In the Company of Ghosts Read online

  An excited snorting sounded from behind the living room door. Saucisses had recognized her voice, the so-called miniature pig the two of them kept as a pet scratching at the wood.

  ‘You haven’t eaten Saucisses yet then?’

  ‘One day, madame. Filthy swine. I forgot to give him the breakfast yesterday. He eats my sock, left one only. Just to show me. Not the right sock. Only the left.’

  It was a wonder their neighbours hadn’t rustled Saucisses from their small garden and practised a little amateur abattoir-craft on the pig. Vincent Bouche was even less popular with the Beefeaters than Mrs Witchley. Agatha was dissimilar enough from the Yeoman Warders that they could write her presence off as an aberration, the Queen’s charlady, as they jokingly referred to her. But Bouche was like the staff, an ex-solider, with decades of service in the French Foreign Legion, the Légion étrangère. Able to match them in war stories of corpses and bullets and friend’s bodyparts jokingly left in mess tins. They might laughingly call him the Mighty Bouche, but the Frenchman was close enough to them for his trespassing on their territory to be deeply resented. Agatha stared down the narrow corridor of the hallway. Everything was exactly the same, as if she had never been away. Her Thomas Brigg umbrella with its whangee bamboo handle poking out of her elephant stand, the slightly wonky photograph of Paris in the sixties by Jerry Schatzberg, the threadbare green carpets that hadn’t been changed by the Crown Estate for as long as she had been living here. Bouche followed Agatha to the boot room. It seemed perverse in a house so compact to have a room solely dedicated to hanging up your jacket and storing your boots, but the quarters were meant to billet the Yeoman Warders, with a Beefeater’s uniform almost as important as the man.

  ‘The head doctors, they phone me to come in and talk to them after they took you. I say no. If I come in, it is to snap their necks and break you out.’

  ‘Having you locked up in an observation cell next door to me at Stick Hill or wouldn’t have helped either of us.’

  ‘C’est des conneries. I tell the scum at the office. You do their shit; they are all smiles and happiness. You are caught doing your own, and their loyalty, it runs out like a dry riverbed. They revoke your diplomatic immunity, like this.’ He clicked his fingers.

  ‘Well, I’m out now. I have a feeling our boat is about to be refloated once more.’

  ‘Why should we help them, eh? Let them feast on their ignorance. We stay here, rest of the world can go phoottt.’

  ‘I will be travelling to the Monument tomorrow,’ said Agatha. ‘We’ll see what’s to do, then.’

  Bouche shrugged in a particularly Gallic way as Agatha climbed the narrow staircase towards her bedroom. ‘I am cooking navarin in the back.’

  ‘That, I have missed,’ said Agatha. ‘Along with you, old friend. I could have left Stick Hill, you know. Under my own steam. But sometimes it’s good to take time out to be alone with your thoughts.’

  ‘Alone? To be alone, yes, you can walk the streets at night. As quiet as it is here, that is healthy. But at Stick Hill they give you the drugs and the electrical shocks.’

  ‘Drugs, frequently. The shocks, only once,’ smiled Agatha. And I only had to drown one doctor and two orderlies to put them off their bathing routine.

  Upstairs, the room was exactly as she had remembered it, too. Bouche had attended to it in her absence, dusting and vacuuming it. The chamber had the air of a shrine. The timeless, hermetic spotlessness of a room that had been a road-accident child’s. Or a plane crash. She opened the top drawer on her chest. The photo was still there, taken in the last century. Her husband Sylvester, her two boys – Harry and Carl. She had taken the picture in the snow outside Liverpool, her sons wearing blue overcoats and bobble-top hats that gave them the look of Christmas gnomes. Sylvester was bending over behind them, squeezing his six-foot frame into the picture. His face ruddy and purple from the cold, a slight mist fogging from his mouth, the exertions of the snowball fight a few minutes before she had snapped the photo. The colours on the Polaroid paper seemed faded and washed out compared to modern digital photography. That was how she remembered the world of long ago. Faded and Technicolor. A happier age. Oh my boys, all my boys. She closed the drawer, sealing her family in the cold, locked and frozen, just as they had been caught in her memories.

  The drawer next to the photo frame was the one holding her Vegas Robaina cigars. They were almost impossible to buy in Europe. She opened the drawer, removed the box and took out a cigar, lifting up the cigar cutter. A discrete present from Buckingham Palace after she refused a second-rate honour many years ago. The cigar cutter was her very own Aladdin’s lamp to burnish. The only ghost she could summon at will, rather than trusting to the capricious afterworld to supply her with what was needed… the lamp’s previous owner. Agatha felt his presence as she opened the portico doors at the front of the room, a small balcony with a view of the Bell Tower and the Queen’s House. She sliced the cigar’s closed head off and lit it. To her right, the dark weight of the Thames slid inexorably, snaking across the capital.

  ‘Mrs Witchley,’ rumbled the ghost’s voice behind her. ‘Your vacation has been cut short, I see.’

  ‘Yes, Winnie,’ said Agatha. She sensed him draw closer to her back.

  ‘Ah, Tower Bridge. The grand old crossing still stands.’

  ‘As does England.’

  There was a harumph of approval. A plane passed overhead, the engines of a jet taxiing down towards City Airport, collision lights flickering as if the aircraft was a passing UFO.

  ‘Mister Whittle’s engines are still in use, I see. Noisy, smelly things.’

  ‘They are trying to develop electric engines for aircraft, now,’ said Agatha. ‘The oilfields won’t last many more decades. They even have a name for the problem. Peak oil.’

  ‘Strange days, Mrs Witchley.’

  ‘Strange days, indeed.’ Agatha puffed out a ring of smoke into the cold evening air, watching it dissipate. There was a Yeoman Warder on a balcony at the end of the terrace, another mote of smoke climbing upwards. Ignoring her presence of course, not even going to pass comment on her absence after so much time. ‘Things aren’t normal, are they Winnie? I can feel it in my bones. An ache that shouldn’t be there.’

  ‘Normal,’ the ghost’s voice reverberated, as if he was chewing the word. ‘A pedestrian concept. I met with very little that was normal during my life. Matters run to the humdrum in the absence of strife. What was there to do then, doing the quiet days?’

  ‘Build garden walls?’ said Agatha.

  ‘I fear, Mrs Witchley, that for you the time to lay bricks has passed. Some people are put on this Earth to meet strife, others to cause it. Great events seek us out. That is always the way, whether you are a Wellington, a Cromwell or a Marlborough.’

  ‘I’m not such a person, said Agatha. ‘Nobody knows my name. I’ll not be remembered.’

  ‘They cannot be allowed to,’ rumbled the voice. ‘But we know.’

  Is that a comfort? A small one, perhaps. ‘How bad is it, this time?’

  ‘Worse than anyone suspects, dear lady.’

  ‘What is at risk?’

  ‘Far too much, I am afraid.’

  Agatha drew on the Vegas Robaina, feeling the sweet smoke fill her lungs. ‘And it is all down to me again, I suppose.’

  ‘That is the nub of the issue. There is no one else quite like you, Mrs Witchley.’

  ‘My boys were,’ said Agatha. ‘And my husband.’

  The ghost said nothing, but then he didn’t need to. Her family was no longer here. Agatha was. ‘Well then. It’s a good thing I have you in my corner. And Groucho Marx of course. What would I do without Groucho?’ Agatha sniffed the air. She could smell the lamb and garlic wafting from the kitchen’s ventilator fan on the rooftop. Bouche’s stew. It reminded her how long it had been since she had eaten something that hadn’t been listed on a mental institution menu, where the three main food groups were Salty, Watery, and Overboiled. But I ha
ve work to do first.

  Agatha pulled a chair out onto the balcony and settled down to read the case notes given to her by Gary Doyle. The price of her readmission to the office. There was a little bulge inside. A memory stick shoved inside the folder’s pocket.

  Winston Churchill’s form had dissipated by the time she went back inside her bedroom. Much like cigar smoke in the evening air.

  ***

  Agatha finished explaining the details of the office’s case notes for Bouche’s benefit as she spooned up the navarin. Faced with the Frenchman’s alchemy of carrots, sliced potato, lamb and parsnips dissolving in her mouth, the rich stew was nearly enough to banish the tedious memory of a year of hospital food. Not quite, but nearly. Nobody could slice vegetables quite as thin with a knife as Bouche could. Nobody could throw one as proficiently, either.

  ‘A murdered rich American,’ said Bouche. ‘I prefer the old days. When Bulgarians had poison in their umbrellas and Russians had communism in their hearts.’

  ‘If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future,’ said Agatha. ‘Now who was it who told me that?’

  ‘It was not me,’ said Bouche. ‘So, the office say this rich man, this Simon Werks, was assassinated? But he is found hanging with his trousers on the floor and the sex toy around his throat. How is this murder?’

  ‘I dare say I will find out tomorrow when I visit the office at the Firehall.’

  Bouche speared a piece of celery from the autumn-coloured contents of his plate. ‘You listen to the dead too much. Les morts. It is time you listen to the living. We should not again involve ourselves in the affairs of the office.’

  ‘You don’t have to help this time, Vincent. It would appear my assistance in this affair is the price of my freedom.’

  ‘I do not need the licence of those pushers of pens to permit me my freedom, those goblins in their stone lair. You do not either. It is not just the dead who can become ghosts. We disappear. They will not find us. Who do they have to catch us? Children. If the babies cannot find us listed on Google, they give up and go back home.’

  ‘The old don’t like change,’ said Agatha.

  ‘A white jacket without sleeves, too tight, is also a change. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. We can escape to France.’ Vincent seemed to consider the idea, then rejected it. ‘No. No, France is as bad as here these days. Algeria, still I have friends in Algeria. We shall drink mint tea and eat sweet makroudh in Algiers. The Casbah swallows everything.’

  ‘I’m too much of a mouthful for it. Besides, I told Helen I would help the office with this job.’

  ‘Her? Then you break your word to rob a thief. Who cares? A billionaire is dead, maybe by the hands of his enemies. So what? All rich, powerful men have enemies. This case is not for the cause. Nobody believes in them anymore. The best we have is religion and even the Arabs do not believe in killing for heaven these days. The war on terror is over. The posters of Che Guevara have been rolled away. All we have left to kill each for is the money. Money and the plastic merde it can buy.’

  ‘Winston seems to think otherwise.’

  ‘Les morts,’ he spat. ‘Their words are dead too. You want to know who killed this billionaire? Everyone with a dollar in their pocket. We all killed him. Yes… à chaque jour suffit sa peine. Because their kind kills us. With their streets with each shop the same as the next. With their burgers that look like flattened turds and their phones the size of lighters that are thrown away every year for the better, shinier toys. With all the comrades’ jobs that they send to Asia except their own. There are a billion reasons Monsieur Simon Werks had to die, all with the faces of dead presidents’ printed on them. Tell the office to look in his safe deposit box in Bern. They will find the killers inside his vault. Already jailed.’

  ‘As I said, you don’t have to help me with this case.’

  ‘Pah.’ He stabbed the air with his fork. ‘Who else is there is to help Madame Agatha Witchley? All the little children at the office? Helen Thorsen? The police? The secret intelligence service of the British?’ He put on a weak, trembling voice. ‘Will shooting him demonstrate lack of empathy or respect? Let me first check health and safety laws for definition of unintended collateral damage.’ Bouche banged the table, making his plate jump. ‘No, direct action is always the best. Direct action where direct action is needed.’

  ‘This will call for a more subtle approach.’

  ‘Of course you will need my help. Such a man,’ said Bouche. ‘The problem will not be finding out who wants this Simon Werks dead. It will be eliminating the few who wanted him kept alive.’

  ‘Perhaps, we shall see. Did you know Margaret has retired? There’s an ex-policeman in charge of the section now. A Mister Gary Doyle. A large, crude fellow. Rather old school in his methods, I suspect, although not quite as old school as you or I.’

  ‘Les flics. But is he a professional? The office is a graveyard. That is why it calls to you and your phantoms. It is filled with those whose careers have died, thrown only cases that cannot be solved. Cases that even if you do solve, will bring you nothing but a stream of warm piss from above. I was in the legion, yes. I know the stench of the suicide squad. I smell this thing at the office.’

  ‘Well, at the very least, I will be in the charge of someone other than a psychiatric doctor.’

  Bouche picked up one of the knives off the table and flung at it the ceiling’s exposed beams, the length of stainless steel sinking deep and left quivering in the wood. ‘If it is an assassination, I will help you pin down the leads.’

  CHAPTER FOUR – THE FIREHALL

  Doyle parked his car in Pudding Lane, only just remembering to leave the small blue oblong of the parking permit visible on the dashboard. Doyle’s 1969 Chevrolet Nova was always getting clamped, minor infractions against parking restrictions so arcane you needed to be a lawyer to comprehend their complexity. That was the problem with driving a classic car… wardens seemed to go out of their way to target it; you’d think they were playing muscle car bingo between themselves. He had caught a traffic warden once, shaking his car, trying to dislodge the permit from the dashboard and send it sliding back, where the warden could take a photograph of the permit illegally obscured by a road tax sticker. Doyle had taken a video of the warden doing the dirty deed on his mobile phone, using it to blackmail the man into silence over the slapping Doyle had administered. In the Royal Hong Kong Police Force you learned how to hurt someone without leaving bruises. Not that the island’s next set of masters cared anything about such niceties. There weren’t enhanced interrogation techniques in Hong Kong anymore. Only interrogation techniques. One-size-fits-all. Doyle was the last of a dying breed. And he had been exiled to the office to die quietly… occasionally, even usefully. He got out of the car and pulled his coat on. The days were getting colder as winter approached. As he was slipping the car keys into his pocket, he noticed there was a tiny triangle of fabric missing at the bottom of his green wax-coated coat, pea-sized, as if someone had shot at him with a weird-shaped pellet and he had failed to register the hit. Doyle sighed. If that’s the boy with his scissors again, he can kiss goodbye to his computer game time this weekend. It was only the day before Doyle’s son had scattered a dozen spherical toys at the top of the stairs, little plastic things that transformed into robots with Korean names when you tapped them with a magnet. It was like a roller-skate gag from children’s TV all over again, with Doyle playing the long-suffering part of Horrid Henry’s dad.

  Ahead, the towering rise of the Monument to the Great Fire of London stood waiting. Two hundred feet of Portland stone spearing up towards a gunmetal sky. Its Doric column topped by a gold leafed orb placed above the viewing platform. The view from the top of the column had been better once. St. Paul’s and the Thames and the clatter of hansom cabs. Now what did it give out on? Mirrored needles of glass, a Shard set against the heavens, the weary shuffle of Regulatory Reporting Accountants and Asset
Transfer Associates crossing London Bridge. The first tourists hadn’t yet appeared in the square, Japanese salarymen and Indian steelworkers and Midwest farmers from North Dakota, who would patiently circle the small square in expectant spirals, queuing in the Monument’s shadow.

  It was ironic, really. The column had originally been built as an astronomical viewing platform, not a tourist attraction. But the clatter of carts and the constant vibrations of the mob had rendered the delicate instruments of seventeenth century astronomy blind as soon as it had been completed. So instead, London had filled the spire with itself, with humanity, and it had continued doing so for three hundred years. With no lift and hundreds of steps to climb on foot, the attraction’s queues no longer grew to a respectable size – not with the London Eye just down the river and the Shard’s viewing level opposite, the skyscraper able to effortlessly lift tourists many times higher than the Monument’s elevation. Much like Doyle, the Monument was a relic from a less sophisticated age. But unlike Doyle, tourists only ever got to ascend the Monument’s steps, not descend the spiral pit concealed beneath. While the Monument’s exterior had been built by the scientist Robert Hood, Sir Christopher Wren had secretly designed what lay below the column. The project had been a quid pro quo for King Charles II’s commission for a new London… one that was never constructed, despite most of the original city having been burnt to the ground during the Great Fire of London. Those who worked below jokingly spoke of their workplace as the world’s first panic room. The staff operating there still referred to the buried chambers by Wren’s original non-de plume, the Firehall. Originally, Wren’s series of connected underground vaults had been intended as a concealed refuge and strongroom for the Stuart dynasty and their wealth, an insurance against the Restoration failing and falling to a resurgent Commonwealth. As the centuries passed, the concealed lair went on to fulfil similar functions. During the Hanoverian era, the underground palace had been fitted out as an Arabian boudoir and used for King George II’s secret assignations. Wellington had packed the Firehall full of rifles and gunpowder, planning to use it to co-ordinate a London militia of propertied gentlemen if the revolutions and agitations of the 1830s had spread from the continent to Britain. Finally, Lord Palmerston had passed the vaults to the Circumlocution Office, where the dark, windowless arcades had been swapped between the office’s various sections supporting the great Empire’s commerce, industry, empire and security. And there, ownership had stayed, fulfilling that celebrated organ of state’s purposes. Stuffed with the British Museum’s artworks and Egyptian sarcophagi during the zeppelin raids of the First World War. A secret bunker for London’s resistance movement during World War Two – one thankfully never called to service, hidden and trembling during the years of the Luftwaffe’s furious bombardment, the dust from its arched buttresses barely dislodged by V1 and V2 rockets. Unable to be effectively retrofitted to survive nuclear assault and radiation poisoning in the fifties, the Firehall had been linked to the secret underground tube network from the Cold War, an undisclosed train line to access the hidden bunker complexes beneath the many civil service buildings, Downing Street and Buckingham Palace… the subterranean cities beneath the capital that went by such classified names as Pindar, Q-Whitehall and Scheme 3245. And now, like some abandoned train stop, Sir Christopher Wren’s hidden palace was still utilised by the office. A solitary Bombardier transit-carriage rumbling through the Firehall’s underground platform concourse towards the end of each month, carrying confidential paperwork for Section Six of the Circumlocution Office to archive, shred or burn.