The Furthest Station
Copyright © 2017 by Ben Aaronovitch.
All rights reserved.
Dust jacket illustration
Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Walters.
All rights reserved.
Print version interior design
Copyright © 2017 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.
All rights reserved.
Electronic Edition
ISBN
978-1-59606-834-6
Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
subterraneanpress.com
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1: Ceci N'est Pas Un Métro
Chapter 2: The Neasden Postboy
Chapter 3: The French Lieutenant's Commuter
Chapter 4: The Harrow Schoolgirl
Chapter 5: The Water Baby
Chapter 6: The Ghost Wrangler
Chapter 7: The Polish Barista
Chapter 8: The Master's Palace
Chapter 9: The Refugee's Daughter
Technical Note
To Bob Hunter who still doesn’t understand
his role in making me look good.
Whoever you are,
I have always depended
on the kindness of strangers.
A Streetcar Named Desire,
Tennessee Williams
Chapter 1:
CECI N'EST PAS
UN MÉTRO
Jaget said he’d been watching this documentary on TV about the way people learn to track animals.
“Not white people, right?” he said. “Like people that grow up in the bush.”
In this case !Xun people from southern Africa, only Jaget couldn’t do the click sound until I taught him. I can only do it because I once harboured romantic dreams of emigrating to South Africa and had got someone to teach me. Since I hadn’t practised in ten years it probably meant we were both doing it wrong. We got some from funny looks from our fellow passengers—possibly because we were both in full uniform.
Now, Sergeant Jaget Kumar swans around in his uniform all the time, the better to deter terrorism, pickpockets and people playing their music too loud. But I can normally live without my Metvest. Especially on a Tube train during the morning rush hour in late July when Evian sales are at their peak. The S8 rolling stock is supposed to be air conditioned but, seriously, you wouldn’t know it.
Still, it’s amazing how even on the most crowded Tube train a police uniform can clear a good ten centimetres of personal space all around your body. The other commuters will literally climb into each other’s armpits to avoid touching you. Maybe they think it’s bad luck or something.
“Anyway,” said Jaget. “The thing about these people, right, is that they start learning to track about the same age they can walk. Their dads take them out and teach them, so by the time they’re grown up they’re experts. They had this young boy and he looked at this trail and he just reeled off all the animals that had gone past in the last couple of days.”
“How did they know he was telling the truth?”
“What?”
“The documentary makers,” I said. “How do they know he was telling the truth. He could have been making all that shit up.”
“Why would he make it up?”
“Because there’s these rich geezers with money and cameras and he figures that’s what they want to hear.”
“I believed him, okay?”
I said that I would have set up a low-light camera in a hide overnight and then you could check the boy’s account against the video evidence. Jaget said I was missing the point.
“Which was?”
“Maybe the reason Abigail is better at finding ghosts than you,” he said, “is because that’s all you’ve let her do for the last couple of years. Ten thousand hours and all that.”
“She’s been doing more than chasing ghosts,” I said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what’s worrying me.”
Which was when we heard the commotion further down the carriage. A good solid scream would have been nice, but after two hours of riding the trains at rush hour we’d settle for anything we could get.
“At last,” said Jaget.
Even with our uniforms on, it took us a good five minutes to push our way down the train. And, by the time we reached where it had come from, everyone was busily trying to pretend nothing had happened.
I made a mental note of the faces in case they became relevant later, before zeroing in on a young white woman in a blue off-the-peg skirt suit sitting in a seat by the end door. She caught my eye because, not only was her face flushed, but she kept on sneaking looks at us and then pretending to become madly interested in her Kindle.
Me and Jaget did some professional looming until we’d cleared enough space for me to crouch down and, in my best non-intimidating voice, ask whether she was alright. In case you’re wondering, that blokey sing-song timbre with a reassuring touch of regional—in my case cockney—accent is entirely deliberate. We actually practice it in front of a mirror. It’s designed to convey the message that we’re totally friendly, customer-facing modern police officers who have nothing but your wellbeing at the core of our mission statement…but nonetheless we are not going to go away until you talk to us. Sorry, but that’s just how we roll.
I let Jaget take over, since technically this was his jurisdiction—especially if this turned out to be a common or garden sexual assault. He started by getting her name out of her—Jessica Talacre, aged twenty-four, publicist for a small technical publisher located off Charterhouse Street.
“Was that you yelling?” he asked.
“I was just startled,” she said and crossed her arms. “Someone knocked into me.”
Jaget looked around at the nearby passengers.
“One of these people?”
“It was an accident,” she said. “They didn’t mean to.”
“But it wasn’t one of these guys, was it?” I said.
Jessica Talacre looked at me sharply. “What makes you say that?”
“Was there something a bit weird about this person?” I asked.
“What, apart from being a ghost?” she said, and looked defiant and then a bit fearful that we might have the famous white coats stashed about our person.
“What makes you think it was a ghost?” I asked.
“Because,” she said, “he faded out in front of my eyes.”
I pulled out my notebook and asked if she could give me a description.
“Wait,” she said. “You believe me?”
There had been reports suggesting that there was a ghost on the Metropolitan Line. Which Jaget brought to me, because disruptive phantasmagoria is the responsibility of the Special Assessment Unit, otherwise known as the Folly, otherwise known as “those weird bleeders.” Since, despite being an Operational Command Unit, the SAU consisted of me and Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale, and since Inspectors don’t get out of bed for anything less than a body in the vicarage, most initial case assessments were done by yours truly.
When I’d first met him, Jaget had been working for the London Underground division of the British Transport Police but they’d just now re-organised and reassigned him to his very own office at their swanky HQ in Camden Town. Technically he worked directly for the Chief Constable as a trouble shooter and go-to problem solver, but really he was there to deal with the weird shit on the Underground. For this he blamed me.
“You’re the one that likes exploring places underground,” I said. “You walked right into this of your own accord.”
He did admit that it gave him a varied workload. I got to see his brand-new office, which would have had a lovely scenic view of the car park and canal if the blinds didn’t have to be permanently drawn to prevent people looking in.
“Can’t have members of the public seeing what we get up to all day,” said Jaget before passing over a yellow folder full of hardcopy. Normally these days we shunt files back and forth as email attachments, but the Folly prefers to do things the old-fashioned way. Just in case someone leaks our emails, and also because only one of us currently lives in the 21st century.
“I was handed this by Project Guardian,” said Jaget. “They wanted my advice.”
Project Guardian was a joint BTP/Met/Transport For London/City Police initiative to deal with sexual assaults and offensive behaviour on the transport system. Part of that initiative was improving reporting rates for those offences, which meant convincing victims we were taking them seriously. So when you get a cluster of complaints about assaults by a “man who wasn’t there” you don’t just bin them. You pass them to the people who are responsible for weird shit, i.e. me and Jaget.
“A man who wasn’t there?” I said.
There was a cluster of complaints, two men, three women, who either called the Project Guardian hotline or 999, who reported they had been variously groped, shouted at and, in one case, racially abused.
“All of them on the Metropolitan Line,” said Jaget.
Where it got weird was in the follow-ups. When contacted, all seven complainants denied the encounter had ever happened and expressed a mixture of surprise and irritation that the police were contacting them. Witnesses and victims changing their mind happens all the time, particularly in hate crimes and domestic abuse, but there was a definite pattern here—so I was wondering whether they’d been intimidated.
“Did they follow up the follow-up?” I asked.
“They were particularly worried about Amirah Khalil, because of the racial aspect,” said Jaget and showed me the transcript of her initial 999 call—the relevant bits had been highlighted.
CALLER: He called me a dirty Saracen and he was acting totally manic. I’m terrified he’s [unintelligible] come back. He scared me there was something…[CALL TERMINATED AT SOURCE]
“We think she went into the tunnels north of Baker Street at that point,” said Jaget. “She didn’t call back.”
But Operation Guardian knew her name because she’d called on her mobile, so it was a relatively simple act to trace her to her home address in Watford. There she denied that any such incident had taken place or that she’d called the police.
“I spoke to the officers who interviewed her and they say they thought she genuinely had no memory of making the call,” said Jaget.
I looked at the picture of Amirah Khalil, a round face, dark eyes. Her family were from Egypt, but she was light enough to pass for Italian or Spanish. Saracen…it was an odd insult.
“Was she wearing a head scarf or hijab when she was on the train?”
“You noticed the Saracen thing, right?” said Jaget. “She was wearing a hijab when they interviewed her—hence the interest.”
Operation Guardian followed up with a second complainant. One Jonathan Pickering of Grove Avenue, Pinner. Mr Pickering had actually been interviewed shortly after he’d made his call. This had been undertaken by a pair of BTP officers who met him, at his own request, at Finchley Road Station within ten minutes of his initial call. According to the BTP officers’ statements Mr Pickering had seemed vague and uncertain as to why he’d got off at Finchley Road—when they attempted to take a statement he denied that any incident had taken place. When challenged, they had a logged call from his number after all, Mr Pickering said he had no memory of making a 999 call and expressed surprise and disbelief when the call log of his own confirmed that he had.
I checked the transcript of the 999 call. Mr Pickering clearly states that he’s been harassed by “some weird guy” who called him a “tinker” and demanded that he “stand up straight.” There’s a pause listed as being two seconds long and then Mr Pickering can be heard asking other passengers “You saw that right? You saw that? …How can you not have fucking seen that?”
Mr Pickering was a coder for a software development company based near the Old Street roundabout, so unlike Ms Khan he would have changed at Kings Cross. So no point of correspondence there.
“What do you think?” asked Jaget.
I told him that he’d pretty much had me at “Saracen” and that I’d take the files home, do a preliminary Falcon assessment, and get back to him the next day.
“Preliminary Falcon assessment?” said Jaget.
“We at the Folly have embraced the potentialities of modern policing,” I said.
Our filing system was strictly Edwardian, with our ghost-related material scattered through two different libraries, seemingly randomly archived reports by wizards and county practitioners going back two centuries, and a card file system that was suspiciously incomplete—I suspect whoever was organising it gave up in disgust halfway through.
Fortunately, I also had access to that most modern of office accoutrements, the unpaid teenaged intern in the form of my cousin Abigail Kumara. Who, because it was the summer holidays, had to be kept out of mischief.
“What kind of ghost?” she asked.
“We don’t know it’s a ghost,” I said. “Don’t make assumptions.”
She rolled her eyes to indicate that only one of us was making assumptions, and it wasn’t her. She had a narrow face which could fall into an expression of belligerent suspicion of such power that her teachers said they could feel it even when they were hiding in the staff room. It was her stubbornness, coupled with this expression, and routine everyday low-grade racism, that kept her constantly on the verge of a school suspension.
“She’s disruptive,” one of her teachers told me, but floundered when I asked her precisely how this disruption manifested itself.
“I don’t know,” wailed the teacher. “She just sits and stares at you and the lesson plan goes out of the window.”
My boss Nightingale, who teaches her Latin, has no such problems.
“If only all my students were so diligent,” he said, which given that I was his only other student was a bit unfair. Abigail didn’t have to work a full case load or learn magic. Although I figured the magic wasn’t far off.
“You must have known that inevitably she would have to be taught,” said Nightingale.
“I was hoping to wait until she was at least eighteen,” I said, although actually I’d been hoping she’d lose interest…but what can you do? A promise is a promise, or as Nightingale put it, “Either your word is good or it’s worthless.”
And magic is difficult, complicated, and carries serious risks. But trying to teach yourself it is almost inevitably fatal. And I reckoned that, left to her own devices, Abigail would have a go at trying to teach herself. So at some point we were going to have to sit down with her parents and explain that we wanted to teach their daughter magic.
“Is it safe?” they’d ask.
“No, it’s hideously dangerous, but if we don’t teach her she’ll probably accidently kill herself before she’s sixteen.”
There’s a conversation I was looking forward to.
So a good, thorough, and probably pointless search of the archives was just the thing to stave off that awful day. While Abigail went through the card file I pinned a map of North West London onto the wall in the upstairs reading room and marked out the route of the Metropolitan Line and the locations mentioned in the reports.
The Metropolitan Line runs from the heart of the city at Aldgate out to the northwest beyond the M25, until it peters out just short of the Chilterns. The original plan was to build a railway that ran from the Midlands to Paris with a stopoff in London for shopping. That it ended up creating a quarter of modern London instead was a completely unintended consequence, but then the history of my city has always been a series of
unintended consequences—just ask Boudicca.
The line emerges into the daylight at Baker Street, leapfrogs the Jubilee Line to reach Wembley Park in just two stops, crosses the North Circular and makes a mad dash for the green belt, only pausing to split in two to spawn a series of commuter suburbs that provide the disaffected middle class youth of London with somewhere to rebel against. Then comes Rickmansworth and disaster—the last vestiges of London are left behind and the line vanishes into the green tinted mists that are Buckinghamshire.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the countryside. In fact, some of my best friends are geographical features. It’s just a tricky place to operate in. Fortunately for me, all seven incidents in Jaget’s file took place between Baker Street and Wembley Park. And it was definitely something supernatural. I’ve seen that fading memory phenomena before.
Dr Walid has speculated that people under a certain kind of influence might be generating different set of neurotransmitters, not unlike the ones it’s speculated we generate during sleep. In both cases, short term memories are not consolidated into long term memory. In exactly the way our dreams aren’t, which is why we forget them. I gave him a call and his best suggestion was if I could get to a witness early enough they might retain more memories.
“If it is like dream retention,” he said, “then recounting the events might help the transfer to long term memory.”
He would have liked blood samples as well, but we’ve found that people are strangely reluctant to give up their bodily fluids to the police for science.
I went through the reports again in the vain hope that something new would jump out before heading downstairs for tea in the atrium. Molly had made something that might have been banana cake, except it had sultanas in it. She was experimenting again—we suspected the influence of The Great British Bake Off.
While we had our tea Abigail got out her notebook and started flipping through the pages. I had given her her first notebook a year or so earlier, but this was probably number ten. It was hard to keep track because she refused to let anybody else look at them and, according to her dad, kept them in her room in a lock box that he’d made for her. Her dad’s a track maintenance engineer, so when he builds something it’s going to be too robust for me to get a sneak peek. Nightingale could probably open it with a wave of his hand, but I didn’t need to ask him to know he would regard it as an ungentlemanly act.