Ross managed one of her awkward smiles. ‘You’ve got something going here,’ she acknowledged. ‘Go on, establish the narrative.’
Sefton shared that look with her, feeling relieved.
He took them to Charterhouse Square near the Barbican and, as the rain battered down on them, they bent down to hear more clearly the agonized, continual screaming under the carefully mown grass. Quill got quickly to his feet and walked away a few paces. ‘A plague pit,’ explained Sefton. ‘Some of them are meant to have been buried alive.’
‘Ghosts again,’ said Costain.
‘Yeah, sort of. It’s meant to be the ones who were still alive doing the screaming.’
Quill sighed. ‘Fuck me. I wish there was some point at which this team of ours could decide to go off duty, ’cos I need a pint.’
Sefton nodded obligingly. ‘We can do that, too, and continue the demonstration.’
They ended up drinking at a pub called the Sutton Arms. And Sefton felt an awkwardness as they had a pint without having officially come off duty. But Quill was right. With just the four of them in the only unit pursuing this, they could never really go off duty, so they had to cut themselves some slack. There still hadn’t been further word from the database searches. He asked the pub regulars what their ghost ‘Charley’ was like, and then led the other three as they looked around the place, finally finding a shimmering man with a ruddy face sitting on his own in a corner, staring wide-eyed at every woman. He looked part funny and part scary, in a ratio which changed, Sefton thought, almost every second.
‘Definitely scary,’ said Ross when he asked her. And, in that same moment, Sefton watched as the man’s leer became less a thing of seaside postcards and more like something you’d imagine on the face of a rapist. ‘I wouldn’t mind interviewing him, mind. What could one of those things tell us, if they’ve been hanging round for centuries?’
‘Harry’s dad wasn’t much use.’
‘That might not always be the case, though. Maybe I should work out a questionnaire.’
They sipped a careful two pints each. Quill hesitated a moment when Sefton said they’d get a better look now it was dark. But finally he followed them. Sefton took them to the Charterhouse itself, off the square of the same name.
‘I looked up some of the most historical places,’ he explained, ‘by which I mean places where terrible shit happened. Places that are meant to have ghosts. This was originally a priory, like a monastery, and it’s been used for all sorts of stuff since.’ They entered the complex of cobblestone courtyards and old buildings, with signs pointing to restaurants and toilets, and still a few hardy tourists. Immediately Sefton pointed out the wraithlike figure of a monk drifting through the grounds. They watched for a minute as it repeated the same pattern of movements. Quite a few tourists seemed to look round as it passed them, but none of them stopped and stared. Conditions, whatever they were, obviously weren’t right for them to see it entirely.
‘Now that,’ said Costain, ‘is a ghost.’
Sefton consulted the website map, and walked them over to a specific stairwell inside the main building. He leaped back as a man dressed like something out of Shakespeare walked out of it, with his head tucked underneath one arm.
‘Even better,’ said Ross.
‘That,’ Sefton said, ‘is Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk.’
‘And he is-?’
‘Some dead posh bloke. I could read you his Wiki.’
‘What he is now is a well proper ghost,’ said Costain. He sounded to be putting some hope in the simplicity of the statement. Sefton looked to the others. They didn’t look quite so burdened. He hadn’t yet got to the point of this exercise but, along the way, the familiar nature of some of these ‘hauntings’ seemed to be doing the team good. That was kind of awkward, given what he’d particularly wanted to tell them. Even Quill was now looking more engaged.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘maybe there are categories we could sort this stuff into. .’
‘Ghosts, witches, objects, like the ships. .’ suggested Ross.
Sefton hesitated. Right now he didn’t want to tell them that he thought it was more complicated than that. But he had to reach the end of his demonstration. ‘Let’s get to the final stop on my list,’ he said.
It was getting close to 7 p.m. by the time Sefton led them into Berkeley Square. The pavements were still busy with office workers going off to the pub, tourists heading between sandwich bars and coffee shops. The little park in the middle had a few remaining parents with pushchairs and owners of small dogs, or the homeless combing the bins that by now were full of the remains of the day.
‘Number 50, Berkeley Square,’ said Sefton, as they arrived at the address. The ground floor contained the shopfront of Clanfields, a dealer in rare books, with a window that looked warm and inviting and modern. They all looked up together. The upper floor radiated darkness. ‘According to all the books, this is the most haunted building in London.’
Costain watched Quill summon the manager of the shop and, albeit with a bit of initial weariness, manage to summon up his usual rough-diamond character to talk to her. He looked relieved to be throwing his weight around again. Costain knew how that went, but these days he wondered if merely pretending to be someone other than the cringing savage that was surely inside everyone was bad in itself, yet another contribution to whatever complex of burdens was taking him to Hell. Everything for him was now about that. Everything had to be.
The manager had been about to close up for the evening, and was understandably concerned at having a detective inspector on the premises. ‘It’s the sort of thing I hope we can do without a warrant,’ explained Quill. ‘Nobody in your firm is under suspicion of anything. But, unfortunately, I can’t tell you much beyond that.’
He asked her if they’d heard anything strange from the upstairs floor, and it was immediately obvious he’d touched a nerve.
‘You’re interested in. . all that?’
Costain felt stupidly offended by her tone. The weight he felt on his shoulders, that they all did — to these ordinary people it was merely ‘all that’. But he recognized the direction his thoughts were going, and made himself stop thinking badly of her. Every thought, every moment. . how much would it take to scrub him clean? Or would he one day be able to put a bullet through the head of that smiling man and get out of jail free? Or was that a bad thought, too?
‘Purely professionally, ma’am.’
She made a sour face. ‘Every few days, someone comes in asking about it. We’re a bit fed up with it, to be honest, and none of us believes in it. Except, you know, whenever we hear a bang or a crash from the stockroom or the office, we say “That’s just the ghosts.”’
She led them up a narrow unpainted flight of stairs, a sudden contrast to the shop below. It got quickly colder as they climbed, and Costain found himself thinking of the warm comfort of that pub. He put that unworthy idea out of his head, too. Every thought, every moment. . But it was going to take more than that, wasn’t it? Some holy ceremony, some great deed of repentance — or just making right everything he’d done. But how could he do that, when so much of it was lost in the past, beyond altering? He wasn’t used to shit like this slopping around inside his head. He hoped that it wasn’t showing on his face. That was the last bit of front he had left.
They came out onto a landing with bare boards, an open door that showed a tiny office beyond, two closed doors leading to the stockrooms further back. ‘This is where it’s all supposed to happen,’ she said. Even with all of them up here beside her, she looked eager to retreat. Their vague interest was making her believe far more than she normally liked.