Constable & Toop (32 page)

The ghost of Reverend Fallowfield nodded and solemnly stepped through the Unseen Door.

Clara, who was clinging onto Sam, looked up at him. ‘Is it over?' she asked.

‘I think so,' he replied.

‘Emily's gone, hasn't she?'

Sam nodded and held Clara tightly while she wept quietly.

‘Never a dull moment with you around, is there, Words?' said Tanner.

‘Sorry about Lil' Mags,' he replied.

‘It's better this way. But you know what all this means. If this house's Resident has gone, one of us is stuck here.'

‘Yes, but which of us?' asked Lapsewood.

‘There's only one way to find out,' replied Tanner.

They looked at the outside wall.

‘Ready?' said Lapsewood.

‘Always ready,' replied Tanner.

They both stepped forward. Lapsewood passed straight through while Tanner hit his head on Mrs Tiltman's tasteful wallpaper.

Lapsewood stepped back inside. He placed a hand on Tanner's shoulder. ‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘Don't worry about me,' said Tanner. ‘I can think of worse places to be stuck. I knew a ghost who ended up stuck in a lavvy. Imagine that. The rest of eternity surrounded by people doing their business. This will be fine.'

Sam and his father learnt of Jack's death from the newspaper. The report on the police's capture of the Kitchen Killer was full of exaggeration and overblown hyperbole, but one thing was clear. Jack was dead. According to the report he had taken his own life after confessing to the crimes and repenting the atrocities he had committed. Sam found this hard to believe.

Mr Toop had been quick to consider the practicalities, announcing that he would go and speak to Inspector Savage about the body.

Sam couldn't remember the last time his father had gone to London. He offered to accompany him but Mr Toop said it would be better if he went alone, and requested that Sam remain and help out Mr Constable with the shop.

In fact it was a quiet day at Constable and Toop. Mr Constable busied himself by updating the accounts ledger, while Sam spent most of the day in the workshop, finding odd jobs to do. Around midday, Mr Constable suggested they sit down to eat together.

Over lunch, Sam said, ‘How long do you think it will take?'

‘Dealing with the police can be a lengthy process,' Mr Constable replied.

‘Father has barely spoken since he heard the news. I can't tell whether he's upset or relieved.'

‘I would expect it to be both these emotions and many more. Jack was always trouble, but one cannot account for the bond of blood.'

Sam felt no connection with his uncle, even though he had more than most, yet he couldn't rid from his mind the thought of how he could have prevented all those deaths. ‘Do you really think Jack killed himself?' he asked.

‘I can easily believe it,' said Mr Constable. ‘Jack preferred to take matters into his own hands. And the distinction between the living and the dead was especially blurred for him.'

‘You mean as it is for me?'

Mr Constable shook his head solemnly. ‘I mean that Jack was dead inside long before he turned his knife on himself.'

The winter sun was low in the sky when Mr Toop returned with the body, wrapped in a cloth bag tied up with string. Mr Constable helped him carry it to the back room. Mr Toop took a knife and cut open the bag, revealing Jack's body. It was covered in congealed blood and dirt. His face was bruised and lifeless.

‘I will clean him up tonight,' said Mr Toop.

‘Is there any need?' asked Sam, concerned that such a job would take hours. ‘After all, we are the only ones who will see him.'

‘I can't bury him like this,' said his father.

Mr Toop toiled long into the night and Sam fell asleep waiting to hear his footsteps on the stairs.

The following morning, Sam looked inside the coffin before they nailed down the lid. His father had done a good job. He had cleaned up the wounds, changed his clothes and combed his hair. It occurred to Sam that this was how he had first seen Jack, lying in a coffin, except this Jack didn't look like the same man at all. He wore no sneer on his lips. There was no fire in his eyes. Somehow this Jack looked more human.

A dense fog hung low over the cemetery. It felt strange to Sam to see his father at a funeral. As they stood beside the grave, he kept having to remind himself to listen to the vicar's words. The service was thankfully brief and impersonal. It would have felt wrong for him to have spoken of Jack's contribution to the world or of the grieving loved ones left behind.

Before they lowered the coffin into the ground Mr Constable requested to say a few words while Mr Toop stared at the ground and said nothing.

‘Many will judge Jack Toop for his actions in life,' said Mr Constable. ‘He was as flawed as all men are flawed men. But now he is dead we search for the strength to forgive. The dead deserve our respect. They can do no further harm, and gone is any hope of redemption. If the dead live on in our memories, let us try to remember them well.'

‘Thank you,' said Mr Toop.

The vicar said a final prayer and the coffin was lowered into the ground. As they walked away from the grave, Mr Toop and Mr Constable kept their heads bowed, but Sam gazed searchingly into the fog. If Jack's ghost had resisted the pull of the Unseen Door he would certainly be nearby. Sam had never met a ghost who had not attended his own funeral. He was relieved when he saw no sign of him.

Finally Sam could look past the dead that clouded his vision and see the living. Soon he would see Clara again. Walking slowly through the cemetery, he raised a hand to his face to hide his smile.

Alice Biggins was lying flat on the single bed in her small room along the Endless Corridor. An unread book lay by her side. Sleep was the thing Alice missed most about being alive. She missed the ability to switch off. In life there was respite. Death was relentless. She wished now she had been more appreciative of afternoon snoozes, lie-ins and early nights. Sometimes she tried to trick her ghostly body into thinking she was asleep, allowing her mind to drift into a fragmented dream-like state, hoping this would make the time pass faster.

When she heard a knocking her first thought was that it was the Unseen Door and that finally her endless existence in the Bureau would be over.

It came again and she realised it was just the door to her room. She stood up and opened it.

‘Lapsewood,' she said.

Lapsewood smiled. ‘Alice,' he replied. ‘Can I come in?'

‘It's not safe for you here. Penhaligan's got half the Bureau looking for you.'

‘That's why I asked to come in,' he said.

‘Of course. Sorry.' She moved to the side and Lapsewood closed the door behind him.

Alice had never had a visitor before. Unsure what to do with herself, she sat down on her bed. Lapsewood sat next to her. In his hands was a heavy-looking document bound with string.

‘What is it?' she asked.

‘My report,' he said. ‘I'd like you to get it to General Colt.'

‘Why?'

‘It has an updated tenancy list for London. All the houses have ghosts now. It wasn't hard to find volunteers willing to enter infected houses once they knew the consequences of leaving them unoccupied.'

‘You're still working with Rogue ghosts?' said Alice.

Lapsewood sighed. ‘No. I'm working with ghosts. There's no difference between us and the Rogue ghosts. It's all in my report. It's not just the spirit hounds that are anomolies. We are all anomolies. The only difference between us and them is that we do more paperwork. Ghost status doesn't mean anything. Licences, forms, permissions – none of it
does
anything except monitor what's going on. The Bureau just pretends it does to justify its own existence.'

‘So why do you want to give the report to General Colt?'

‘Because he needs to assign a new Outreach Worker. They're the only visitors a lot of these Residents get.'

‘But if nothing we do makes any difference, what's the point of any of it?'

‘Alice, you and I have unfinished business. Aren't you curious to find out what it is?'

‘Yes, I suppose . . . but I'd be scared, you know, of stepping into the Void.'

‘We're all so scared of the unknown, but who says it's something bad that happens when you go through? Hanging around like this, living these half-lives, doing work that doesn't need doing, filling in forms, following procedure, applying for licences. We're all in limbo.'

‘So that's what you're going to do, is it?' asked Alice. ‘Finish your unfinished business?'

‘I'm going to try. That's why I'm here.' Lapsewood took Alice's hands in his own.

‘You're confusing me,' she said, looking into his eyes.

‘That's because I'm confused,' said Lapsewood. He smiled. ‘After a life and death of dull, predictable certainty I'm finally confused. Beautifully confused, Alice. And that's how it should be. The world
is
confusing. But I do know one thing.' Lapsewood gave Alice's hands a little squeeze. ‘Once you've delivered the report I'd like to ask you out, Alice.'

‘Out? Where?'

‘I don't mind. Paris . . . Vienna . . . Blackpool. We can go anywhere. We're free spirits, Alice. I don't mind where I am so long as I'm with you. You see, I think you're my unfinished business.'

‘Me?' she exclaimed. ‘But we never even knew each other in life.'

‘I'm not explaining myself,' said Lapsewood. ‘Love, Alice. I never loved. I
was
never loved. I never fell in love. Not in life. Not in death. Don't rot away in this miserable place. Come with me and see the world. Maybe we'll find our unfinished business, maybe we won't, but at least we'll be together. What do you say?'

Alice Biggins glanced at the drawn curtains in front of the window that looked out onto the Endless Corridor. She turned back to Lapsewood and smiled.

‘Yes,' she said.

Clara stepped off the train and drew the fresh cold, winter air into her lungs. Her mother was ahead of her, talking to her father incessantly about new opportunies and bright beginnings. Clara had stopped listening. She knew what her mother was doing. Mrs Tiltman needed to fill her head with thoughts about furnishings, wallpaper and house decor to keep out the horror of a second corpse found in Aysgarth House.

Clara had spent every available minute since that day writing about the curious incidents of Aysgarth House, but it was too long for an article and it was such an extraordinary and unbelievable tale that no newspaper or journal would publish it as fact. This didn't matter to Clara. She was no longer working on an article. The only way to do justice to the incredible truth she had learnt was to turn it into a form which welcomed such flights of fancy. The only way to make it believable was to transform it into fiction. Clara finally understood what she was writing. It was going to be a novel.

The train pulled away and Mr Tiltman busied himself by organising the team of porters that had been waiting to greet them. Clara looked up at the bridge. As the steam from the train drifted away it revealed a boy with mournful eyes. She smiled at him and raised a hand.

Sam Toop smiled and waved back.

 

The End

The idea for this book came to me while sitting in a South London coffee shop. I was gazing at the funeral directors opposite and something in its name,
Constable & Toop
, leapt out at me. Once I had written down the name, a skeleton of the story appeared very quickly on the rest of the page. I should point out that beyond sharing the same shop space in Honor Oak, the funeral business described in these pages bears no relation to its namesake and inspiration.

The story is set in 1884, the forty-seventh year of Queen Victoria's reign. Mourning was an important part of Victorian culture. The queen herself had worn nothing but black for over two decades, since the death of her beloved husband, Albert. Following her example, mourning rituals became more elaborate, funerals increasingly lavish, and the newly developed cemeteries boasted magnificent monuments to the wealthy dead. Death was a national obsession and, for those in the undertaking business, a lucrative occupation. By the 1880s, there had been attempts by the National Funeral and Mourning Reform Association to curb the excesses of mourning, but many of the rituals and associated costs lingered on.

In the world of Victorian fiction, writers penned ghost stories exploring what happened after death. In the world of fact, newspapers pored over the lurid details of murders, turning the victims and murderers into celebrities. The more gruesome the better. In the autumn of 1888 they would become obsessed with the killings of London's most infamous killer, sensationally christening the anonymous murderer roaming the streets of Whitechapel
Jack the Ripper
.

Amongst the books I found especially useful while researching this story were Catharine Arnold's
Necropolis: London and Its Dead
, Charles Dickens Junior's
Dictionary of London
(a guide to London published in 1888) and a number of ghost stories written by his father and other great nineteenth-century writers. Lee Jackson's excellent website,
The Victorian Dictionary
, was also an invaluable source when it came to recreating historically convincing dialogue.

But my main method of research was to take long walks around London. Once you start looking, you realise that London is crammed with dates, stories and history. Reading the plaques and signs, and studying the buildings themselves, can provide as much information as opening a book on the subject. Soon the entire city transformed into a huge interactive museum to explore, each turn of a corner transporting me to another aspect of its rich history. These walks, intended to flesh out details of the story, actually fed the ever-growing plot.