The Shadow Cabinet Read online

  “One of them,” I said. “Devina . . . she drove me to Stephen and Callum’s place. Well, not all the way there. I didn’t want her to have the address, because no one was supposed to know about the flat. I had her drop me at Waterloo station. I don’t think she followed me.”

  “How sure are you of that?”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “I don’t like pretty sure,” he said. “But I think this Devina has gone to ground with Jane, and our time to get into that flat may be limited. We’ll be fast and careful. Put your coat on.”

  He handed me the plain brown coat Boo had purchased for me.

  “You do what I say,” he said, “when I say it. You have a habit of not following instructions. I’m not Stephen. Remember that.”

  This statement fixed me firmly back in reality. Despite the fact that he had taken me into his house, Thorpe had no intention of coddling me. I wasn’t going to be curled up on his couch or sharing cups of tea and personal stories, like I had been with Stephen. Thorpe was the suited, white-haired enigma again. I may have been with other people, but I was very much on my own.

  4

  WHEN I FIRST MET STEPHEN AND CALLUM AND BOO, Stephen and Callum lived together in a flat off Charing Cross Road, in an alley so narrow you could stretch out your arms and touch the houses on either side. The front of it looked like it was a storefront from a Dickens novel—a large window cut into a dozen or more little panes, shiny black paint, lights that I think were supposed to look old-fashioned. They’d gotten the place on a good deal because it appeared to be haunted and people didn’t like staying there. Then they dehaunted it, it became a more pleasant place to live, and the rent went up. They found another, more basic place on the streets behind Waterloo station. This one was a grungy walk-up with a malfunctioning hall light and weird stairway carpet and everyone’s old mail all over the floor by the door.

  This was the flat we waited by now, tucked inside Thorpe’s car. We didn’t park right in front of it. At first, Thorpe wouldn’t stop at all—he drove around the block slowly, scanning all the cars. Then he parked a few streets away and instructed someone to send a CCTV feed to his phone. He studied this for another ten minutes or so. He told Boo to walk to the street the flat was on, go past it, buy something from the shop on the corner past the house, and come back again. I was instructed to keep down, so I lay on the backseat and stared up through the rain-dotted window at the gray sky. Boo came back after ten minutes or so and reported that the curtains were open and the lights were off.

  On the way over, Thorpe had run through what we’d be doing inside. We’d check the flat for Stephen. If he wasn’t there, Thorpe and Boo would immediately begin removing any of Stephen’s notes and files, as well as his computer and tablet. I was to go to his room and look around quickly for anything that seemed important—a second phone, notepads, anything of significance that had to do with his work or life. We’d been given reusable shopping bags for these purposes. We were to fill them and be out the door within five minutes.

  We waited some more. Thorpe continued to study his phone, the street. He told Boo to take his place behind the wheel and to drive off if anyone got anywhere near the car. He then did the same errand he’d sent Boo on. Boo sat in the front, I remained lying down in the back, and we both listened to the rain hitting the roof of the car.

  “How did we get here?” I asked.

  “Dunno,” she said. She sounded exhausted. I had never known Boo to seem even remotely tired. When I’d lived with her at Wexford for a few weeks, she seemed to be powered by taurine and enriched uranium.

  “I know he came back,” Boo said. “I saw how you reacted when he . . . I mean, when you were holding his hand. You didn’t just fall—you were thrown, like you’d had a shock. I know he’s out there, and it’s good that he is. And we will find him. Jo told me that sometimes they get confused. They don’t know what’s happened to them. It’s like . . . amnesia or something. They’re in shock.”

  Jo had been Boo’s best friend. She was a ghost, a soldier from World War II who’d been killed during a bombing raid on London. Jo patrolled the streets of East London for over seventy years. When Boo had the car accident that gave her the sight, it was Jo who helped get her out of the wreck before the car caught fire. Jo had come to my aid when the Ripper, Alexander Newman, cornered me and stabbed me in the downstairs bathroom in my house at Wexford. Jo took the terminus and used it on Newman, taking him out and taking herself out in the process. The resulting explosion was so powerful that it shattered all the glass in the room, cracked the floor, and made me what I was. Boo never got over Jo’s loss. She didn’t mention her name much anymore, but I could tell Jo was never far from her thoughts.

  “We need to think of places,” she went on.

  “What about his sister?” I asked. “He might try to find her.”

  “He already did that,” Boo said. “He told me. First thing he did when he joined the squad and got access to the police database. He went looking for her where she died, and he said she wasn’t there.”

  “He told you that?”

  For some reason, it bothered me that Stephen would share something as personal as that with Boo. It shouldn’t have, but it did.

  “When I joined,” she said. “He told me not to go looking for the dead.”

  We let that remark go.

  “Last night,” she said, turning around for a moment to look at me. “Something weird was going on. What were you two talking about in the bedroom?”

  “We . . . were kissing.”

  Boo wheeled around and widened her eyes so suddenly and so extremely that I thought they might come out of their sockets. Because that can happen. I mean, I know it happens to dogs. One of our neighbors at home had a pug whose eyes used to come out every once in a while, and they’d put them back in. They called him Popeye. Swear to God.

  I hoped Boo’s eyes wouldn’t fall out.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it. I knew it was going to happen. I knew it.”

  “Callum saw,” I said. “But he said something about a bet.”

  Boo shook her head, then turned back around.

  “It’s good,” she said. “You two—that was coming for ages. It’s good he had that. He needed that. He was always so . . .”

  “Is,” I corrected her.

  “We’re all going to be all right, yeah?” she said, though it sounded more like she was reassuring herself. “We’re going to find him. We’re all going to be fine, yeah? All of us.”

  She pulled out her phone and checked it. From her expression, I could tell she didn’t see what she wanted to see.

  “Callum hasn’t called?” I asked.

  “He will,” she said, pocketing the phone.

  Thorpe came back to the car a few minutes later and got into the passenger side and told Boo to pull the car around to the front of the flat.

  “It’s clear,” he said. “We’ll walk over, slowly. Drive over and park by the door.”

  Everything about Stephen came flooding down on me as soon as we stepped into the dark threshold of the foyer. Funny, I’d only been in these flats a handful of times, and yet they formed some of my most important memories of my time in London. This counted school, and seeing the Ripper, and all of the messed-up things I’d been through. Nothing was quite as vivid as the memory of sitting around with Stephen at the crappy old kitchen table they had, drinking tea out of chipped, mismatched mugs, smelling old curry takeaway containers in the garbage. His surroundings were a sharp contrast to his actual person, which was always perfectly neat, perfectly composed.

  We went quietly up the stairs. Thorpe went first, and we followed.

  I never expected to see Stephen standing there waiting for us. He’d only been in this flat for a few weeks. It wasn’t the place I think he would call home—if he called anywhere home. Still, as we opened the door,
my heart skipped a bit.

  There was nothing. It was a dark, cold flat, all the lights off, the usual takeout containers and dirty tea mugs strewn about. There was a sofa, with a sweater thrown over the back and a book resting on the arm, like the sofa itself was a huge bookmark. Thorpe looked to us to see if we saw anything or anyone, and we shook our heads at the same time. He walked around quietly, testing the doors, looking into the rooms. It was soon clear that we were alone.

  “All right,” he said. “Go.”

  Both he and Boo made for Stephen’s work area at once. Thorpe bagged the computer and papers. Boo started pulling down notes that were pinned to the corkboard and taped to the wall. I headed to Stephen’s bedroom, swallowing hard.

  He really did live like a monk. A messy monk. Nothing on the walls. An unmade bed with a plain green wool blanket and another ugly clay-red blanket tucked at the foot. There were a lot of books piled along the walls, a bit of laundry, poorly folded in a broken basket. Instead of a bedside stand, there was a plastic crate of books and a lamp with a crooked shade. On top, resting on a small pile of novels, was a spare pair of glasses.

  A wave hit me—an agony so profound it was exquisite. It stopped my heart and took my air and made the floor feel like it was falling away. Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Feelings denied. I had to be fine for him, and therefore I would be fine. This was an order.

  I went to the bureau. Top drawer was filled with underwear. Boxers, to be specific. This was exactly the kind of moment when he might turn up, with me peering into the depths of the underwear drawer.

  When I looked over my shoulder, he wasn’t there.

  I turned back to the drawer and took a moment to acknowledge the weirdness of this activity, and another to note that he had nice boxers that were surprisingly colorful and even patterned. Under the uniform, he’d been sporting some purples and pinks and snazzy stripes. I shut the drawer maybe a little too firmly and loudly and moved on to the next and the next and the next. What I wanted to find was some kind of personal journal entitled All My Thoughts and Emotions Explained, Especially the Parts about Rory. What I found were T-shirts and sweat clothes and socks. I moved to the closet.

  This was sparsely packed, but here I saw signs of quality, the evidence of money in his past. Four dress shirts, two blue, one gray, one pink. They had those long, open-fold cuffs that didn’t have buttons because they were designed for cuff links. One suit, which, when I looked at the label, was from a Savile Row tailor. The label indicated that it was bespoke. There were several plain white shirts of a kind of hardy polyester-cotton—police shirts. Police sweater. Police pants and jacket.

  At the bottom of the closet, along with the uniform shoes and one pair of dress shoes, there were sneakers and cleated sneakers and yet some other, entirely different kind of sneaker. A small pile of mystifying sports gear—pads, things like that. At the back of the closet—a painted oar that clearly came from Eton. Also, one closed cardboard box marked with a sticker that read: PERSONAL. This was promising.

  “Rory.”

  Thorpe was at the door.

  “Time to go.”

  I grabbed the box.

  5

  THORPE DIDN’T TELL US MUCH ABOUT THE NEXT STOP ON this trip, except that it was “a property we use for various things.” His tone suggested that we didn’t really want to delve too deeply into what that actually meant. I couldn’t see where we were going, because I was still under orders to remain flat in the backseat, now largely covered in bags of Stephen’s paperwork. It was turning dark, although it probably wasn’t even four o’clock yet. I watched the top halves of buses roll past and sometimes saw up the sides of tall buildings. Then there were no tall buildings and fewer buses, and then we stopped on a street that sounded quite quiet.

  “Get up,” he said to me. “We’re here.”

  The street was lined with brick houses. In London, the houses I’d seen that were like this tended to be joined up and tall, with long windows—more social. The particular house he walked us to was the least social of any on the street. It stood alone at the end of the row. It was dark, with no other decoration in the front garden but two bins, for trash and recycling, each labeled in marker with the house number. While the doorway looked like the others, Thorpe pushed a ceramic house number plate aside to reveal a keypad. He punched in a few numbers, then unlocked the door and ushered us in.

  “Close the curtains,” he said, as soon as we got inside.

  The house was furnished in a basic and tidy fashion using what looked like the greatest hits of the IKEA catalog—at least the hits that had no personality. There were no pictures on the walls, no rugs on the floors. The sofa and chairs were tan, and all the tables and everything else were plain pine. There were white plastic lamps with those energy-efficient bulbs that emit a faintly greenish light. The curtains were the only thing that passed as any kind of decoration at all. They were thick and serious, proper blackout curtains that would have held back the light even if the sun expanded and hovered outside the window.

  “Right,” he said. “Boo, bring in everything from the car. Put it here, on the floor.”

  Boo jogged out and started the unloading.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “Now I have to go back to my office and attend to a few things. You’ll stay here with Boo.”

  “We need to be looking.”

  “Looking where? You have no plan. For now, your job is to keep safe. There are some basic provisions in the kitchen—tea and . . . possibly nothing else. Pot noodle, perhaps. If you’re tired, there’s a bed in the front bedroom.”

  Boo brought in everything in a half-dozen sprints. When she was done and slightly out of breath, Thorpe handed her his car keys.

  “Keep these in case you need them,” he said. “I’ll use Tube and taxis to get back. Set the alarm when I leave. The code is 3762. If it goes off, Boo, you take Rory and you get her out of here. I’ll be back in a few hours. Bhuvana, a word outside, please.”

  The two of them stepped out, and Boo returned a moment later, looking solemn.

  “We’re just going to sit here?” I said.

  She took off her jacket and set it on the back of one of the chairs. Her eyes were flicking back and forth, looking over the bags of paperwork, over to the windows, to the wall.

  “I have to stay with you,” she said.

  “We’ll both go.”

  “No,” she said. “Thorpe’s right. Jane and them, yeah? They’re out there.”

  “So let them come find me. If they find me, you find them, you get Charlotte. We could do that—I could—stand somewhere and we could—”

  Boo ignored my ridiculous nonplan.

  “Leave me,” I said. “If you won’t go with me, then I’ll stay here. There’s an alarm.”

  “Go with you where?” she said. And that was the essential problem. Thorpe was correct. We had no plan.

  “I’ve texted Callum ten times,” she said. “We need him here. If he’s here, I can go look.”

  Callum had left the hospital in a really emotional state as soon as he realized what I’d done. It was another terrible element in an already terrible series of events. I’d lost track of him in the blur of it all. But Boo was in love with Callum. Nothing had ever happened between them, as far as I knew. I wasn’t even sure if Callum knew.

  It was funny—all these important life events had happened to me, and they’d been there, and I really knew very little about either of them. I knew Boo had family in Mumbai, but she was from East London. She still lived with her parents. She was out of school and, as far as they knew, working. She had some kind of cover story for what she did. She had gotten her sight in a car accident, and her friend Jo had saved her life. Her attitude was always ghost-positive. Callum’s mother was from Kingston, Jamaica, and he had been in training to be a professional football player until the accident t
hat gave him the sight. It was a ghost that caused the accident, which involved a live wire in some standing groundwater. Callum had hated ghosts from the start. He was in the squad to destroy them.

  Which is why this was going to be so hard. I had made Stephen into the thing that Callum despised.

  Boo’s phone buzzed. She had been gripping it in her hand the entire time.

  “Callum,” she said. “Finally. Thorpe must have rung him. He’s on his way here. I think I’m going to meet him outside first, yeah?”

  “I get it,” I said.

  When Boo left, the house settled around me. I sat on the cold, bare floor, under the faintly greenish light, Stephen’s work things around me in bags, the box from the closet sitting over by the staircase. Any other day, I would have been in that box like a rabbit down a hole, but now it sat there like some kind of silent threat.

  I crouched down next to it and pulled open the folded flaps. This was wrong—going from learning about his life in tiny spoonfuls to total access to everything because he could do nothing to stop it. The dead had no rights to privacy. Everything Stephen held dear was out there for everyone else to see and pick through.

  The box was packed to the brim. On the top were a bunch of notebooks marked with labels that read Latin, Classics, History (English pre-1600). School stuff from Eton. I gave these a quick page through to see his handwriting, to see what kinds of things he had learned. Mostly they were handouts, all dense and serious, like something you’d get when you were in college. Beneath these were some pieces of what I guessed was the Eton uniform—a tie, a vest with silver buttons. A few books—six novels and a book of Shakespeare’s poetry. An orange train ticket from six years before. Near the bottom, there were two photographs. One was of a dog with curly red fur. The second photo was of Stephen. There was a girl with him, her arm wrapped over his shoulders. They were kneeling in the sand, and he was crouching a bit to be level with her.

  His sister. There was something about the eyes, and they had the same dark brown hair. She was physically much smaller, her smile much wider, much bolder. She wore a two-piece bathing suit, and there were bracelets down her arm. She tipped her head against his. He was clearly younger in this photo—his face smoother and thinner. His eyes and brow still had that worried look, like something was coming in the immediate future. But he was also smiling. I’d very rarely seen him smile.