Toby Ibbotson - Mountwood School for Ghosts

‘Well, sir,’ said Frederick, ‘perhaps to be on the safe side… to avoid unnecessary risks… it might be possible…’

‘What? Spit it out, Snyder.’

‘Some information about the condition of the street might be of use.’

‘Right, I get it. Get me Health and Safety, Fire Department, Department of Works, the lot. I want to see them today.’

‘They are on their way, sir.’

‘Are they?’ Bluffit stared at Fredrick. Sometimes he thought the man was so sharp he might cut himself.

Snyder slithered out.

The most important thing was to get the right person to hold the inquiry. Someone who wouldn’t let him down. Jack knew just the man. He reached for the telephone and dialled.

The voice at the other end was very well-bred.

‘Lord Ridget speaking.’

‘It’s Bluffit.’

‘Yes, oh, hello, how are you feeling? Shame about that little tumble the other weekend. The old mare’s usually very docile. Bit hard in the mouth perhaps. And of course, not used to being kicked and hit. We don’t usually go for that kind of thing.’

‘That nag would be at the knacker’s yard by now if I had my way.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you don’t mean that. Long and faithful service, you know. Out to pasture…’

‘Out to pasture my foot. I don’t have time for all this nonsense, Ridget. I know why you invited me to your place. It wasn’t for my pretty face. You thought you could soft-soap me into stopping the plans for building on your land. Well, I can tell you that the affordable-housing scheme is going ahead anyway. Lots of poor people, you know, and some asylum seekers — they have to live somewhere.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear. You cannot imagine how terrible it is for us. All that hard work reconstituting the bed, and planting the banks, and I had four rods on it last year, and probably six this year. They said I couldn’t do it, but I jolly well showed ’em, I said they’d come back, and they did.’

‘Who came back?’

‘The salmon, of course. After forty years. Your beastly scheme will spoil everything. Houses right on the riverbank. There might be litter louts or even — what d’you call ’ems? — chivs.’

‘Chavs.’

‘That’s it. Is it really not possible to build somewhere else? It is such a lovely spot. The Laird of Rothmull came down last year, and even he was impressed. He showed me his flies.’

‘He what?’

‘He had a lovely Black-Green Highlander that he swore by.’

‘I bet he did. Look, Ridget, stop talking gobbledegook and listen. There is a small chance you might be off the hook. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but…’

‘What? What shouldn’t you be telling me?’

‘Can you keep your mouth shut?’

‘Of course, my dear man. Mum’s the word. Soul of discretion, lips sealed and all that.’

‘Well, it looks as if the council might have overstretched themselves a bit. Money’s short. There’s a big redevelopment planned, dead pricey, and it’s just been approved. If they actually build it, they’ll have to abandon your scheme. Of course, with a great big redevelopment like that, there are objections. There’s going to be an inquiry; who knows what will happen?’

‘Goodness gracious! I shall have to cross my fingers like mad.’

‘You might be able to do more than that,’ said Jack.

They talked for a few more minutes. Then Jack hung up.

‘Daft old git,’ he muttered.

Daniel and Charlotte had worked very hard. They had visited every house on the street, making sure that as many people as possible wrote in good time to dispute the Compulsory Purchase Order, so there had to be an inquiry. But getting an inquiry is just the beginning. You have to win your case. It’s not enough to say that you like your house and don’t want to move. You have to be able to prove that the new motorway will be a terrible disturbance and destroy the environment, or that the new shopping centre will be built right on top of the place where the only pair of web-footed hoopy-birds left in the British Isles make their nest. Or else you have to show that the street is of great historical importance, with a Roman fort or a famous battlefield just under the pavement; or that the houses are very important examples of nineteenth-century urban development, designed by a very important architect.

None of this was particularly easy, because Markham Street, although the houses were pretty old, was just a street, and the park was just a park. Nobody had ever heard of there being anything in particular under it, and in the park there were mostly just pigeons and starlings, and the town was already so noisy and full of cars that some more noise was hardly going to make much difference. But people did their best.

Mrs Wilder, who was writing another detective story, put her work aside and spent days looking through old historical documents about the city, to try to find something important that had happened just on the site of Markham Street. Even Daniel’s new neighbours, the Bosse-Lynches, although they were just as stuck-up and snooty as Daniel had expected, did their bit.

Mr Bosse-Lynch wrote long letters to the newspapers, complaining about commercial interests lowering the value of a residential area, and the rise in crime, and the country generally going to the dogs, and the pitifully small compensation he had been offered. Daylight robbery, he called it. Free Englishmen were being mugged by the council, he wrote. He also wrote that the chairman of the council was a crypto-Stalinist, but that bit didn’t get printed, because the newspaper was afraid they would be sued for libel.

One person who gave them some real hope was Jim Dawson, who lived with his partner Peter Richards at number three. He worked in the zoology department at the university.

‘Birds are all very well,’ he said to Charlotte and Daniel one day, when they met on the street, ‘but there’s not much chance of finding anything of note in the park. Something small, that’s your best bet. Doesn’t even have to be an insect or a worm. Lichens, mosses, moulds. Nobody has much idea about what has evolved in these old half-polluted city biotopes. Something genuinely unique of that kind might make them think twice.’

So now the children of Markham Street and the streets nearby had something useful to do after school. They all crawled all over the park with tins and jam jars, collecting bugs and beetles and worms and woodlice and spiders. They scraped moss and mildew from stones and green algae from benches and from the bark of expiring trees.

Charlotte’s small brothers were in seventh heaven. Every day, covered in dirt from the day’s exertions, they waited outside number three for Jim to come home, so that they could show him the day’s harvest, and he always looked carefully and said, ‘Mmm, that’s interesting,’ or, ‘Oh, what have we here?’ But he never got really excited.

In spite of all their efforts, the Markham Street residents weren’t getting very far. And there was something else. One day when Daniel came home from school there was a van parked outside the house. On the side were the words ‘County Surveyor’. In the hall Great-Aunt Joyce was talking to a young man in a suit. He had lots of pens in his top pocket and a clipboard, and a piece of apparatus in his other hand that looked like some kind of meter.

‘Oh yes,’ Great-Aunt Joyce was saying in her moany voice, ‘terrible, really not hygienic at all. It should certainly be looked at. I shouldn’t be surprised if there are nasty bacteria. One can catch things; I have a very sensitive immune system. That boy, I don’t think he washes his hands properly after, you know…’

‘What boy?’ asked Daniel, dropping his bag on the hall floor.