What Abigail Did Tha Summer, Ben Aaronovitch [if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud txt] 📗

Simon’s mum only wishes she had. His name is Thomas Nightingale, he is a detective chief inspector and is at least a hundred years old, though he don’t look it. He is also Britain’s only licensed, fully qualified wizard. He takes a seat next to Toby and pulls out his notebook.

‘I’ve just had an interesting chat with a Detective Constable Jonquire,’ he says.

Which is typical. I never asked him to talk to anyone – all I wanted was for him to look some stuff up on Peter’s AWARE terminal. That’s the excluse6 Fed internet which gives them access to the various computer systems that I’m sure some of them actually know how to use. Peter knows how to use them. Nightingale, I’m not so sure.

Obviously, I’m not authorised to use them. And, while I’ve memorised both Nightingale’s and Peter’s warrant numbers and their additional security passwords, I’m saving those for an emergency.

Nightingale reads my face.

‘I’ve always found it more efficient to simply find someone who knows the answers and ask them,’ he says. ‘Especially when one is not sure what the precise nature of the question is.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You’re a detective inspector so people’ve got to answer.’

‘If only that were the case,’ he says.

‘Anyway, did you get one? An answer?’

‘There are no current missing persons cases that match the criteria you specified,’ he says. ‘However, there were twenty-three reports in the last three weeks, which is what triggered the operational response you witnessed. But all of them have been resolved.’

All the kids were between the ages of twelve and sixteen, had been missing no more than two nights, and a maximum of three of them had been missing on the same nights. Nightingale is thorough, so he’d asked whether there’d been follow-up interviews. But apart from Natali, Jessica and two other recent teenagers, none had been taken.

Nightingale draws the line at showing me the interviews or giving me the names of the other two teens.

‘That information is confidential,’ he says. ‘And this is not our case.’

I say I understand, but I don’t think he believes me because he says that if I find out anything ‘interesting’ I should call him.

‘No worries,’ I say.

‘Before you do anything precipitate,’ he says.

6 Much like the youth of my own generation, today’s young people have taken to amputating the ends of words. Presumably so they can speak them faster and with greater emphasis. Thankfully they have yet to take up the antipodean habit of adding an ‘o’ to aid flow. In any case, ‘excluse’ is short for ‘exclusive’.

11

Legwork

My Samsung may be krutters7 but I can still access Facebook. I know Natali’s surname and the area she lives in – the 168 has barely made it to Euston Station and I have enough information to narrow her house down to one of three on Savernake Road. I bale the bus at Camden and hop on a 24.

Savernake Road runs down the southern side of the Overground tracks from Hampstead Station to Gospel Oak. On the other side of the line is the Heath, and I wonder if that’s significant. But without the other kids’ addresses I can’t check it.

It’s fifteen minutes later and I’m standing outside a house I realise I still recognise from a birthday party I went to eight years ago. It’s another Victorian semi, but a scale down from Simon’s house. This is the mid-rent version although, according to Zoopla, houses on this side of the street, with back views over the Heath, go for a million more than houses on the other side.

The white stucco on the gatepost is grimy and cracked and the front garden has gone a bit wild. The porch is freshly painted, though, and it has one of those Number 10 doors with an ornamental knocker that looks like it should have the face of a dead banker but doesn’t.

I ring the doorbell and wait.

A white man opens the door, a shrunk version of the Natali’s dad I remember from eight years ago. He’s wearing a black T-shirt with THE CLASH written across the front over a red Soviet-style star, black jeans and a hostile expression. He tries to look friendly when he sees me, but he’s too pissed off to make it convincing.

‘Can I help you?’ he says, and I ask whether Natali is in.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But she’s not allowed visitors.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say. ‘I just need to ask her a few things for a school project. I won’t take long – I promise.’

Natali’s dad hesitates, but the aura of the school project exerts a powerful influence on posh grown-ups. My mum would have wanted to know details – what project? Which school? But Natali’s dad is too worried about seeming rude to a child to ask questions. Plus I think he sort of recognises me.

He doesn’t invite me in, though – makes me wait on the doorstep while he fetches Natali.

Natali is looking pale and booky8 in pink pyjama bottoms and an oversized Sex Pistols T-shirt that she must have borrowed from her dad. She’s surprised to see me. ‘Abigail,’ she says. ‘I haven’t seen you for years.’

We’re back in sus-land, then. But what kind of sus is it?

‘You came down my ends two days ago,’ I say. ‘You invited me to a happening on the Heath.’

‘I don’t remember,’ she says.

Not No I didn’t, which is what you would say if you were denying things.

‘Really?’ I ask.

‘Yeah,’ she says. Leaning closer as if she don’t want anyone else to hear. ‘They say I was . . .’ She hesitates and leans in even closer and whispers, ‘Missing.’

‘Missing how?’ I whisper back.

‘I don’t know.’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

‘What – nothing?’

‘I remember a kitchen. Maybe . . .’ Natali shrugs.

‘Natali!’ Her dad is calling from further along the hall.

‘Dad doesn’t believe me,’ she says in a normal voice, on purpose I reckon, so that her dad can hear. ‘He never believes me about anything.’

‘I believe you,’ I whisper, and I’m a