the years I’ve managed to supress my instinct to leap up screaming. It’s not getting any easier, though.
At least it was scrambled eggs on toast this time and not kippers.
I sat up, took the tray off her and watched her glide back out the door.
Abigail was smart enough to wait for me to drink some of the coffee, although she did nick a bit of my toast.
“Oi,” I said.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?” she asked.
“What’s the time?” I asked.
“Eight…ish,” she said.
Operation Polygon would be well up and running by now. The TVP would be questioning commuters as they arrived at Chesham Station with additional coverage at Chalfont and Latimer, and Amersham just to be on the safe side. Serious house to house would start after nine and cadaver dogs would be sniffing around likely dumping sights. TVP had made it clear that they would value my input from within the sphere of my core competences.
Which meant I really hoped Abigail had discovered something useful.
“We found a ghost wrangler,” said Abigail. “Guess where?”
“Chesham,” I said.
“Points,” said Abigail, meaning yes. And also meaning she was going to draw this out as much as possible.
“Now or historical?” I asked.
“Oh, definitely historical,” said Abigail. “George Buckland, born 1742 died 1815.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “At the Battle of Waterloo.”
“Nah—in bed.”
“And his relevance to this case is?”
“First,” said Abigail, “there’s got to be context—right?”
Because the parish of Chesham was unusual in that, at the time of King Harold, the church used to have three vicars, or rather the advowson for the parish was split equally between the three adjacent manors. Advowson is the right to appoint the incumbent clergy of a parish, so three advowsons meant three incumbents.
“Which was all right in those days,” said Abigail. “Because they were mostly in it for the tithes.”
The three “mates of Harold” passed the rights down to their descendants who all, at one time or another, and in a spirited attempt to avoid eternal damnation, passed them on to local monasteries who farmed them out to their favourites, political allies and/or misshapen sons of the abbot. Because while the monasteries often disagreed with the state about the authority of the king, they were bang on side for feudalism when it worked for them. However, three hundred years later the monasteries were done in by the Renaissance, the chill theological winds blowing in from Germany, and Henry VIII’s need to get his leg over on a regular basis.
“Is this going to become relevant at any point?” I asked.
“Well, the advowsons bounced about between various posh families until one of them was picked up by a geezer called George Buckland,” said Abigail. “And guess what he did for a living?”
“He was a vicar?”
“Wrong!” said Abigail, which apparently wasn’t that unusual because being a country parson didn’t actually involve much in the way of theology. “He was a practitioner, wasn’t he?”
George Buckland Esquire was not exactly a founder of the modern Folly, but was definitely around when it relocated to the nice Georgian pile we currently eat our scrambled eggs in. He even belonged to the wild and woolly, and earlier, times when the practitioners of London met on a disreputable floating coffee house on the Thames. Back then a practitioner could consort with conmen, mountebanks and even, shockingly, women—and it was reputedly from a woman that he learnt how to capture ghosts.
“Ghosts?” I asked. “How?”
“A lot of this is gossip, right?” said Abigail. “But he was said to have married a Creole lady from New Orleans and she knew how to make this thing called a rose jar. Which you’re supposed to be able to catch a ghost in. But once you put the ghost in, you can’t let it out because it would fall apart. The ghost, that is. Any of this ringing a bell?”
It was. And it might explain our disintegrating ghosts.
“Are you saying Brené McClaren is a practitioner?”
“Not really,” said Abigail, eyeing my last piece of toast. “We ain’t finished yet.”
Because George Buckland’s membership of the all new officially sanctioned and respectable Society of the Wise, which was what the Folly was calling itself in those days, was not smooth.
“He’s famously the first person to face a disciplinary tribunal,” said Abigail. “Ever.”
“What for?”
Abigail grinned.
“Nobody knows,” she said. “The records were sealed and Mr Nightingale says he can’t find them.”
“Helpful,” I said.
“But not important right now,” said Abigail. “What is important is that the parsonage stayed in the family until 1914 when his great-grandson died without any kids.”
I thought I knew where we were going, but I kept my face suitably gormless so as not to harsh Abigail’s squee. At least that’s the story I’m going with.
“They never found the rose jars,” said Abigail.
And there are records of Walter Buckland, who was the last of the family to join the Folly, mentioning them in conversation as late as 1860.
Ah, I thought, Walter Buckland of the abducting Fairies fame.
“So what if they’re still in the parsonage,” said Abigail. “In the basement?”
I finished my coffee.
“Let’s go and have a look,” I said.
“Yes, let’s,” said Abigail.
4Note for Reynolds: Like the Yankees and the Red Sox only with added sectarianism. [back]
Chapter 7:
THE POLISH
BARISTA
We did pause to check whether we could find Walter Buckland’s CP ledger first. Or rather I sent Abigail to do that, with the rare delight of a minion who has at last discovered that he has a littler minion to put upon. While she was doing that I called up DS Transcombe and told him what we were planning, although strangely I didn’t tell him it was bring-a-nosey-cousin-to-work day. He said he’d generate an action at his end and I made a note of the conversation in my day book just in case something went horribly wrong. Then, with everybody’s arse suitably covered I picked up Abigail from the library and we piled into the Orange Asbo, which had the better engine, and headed off with a song in our hearts and an argument about music selection on our lips.
We finally compromised on Janelle Monáe and sang along to “Many Moons” as we left the comforting boundary o
f the M25 behind.
The third parsonage, former home of George Buckland and his descendants, was built down the hill from the St Mary’s Church on the wrong side of the busy A416. Convenient for the shops, though, I noticed.
“This is a mess,” I said when I saw it.
“I thought you liked old buildings,” said Abigail.
“Old doesn’t always mean good,” I said. “Case in point.”
I’m no expert, but I’d say the original was seventeenth century, erected during the period known as the great rebuilding when the gentry kicked their servants out of the hall and the simple folk finally turfed the livestock out of their living rooms. It was well built, I’ll give it that. A lot of the original narrow red brickwork and a particularly fine Tudor chimney had survived, but its dimensions were as squat and as lumpen as Le Corbusier’s imagination. Somebody had added a wing and additional chimneys in the neo-classical style, and a ground floor coated with ill-thought-out Regency rustication was just the icing on the cake. At least the sash windows hadn’t been replaced with PVC frames, although from the residents’ point of view that just probably meant the house was both ugly and difficult to keep warm.
There was a grey intercom bolted onto the wall beside the front door with three slots for name tags, all with the factory default placeholder still in them.
While we didn’t have a full Integrated Intelligence Platform report, we did have a list of the residents from the electoral register. I started with the top button and worked my way down. Only Geoffrey Toobin, in the ground floor flat, was at home. He was a pleasantly wide-faced white guy with a mop of brown hair and an unfortunate predilection for plaid shirts and skinny jeans.
He glanced at my warrant card and then gave Abigail a puzzled look.
“Aren’t you a bit young to be a police woman?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.”
I explained that she was a volunteer helping canvass the neighbourhood in the search for Brené McClaren, which was a good segue into whipping out my tablet and showing him her photograph.
“And she’s missing?”
I explained that, indeed, she was missing and asked whether he recognised her, perhaps from his morning commute. He said he’d love to help but he was one of the residents of Chesham who didn’t slog into the city each day. He was, in point of fact, a solicitor who worked out of an office in the town centre.
I asked whether he knew his neighbours in the other two flats and he said just to nod to and confirmed their names, or at least their first names. This was all a warm-up to me asking whether I could have a look round his flat.
Given that he was a solicitor, I wasn’t surprised that he gave it some thought before agreeing.
“It means we can tick you off the list,” I said.
“What list is that?” he asked.
“It consists of just about everybody who lives in the area,” I said.
“That’s a lot of people,” he said, and I knew right then that this was our man.
I’ve never put much store in hunches and the detective’s gut—even when it’s mine—but if this had been a film there would have been a sinister string section playing away in the background.
Unfortunately the interior of Geoffrey Toobin’s flat wasn’t exactly awash with sinister objects, except maybe the hammered aluminium coffee table that was a serious breach of the peace in of itself. It was a standard late-twenties single man’s collection of mid-range flat pack, cheap stuff left over from uni5 and the occasional antique that I suspected he’d inherited from his family.
The flat itself occupied all the ground floor that hadn’t been retrofitted into an awkwardly shaped and dimly lit communal lobby. I’m probably not up to POLSA standards but I was pretty certain that there were no voids or hidden rooms on the ground floor. Geoffrey Toobin followed us from room to room with a quizzical expression carefully glued to his face. I made a point of making sure I was between him and Abigail at all times, which is exactly why you don’t take teenaged relatives with you on house to house.
We finished our tour in the communal lobby where I whispered to Abigail that she needed to go sit in the car. She trotted off with a docility that would have amazed every adult that had ever crossed her path. I asked Geoffrey Toobin some routine questions about his neighbours and when I judged that he had relaxed a bit I asked him about the basement.
“The basement?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “A house of this type should have a basement or a cellar. Do you know where the stairs are?”
He hesitated—the bland look stayed, but if I’d needed any confirmation that was it.
Still, my personal confidence was not the same as your actual evidence and these days we’re expected to provide the good stuff before we charge people. It’s political correctness gone mad I tell you.
“There’s nothing down there,” he said. “But you can have a look if you want.”
“Thanks,” I said, and then stopped as if suddenly remembering something. “Got to make a quick call.”
I called Nightingale and told him where I was.
“I’ve just got a basement to check,” I said. “Then I can move on.”
Nightingale, who knew exactly what had led me to the parsonage, asked me whether there was a problem.
“Nah,” I said. “I’ll give you a call in five minutes when I’ve finished.”
“Understood,” said Nightingale, “I’ll let Jaget know. Would you like me to apprise Thames Valley Police?”
I said that wouldn’t be a bad idea, and we hung up.
Satisfied that not only was backup on its way but that Geoffrey Toobin knew that too, I let him lead me to where a white wooden door, tucked out of sight down a short side corridor, gave us access to the basement.
I still made him go down the steps ahead of me.
The stairs were unusual—instead of your standard creaky wooden affair they were solid, built against the wall of the basement with stone risers and no handrail. It was also missing the traditional creepy 40 watt bulb. Instead there was modern LED strip lighting and whitewashed walls.
And nothing else.
No junk, old bicycles, partially disassembled motorbikes, manacles, Perspex cells or clever rope rigs for strangling Daniel Craig.
“This is a bit bare,” I said.
Geoffrey Toobin shrugged.
“It was like this when I bought it,” he said.
“When was that?”
“Two years ago,” he said. “I didn’t want to fill it up with junk because it’s a useful space, but even so it’s not exactly somewhere you want to spend a lot of time.”
“You don’t have any hobbies?” I asked. There was a faint whiff of bleach. Now, my mum’s attitude to bleach is that if you haven’t used up the entire bottle of Domestos equivalent, then you probably haven’t cleaned the surfaces properly. So I’ve had a lot of experience with this smell, and someone had used a lot of bleach in the basement, but a while back. A week ago, maybe more—it was hard to tell in such an enclosed space.
“Tennis,” said Geoffrey Toobin. “Not really a basement sport.”
There was a restless ringing sound like glass wind chimes and the smell of salt sea and rum and molasses—that was vestigia.
“Have you finished? Because I really have some work that needs finishing up.”
“You’re working from home today?”
“I…” he said and hesitated. “I often work from home. As you probably know, my job’s nearly all paperwork.”
It had been hard to tell through a thick layer of white paint, but the bricks in the far wall were laid in a different bond from the rest of basement. All of them were of a non-standard size, flatter and smaller than modern bricks—probably seventeenth or eighteenth century—but they’d definitely been re-laid again and definitely no earlier than the mid-nineteenth.
“Given the size of the house, this basement seems a bit small,” I said. “There isn’t another area
? Maybe accessed from outside or through a trap door?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Sorry.”
Again he was giving me fuck-all in the way of a response—either he was unnaturally calm or my gut was wrong.
Or, rare but horrible, some other entity had sequestrated him and was either puppeting him right now or had left him with no memories of his actions.
Or my gut was wrong.
Confirmation bias has put more innocent people in prison than malice.
“Well, thank you for your time,” I said and made sure I went up the stairs ahead of him.
Inconveniently, the stretch of the A416 outside the parsonage was a dual carriageway with no parking. I’d left the Asbo outside the Chesham Cottage Chinese restaurant across the way—it was the one place I could park where I could maintain a good view of the front door. If anything kicked off I’d have to run across four lanes of heavy traffic and vault, in a suitably dynamic fashion, the fence that ran along the central reservation.
Its only advantage as a location was that, should the stakeout become protracted, we wouldn’t have to go far for refs.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” said Abigail as I got in.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
I handed Abigail a twenty and told her that she could either find a café in the High Street to wait in or catch a train back to the Folly.
“You think he’s the bad man?” asked Abigail when she saw the twenty.
“If it is him, I’m not comfortable with you being this close,” I said. At least not until I had a sprinter full of backup and/or Nightingale had arrived.
“There’s a Greggs up by the station road,” she said. “I’ll wait there.”
“You sure?” I asked. “It could be a long time.”
She held up a tatty hardback copy of Tacitus: Histories I & II in the original Latin. Judging from the dust jacket, a photograph of the Colosseum, it was post-war and hadn’t come from the Folly’s library. Plus I had the Folly’s only copy on a shelf in my room.
“Where did you get that?”