“I can’t talk now,” she said and I guessed she was tucked out of sight at the front of the train.
I heard another voice, high pitched, breathy but too quiet for me to make out the words. Nosiness is practically a professional requirement in the police, so I had no qualms about quietly easing myself closer so I could eavesdrop.
“Because Peter is here,” said Abigail, then a pause. “You’re the ones that don’t want him to know.”
The other speaker either laughed or had a coughing fit.
“I should tape you and sell it to Fox Watch,” said Abigail.
“There’s a house,” said a different voice, with the same breathy texture, only crisper and better enunciated. “It sits out on a hill at the end of the line. It used to stand alone but now it’s crowded round—there are stories and ghosts.”
“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.”