What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch (most read books TXT) 📕

them were pilots,’ says Simon’s mum. ‘That’s how they met. She flew for the Air Transport Auxiliary – delivering planes to the front-line squadrons during the Battle of Britain. There was nearly a TV drama about it in the eighties, but it never got made.’

Somewhere, I thought, in a room in a building by the river, a minion has spent an hour on Google digging that up. Probably not just Google and not just one minion either. I wonder if Simon’s mum told them why.

She hands me a plain beige cardboard box with a dozen glass and plastic capsules stored in individual compartments.

‘They did take in Hungarian refugees in 1956. An old RAF friend of his who’d returned to Hungary after the war, his wife and their daughter.’

‘No son called Charles?’ I ask, and start distributing the capsules about my person.

‘Just the daughter,’ says Simon’s mum. ‘And be careful with those. They’re not jokes and they’re quite a bit stronger than what you asked for. They’ll be a hazard if you overuse them.’

‘How much of a hazard?’

‘Don’t deploy more than one in an enclosed space if you want to retain a sense of smell,’ she says, and goes back to her notes. ‘Grace, whose maiden name was Harnal, inherited the house from her father Edward Harnal, who in turn purchased it from one Wilfred Wright, eldest son of Henry Wright, who bought the house in 1870.’

There’s a ton more stuff about Henry Wright, who had made a name for himself as one of the new breed of shopkeepers and wholesalers feeding and clothing the expanding urban population.

Hackney boy made good, I think. Married a boujee wife and moved to Hampstead. It’s a tale as old as time.

‘He bought the house from the Brown family,’ says Simon’s mum. ‘And they appear to have owned the house from the time it was built, which was 1801.’

‘Any Charleses?’ I ask.

‘You asked that before,’ she says. ‘Is it important?’

‘Could be,’ I say.

‘There’s no record of a Charles living in the house that we could find, but they didn’t ask personal questions in the census until 1841,’ she says. ‘I’ve got people looking through parish records, but their name was Brown.’

At least it wasn’t Smith or Jones, I don’t say.

She shrugs and hands me a metal pole 30 centimetres long, with a double claw at one end and a horizontal spike at the other. There’s a twist grip in the middle – I turn it and the pole extends by another third.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s a hooley bar,’25 says Simon’s mum. ‘Firemen use them. You asked for a crowbar – this is better.’

I give it an experimental swing and then collapse it and stow it in my backpack. She’s right. It’s definitely better.

Simon’s mum hands me a water bottle made from impact-resistant plastic and a round of sandwiches wrapped in silver foil.

‘Cheese and pickle,’ she says. ‘It’s all I had time to make.’

We stand facing each other – she doesn’t tell me to come back with Simon or not at all. I don’t tell her not to worry. She’s going to drive to the house and run interference with the Feds. I’m going to go out the garden door so I can sneak over the Heath and hit the house from the back.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

*

Here’s the thing that’s causing me grief. I was hoping that Simon’s mum would pull out some big fat fact that made the house make sense. There are lots of haunted houses, I’ve checked out a few myself, but a house with a genius loci powerful enough to suck in random teens? If it were just a matter of accumulating stories, then every house built before 1920 would have its own mad god. Peter did a case with a genius loci in a bookshop, and his theory about that was it formed because the shop was built into a former cockfighting ring. All that ritualised violence being the equivalent of a Gro-bag in a ganja farm when feeding the supernatural. But Simon’s mum found no record of any family annihilation, satanic rituals or any other murder most horrible – and the Victorians loved their horrible murders. If something had happened in the house, there would have been a lurid account of it in the papers.

Kingsley, who was mad keen on this sort of stuff when he wasn’t away with the fairies and the water babies, said that such genii locorum ‘often form around a singular event much like a pearl forms around a single particulate’.

I was missing something but real talk – sometimes you’ve got to go with what you’ve got.

*

I’m standing in the back garden of the house. Like a lot of houses built on hills, the garden is an artificial terrace on a level with the basement floor, with steps up to the kitchen door on the floor above. Not that I can see any of that because it’s hidden behind scaffolding and plastic sheeting.

I reckon it’s time to phone Nightingale. Not even the Jag will get him here before I can breach the house.

He picks up on the first ring. I was hoping for voicemail, but Peter’s been teaching him bad habits.

‘Abigail, where are you?’ he asks.

I tell him where and why, but I leave out Simon’s mum.

‘Abigail,’ he says in his most old-fashioned voice, ‘I forbid this – it’s too dangerous.’ I can hear the ambience changing behind his voice.

‘It’s not going to let you in,’ I say. ‘It’s not going to let any grown-ups in, and you’re the oldest old that ever was.’

‘At least wait outside until I can join you,’ he says – he’s outside the Folly now.

But I’m wise in the ways of grown-ups, and I know that once he’s here he’ll stop me – he has no choice.

I’m tempted to tell him I’ll wait, but apart from my brother I think Nightingale is the only person I’ve never lied to.

‘If I’m not out in two hours,’ I say, ‘start taking