The Shadow Cabinet

by Maureen Johnson

  “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

  WHEN WE GOT INSIDE, BOO AND CALLUM 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.”

  I looked at the pile of papers. There had to be something in here, but my brain was so weary, so stretched out and stressed. What I wanted to do was sleep, or walk every street in London looking for Stephen, or both at the same time. What I had to do was figure out a job for myself that somehow involved these papers.

  “Did you find anything else useful?” Freddie said.

  “The way I got to the cemetery was this,” I said, pulling the A–Z out of another pile. “It looks like Stephen was tracking activity at different locations.”

  “This could be very useful,” Freddie said. “We could plot it on a map. It might give us a geographical distribution. That might tell us something. Is there a large map in here?”

  “There has to be,” I said. “Stephen loves maps. There’s usually one on the wall of the flat. I think Boo took it. It should be in here.”

  We both dug through until Freddie found it, still in one of the bags. It was a well-worn map of London. We spread it open on the floor. It had old pinholes in it from where he’d marked information before.

  “If you mark an x anywhere there was an encounter, we’ll be able to get a large-scale picture,” Freddie said.

  This was something I could do. It made sense. It was a task when I needed a task. I found a pen in the middle of the mess and climbed onto the map, pulling the A–Z with me. Each page of it covered a small zone of London. The book was a few hundred pages long and far more detailed than the big map. I would have to work zone by zone, moving slowly across the city with my pen, finding streets or guessing where they should be if the big map didn’t have them in detail. Freddie tucked herself up on the sofa with the notebook and a pad of paper. The time started to slip by very quickly. I worked through page after page, crawling around the map of London. There were a few little pools of activity, a few large blank spaces. Nothing I could see that seemed important. I’m not sure how much time went by. The curtains were closed, and it had gotten dark a long time before.

  “All right,” Freddie said, breaking the silence. “I’m fairly certain it’s not a standard substitution code. It looks like it needs a key. Did you find any single pages that seemed to be completely in gibberish? Charts of letters . . .”

  “I would have noticed that,” I said.

  “Of course. Well, all right. Why would Stephen code his own book? What would he want to use it for? That might tell us something about how he keyed it.”

  “He was careful about everything,” I said.
r />   “But was anything else written in this code?”

  “No,” I said. “Everything else is pretty normal.”

  “Then this book is different. This book contains some different information. You only record things you need to remember, so why would he—”

  The kitchen door opened, and Thorpe hurried into the room.

  “They’ve got a hit,” Thorpe said. “Get your coats.”

  14

  THORPE DROVE QUICKLY NOW, MUCH MORE QUICKLY THAN I think you’re allowed to drive in London. He was dipping into bus lanes and swerving around other cars. No one stopped him. There must have been something about his car that signaled to the police that he was to be left alone. He did stop at red lights when we hit them, which would send us bucking forward.

  “The house was under the name Mick Dunstan,” he said. “Real name Michael Phillip Dunstan, born 1952, arrested six times between 1968 and 1973 for possession and selling of cannabis. No records of any kind at all for nine years, until he bought a house in 1982. It’s in East Acton, near Wormwood Scrubs, which explains quite a lot.”

  “What’s Wormwood Scrubs?” I said to Freddie.

  “I believe it’s a prison,” Freddie said.

  “It’s also a nature preserve,” Thorpe said. “It’s one of the largest green spaces in London. It’s the country in the city.”

  The country.

  “She’s there,” I said.

  “I think it’s likely.”

  “So going to see Clover was useful,” Freddie said eagerly.

  “Yes, Freddie,” Thorpe said. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a phone, which he tossed onto my lap.

  “Write a text message to Jerome. Tell him you’re fine. Don’t hit Send. Pass it back to me.”

  This was kind of an intense moment to be writing text messages to Jerome, so after a minute or two of thinking, I came up with: I’m fine.

  I passed it to Thorpe, who eyed it before hitting Send. The reply came quickly.

  How do I know this is you?