Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

“Glad to hear you’re keeping busy,” Barnes went on. “And out of trouble, too.”

“Yes, Inspector,” Lockwood said. I looked at him. He caught my eye.

We sat there quietly.

“Well, if there’s nothing further, I’ll be on my way.” Barnes turned to go.

“Actually, Inspector,” I said. “There is something.”

“We urgently need to talk with you, Mr. Barnes,” Lockwood said.

The inspector gazed at us. He lifted a hand as if something had just occurred to him. “That boy over there,” he said idly. “The one swinging like a maniac on that gate.”

“What about him?”

“Think he’d like to earn a little money?”

Almost before the last word had left his lips, Danny Skinner had crossed the garden and was standing to attention at Barnes’s side. He performed an outlandish salute. “Anything I can do for you, mister? Just say the word.”

“I need lunch for me and three of my officers. Think you could go in there and rustle up some sandwiches? There’s five pounds in it for you if they’re edible.”

“Yes, sir. Certainly, sir. They’ll be the best you ever tasted.” He trotted into the house.

“Your five is safe, Mr. Barnes,” George said. “The wrapper will be the only edible part, take it from me.”

Barnes nodded grimly. “That’s not the point. I thought he looked like a boy with excessively sharp hearing—leastways, his ears are big enough—and I was right. Tell you what, why don’t you walk with me a minute, Mr. Lockwood, Miss Carlyle? Come out on the green and take some air.”

Barnes left the garden, crossed the road. He led us across the green to a spot some distance from the inn. “Now,” he said, “it’s quieter here. No one around. What was it you wanted?”

“It’s about what happened last night,” I said. “About the institute.”

“The institute?” Barnes rubbed his mustache and stared into the middle distance. “Well, investigations are currently under way at the facility. All I can tell you is there was some kind of accident there last night.”

“Well, that’s just it,” Lockwood said. “It wasn’t exactly an accident—”

“Some experiment that went tragically wrong,” the inspector continued. “I hear there’ve even been casualties.”

“Yes! And Steve Rotwell—”

“I wish I could tell you more,” Barnes said, interrupting me, “I really wish I could. Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, that’s all I know.”

We looked at him.

“And you two , of course, know nothing about it, either.”

Lockwood frowned. “Well—”

“You weren’t anywhere near that place,” Barnes said.

“Erm, well, in fact we—”

“You were coincidentally dealing with some local ghosts in Aldbury Castle—in a case that was quite separate to whatever was going on out on those fields. You have no interest in Rotwell or his institute, or what they were doing in that building at the heart of it, and if you have any sense, you’ll make that abundantly clear to anyone who asks you. And anyone who doesn’t , for that matter. I’d spread that information loud and quickly, if I were you. Do you understand me? Mr. Lockwood? Miss Carlyle?” Barnes surveyed us with his tired, pouchy eyes. “One of DEPRAC’s jobs, you see, is to prevent bad things from happening to agents, even irritating ones like you. I wouldn’t want to wake up one morning and discover that there’d been four more accidents at Portland Row. It would really put me off my breakfast egg.”

Lockwood looked at me. He took a deep breath. “Thank you, Inspector,” he said loudly. “You’ve been very clear. I’m sorry you can’t tell us more about what happened up at that institute. We’ll just have to accept that we’ll never know.”

Barnes nodded peaceably. “Perfect. That’s the idea.”

We stayed at Aldbury Castle for two more nights, and made halfhearted forays on each to see what supernatural activity remained. But as Mr. Skinner had said, signs of the village ghosts had greatly diminished. With the destruction of the iron circle at the Rotwell facility, and the end of the Creeping Shadow’s mysterious comings and goings, the cluster at once calmed down. Many of the Visitors did not appear at all, while those that did seemed weaker and less vicious. It was easy to claim (as we did) that this change was entirely due to our own zeal. We made lots of noise running about the place, and threw occasional salt-bombs around to make it look like we were doing something. Mostly we just stayed at the inn and played cards.

On our fifth morning in the country, things had quietened down over on the eastern fields. Many of the DEPRAC cars had left, and the cordons by the village had been lifted. By now our heroic status in the village was assured. There were still a few Type One ghosts kicking around, but nothing that needed to delay us. Kipps in particular was keen to head off—for two nights he’d been forced to choose between sleeping in the bed with George, or in the storage closet with the skull (he’d preferred the skull, for unnamed reasons)—but we were all eager to get home. A farewell committee from the village accompanied us to the station, Danny Skinner marching proudly at the head. We were given gifts of root vegetables. Lockwood took possession of an envelope stuffed with cash—our payment from the grateful villagers. The children threw garlands of flowers. When the train departed, handkerchiefs were waved until we disappeared from view.

On our way home, I sat opposite Lockwood. He seemed pale and tired. In the days since our visit to the institute, we hadn’t spoken privately of what had happened to us. Occasionally, when our eyes met, we shared something that couldn’t be expressed in words.

We smiled at each other, and gazed out at the woods and fields. It was a beautiful spring scene. The column of smoke above the eastern hills had long since drifted away on the wind; nevertheless, a hint of it hung in the air. It had entered the train car with us at Aldbury Castle station, and through the opened windows, the smell of distant burning stayed with us all the way to London.

TERRORIST LINK TO ROTWELL AGENCY!

FORBIDDEN WEAPONS FOUND AT RUINED INSTITUTE

STEVE ROTWELL STILL MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD

FIRST INTERVIEW WITH DEPRAC INVESTIGATOR MONTAGU BARNES INSIDE

The sensational discoveries made in the rubble of the ruined Rotwell Institute facility in Hampshire continued yesterday, with confirmation that police had uncovered the remains of a large “weapons factory” in one of the outbuildings. Among the items recovered are said to be several unexploded “ghost-bombs” of the kind used in a terrorist attack on the London carnival last November, in which an attempt on Ms. Penelope Fittes’s life was made. Several members of the institute staff, including facility chief Mr. Saul Johnson, have been arrested, amid claims that they and agency head Mr. Steve Rotwell were intimately involved in that attack. Mr. Rotwell’s whereabouts remain unknown, but it is believed that he may have perished in the explosions that destroyed the facility.

In today’s exclusive interview in the Times , DEPRAC chief investigator Mr. Montagu Barnes gives a detailed account of his team’s dangerous exploration of the ruins. “It was an inferno when we arrived,” he says. “But we managed to discover a store of illicit weapons, including deadly ectoplasm-guns. Ghost-bombs are just the tip of the iceberg, believe me.” He refused to comment on the contents of the central building at the site, which was severely damaged in the incident. “Sadly, the purpose of that building is not yet clear. Rest assured that inquiries are continuing.”