The Boy in the Smoke

by Johnson, Maureen

  Annoyingly, she was right.

  “What about the torch?” he asked, holding it up. “Explain this.”

  She took the torch from him.

  “Go and get in the car,” she said.

  She wasn’t lying.

  The car cruised down to the Embankment Road, turning by Westminster Bridge and heading along to Vauxhall, stopping in front of the massive structure that was Thames House. Stephen had read enough and seen enough to know the building by sight. The driver said nothing at all for the entire trip, and continued to say nothing now that they had stopped. Stephen let himself out, and immediately saw that there was a man sitting on the wide steps leading up to the grand arch that fronted the building. He had very striking white hair, which didn’t quite match his face, which was young and clean shaven. He wore an elegantly tailored but nondescript grey suit—a light summer one that didn’t crumple in the heat.

  “Stephen Dene,” the man said, standing and extending his hand. “I expect you’ve had rather a strange evening.”

  The matter-of-factness of the man’s voice was soothing.

  “I’m Thorpe,” the man said. “Come inside. Unless you want to walk. It’s nicer out here than in there, but it’s your choice.”

  Part of Stephen wanted to go inside, just to be assured that this man could go inside. But a bigger part believed him, and preferred the cooling night air and being able to walk. Also, he could simply run off if he chose to do so.

  “Outside,” he said.

  “All right. Let’s walk a bit.”

  The stretch of the river along Vauxhall was darker than the path further up, and the bushes rattled a bit as they passed. Rats? Drunks? It was hard to tell.

  “I’ve read your records,” Thorpe said. “Quite impressive.”

  Stephen had no reply to that. That was simply what people said to you when you went to Eton, that you were impressive.

  “We’ve come to recruit you,” Thorpe said.

  “Recruit me for what?”

  “To restart a group that hasn’t been functional since the early 1990s. It appears that London is a city plagued by the departed. This causes any number of problems, anything from disruptions on Tube lines to accidents or even death. So, for years, we had a group who could see and deal with these issues. It’s not something we really want getting out—that we run a unit that deals with ghosts. And, as I said, the last unit was disbanded some time ago. But it’s been decided that it must be reopened. And we’d like you to be at the head of it.”

  “Me? How did you even find me?”

  “We’ve been looking for someone like you for a long time. We had feelers out at hospitals and clinics. We were looking for someone around your age, someone who had just had a close brush with death, someone who then reported seeing … ”

  “ … ghosts.”

  “Ghosts, yes. When you turned up, we acted quickly. You have everything we’re looking for—a fine academic record, high-scoring, rational, good levels of physical fitness, and some experience in leadership. Eton certainly trains for that.”

  “And you want me to run a group?” Stephen said. “What kind of group?”

  “Technically, a police unit. Much of the work is done under the auspices of other professions, to allow access to various places. So you could be uniformed police, or work for the Underground, or British Gas…”

  “A police officer?” Stephen said, stopping him. “I could become a police officer?”

  “Yes. Does that interest you?”

  It definitely interested him, but it still all felt like a trick.

  “What was the business with the torch?” Stephen asked.

  Thorpe reached his hand into his pocket and produced a plastic vial. He illuminated his palm with his phone, revealing that the vial contained two small, clear stones.

  “These are diamonds,” he said. “Not particularly valuable ones. They’re small and flawed. There is a third one of this set, which is located in the torch you handled earlier. When a current is run through these stones, they produce something—I’m not going to pretend to know what—but something that dismisses whatever the thing … the … ghost.”

  “You’re joking,” Stephen said.

  “Trust me, I wish I was. I’m not necessarily any more comfortable with this than you are. But it is what it is.”

  “You’re saying that you have diamonds that can get rid of ghosts.”

  “That is exactly what I am saying, because it’s what I’ve been told. Diamonds are excellent semiconductors. They’re pure carbon. I don’t know why they work. I don’t know where we got them. But we have them. They are quite a precious resource. They’re called termini. Each one, a terminus. An end point. Name’s a bit on the nose, but I suppose it does provide an accurate description.”

  Stephen rubbed at his forehead. The day had been far too long.

  “You would be in charge of the immediate workings of the group,” Thorpe said. “You’d have to be, as I can’t do what you do. But I would be your supervisor within MI5. I’d help you get access to recourses.”

  Stephen went to the balustrade and took a few deep breaths of Thames breeze, with its peculiar odour of salty ocean and rubbish. If this was a trick, who was playing it? To what end?

  What if it was all true?

  There had to be a way to know. And then it hit him.

  “I want proof,” Stephen said.

  “What kind of proof?”

  “I need to access records from Eton,” Stephen said. “All files on students coming in … ”

  Best to give a range, not allow for any clues as to what he had seen. He had no idea what year Peter had entered the school, but twentieth century seemed a good enough window to start with. He certainly wasn’t from a recent time.

  “Everyone entering between 1900 and 1970. Complete files.”

  “And this would assure you that what you saw was real?”

  “I want to see those files,” Stephen said.

  “It would be quite a lot of files.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Thorpe nodded.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Until then … the car will return you to the hospital. I will be in touch.”

  Stephen woke up the next morning to the sound of knocking, the sun pouring on to his bed from the curtains he’d forgotten to close the night before. A nurse carefully opened his door.

  “Mr. Dene? Stephen? Are you awake?”

  She put a new schedule in the frame by the door. The same round as before, with the usual variations. Today he had a choice between kite flying and learning about the spices that go into various curries of the world. He rubbed his eyes, wondered what the hell he had been doing the night before. He was in a hospital, and hours before he had been taking out a child ghost and meeting with MI5.

  He decided to go with the kite flying, and left his room in a daze. He ate a not-at-all-bad full English in a daze, looking around at his fellow patients. As he was leaving to go to the first therapy session of the day, a nurse approached.

  “Something for you,” she said. “I was told to give it to you and tell you that you should probably go back to your room to open it. Your first session has been moved by an hour.”

  She looked puzzled, even slightly disturbed, as if this was not something that usually happened and therefore could not possibly be good. She handed him a large padded envelope that contained a flat, rectangular object. A tablet computer, from the feel of it.

  He returned to his room and shut the door. The envelope did, indeed, contain a tablet computer. It had no password to unlock. There was only one icon on the home screen, and it was of a folder labelled REQUESTED FILES. When Stephen clicked this, he found a long string of sub-folders, each one labelled with a year, 1900–1970, just as he had asked.

  “You did that fast,” Stephen said to himself.

  Someone had spent a lot of time doing this. It appeared that every single page had been hand-scanned, then organized. The names were a
lphabetized by last name, and he had no idea what Peter’s last name was, but searched the name.

  A lot of Peters entered Eton in the twentieth century.

  But he had another name—Simmons. Once he entered that, it limited the results to sixteen yearly files. He scanned these, reading the file for every Peter he found. The files contained home information, information on parents, divs taken and marks scored. It was all very familiar.

  It took an hour, but he finally found something on his fifteenth Peter. Maxwell Lemington Addison, Peter Edward (Hon.). Entered Eton 1946, but his file ended in 1949.

  Three years, Peter had said. Three years of looking at Simmons. And there was a Simmons in the 1946 class. Stephen flicked through the pages of divs and grades and notes on Peter, finally coming to Lent term, 1949, where the record stopped abruptly and was replaced with a single typewritten page. The scan captured something of the tone of the event—the official Eton stationery of the time, the red looking rusty from age and the blue slightly dusty. The paper itself had browned just a bit. And the text was typed in the centre of the page, very deliberately, very terse. The typewritten letters were just a bit uneven, as if they couldn’t quite get out the words:

  Student deceased following accident on river, 6th May. All further records located at Eton Police Station.

  Stephen set the tablet down on his bed and looked out at the sunny day and the distant view of the sea just over the trees. Someone was kite-surfing with a bright rainbow-striped kite. He touched the glass of the window, and it was warm under his fingers. Such a thin piece of glass separated in from out.

  Peter was real. The girl, real.

  All of it was real.

  Thorpe came for visiting hours the next day, while Stephen was taking an agonizingly slow group seaside walk. He had been eyeing the sea, longing to run in and swim for miles. He missed his swimming and rowing and feeling the water, and it seemed like a good, normal thing to feel.

  Thorpe met him outside, and they walked around a deserted part of the gardens.

  “Did you find what you needed?” Thorpe asked.

  “How exactly would this work?” Stephen said. There was no need to answer directly and verify or deny anything.

  “You’d be moved to London, where I’d brief and train you for four weeks. From there, you’d go to the police academy at Hendon for formal training. Between that and a few other courses we want you to go on, you’d be training continuously for eight months.”

  “And after that?”

  “And after that, we assess. And if all has gone to plan, you begin work and start to build your team.”

  “Build it how?”

  “Find more people like yourself. We’ll help you locate them. There’s a lot to learn, but you’re more than up to the task. Do you agree?”

  “Do you believe this?” Stephen said. “Do you think this is real?”

  “My belief doesn’t come into it.”

  “But do you?” Stephen asked.

  Thorpe paused and considered his reply.

  “I believe what I’ve heard on good authority,” he said. “Frankly, in the work I do, you learn to expand the bounds of your credulity. The world is an odd place. I don’t know what I would do in your shoes, but I can tell you the offer is absolutely legitimate. The question is—do you want to go back from where you came, finish up the year, go to Cambridge, or would you like to see what all this could mean? It’s an offer that will only be made once. What is your answer?”

  There was really only one answer to give.

  “When do I go?”

  “Now, if you’d like. The doctors here feel you’re fine to leave. We have someone in London you can follow up with. You’ll have a flat. It’s nothing too fancy, but very well-located. For this first part, you’ll be with me, working at Thames House.”

  “And my family?” Stephen said. “What will they be told?”

  “The hospital will inform them that you’ve discharged yourself.”

  “What do I tell them after that?” Stephen asked.

  “Whatever you want, aside from the truth. I’d suggest you simply tell them you are joining the police.”

  The sun came out from behind the clouds, as if on cue.

  “In that case,” Stephen said, resisting the urge to smile, “I’m going to need my phone.”

  IV

  THE BOY IN THE SMOKE

  It was a typical December day in London—dark, vaguely rainy. Constable Stephen Dene walked quickly, head down, through the confused crowds clinging to the outer regions of Harrods, all of them moving in confused, pointless patterns with their green signature Harrods bags. The lights that outlined the building were already illuminated, even through it was only two o’clock.

  The uniform was fairly warm and comfortable. It was still new and despite two ironings still had some of the creases from the packages it had come in. Still, it was the best outfit he had ever worn. Once it was on, he felt different. He felt right. People stopped him and asked for directions and help and occasionally, for photos. Some people his own age sneered at him, and most people seemed a bit confused by his youth.

  The training had been intense, but as Thorpe had pointed out, Eton did nothing if not prepare one for intense training. For six months, he had done nothing but study, train and practise. He was moved around a lot so no one really got to know him for long. One day, Thorpe just told him it was done. He was given the uniform, the identification, the car, access to the databases—all the keys to the kingdom. It was time to build the team. He was to look for people his age or younger who had recently had accidents and claimed to see people that weren’t there. He was to put feelers out at A&Es around the city.

  But there were two things to do first.

  The police database, he was amused to find, was called HOLMES—the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System—a somewhat redundant name that had been made to fit the acronym. The information he needed wasn’t on this, so he had to look through several sub-systems until he got the address he was looking for. It had happened in Knightsbridge, in some maisonette round the corner from Harrods. The flat had since changed hands and was now owned by a couple based in Dubai.

  Stephen rounded the corner and checked his notes. Number seventeen. That was the one he wanted. It looked like every other building on the street—gold and red brick, expensive, quiet. The flat was the one on the third floor. The lights were off. With his uniform and new abilities, it would be easy to get into the building and get the door opened. The flat was likely vacant.

  But he found he couldn’t quite move. He stood looking up at it for a very long time.

  “No one’s there,” said a voice behind him.

  Stephen turned to see the woman from the bookshop, the one with the steel-grey hair. Her clothes were the same. Every single thing about her was the same—washed out, grey, almost blending into the December sky and the pavement.

  “I thought you might turn up here,” she said.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “That’s not something you need to know. But I think you know what I am.”

  “Why were you there in the bookstore that night?”

  “Also not necessary for you to know. But I think I know why you’ve come here. You’re looking for your sister.”

  Stephen turned back to the dark window.

  “Who becomes a ghost?” he asked. “Is she here?”

  “Though related, those are two different questions.” The woman folded her arms over her chest and looked up at the building. It appeared as though she would offer no more information, but then she opened her mouth again.

  “It’s not that common,” she said. “Those of us who are lucky or unlucky enough to achieve this status … we’re a rather select group.”

  “Is it because you have some unfinished business, or—”

  “What utter rot!” She laughed a laugh that was somewhere between a cough and a roar. “Unfinished business. Whatever do you read? No one knows why
. Something just goes wrong. It’s not meant to be this way. It’s like being stuck in a doorway, never being able to go in or out, unless someone helps you along.”

  “With this.”

  He took the device from his pocket. He had wired one of the stones into a phone, which was much easier to carry and less obvious to use than a torch.

  “That looks a more sensible casing,” she said. “I told them you had good sense.”

  “So if you know about the terminus, why don’t you have someone use it on you?”

  “Because I have a duty,” she said. “I arrived here by accident but remain by choice. And you, my boy, have a duty as well. That tool you have is a serious business. You must use it with care.”

  “My sister,” he said.

  It wasn’t a question, but she understood.

  “Your sister is not here. She did not return.”

  “How do you—”

  “Stephen, ask yourself the merits of that question. I am in a position to know. And you should be happy with this news. Your sister is not stuck. She is gone. You are not going to be forced to make the decision of whether or not you should use that device.”

  He gripped the phone. A siren went off in the distance. Stephen could imagine the ambulance that had come here, the one that had been called so many hours too late …

  “Let me impart one piece of advice, Mr. Dene.” The woman’s usually stern voice had taken on a somewhat softer tone. “Do not go looking for the dead. You’ll be seeing enough without going and looking for people who are probably not there. There’s nothing in this place for you but heartache, and I won’t let you stand here and wallow when there are things to be done.”

  There was just enough authority in her voice for Stephen to understand that this was an order, and it came from a place of real power.

  “There’s one more thing I have to do,” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I thought there might be. That one I understand, but no more. No more.”

  He drove to Eton that very evening, waiting only for the evening to come and the traffic to clear. He parked at Windsor for a bit and wandered around in the cold drinking a coffee, working up the nerve to cross the river. Term was safely over—only the beaks and masters would still be around, and many of them would have left for the holiday as well. He was well-bundled in a black coat and hat and scarf. Going in uniform would have drawn attention.