Jonathan Stroud - Lockwood & Co - The Whispering Skull

Have I mentioned Kipps before? He’s a team leader for the Fittes Agency’s London Division. Fittes, of course, is the oldest and most prestigious psychical investigation agency in the country. It has more than three hundred operatives working from a massive office on the Strand. Most of its operatives are under sixteen, and some are as young as eight. They’re grouped into teams, each led by an adult supervisor. Quill Kipps is one of these.

Being diplomatic, I’d say Kipps was a slightly built young man in his early twenties, with close-cut reddish hair and a narrow, freckled face. Being undiplomatic (but more precise), I’d say he’s a pint-sized, pug-nosed, carrot-topped inadequate with a chip the size of Big Ben on his weedy shoulder. A sneer on legs. A malevolent buffoon. He’s too old to be any good with ghosts, but that doesn’t stop him wearing the blingiest rapier you’ll ever see, weighed down to the pommel with cheap paste jewels.

Anyway, where was I? Kipps. He loathes Lockwood & Co. big time.

‘You do look a sight,’ Kipps said again. ‘Even scruffier than usual.’

I realized then that all three of us had been caught in the blast of the flare. The front of Lockwood’s clothes was singed, his face laced with stripes of burned salt. Black dust fell from my coat and leggings as I moved. My hair was disordered, and there was a faint smell of burning leather coming from my boots. George was sooty too, but otherwise less affected – perhaps because of the thick coating of mud all over him.

Lockwood spoke casually, brushing ash off his shirt cuffs. ‘Thanks for the help, Kipps,’ he said. ‘We were in a tightish spot there. We had it under control, but still’ – he took a deep breath – ‘that flare came in handy.’

Kipps grinned. ‘Don’t mention it. We just saw three clueless locals running for their lives. Kat here had to throw first and ask questions later. We never guessed the idiots were you.’

The girl beside him said, unsmilingly, ‘They’ve completely botched this operation. There’s no way I can listen here. Too much psychic noise.’

‘Well, we’re clearly close to the Source,’ Kipps said. ‘It should be easy to find. Perhaps Lockwood’s team can help us now.’

‘Doubt it,’ the girl said, shrugging.

Kat Godwin, Kipps’s right-hand operative, was a Listener like me, but that was about all we had in common. She was blonde, slim and pouty, which would have given me three good reasons to dislike her even if she’d been a sweet lass who spent her free time tending poorly hedgehogs. In fact she was flintily ambitious and cool-natured, and had less capacity for humour than a terrapin. Jokes made her irritable, as if she sensed something going on around her that she couldn’t understand. She was good-looking, though her jaw was a bit too sharp. If she’d repeatedly fallen over while crossing soft ground, you could have sewn a crop of beans in the chin-holes she left behind. The back of her hair was cut short, but the front hung angled across her brow in the manner of a horse’s flick. Her grey Fittes jacket, skirt and leggings were always spotless, which made me doubt she’d ever had to climb up inside a chimney to escape a Spectre, or battle a Poltergeist in the Bridewell sewers (officially the Worst Job Ever), as I had. Annoyingly, I always seemed to meet her after precisely that kind of incident. Like now.

‘What are you hunting tonight?’ Lockwood asked. Unlike George and me, both wrapped in sullen silence, he was doing his best to be polite.

‘The Source of this cluster-haunting,’ Kipps said. He gestured at the trees, where the last Visitor had just evaporated in a burst of emerald light. ‘It’s quite a major operation.’

Lockwood glanced at the lines of child agents streaming out across the glade. They carried salt guns, hand catapults and flare-throwers. Apprentices loped along with chain-reels strapped to their backs; others dragged portable arc lamps and tea urns, and wheeled caskets containing silver seals. ‘So I see . . .’ he said. ‘Sure you’ve quite enough protection?’

‘Unlike you,’ Kipps said, ‘we knew what we were getting into.’ He cast his eyes over the meagre contents of our belts. ‘How you thought you’d survive a host of Wraiths with that little lot, I don’t know. Yes, Gladys?’

A pig-tailed girl, maybe eight years old, had scampered up. She saluted smartly. ‘Please, Mr Kipps – we’ve found a possible psychic nexus in the middle of the glade. There’s a pile of earth and a big hole—’

‘I’ll have to stop you there,’ Lockwood said. ‘That’s where we’re working. In fact this whole thing is our assignment. The mayor of Wimbledon gave us the job two days ago.’

Kipps raised a ginger eyebrow. ‘Sorry, Tony, he’s given it to us too. It’s an open commission. Anyone can take it. And whoever finds the Source first gets the money.’

‘Well, that’ll be us , then,’ George said stonily. He’d cleaned his glasses, but the rest of his face was still brown with mud. He looked like some kind of owl.

‘If you’ve found it,’ Kat Godwin said, ‘how come you haven’t sealed it? Why all the ghosts still running around?’ This, despite her chin and hairstyle, was a fair point.

‘We’ve found the burial spot,’ Lockwood said. ‘We’re just digging for the remains now.’

There was a silence. ‘Burial spot?’ Kipps said.

Lockwood hesitated. ‘Obviously. Where all these executed criminals were put . . .’ He looked at them.

The blonde girl laughed. Imagine an upper-class horse neighing contemptuously from a sun-bed at three passing donkeys, and you’d have her down perfectly.

‘You total and absolute bunch of duffers,’ Kipps said.

‘That’s rich,’ Kat Godwin snorted. ‘That’s priceless.’

‘Meaning what?’ Lockwood said stiffly.

Kipps wiped his eye with a finger. ‘Meaning this clearing isn’t the burial site, you idiots. This is the execution ground . It’s where the gallows stood. Hold on . . .’ He turned and called out across the glade. ‘Hey, Bobby! Over here!’

‘Yes, sir, Mr Kipps, sir!’ A tiny figure trotted over from the centre of the glade, where he’d been supervising operations.

I groaned inwardly. Bobby Vernon was the newest and most annoying of Kipps’s agents. He’d only been with him for a month or two. Vernon was very short and possibly also very young, though there was something oddly middle-aged about him, so that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d secretly turned out to have been a fifty-year-old man. Even compared to his leader, who was diminutive, Vernon was small. Standing next to Kipps, his head came up to his shoulders; standing next to Godwin, he came up to her chest. Where he came up to on Lockwood I dread to think; fortunately I never saw them close together. He wore short grey trousers from which tiny legs like hairy bamboo canes protruded. His feet were almost non-existent. His face shone pale and featureless beneath a swirl of Brylcreemed hair.

Vernon was clever. Like George, he specialized in research. Tonight he carried a small clipboard with a penlight attached to it, and by its glow surveyed a map of Wimbledon Common, encased in a weatherproof sleeve.

Kipps said: ‘Our friends seem a bit confused about the nature of this site, Bobby. I was just telling them about the gallows. Care to fill them in?’

Vernon wore a smirk so self-satisfied it practically circled his head and hugged itself. ‘Certainly, sir. I took the trouble to visit Wimbledon Library,’ he said, ‘looking into the history of local crime. There I discovered an account of a man called Mallory, who—’

‘Was hung and buried on the Common,’ George snapped. ‘Exactly. I found that too.’