David Mitchell - Slade House

“The one who came to Saint Aelfric’s. The one with the huge gazonking—” Lance mimes a pair of breasts “—personality. The Waylsh one.”

Fern swirls ice cubes round her glass. “Yasmin, you mean.”

“ Yasmin. Get a better offer tonight, did she? Eh? Boy o?” Lance gurns at Todd. I send Todd a telepathic message saying, Ignore Lance, he’s a plonker. And lo and behold, Todd ignores Lance, so maybe it’s actually Angelica who has no psychic potential “whatsoever.” I try again: Look at my fingernails, Todd, I painted them peacock blue . But Todd’s got his apple-pip brown eyes on Fern, who’s explaining that her absent friend Yasmin was underwhelmed by the last field trip.

“ ‘Underwhelmed’?” Axel stops spinning his beer mat. “By any standard metric, Saint Aelfric’s is England’s most haunted church.”

Fern shrugs. “She was hoping to catch a glimpse of an actual ghost instead of catching a head-cold.”

“Paranormal entities don’t come when you whistle,” Angelica tells her. “They’re not like live-in Filipino maids.”

I’d be stung by that, but for Fern it’s water off a duck’s back. “It’s ‘Filipin a ,’ for females, you’ll find — and I’d know, of course, being so awfully, frightfully posh.” Fern places one of her Gauloise cigarettes between her lips and lights it. Angelica’s squished like a bug and I think, Direct hit! and Fern gives me a knowing look.

“Well, I’m not hanging about any longer for any latecomers,” says Axel, passing around a thin wodge of print-outs headed Paranormal Society Field Trip Briefing, 25 October 1997 and subtitled The Slade Alley Vanishings . Underneath are two photographs. The top picture’s actually split into two: the left half is a grainy school photo of a boy, about twelve, with geeky hair and a nose on the wrong side of large; the right half shows a strict-looking woman in her late thirties, dark hair bunched up, thin, wearing a blouse with a frilly neck, pearls and a cardigan. Mother and son, you can tell at a glance. Neither was comfortable looking into a camera. The caption reads, Nathan and Rita Bishop: last seen in Slade Alley, Saturday, 27 October, 1979 . The bottom picture shows a man of thirty or so, grinning at the camera, sinking a beer and dressed like a cop from Miami Vice, though he’s going bald and he isn’t thin. His caption reads, Detective Gordon Edmonds: last seen in Slade Alley, Saturday, 29 October, 1988 . So I was right: he is a cop. At the foot of the page is Copyright Axel Hardwick 1997 . That’s it.

“ ‘The Slade Alley Vanishings,’ ” reads Lance. “Cool.”

“Uh, I think we can all read the title,” says Angelica.

“The case study would have taken an age to write down in all its detail,” says Axel, “so I’m going to brief you all verbally.”

“It was a dark and stormy night,” says Lance in a comedy Somerset accent.

“If you’re not serious about this,” Angelica tells him, “you—”

“Just cranking up the atmosphere a bit. Go on, Axel.”

Axel stares at Lance to tell him, Grow up . “It begins eighteen years ago, in early November 1979. A pissed-off landlord was banging on the door of a property he was renting to Rita Bishop, divorced mother of Nathan, pictured here. The rent check had bounced. Again. A neighbor told the landlord that he hadn’t seen either Rita Bishop or her son for at least ten days. Hearing this, the landlord notified the police, who found out that Nathan hadn’t been at school since the last Friday in October. A half-arsed search ensued. Why half-arsed? Because Rita Bishop had dual British-Canadian citizenship, an ex-husband living in Zimbabwe-slash-Rhodesia, and mounting debts. The police assumed she’d done a runner to a new credit rating, and filed the case in the WGT file.”

Fern flicks her mane of hair. “ ‘WGT’?”

“It stands for ‘Who Gives a Toss?’ ” Axel sips his bitter while Angelica acts all amused. “Next, fast-forward to September 1988. A patient named Fred Pink wakes up from a coma in the unit at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, nine years after being knocked into oblivion by a drunk taxi driver on Westwood Road.”

“Westwood Road’s this road, right?” I ask.

“It was on tonight’s rendezvous sheet,” says Angelica.

Stupid moo. I sip my Diet Coke, wishing I were Fern so I could administer a barbed put-down. And pull guys. Like Todd, for example.

“Fred Pink began working through all the back-copies of the local newspaper, to see what he’d missed during what he calls his Big Sleep. Pretty soon, he found a picture of the missing Rita and Nathan Bishop. They looked familiar. Why? Because back in 1979, just before the minicab driver hit him, Fred Pink had spoken with Rita Bishop at the Cranbury Avenue entrance to Slade Alley, one street up from Westwood Road. She’d asked if he knew where Lady Norah Grayer lived. Fred Pink said no, walked down the alley, and at the far end got knocked down by the taxi.”

“Bang! Crash! Wallop!” Lance rearranges his genitals without a flicker of embarrassment.

“No disrespect to Mr. Pink,” says Todd, “but how trustworthy a witness was he?” His voice has a soft yokel twang but it’s actually quite sexy.

Axel’s nod means, Good question . “The police were sceptical too. This neighbourhood isn’t rough, but it certainly isn’t rich. If a genuine ‘lady’ had her ‘residence’ here, she’d stick out like a very posh sore thumb. Even so, CID didn’t want Fred Pink to feel brushed off, so they sent a man to give Slade Alley the once-over. Enter Detective Gordon Edmonds.” Axel taps the second photograph on the A4 sheet. “On October twenty-ninth, 1988, he entered Slade Alley and found a door in the wall. It was open. He went in, and found a garden and a ‘substantial property’ called Slade House.”

“And living in Slade House was Lady Grayer?” asks Angelica, looping her finger through her indigo hair.

“No. By 1988, the owner was a young widow called Chloe Chetwynd. Edmonds’ brief report — my primary source for tonight’s field trip — makes it clear that Chloe Chetwynd knew nothing about a Lady Grayer or the missing Bishops.”

“Ah, but she would say that, wouldn’t she?” Fern stubs out her cigarette. “In racy Victorian novels, beware of young widows.”

“Pity no one told Gordon Edmonds that,” says Axel. “The following Saturday he went back to Slade House. Apparently he’d recommended a security contractor to Chloe Chetwynd to fix that garden door, and she asked him to check the workmanship. A witness saw him park his car on Westwood Road at 6 P.M.”—Axel can’t resist a dramatic pause—“but Detective Edmonds was never seen again.”

“When a cop goes missing,” says Angelica, “the fuzz don’t rest until they’ve found their man. The media join in, too.”

“True,” replies Axel. “And Gordon Edmonds did make the front pages, for a few days. Theories about an IRA kidnapping or a suicide pact kept the story on the boil for a while, but when Edmonds refused to show up either dead or alive, pictures of Lady Di’s arse or the Poll Tax riots or the Divorce of the Day began to reclaim their rightful place on the front page of the News of the Screws .”

Angelica asks, “What was Chloe Chetwynd’s version of events?”

“In a curious twist to the tale,” says Axel, “Chloe Chetwynd was never tracked down by the investigators.”

We look at each other, wondering what we’ve missed.

“Hang on a mo,” says Lance. “So who answered the door at Slade House when the cops went looking for Gordon Edmonds?”