Melody Bittersweet and the Girls' Ghostbusting Agency

by Kitty French

  ‘It has a lock,’ I murmur, feeling ridiculous. Marina turns the little golden key and extracts it, holding it in the air like Exhibit A.

  ‘It’s a child’s toy, and I refuse to play your childish games.’

  He stalks towards the door, then pauses to speak again without even having the courtesy to look at me.

  ‘Leave the pens and the puzzle book on the table when you go.’

  Oh, I will, and I’ll leave the diary too, because despite his apparent fury, I think Lloyd wants it really quite badly.

  * * *

  Amazingly, the TV works like a dream after Artie has fiddled around with it, and I consult the TV guide I brought with me to see when the cricket is next on.

  ‘You’re in luck. There’s live coverage this afternoon,’ I say, and Douglas’s dark eyes flare with excitement.

  ‘You’ll have to remember to turn the TV off if anyone but us comes to the house,’ I warn him. I’ve yet to work out a cover story to explain why I’ve installed a TV in the sitting room, but one thing is for sure; it isn’t going to involve Douglas wanting to watch the cricket.

  ‘There’s swimming,’ Artie says, flicking through to the sport channels. ‘Or snooker.’

  ‘Swimming.’ Douglas stares at the screen with wistful eyes. ‘God, I loved to swim. Remember, Isaac, when we used to go and swim in the lake? Take a picnic?’ A playful smile crosses his lips as he rests his head back against the chair. ‘The girls in swimsuits were quite one of the best things about summer.’

  ‘I recall you were always very popular with the ladies.’ Isaac nods briefly towards the TV. ‘Not in suits like those though.’

  Douglas stares at the modern pool and the, no doubt comparatively tiny, bathing suits of today in fascination, whilst Marina, who hasn’t been privy to their trip down memory lane, grabs the remote and flips channels.

  ‘I was rather enjoying that,’ Douglas says mildly. ‘Do you like to swim, Melody?’

  I shrug, very aware that right now he’s probably imagining me in a scanty swim suit. ‘Not often these days.’

  Marina has settled on her choice of channel, and Artie looks sideways at her, surprised. ‘You like snooker?’

  ‘So what if I do?’ Even though it’s only Artie, she’s still immediately on the defensive; snooker isn’t something many twenty-something-year-old women like to watch.

  ‘Nothing,’ he shrugs. ‘What do you think of O’Sullivan’s chances this year?’

  A tiny smile brushes Marina’s mouth, and her shoulders relax from around her ears. ‘Fair to medium, he’s having a decent season. You?’

  ‘Is this billiards?’ Douglas says, sitting forward in the edge of his chair to study it.

  ‘Similar,’ I say. ‘Marina, Artie? Could you please explain the basics of snooker for Douglas? He’s just here.’ I indicate the seat, and try to imagine how it is for them to not be able to see him. It must be like green-screen acting to an empty room, but to give them their due they take my request on face value and start going over the basics, correcting each other every now and then.

  Leaving them settled, I turn to Isaac. ‘Can we sit down for a few minutes and run through the list?’

  He leads me away from the group of chairs around the TV to the sofas grouped around the fireplace at the top end of the room. I dig out his list as I sit down and smooth it out on my knee.

  ‘So, this is quite long,’ I say, turning it over. As I suspected, his cobweb writing continues on the back of the paper.

  I run my finger down the list, checking I understand each one before I move to the next. Some of them are quite self-explanatory; ‘under the cold slab in the pantry, behind the water boiler in the upstairs landing cupboard’.

  Then there’s things like ‘make a thorough search of the bedroom Lloyd hangs out in, the room he shared with his wife Maud when he was alive.’ I agree, but it’s going to be tricky to get in there with Lloyd breathing down my neck. Or not breathing down my neck, but you know what I mean.

  ‘Your parent’s bedroom?’ I say, moving down the list. ‘Show me which one it is?’ I glance towards the others chatting on the chairs grouped around the TV and call ‘Just going upstairs for five. Hang out there and keep Douglas company.’

  Artie lifts his hand and waves in acknowledgement whilst Marina points out something on the screen, clearly enjoying explaining the finer points to Douglas regardless of the fact that she can’t see him and he can’t answer her back. Thinking about it, that’s probably a good thing for both of them.

  * * *

  I follow Isaac as he heads into the hallway, up the stairs and along the shady first floor corridor to a closed door at the end.

  ‘I’ll wait for you to open it rather than just walk through it,’ he says, stepping aside.

  ‘Cheap tricks are best avoided unless you’re dealing with a rookie,’ I agree, hiding my smile as I turn the brass doorknob and push the heavy door open.

  ‘It’s changed quite a bit since my parents’ day,’ he says, even though to my eyes the bedroom is already a time warp. It looks as if it was last decorated in the 1970s, retro blonde wood wardrobes and furniture with sexy curves and simple lines. I like it, actually – it has cool, stylish appeal that wouldn’t look out of place in a home interiors magazine on sale today. The orange and lime wallpaper would make Orla Kiely swoon, and I’d like to roll the puffy, dull satin eiderdown up and take it home for my own bed. It’s deliciously kitsch, and quite different to the rest of the house.

  ‘Lloyd’s son let his wife Barbara redecorate it.’ The distaste in Isaac’s tone is clear.

  ‘Lloyd’s son . . . so that would be Donovan Scarborough’s father? The guy who recently passed away?’

  Isaac nods. ‘He allowed his wife free rein in here, and this was the result. I’m sure you can appreciate why she was never allowed to decorate the rest of the house.’

  Privately, I’m imagining that Barbara might have made a rather fabulous makeover job of it and feel quite sorry for her that she wasn’t given more freedom. I bet she spent a fair amount of her time up here in this room.

  ‘Okay, so I should ignore all of the recent additions, the wardrobes, the dressing table, etc,’ I muse. ‘What’s here that would have been here back in 1910?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  I look at him, doubtful. ‘That’s not a lot to go on.’

  Isaac shakes his head. ‘My dear, if you’re going to be a sleuth, you need to think like a sleuth.’

  ‘I’m not Miss Marple, Isaac. Help a girl out?’

  He scans the room. ‘Look around. Check the walls for signs of any disturbance in the brickwork, hidden compartments, loose floorboards.’

  ‘That’s all very well for you to say.’ The violently patterned rug is huge and has been down for longer than I’ve been alive, lifting it will likely make a dust cloud that could kill me.

  He crosses to the chimneybreast. ‘There was always a live fireplace here when my parents had this room. It’s been bricked up. Tap it, you’ll probably be able to tell.’

  I follow him across the room and do as I’m told, and believe it or not I can detect the change in sound as I rap my knuckles lightly on the wall.

  ‘There,’ I whisper, in wide-eyed wonder. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right,’ he says. ‘It’s hardly a surprise that these houses were built with fireplaces. We didn’t all have fancy radiators back in those days, you know.’

  I feel scolded. ‘I was only saying.’

  ‘You need to knock a hole through and check inside the fireplace.’

  I balk at the idea of damaging the property, and even more so at the thought of ripping that amazing wallpaper.

  ‘What do you expect me to do, Isaac, put my fist through? I’ll end up in A&E. Besides, why do you think we should check your parents’ room in particular?’

  ‘I didn’t say in particular, I just said you should check it. You’re going to have to do this in every room, not just this one.�
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  I huff, and make a mental note to check the internet tonight to see if anyone has written Basic Sleuthing for Dummies, because one of those big comforting yellow guides would come in really handy right about now.

  ‘Right. I’m not going to damage anything in here at this very moment,’ I voice my decision for Isaac’s benefit. ‘Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up through the house.’

  He doesn’t look all that impressed. ‘To the cellar, then.’

  It’s my turn to be unimpressed. I don’t need a dummies guide to tell me that bad things happen in cellars. We troop downstairs, and I decide that if I’m tackling the cellar, then it’s definitely a case of safety in numbers.

  ‘Marina? Artie?’ I call as I follow Isaac towards a door underneath the staircase.

  ‘We’re watching the snooker with Dougie,’ she calls back. ‘Be there in a sec, Bingham’s on for a potential one-four-seven.’

  ‘I have no clue what that means, but I’m on course to be potentially murdered in the cellar, so get your backsides out here and come down there with me!’ I aim for a jokey tone, but I think it might have come out more shrill/desperate/terrified. It has the desired effect though, because they both dash through and join me by the cellar door.

  ‘Who’s going to murder you?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’ I whisper to Marina. ‘It’s a cellar.’

  She looks at the cellar door and then back to me. ‘If Bingham gets a maximum break and I miss it, I’ll murder you myself.’

  Artie scratches his head. ‘You die either way in that scenario, Melody.’

  ‘Thank you, Artie,’ I smile wide. ‘That’s so incredibly comforting.’

  Marina turns her head and shouts over her shoulder. ‘Keep an eye on things for me, Dougie!’

  I lift my eyebrows at her for shortening his name in such a pally fashion, but she just shrugs and laughs.

  ‘I can be friends with the ghosts too, you know. Especially young, hot ones.’

  Artie rolls his shoulders and steps forward. ‘Let me go first.’

  For a moment I think about arguing, but then I change my mind. Artie Elliott is coming out of his shell more every day, and the fact that he’s putting himself forward like this is endearing. Plus, despite the fact that I hang out with the undead, I am actually a bit scared of dark and creepy cellars, so I magnanimously agree and step aside. He turns the paint-encrusted key with some difficulty and twists the handle a few times. With a sharp yank the door swings open.

  ‘Is there any electricity down there?’ I ask, looking at Isaac, whose expression is enough to tell me the answer is a big fat no.

  ‘I don’t think the bulb would still work, even if there was,’ Artie muses, pulling his phone out and clicking the torch on. Marina and I do the same and Isaac looks grudgingly impressed.

  ‘You all carry torches?’

  ‘They’re mobile phones. They have torches on these days.’

  He scowls. ‘Sometimes I’m glad I’m dead. All of this technology is beyond me.’

  ‘You won’t say that if we find the murder weapon and technology helps clear your name.’

  ‘I know we’re only getting one side of the conversation so I might be wrong, but you really should try to be a bit more grateful that we’re all putting our lives in danger for you here, Isaac,’ Marina mutters, gripping the bottom of my T-shirt tightly as we follow Artie slowly down the cellar steps, our phones held aloft to light the way. It’s more than gloomy down there, I’m glad of the slim shaft of daylight that picks out the steps.

  ‘Well, someone certainly liked their wine,’ Marina says as she runs an appreciative hand over the corks of the dusty, dark green bottles laid down on their sides in a rack built into one wall. As you’d expect from a house on the scale of Scarborough House, the cellar is quite large, and from what I can make out, it houses at least a century’s worth of junk.

  ‘My brother and his cronies, and no doubt his son too.’ Isaac’s sniffy tone tells me that he wasn’t a wine fan or, more likely, he never got the chance to live the high life if he was thrown out of the family in disgrace in his early-twenties. I can’t imagine how life was for him after that; it must have had a pretty catastrophic effect.

  ‘Did you never see your family at all afterwards?’

  ‘My mother sent for me shortly before her death.’

  ‘She did?’ I whisper in the darkness. ‘What did she want?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t come.’

  I can’t make Isaac out in the low light and his monotone delivery tells me precisely nothing. I don’t know if he regrets not coming back to hear his mother’s final words, or if he’s still furious and would do the same again if he had to make the choice right now.

  I don’t get much time to dwell on it though, because above us the cellar door suddenly slams decisively shut and plunges the place into complete darkness aside from our phones.

  ‘Oh no!’ I yelp loudly, horrified by the sudden hammer-house-of-horror turn of events. Artie makes a similarly shocked sound, whilst Marina’s choice of words is far more explicit as she grabs hold of the hem of my T-shirt again and winds it around her fist to make sure we are right next to each other.

  ‘Is this the bit where we all get murdered?’

  Her shaky voice only scares me more. Marina does not, repeat not, get scared. Neither do I. I see ghosts, remember? I am officially hardcore. Isaac is the only one who seems completely unmoved, most probably because he’s the only one amongst us who isn’t preoccupied by the possibility of imminent death.

  ‘Let me go and see what the devil’s going on up there,’ he says, agitated, and then he disappears into thin air, dispensing with his usual habit of observing the rules of the living because speed is of the essence.

  ‘This is the first time I’ve ever wished I was a ghost,’ Marina whispers when I tell them that Isaac has gone upstairs to investigate.

  ‘You might be in a few minutes,’ I joke, but unsurprisingly she doesn’t laugh. She goes to snip back, but I shush her because I can hear voices.

  ‘Isaac is arguing with someone . . . Lloyd, I think?’

  ‘What are they saying?’

  ‘Shush,’ I flap a hand in the darkness as I strain to hear them.

  ‘I can hear them too,’ Artie says suddenly, clutching my arm. ‘Oh my God, I can hear the ghosts, Melody!’

  Marina lets go of my T-shirt. ‘Sorry, Artie. Unless we’ve both been bashed over the head and died at the same time, there’s living, breathing people up there because I can hear them too.’ She pauses, and for a moment all I can hear is our own laboured breathing. ‘Women, I think?’

  We all struggle to hear. She’s right. Behind Isaac and Lloyd’s heated debate there are quieter female voices too. For a moment I fear Gran has turned up to meddle again, but why the hell would she lock me in a cellar? I listen harder, and no, I’m sure it isn’t Gran, or anyone else I know well enough to recognise.

  ‘I’ll just go up there and hammer on the door.’ Marina stomps towards the steps but I hang onto her arm.

  ‘Wait, let’s listen. They must know we’re here, which means they probably shut us in deliberately. Babs is hardly inconspicuous, is she? Let me go and see what I can suss out.’

  I inch up the steps in an exaggerated way and lay my ear to the door. It doesn’t help me that I can hear Isaac and Lloyd’s raised voices over the top of the hushed female ones. Bloody Isaac! If he’d just pop back this side of the door we could probably get this sorted out a damn sight faster.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop them, you silly old goat?’ I think that was Isaac.

  ‘Perhaps because I’ve been dead for over forty years?’

  ‘Well, you could have tried to frighten them, distracted them, anything but let them lock the door,’ Isaac roars. ‘Admit it. You were perfectly happy to see those children locked down there.’

  I bridle a little at the word ‘children’. We’re the best hope he’s got of sorting this out
; would it kill him to give us a little more respect? But then I suppose he was born in 1887, so maybe I’ll let that one slide.

  ‘Well, you should have made sure Miss Bittersweet and her cohorts closed the door behind them if they didn’t want people to know where they were,’ Lloyd sulks.

  ‘I damn well would have if I’d have thought for one moment that someone would come and lock them in. When did they get here?’

  ‘I didn’t notice.’

  ‘Like hell you didn’t.’

  ‘It’s true actually, Isaac.’

  ‘Lloyd and Isaac are arguing, and Douglas has just joined them,’ I say for Marina and Artie’s benefit.

  ‘Lloyd was watching that billiard game on the television with me,’ Douglas says. ‘Someone scored the most possible points from what I can gather. Quite tense, actually.’

  I wince, and decide it’s best not to mention to Marina that she’s just missed a maximum break.

  ‘Well?’ hisses Marina. ‘Who is it?’

  I sigh with frustration. ‘I can’t hear them over the argument about whose fault it is that we’re locked in. Oh, hang on . . .’

  I step away from the door as Isaac finally materialises through it.

  ‘You took your time,’ I grumble under my breath. ‘Who’s out there?’

  ‘Bloody twins, they should be ashamed of themselves.’ He shakes his head in disgust.

  ‘Isaac, please. I don’t have time to talk about Lloyd and Douglas right now. Who locked us in?’

  ‘I’m not talking about my brothers,’ he says. ‘Those girls locked you in.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Girls? For a second I’m confused, and then the mists clear. Nikki and Vikki, Leo’s Barbie Twins have locked us in the cellar.