by Sophie Green
Contents
Title Page
Also by Sophie Green
Dedication
Chapter 1: Alias Stellar Darke
Chapter 2: Mr Dose
Chapter 3: These Pots Aren’t Going to Wash Themselves
Chapter 4: The Toymaker
Chapter 5: The Doll Hospital
Chapter 6: The Locked Door
Chapter 7: Multi-Storey Murder
Chapter 8: The Dog Who Wouldn’t Play Ball
Chapter 9: There’s No Such Thing as Ghosts
Chapter 10: Peligan City Morgue
Chapter 11: The Peligan City Paranormal Society
Chapter 12: Jailbreak
Chapter 13: The Brave Dr Lankin
Chapter 14: How Do You Like Those Onions?
Chapter 15: Scooped
Chapter 16: Exposé
Chapter 17: Haunted
Chapter 18: The Secure Wing
Chapter 19: The Stolen File
Chapter 20: The Bird Can Sing
Chapter 21: Hide-and-seek
Chapter 22: Deal or No Deal
Chapter 23: Nothing But Creepy Toys
Chapter 24: Invisible Friends
Chapter 25: The Last Poppet
Chapter 26: Mr Grip
Chapter 27: The Ghost in the Machine
Chapter 28: An Early Breakfast
Acknowledgements
About Sophie Green
About Karl James Mountford
Copyright
ALSO BY SOPHIE GREEN
Potkin and Stubbs
To all those who keep the library doors open
Chapter 1
Alias Stellar Darke
It was mid-afternoon and snow was spiralling through the November sky, pure and white as it passed the street lamps, wet and grey as it touched the pavements of Peligan City. It was the kind of snow that made the air look grainy, ghosting out the tower blocks and the industrial chimneys on the horizon.
A small figure stood out against the gloom: Lil Potkin, woollen earmuffs nestled over her cup-handle ears and a thin scarf tucked into her bright yellow raincoat. Lil was perched on the back of a frosty wooden bench, in front of the Limelight Picture House on the corner of Spooner Row and Bead Street. Snow dusted her hair, gathered in her hood and slowly soaked its way through the leather of her boots.
On the seat below sat Nedly Stubbs, her friend and fellow investigator. Snow didn’t land on him at all, because Nedly was a ghost. Thin, stooped and wearing nothing but a frayed grey sweatshirt, worn jeans and battered trainers, Nedly wasn’t visible to anyone but Lil, although people felt his presence all the same: a whisper at the back of their neck, an icy spot to be avoided – something they might call a bad case of the creeps.
Nedly had been killed while trying to save a young man called Leonard Owl from the clutches of the evil genius Cornelius Gallows. Gallows, after faking his own death, had laid low for a decade, perfecting his macabre experimental procedure for capturing a ghost and binding it to his will. But on the night of his first attempt, unbeknownst to Gallows, two ghosts, not one, were forged. One was Leonard’s ghost, whom Gallows bound and called Mr Glimmer. The second ghost was Nedly, who escaped to wander invisible, confused and alone until he found someone willing to take on his case and discover exactly what had happened to him and why.
Nedly had waited for a year in the Paradise Street All-Night Bus Station before he met Lil. Lil had persuaded Abe Mandrel, the former police detective turned private eye, to join forces, and together they had solved the mystery of Nedly’s murder, thwarted Gallows’ evil plans and rescued his treacherous partner in crime, the disgraced former mayor Ramon LeTeef, from Gallows’ most terrifying ghostly creation, Mr Grip.
Now Gallows had vanished again, but Lil was sure of one thing; he wasn’t finished with Peligan City yet.
Across from where she and Nedly were sitting was an old warehouse with empty, snow-crusted windows and three steps leading to a bricked-up double doorway. Despite the cold, Lil had been staring at it without moving for over ten minutes. Her gaze was broken only by the occasional car splattering through the puddles of melted slush, or the odd passer-by hurrying along the pavement, eyes squinting against the snow, with their hat pulled down and their scarf wound high.
‘I don’t get it,’ she murmured. ‘Delilah’s always there, that doorway is her home – it has been for years and now … Where is she and who is that guy in her spot?’
The man in question was lying inside a blue-and-orange sleeping bag in the midst of a carefully constructed den of old crates and flattened cardboard. He looked like an old brown moth emerging from a brightly coloured chrysalis. A trapper hat was pulled low over his eyes and his head was flopped back, mouth slightly open.
‘Why don’t you ask him?’ said Nedly.
Lil bit her lip. ‘I will. I just want to stake him out a bit before I go in. Now that I’ve had an article printed in the Klaxon I’ve got to keep a low profile.’
Nedly nodded soberly. ‘Maybe you should get a less conspicuous coat?’
‘This is my signature yellow mac. I can’t just stop wearing it. That would look suspicious.’
The mac bore the scars of Lil’s previous escapades: the left-hand sleeve was melted slightly and black soot had ingrained itself in the fabric when she had tried to rescue Abe Mandrel from his burning apartment; the stitching round the hood was loose where she had been grappled in a headlock by the ex-mayor of Peligan City’s bodyguard; and there were puncture marks on both wristbands where a specially adapted crochet hook had tried to loosen the ropes that bound her hands when she was taken prisoner by Gallows in an abandoned asylum.
It had seen better days but it had character.
She pulled out a pencil that she had lodged in her hair and chewed on the end of it thoughtfully. She had wanted to keep it tucked behind her ear like her hero, the enigmatic investigative reporter A. J. McNair used to, but she didn’t have the right kind of ears. Lil was also teaching herself to twiddle a pencil casually between her fingers like a baton. It was early days but it looked pretty good when she got it right.
McNair had been the chief journalist for the Chronicle, Peligan City’s former newspaper. Legend had it that he had been killed while pursuing a political corruption story. The next day City Hall shut the Chronicle down and founded the Herald in its stead, and that was the last anyone in Peligan knew of the free press. Now the only place the real news was reported was in the Klaxon, an underground gazette written by a handful of anonymous reporters and circulated inside flyers for a non-existent restaurant, the Black Pug Eatery.
For as long as she could remember it had been Lil’s dream to write for the Klaxon, but an undercover reporter with the alias Randall Collar had beaten her to the corruption scoop about Ramon LeTeef. Lil didn’t mind as much as she thought she would; although they had never met, she admired Collar, and often dreamt that if she could get her hands on another really big political story, maybe they could work on it together. In fact, Lil had a fistful of dreams about the kind of reporter she’d like to become and she held on to them tightly. Now that she’d had her first article published – a half-page profile on Delilah Joan, a nightclub singer who had fallen on hard times and was usually found sleeping in the doorway opposite – Lil was sure her dreams were lined up to become a reality; behind the aroma of exhaust fumes and rubbish bins that hung in every street, she could sense a story lurking. She could almost smell the newsprint in the air.
‘Well,’ said Nedly, clearing his throat meaningfully, ‘while we’re waiting I want to show you something.’
Lil dragged her gaze away from the doorway. ‘Go on then. I’m all eyes.’
He gulped.
‘OK. Check this out.’ He swivelled to face the Limelight Picture House, now showing a double bill of Time is a Deadly Vice and The Night is Smoke and Shadows. The edge of the billboard was studded with light bulbs; Nedly narrowed his eyes at them, wriggled his shoulders and took a deep breath.
One of the bulbs dimmed, grew brighter, and dimmed again. Lil waited
‘That’s it?’ she said eventually. Nedly’s face fell.
‘I’m actually controlling it!’ he protested.
‘Nedly. I thought you were going to be working on some serious moves. How long did it take you to learn that one?’
‘Just a few weeks, but I’ve been working on something else at the same time so …’
‘Weeks! You’re supposed to be learning useful stuff like how to bend iron bars with your mind, or –’
‘Are you talking to me?’ An old woman in a corduroy cap and thick plastic glasses had stopped in front of the bench and was looking at Lil with alarm.
‘No, sorry, I was just thinking out loud.’ The edges of Lil’s ears glowed scarlet. She waited for the woman to pass and then continued in a whisper, ‘Or picking locks with your invisible fingers. Nedly, Gallows is still at large!’
‘But you said learning to control electricity would be something worth knowing.’
Lil avoided Nedly’s hurt look. She jumped down from the bench. ‘It’s just not the kind of thing I meant when I said “learn some combat skills”. Gallows could strike at any minute!’ She huffed as she jumped down from the bench and then skidded her way across the road to the man in the sleeping bag.
Lil leant across to give him a gentle prod and whispered, ‘Hey, mister.’
He opened his eyes like his lids were spring-loaded. ‘So you finally decided to come over?’
Lil nearly jumped out of her skin. ‘I thought you were asleep!’
He tutted. ‘I didn’t even have my eyes properly closed. I was just keeping very still and there’s no law against that.’
‘I never said there was.’ Lil tucked her hair behind her ears and then untucked it again. ‘I just wanted to ask you something. You see, I’m looking for a woman called Delilah. She’s always here … and now she’s not.’
‘And I am.’ He let his eyelids droop and then flickered them open again. ‘This is one of the best pitches in Peligan City – you know why? Down there is a furnace.’ He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, past the bricked-up doorway behind him. ‘Keeps the cold out, day and night. Keeps me warm. Kept Delilah warm too for as long as she wanted it. But she didn’t want it any more, so now it’s mine.’ He snuggled down into his bag and pulled the drawstring opening up to his chin. ‘What is it to you?’
‘Well, this investigative reporter wrote a profile of her and it got published in the Klaxon, which is this underground news pamphlet –’
‘I know it.’
‘Right.’ Lil beamed. ‘So you’ll know it’s a pretty big deal and I just thought she might like to see it.’ She thumbed the piece of newsprint in her pocket that she had been carrying around with her ever since she’d been published. ‘Maybe you’d like to read it yourself?’
Lil looked furtively over her shoulder and then took a step forward into the shelter of the doorway. The man was right; it was warmer in there. She held the news pamphlet out until his fingers emerged from the bag like a hermit crab from its shell and took hold of it.
He held the paper right up to his eyes and peered closely and then handed it back. ‘Seen it already.’
‘You have?’ Lil had to work hard to keep the smile off her face as she repocketed the pamphlet. ‘Well, I expect you’re wondering who the new reporter Stellar Darke is, then.’ She tried twiddling the pencil but it flew out of her fingers and disappeared into the man’s cardboard nest.
‘Who?’
Lil bit back an eye-roll. ‘The intrepid reporter who wrote the article. You see, Stellar Darke will be an alias – it’s not her, or his, real name.’
‘Uh-huh.’ The man settled back and closed his eyes.
‘So even if I knew who it was, which I don’t, obviously, I couldn’t tell you. It would go against the reporter’s code of conduct, or something like that. It literally could be anyone. You …’
One eye opened a crack and then shut again. ‘It’s not me,’ he assured her.
‘Me,’ Lil said hopefully.
He chuckled. ‘That’s even more unlikely than it being me; you can’t be any older than ten.’
Lil gritted her teeth; her ears were getting hot. ‘I’m nearly thirteen and it could be me. But it isn’t,’ she added quickly. ‘But it could be.’
The man pushed himself further down in the sleeping bag and tugged the brim of his hat. ‘Whatever you say.’
She swallowed hard. ‘It wasn’t you I wanted to show it to anyway. Like I said, I’m looking for Delilah.’
He nodded without opening his eyes. ‘All right. If she comes by, I’ll tell her. What did you say your name was again?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Lil, mentally punching the air at being able to put her latest move, the ‘Cryptic Eyebrow raise’ into action. She held it for a few seconds hoping that the man would open his eyes in time to catch it. He didn’t.
‘Well, good luck, whoever you are. No one has seen her for days.’
‘No one?’ Lil let the Cryptic Eyebrow drop into a frown. ‘So where is she?’
‘Beats me. The same place as the others I suppose.’
A cold feeling squirmed in Lil’s belly. The falling snow surged as the wind changed direction and blew icily against her cheek. She shivered.
‘What others?’
But the man in the doorway didn’t reply, his eyes stayed shut and the breath whistled out of his nose.
Across the road Nedly was making three of the bulbs round the billboard flash on and off in a sequence. A little kid in a bobble hat was standing under the marquee of the picture house, watching the display, wide-eyed.
As Lil drew near the bench Nedly turned to face her. His smile was radiant. ‘Like I said, it’s just something I’ve been working on.’ The smile drooped when he saw her expression. ‘What did he say?’
Lil shrugged. ‘Delilah’s not there. She’s vanished.’ She squinted up the road. ‘Something doesn’t feel right.’
Nedly followed the direction of her gaze, into the shadows that lurked in the alleyways that cut between the buildings opposite. ‘You say that nearly every day.’
Lil gave him a look. ‘One day I’m going to be right.’
She shivered and – bang! – one of the light bulbs exploded suddenly. Nedly’s pale skin had turned china white.
Lil looked at the fragments of shattered glass winking in the slush.The little kid was shaking tearfully, a woman came out from the box office, put her arm round him and ushered him inside.
Without taking her eyes away Lil whispered to Nedly. ‘You feel it too, don’t you? The creeps.’
Nedly didn’t reply. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and kicked at a ridge of filthy snow with his toe, knocking a couple of flakes off the top but leaving it otherwise intact.
Across town an alarm bell had started ringing.
Chapter 2
Mr Dose
The wheels of the hospital trolley twisted and squealed as it was roughhoused out of the cell. Its cargo, an old grey-faced man with conspicuous front teeth, was bound loosely with leather straps round his sunken chest, but they weren’t necessary; he was too frail to escape, even if he wanted to.
Vassal Hench, the man pushing the trolley, wore his small pork-pie hat on the slant, like a garnish, over his thick oily hair. It was completely at odds with the orderly’s uniform that stretched uneasily over his hunched shoulders. As the trolley moved past the rows of metal cages, eyes watched from the darkness behind the bars, and the occasional whimper was stifled with trembling hands. Those taken on the shrieking trolley never returned and no one knew who would be next.
Well, almost no one.
A metal machine, about the size of a shoebox, hummed menacingly in the background, sprouting a tangle of discs on wires like suckers. Hench wrangled the trolley towards it and then jumped as a thin man stepped out of the shadows before him.
‘Trouble, Hench?’ The speaker, Cornelius Gallows, wore a surgical mask and a long rubber apron over his doctor’s coat. His deep-set eyes watched coldly from under his hairless brow.
‘Quiet as a lamb, Dr Gallows,’ Hench replied, shakily mopping his forehead with a red-spotted handkerchief.
Gallows’ left eyelid twitched as he examined the man on the trolley. He fixed two adhesive discs on either side of the man’s bony temples, and two on his chest. Then he held out a hand impatiently, clicking his fingers.
Hench passed him a poppet made from white flour-sacking sewn with heavy black thread and stuffed with straw. A face had been stitched on – crosses for eyes, a straight-stitch mouth – and tacked to the topknot where the cloth was gathered and fastened with string, was a tiny bell. Gallows placed the poppet across the man’s chest, where it lay barely rising and falling with his shallow, wheezing breaths.
Gallows’ fingertips quivered as he turned a dial on the machine. Electricity surged through the wires; the adhesive discs crackled and sparked. The old man’s eyes snapped open, his body jerked and his mouth formed a scream that never sounded.
A sickly smell of burning fizzed in the air.
The old man lay there, no longer breathing. His eyes stared blankly. Gallows took out a stethoscope and held it against the corpse’s chest. He listened for a minute and then nodded to himself.
The air grew cold and clammy. The emergency lamps buzzed and dimmed. Gallows looked at the thermometer on the wall.
‘It’s here,’ he whispered. ‘The one we will call “Mr Dose”.’
Hench gave an involuntary shudder.