Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

15

EVEN THOUGH I WAS JUST STEPS AWAY FROM WEXFORD, Stephen thought it might be a good idea to take me back to the flat to decompress and debrief. I was fine with that. I don’t know how he drove since he was giving me the side-eye the entire time. I guess it was one thing seeing me do my new party trick from a distance or by accident, and it was another thing entirely to see it up close, being used deliberately. I killed a ghost . With my hand .

That was awesome .

“You did the right thing,” he said.

“I know.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Not going to vomit?”

“I’m completely fine,” I said.

“Are you sure? You seem a bit manic.”

“Look,” I said, turning to him, “I’m fine. I was right. You didn’t believe me, but I was right.”

“If I didn’t believe you, would I have gone to the trouble of arranging an interview at the hospital? That wasn’t exactly easy. Are you sure you feel all right?”

“Are you going to stop asking me that?”

“I’ll stop when I think I’ve got the real answer,” he said.

“Oh. Fine then. No. I feel like death.”

“Do you?” he said, almost eagerly.

“No. I feel great.”

I leaned back in the seat and drummed my fingers on the window and tried to look like a cop. I made cop faces at the cars passing by—hard, long stares. Sometimes I’d give them a little nod, as if to say, “You’re doing all right, law-abiding citizen.” I liked being right, and I liked being powerful, and I liked the way I felt right now.

“When we get back to the flat, let me explain to Callum and Boo what’s happened.”

“You always want to do all the talking,” I replied.

“Because it is my job. I am in charge. And I was trying not to get us both caught out today. It’s a crime to impersonate a police officer.”

“I mean in general. Even Callum says…”

Stephen jerked his head in my direction, and I knew I had overstepped. This is what happens when I feel too good. I talk and talk and talk and eventually I start saying things that are supposed to be in the secret file, the things other people told you that you were supposed to keep to yourself and then…boop! Out they come.

“Callum says what?”

“That you’re…serious,” I said. “About your job.”

“Of course I’m serious about my job.”

“That’s what he says,” I replied.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning…you can tell them. And something I never understood…how does it work, you being a police officer, but not a police officer, or—”

There was every chance that Stephen knew I was trying to switch topics. He definitely wanted to know what Callum had said. But I understood Stephen enough now to know that he could always be relied on to talk about procedures and how things worked. He would be compelled to answer me.

“Technically,” he said, “I am a sworn police officer. I’m just not assigned to any particular station or role, at least not as far as the Met is concerned. I went through the training. I did five weeks at Hendon, another four months or so at Bethnal Green, then in-person training out of Charing Cross police station, then back to Hendon. It took about eight months. On the side, I was given some bespoke training at the MI5 training academy, most of it on how to get into places where security clearance is needed. Oh, and management. They had me do some management training. All in all, it took about a year, but I’m still learning, every day. A lot of these jobs, they train you, but you really learn by doing it. Normal constables train with experienced people, but no one does my job. I have Thorpe, I suppose.”

“He’s scary,” I said.

“He has to be like that. You can’t let your emotions get in the way of what you need to do, and you can’t have too much of a personality, at least on show. But he’s all right. Every time I’ve needed something from him, he’s been there. And, frankly, I don’t think he knows what to make of us. Must have been a shock to get us as an assignment. He might be relieved if it all falls apart. He can go back to finding terrorists or whatever he did before.”

“I guess that is kind of crazy,” I said. “He doesn’t have the sight. He just has to take your word for it that there are ghosts and that you’re getting rid of them?”

“Basically. Now, what did Callum say?”

“Nothing,” I said. He didn’t press the matter.

The flat had the sour smell of day-old garbage. Some effort had been made to pick up the place. Dirty containers had been bagged up and left to ripen in the kitchen. In addition to that scent was a sharp, familiar fragrance that made me wildly hungry.

“Look who it is!” Callum said. He was on the sofa, eating something from a bowl. Presumably this was the source of the good smell. God, I was starving. Taking out the ghosts clearly took something out of me. Boo was walking around the room in a pair of yoga shorts, flexing and pivoting on her newly freed leg. She spun around when Callum spoke.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Come to see me, right? I have my leg back!”

“How does it feel?”

“Ready to kick something,” she said. “Still itches. And I think it might’ve shrunk? That can happen, you know. The muscles lose tone.”

“Looks the same size to me.”

“Does it?”

She bent over and examined her leg for a moment. I would have been freezing in those shorts. The flat was hardly warm. But English people are hearty.

“What is that?” I asked Callum. “It smells amazing. ”

“Jerk goat,” he said. “Made by my mum last night.”

“Can I try it?”

“This is the real thing. My mum’s from Kingston. This is a family recipe.”

“I can’t eat that,” Boo said. “And I can eat almost anything.”

“I can eat anything,” I said.

“Not joking,” Callum said. “This stuff would actually kill you.”

“I’m hard to kill.”

“If you like.” He held the bowl out to me. “But I’m warning you. Be careful.”

The meat in the bowl was gray and cooked to soft pieces. I held the bowl up to my nose and inhaled the delicious, prickly aroma of things that were on the high end of the Scoville scale. My eyes watered very gently from the pepper oils. Spicy food and I have a close relationship—an obsessive one, in fact. If it’s spicy, I want it. I want to sweat and shake and go half blind from the searing pain…which, now that I put it that way, seems really suggestive. But spicy stuff is addictive. That’s a known fact of science . I shoveled in three forkfuls one right after the other. And then, after riding through the sweats and shakes, had another. Callum burst out laughing.

“Clearly you are fine,” Stephen said.

“Why wouldn’t she be?” Boo asked.

Boo had been eyeing Stephen for about a minute now. I noticed it through the waves of delicious pain. Considering how large and luminous and heavily lined her eyes were, it was remarkable how she had mastered the subtle stare. I’d only learned to see it because she had applied it to me for about a week straight when we first met.

“We need to talk to you about where we’ve been this morning,” Stephen said.

And so, he told them. His account was all right. I would have added a lot more description and detail.

“One morning,” Callum finally said. “We were gone for one morning and this happens?”

“It wasn’t planned that way. We went to the hospital, and then we stopped into the pub on the way back to Wexford. It all happened quite quickly, and Rory handled it very well.”