The Shadow Cabinet (6 page)

“He wouldn't go to his parents. He hated them. Eton too.”

“Might not be a choice,” Boo said. “We have to look. He got the sight at Eton, yeah?”

“When he—” Callum cut himself off.

“He told me,” I said, “he almost killed himself. Because of what happened to his sister. It was in a boathouse or something?”

“It's somewhere to look.” Boo pulled out her phone and checked something.

“Eton is near Windsor. If we take Thorpe's car, we can be there in an hour. Let's find the other address.”

She dove into the bags of paperwork alone and dug around for a few minutes before giving up.

“We'll get it from Thorpe,” she said. “We'll start at Eton. Rory, are you okay, being here?”

So she had changed her mind on that one. I didn't want to hold them back, and I didn't want to be alone. Alone was the end of the world.

“Go,” I said.

Callum turned to the door and left. Boo came over to me and took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eye.

“We'll sort it,” she said. “It'll be okay, yeah?”

“Callum hates me.”

“He doesn't. He's upset, that's all. I'll talk to him. I'll sort it.”

I didn't know if Boo believed these things could all be fixed or was talking herself into it.

Then it was just me and the box again, and I wasn't going back in there. I curled up on the sofa and turned on the television for some company. I needed noise, light, something to fill the vacuum. I would use this time. I would think about this problem. Where would Stephen be? Not Eton, not his parents'. Those didn't feel right to me. There had to be an answer.

Or there was no answer at all. That was the other possibility.

I closed my eyes like I had at the hospital and tried to return to Imaginary Uncle Bick and the bird store. I could see the store in my mind, hear the birds tweeting and bickering overhead, feel the little feathers fluttering down and landing on my face. I could see my uncle's beardy face, hear his broad Southern accent saying my name, see the A Bird in Hand logo on his baseball cap—but he had no wisdom to impart to me. He was sweetly silent, and the birds flew around. As I found myself drifting, I felt like there might be someone lingering in the aisles of the store, over by the birdseed bells and tiny mirrors, and I wanted to say something about this to Uncle Bick, but he shook his head and said, “They're sleeping.”

Then I was too.

6

T
HE
NEXT
THING
I
KNEW
, T
HORPE
WAS
SITTING
ACROSS
from me in different clothes. I sat up with a jolt.

“What time is it?”

“Just after nine.”

“Nine?”

“In the morning,” he said.

The curtains were still closed, so the room was dark.

“I slept?” I said, rubbing my head.

“Shock,” he said. “It's what happens. Boo and Callum went to Eton last night. They didn't find anything. They're driving to Kent now, to where Stephen's family is.”

“I don't think they're going to find anything there,” I said.

“Why's that?”

“I don't know.”

“Normally,” he said, standing up, “I wouldn't be able to work with that. But this isn't normal, is it?”

He blinked, and I wondered if he had slept. It was possible he'd been sitting in that chair all night, looking at me. He had a massive paper coffee cup sitting on the floor and another in his hand.

“That's a lot of coffee,” I said.

“I need to go out as well,” he said. “Something to attend to. I didn't want to leave until I spoke to you. You're secure in here. Boo left you last night, which was against instruction, but as long as the alarm is on and you don't . . .”

He fumbled around with his coat. No, no sleep for Thorpe. This was not happening. I was going to be left in this stupid empty house again while Stephen and Charlotte were out there. Not that I had any more of a plan than last night.

“I should be doing something,” I said.

“You should be staying here, at least until we have Jane and the others in custody. Set the alarm behind me. Boo and Callum will be back in a few hours.”

“But . . .”

“I have to attend to the body,” he said. He wasn't mean about it, just direct. The body. In this impossible new reality, Stephen was “the body.” Which made me think of something that should have occurred to me sooner—I mean, I knew it on some level, but there is knowing something in the back of your mind, and knowing it in the front of your mind, where you see how it's relevant to your actual life. That body, now separated from Stephen, was the same one I had seen some parts of and touched some parts of the night before. And now, just when everything was good, that body was gone. However Stephen came back to us, I could not touch him. I was actively dangerous to him.

I looked at my hands, as if this were their fault.

“I'll be back as soon as I can,” he said. “You
can
do something. You can go through these bags. There might be something in there that's useful.”

This was Thorpe's way of throwing me a bone. Those bags contained notes, documents—stuff relating to the squad that I guessed very few people would ever be allowed to see.

“Make yourself some tea,” he said. “I brought some fruit and packets of cereal. Eat.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I mean it. If you don't eat, you don't function. If you want to be useful, eat, then go through the documents.”

When he left, I did as he said—I made a cup of tea, and I ate some honey nut flakes dry, out of the box. In the living room, I opened the curtains to let in some light. I was going to sit on the floor, so it wasn't like anyone was going to be able to see me, and I couldn't read all these papers under the sick glow of the cheap lamps.

Also, I was tired of being in the dark.

There were nine bags in total, all stuffed and thick with papers, folders, and notebooks. This prospect was less imposing than the box. These were Stephen's professional thoughts, and somewhere in here there might be an answer. In the light of day, tea in body, something to do—I started to feel almost normal.

The first bag was useless. Lots of police stuff, lots of the forms that Stephen had tried to implement to bring some order to what they did. Boo and Callum had made fun of him for these, and I could see why. Nothing direct was mentioned on the forms. They didn't have boxes marked, “List how many ghosts you blew up today.” There were places for an address, a time, a few coded things. All they told me was where a ghost had been found and if a
T
had happened.
T
, I soon figured, meant
terminus
or
terminate
, which was the same thing. Boo's rarely had
T
s. Callum's almost always did. Stephen's was half and half. In with these there was a
London A–Z,
which was a standard-issue book of maps they sold everywhere in the city. It was all of London, in detail, with an index in the back so you could look up any street and go right to that page. He had marked this one up with dots and Post-its stuck to the pages, dozens of them.

12 December

Called to Tower Hill after unexplained power cut. Subject (female, date unknown) seen walking on track surface. Coaxed to platform. Subject had fallen in front of the train. T, 18:45.

16 December

Subject at Dead Man's Hole, female, recent (within last ten years). Left to remain. Possible contact.

18 December

Family of six (date unknown but looked to be late 19th or early 20th), two parents, three children, one infant, found in Catharine Wheel Alley. On questioning responded that there had been a fire in the night. T group, 20:35.

28 December

Subject (male, date unknown) spotted on Embankment. Subject had jumped into river. This subject seemed aware of passing time. T, 22:00.

These notes weren't on every page—London is massive—but there were a lot of them. Maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. What it looked like he was doing was taking the information from the forms and making a map of the ghosts of London—who they were, what they were generally up to.

I dug into the next bag. This was full of loose paperwork. Most of it looked boring or irrelevant—details of police training at Hendon. Handouts about police procedures, paperwork, uniforms, standards of conduct. There were copies of signed forms signifying the completion of different units of training—defensive driving, evidence processing, what forms to fill out. So much of this was about filling out forms. There were several sets of photocopies from what looked like academic works on magic and myth and ritual. I glanced through these very quickly before setting them into their own pile.

At the bottom of one of the bags was a small black hardback notebook bound shut with an elastic band. I snapped this off. Inside, I was greeted with what looked like pure gibberish:

LXXIKTZIHVHZ

NCXWTUGVGTA

QXQDYPWNY

There were a few pages of this, broken usually into blocks of one or two lines. I flipped through the entire book, but nothing else was written in it. I stared at this for a while. This was clearly something very different from the rest of the materials. I set this aside. This would need coming back to.

I continued going through the bags quickly, trying to get a sense of what was here. What I found in the next two was more police paperwork and forms. The forms were
endless.
I nearly went into a trance sifting through these and was about to push the bag aside, when one piece of paper caught my eye. It was thicker, better quality. There was a raised official seal in the corner that read
FOR H
OME
OFFICE
USE
ONLY
. And then I saw—it was Stephen's whole past on a page.

INTAKE FORM

Surname:
Dene

Given name:
Stephen Dorian

Place of birth:
Canterbury, Kent

Parents:
Edward and Diana Dene (banker/wedding planner)

Siblings:
Regina Claudette Dene (deceased aged 17, recreational opiate overdose, ruled accidental)

Education:

Winchester House School, Brackley, Northamptonshire

Eton College

Honours:
House Captain, Godolphin House; Oppidan Scholar; Sixth Form Select

Sport:
Rowing

Admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, department of Natural Sciences (Chemistry) [did not attend]

Languages known:
French, Latin, some Italian

Recruited:
via hospital

Notes on first interview:
Dene presents as highly intelligent, competent. Does not appear to have many outside interests outside of reading and some sport. Does not appear to have wide social circle. Speaks of Eton and parents with flat affect. When asked about sister, will not reply beyond fact that she is deceased.

Recommendation:
Exceptional intelligence and sterling academic record make him natural candidate. Recommended for stage two at Hendon immediately following discharge.

There was an addendum at the bottom of the page:

Instructors at Hendon note that Dene is highly competent and progressing well. However, in standard risk-assessment simulations, Dene either fails to notice or discounts certain dangers. He seems to have a certain lack of regard for personal safety. Despite some reservations, recommended for stage three. Continue monitoring.

Which told me exactly one thing—they knew. They knew that Stephen was exactly the kind of person who would throw himself into the line of fire. He'd done it
twice
with me, the second time being the one that really counted.

Someone had known he was like this and had let things go on anyway.

This is when the rage began. It came down on me like thunder—like a big Southern summer storm, taking over everything, cracking through the sky. Thorpe, and whoever else Thorpe worked with, they let this happen. Thorpe, who was matter-of-factly dealing with the body. The
body.

Last night's tears were this morning's current of electricity. I was leaving this house. I would look all over London. I would burn London down if I had to.

But I
still
didn't have a plan.

I stood, hands on hips, heart pounding, staring down at the piles I had created around the room. I grabbed the
A–Z
and flipped through the book. I turned to where I thought we were now, Highgate. There were a few notes on this page, but the one that caught my eye was this:

4 April

Found in Highgate Cemetery/tree, subject “Resurrection Man.” Mid 19th c. Clearly well informed. Left to remain. Possible contact.

A possible informant, around where I was currently staying. Resurrection Man was a weird name, but one that sounded promising. This was enough for me.