I asked Abigail how much she was planning to charge.
“Client confidentiality,” she said. “But if you want your stuff at the coach house fixed I can give you a quote.”
We popped out of the station and round the corner to a dubious fried chicken stroke internet café where we could look dodgy and technological without drawing adverse attention. Abigail handed me a USB pen and I transferred the file over to my laptop where it nearly broke my player.
“You want to get that upgraded,” said Abigail.
The video started with a brief title sequence before opening on an interior shot of an S8 carriage, shot from the high, wide angle point of view of a ceiling-mounted CCTV camera.
“This is the unit where you found the Postboy,” said Abigail.
Titles crashed in with the opening chords of the song, starkly white against black—POSTBOY—and below that the unit serial number and a time stamp. Then the actual CCTV footage faded up to reveal a familiarly rammed carriage wall to wall with commuters and, judging by the light, running above ground in daylight.
“Top left hand corner,” said Abigail.
I saw it—a flicker of movement.
“Can you…” I started, but Abigail told me to wait.
The sequence repeated, only now in grainy close-up.
“Sorry about the quality,” she said. “But I didn’t have any clean-up tools.”
We didn’t need them, because even with the blur and grain it was easy to see the ripple amongst the passengers as they reacted to a patch of empty space. You didn’t need much of an imagination to insert the figure of Postboy working his way up the carriage.
“Why can’t we see him?”
“You’re asking me?” said Abigail.
“We have photographs back at the Folly,” I said. “You can see the ghosts on those.”
Abigail said she was dubious about the collection of faded sepia prints we’d unearthed in the mundane library. She’d done her own experiments both with her phone and a vintage Leica camera she’d found inside one of the storage cupboards in the lecture theatre.
“What were you even doing in there?” I asked.
“Having a look around,” she said.
“How did you get them developed?”
“There’s a darkroom in the metal working lab.”
And she’d taught herself photographic developing off the internet because of course she had.
Her theory was that the visible aspect of the ghosts, the bit that reflected photons which could register on our eyeballs or London Underground’s CCTV, was very tenuous. Since they were manifesting in full daylight they were lost in the contrast.
But people had reported seeing them even if the memories had quickly faded.
“Maybe human eyesight is still better than the cameras?”
I ran the sequence back and forth, watching the passengers reacting to a presence that wasn’t visible on screen.
“Vestigia,” I said. “Our brains get additional information from non-corporeal aspects of the ghost and automatically uses that to fill in the gaps in the visual information.” Human visual perception often being more like educated guesswork than a camera recording.
“Nice,” said Abigail. “Very plausible.”
“Yeah, but just because it’s plausible doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Testable?” asked Abigail.
“You’ve been reading books again, haven’t you?”
Abigail rocked the footage back and forth.
“Testable?” she asked again.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.” And, before she could open her mouth to speak, “But not today. What else did you find?”
Abigail ran her little fan film forward to reveal a number of other incidents including Jonathan Pickering and Amirah Khalil’s close encounters.
“One incident every weekday for the last nine weekdays, most of them in the stretch between Wembley Park and Harrow on the Hill, and none closer in than Finchley Road. All of them travelling into London during the morning rush hour.”
“Ghost commuter,” I said. “At least now we’ve narrowed down where to look.”
1Note for Reynolds: that's a bit over the length of an American football pitch. Sorry, field. [back]
Chapter 3:
THE FRENCH
LIEUTENANT'S
COMMUTER
It's hard to conduct an interview on a rush hour train, and normally we’d have gone somewhere quieter with hot and cold running coffee, but we didn’t know how long the woman’s memories would last. I didn’t even dare wait until we could bail at the next station. So Jaget used his uniformed presence to create a perimeter while I evicted a young white man with a shovel beard off an adjacent seat and sat down next to her.
Likewise, you usually take down a few details to calm the witness down and reinforce the notion that you are an authority figure before taking a statement. But this time I just settled for her name—Jessica Talacre.
“I thought he was French to start with,” said Jessica. “He sounded French, at least I think it was French. He was shouting at me and he seemed angry.”
I asked if she could remember what the man had looked like, black or white or…
“Mixed,” said Jessica. “But lighter than you, with curly hair in those things.” She raised her index finger to her scalp and made circular motions.
“Ringlets?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “That and his teeth were bad.”
He was also wearing a long old-fashioned “Mr Darcy” coat in heavy material but not, unfortunately, in red. So not a match with our Neasden Depot ghost. Jessica seemed startled when I asked for details of his trousers but remembered enough to confirm that the ghost had been wearing breeches and white stockings—she hadn’t seen his shoes.
I asked her if she could remember what the French had sounded like and she gave me a strange look.
“What French?” she asked.
I kept going, but it was too late. In less than five minutes from the end of the incident Jessica Talacre had lost all memory of it. I gave her my card and asked her to call me if she remembered additional details, but it was obvious that she thought I was bonkers.
“Want to keep going?” asked Jaget as we wrote up our notes.
“If Abigail’s right, then that’s our last sighting this morning,” I said.
“And if she isn’t?” asked Jaget, because police and scientists have that in common.
“Then hopefully she’ll spot it,” I said. Abigail was cheerfully playing Big Brother in Finchley Road’s control centre, which just went to show that when it came to London Underground’s regulations my friend Dwain hadn’t totally reformed.
And, speaking of Abigail…
“Let’s take a ride up to Amersham,” I said. “I want to check something out.”
Amersham is well out of our manor, being in the County of Buckinghamshire and thus subject to the cool and professional attentions of the TVP, who are never referred to by their colleagues in the Met as the Chav Valley Police. So as we rode the train back up the line I called ahead and let them know we would be poking about, in full uniform, around their patch. They didn’t seem bothered, but they did want a firm commitment that we’d warn them before doing anything drastic.