The Furthest Station

  “Secondhand shop,” said Abigail.

  “You spent your own money on it?”

  “Might have done,” said Abigail. And, when I didn’t say anything, “Miss Margot gave it to me.”

  “What, Margot the Maggot?” I said. Miss Margot had been a teacher when I was at school. She’d taught RE6 and I don’t remember her as being all that encouraging.

  “She’s the one organising the GCSE for me.”

  “You never said.”

  “You never asked.”

  “So how long has she been teaching you Latin?”

  “You know when I asked whether you’d teach me magic?” said Abigail. “And you said you would when I passed my GCSE?”

  “Since then?” I said.

  “Believe it.”

  Oh, shit.

  But at least it explained why she’d picked up it up so fast.

  “So you going to keep your promise?” she asked.

  “We’ll talk about it after,” I said.

  “After what?”

  “After we’re done here,” I said.

  Abigail nodded.

  “Laters,” she said.

  And the moral of that story is, think before you open your gob.

  Which left Geoffrey Toobin who, had I not suspected he was either holding or had already murdered Brené McClaren, I would have regarded as the least of my current problems.

  I had a good view of his front door, but there were windows around the back at ground level and our friend Geoffrey could have been hopscotching his way to freedom even as me and Abigail were saying goodbye.

  Luckily Jaget turned up not five minutes later.

  “Thames Valley have got a person of interest,” he said as he got in.

  And it’s obviously not Geoffrey Toobin, I thought, so I asked who.

  “A Polish barista,” said Jaget. “Janusz Zdunowski.”

  I asked why TVP liked him in particular and Jaget said that their canvass had led them to the Costa on the High Street where Brené McClaren was known to pop in on her way to work each morning.

  “Wait,” I said. “That’s not on her way to the station.”

  “No,” said Jaget and explained that Brené only started turning up for tea three months earlier—just a week or so after Janusz started work there. Not a coincidence, according to Janusz’s fellow baristas, who had been taking bets as to how long it would be before Brené plucked up enough courage to ask him out.

  “And Thames Valley like him for the abduction?” I asked.

  “They like that they have CCTV footage of him and Brené chatting in the car park the morning she disappeared,” said Jaget.

  The car park filled the space between the A416, which I was currently parked the other side of, and the pedestrianised High Street where the Costa was located. I asked how much CCTV they had and what it showed, but Jaget said that was all DS Transcombe had told him.

  I said that whatever else, we needed to cover Geoffrey Toobin’s back door and we settled who was going to leave the nice comfy car and loiter suspiciously around outside with a quick game of rock, paper, scissors—best out of three. Jaget always favours paper, but he hasn’t figured out I know that yet.

  While Jaget was getting into position I called Nightingale and briefed him. We decided his best option would be to drive to Aylesbury nick where the Thames Valley Major Investigation Unit had its incident room and where he could swing his rank from side to side and persuade TVP to take us seriously.

  While he was heading across the Chilterns I got out my tablet and Googled Geoffrey Toobin until I had the address of his solicitor’s firm and a confirmed picture of him. I risked a PNC check on his name and address—just because it’s a small town doesn’t mean there couldn’t be more than one Geoffrey Toobin. He didn’t have any previous, but he did have a driver’s licence and registered vehicle—the Red VW Golf I could see parked, ironically, down a nearby side road.

  Then I called up Abigail and asked her to trace a route from Toobin’s solicitor’s office to Janusz Zdunowski’s Costa and/or his house.

  “But without going anywhere near the house,” I said. “Or any Thames Valley Police that might be hanging about.”

  Abigail told me not to worry.

  I sent the picture of Geoffrey Toobin to Nightingale’s phone and asked if he could try and persuade the MIU to add him as a nominal to their investigation.

  I called Jaget and updated him. He kept me amused by complaining for five minutes solid, but alas even that had to end and I settled into my seat and awaited developments.

  Abigail reported back that the fastest route from Geoffrey Toobin’s office to his home ran past the Costa and then through the car park. I dutifully wrote this up in my notebook, but when I called Nightingale to update him his phone went straight to voicemail. Since with Nightingale this could signify anything from a loss of bars to full-on magical Armageddon I didn’t find it at all comforting.

  Abigail phoned to say she was heading back to town but I was to call her as soon as anything interesting happened.

  A woman from the Chinese restaurant came out and asked if I could move my car. When I explained why I was there, she popped back in and brought me a full meal in a bag—crab with ginger and spring onions plus sides. This is why it always pays to try and park outside Chinese takeaways.

  I watched the house across the road, chomped my way through the prawn crackers and wondered about the basement. It definitely wasn’t big enough, but I hadn’t spotted a second staircase or trap door and I’d been really looking. The later period brick bond of the end wall suggested that a section had been walled off in the nineteenth century, but despite the whitewashing I’d swear it was bereft of convenient secret doors.

  I wondered whether there was a spell for detecting life at a distance.

  Think how useful that would be as a skill for rescue workers. No more mucking around with infrared cameras and listening devices.

  Could genius loci do it? Could Bev? I’d have to ask her. But even if she could, it might not be a conscious thing. Bev often talked about some things being a function of the river, some things being Beverley Brook young woman about town, and that she didn’t always know which was which.

  “Like when you kiss me,” she’d said. “Is it enjoyable because of the physical sensation or is it because you think it should be enjoyable?”

  Good question, and we quickly developed experimental protocol which unfortunately left us too knackered to record our results properly and thus invalidated any conclusions. We have faith in the methodology, though, and continue to repeat the experiment on a regular basis.

  And people say science is dull.

  Someone rapped at my window and I started.

  It was DS Transcombe—leering at me through the glass.

  “Evening all,” he said and climbed into the passenger seat. “Any movement?”

  I said no, and nothing from Jaget around the back neither.

  “Your weirdo governor is going to be along in a minute, accompanied by my totally normal and not in any way peculiar governor,” said DS Transcombe. “And some bodies and a POLSA.”

  I asked what had happened to the Polish barista.

  “We like your guy better,” said DS Transcombe. “Especially now we have CCTV of him harassing Brené McClaren outside the Costa.”

  “The day she vanished?”

  “At least three incidents over the two weeks previous,” said DS Transcombe. “We think he tried to follow her home on the last occasion.”

  Shit, I thought, classic stalker escalation.

  “Here they come,” said DS Transcombe as a very dodgy-looking white Hyundai pulled up outside the parsonage with a couple of unmarked Astras in tow. Nightingale and another man got out of the back of the Hyundai. The second man was white, stocky, with brown hair in a buzz cut and a loosely cut black suit.

  This was the SIO Detective Inspector Vincent Colombo, said DS Transcombe.

  “He loves having peopl
e make jokes about his name,” said Transcombe. “So feel free to pile in when introduced.”

  Nightingale and Colombo stood aside as an entry team formed up, a couple ambling round the back to join Jaget. I went to get out, but DS Transcombe told me to stay put.

  “You’re the Falcon reserve, apparently,” he said.

  They started with a bell ring, a police knock, then a fist bang accompanied by shouts of “we’re the police” which was then bellowed through the letterbox. I saw Colombo ask Nightingale something and when he answered they both turned to look back across at me.

  Colombo called us on DS Transcombe’s airwave.

  “Are you sure he’s still in there?” he asked.

  I said as sure as I could be.

  There was more discussion across the road and one of the uniforms donned a riot helmet and gloves before pulling the big red metal key from the boot of one of the Astras. There was a bit of a shuffle as they all lined up behind him before he swung the business end of the key into the door and it banged open as sweet as you could want.

  They all trooped inside.

  “Got any snacks?” asked DS Transcombe.

  I was just about to hand him the emergency stake-out bag and let him take his chances, when his airwave squawked and a voice that identified itself as the DI gave the address and requested an ambulance.

  “I have a male with life-threatening injuries, wounding to wrists, unconscious but still breathing.”

  So, suicide attempt then.

  “I have sufficient units on the scene at the moment—I will post a PC on the door to meet SCAS.”

  SCAS to me was the serious crime analysis section of the National Crime Agency.

  “SCAS?” I asked.

  “South Central Ambulance Service,” said DS Transcombe.

  The airwave squawked again.

  “Grant,” said the DI. “Inspector Nightingale wants you in here now.”

  5Note for Reynolds: Uni is short for University.[back]

  6Note for Reynolds: Religious Education. [back]

  Chapter 8:

  THE MASTER'S

  PALACE

  Geoffrey Toobin died in the ambulance.

  Later examination determined that he had slit his own wrists while lying fully clothed in a bath full of warm water. You can never be totally precise, but it was estimated that he must have run the bath as soon as I’d left the parsonage.

  “He knew I knew,” I said.

  “Yeah, but what did you know?” said DI Colombo.

  “Obviously something,” I said. “If only I knew what it was.”

  The simplest theory of the crime was that Geoffrey Toobin had drugged Brené McClaren, stashed her in the basement, murdered her, probably in the basement, then disposed of her corpse in one of the many convenient body-dumping sites afforded to those who live in the outer suburbs. Then he’d cleaned out the basement and scrubbed every surface as a forensic counter measure.

  “Then you turn up on his doorstep,” said Colombo, “he loses his composure and ends it all.”

  He had officers out doing door to door and at Geoffrey Toobin’s office trying to timeline his activities back from now to the day before Brené McClaren went missing.

  There were no obvious signs of a second basement, but a house as big as the parsonage would have had one matching the area of its ground floor. I have my artistic limitations, but even I can draw a rectangle and measure its sides. And I estimated that the current basement only covered one third of the potential area. It wasn’t much but it was enough, with Nightingale’s help, to get Colombo and DS Transcombe down into the basement.

  “And you think there’s another room behind that wall?” said Colombo. “And that Brené McClaren is in there?”

  “It makes sense from an architectural standpoint,” I said.

  “But there’s no door,” said Colombo. “Or any sign of recent brickwork.”

  “That we know of,” said Nightingale.

  “And you want to pull down the wall?”

  “If she’s dead, then we can wait to pull it down slowly,” I said. “But if she’s still alive…”

  “Do we have any reason to believe that?” asked Colombo.

  I considered telling him that Alice Bowman, even more late than late of this parish, had intimated that the “princess” still needed rescuing. You know how sometimes things sound better in your head than when you say them out loud—this line didn’t even sound good in my head.

  “Information received, Vincent,” said Nightingale, who was allowed to call strange DIs by their first name. “The same information that brought this case to light in the first place.”

  Colombo nodded slowly.

  “Fine,” he said. “We’ll have to get some workmen down here, then.”

  “That will not be necessary,” said Nightingale, adjusting his cuffs. “If you’d like to stand back?”

  “And turn off your mobile phones,” I added.

  The last time I saw him do this spell I was a bit distracted, what with the shotguns and the imminent fear of death and everything. The trick, Nightingale told me later, is being precise with inflectentes, the sub-formae that change the way the principal forma act upon the material world. Also, the last time he done it he’d done it fast—this time it was slow enough to watch.

  Nightingale made a short chopping motion with his hand. There was a loud crack and dust sprang from a split down the midline of the wall from ceiling to floor. The open hand became a fist and the bricks along that line twisted outward and the greyish brick dust fountained out as they ground noisily against the mortar trying to hold them in place.

  Colombo and Transcombe took an involuntary step backwards.

  “Bloody hell,” said Colombo.

  When the line of bricks had all turned out ninety degrees, Nightingale paused to let the dust settle.

  He told me to see if I could see anything.

  I sidled up to where the twisted bricks had left a gap up the centre—it looked like a gigantic, half-open zip. I touched one of the bricks—it was warm under my fingers. Friction, I wondered, or an interaction between it and the force that moved it?

  “Peter,” said Nightingale. “If you wouldn’t mind…”

  I tried various points of view, but even with light leaking in from my side all I could make out were angular shadows in the darkness.

  But there was the acrid winter bedroom smell of old sweat, breath and ancient farts.

  I stood back and said I couldn’t see anything.

  “But there’s definitely somebody in there.”

  “Alive?” asked Colombo.

  “Let’s find out,” said Nightingale.

  His fist twisted and I felt the power as the smell of white willow and mown grass, as the sensation of rough wool and a young voice singing something choral—high and sweet.

  And behind it the impression that I stood amidst the precision gears of a vast clockwork orrery—smoothly and patiently reordering the cosmos to match its creator’s design.

  Give him a place to stand, I thought, and I believe he could move the world.

  He certainly made short work of the wall.

  I watched as bricks divided like a herd of sheep and bounded left and right to form neat piles in the corners of the room. Dust rolled over us and I had to cover my mouth with my hand. Back at the Folly I have filter masks and eye-protectors for just this eventuality.

  Nightingale flicked his hand with an almost negligent gesture and the dust cloud parted like a curtain. A last few stray bricks clunked down onto their piles.

  “Light, if you will, Peter,” said Nightingale.

  I conjured a nice low-powered yellow werelight which revealed the space beyond the now-missing wall. For a moment I thought we’d uncovered nothing more than a hidden wine cellar, but the shelves that lined the aisles were the wrong size and the glass vessels they held were shaped like small demijohns.

  There were three aisles between the shelves and behind the l
eftmost one a woman was stretched out on the floor, lying on her side, head resting on one outstretched arm. Nightingale surged forward, stopping beside her to check pulse and breath.

  “She’s alive,” he said.

  Colombo snapped his fingers and sent DS Transcombe running up the stairs.

  The paramedics had been on standby upstairs and as they came thumping down the steps I moved into the centre aisle to avoid my werelight messing with their equipment and had a closer look at the individual jars. Most of them were filled to the neck with a cloudy liquid, although some had visible cracks and were empty or part drained. I tapped a couple with my fingernail—cautiously, just in case there was a facehugger lurking inside.

  I could hear the paramedics in the next aisle lifting Brené McClaren onto a stretcher. Their voices were unhurried and lacking the urgent edge that is the harbinger of bad news at the scene of an accident.

  A flicker of light at the far end drew me up the aisle. At first I ought it was a reflection of my werelight, but as I approached I saw it was a genuine glow from inside the centremost jar. I reached out and placed the tips of my fingers against the cool, green glass.

  And I was for a moment in a palace of glass, standing on a formal lawn bounded on all sides by shifting planes of crystal. Standing before me was a man in a velvet frock coat who I later identified, from the portrait hanging in the billiards room at the Folly, as George Buckland.

  “You have certainly been tardy,” he said.

  “Your messengers went a bit astray,” I said. “Are you the only one left?”

  “I am, and soon to be also quit of this wretched existence,” he said. “I follow on to whatever undiscovered country they have found.”

  I wanted to ask how the jars worked to trap ghosts, to ask whether there was a continuation of consciousness, and to see if I could determine whether the ghosts in the jars were really people or not.

  But it was too late. The light was fading, and with it any sense that I was anywhere else but standing in the cellar of a house in Chesham. Still, as he went I was pretty certain that George Buckland, Master of the Glass Palace, looked me straight in the eye.

  “Vita non est vivere sed valere vita est,” he said—Life is more than merely staying alive.