The Shadow Cabinet (13 page)

Some rain pattered on the windscreen, and he hit the wipers for a moment. Then he looked at the paper again.

“I didn't write this report,” he said, holding up the paper. “The contents don't shock me, but had I known the contents, I would have proceeded differently. I thought he had done better than this on the risk-assessment tests.”

A moment of Thorpey silence. The air in the car became heavy with our thoughts.

“Stephen was very closed off emotionally,” Thorpe said. “This is not an uncommon trait amongst people in the security services. But what I came to realize is that he was a very compassionate person who grew up in an atmosphere where compassion wasn't valued. He didn't know what to do with it. So instead of weighing a situation in terms of his own safety, he simply threw himself into it.

“He had been through a system that produces very professional people, very smart people—but sometimes very broken people. Eton's reputation is well earned. Stephen was focused, someone who wanted to devote his life to helping others—and he'd never been put in a position where he could do that. This job gave him meaning and purpose. Whatever happened, whatever risks were taken—he wanted to take them. Stephen was highly intelligent. He made his own choices.”

“So . . . that's okay, then?”

“No,” Thorpe said sharply. “This is where we need to be clear about my position. It was only after meeting Stephen, actually talking to him, seeing what he was doing—only then did I realize that this was not an exercise at all. It took me some time to come to grips with that, and Stephen was helpful. I regarded him not just as my recruit, but as my friend. If you think I don't care about what's happened on a personal level, then you are much mistaken.”

His voice had acquired an edge I'd never heard in it before. It wasn't like it broke, or that he was crying. The words were coming quick and sharp, with a little intake of breath at the end of the sentences. Thorpe was leaning toward me, making sure I took in every word.

“Stephen cared very much about your safety. That was obvious to me from the start. So if you value Stephen, and you value how he felt and what he actually sacrificed himself for, you need to be more careful, and you need to listen to me. Can I get you to agree to that much, for his sake?”

“Yes?” I said.

It was like I'd just been subjected to my own personal thunderstorm, one that passed as quickly as it had come. Thorpe leaned back. He relaxed his expression in what seemed like a very intentional way, cleared his throat, and looked up at Freddie's building and checked his watch. His phone made a noise, and he pulled it from his pocket.

“Nothing at Stephen's parents' house,” he said. “Callum and Boo are going back to Highgate to meet us.”

“What about his parents?” I said.

“They haven't been informed,” Thorpe said.

“Why?”

“For a number of reasons,” Thorpe said. “When an officer in a security service dies on duty, certain measures are taken to secure information about that individual. Families are not informed what they actually did for a living. Stephen's parents think that he was a police officer, which he technically was. They stopped speaking to him at that point, I believe. And in this particular case . . .”

Here, Thorpe stopped and took a deep breath. Something had unsettled him.

“His body was removed from the hospital morgue, and all records of his being there were expunged.”

“Where is he?”

“He's secure,” Thorpe said. But he said it without his normal sharpness. “I believe he was removed for a specialist autopsy. When they need a body for a funeral, we can supply an unclaimed one.”

At home, there's a local commercial for an unclaimed freight store where they sell—you may be ahead of me here—unclaimed freight. They just sell
things.
The owner is a small-headed man who screams the words
UNCLAIMED
,
UNCLAIMED
,
UNCLAIMED
FREIGHT
! over and over in the commercial, until you are at least 90 percent certain that unclaimed freight is the thing being talked about. This is all that was going through my mind when Thorpe started talking about an
UN
CLAIMED
,
UNCLAIMED
,
UN
CLAIMED BODY
! Like maybe there was a warehouse of unclaimed bodies somewhere, next to the unclaimed sofas and TVs and tires. And maybe you could buy one and take it home and dress it up and pretend you had a friend. Except it would be an unclaimed body and would keep falling off the unclaimed sofa you had also just purchased, and eventually you would have to store it in the unclaimed freezer or it would rot.

It was possible I was mentally leaving the situation at hand, because I could not process a world in which Stephen was a body that was going to be autopsied.

It was cold in the car, and Thorpe suddenly didn't look so high and mighty. He looked younger than my dad—definitely more built than my dad, though. His white hair was the thing that always threw me off.

“When did your hair turn white?” I asked him. I didn't really care. I just needed to change the subject.

“When I was in my gap year,” he said.

“Before college?”

“I was eighteen,” he said.

“Why did your hair turn white when you were eighteen? Was it a medical thing, or—”

“Rory,” he said again. I had gone too far into personal time with Thorpe. His voice was not unkind, though. “I realize things have not been easy for you, and I'm sorry for that, but things are what they are. And now you understand where I am coming from. From now on, I need you to be more compliant. I'm trusting in what you said you saw. I believe you. If we're to find Stephen, we need to work together. Agreed?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Tell me what happened in that graveyard.”

My eyes were burning a bit with impending tears, so I gave them a quick rub and cleared my throat.

“Stephen kept notes,” I said. “In one of those
A-to-Z
map books. He put notes on all the pages about ghosts they'd found, and on the Highgate Cemetery page, there was one about an informant, someone named the Resurrection Man. So I went over to see what I could find out about where people appear after they die. I found him, and he was really talkative, and he said he wanted to take me on a tour of the place. But really what he wanted, once he found out what I was, was for me to take out some other ghost—some creepy, messed-up thing. He said the cemetery was his, and he wanted this other thing gone. We kind of got in an argument, and . . . then he threw rocks at me. I hid in the tomb for a minute so I wouldn't get hit. He locked me in.”

“And attempted to set it on fire?” Thorpe asked.

“I don't know if it would have been that big of a fire,” I said. “The gate was open to the air, and there weren't that many leaves. I think he was trying to stop me or scare me because I said I was going to blast the crap out of him—and I am. I'm going to go back and do that.”

“Perhaps later,” Thorpe said.

“Yeah. Later.”

“But he had nothing useful to say.”

“Nothing he told me.”

He looked into the rearview mirror. “There's Freddie.”

“So she's coming with us?”

“She is indeed. She's been working on this case longer than we have. She'll take some training, but Stephen thought highly of her. He planned on recruiting her. She was next on the list and had already been vetted, which is why we can do this now.”

Freddie was struggle-running with what looked like a massively heavy duffel bag.

“What did you do to Jerome's phone?” I said.

“I don't need to do anything to access his phone. Mobile phones aren't very secure. He should know that. He seems like the type who would.”

Freddie reached the car and breathlessly got inside, dragging the bag in after her.

“Right!” she said brightly. “I have my computer and a few books that might be useful. Where are we off to? What happens now?”

“You'll be meeting the rest of the team,” Thorpe said. “Though I gather you have some idea already of who they are.”

“Some,” she said, leaning forward. “There's Boo. There's the guy who looks like an athlete of some kind. And the one in charge . . . is his name Stephen?”

I gulped a bit of air and waited to see how Thorpe was going to answer that.

“Officer Dene died in the line of duty,” he said plainly.

“What? Oh—oh, I . . . What happened?”

I bit down hard on my lip and hoped Thorpe would be his usual self and offer no long explanation.

“There was an accident,” Thorpe said. “We won't be discussing it in detail right now.”

“I'm sorry,” she said to me. “You seemed close. I didn't mean to . . .”

We seemed close? What the hell had Freddie seen? Stephen and I had never done anything in public. We'd only kissed once, and that was inside, with the curtains shut, in a place she had likely never been. This thundered through my mind. Why did we seem close? Oh, my mind. My broken, frazzled mind. My emotional needle was swinging between “there is a body” to “we seemed close—maybe he liked me all along” from second to second, which made me wonder for another second if feelings were to be trusted at all. Then the needle started wobbling in confusion and my meter cracked in half and I stared out the window.

“This is what happens next,” Thorpe said. “We are going to the safe house, which I'm hoping you haven't blown.”

“I didn't tell anyone,” she said. “Well, Jerome . . . not even Jerome. I had him meet me nearby. I never took him there.”

“We meet with the team,” Thorpe went on. “We now have something to work with. You'll be with us for several days at least. You may need to make excuses to your family about the holiday. You will not have your phone otherwise. Then we'll talk long-term training. Do you accept these conditions?”

“Absolutely!” Freddie said.

“Fine. Then it's time to meet everyone properly.”

And so, we made our way up to Highgate.

13

W
HEN
WE
GOT
INSIDE
, B
OO
AND
C
A
LLUM
WERE
SITTING
side by side on the sofa, deep in conversation. They stopped the second they saw us, or, more specifically, Freddie. She quivered in the doorway like a spiderweb.

“Freddie,” Thorpe said, “come in and shut the door.”

“Who's this?” Callum said.

“This is Freddie Sellars,” Thorpe said. “She'll be joining us.”

“What?” Callum said.

“Freddie, sit,” Thorpe said.

Freddie managed to set her bag down and get herself over to one of the chairs. All the confidence she'd been showing had shot off.

“This is Freddie Sellars,” Thorpe repeated. “She has been trailing all of you for months. She followed us here on her bicycle yesterday. She's going to be the newest member of this team.”

Boo let out a little unamused laugh.

“You must be joking,” Callum said.

“Freddie,” Thorpe went on, “has made this team an object of study for some time. Stephen caught her at it and found out who she was. He traced her background. Life-threatening accident at age fifteen . . .”

“How did he find that out?” Freddie asked. “That happened in Turkey, and I didn't go to the hospital. They treated me on the beach.”

“You spoke to Stephen online, though you didn't know it, on one of your message boards. You mentioned your accident in conversation.”

Freddie looked away for a moment and then her face lit up in realization.

“Dreadfulpenny,” she said. “Of course.”

We all waited for her to explain that one.

“That's what he called himself. Dreadfulpenny was his name online. The reverse of penny dreadful. We used to talk about the Society of Psychical Research. He mentioned one day that he'd almost been hit by a car whilst out on his bike and how scary it was, and I told him about the jellyfish sting. I should have realized, but I didn't think . . . We'd been chatting for weeks by that point.”

I felt weirdly jealous at the thought of Freddie getting to talk to Stephen online for weeks. He was probably one of those people who found it easier to talk that way. It had been that way for Jerome and me, when we'd been separated. We actually got closer when we could only be online.

“So she's one of us,” Boo said. “It doesn't mean she should be here.”

“Stephen was about to bring her in anyway. He had already vetted her. He would have told you soon enough. Freddie, why don't you give them a quick explanation of your background and expertise?”

“Of course!” Freddie said, perking up. “Well, my parents are profs at Cambridge. My mum is an associate chair of ancient history, and my dad is a behavioral psychologist. I grew up surrounded by academics and researchers. I knew my myths before I knew all the incarnations of the Doctor. My father's work dealt quite a lot with criminal behavior. He's essentially a profiler, though he doesn't work as one. I intended to go into that field myself until I had my accident. Once I started to see things, at first I thought it was purely a neurological event, but then I realized it wasn't. I found out there were people like me—like
us.
I changed my area of interest to history, to folklore and magic. Plus, I read up on the more fringy bits of psychology as it deals with matters like this. My father would be horrified if he knew.”

“Freddie has provided us with some information on Jane Quaint,” Thorpe said. He removed a device from his pocket and played back a recording of the conversation. Callum and Boo listened, looking over at Freddie on occasion.

“So where does that get us?” Callum said.

“It gets us ten names,” Thorpe said. “If those people were in Sid and Sadie's thrall, and if they've been missing since 1973, there might be a property held in one of their names. I already ran them through our database, but there's nothing in there about them, which makes sense. These people were last seen in 1973 and some used aliases. You and Boo need to go to the police archive and see what you can find in the files. See if you can find out who these people were. Given what we've been told about them, some of them will have been picked up for something or other. There will be a lot to look through, but it's all we've got. Maybe we'll get lucky.”

“I can help with that,” Freddie said eagerly. “I—”

“Will do what you're instructed to do.”

“Yes,” Freddie said quickly. “Yes, of course.”

“Can we talk to Rory for a moment?” Boo asked. “Upstairs?”

“Of course. There are some things I need to run through with Freddie. Don't be long.”

I followed Boo upstairs. Callum trailed silently. We went to the front bedroom and shut the door. The room was so empty and echoey that we had to speak in very low voices.

“You ran off,” Boo said. “Where did you go?”

“I thought I had an idea,” I said. “It didn't really work out, except . . . well, I met her.”

“Yeah,” Callum said, with an accusatory tone. “You found her.”

“She found me,” I corrected him. “She could help.”

“Help how? She studies
folklore.
”

“She knew all about Jane Quaint,” I said. “And Stephen thought she was good.”

This remark was met by silence and stillness.

“There was nothing at his house?” I asked them.

“We went through the place top to bottom,” Boo said. “It was easy enough. His parents are on holiday, and the cleaner left the kitchen door open to let the floor dry. They're on holiday, and their son's . . .”

“They don't know,” I said. “Thorpe told me.”

“I don't think they would have come home even if they did,” Callum said. “That's the kind of people they are.”

“So where do we look next?” I said.

Callum and Boo looked at each other, but meaningfully. The kind of look you give when you've already had a long conversation about something.

“I'm going downstairs,” Callum said. He left us, shutting the door a little too loudly.

“Is he going to hate me forever?” I asked Boo.

I expected her to say, “He doesn't hate you.” Instead, she leaned against the door and shook her head.

“We need to find your friend Charlotte, yeah?” she said. “We have to go.”

Downstairs, Freddie was settling on the floor, looking at the bags I'd been going through this morning. I hurried down and took one of his notebooks out of her hands.

“What are you doing?” I snapped. I had no real ownership of Stephen's things. They were, after all, Stephen's.

“He told me to . . .” Freddie said meekly.

Thorpe looked up from his laptop. He was sitting quietly in the corner and typing intently.

“You two will continue going through these,” Thorpe said. “Rory, you can show Freddie what you've done so far. She can help. Boo, Callum, get going.”

Boo and Callum left without another word. Thorpe took his laptop into the kitchen and closed the door. I sat down on the floor in the middle of the bags and papers. Freddie looked over at me, but kept her eyes low.

“So there's a lot to go through,” she said. “You've already started, I see. What exactly are we looking for? Something about Jane?”

“You know about myths?” I said.

“Quite a lot, yes.”

“When Jane grabbed me, she told me she was into something about Greek mysteries. Ell—”

“
Eleusinian
Mysteries?” Freddie said.

“I think so. That sounds like it.”

“They're also called the Rites of Demeter. It's an ancient Greek ritual, mostly an initiation rite, one that probably involved a lot of drugs and visions. Like a vision quest, except, more . . . well, ancient Greek. I'd have to brush up on it. That's what she was interested in?”

“They said they were going to
defeat death.
Do you know what they could have meant?”

“Defeat death? No. Well, there are certainly traditions that believe death isn't real, not in the way it's normally understood. We're evidence of that. We see the dead all the time. But if they have the sight already, I couldn't tell you what they were hoping to achieve beyond that. I could look into it.”

Something in my expression made her sag.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I can be helpful. I promise. I'm very sorry about Stephen. He seemed very . . . well, I never got to meet him except online, and perhaps then he was simply acting a certain way . . .”

“I don't think he knew how to act,” I said.

She had nothing to say to that. I looked at the mess of papers around us and wondered if it was information or distraction. Maybe it would lead us somewhere, or maybe Thorpe was just trying to keep me out of the way. Whatever the case, if I had to sit here with Freddie, I would try to get some use out of her.

“We're looking for him,” I said.

“Who? Stephen, you mean?”

I nodded.

“He's . . . come back?”

“I think so.”

“You saw him?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It's a long story, but I'm almost positive he's back. But we can't find him in any of the places we thought he'd be. Do you know anything about where the dead end up after they first come back?”

“Well . . .” Freddie considered for a moment. “I didn't do the kind of fieldwork that all of you have, but I have read a lot of accounts. It's true that most places that are so-called haunted are where someone has died, or where someone has a deep connection.”

“We've done everywhere we can think of like that. We did the hospital, the flat, his home. Callum and Boo went back to Eton.”

“Perhaps there was somewhere significant he didn't mention to anyone? We all have a place we value, a place we may not mention to anyone else—not out of secrecy, but because we don't even know how much we value it until it's gone or we can't reach it. For me, it's a bit of the back garden at my grandmother's house on a sunny day in June. There's a little stream there where you can see the reflection of the clouds. It's surrounded by wildflowers—a lot of poppies—and you can sit on a little footbridge and dangle your feet in and read a book. It's what I think of when people ask me what my favorite place is, but I don't think I've ever mentioned it to anyone until now. Something like that. There might be a place.”

“But if he didn't mention it . . .”

“It doesn't mean I'm right, or that there's no clue. Now, what have you found in here so far?”

“Over here,” I said, pointing to the pile of photocopies, “are some research things of his.”

She flipped through these and shook her head.

“These are all highly speculative things. Shadow Cabinet and all that.”

“What's the Shadow Cabinet?” I asked.

“It's nonsense,” she said. “Conspiracy theory. Here, for example, is a copy of some pages from a grimoire written in 1908 by a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and one of the original members of the London temple of Isis-Urania.”

I'd read that much from the front page of the copy. When I remained silent, she nodded, as if she thought we were in perfect understanding as to what that meant.

“Well, listen.
And so it was that in 1671, Thomas Blood went to the Tower of London and therefrom took the jewels belonging to the King. The theft was completed over several days, taking all manner of goods, including the Crown of St. Edward, and the Orb and the Scepter of the Cross. On being caught, Blood would speak only to the King, who, much to the surprise of all concerned, pardoned him once he returned the hoard. But the great diamond, the Eye of Isis, was not returned. And yet the King pardoned him. It is said that the Eye of Isis was broken into a dozen pieces, and each of these pieces contains the power to dispel spirits in a manner most distasteful.
”

I hadn't gotten that far in my reading. That sounded like research about the terminus.

“It's all about the connections between magic and the government,” she said, shaking her head. “I read this sort of thing too, but no one takes it seriously. You've heard of people who believe in ancient aliens building the pyramids? This is similar stuff.”

I let that go. Freddie didn't seem to know that the terminus was real. She would probably find out about that soon enough. In any case, it had nothing to do with where Stephen might be hiding.

“There's also this,” I said, pulling the black notebook from under a stack of forms.

She opened the book and flipped through. From the way her eyes widened, I could tell this was exactly the kind of thing she had been hoping for.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I love a cipher. I can work on this.”