“One theory at a time,” said DS Transcombe, but we found no convenient holes in the chain-link fence that lined the side with the tracks, no abandoned bags or other signs of a struggle. Not even a dropped brooch or packet of lembas.
We stopped when we reached the station and then walked back a different route—just to be on the safe side. DS Transcombe had called his Inspector as soon as we’d left Brené McClaren’s house and he called back just as we reached where our cars were parked.
“My governor says we’re going to go all in,” said DS Transcombe. “We want to see if we can catch the late news, put it out as an alert on social media.”
They were going to start house to house first thing, canvass commuters on the footpath and at the station. Then interview the work mates and check on ex-boyfriends, male relatives and all the usual suspects that the police look for when a woman goes missing. The media strategy was going to be helped by the fact that Brené was a good-looking white woman in her late twenties, so coverage should be good and sightings numerous. Luckily it wasn’t going to be my job to process them.
I told DS Transcombe that we’d let them know if we dug up anything at our end.
“Not so fast,” he said with a grin. “My governor wants to see you first.”
I woke up to the smell of coffee and Abigail sitting on the end of my bed practically bouncing up and down with excitement.
“Guess what we found?” she said.
I blinked at Abigail and wondered where the coffee smell was coming from until I realised that Molly was standing right next to the bed and holding a breakfast tray. Only Molly can make breakfast in bed a sinister experience, but over the years I’ve managed to supress my instinct to leap up screaming. It’s not getting any easier, though.
At least it was scrambled eggs on toast this time and not kippers.
I sat up, took the tray off her and watched her glide back out the door.
Abigail was smart enough to wait for me to drink some of the coffee, although she did nick a bit of my toast.
“Oi,” I said.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?” she asked.
“What’s the time?” I asked.
“Eight…ish,” she said.
Operation Polygon would be well up and running by now. The TVP would be questioning commuters as they arrived at Chesham Station with additional coverage at Chalfont and Latimer, and Amersham just to be on the safe side. Serious house to house would start after nine and cadaver dogs would be sniffing around likely dumping sights. TVP had made it clear that they would value my input from within the sphere of my core competences.
Which meant I really hoped Abigail had discovered something useful.
“We found a ghost wrangler,” said Abigail. “Guess where?”
“Chesham,” I said.
“Points,” said Abigail, meaning yes. And also meaning she was going to draw this out as much as possible.
“Now or historical?” I asked.
“Oh, definitely historical,” said Abigail. “George Buckland, born 1742 died 1815.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “At the Battle of Waterloo.”
“Nah—in bed.”
“And his relevance to this case is?”
“First,” said Abigail, “there’s got to be context—right?”
Because the parish of Chesham was unusual in that, at the time of King Harold, the church used to have three vicars, or rather the advowson for the parish was split equally between the three adjacent manors. Advowson is the right to appoint the incumbent clergy of a parish, so three advowsons meant three incumbents.
“Which was all right in those days,” said Abigail. “Because they were mostly in it for the tithes.”
The three “mates of Harold” passed the rights down to their descendants who all, at one time or another, and in a spirited attempt to avoid eternal damnation, passed them on to local monasteries who farmed them out to their favourites, political allies and/or misshapen sons of the abbot. Because while the monasteries often disagreed with the state about the authority of the king, they were bang on side for feudalism when it worked for them. However, three hundred years later the monasteries were done in by the Renaissance, the chill theological winds blowing in from Germany, and Henry VIII’s need to get his leg over on a regular basis.
“Is this going to become relevant at any point?” I asked.
“Well, the advowsons bounced about between various posh families until one of them was picked up by a geezer called George Buckland,” said Abigail. “And guess what he did for a living?”
“He was a vicar?”
“Wrong!” said Abigail, which apparently wasn’t that unusual because being a country parson didn’t actually involve much in the way of theology. “He was a practitioner, wasn’t he?”
George Buckland Esquire was not exactly a founder of the modern Folly, but was definitely around when it relocated to the nice Georgian pile we currently eat our scrambled eggs in. He even belonged to the wild and woolly, and earlier, times when the practitioners of London met on a disreputable floating coffee house on the Thames. Back then a practitioner could consort with conmen, mountebanks and even, shockingly, women—and it was reputedly from a woman that he learnt how to capture ghosts.
“Ghosts?” I asked. “How?”
“A lot of this is gossip, right?” said Abigail. “But he was said to have married a Creole lady from New Orleans and she knew how to make this thing called a rose jar. Which you’re supposed to be able to catch a ghost in. But once you put the ghost in, you can’t let it out because it would fall apart. The ghost, that is. Any of this ringing a bell?”
It was. And it might explain our disintegrating ghosts.
“Are you saying Brené McClaren is a practitioner?”
“Not really,” said Abigail, eyeing my last piece of toast. “We ain’t finished yet.”
Because George Buckland’s membership of the all new officially sanctioned and respectable Society of the Wise, which was what the Folly was calling itself in those days, was not smooth.
“He’s famously the first person to face a disciplinary tribunal,” said Abigail. “Ever.”
“What for?”
Abigail grinned.
“Nobody knows,” she said. “The records were sealed and Mr Nightingale says he can’t find them.”
“Helpful,” I said.
“But not important right now,” said Abigail. “What is important is that the parsonage stayed in the family until 1914 when his great-grandson died without any kids.”
I thought I knew where we were going, but I kept my face suitably gormless so as not to harsh Abigail’s squee. At least that’s the story I’m going with.
“They never found the rose jars,” said Abigail.
And there are records of Walter Buckland, who was the last of the family to join the Folly, mentioning them in conversation as late as 1860.
Ah, I thought, Walter Buckland of the abducting Fairies fame.
“So what if they’re still in the parsonage,” said Abigail. “In the basement?”
I finished my coffee.
“Let’s go and have a look,” I said.
“Yes, let’s,” said Abigail.
4Note for Reynolds: Like the Yankees and the Red Sox only with added sectarianism. [back]
Chapter 7:
THE POLISH
BARISTA