In the Company of Ghosts

by Stephen A Hunt

  Doyle and Thorson sprinted behind the laptop, the light of the movie file washing over them. It lasted for two minutes and, much like the head of security who’d seen it play the first time, Doyle wished he could just call for help and then vanish to safety.

  ‘Shit,’ said Doyle. ‘I mean really. Shit.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s too late to ask the court to wave through my extradition to the States,’ said Spads. ‘Right now, being locked up in the Florence Supermax is looking pretty good.’

  ‘You still think we’re not going to need her help,’ asked Thorson.

  ‘You tell me,’ said Doyle. ‘You’re the one who has worked with her. She was before my time.’

  ‘You need her. We need her.’

  ‘Do it, then,’ ordered Doyle, half a groan. ‘Put the wheels in motion to get her out.’ He tapped the computer. ‘Get me a copy of this film. A clean one, not the kind that ends with “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Spads.” I want the file unencrypted for good.’

  Thorson raised an eyebrow. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to the porcelain throne.’ Doyle reached for the door behind the corpse. He had changed his mind about the bidet. As far as his poor suffering digestion as concerned, this was turning out to be a Three Flush Mystery. But then, the office didn’t get lumbered with any other sort.

  CHAPTER TWO – DANCING WITH NIVEN

  Psychiatric care had come a long way since the days of Bedlam. When Victorian gentlemen would pay to bring their families into mental homes of a Sunday afternoon and poke sharp sticks through the cages, hand over good money to be regaled by tales of prisoners’ crimes of slaughter and sexual deviancy. Why, you could glance around her room with its thick comfortable rug and television and cosy oak reading table and you’d hardly know that you were inside a cell. Apart from the nearly blank wall that concealed the one-way mirror and the viewing room. And the straitjacket binding Agatha Witchly’s arms, of course. Her jacket was making it hard to dance with David Niven, the old actor’s ghost wearing the same Royal Airforce uniform he had worn his 1946 hit, A Matter of Life and Death. The irony of his choice of clothing wasn’t lost on Agatha. Niven had played a ghost in the film, returned to make peace with his true love, played by the actress Kim Hunter. Agatha wasn’t anyone’s true love now, but if there is one thing she did know about ghosts, it was that you couldn’t choose who would come to visit you, or when.

  ‘Are they still watching?’ Agatha asked Niven as the ghost held her, not too taut, not too loose, both of them turning to the tune of The Specials’ Ghost Town playing on the television’s digital radio setting.

  ‘Yes,’ Niven smiled, reassuringly. ‘Three doctors and a nurse, the oldest one is dictating notes to his intern.’

  ‘That would be Doctor Bishop,’ Agatha whispered. She made sure she talked to the actor only when her back was turned towards the mirror’s one-way viewing glass. Doctor Bishop could lip read, and she didn’t want to feed his salacious case file on her anymore than she absolutely had to.

  ‘The good doctor appears somewhat miffed,’ said Niven.

  ‘He should be.’

  Niven raised an arm, thoughtfully brushing his neat moustache. ‘He knows they are coming for you. Their car pulled up outside a couple of minutes ago. The doctor’s had his staff ringing around the ministry all day trying to find someone with the authority to revoke your release from the section order.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’ Agatha stopped whispering as Niven pirouetted her to face the large mirror across the room. The mirror showed no sign of David Niven. Just a silver-haired old lady of around sixty years twisting and turning in the centre of the room as if she were demented. Mirrors couldn’t show the dead, only the living.

  ‘When they come for you, tell them that you can tie the fanciest of nooses,’ said Niven.

  ‘Are you helping me?’ Agatha’s words came out softly, angled for Niven’s ear alone.

  ‘We like to try.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For the dance?’

  ‘For letting me know they were on their way before they arrived.’

  ‘We thought it was best.’

  ‘Would it be presumptuous to ask you to hold me for a little longer?’ Agatha asked. I haven’t danced with anyone for a very long time.’

  ‘I understand perfectly,’ said Niven. ‘My final dance was on the set of Better Late Than Never with Maggie Smith. At least, my last dance on this side.’

  Doctor Bishop stood ramrod straight, his arms behind his back, his fingers digging into his palm in anger. He didn’t deign to look around at the man and the woman as the pair entered.

  ‘I’m Doyle,’ said the man, ‘this is Thorson.’

  ‘Papers,’ said the doctor. The words came out like the escape of air from a grass snake.

  ‘The Telegraph or The Sun?’ Doyle tossed a sheaf of documents across to Bishop’s intern, the doctor still too angry to directly address the two intruders into his realm. ‘Save your time, chum, they’re all in order.’

  ‘In order? In order for THAT?’ The doctor’s hand jabbed across towards the one-way glass. Agatha Witchley was turning slowly in the centre of the room, her head resting at an unnatural angle. Her rheumy blue eyes stared back at the glass with defiance written across every line of her forehead. ‘Does Agatha Witchley look like she’s ready to be released from the unit?’

  ‘Is the straitjacket really necessary?’ asked Thorson. The tone of voice didn’t bother to disguise her contempt for the unit’s methods. ‘At her age?’

  ‘Last Tuesday,’ spat the doctor, ‘Witchley shattered the knee bone of one of my orderlies and dislocated the shoulder of a second staff member when they attempted to remove the pills she’d been hiding under her sofa’s cushions. She did that with her bare feet, no shoes. With her straitjacket on!’

  ‘You’ve seen the release papers,’ said Doyle. ‘Now, chuck me the keys to her nut-shirt, Doctor Mengele. We’ll be taking tea and biscuits with the old girl before she leaves with us.’

  ‘Has anyone told the Israeli Embassy she’s being released?’ demanded the doctor.

  Doyle raised an eyebrow.

  ‘That’s why she was admitted to us, man,’ spat the doctor. ‘Haven’t you fools even read her case notes? She was dragged from the Israeli Prime Minister’s jet on the tarmac of Heathrow after she attacked his bodyguards. She was planning to kidnap him and take him to The Hague for war crimes. She’s a stalker, psychotic… devious, violent, displaying all the signs of extreme paranoia. For crying out loud, she believes she can talk to John Lennon and Julius Caesar. She suffers from severe compulsive disorders. Twelve months of treatment in the unit and I haven’t even made a dent on her state of mind.’

  Doyle pointed to a dispensary in the room’s corner. ‘The code for her room and the keys to her nut-shirt, or I’ll take that syringe and find a new home for it up your hairy dark porcelain-pincher.’

  ‘If I can’t find anybody in the ministry willing to rescind her release from the unit, I’ll telephone the Israeli Embassy and have their lawyers slap an injunction against all of you,’ warned the doctor.

  ‘Thank you for your concern, doctor,’ said Thorson. ‘We will be handling her case from here.’

  When Doyle and Thorson entered the secure unit, Agatha was no longer spinning around in the middle of the carpet. The old lady was waiting for them, sitting calmly on her sofa. She was pouring three cups of tea with her feet, using her toes to hold the teapot as if an Indian faker had trained her in his arts.

  ‘Hello Witchley. I’m Gary Doyle, I believe you know my colleague here, Helen Thorson.’

  ‘Sit down, dearie.’ She indicated the two armchairs opposite. There was a huskiness to her voice, deep and sensual, a tone that looked to have taken Doyle by surprise. ‘Hello, Helen. If you’ve got the keys to my little fashion accessory here, you might do me the favour of releasing me now.’ She nodded down towards her straitjacket an
d added, ‘Then I might be able to pass you a chocolate hobnob, without the delicate scent of my toes intruding.’

  Doyle gazed appraisingly at her. He appeared to be in his early fifties, the slightly brutish features of a boxer with acne-scarred cheeks and black hair turning to silver at the sides – a man who filled his Crombie coat with six brutal feet of well-aged muscle. It wasn’t a kind face, but it might have been a just one. ‘What makes you think I’ve come to release you from this nut-house, love?’

  ‘I don’t receive many visitors here. You have the whiff of the office about you, also, Mister Doyle. And you appear far too sane to be a psychiatrist.’

  Thorson looked at the table. ‘Three cups laid out ready. Lucky guess?’

  Agatha lent back in the sofa, pale blue eyes switching between her visitors. She passed Doyle his cup clutched between the toes of her foot. ‘You, I would say, are a quarter Chinese, on your grandmother’s side. Born in Essex. Service with the Royal Hong Kong police force. Repatriated after the island was handed back to the communist party. Returned to the UK and joined the police, probably at too junior a position for your experience. Later offered a position in the office by a superior who felt threatened by you and only too glad to see you transferred out from under his or her feet.’

  ‘Thank you, Michel-de-bloody-Nostradamus,’ said Doyle.

  ‘Don’t mind me, dearie,’ said Agatha. ‘I’m just a little miffed that Margaret didn’t come here personally to spring me out of the unit.’

  ‘The old girl retired,’ said Doyle.’ Last year. She’s sitting in the House of Lords now as Baroness Rosalinda of Trumpton or some old bollocks. I’m the new head of section.’

  ‘She must’ve done something right, then,’ said Agatha. Shittysticks, I do hope it wasn’t leaving me here to rot.

  ‘All right then,’ said Doyle. ‘Good enough. Get Miss Marple here out of her nut jacket.’

  Agatha shook her head as Thorson produced the key, twisting and writhing for the minute it took the straitjacket to fall off.

  Doyle kicked the jacket into the corner. ‘If you could do that, why not take it off before we arrived?’

  ‘They would have only sent orderlies in to try to put it back on again,’ explained Agatha. ‘I don’t enjoy hospitalising the staff here. Some of them are nice enough. They’ve got a job to do, after all. Quite a few of the patients on the premises actually do have mental health issues.’

  ‘More than a bloody few,’ said Doyle. He passed Agatha a bag containing the exact same clothes she had been admitted with.

  ‘It’ll be nice to be able to put something on that doesn’t need to be tied at the back,’ said Agatha, tugging at the blue hospital gown hanging from her diminutive frame.

  ‘Of course, you know they would have allowed you to wear your own clothes for good behaviour?’ said Thorson.

  ‘Oh bobbins,’ smiled Agatha. ‘There was never much chance of that, was there?’ She fixed Thorson with a steely glare. ‘Am I needed, Helen?’

  Doyle answered for the woman. ‘Enough for the minister to scrawl his signature on the cancellation for your sectioning order inside this loony bin.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent. Then you’ve mastered the arrangement between the office and the government, Mister Doyle. New in Margaret’s boots or no.’

  ‘The arrangement?’

  ‘You are passed the jobs no one in their right mind would wish to take on. In return you can ask for as much rope, in as many different varieties as you please, to hang yourself.’

  Doyle’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Don’t worry, dearie. I can tie the fanciest of nooses.’

  ‘Unless you want to save me a lot of arse-ache and tell me the name of the murderer now, love, how about you get changed and we run you home before Doctor Mengele out there finds a way to keep you locked in his dungeon?’

  Agatha shuffled off to the tiny bathroom, the bundle of her clothes under her arm held as tight as an aid parcel by a refugee. Her clothes were in a transparent bag, air vacuum-removed to save space, making a tiny crumpled brick. Her handbag was in a separately sealed packet. Yes, this was what she had been wearing when she had been admitted. A musty smell emerged as she broke the seal, what you got after garments had been stored unlaundered for over a year. But at least they’re mine. Agatha removed the clothes one by one, whip-cracking them across the basin, working out the creases. Unsealing her handbag, she checked its contents. Her Mont Blanc pen was there. So was the little steel hole punch, custom made with a dial on top to vary the shape of the holes it could make. Even her purse and money. The unit’s clerks were growing boringly honest. Agatha should have felt elation at being free, instead she felt a tingle of apprehension. Why is that, I wonder? She stared in the mirror. Behind her, sitting on the shelf of the small wet-room was Groucho Marx, his eyebrows moving up and down as if he was attempting to do press-ups with his forehead.

  ‘Am I doing the right thing, Groucho? What do you think of my office friends’ proposal?’

  ‘Why, I would say it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’ He removed the cigar he was smoking and twirled it between his fingers. She could almost taste the smooth flavour as its delicate aroma filled her nose. That was one thing she was looking forward to, smoking her treasured stock of Vegas Robainas again. There was, she suspected, a method to the way these ghosts appeared to her. Like Tarot cards. A hidden significance to their appearance, if only she could puzzle the order out. But who is Groucho in the suite of my haunting? The Hanged Man or The Chariot? Agatha dropped the hospital gown to the wet-rooms’ floor and began to pull on her clothes. The silk blouse, then the berry-coloured corduroy trousers, finishing with her favourite cable-knit lambswool cardigan.

  ‘I think I shall have to take my chances, Groucho. I have been hovering between the worlds myself, vacationing inside the unit. I shall have to swallow my principles and accept Mister Doyle’s offer. It is time to see what’s been going on out there in the real world.’

  ‘Those are my principles, too,’ said Groucho. ‘If you don’t like them, I have others.’

  He had vanished by the time she turned around, which was very like him. Opening the door fully dressed, Agatha faced her two liberators. Salvation always came at a cost.

  ‘I’m ready to go. You can take me to prison now.’

  CHAPTER THREE – MRS WITCHLEY’S OTHER PRISON

  There was peacefulness about the Tower of London out of hours, clinging to it like pollution from the cars crawling past outside. The tranquillity of calling the Tower home when it was shut to tourists during the evening. Before five-thirty when the gates closed, Agatha Witchley would drift among the crowds of tourists. A single snowflake lost among a storm. Nobody would dream of asking the unimposing old lady the way to the Queen’s Stairs or to explain the history of the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. She was indistinguishable from one of them. A visiting American, German, Australian. After the gates shut, a deep silence fell upon the Inner Ward and galleries and gardens and keeps. A quiet broken only by the rare scarlet and blue flash of a passing yeoman warder or one of their family living inside the fortress. Agatha’s house was nestled in among theirs. A tiny, snug terraced dwelling at the end of the Outer Ward, running along the moat-facing side of Tower Green. Theirs was a small colony living inside the historic confines of the ancient prison; a community to which Mrs Witchley was always destined to be an outsider. The staff never had much to say to Agatha. Not a non-com, not one of the members of the Sovereign’s Bodyguard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary – the only people who should have been allowed to claim service and shelter inside the Tower. But if their shunning of Agatha was an attempt at ostracism, it was one that she was glad of. Swapping war stories and tales of soldiers’ comraderies in third world policing actions held little interest for her. Living in the Tower was secure and tranquil, and that was everything that mattered to Agatha. North of the river was the City of London, quiet and empty after the office workers had departed for the
ir houses in the Shires and their flats in the Docklands. Their glass palaces – Gherkins and Shards and Pinnacles – haunted by poorly paid Australians sitting behind the security desks of expensive atriums, wearing starched blue uniforms designed to resemble police tunics, fingers tracing over phone screens. Waiting for timers to rouse them every few hours for a quick walkthrough of empty floor after empty floor. For Agatha, their atriums were illuminated tableaus for her late-night strolls across the Square Mile’s empty streets. Overtaken only by black cabs heading away from the throb of entertainment around Leicester Square, bringing home late night lawyers and consultants and IT staff – all the bottomfeeders that feasted on the dead flesh of the derivative traders’ billions. How pleasant it would be to work as a night watchman in one of those steel and glass pyramids, Agatha marvelled. Striding their vigil through the empty arteries of power. Devoid of all the human passions that surged through such offices during the day. The tedious triviality of minding trillions in hot-flows stripped of any stress and meaning by the emptiness of its stage. A ghost among the living. It must be how the phantoms that came to me feel.

  Agatha knocked on the front door of her small terraced house, snugly nestling against the Tower’s outer wall, her tapping as much a matter of practicality as courtesy. She didn’t have her keys with her. The other person inside her house knew she was coming. Agatha’s two liberators from the office had called ahead. She had insisted on it, otherwise Bouche might not believe it was really her. While many might disapprove of the Frenchman’s caution, Agatha gently cultivated it. Frequently, Vincent Bouche’s suspicious nature was all that had separated them from joining the company of ghosts. Bouche opened the door, a bear-built man of late middle age with suspicious yet vulnerable eyes, a beard that was more stubble than whiskers. He ran a hand through his dark unwashed hair. ‘It is you, madame?’

  ‘So it seems. It hasn’t been that long, has it, Vincent?’ asked Agatha, stepping over the threshold.