Ghost of a Chance (5 page)

“I thought we’d all agreed that the Harroby Hall situation was not my fault,” said JC, with quiet dignity. “Neither of you noticed anything out of the usual either. How were we supposed to know the house was the haunting, and not the people? That the extremely unfortunate Price family were in fact living in the ghost of a house that had burned down thirty years before? It’s not as if any of your precious instruments detected anything, did they, Melody dear? Still, since we’re so happily reminiscing, perhaps we could share some precious memories of the Case of the Glasgow Bogle? When you assured me that the Bogle was, in fact,
entirely harmless
? Hmm?”

“Well it was,” Melody muttered defensively. “Right up until Happy provoked it.”

“Oh right, blame me!” said Happy. “Why do I always get the blame?”

“Because you deserve it,” snapped Melody, crushingly. “Remember the Phantom Bugler of Warwick-on-Sea?”

Happy sniffed, stuck out his lower lip sulkily, and wouldn’t meet her eyes. “How was I supposed to know it wasn’t a bugle? I’ve led a very sheltered life. Or at least, I did, right up until I got drafted into this bloody organisation. I can feel one of my heads coming on.”

“Children, children,” murmured JC. “Let us not discuss our personal failings while the enemy is listening.”

They all looked across at the Boss’s secretary, Heather. She smiled sweetly upon them without slowing her typing for a moment. Heather (if she had a last name no-one knew it, for all sorts of security reasons) was the perfect secretary. Knew everything, said nothing; or at least, nothing that mattered. Calm, professional, and pleasantly pretty, in a blonde curly-haired round-faced sort of way, Heather dressed neatly rather than fashionably; and as the Boss’s last line of defence, she was probably the most-heavily-armed person in Buck House. Supposedly, Heather was equipped to take down a whole army of terrorists, if necessary, and certainly no-one felt like testing the rumour. You had to get past Heather to get to the Boss, and unless you had exactly the right kind of paperwork, signed and countersigned in all the right places, that wasn’t going to happen. JC once saw Heather kick an overpresumptuous Parliamentary UnderSecretary so hard in the balls that half the faces in the portraits winced.

That JC was still prepared to try to charm and wheedle information out of her showed how nervous he really was.

“Heather, my darling . . . looking ravishing as always, of course; might I inquire . . . ?”

“No, JC, my darling, you might not,” said Heather, kindly but immovably. “The Boss will see you when she is ready to see you and not one moment before. All I can tell you . . . is that the Boss is really not a happy bunny this morning.”

JC raised an eyebrow. “Is she ever?”

“Sorry,” said Heather. “That falls under Classified Information.”

“Come on, Heather,” said Happy, giving his best shot at an ingratiating smile. “Can’t you at least tell us what we’ve done wrong this time? I mean, how deep in it are we?”

Heather smiled sweetly at him. “Do you possess a pair of waders? Or perhaps scuba gear?”

“Situation normal, then,” said Melody, going back to her game.

“Oh God,” said Happy, burying his face in his hands.

“Told you not to shoot that albatross,” said JC. “Now brace up, man. We’ve been here before and made it out the other side. If we were in serious trouble, Heather would have shot us the moment we walked through the door.”

“You might think that;” Heather murmured, “I couldn’t possibly comment.”

Happy moaned briefly, then produced half a dozen bottles of pills from various pockets. He rolled them back and forth in his hands, considering the multi-coloured contents, and squinting at the handwritten labels.

“Now . . . These yellow ones are to remind me to take these red ones . . . And the blue ones are only for use in cases of possession. These stripey ones are for radiation exposure, the hundreds and thousands are for my mood swings, and these chequered ones . . . are to give me a better outlook on life.”

“Trust me, those aren’t working,” said Melody. She glared at him sharply. “I thought we were weaning you off those things. So many pills can’t be good for you. It’s a wonder to me you don’t rattle when you cough.”

“I need a little something, now and again, to help keep me stable,” Happy said defensively. “I’ve got to do something to keep the voices quiet.”

Melody sniffed loudly. “If this is stable, I’d hate to see you when you weren’t. Forget stable, Happy, that horse bolted long ago. Why not settle for coherent?”

“You’re being mean now,” said Happy. “I wonder what these violet ones are for . . . ?”

“You have no idea what half that stuff will do to you, in the long term,” insisted Melody. “Have you even considered the side effects, or the cumulative effects?”

“I read all the little leaflets that come with the pills, very thoroughly,” said Happy.

“Yeah,” said JC. “Looking for loopholes.”

Happy knocked back a yellow and two reds. JC took a purple, just to keep him company.

The intercom on Heather’s desk buzzed officiously. Heather stopped typing to listen to something only she could hear, then nodded briskly to JC, Happy, and Melody.

“In you go, 007, 8, and 9. The Boss is ready to see you now.”

“How come no-one ever asks if we’re ready to see her?” growled Happy. He hiccuped, then smiled suddenly. “Oooh . . . They’re kicking in fast today . . .”

JC and Melody took a firm hold on his arms and headed him towards the heavily reinforced steel door that led to the Boss.

The current Boss of the Carnacki Institute was Catherine Latimer. She sat commandingly behind her Hepplewhite desk, while the three field agents arranged themselves untidily before her. She gestured sharply at the three chairs set out in front of the desk, and the trio immediately sat down, like school pupils called before their headmistress, for crimes not yet made clear. JC and Melody did their best to look contrite; Happy didn’t have the knack.

Catherine Latimer had to be in her late seventies but was still almost unnaturally strong and vital. Medium height, stocky, grey hair cropped short in a bowl cut, her face was all hard edges and cold eyes. She wore a smartly tailored grey suit, without a flash of colour anywhere, and smoked black Turkish cigarettes in a long, ivory holder; an affectation from her student days in Cam-bridge. (There were long-standing rumours that she’d made some kind of Deal with Someone, in her college days, but no-one had ever been able to prove anything.)

Every day she sent agents out on missions that could lead to their deaths, or worse. If it bothered her, she hid it really well. But every agent knew that if they fell in the field, she would move heaven and earth to avenge them.

JC always thought of her as the last of the Bulldog Breed. But only to himself, and never in her presence. He didn’t think she could actually read minds, but he didn’t feel like taking the chance.

Rather than meet the Boss’s unnerving gaze directly, JC looked around her office. It was not without interest. The Boss had been a field agent herself, back in the day, and she still kept souvenirs of that time around to brighten up her otherwise-coldly-efficient office. So, apart from the expected shelves crammed with books and files, and the necessary modern technology, there was also a large goldfish bowl, half-full of murky ectoplasm, in which the ghost of a goldfish swam calmly back and forth, flickering on and off like a faulty light bulb. An old Victrola wind-up gramophone, complete with curving brass horn, waited patiently in one corner. It played the memories of old 78 rpm recordings that didn’t physically exist any more. JC had once heard it play a 1908 recording of the last English castrato, David Tennich. A beautiful, eerie, subtly inhuman sound. The Haunted Glove of Haversham, which had strangled seventeen young women in 1953, until the Boss figured out what was going on, and captured it, now resided under a glass display case. Very firmly nailed to its wooden stand, just in case. It looked like a very ordinary glove.

And, finally, there was a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, taking pride of place behind the Boss’s desk. The whole face seemed to follow you around the room.

Having run out of excuses not to meet the Boss’s gaze, JC decided to get his retaliation in first. He arranged his crossed legs so casually it was practically an insult, leaned back in his chair, and looked down his long nose at the Boss.

“What is so important that we had to be summoned here, like peasants to the Great Hall, so soon after our last case?” he demanded. “We are entitled to sufficient downtime between cases. It would say so in our contracts if we were allowed contracts, which we aren’t, and is another matter I’d like to discuss. Hold everything; don’t tell me one of the Royal corgis has got possessed again . . . I keep telling you, they’re too inbred these days. The corgis, not the . . . Look; we do all have lives, you know, outside the Institute . . .”

“I know all about your lives,” said the Boss, in her usual calm, thoughtful tone. “I know everything there is to know about you and your team, Mr. Chance. Including all the things you think I don’t know. You, for example, run a bookshop in Charing Cross Road; ostensibly antiquarian, but actually specialising in rare and dangerous volumes of forgotten lore, forbidden knowledge, and forsaken arts. The erudite scholar’s equivalent of the back-pack nuke. Merely opening some of those books was enough to set off alarms in organisations like this all over the world.

“You recently acquired a folio copy of that damned and utterly poisonous play
The King in Yellow
. Reading it is enough to drive most men mad. On its one and only performance in Paris in 1898, the audience stormed the stage and killed and ate the entire cast. And I am here to tell you that those specially enchanted blast goggles you purchased on eBay will not be enough to protect you if you try to read it.”

She switched her thoughtful gaze to Happy, who jumped in his chair and giggled nervously.

“You, Mr. Palmer, are an accountant. Because there’s always good money in accounting, and because you find numbers soothing. You can make numbers make sense, unlike people. You work for us because I know what else you do with numbers . . . And as long as you continue to work for us, no-one else will ever have to know.”

She turned to Melody, who glared right back at her. Melody was only ever impressed by technology.

“Miss Chambers, I believe you like to say you’re Something in Publishing. In fact, you publish specialised erotica for the fetish community. Some of it so specialised I’m frankly hard-pressed to see where the erotica comes in.”

“People have always liked to play dress-up,” said Melody. “I just take it a bit further than most.”

“How shall I love thee, let me count the ways,” murmured JC. “I should come here more often; I learn the most intriguing things . . .”

“For once, the three of you are not here to be judged on your many and various misdeeds,” said the Boss. She stopped to fit a new cigarette into her holder and lit it with a monogrammed gold Zippo. “Annoying though they frequently are. I have told you before, Mr. Chance; travel expenses do not extend to first class.”

“Only way to get a little peace and quiet, these days,” said JC.

The Boss glared at Happy. “Nor am I happy with your continuing demands for new medications. When you finally die, we’ll have to bury you in a coffin with a child-proof lid.”

Happy sniffed. “I only stay with the Institute for the free prescriptions and access to unstable chemicals. I am a medical miracle. Universities have been bidding against each other for years, for the rights to my body for scientific research. Some don’t even want to wait till I’m dead.”

“And I’m only here for the tech,” Melody said firmly. “Can’t do the job without the right equipment.”

The Boss’s nostrils flared slightly. “You just like to play with the latest toys. And break them.”

JC realised, with something like wonder, that the Boss was only saying these things in order to avoid saying something else. She was distracting herself with familiar complaints so she could put off having to tell them about the new case. Which meant it had to be something really bad . . . He watched, impressed despite himself, as the Boss squared her shoulders and got down to business.

“All of this . . . is irrelevant. You are not here to receive the various dressing downs you so thoroughly deserve; you are here because the Institute is faced with a major emergency. Something bad has happened, down in the London Underground. Oxford Circus Tube Station is haunted. A Code One Haunting.”

JC sat up sharply. “A Code One, right here in the heart of London? That’s supposed to be impossible! The whole city’s covered with overlapping layers of pacts and protections, laid down ever since Roman times.”

“The unprecedented nature of the haunting is what makes this such an emergency,” said the Boss. “If what we suspect is true, all hell is about to break loose in the Underground.”