Beyond Dead: A Bridget Sway Novel (A Paranormal Ghost Cozy Mystery Series)

by Jordaina Sydney Robinson

  She gave him a happy shake of her head, her small ponytail swaying with the movement. “That I didn’t know anything about either.”

  He snorted in disbelief. “And they were happy with that?”

  “Well it’s the truth, so their happiness is really immaterial.” Sabrina took a small bite of her toast. “Besides, they already have their suspects, they were just after confirmation.”

  “Why do they need confirmation?” Charlie asked, showing none of his usual reluctance.

  “They haven’t found Fenton’s notebook.” Sabrina delivered the titbit with the indifference of a pro. “It wasn’t on the body and they searched his house but didn’t find it. Without it, they only have suspects without evidence.”

  “What does Fenton have to do with this?” Charlie looked between Sabrina and me. “And why is his notebook important?”

  “He was a snitch.” Sabrina spoke over the rim of her coffee cup with a casual air that I didn’t possess even when I was actually causal. “All of the evidence is in his notebook.”

  “So the GBs have his place under surveillance to catch anyone that shows up looking for it?” Pete loaded his fork with more food than I was sure he could fit in his mouth. “And whoever turns up looking for it is the killer? Lame-ass plan, if you ask me.”

  I nearly choked on my tea but Sabrina just shook her head. “Nope.”

  Charlie’s brow wrinkled as he looked between Sabrina and Pete “But you just said …”

  “They’re certain it’s not there.” Sabrina took another bite of her toast. If we hadn’t just discussed it she’d have had me fooled as well. “So they’re leaking a rumour that Fenton’s hidden it somewhere, I think it was a bar – I can’t remember the name – and then wait and see who shows up.”

  “Smart, I guess.” Charlie nodded.

  Sabrina took another sip of her coffee. “Hmm.”

  “You don’t think so?” Pete asked.

  “Something that important?” Sabrina shook her head. “Fenton had to have hidden it at his house or kept it with him all the time. That’s what I’d have done.”

  “What do you think?” Charlie asked me since I’d been maintaining a careful silence throughout the conversation, partly not to incriminate myself since I still had Fenton’s notebook but also not to get in the way of the trap Sabrina was setting for them. Guess she really didn’t trust Pete.

  “I didn’t know him that well but he could be pretty paranoid at times.”

  “And how exactly do you know all this?” Pete narrowed his eyes at Sabrina, who stood up, collected my empty plate and stacked it on hers.

  “I used to be a private investigator.” She winked at Pete. “Guard your secrets.”

  I followed her to the kitchen hatch to dispose of my empty cup. Neither of us looked back.

  “You think they bought it?” she asked, pointing to a belt loop on her jumpsuit so it would look like we were talking about something else completely.

  “I think so.” I nodded and gestured to the same thing on mine. “You really think they’re involved in the murders?”

  “I don’t know.” She pulled on my belt loop. “But I find them suspicious as hell.”

  We walked out of the canteen without a backward glance. “I’m pretty sure they’re saying the exact same thing about us right now.”

  ∞

  My morning assignments had been relatively easy. I’d already decided to complete them as directed for the moment – until I was in a position where I could investigate exactly where the lists came from before they ended up in Sabrina's department and who compiled them – though it didn’t stop me from pausing after each one and speculating on the consequences.

  “Already got you a sandwich.” I handed Sabrina a tuna salad baguette when she walked into the canteen at lunch. I couldn’t take a repeat of her inability to choose a filling again and it was wise not to get not the wrong side of people who served you food.

  Sabrina peered at the filling through the plastic wrapper. “What is it?”

  “Tasty.” I guided her out of the canteen and to the departures room so she couldn’t try to swap it and tunnelled us to the theatre.

  Jeremy’s eyes watched us from the poster advertising his show at the side of the theatre entrance.

  “Tonight is his last show here,” I said, reading the dates at the bottom of the poster before turning my back on him. I knew it was a two-dimensional image with no conscious thought but it still creeped me out. I looked out over the bustling square full of people rushing around on their lunch breaks. All the haste seemed a little futile from my dead viewpoint.

  “Good riddance, I say.” Sabrina hovered in front of the poster and tilted her head to the side as if evaluating his face. After a quick check around, she drew an evil villain’s moustache on the poster.

  “You feel better now?” I asked and she nodded happily, putting her pen away.

  Sabrina turned to survey the crowded square and frowned. “I reckon he must do this in other cities.”

  “His show?”

  Sabrina rolled her eyes at me. “His scam. He must have the goods on a lot of us.”

  “Wouldn’t he just use the same person? It would be much easier for him than having a range of different agreements with a harem of ghosts.”

  “They wouldn’t have access to records of ghosts from other cities,” Sabrina said and turned her back on the square. She cupped her hands around her eyes and pressed her face up against the glass doors of the theatre, peering inside.

  “I thought our bureau covered the whole country?”

  Sabrina barked out a sharp laugh and stepped back from the glass. “Do you know how many files that is? How much space that would take up?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “A lot?”

  “Yeah.” Sabrina nodded, hands on her hips and tuna baguette sticking out of her jumpsuit pocket. “Every area has their own bureau, but there’s a central hub up in Edinburgh.” She pointed through the doors of the theatre. “So where do you think he keeps the audience lists? His dressing room?”

  “How do we know he even has an audience list?” I asked. “Would he not just use an online or phone booking system?”

  “Yeah, probably, but he’d still need to have a list of people coming to the show to give to his ghost contact so she can find out stuff. He wouldn’t just want to give her a handful of names in case she couldn’t find anything on them, would he?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Let’s go investigate.” Sabrina wiggled her eyebrows at me and tunnelled us both into the foyer.

  We made our way down the now far too familiar dingy corridor and paused outside the dressing room to listen.

  “You hear anything?” Sabrina mouthed. I shook my head.

  Gently Sabrina turned the handle and cracked the door open. “No one in here.” She strode into the room and checked behind the dressing screen. “Since he can see you, I’ll be lookout while you snoop?”

  I saluted her as she backed out of the room to hover in the hallway. She left the door ajar so she could dive back in to warn me if necessary.

  I didn’t even need to check around the room. An open briefcase was sitting halfway down the counter in front of the mirrors.

  “Surely it can’t be this easy?” I rifled through the papers inside and snorted in disgust. An official document that looked like a contract was lying on top, but underneath was nothing but a stack of reviews of his show from local newspapers. Mostly good, but the few bad ones had specific passages underlined with notes scrawled at the side on how to improve on those areas. Give the man credit for taking criticism constructively.

  There was nowhere else to look, really. I rooted through the drawers beneath the dressing tables, through the discarded magicians’ boxes, behind the mirrors. I was about to start peeling back the corners of the carpet when Sabrina darted in and closed the door softly behind her.

  “Anything?” she asked while ushering me behind the dressing screen.
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  “Nada.”

  “He’s coming back. Let’s watch him for a few minutes. He might give us a clue where to look.”

  We positioned ourselves so we could watch through the gaps at the fold in the dressing screen and waited. Jeremy strolled in smiling to himself and reading the local paper.

  “… his show is the best mixture of sophisticated production and intimate, personal delivery. Caring and honest, he connects with the bereaved and gives them exactly what they need: a direct line to their loved ones who have passed. Undoubtedly the best medium of our time.”

  Sabrina turned to me, her face twisted in disgust, and mimed a vomiting action. We heard Jeremy’s happy sigh and the creak of a chair as he sat. Footsteps approached from the corridor.

  “Here you go, Jez.” The speaker was male and probably in his late teens by the sound of his voice.

  “It’s Jeremy. Or preferably Mr Thomas Leith to you, you impudent whelp,” he snapped back. “And what’s this?”

  “The audience lists for the Hull shows.”

  There was a long pause. “And why are you giving me this?”

  “So you can google them and get all the information you need so you can fool people into thinking that you are ‘undoubtedly the best medium of our time’.” The boy affected a misty voice as he quoted the newspaper. He didn’t sound bitter, just disillusioned with Jeremy.

  “Ah.” Jeremy mistook the boy’s insult for a compliment. “You read the review.”

  “Only wish I’d read it before my breakfast.” His voice followed the receding footsteps out into the corridor. “That way I wouldn’t have wasted my egg muffin.”

  “Your mother would be ashamed!” Jeremy shouted from his chair.

  “Only of you,” the boy’s distant voice called back.

  There was a brief moment of silence in the dressing room before the door slammed with a sharp bang.

  “‘Only of you’,” Jeremy mimicked as he lifted all the paper cuttings out of his briefcase. After loosening the false bottom, he removed several sheets of paper and placed the new audience list inside.

  “I thought you searched that?” Sabrina mouthed.

  “I did,” I mouthed back. A false bottom. What was this? Mission Impossible?

  Sabrina shook her head and rolled her eyes at me. “They must be the audience lists for here,”

  “Well, go and get them then.” I shooed her from behind the dressing screen.

  Hesitantly, she stepped towards him, making sure to maintain at least an arm’s length distance so he didn’t accidentally walk or gesture into her as she moved around him, and headed for the door. She didn’t open it but knocked loudly on the inside.

  “Come in.” Jeremy quickly slid the old audience list underneath his open briefcase.

  Sabrina knocked again.

  “Come in,” Jeremy snapped, spinning in his chair to face the door.

  Sabrina waited for several seconds then screwed up her fist and hammered on the door.

  “For god’s sake.” Jeremy leapt up from his seat and covered the distance to the door in three angry strides.

  Sabrina leapt out of the way just in time and deftly swiped the audience lists from under the briefcase while Jeremy was checking along the corridor. She made it back around behind the dresser and waved the papers in victory just as Jeremy closed the door.

  “Sabrina, sweetheart?” Jeremy leaned against the closed door, his eyes cataloguing every inch of the room. “Is that you?”

  Sabrina’s faced blanched.

  “You don’t need to tease me this way, darling. Just show yourself.” His eyes focused on the dressing screen. “I won’t bite.”

  Jeremy began to walk towards us, all sleek predatory motions. In someone else it would’ve reminded me of a jungle cat, but with him it conjured images of a snake, coiled and ready to strike.

  Sabrina stared at his approaching form through the crack in the fold of the dressing screen, her mouth hanging slightly ajar. I placed my hand on her shoulder and tunnelled us to a nearby park.

  She finally closed her mouth and turned to me, arms folded, still clutching the audience list. “I am not happy about this.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “There’s another one there.” Sabrina circled a fourth name on the list with her red biro.

  We’d settled down by a small pond in the park, making the most of the sunshine and the last of our lunch hour as we trolled through the audience list. It was pleasant to be out relaxing in the midday warmth and we’d decided it was best that neither Charlie nor Pete knew about the list.

  “How do you know for sure all these people’s dead relatives’ files were checked?” I watched her flip the page and circle another name.

  “I can read backwards,” Sabrina said, taking a bite of her baguette while circling yet another name.

  “Yeah?” I watched a young girl throw the ball for a small tan puppy of indeterminable species. “I can juggle.”

  Sabrina looked up from her list after a moment, her face wrinkled in confusion. “What?”

  I tore my eyes from the puppy, who’d decided to dig up the flowerbeds rather than chase the ball. “I thought we were listing random useless talents.”

  “When the police interviewed me they had a list of the people whose files had been illegally accessed,” she explained, but my blank expression must have told her I still didn’t see the connection. “The detective was standing with his back to the mirror. I could see the reflection of the list in the mirror. I can read backwards.”

  “Ah, okay.” I gestured to the sheet dotted with sporadic circles. “So how can they tell the files were illegally accessed?”

  “They came across it in the audit. Whoever accessed them signed them in and out.”

  I started at Sabrina. “What?”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “They didn’t sign them in and out with their own name, right?” That was just a step too far up the stupidity scale.

  “No, they used someone else’s name.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t their name?”

  “Because they used the name Elizabeth Windsor.”

  “Elizabe—as in the queen?”

  Sabrina raised her eyebrows and nodded. “Although I don’t understand why they signed them out in the first place.”

  “Don’t you have to? Didn’t you have to sign out Barry’s file?”

  Sabrina shook her head. “You’re supposed to. There’s a log sheet on the front of every folder. But I just find the file I want, take it to my desk to read and then put it back in the right place. Nobody notices.”

  “So why didn’t they do that?”

  Sabrina shook her head again. “I’ve no idea. Maybe they thought someone was watching them so tried to make it look like they were doing what they were supposed to. Funny thing is, if they hadn’t signed the file the audit wouldn’t have picked up any irregularities.”

  “So … the security process to keep all these oh-so-detailed files protected is basically an honour system?”

  “Yeah, basically.”

  “Huh.” I watched the tan puppy chase his tail until he got so dizzy he fell over. I kinda felt my life, or afterlife, was going in a similar direction.

  Sabrina folded the audience list and stuffed it into her pocket so she could concentrate on her lunch. “Now to go about finding this snooper.”

  “We could still go with the eavesdropping plan at lunch tomorrow.”

  “For sure,” Sabrina agreed. “That’s if this snooper doesn’t turn up at Fenton’s place tonight. You okay with your job now, consequences wise?”

  “Actually, I’m glad you mentioned that. Who in your department makes up the assignment lists?”

  “There’s a team who deals with it. But they only get a list of assignments and then break that list down into smaller lists and allocate them to the different facilitators. They have no raw information to help them create the assignments. I already asked.”

  �
�So who do they get the bigger list from?”

  “Comes by special messenger from the Edinburgh office,” Sabrina said and smiled indulgently at me. “Let’s get this death shroud off your back first before we start looking into that.”

  A man dressed in a bright red jumpsuit appeared directly in front of us with no warning. He startled me so badly I spilled my drink, soaking my lap in water.

  He grinned. “I have that effect on most women.”

  I doubted that. He was shorter than I was and a little chubby with badly bleached shoulder length hair. It’d clearly been a DIY job because it had that awful brassy tinge, and he was still at the awkward stage of adolescence where spots had taken over his face. I knew there was never a good time to die but that just seemed unnecessarily cruel.

  He looked between us. “Sabrina Shaw?”

  Sabrina stared blankly back at him. “Who?”

  “Yeah, Sabrina Shaw.” He checked his clipboard. “Which one of you two is it?”

  “Never heard of her.” Sabrina shook her head and looked at me. “Have you?”

  “Sorry.” I had no clue why Sabrina was pretending but figured she had her reasons.

  “Look. Stop playing around, all right? I know it’s one of you.” He gestured to each of us in turn with the corner of his clipboard. “So which one is it?”

  “How do you know it’s one of us?” I asked, still trying ineffectually to dab the water from my lap with a soggy tissue. There was something surreal about being told off by a child.

  “I just do,” he snapped. “Now, one of you own up.”

  “Looks like there’s a glitch with your thingamabob.” Sabrina pointed in his general torso area. “When was the last time you had it checked?”

  His eyes flicked to me then back to Sabrina. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s right, stick to protocol,” Sabrina said, nodding sagely. “I’d still get it checked, though.”

  “So, neither of you is Sabrina Shaw?” he asked again a lot more uncertain than the first time.

  “Have you got the older version?” Sabrina asked, nodding to his middle again. “I know a few tricks that could help you fix it.”