In the Company of Ghosts (3 page)

‘I don’t receive many visitors here. You have the whiff of the office about you, also, Mister Doyle. And you appear far too sane to be a psychiatrist.’

Thorson looked at the table. ‘Three cups laid out ready. Lucky guess?’

Agatha lent back in the sofa, pale blue eyes switching between her visitors. She passed Doyle his cup clutched between the toes of her foot. ‘You, I would say, are a quarter Chinese, on your grandmother’s side. Born in Essex. Service with the Royal Hong Kong police force. Repatriated after the island was handed back to the communist party. Returned to the UK and joined the police, probably at too junior a position for your experience. Later offered a position in the office by a superior who felt threatened by you and only too glad to see you transferred out from under his or her feet.’

‘Thank you, Michel-de-bloody-Nostradamus,’ said Doyle.

‘Don’t mind me, dearie,’ said Agatha. ‘I’m just a little miffed that Margaret didn’t come here personally to spring me out of the unit.’

‘The old girl retired,’ said Doyle.’ Last year. She’s sitting in the House of Lords now as Baroness Rosalinda of Trumpton or some old bollocks. I’m the new head of section.’

‘She must’ve done something right, then,’ said Agatha.
Shittysticks, I do hope it wasn’t leaving me here to rot.

‘They would have only sent orderlies in to try to put it back on again,’ explained Agatha. ‘I don’t enjoy hospitalising the staff here. Some of them are nice enough. They’ve got a job to do, after all. Quite a few of the patients on the premises actually do have mental health issues.’

‘More than a bloody few,’ said Doyle. He passed Agatha a bag containing the exact same clothes she had been admitted with.

‘It’ll be nice to be able to put something on that doesn’t need to be tied at the back,’ said Agatha, tugging at the blue hospital gown hanging from her diminutive frame.

‘Of course, you know they would have allowed you to wear your own clothes for good behaviour?’ said Thorson.

‘Oh bobbins,’ smiled Agatha. ‘There was never much chance of that, was there?’ She fixed Thorson with a steely glare. ‘Am I needed, Helen?’

Doyle answered for the woman. ‘Enough for the minister to scrawl his signature on the cancellation for your sectioning order inside this loony bin.’

‘Excellent, excellent. Then you’ve mastered the arrangement between the office and the government, Mister Doyle. New in Margaret’s boots or no.’

‘The arrangement?’

‘You are passed the jobs no one in their right mind would wish to take on. In return you can ask for as much rope, in as many different varieties as you please, to hang yourself.’

Doyle’s eyes narrowed.

‘Don’t worry, dearie. I can tie the fanciest of nooses.’

‘Unless you want to save me a lot of arse-ache and tell me the name of the murderer now, love, how about you get changed and we run you home before Doctor Mengele out there finds a way to keep you locked in his dungeon?’

Agatha shuffled off to the tiny bathroom, the bundle of her clothes under her arm held as tight as an aid parcel by a refugee. Her clothes were in a transparent bag, air vacuum-removed to save space, making a tiny crumpled brick. Her handbag was in a separately sealed packet. Yes, this was what she had been wearing when she had been admitted. A musty smell emerged as she broke the seal, what you got after garments had been stored unlaundered for over a year.
But at least they’re mine.
Agatha removed the clothes one by one, whip-cracking them across the basin, working out the creases. Unsealing her handbag, she checked its contents. Her Mont Blanc pen was there. So was the little steel hole punch, custom made with a dial on top to vary the shape of the holes it could make. Even her purse and money. The unit’s clerks were growing boringly honest. Agatha should have felt elation at being free, instead she felt a tingle of apprehension.
Why is that, I wonder?
She stared in the mirror. Behind her, sitting on the shelf of the small wet-room was Groucho Marx, his eyebrows moving up and down as if he was attempting to do press-ups with his forehead.

‘Am I doing the right thing, Groucho? What do you think of my office friends’ proposal?’

‘Why, I would say it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’ He removed the cigar he was smoking and twirled it between his fingers. She could almost taste the smooth flavour as its delicate aroma filled her nose. That was one thing she
was
looking forward to, smoking her treasured stock of Vegas Robainas again. There was, she suspected, a method to the way these ghosts appeared to her. Like Tarot cards. A hidden significance to their appearance, if only she could puzzle the order out
. But who is Groucho in the suite of my haunting? The Hanged Man or The Chariot?
Agatha dropped the hospital gown to the wet-rooms’ floor and began to pull on her clothes. The silk blouse, then the berry-coloured corduroy trousers, finishing with her favourite cable-knit lambswool cardigan.

‘I think I shall have to take my chances, Groucho. I have been hovering between the worlds myself, vacationing inside the unit. I shall have to swallow my principles and accept Mister Doyle’s offer. It is time to see what’s been going on out there in the real world.’

‘Those are my principles, too,’ said Groucho. ‘If you don’t like them, I have others.’

He had vanished by the time she turned around, which was very like him. Opening the door fully dressed, Agatha faced her two liberators. Salvation always came at a cost.

‘I’m ready to go. You can take me to prison now.’

CHAPTER THREE – MRS WITCHLEY’S OTHER PRISON

There was peacefulness about the Tower of London out of hours, clinging to it like pollution from the cars crawling past outside. The tranquillity of calling the Tower
home
when it was shut to tourists during the evening. Before five-thirty when the gates closed, Agatha Witchley would drift among the crowds of tourists. A single snowflake lost among a storm. Nobody would dream of asking the unimposing old lady the way to the
Queen’s Stairs
or to explain the history of the
Lieutenant’s Lodgings
. She was indistinguishable from one of them. A visiting American, German, Australian. After the gates shut, a deep silence fell upon the Inner Ward and galleries and gardens and keeps. A quiet broken only by the rare scarlet and blue flash of a passing yeoman warder or one of their family living inside the fortress. Agatha’s house was nestled in among theirs. A tiny, snug terraced dwelling at the end of the Outer Ward, running along the moat-facing side of
Tower Green
. Theirs was a small colony living inside the historic confines of the ancient prison; a community to which Mrs Witchley was always destined to be an outsider. The staff never had much to say to Agatha. Not a non-com, not one of the members of the Sovereign’s Bodyguard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary – the only people who should have been allowed to claim service and shelter inside the Tower. But if their shunning of Agatha was an attempt at ostracism, it was one that she was glad of. Swapping war stories and tales of soldiers’ comraderies in third world policing actions held little interest for her. Living in the Tower was secure and tranquil, and that was everything that mattered to Agatha. North of the river was the City of London, quiet and empty after the office workers had departed for their houses in the Shires and their flats in the Docklands. Their glass palaces – Gherkins and Shards and Pinnacles – haunted by poorly paid Australians sitting behind the security desks of expensive atriums, wearing starched blue uniforms designed to resemble police tunics, fingers tracing over phone screens. Waiting for timers to rouse them every few hours for a quick walkthrough of empty floor after empty floor. For Agatha, their atriums were illuminated tableaus for her late-night strolls across the Square Mile’s empty streets. Overtaken only by black cabs heading away from the throb of entertainment around Leicester Square, bringing home late night lawyers and consultants and IT staff – all the bottomfeeders that feasted on the dead flesh of the derivative traders’ billions. How pleasant it would be to work as a night watchman in one of those steel and glass pyramids, Agatha marvelled. Striding their vigil through the empty arteries of power. Devoid of all the human passions that surged through such offices during the day. The tedious triviality of minding trillions in hot-flows stripped of any stress and meaning by the emptiness of its stage.
A ghost among the living. It must be how the phantoms that came to me feel.

Agatha knocked on the front door of her small terraced house, snugly nestling against the Tower’s outer wall, her tapping as much a matter of practicality as courtesy. She didn’t have her keys with her. The other person inside her house knew she was coming. Agatha’s two liberators from the office had called ahead. She had insisted on it, otherwise Bouche might not believe it was really
her
. While many might disapprove of the Frenchman’s caution, Agatha gently cultivated it. Frequently, Vincent Bouche’s suspicious nature was all that had separated them from joining the company of ghosts. Bouche opened the door, a bear-built man of late middle age with suspicious yet vulnerable eyes, a beard that was more stubble than whiskers. He ran a hand through his dark unwashed hair. ‘It is you, madame?’

‘So it seems. It hasn’t been that long, has it, Vincent?’ asked Agatha, stepping over the threshold.

An excited snorting sounded from behind the living room door. Saucisses had recognized her voice, the so-called miniature pig the two of them kept as a pet scratching at the wood.

‘You haven’t eaten Saucisses yet then?’

‘One day, madame. Filthy swine. I forgot to give him the breakfast yesterday. He eats my sock, left one only. Just to show me. Not the right sock. Only the left.’

It was a wonder their neighbours hadn’t rustled Saucisses from their small garden and practised a little amateur abattoir-craft on the pig. Vincent Bouche was even less popular with the Beefeaters than Mrs Witchley. Agatha was dissimilar enough from the Yeoman Warders that they could write her presence off as an aberration, the Queen’s charlady, as they jokingly referred to her. But Bouche was like the staff, an ex-solider, with decades of service in the French Foreign Legion, the Légion étrangère. Able to match them in war stories of corpses and bullets and friend’s bodyparts jokingly left in mess tins. They might laughingly call him the Mighty Bouche, but the Frenchman was close enough to them for his trespassing on their territory to be deeply resented. Agatha stared down the narrow corridor of the hallway. Everything was exactly the same, as if she had never been away. Her Thomas Brigg umbrella with its whangee bamboo handle poking out of her elephant stand, the slightly wonky photograph of Paris in the sixties by Jerry Schatzberg, the threadbare green carpets that hadn’t been changed by the Crown Estate for as long as she had been living here. Bouche followed Agatha to the boot room. It seemed perverse in a house so compact to have a room solely dedicated to hanging up your jacket and storing your boots, but the quarters were meant to billet the Yeoman Warders, with a Beefeater’s uniform almost as important as the man.

‘The head doctors, they phone me to come in and talk to them after they took you. I say no. If I come in, it is to snap their necks and break you out.’

‘Having you locked up in an observation cell next door to me at Stick Hill or wouldn’t have helped either of us.’

‘
C’est des conneries
. I tell the scum at the office. You do their shit; they are all smiles and happiness. You are caught doing your own, and their loyalty, it runs out like a dry riverbed. They revoke your diplomatic immunity, like this.’ He clicked his fingers.

Bouche shrugged in a particularly Gallic way as Agatha climbed the narrow staircase towards her bedroom. ‘I am cooking navarin in the back.’

‘That, I have missed,’ said Agatha. ‘Along with you, old friend. I could have left Stick Hill, you know. Under my own steam. But sometimes it’s good to take time out to be alone with your thoughts.’

‘Alone? To be alone, yes, you can walk the streets at night. As quiet as it is here, that is healthy. But at Stick Hill they give you the drugs and the electrical shocks.’

‘Drugs, frequently. The shocks, only once,’ smiled Agatha.
And I only had to drown one doctor and two orderlies to put them off their bathing routine.

Upstairs, the room was exactly as she had remembered it, too. Bouche had attended to it in her absence, dusting and vacuuming it. The chamber had the air of a shrine. The timeless, hermetic spotlessness of a room that had been a road-accident child’s.
Or a plane crash.
She opened the top drawer on her chest. The photo was still there, taken in the last century. Her husband Sylvester, her two boys – Harry and Carl. She had taken the picture in the snow outside Liverpool, her sons wearing blue overcoats and bobble-top hats that gave them the look of Christmas gnomes. Sylvester was bending over behind them, squeezing his six-foot frame into the picture. His face ruddy and purple from the cold, a slight mist fogging from his mouth, the exertions of the snowball fight a few minutes before she had snapped the photo. The colours on the Polaroid paper seemed faded and washed out compared to modern digital photography. That was how she remembered the world of long ago. Faded and Technicolor.
A happier age. Oh my boys, all my boys.
She closed the drawer, sealing her family in the cold, locked and frozen, just as they had been caught in her memories.