“Is it safe?” they’d ask.
“No, it’s hideously dangerous, but if we don’t teach her she’ll probably accidently kill herself before she’s sixteen.”
There’s a conversation I was looking forward to.
So a good, thorough, and probably pointless search of the archives was just the thing to stave off that awful day. While Abigail went through the card file I pinned a map of North West London onto the wall in the upstairs reading room and marked out the route of the Metropolitan Line and the locations mentioned in the reports.
The Metropolitan Line runs from the heart of the city at Aldgate out to the northwest beyond the M25, until it peters out just short of the Chilterns. The original plan was to build a railway that ran from the Midlands to Paris with a stopoff in London for shopping. That it ended up creating a quarter of modern London instead was a completely unintended consequence, but then the history of my city has always been a series of unintended consequences—just ask Boudicca.
The line emerges into the daylight at Baker Street, leapfrogs the Jubilee Line to reach Wembley Park in just two stops, crosses the North Circular and makes a mad dash for the green belt, only pausing to split in two to spawn a series of commuter suburbs that provide the disaffected middle class youth of London with somewhere to rebel against. Then comes Rickmansworth and disaster—the last vestiges of London are left behind and the line vanishes into the green tinted mists that are Buckinghamshire.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the countryside. In fact, some of my best friends are geographical features. It’s just a tricky place to operate in. Fortunately for me, all seven incidents in Jaget’s file took place between Baker Street and Wembley Park. And it was definitely something supernatural. I’ve seen that fading memory phenomena before.
Dr Walid has speculated that people under a certain kind of influence might be generating different set of neurotransmitters, not unlike the ones it’s speculated we generate during sleep. In both cases, short term memories are not consolidated into long term memory. In exactly the way our dreams aren’t, which is why we forget them. I gave him a call and his best suggestion was if I could get to a witness early enough they might retain more memories.
“If it is like dream retention,” he said, “then recounting the events might help the transfer to long term memory.”
He would have liked blood samples as well, but we’ve found that people are strangely reluctant to give up their bodily fluids to the police for science.
I went through the reports again in the vain hope that something new would jump out before heading downstairs for tea in the atrium. Molly had made something that might have been banana cake, except it had sultanas in it. She was experimenting again—we suspected the influence of The Great British Bake Off.
While we had our tea Abigail got out her notebook and started flipping through the pages. I had given her her first notebook a year or so earlier, but this was probably number ten. It was hard to keep track because she refused to let anybody else look at them and, according to her dad, kept them in her room in a lock box that he’d made for her. Her dad’s a track maintenance engineer, so when he builds something it’s going to be too robust for me to get a sneak peek. Nightingale could probably open it with a wave of his hand, but I didn’t need to ask him to know he would regard it as an ungentlemanly act.
It was no use pointing out that we were actually policemen, not just gentlemen, because Nightingale has a very clear idea where one ends and the other begins. One day, I’m hoping, he’ll show me where that line is.
I know Abigail goes out and gets herself into trouble when our backs are turned. I’m pretty certain she was mixed up somehow with a couple of teenaged mispers last summer. And she seems to have picked up protection from a senior civil servant at the Home Office—although Lady Ty swears blind that it’s nothing to do with her.
“On the Metropolitan Line,” said Abigail using her serious voice, “we have a bunch of public domain hauntings and some verified ghosts, three of which were reported expunged.” The Folly had done a lot less expunging of ghosts than you might expect. In the eighteenth century they were more interested in studying them, and the Victorians were worried they might truly be the souls of human beings and left that sort of thing to the Church. Abigail was of the opinion that if your average vicar had ever truly exorcised a ghost it was only by accident. But there’d been a number of practitioners who were also parsons. Apparently being a country parson was a cushy living up until the late nineteenth century and had involved remarkably little in the way of actual religion.
“There’s the ghost of Anne Naylor at Farringdon,” said Abigail. “Thirteen-year-old girl murdered in 1758, known as the Screaming Spectre.” There was a pause for some more possibly-not-banana cake. “Then the famous phantom footprints between Baker Street and St Johns Wood and Boudicca’s burial site at Kings Cross—remember that?”
We’d done it as a field trip—Platform 10 at Kings Cross, which was reputedly the last resting place of the woad-wearing warrior woman. We hadn’t found anything, but it had led to a lively discussion about the practicalities of attaching blades to the wheels of your chariot. We got so carried away that a posh middle-aged white woman, no doubt waiting for a train, congratulated me on being an excellent father and for fostering an interest in British history in my daughter.
“Well done you,” she’d said.
There were a couple of verified ghosts of the “full torso repeating manifestation type” at Finchley Road, but they only manifested when someone fed them some magic. Which we’d done one wet Sunday when Abigail had been particularly restive and I was too lazy to come up with something better.
“I think we should go have a look,” said Abigail.
So I called Jaget and asked him to inform the relevant station control rooms that we’d be out and about that evening. Then we procured a packed supper from Molly and walked up to Kings Cross to hop on the Metropolitan Line.