We’d timed it to miss the worst of the rush hour, but it was still packed all the way up to Wembley where we hopped off and waited for a southbound train. We started at the far end of the platform so Abigail had plenty of time to note the train number as it pulled in. The S8 Bombardier rolling stock is a walkthrough train, so there’s no fiddling about with doors from carriage to carriage. Being able to see or move down the whole length of the train easily increases capacity and is a boon to police officers, fare dodgers and pickpockets alike. We walked up its length during the long run back from Wembley Park to Finchley Road feeling for any vestigia and trying not to look too much like weirdos.
We got off at Finchley Road, waited for the next train, and repeated the process on the way to Baker Street where we turned around and did it again back up to Wembley. We did the journey a couple more times before stopping off at Finchley to eat our suppers.
Which turned out to be steak and kidney pasties, still warm, with a recycled jam jar full of pickled onions staring out at us like so many eyeballs. We ate the pasties but we both figured that eating the pickles in a public place would constitute a nuisance under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014.
There had been a ton of vestigia on the trains, but it had all been the routine noise that we’d taken to calling “engineering background”—random sensations involving bits of metal banging together, the smell of oil and sweat and steam, chips and vinegar, topless pin-ups and rolling tobacco.
Nothing that said “agitated spirit” to either of us.
We were considering whether to do another couple of runs or not when a voice called my name.
A short black man in a blue London Underground shirt was striding down the platform towards us. He was built like brick shithouse, with broad shoulders and short muscular legs—he also walked with the familiar bantam strut, and that’s what I recognised before his face, which had acquired a pair of Malcom X specs and a conservative fade cut that couldn’t disguise his receding hairline. His name was Dwain Fletcher and he may have looked older than me, but we’d been in the same year at school. We hadn’t been friends exactly, but we’d got along and the last time I’d seen him he was disappearing under a pile of police outside the Camden Palace. We’d been fifteen, and I’d heard later that he’d ended up in a young offenders institution or emigrated to Canada, or something equally dire.
I stood up to meet him and he hugged me briefly.
“Bruv,” he said. “Remember me?”
I said I did but that I’d heard he’d “gone away,” which I felt covered all the bases.
“Nah, man,” he said. “I’m respectable.”
He was in fact a station manager for London Underground, currently covering a colleague on maternity leave at Finchley Road. He’d heard that I’d be on his stretch, so he’d kept an eye on the CCTV.
I asked him what he’d been up to, because I didn’t want to have to run a PNC check to find out. He’d manage to avoid a spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but his mum had sent him back to Jamaica in the strange belief this might straighten him out. Which it did, but not for the reason his mum thought.
“They’re mad there,” he said. “So I came back and went to college.”
And got a job with the Underground and a wife and two kids and a semi in Redbridge. He got out his phone and showed me pictures. His wife was mixed race and had a serious face. The children were six and four years old and looked like trouble, but in a good way.
I told him that they seemed like brilliant kids while Abigail made gagging motions behind his back.
He asked if we were really ghost hunting, and I said we were.
“What, like officially?”
“Officially secret,” I said because discretion is supposed to be, if not our middle name, at least a nickname we occasionally answer to when we remember.
“You want to be looking further up,” he said. “At Pinner. That’s where all the ghostly stuff is.”
“Who says?”
“You know,” he said. “Track walkers, engineers, superstitious folk.”
I expressed polite scepticism, but Dwain insisted that it was true. I said we’d look into it, and we exchanged numbers and promises to come round for supper and meet the missus before me and me and Abigail hopped the next train back to Kings Cross.
As we travelled Abigail consulted her notebooks.
“There’s got to be a better way to check the trains,” she said.
“It would probably be easier if we waited for them to all parked up,” I said. “You know—like in a depot or something.”
Chapter 2:
THE NEASDEN
POSTBOY
At peak capacity the Metropolitan Line runs twenty-two trains per hour, and at the end of the day those units—because that’s the technical term—have to be stored somewhere. That’s fifty-eight trains, each one about one hundred and twenty metres long 1, so the depots have to be a bit on the largish side. You catch a glimpse of this enormity as you swish past on your way to Wembley Park, but you don’t appreciate the sheer fuck-off size of the place until you walk in and see a couple of thousand tons of rolling stock laid out in ranks in the marshalling yard.
“That’s a lot of trains,” I said.
The depot management weren’t happy about us being there, and only agreed to let us in because we had Jaget with us and agreed to wear hard hats and reflective jackets and not wander off unaccompanied. It took a bit of fast talking on Nightingale’s part to explain that we needed a bit of privacy to work properly. It ended up being a messy compromise and it didn’t help that Jaget hadn’t wanted to come out and play in the first place.
“It’s fish and chip night tonight,” he said, and scowled.
Fish and chip night was a Kumar family tradition that dated back to when Jaget was courting his wife and they used to meet in the last white English-owned fish and chip shop in Wembley on the basis that none of their relatives would go in there.
“It was proper fish and chips too,” Jaget had said, although of course they’d had to smuggle in a few condiments to take the edge off the blandness. “They closed down years ago—it’s a Pret now I think.”
I’d asked why their relatives might have objected to them going out. Jaget said it wasn’t like that at all. “Our families were seriously intertwined at the Aunty level, and when they found out they practically died of happiness. We just wanted a bit of time and privacy before our families steamrollered us into the temple.”
So every month they palmed off the kids onto their—still presumably ecstatic—families, cooked fish and chips and spent the rest of the evening in. Mrs Kumar was not going to be happy.
“Now you’ve made me hungry,” said Abigail, whose parents had become remarkably relaxed about her late night ghost-hunting jaunts.
“We’ll grab an Ethiopian on the way over,” I said.
But we got a Kurdish instead and finished it off while waiting for all the stock to arrive.