Free The Shadow Cabinet by Maureen Johnson Page A

normal.
    The first bag was useless. Lots of police stuff, lots of the forms that Stephen had tried to implement to bring some order to what they did. Boo and Callum had made fun of him for these, and I could see why. Nothing direct was mentioned on the forms. They didn’t have boxes marked, “List how many ghosts you blew up today.” There were places for an address, a time, a few coded things. All they told me was where a ghost had been found and if a
T
had happened.
T
, I soon figured, meant
terminus
or
terminate
, which was the same thing. Boo’s rarely had
T
s. Callum’s almost always did. Stephen’s was half and half. In with these there was a
London A–Z,
which was a standard-issue book of maps they sold everywhere in the city. It was all of London, in detail, with an index in the back so you could look up any street and go right to that page. He had marked this one up with dots and Post-its stuck to the pages, dozens of them.
    12 December
    Called to Tower Hill after unexplained power cut. Subject (female, date unknown) seen walking on track surface. Coaxed to platform. Subject had fallen in front of the train. T, 18:45.
    16 December
    Subject at Dead Man’s Hole, female, recent (within last ten years). Left to remain. Possible contact.
    18 December
    Family of six (date unknown but looked to be late 19th or early 20th), two parents, three children, one infant, found in Catharine Wheel Alley. On questioning responded that there had been a fire in the night. T group, 20:35.
    28 December
    Subject (male, date unknown) spotted on Embankment. Subject had jumped into river. This subject seemed aware of passing time. T, 22:00.
    These notes weren’t on every page—London is massive—but there were a lot of them. Maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. What it looked like he was doing was taking the information from the forms and making a map of the ghosts of London—who they were, what they were generally up to.
    I dug into the next bag. This was full of loose paperwork. Most of it looked boring or irrelevant—details of police training at Hendon. Handouts about police procedures, paperwork, uniforms, standards of conduct. There were copies of signed forms signifying the completion of different units of training—defensive driving, evidence processing, what forms to fill out. So much of this was about filling out forms. There were several sets of photocopies from what looked like academic works on magic and myth and ritual. I glanced through these very quickly before setting them into their own pile.
    At the bottom of one of the bags was a small black hardback notebook bound shut with an elastic band. I snapped this off. Inside, I was greeted with what looked like pure gibberish:
    LXXIKTZIHVHZ
    NCXWTUGVGTA
    QXQDYPWNY
    There were a few pages of this, broken usually into blocks of one or two lines. I flipped through the entire book, but nothing else was written in it. I stared at this for a while. This was clearly something very different from the rest of the materials. I set this aside. This would need coming back to.
    I continued going through the bags quickly, trying to get a sense of what was here. What I found in the next two was more police paperwork and forms. The forms were
endless.
I nearly went into a trance sifting through these and was about to push the bag aside, when one piece of paper caught my eye. It was thicker, better quality. There was a raised official seal in the corner that read FOR H OME OFFICE USE ONLY . And then I saw—it was Stephen’s whole past on a page.
    INTAKE FORM
    Surname: Dene
    Given name: Stephen Dorian
    Place of birth: Canterbury, Kent
    Parents: Edward and Diana Dene (banker/wedding planner)
    Siblings: Regina Claudette Dene (deceased aged 17, recreational opiate overdose, ruled accidental)
    Education:
    Winchester House School, Brackley, Northamptonshire
    Eton College
    Honours: House Captain, Godolphin House; Oppidan Scholar; Sixth Form