Chapter 1 – Finding Mabel [ discovery ]

She awoke slumped at her desk.

As she lifted her head, fear spiked within her that she was late for duty. She jolted upright in her chair, scanning the room for the clock and calendar. A moment later, relief washed through her. Saturday. Eight a.m.

Her shoulders dropped. She let out a quiet laugh at herself.

After twenty-eight years of police service, duty was now a desk job. And weekends were no longer stolen by the call of a whistle or the ring of a phone.

The previous evening began to surface. Drinks with colleagues and friends. Stories shared with the old guard. The station had closed, and those who remained were either retiring or moving on to new pastures. She had stayed sober. She needed to drive home.

Her exhaustion had not come from drink.

It had come from reading.

All night long.

Revelations had unfolded from those pages. A world she had dismissed as fairy tale had revealed itself as something disturbingly real. Worse, she had felt something stir within herself. A pressure. A recognition. Power, perhaps, though she had no language for it yet.

And there was the message.

Someone had written to her. Someone who knew her name, and more than that, knew how to reach her. Joyce wanted answers. She intended to find whoever had sent it.

She pushed herself up from the bureau and made her way to the kitchen. Tea was essential. Without it, she would not manage the next page.

It had taken her the entire night to read just one.

That was not normal.

That was something else entirely.

For a copper raised on solid facts and evidence, it did not compute. Which meant only one thing.

It had to be resolved.

──✿──

Sergeant Joyce Turner’s footsteps echoed through the empty corridors of the London police station. The year was 1967, and after eighty years, they were finally closing the place down. Joyce had been stationed there for twenty eight years of that span,. She was now two years off retirement.

The memories returned as she passed the holding cells where she’d talked down more drunks than she could count, the interview rooms where sprogs had fumbled their first questioning and where she’d watched good coppers rise to distinction. The Mother of this nick, they called her – though never to her face. She’d nurtured the new recruits, watched them find their feet or wash out, stood at too many funerals in her dress uniform.

As she made her way down the last place to be cleared, a young constable appeared at the end of the corridor, saw her, and immediately straightened. Joyce didn’t smile. Didn’t need to. He nodded respectfully and disappeared back around the corner

Respected by all, loved by many—a rare commodity for a woman sergeant in the 60’s. She’d never needed to raise her voice. One look had been enough to stop Detective Inspector Morris mid-rant last month, the same look that had sent three decades of cocky constables back to redo their paperwork without a word of argument.

──✿──

They had tasked Joyce with decommissioning the station. Who else knew every inch of it. Everything of importance had already been checked, catalogued, and dispatched to the new Divisional Headquarters. The archives job was waiting for her there, Officer-in-Charge of the Divisional Registry. Two years until retirement, and at last they had found a use for what she carried in her head: thirty years of cases, faces, and secrets that no evidence file ever recorded.

She took one last turn into the Property Store. A room of organised decay, smelling of floor wax, damp brown paper, and the cold iron of the racking. Old Arthur, the Property Officer, had already cleared his desk, leaving behind only a half-empty tin of biscuits and the leather-bound Property Register.

The room was nearly hollow, but in the corner sat a single disposal crate, items deemed unnecessary by the college-bred boys from Central. Obsolete ledgers. Administrative clutter. Incinerator fodder. Joyce saw the weight of the paper before she touched it. Resting atop a stack of traffic logs was a leather map case that did not belong in a modern nick. No property tag. No entry in the register.

As she lifted it free, the air in the Store tightened. She tutted at the casualness of the discard. Sloppy work. She was responsible for the Divisional Registry now. She decided what was history and what was ash.

Joyce sat at Arthur’s desk and placed the map case on its surface. The leather was cracked, weathered, marked by hard use. And yet there was a warmth to it. Not physical, but something held rather than made. She had known that sensation since childhood, the ability to read a room, to feel what lingered after people had gone. Back then, you did not speak of such things. You learned to keep them close. You used them only when necessary.

Joyce eyed the map case. For a moment, she swore she saw it shudder at her presence, as though briefly brought to life. She unbuckled the flap and withdrew a file stuffed with papers. She opened it and flicked through the documents within, all of them blank. No wonder Division had placed it in the disposal crate.

Only one page, the top one, bore any mark at all. The wording was faint. She took it from the wad of documents and raised it to the light of the bulb overhead. The letters became more distinct. J. O. Y.

Distant steps sounded from the corridor above. Joyce’s eyes flicked towards the door, then back to the page. She gasped.

It now read: “Joyce, hide me. Someone is coming.”

Her pulse spiked. Without thinking, she slid the paper back into the case, closed the flap, and covered it with the property book. Only then did she realise her hands were shaking. She sat very still, listening to the ring of boots as they approached the corner, wondering, not for the first time, why instinct had taken over so completely.

The footsteps stopped.

Superintendent Harper appeared at the door.

“Joyce, how’s it going? Everything in order?”

Joyce rose from the table, tucking the case and the property book under her arm.

“George, you monkey, you made me jump.”

He laughed. Joyce was the only one who called him by his first name when no one else could hear. Like many, George had spent his first day on the beat with Joyce. She had watched him advance with a motherly pride.

Harper looked around the room, knowing it would be the last time he ever saw it.

“Always a grim place to work in,” he remarked.

She nodded.

“But necessary,” she countered.

Harper’s gaze dropped to what she was carrying.

“Is that the last of it?” he asked.

“Yes, George. The property book and an old case that seemed too good to throw away. I may keep my mémoires in it,” she fibbed.

“You’ll need something bigger than that. About the thickness of a bible.”

“Cheeky bugger. I’m not that old,” she retorted.

They laughed in the easy way only long-standing comrades could.

“I’m treating the old hands to lunch at the pub. Are you up for it?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she replied. “I’ve just got to drop these off at my car and I’ll join you.”

They both took one last look at the room. Then they looked at each other and smiled, the shared expression of people accepting that the old world was falling away.

Harper linked his arm through hers.

“Come on, Mother. Let’s go.”

He was the only one who ever got away with saying that.

──✿──

Joyce and Harper exited the police station and stopped, turning back to look at it. The old blue lanterns had been taken down, signs removed. Everything of use, or anything that could be misused, had been shipped out. What remained was a shell of what had once been a London police station.

“I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry,” Joyce remarked.

“Yes,” Harper replied. “But let’s just hold on to the kind memories, or it’ll taint the good ones that came out of this place.”

She gave him a knowing look and smiled.

A thousand memories flooded back. Some good. Many brushing up against evil. She had seen it all. And the parting gift from this place had scared her more than any villain she had ever come near to. She could feel life emanating from the map case under her arm. She clutched it tighter, not knowing why.

“I’ll see you at the pub. You go on, and I’ll secure these in the panda car.”

He nodded and made his way towards the Oxford Arms, the pub known in the district as the police watering hole. Six shops down. Comfortably within staggering distance of the nick.

The panda car was parked a short distance back from the station. A Morris Minor, tarted up with police markings. In the past, it would have been contrasting black and white paintwork, hence the name. Now it was blue and white. This was the divisional car she had been assigned, purpose-built with a strong box in the boot.

Joyce was not only decommissioning one station, but all of them.