“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 Maradona 2 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.