He did admit that it gave him a varied workload. I got to see his brand-new office, which would have had a lovely scenic view of the car park and canal if the blinds didn’t have to be permanently drawn to prevent people looking in.
“Can’t have members of the public seeing what we get up to all day,” said Jaget before passing over a yellow folder full of hardcopy. Normally these days we shunt files back and forth as email attachments, but the Folly prefers to do things the old-fashioned way. Just in case someone leaks our emails, and also because only one of us currently lives in the 21st century.
“I was handed this by Project Guardian,” said Jaget. “They wanted my advice.”
Project Guardian was a joint BTP/Met/Transport For London/City Police initiative to deal with sexual assaults and offensive behaviour on the transport system. Part of that initiative was improving reporting rates for those offences, which meant convincing victims we were taking them seriously. So when you get a cluster of complaints about assaults by a “man who wasn’t there” you don’t just bin them. You pass them to the people who are responsible for weird shit, i.e. me and Jaget.
“A man who wasn’t there?” I said.
There was a cluster of complaints, two men, three women, who either called the Project Guardian hotline or 999, who reported they had been variously groped, shouted at and, in one case, racially abused.
“All of them on the Metropolitan Line,” said Jaget.
Where it got weird was in the follow-ups. When contacted, all seven complainants denied the encounter had ever happened and expressed a mixture of surprise and irritation that the police were contacting them. Witnesses and victims changing their mind happens all the time, particularly in hate crimes and domestic abuse, but there was a definite pattern here—so I was wondering whether they’d been intimidated.
“Did they follow up the follow-up?” I asked.
“They were particularly worried about Amirah Khalil, because of the racial aspect,” said Jaget and showed me the transcript of her initial 999 call—the relevant bits had been highlighted.
CALLER: He called me a dirty Saracen and he was acting totally manic. I’m terrified he’s [unintelligible] come back. He scared me there was something…[CALL TERMINATED AT SOURCE]
“We think she went into the tunnels north of Baker Street at that point,” said Jaget. “She didn’t call back.”
But Operation Guardian knew her name because she’d called on her mobile, so it was a relatively simple act to trace her to her home address in Watford. There she denied that any such incident had taken place or that she’d called the police.
“I spoke to the officers who interviewed her and they say they thought she genuinely had no memory of making the call,” said Jaget.
I looked at the picture of Amirah Khalil, a round face, dark eyes. Her family were from Egypt, but she was light enough to pass for Italian or Spanish. Saracen…it was an odd insult.
“Was she wearing a head scarf or hijab when she was on the train?”
“You noticed the Saracen thing, right?” said Jaget. “She was wearing a hijab when they interviewed her—hence the interest.”
Operation Guardian followed up with a second complainant. One Jonathan Pickering of Grove Avenue, Pinner. Mr Pickering had actually been interviewed shortly after he’d made his call. This had been undertaken by a pair of BTP officers who met him, at his own request, at Finchley Road Station within ten minutes of his initial call. According to the BTP officers’ statements Mr Pickering had seemed vague and uncertain as to why he’d got off at Finchley Road—when they attempted to take a statement he denied that any incident had taken place. When challenged, they had a logged call from his number after all, Mr Pickering said he had no memory of making a 999 call and expressed surprise and disbelief when the call log of his own confirmed that he had.
I checked the transcript of the 999 call. Mr Pickering clearly states that he’s been harassed by “some weird guy” who called him a “tinker” and demanded that he “stand up straight.” There’s a pause listed as being two seconds long and then Mr Pickering can be heard asking other passengers “You saw that right? You saw that? …How can you not have fucking seen that?”
Mr Pickering was a coder for a software development company based near the Old Street roundabout, so unlike Ms Khan he would have changed at Kings Cross. So no point of correspondence there.
“What do you think?” asked Jaget.
I told him that he’d pretty much had me at “Saracen” and that I’d take the files home, do a preliminary Falcon assessment, and get back to him the next day.
“Preliminary Falcon assessment?” said Jaget.
“We at the Folly have embraced the potentialities of modern policing,” I said.
Our filing system was strictly Edwardian, with our ghost-related material scattered through two different libraries, seemingly randomly archived reports by wizards and county practitioners going back two centuries, and a card file system that was suspiciously incomplete—I suspect whoever was organising it gave up in disgust halfway through.
Fortunately, I also had access to that most modern of office accoutrements, the unpaid teenaged intern in the form of my cousin Abigail Kumara. Who, because it was the summer holidays, had to be kept out of mischief.
“What kind of ghost?” she asked.
“We don’t know it’s a ghost,” I said. “Don’t make assumptions.”
She rolled her eyes to indicate that only one of us was making assumptions, and it wasn’t her. She had a narrow face which could fall into an expression of belligerent suspicion of such power that her teachers said they could feel it even when they were hiding in the staff room. It was her stubbornness, coupled with this expression, and routine everyday low-grade racism, that kept her constantly on the verge of a school suspension.
“She’s disruptive,” one of her teachers told me, but floundered when I asked her precisely how this disruption manifested itself.
“I don’t know,” wailed the teacher. “She just sits and stares at you and the lesson plan goes out of the window.”
My boss Nightingale, who teaches her Latin, has no such problems.
“If only all my students were so diligent,” he said, which given that I was his only other student was a bit unfair. Abigail didn’t have to work a full case load or learn magic. Although I figured the magic wasn’t far off.
“You must have known that inevitably she would have to be taught,” said Nightingale.
“I was hoping to wait until she was at least eighteen,” I said, although actually I’d been hoping she’d lose interest…but what can you do? A promise is a promise, or as Nightingale put it, “Either your word is good or it’s worthless.”
And magic is difficult, complicated, and carries serious risks. But trying to teach yourself it is almost inevitably fatal. And I reckoned that, left to her own devices, Abigail would have a go at trying to teach herself. So at some point we were going to have to sit down with her parents and explain that we wanted to teach their daughter magic.