Chapter Thirty-Four

KATH COLLINGSWOOD WAS IN A WINDOWLESS STOREROOM LIKE some forgotten dollhouse heart of the Neasden Station. Baron watched through the door’s wire-reinforced glass. He had seen Collingswood perform this before. It was a methodology of her own creation. Vardy was there, standing back, his arms crossed, watching over Baron’s shoulder.

The room was dusty. Collingswood thought the presence of that desiccation, the sheddings of time, was efficacious. She could not be sure. She replicated as many of the circumstances of her cavalier first success as she could, knowing each might be mere superstition, and she a kind of Skinnerian rat. So the pile of empty cardboard boxes in one corner were left as they had been for months. When Baron had inadvertently knocked one out of position, she had given him an earful and spent minutes trying to rebuild the stack as it had been in case of some nuance of force in the angles.

“Wati ain’t going to come here,” she had said to Baron, “even if he could.” There were wards in place keeping figures and toys within the station empty of hitchhikers. “We got to get him where he lives.” Not in the statues-those were moments of rest. Wati lived in one of the infinite iterations of the aether.

In the middle of the striplit room was a pile of magicky stuff: a brazier in which burned a chemically coloured fire; a stool on which were bottles of blood; words in old languages on particular paper. Three old televisions were plugged in surrounding the pile, beaming static into it.

“Here,” said Baron conversationally to Vardy, “come the PCDs.”

COLLINGSWOOD DRIPPED BLOOD INTO THE FIRE. EMPTIED LITTLE urns of ashes into it. It flared. She added papers. The flames changed colours.

The fluorescent lights flattened out the conjuration, gave shadows few places to gather or hide, but shadows managed. Patches like dirty air welled. Collingswood murmured. She pressed a remote control and the televisions began to play well-worn videos to the fire. The audio was low but audible-ragged theme musics, jump-cut editing, men snarling.

“Officers,” said Collingswood. “Duty call.” The gusting things coiled around the rising fire, muttering. leave it she heard one whisper.

Collingswood threw two videos into the brazier. They gushed smoke that clotted, and the darknesses dived through it. There were hisses like pleasure. She turned up the televisions. They started to shout. Vardy shook his head.

“Think what you like,” Baron said. “She’s smart as a whip to think this up.”

“Just because you’ve passed on,” Collingswood said to the muttering nothings, “don’t mean you ain’t on duty.” They gibbered at the hard men with outdated haircuts, the screened car chases and fist-fights. She threw another video onto the fire, some paperbacks. Shades crooned.

PCDs, Baron had called the presences she was invoking-Police Constables, Deceased.

There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology. Who better to close in on Wati the bodiless subversive than bodiless forces of the law?

“Come on, Constables,” Collingswood said. “I’d say you live for this shit, but that would be a bit tasteless.”

She pushed each television closer to the flames. The shadow-officers spiralled over the fire. They barked like spectral seals.

Cacophony of overlapping old shows. The glass fronts of the televisions blackened, and first one, then rapidly the other two sets banged, ceased transmissions. Smoke gushed from their vents, then gushed back in under pressure from the PCDs, who tore down the gradient of heat into the sets, jabbering.

as high. A snarl in the room’s abrupt silence.

as high was proscenium longy eye’s tree.

leave it, Collingswood heard, evenin evenin all evenin all, hes a nonce sarge, fell dan the stairs. as high was proscenium.

“Alright,” she said. “PC Smith, PC Brown, and PC Jones. You three are heroes. You all made the ultimate sacrifice for the force. Line of duty.” The dirty smoke ghosts shivered, in and out of sight, proudly waited. “Now’s your chance,” she said, “to do it again. Work for those pensions you never got, right?” She lifted a big file.

“In here’s all the info we’ve got on the case so far. What we need is a certain bad boy name of Wati. Flits about a bit, does Wati. We need him brought to heel.”

wati wati? some voice said out of smoke. sands like a nonce sands like a paki oozes wati cunt?

“Half a mo,” Collingswood said. slag a slag she heard, arl nick that cunt. She dropped the folder into the fire. done me prad.

The ghost-things made ah noises, as if they were lowering themselves into a bath. They churned up a froth of aether that made Collingswood’s skin itch.

Ghosts, she thought. As if.

IT WAS A CON TRICK, WHOSE GULLED VICTIMS WERE THE TRICK itself. A persuasion. These things she had made, constituted of vague but intensely proud memories of canteen banter, villains brought down, uppity little cunts slapped into place, smoky offices and dirty, seedy, honourable deaths, had not existed until a few moments before.

Ghosts were complicated. The residue of a human soul, any human soul at all, was far too complex, contradictory, and willful, not to say traumatised by death, to do anything anyone wanted. In the rare and random cases when death was not the end, there was no saying what aspects, what disavowed facets of persona, might fight it out with others in posthumous identity.

It isn’t a paradox of haunting-it only appears to be to the alive-that ghosts are often nothing at all like the living whose trace they are: that the child visited by the gentle and much-loved uncle succumbed to cancer maybe horrified by his shade’s cruel and vindictive needling; that the revenant spirit of some terrorising bastard does nothing but smile and try with clumsy ectoplasmic intervention to feed the cat his fleshly leg had kicked days before. Even had she been able to invoke the spirit of the most tenacious, revered, uncompromising Flying Squad officer of the last thirty years, Collingswood might well have found the spirit a wistful aesthete or a simpering five-year-old. So the experience and verve of genuine dead generations were closed to her.

There was another option. Toss up a few crude police-functions that thought they were ghosts.

Doubtless there was some soul-stuff from genuinely deceased officers in the mix. A base, an undercoat of police reasoning. The trick, Collingswood had learnt, was to keep it general. Abstract as possible. She could clot together snips of supernatural agency out of will, technique, a few remnants of memory and, above all, images, the more obvious the better. Hence the cheap police procedurals she burnt. Hence the televisions and the tapes, copies of The Sweeney and The Professionals, spiced with a little Dixon for sanctimony, swirled up into a golden-age nonsense dream that trained her spectral functions in what to do and how to be.

This was no arena for nuance. Collingswood wasn’t concerned with fine points of post-Lawrence policing, sensitivity training, community outreach. This was about the city’s daydream. A fetishised seventies full of proper men. There went a DVD of Life on Mars onto the pyre.

What Collingswood did was motivate into being tenacious gung-ho clichés that believed themselves. She heard herself slipping into the absurd register the functions themselves used, the kitsch pronouncements and exaggerated, stretched-out London accents.

“There you go, squire,” she said. “That’s yer lot. Wati. Last known address: any fucking statue. Job: making our lives difficult.”

They did not have to be, could not really be, clever, the faux ghosts; but they had a nasty sort of cunning, and the accrued nous of years’ worth of screenwriters’ fancy. little bastard she heard them say. look at this shit, a billowing of ashes of case notes. bring this little toerag in, overtime, nonce, slag, guv, sarge, proceedin long the eye street. They clucked the words. They muttered in conspiracy, compared nonexistent notes. Collingswood heard them say names from the case-wati billy dane adler archie teuthex bleedin nora-as they learnt them from the burning files.