What Abigail Did That Summer

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never had to get authorisation for an op that big.’

  We’re walking down to the east side of the Model Boating Pond because I reckon there’ll be fewer people to notice that I’m carrying a talking fox around my neck.

  ‘Normally,’ she says, ‘I just get assigned missions.’

  ‘Am I a mission?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Need to know,’ says Indigo.

  And obviously I didn’t need to know.

  I reach up and prise her off my shoulders and drop her – she lands on her feet like a cat.

  ‘Go get authorisation,’ I say.

  *

  I’m sitting outside the café that sits at the bottom of Kite Hill and trying to make the tea I bought with the last of my pocket money last until Indigo gets back. In front of me is Parliament Hill School, which is an all-girls ex-grammar school where parents try to send their girls so they won’t have to mix with roughnecks like me at Acland Burghley. A couple of my ex-friends from primary school go there.

  It’s closed for the summer holidays.

  The path that runs past the café goes east to west, linking the park entrances on both sides of the Heath. To my right there’s the path that leads down to Gospel Oak Station, and on either side of the café are paths that run up the side of Kite Hill. It’s a good place to watch for any recruited kids and to spot Indigo when she comes back from her meeting.

  ‘Abigail Kamara?’ says a voice from under my table, and I almost spill what’s left of my tea.

  I drop my spoon, which gives me an excuse to bend over and look. And there, sitting primly, is a vixen that is definitely not Indigo. This one is darker red, almost black around her eyes, tail and face. There are flecks of grey along her muzzle and the tips of her ears. Her eyes are a dark emerald green.

  ‘That’s me,’ I say.

  ‘If you’d care to follow me,’ she says. ‘Control will see you now.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ I ask.

  ‘Lucifer,’ she says.

  *

  Foxes have slit pupils for good night vision, and so their earth15 under the platform of Gospel Oak Station is dimly lit but surprisingly fresh, given that I’m surrounded by a dozen foxes – at least.

  The ceiling is so low that I have to sit cross-legged with my back to the wall. One of the foxes, who Indigo calls Sugar Niner, has curled up in my lap and gone to sleep. This is vexing Lucifer because it’s undermining the whole badass fox vibe, but I can tell that Indigo is trying not to laugh. I scratch the fur on Sugar Niner’s back, which winds up Lucifer even more.

  Golden sunlight is fighting its way through little squares of thick and dusty glass that line one of the walls just below the ceiling. Through them I can see the railway tracks curving off towards South End Green. I’m guessing that we’re under the GOBLIN Line16 platform but there were some proper zigzags on the way in so I can’t be sure. The tunnels were fox-sized so I had to crawl past what looked like individual sleeping dens, a food store that smelt of spoiling meat and another store that was full of Tupperware boxes – contents unknown.The floor is bare, there are no cushions or straw, and when I ask Indigo why this is Lucifer interrupts to inform me that since this is the ops room, furniture would be inappropriate.

  ‘Also, people used to fight over the cushions,’ whispers Indigo.

  The other foxes are gathered into groups of two or three, heads close together, whispering. Occasionally one will turn to give me a sly look.

  ‘You’re the first chap we’ve ever had in here,’ says Indigo. The way she pronounces chap makes me think of posh people and period dramas.

  Outside the rails begin to sing and a train squeals and rattles into the station. All I can see are the wheels, but I recognise the layout as belonging to the Class 172/0 diesels that do the Barking run.

  I turn back to find a new fox sitting in the centre of the room. There is nothing unusual about this fox. It’s a standard rusty brown with white flashes. But it’s looking at me with clever hazel eyes. All the other foxes have shut up and are sitting at attention like a semicircle of statues. Even Sugar Niner has stopped squirming and sat up. But not, I notice, bothered to leave my lap.

  I think Indigo winks at me but it’s hard to tell.

  ‘I take it you’re Control, then?’ I ask to break the silence.

  The fox cocks its head to one side and narrows its eyes.

  ‘I need to track the kids,’ I say.

  The fox continues to give me a cool look.

  ‘Either you’re going to help me or you’re not,’ I say. ‘It’s down to you, innit?’

  Real talk – we stared at each other for the most minutes until suddenly the New Fox says, ‘Mission authorised,’ and turns and vanishes into the gloom.

  The other foxes all relax and Sugar Niner yawns and snuggles down like it’s going to go back to sleep.

  ‘Don’t get comfortable,’ I say. ‘You’ve got work to do.’

  14 Here in the UK one can legally drink beer or cider at home with meals from the age of 16 onwards and can purchase alcohol at 18 years old. One fears that Abigail is referring to the lower threshold rather than the higher.

  15 These are known in America as ‘dens’.

  16 The colloquial name for the Gospel Oak to Barking Line. I must say that Miss Kamara seems very knowledgeable about the make of trains that run through Gospel Oak. It takes me back to my youth when my friends and I would gather on the Tollerton Bridge to watch the Flying Scotsman whizz by.

  18

  Isochrone

  Mum and Dad are asleep on the sofa in the living room with the TV on. Even from Paul’s room I can hear Ian Beale pleading with Denise to give him one more chance. I wouldn’t. But then I wouldn’t have stuck myself with someone that pathetic in first place.

  Paul makes a noise – it’s all he’s got left, but I’ve taught myself to understand him and he wants me to keep reading. I tune out EastEnders and concentrate on Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. It’s his favourite and I could do most of it off by heart, except it makes me cry at the end because now I know what magic can really do and what it can’t.

  I was going to spend this evening making an isochrone map of the area around the Heath. It’s from the Greek isos meaning equal and khronos meaning time, and basically you work out the area you can reach travelling by a certain mode for a certain length of time from a single point. In this case, fifteen minutes by foot from the edge of the Heath. Fifteen minutes, because I reckon that any longer than that and the Feds would have spotted one of their mispers17 on CCTV, and Mr and Mrs Fed wouldn’t have had to randomly harass law-abiding young ladies like myself. But Mum wanted to watch the six o’clock news and she looked so peaceful with her head on Dad’s shoulder, like they were teenagers, that I reckoned Paul could wait a bit for his bath.

  Paul makes a sudden ugh sound and bangs his shoulder on the padded bars that stop him rolling off the bed.

  ‘Do you want me to read this or not?’ I ask, and he quietens down.

  I discovered isochrones on the internet when I was still in primary school and spent hours mapping out my own independent isochrone – how far I could escape from my house on foot in one hour, two hours, a morning . . .

  Then I discovered the TfL site and realised I could go anywhere in the whole of London for free as long as I took a bus.18 I spent a whole week and a half going everywhere – I’d pick a bus that went out into the zones and ride it all the way to the end and then all the way back. Finally, my school informed my parents that I’d been bunking off and I was grounded into the ground. I pointed out that I’d gone missing over the weekend as well, and they hadn’t noticed. But that just meant my mum starting crying as well as shouting. I was so happy in y
ear 7 when the school put me in special measures because then I was going to be special too. You’re stupid when you’re a kid, aren’t you?

  I’ve still got my independent isochrone map hanging on my bedroom wall in an old frame I found in a skip.

  Paul’s independent isochrone map has been shrinking since he was five years old. All the way down to a single point centred on his bed.

  So I kept reading to my brother all the way through Holby City, until my mum woke up to help get him ready for sleep. Afterwards she hugged me and said she loved me, and then spoilt it by saying she didn’t know what she’d do without me.

  Which just goes to show that elders can be just as stupid as you are.

  *

  It is the middle of the night and I am awake because I had a dream but can’t remember what it was about. I lie in my bed and imagine I have slit pupils like a fox and can see in the dark.

  Close by I can hear a big diesel locomotive revving up. Probably a Class 67 dieselelectric powering up after being held at signal outside Kentish Town Station. The Class 67 is nicknamed the Cyclops because of its single-pane windscreen. Two years ago I could have told you what the train was carrying and I would have imagined myself carried away to Tonbridge or Derby or Angerstein.

  Now I know about magic.

  Now I imagine seeing in the dark and running with foxes.

  And maybe, somewhere out there, something that can save my brother.

  It’s magic, after all – anything could be possible.

  17 In some ways I fear the police are as bad as contemporary youth when it comes to playing fast and loose with the English language. In this particular case, ‘mispers’ is a portmanteau word derived from ‘missing persons’.

  18 TfL – Transport for London is the body that runs or regulates public transport within the Greater London Area. Children under the age of eleven may travel for free, which has livened up many a bus ride, I can tell you.

  19

  Camp Simon’s House

  ‘

  It can’t be easy at home, helping look after your brother,’ says Simon’s mum.

  Which means she and the foxes have one thing in common – they’re both up in people’s business when they shouldn’t be. I know this because I never mentioned my brother to her or Simon. I don’t, as a rule, tell people unless I have to. I don’t like the way they look at me afterwards – like I’m a background character in somebody else’s soap opera.

  To be fair, I looked her up on the internet myself. But all I found was pictures of her on other people’s Facebook pages – most of them antique, and the only recent mention was of her as a senior manager at the Home Office.19 I ignore her and pretend I am distracted by Simon trying to carry his camping gear out the kitchen’s back door. He’s got such a pile in his arms that he has to do a shimmy to finesse the doorway, and there’s something about his shoulders that’s making me feel bare queasy. But that ain’t going to run with me, because we done puberty in year 6 and I’m starting late and I’ve had a chance to see how it messes with your head and makes you wavy when you should be thinking straight.

  He is a boom ting, though.

  *

  It is a hot day and I am jamming in Simon’s tent at the far end of the garden. Ahead of me is a wooden door that leads out onto Hampstead Heath, set into a two-metre wall topped with a double strand of barbed wire. This is, Simon says, to stop burglars and is the reason why he has to escape over the side door at the front. It doesn’t seem to stop the foxes, who ooze through it at will.

  Simon’s garden is divided into two bits. The two-thirds closest to the house has a patio, a lawn and neat flower beds. There’s a white enamel garden table and red wooden folding chairs. Angelica the housekeeper has promised sandwiches and ginger beer for laters.

  The other third of the garden, starting about where Simon’s escape tree stands, is deliberately messy with a trio of smaller trees, long grass and what Simon says his mum calls a rockery. This is obviously his bit and is littered with loads of old toys. Not far from the tent is a big plastic tank manned by a small teddy bear wearing an old-fashioned army helmet, keeping watch from the commander’s hatch.

  ‘Commander Ted,’ Simon says when he spots me looking. ‘Guarding the back door.’

  Lucifer has taken up position behind me in the tent and Simon, now that his mum has left for work, has rushed in to get the Chubb key for the garden gate from the hiding place she thinks he doesn’t know about.

  ‘So you could have gone out of the back whenever you liked,’ I said when he told me about it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But then Mum might notice and hide it somewhere else.’

  Lucifer nodded in approval and said that it showed good tradecraft – no wonder Simon gets on with the foxes so well. I have my isochrone map hidden in one of Simon’s sketchbooks. He has a ton of these in his room and another ton of crayons, pencils, watercolour sets although, real talk, he doesn’t seem to use them much.

  Still with Lucifer’s help, I make a list of our assets, twenty-four foxes in all, operating in pairs for safety.

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ says Lucifer, ‘a proper surveillance team should have three foxes for daylight operations – five would be better.’

  But we need twenty-four teams to cover the main access points on and off the Heath – especially since we have to have what Lucifer calls ‘operational redundancy’ in case there is more than one set of Sugars, which is what Lucifer called the teens we were watching for.

  ‘Sugars?’ I asked.

  ‘Subjects,’ said Lucifer. ‘Sugar for S, as opposed to targets which would be Tare for T.’

  I actually had to deep that a bit before I realised that Lucifer was using a phonetic alphabet again, but not the one everyone uses now. When I asked Lucifer why they used that particular alphabet, she gave me a very human-looking shrug and said that it was the one the foxes had always used. Which at least was more than I’d got out of Indigo.

  This was supposed to be Camp Simon’s House, the nerve centre of the combined human/fox intelligence-gathering effort – serious business, right? Up until the point where Sugar Niner and Indigo discovered Simon’s garden trampoline. After a couple of experimental bounces they start doing the strange jump-dive thing foxes like to do, and then it’s all of five minutes before Simon is joining in.

  ‘I swear,’ says Lucifer, glaring at the two other foxes, ‘it’s like herding humans. You two – we’re working here.’

  ‘I thought you guys were professionals,’ I say.

  Sugar Niner starts using Simon as a platform to jump from and is making delighted squeaks as he bounces.

  ‘I blame you for this,’ says Lucifer.

  It’s not like we’ve anything to be professional about for the next couple of hours, and eventually the foxes curl up in a heap at the back of the tent for a nap and only wake up when Angelica brings out tea.

  ‘What are those?’ asks Sugar Niner after Angelica has gone.

  ‘Cheese puffs,’ says Simon with his mouth full.

  Sugar Niner says something but since his mouth is full of cheese puff, all I get is showered with crumbs. Lucifer rolls her eyes, but I notice she and Indigo are too busy nomming their own cheese puffs to speak.

  Fortunately for me and Simon, the cheese puffs keep the foxes busy long enough for us to bags the sausage rolls and cheese and tomato sandwiches. I make Simon swap places with me and sit in the tent – I’m worried about him getting sunburnt, and I need the vitamin D.

  ‘If you could do anything,’ asks Simon, ‘what would you do?’

  Simon likes to ask these questions at random intervals. The last one was if you could be any superhero, and I said Dr Manhattan and then had to explain what that was all about.

  ‘I’d learn to fly,’ I say – lying. ‘What would you do?’

  �
��Climb Nanga Parbat,’ says Simon.

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘A mountain in Pakistan,’ he says, and explains that it’s the ninth highest in the world and considered the third most dangerous to climb. But apparently this was not the reason Simon wanted to climb it.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ he says, and I think that his mum would do her nut if she found out his plans. Or maybe she has, and that’s why she doesn’t like to let him out of her sight.

  I’m about to ask why he thought it was beautiful but a little vixen called Zebra slinks over the garden wall and through the long grass towards us.

  ‘Got a report,’ she says once she’s reached the safety of the tent.

  ‘You’ve tracked one of the Sugars?’ I ask.

  ‘Not exactly,’ says Zebra.

  19 As far as we can tell, Simon’s mother, BLACK REDACTION OVER NAME, is a Grade 7 civil servant working for the Home Office. Peter knows more and says he will explain next time you and he are facing each other in a SCIF.

  20

  It Could Be a Folly

  Officially it’s known as the Tumulus, but everyone I know calls it Boadicea’s Mount because they think she watched her last battle with the Romans from there. The archaeologists say they’re wrong because (a) the last battle was further north and (b) you got to pronounce her name with a hard ‘c’.

  It’s a big lump forty metres across that sits upslope of the Model Boating Pond and is covered in trees and bushes. Because it’s a scheduled monument it’s surrounded by a crusty wrought-iron fence that needs some serious love and attention. Peter and me did a vestigia pass on the place in the spring, but Peter wouldn’t let me hop the railing to check inside. He said he’d done a historical check and the two main theories was that either it was a genuine Bronze Age burial mound or an eighteenth-century landscaping folly. It hasn’t been excavated to find out, on account of it being scheduled and all that.