In the Company of Ghosts Read Online Free Page B

the two of them kept as a pet scratching at the wood.
    ‘You haven’t eaten Saucisses yet then?’
    ‘One day, madame. Filthy swine. I forgot to give him the breakfast yesterday. He eats my sock, left one only. Just to show me. Not the right sock. Only the left.’
    It was a wonder their neighbours hadn’t rustled Saucisses from their small garden and practised a little amateur abattoir-craft on the pig. Vincent Bouche was even less popular with the Beefeaters than Mrs Witchley. Agatha was dissimilar enough from the Yeoman Warders that they could write her presence off as an aberration, the Queen’s charlady, as they jokingly referred to her. But Bouche was like the staff, an ex-solider, with decades of service in the French Foreign Legion, the Légion étrangère. Able to match them in war stories of corpses and bullets and friend’s bodyparts jokingly left in mess tins. They might laughingly call him the Mighty Bouche, but the Frenchman was close enough to them for his trespassing on their territory to be deeply resented. Agatha stared down the narrow corridor of the hallway. Everything was exactly the same, as if she had never been away. Her Thomas Brigg umbrella with its whangee bamboo handle poking out of her elephant stand, the slightly wonky photograph of Paris in the sixties by Jerry Schatzberg, the threadbare green carpets that hadn’t been changed by the Crown Estate for as long as she had been living here. Bouche followed Agatha to the boot room. It seemed perverse in a house so compact to have a room solely dedicated to hanging up your jacket and storing your boots, but the quarters were meant to billet the Yeoman Warders, with a Beefeater’s uniform almost as important as the man.
    ‘The head doctors, they phone me to come in and talk to them after they took you. I say no. If I come in, it is to snap their necks and break you out.’
    ‘Having you locked up in an observation cell next door to me at Stick Hill or wouldn’t have helped either of us.’
    ‘ C’est des conneries . I tell the scum at the office. You do their shit; they are all smiles and happiness. You are caught doing your own, and their loyalty, it runs out like a dry riverbed. They revoke your diplomatic immunity, like this.’ He clicked his fingers.
    ‘Well, I’m out now. I have a feeling our boat is about to be refloated once more.’
    ‘Why should we help them, eh? Let them feast on their ignorance. We stay here, rest of the world can go phoottt.’
    ‘I will be travelling to the Monument tomorrow,’ said Agatha. ‘We’ll see what’s to do, then.’
    Bouche shrugged in a particularly Gallic way as Agatha climbed the narrow staircase towards her bedroom. ‘I am cooking navarin in the back.’
    ‘That, I have missed,’ said Agatha. ‘Along with you, old friend. I could have left Stick Hill, you know. Under my own steam. But sometimes it’s good to take time out to be alone with your thoughts.’
    ‘Alone? To be alone, yes, you can walk the streets at night. As quiet as it is here, that is healthy. But at Stick Hill they give you the drugs and the electrical shocks.’
    ‘Drugs, frequently. The shocks, only once,’ smiled Agatha. And I only had to drown one doctor and two orderlies to put them off their bathing routine.
    Upstairs, the room was exactly as she had remembered it, too. Bouche had attended to it in her absence, dusting and vacuuming it. The chamber had the air of a shrine. The timeless, hermetic spotlessness of a room that had been a road-accident child’s. Or a plane crash. She opened the top drawer on her chest. The photo was still there, taken in the last century. Her husband Sylvester, her two boys – Harry and Carl. She had taken the picture in the snow outside Liverpool, her sons wearing blue overcoats and bobble-top hats that gave them the look of Christmas gnomes. Sylvester was bending over behind them, squeezing his six-foot frame into the picture. His face ruddy and purple from the cold, a slight