Tales from the Folly

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘It’s no bother,’ I said.

  ‘It is to me,’ she said. ‘And I’m sick and tired of it. Have you got a warrant?’

  I admitted that I did not.

  ‘Then you can piss off,’ she said, and locked herself back inside.

  Crosslake had said something was off about the flat.

  ‘Your kind of weird bollocks,’ he’d told me. ‘That’s why I called you in.’

  Crosslake was career uniform and had been doing neighbourhood policing since back in the days when it was just called “policing”. He didn’t have “instincts”, he had thirty years of experience—which was much more reliable.

  There was no way I was going to get a warrant because part of the Folly’s arrangement with the rest of the criminal justice system is that we don’t bother them with the weird shit and in return they occasionally look the other way when the weird shit happens. But if I was going to barge into Mrs Fellaman’s flat then I’d better make sure that there was actually some weird shit going on so that they could ignore it.

  This was a job for Toby the Wonder Dog.

  * * *

  I don’t know whether it was because he was exposed to magic during the Punchinello case or whether all dogs, particularly small yappy ones, have an instinct for the uncanny, but I’ve always found Toby a pretty reliable magic detector. I’ve actually done controlled laboratory experiments that indicate that he can detect magical activity up to ten metres away, although false positives can be generated by cats, other dogs and the remote possibility of a sausage.

  That’s why I fed him a sausage before we started the stakeout, although that did mean I had to keep the car window open. I parked outside the flat at seven in the evening and settled in. Toby curled up on the passenger seat with his feet twitching, intermittently nudging me on the thigh, and presumably dreaming of squirrels while I cracked open Juvenal and laboured through the last part of Book III: Flattering Your Patron Is Hard Work. It had been my set text for months and had led me to think of the Romans as a bunch of Bernard Manning wannabes with an empire. At nine fifteen Toby woke up with a start and stared about suspiciously—I put down my Latin homework. Was it going to be police work or sausage, I wondered?

  Toby’s head stopped swinging with his nose pointed directly at Mrs Fellaman’s flat and he started to bark, the proper watchdog bark which was what got those original wolves invited in to share the fire in the first place. Not a sausage then.

  I left Toby in the car and slipped down the iron stairs to the basement. I stopped at the door and listened. A raised voice, definitely Mrs Fellaman’s although I couldn’t make out the words. Then a response, younger, deeper, male. Then a crash of breaking crockery.

  I banged on the door and called Mrs Fellaman’s name.

  ‘It’s the police,’ I shouted. ‘Open up.’

  It went silent inside.

  ‘You might as well let me in Mrs Fellaman,’ I called. ‘I know you’ve got a ghost in there.’

  Toby stopped barking. The door opened.

  ‘What do you know about it?’ asked Mrs Fellaman.

  ‘I have reason to believe that you are consorting with a spirit in contravention of the Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft and Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits 1604,’ I said. The Witchcraft Act had actually been superseded in 1736 but I find quoting it helps break the ice on the doorstep.

  ‘No I ain’t,’ said Mrs Fellaman. ‘And in any case he ain’t wicked, he’s my husband.’

  I waited until she’d figured out what she’d just said.

  ‘Bugger,’ she said, and sighed. ‘You’d better come in.’

  I followed her into a mean little corridor which opened into a mean little living room/kitchen combination. She’d done her best, but the whole terrace had been built cheaply and the basement had been where the Victorians had stuck the kitchen, the servants and the coal bunker. Nothing could disguise the low ceiling and permanently moist walls. I doubted it got a lot of sunshine either.

  ‘I’d offer you a cup of tea,’ said Mrs Fellaman. ‘But I don’t think I’ve got any cups left.’

  There was a scatter of broken pottery spread across the floor.

  I suggested that we sit down at the kitchen table, but she insisted that she wanted to sweep up first. I sat and let her bustle about—I wanted her relaxed and talkative. From under the sink she produced a white enamel camping mug and the kind of plastic cup that comes as the top bit of a thermos. So she made tea after all and, even better, offered me a custard cream. It’s hard for even the most hardened criminal to maintain a belligerent tone with someone who’s eating a custard cream biscuit. Although I suppose a chocolate digestive might do in a pinch.

  Once she had a cup of tea in her own hand I asked her whether she was sure the ghost was her husband.

  ‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘I knew him as soon as he appeared.’

  ‘And when did he appear?’ I asked.

  Three months earlier, she told me vaguely, but I pinned her down to a specific date and made a note. You never know when precise information will come in handy.

  ‘So the ghost of your husband appears,’ I said. ‘And you decide to have an argument with him.’

  ‘I didn’t decide,’ she said. ‘We always used to row, you know, some people you just row with—I suppose even him being passed on couldn’t change that.’

  ‘Did he hit you?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. How could he hit me?’ asked Mrs Fellaman. ‘He’s a ghost.’

  ‘So how did you get the bruises then?’

  ‘I was a clot and ran into the wall,’ she said.

  ‘How did you manage to do that?’

  Mrs Fellaman looked sheepish. ‘I forgot he was a ghost and he made me so angry—.’ She made punching motions with her right hand. ‘I ran right through him. Hit the wall, fell over. You know how it is, you grab the nearest thing and that was the cupboard and that fell over and the next thing I know I’ve got the Old Bill knocking on my door.’

  ‘And what happened tonight,’ I pointed at the smashed cups with my pen.

  ‘I was throwing them at him,’ said Mrs Fellaman. ‘Well he makes me so cross, he always did. It was his fault, he was always so stubborn.’ She gave me a defiant look.

  I decided to see if we could have a word with “Mr Fellaman”.

  ‘What was your husband’s name Mrs Fellaman?’ I asked even though I already knew.

  ‘His name was Victor,’ she said. ‘His parents were a bit la-di-dah.’

  ‘Can you summon him for me?’

  ‘You’re joking,’ she said. ‘He comes and goes when he wants—always did.’

  I knew how to get a ghost’s attention, although I’d been hoping to get through the case without doing anything too overt. Still Mrs Fellaman had been consorting with a ghost for at least three months so I doubted I could shock her any further.

  I conjured a werelight and stuck it to the centre of the kitchen table.

  Mrs Fellaman’s eyes were round. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘Ghost-nip,’ I said. ‘This should bring your husband out.’

  Normally when you feed a ghost, they drain the magic quite gently and the werelight dims slowly, but this time the ball of light darkened to a dim crimson almost instantly. I looked around quickly and found the ghost, standing by the side wall, staring at me in apparent amazement.

  He was young, early twenties, wearing a rather nice suit with a slim shirt with a button-down collar. In the 1950s it was called the City Gent look and my dad probably had a suit like that - at least until my Mum got the keys to his wardrobe. That was a Mod suit.

  ‘He’s a bit young isn’t he?’ I asked.

  ‘He looks just like he did when I met him,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason for him to look old, is there?’

  Except generally speaking all the ghosts I’d met looked the age they did when they died. Lesley says to always check the shoes, so I did—they were old, worn, too big for his feet a
nd an unpleasant brown colour. No Mod would have been seen dead in those shoes.

  ‘Hello Victor,’ I said. The ghost looked at me blankly.

  ‘Talk to him, Victor,’ hissed Mrs Fellaman. ‘He’s a policeman.’

  ‘What do you want?’ asked the ghost. His accent was wrong too, not sixties cockney but older—I recognised it. He wasn’t what he seemed, and I didn’t want to prolong the conversation and feed him magic for much longer.

  ‘What’s you mum’s name?’ I asked.

  The ghost hesitated. ‘What do you want to know for?’

  ‘No reason,’ I said. The hesitation had told me all I needed to know. I shut down the werelight and the ghost went suddenly transparent.

  ‘Martha,’ said the ghost in a whisper and then he was gone.

  ‘Bring him back,’ said Mrs Fellaman.

  ‘Was Martha the name of his mother?’ I asked.

  Mrs Fellaman shook her head.

  ‘He didn’t know the answer, did he?’

  ‘Well he’s dead,’ she said. ‘You’re bound to forget stuff once you’re dead.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, and it was. Most of the ghosts I’ve met always give the impression that they aren’t all there mentally. My theory is that they are echoes, near-sentient imprints in the stone and concrete around them. But that’s just a theory.

  ‘See,’ she said.

  ‘But the thing is, Eugenia,’ I said, ‘before I knocked on the door I requested what’s known as an intelligence package on you and it turns out your husband left you thirty years ago and is currently living in Prestatyn, Wales with a woman called Blodwyn.’

  ‘I knew that,’ said Mrs Fellaman. ‘I’d just assumed that he’d died recently, left the Welsh bint to her own devices and come back home where he belonged.’

  ‘I had the local police call round,’ I said. ‘He’s alive and well.’

  ‘Pity,’ she said, and slumped in her chair.

  I told her to stay put while I fetched some more equipment from my car, but she barely acknowledged me. Toby was pleased to see me and I gave him the requisite amount of encouragement for being a good boy. Grabbed the little and the big hammers from the boot and went back down to see how Mrs Fellaman was doing.

  She was still slumped in her chair.

  ‘So, who have I been talking to?’ she asked.

  ‘Definitely a ghost,’ I said. ‘Just not your husband.’ Victorian terraces were pretty much all built with similar design features and if you know any architectural history at all it’s fairly easy to spot when something is missing. Like the pantry alcove that should have been to the left of the bricked-up fireplace, very close to where the ghost had materialised—I did not think that was a coincidence.

  Mrs Fellaman sighed. ‘He did look like my Victor.’

  ‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘He must have changed his appearance to suit you.’

  ‘How would he know?’

  ‘Good question,’ I said and banged the small hammer on the wall until I got a hollow noise. I swapped for the big hammer. ‘I’m afraid I’m about to make a bit of a mess,’ I said, and got a good two-handed grip on the long shaft.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Mrs Fellaman.

  It was an awkward swing, what with the low ceiling, but the iron head of the hammer went through on the first blow. I knocked out the loose plaster around the edges, got out my key-ring torch and had a look. As I did, I got a strong flash of carbolic soap and fish guts, the smell of sweat and a blast of cold that made my fingers numb. The vestigia pretty much confirmed my suspicions and so I wasn’t nearly so surprised as I might have been when the beam of the key-ring torch fell upon the empty eye socket of a skull. I swept the light around and thought I could make out the rest of a skeleton collapsed at the bottom of the void.

  I told Mrs Fellaman that she would need to find somewhere to stay for the next couple of days.

  ‘Whatever for?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I’m about to call my colleagues at the Major Investigation Team, tell them that I’ve found a body and they’re going to be round here mob handed to investigate,’ I said.

  ‘What kind of body?’ asked Mrs Fellaman.

  One that I suspect was walled up, judging from the shoes, in the late 19th Century. Some domestic worker whose employer got a bit heavy handed one day—one of those little Victorian stories that didn’t get talked about. I looked at Mrs Fellaman who was staring morosely around her kitchen/living room area. Or perhaps there was somebody else after the first Mr Fellaman decamped to the Welsh seaside. She obviously had a temper did our Eugenia. As I said—crime often begins at home.

  Fortunately, that question was not my responsibility. Nine times out of ten, once the bones were gone, so was the ghost. Although I thought I might take Toby for walkies past the house for the next couple of weeks—just to be on the safe side. I turned on my phone and keyed up Belgravia.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d just consider leaving him in place, would you?’ asked Mrs Fellaman.

  ‘What for?’ I asked.

  ‘I rather liked the company,’ she said.

  Introduction: The Cockpit

  (Set between Whispers Under Ground and Broken Homes)

  So Waterstones now expected a bloody short story with every book and I was beginning to get the hang of the short form. I thought it might be fun to actually set a story in the branch of Waterstones I used to work in. This also allowed me to insert a Ghostbusters joke which, if nobody else got it, at least gave me a great deal of pleasure.

  The Cockpit

  ‘It’s not easy being a bookseller,’ said Warwick Anderson—bookseller. ‘Especially in that branch. It’s a listed building, so Waterstones can’t put in a lift and we have to carry the stock up and down the stairs.’

  ‘So, you were tired?’ I said.

  Warwick took a sip of his coffee. We were in a spare office that the company had made available to us at Waterstones’ gigantic art deco store on Piccadilly. We were there because Warwick Anderson refused to go within five hundred metres of his old store in Covent Garden.

  He was a white guy in his late twenties with slightly mad blonde hair flying up into spikes.

  ‘Well, I already had to do the overnight on my own, so that didn’t help,’ said Warwick, because the perennial problem for all retailers the world over are the customers. Not only do they clutter up the shop, but they also demand to be reminded of the title of a book they read a review about in the Telegraph, given directions to The Lion King, helped to find a book their mum will like and, occasionally, purchase some actual merchandise. All of this customer-facing activity gets in the way of the shelving, merchandising, stickering, destickering, table pyramiding and stock returning that is necessary for the smooth operation of a modern bookshop. The bigger stores can have whole shifts devoted to coming in early and making sure their shelves are ship shape, but small stores have to resort to the occasional overnighter.

  ‘You can get a tremendous amount of work done if there are no customers in the way,’ said Warwick. ‘It’s crucial if you have to move a section or something.’

  ‘And you were on your own?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Yes,’ said Warwick, who was obviously disturbed by Lesley’s face mask. ‘Peggy had been with me the night before, but last night it was just me.’

  Lesley checked her notebook. ‘This would be Peggy Loughliner?’ she said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Warwick, looking anywhere but at Lesley’s face. ‘I was in the basement shifting celebrity chefs from one end of the cookery section to the other when a book hit me in the back.’

  Warwick had spun around, but found he was still alone. There was a book at his feet. It was Banksy’s Wall and Piece. Fortunately, it was the paperback version.

  ‘Or else that would have really hurt,’ said Warwick.

  Spooked, he’d taken the time to check the rest of the shop, including the staff areas and the three entry points, but didn’t find any evidence that he w
asn’t alone. He went back to his shelving and was more annoyed than frightened when he was hit on the back of the head by a soft toy—the kind on offer at the till point. He was just about to whirl around and catch the perpetrator red handed when approximately five shelves of the art section hit him in the back—including two display shelves of Art Monographs.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ said Warwick. ‘Some of those Taschen books are huge.’

  Actually, the CCTV footage was sort of funny, in a cruel YouTube kind of way. Unfortunately, the camera had been positioned to cover a blind spot behind the till, so the books were already in mid-flight before they appeared on screen. Warwick was just visible on the left of frame being knocked down by the sheer weight of literature. Worse than that, a couple had struck him squarely on the back of the head, rendering him semi-conscious.

  He’d managed to stagger to the phone at the downstairs till and dial 999 before collapsing. The response team had been forced to break in, adding to the damage. And, having waved Warwick off in the ambulance, they called in the store manager to take care of the door before being called away to deal with a birthday party that was explosively decompressing outside the newly rebuilt Genius Bar in the piazza.

  A DS from the CW’s PSU, that’s the Charing Cross Primary Crime Unit to you, evaluated the case and, since Warwick had suffered only a minor concussion, there didn’t seem to have been a break-in prior to the arrival of the police, and nothing appeared to have been stolen, assigned it to his most junior PC with strong hints that it should be cleared, dumped or passed into oblivion by the end of the day. The PC, who shall remain forever nameless, had been at CW with both me and Lesley and had been following our subsequent careers with the same appalled interest engendered by the early round contestants in Britain’s Got Talent, so he decided this was just the sort of weird shit that the Special Assessment Unit, aka the Folly, aka those weirdos, had been formed to deal with.