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

Unless you’re yearning for another long talk with the Feds, it’s not a good idea to be caught being black, young and leering over someone’s fence. So I make Simon move to the right so I can hop over and use the skip to climb down.

It’s quiet inside and feels abandoned. The skip is empty and there is grass growing up between the gaps in the pallets – it’s like nobody has worked here for weeks, maybe months. A steep flight of steps leads up to the front door, but the rest of the house is hidden behind scaffolding and plastic sheeting that covers it all the way down into the basement area.

There’s steps down, but if there’s a door into a separate basement flat it’s been sealed up behind the scaffolding too.

Peter and Nightingale have been teaching me how to sense vestigia – the traces that magic and stuff leaves behind it. Not just magic, though. It’s like people leave behind traces too – very faint but it builds up. Trouble is, you’ve got to learn the difference between your certified vestigia and the random shit that goes on in your head.

Very random in your case, says Peter. But he can talk.

I’m being quiet and blank like they taught me. But all I’m getting is a whispering sigh, like the wind through trees in winter, like someone being sad on the other side of the library shelves at school.

Indigo jumps over the fence and joins me.

Then Simon opens the small door, the one I thought was locked, and comes into the front garden.

‘Are we going inside?’ he asks.

‘Maybe,’ I say, and check the Chubb lock on the back of the small door. The latch bolt is still extended and the strike plate is undamaged, so no way Simon should have been able to push it open.

I know all the names of the parts, because I’ve been helping Peter learn how to finesse locks with magic. It’s still easier to blow the whole lock out. But if you’re going to do that, Peter says, why not just use a battering ram like normal police?

I turn the lock so that the latch bolt is fully retracted and click the safety into position so it stays open. Then I close the door and wedge a brick against the bottom so it won’t blow open.

I turn and find Indigo and Simon looking at me with the same expression on their faces – which is a neat trick when you think about it.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘Nothing,’ they both say at the same time.

‘Are we going inside?’ asks Simon.

I say that we should have a look first, but that’s easier said than done since the front windows are covered and the passageway on the right side is blocked by building materials. The front door is the original, I think, made of dark wood with panels, a brass letterbox and knocker. Above is a stained-glass window in the shape of a peacock’s tail.

I ask Indigo whether she can hear anything.

‘No,’ she says, her ears cocking forward. ‘Nothing’s moving about inside.’

‘Try the door,’ I tell Simon, and he grins and trots up the stairs. Me and Indigo follow so he doesn’t get carried away.

Simon pushes the door and it opens way too easily. Just like the small door in the hoarding.

I put my hand on his arm to stop him rushing inside.

‘We’ve got to have a look,’ he says.

I’m thinking that the door shouldn’t be open. But if Jessica, Natali and Goth Girl and all have been traipsing in and out, then it would have to be open – right? And I didn’t want to call Nightingale and have him come over and find it’s just an empty house.

You always watch scary movies and laugh at the white girls that go inside when they should be hopping a bus to the next postcode. But, real talk – most of the time you’re not in a film and the music doesn’t go all minor key to clue you in.

So in I go – with Simon and Indigo right behind me.

22

Doing It Like the White Girls Do

Inside is dark and sad.

There’s a hallway with stairs going up, doors to the left and, at the far end, a gloomy rectangle leading to probably the kitchen. Or, going by the state of the hall, what’s left of the kitchen. The builders obviously started stripping the walls and stopped before they’d finished, ’cause there’s layers of wallpaper ripped off to reveal bare brick or older paper.

They left the green tiling just inside the door though – probably not worth looting.

‘Anything?’ I ask Indigo.

‘Nothing,’ she says.

‘We all stay together,’ I say. ‘No splitting up.’

‘Roger,’ says Indigo, and Simon nods.

Through the door is the front room/back room knock-through that Peter says is a sign that you’re rich enough to have more rooms than kids. It’s bigger and taller even than Simon’s house. The double-height windows at either end allow in enough light, despite the plastic sheeting, to reveal it’s been stripped, too. Not just the wallpaper – there’s a rectangle around a bricked-up fireplace where a mantelpiece has been ripped out. The skirting boards have gone and the plug sockets are pulled out to expose the wiring behind.

‘Don’t touch the wires,’ I say as we walk through the room.

‘Why haven’t they finished?’ asks Simon.

‘Who?’ asks Indigo.

‘The builders,’ he says. ‘Everything is ready but they’ve just left it.’

‘They could have run out of money,’ I say, which is unlikely on account of if you’re rich enough to buy a house this far up Hampstead Hill you’re not going to be hurting for paper. Something to check, though – afterwards.

Simon stops suddenly and points at the second fireplace, the one that once served the back room, and says, ‘Toast – on a fork.’

This one is missing its mantelpiece, too, but still shows green ceramic tiles and a tangle of gas pipes where a heater had once been installed.

‘If there