by Kitty French
‘Leo’s out there?’ I’m genuinely shocked and more than a little bit hurt. Despite Gran’s stunt with the armour, I thought we had more respect for each other than this.
‘I didn’t see anyone else but those two women. I don’t think their boss is here.’ Isaac frowns.
Marina, on hearing my words, barges up the steps and bangs hard on the door. ‘I’ll kill you for this, Leo Dark. Open this frigging door this minute, and then you better hope you can outrun me!’
‘I’m not sure he’s here, Marina,’ I say quietly. ‘Isaac seems to think it’s just the twins.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ She hammers her fists against the thick old door, furious. ‘I’m seriously losing my temper in here! You two are so dead when you open this door.’
To be absolutely honest, I don’t think she’s helping our cause. If I was one of the twins, I wouldn’t let her out for fear of what she’d do.
We freeze, waiting. Deathly silence. We wait some more. Still nothing.
‘Isaac, go and find out what’s happening.’
‘I’m not sure I appreciate being used as a go between,’ he grumbles.
‘Well, I can’t exactly do it myself can I?’ I hiss. ‘Please?’
‘Fine,’ he relents ungraciously. ‘Wait there.’
‘Well, I’m hardly likely to go anywhere else, am I?’
I stand back as he disappears back through the door and let Marina and Artie, who by now have taken a seat on the stairs, know what’s happening.
‘Can you believe those two?’ Marina says, sticking two sticks of fresh gum into her mouth at the same time and chewing aggressively.
‘Honestly? No. I really can’t,’ I say. I find it hard to imagine the twins doing anything without being expressly told to, I’m guilty of assigning them no free will at all. In my head, they’re Leo’s glamorous autobots, sort of similar to how Paris Hilton might have a pair of teacup pigs in her handbag just for show. I have underestimated them at my own peril.
Lloyd strolls through the closed door, looking far too smug for my liking. He’s clearly enjoying this.
‘Is this a bad moment to mention that those two ladies are leaving and they appear to have taken the key with them?’
‘Leaving? They can’t leave us down here!’ I practically shout, and Marina and Artie both jump up at the same time.
‘Get your scrawny arses back here and open this fucking door this instant!’ Marina lets rip, but all we hear is the resounding slam of the front door echoing around the high-ceilinged hall.
‘Oh shit,’ I whisper, clutching my face between my flattened palms. ‘They’ve only actually gone and bloody left us.’
‘I wish I’d brought my lunch box with me,’ Artie says, and we both stare at him, incredulous.
‘Sorry.’ He looks crestfallen. ‘It’s egg sandwiches, my favourite.’
‘I think that’s my cue to leave you all to it.’ Lloyd gives me a superior little smile before he disappears, marking himself out as a member of ‘Team Leo’, or more likely as team Lloyd. He doesn’t seem to really have much in the way of empathy for anyone.
‘Phone reception?’ I say, and we all click our screens to check.
‘Nothing.’ Marina shakes her phone as if it might help.
‘I’ve got one bar,’ Artie says, and then his phone promptly dies. ‘And no battery.’
We all look at my mobile, now officially our last hope. The signal is flickering between no service and one bar when I move my hand around in big circles.
‘Okay. I might be able to make a call,’ I say calmly. ‘But who to?’
‘The police?’ Marina jumps right in.
‘Anyone without sirens?’ I’m really keen not to make a scene that will draw Fletcher Gunn’s attention. I fully expect that he has a hotline from the police station set up to give him the juicy goss on all incoming emergency call-outs, and there’s no juicier bone for that man than a Bittersweet in distress.
‘Well, we can safely cross Leo off the list,’ I say. I have no way to know why his minions were here without him or if he even knew anything about it, but he’s the last person I’m going to call right now.
‘Your mother? Your gran?’
I consider it; my mother and grandmother closing up Blithe Spirits early to come over here and rescue us. This is my first official case for the agency. Am I really so inept that I need to call my mum?
‘Any other suggestions?’
Unusually for Douglas, he hurtles into the cellar at a dash straight through the locked door rather than his usual relaxed stroll.
‘You can get out through the coal chute,’ he says quickly. ‘I snuck out of there enough times to know.’
I stare at him, hopeful. ‘The coal chute?’
He nods across the darkness of the cellar. ‘Over there to the left of the chimney breast.’
‘Coal chute over by the chimney,’ I relay to the others, using my phone as a torch again to scan the wall. We all squint as we bump and squeeze our way across the dark, cluttered room.
‘There, look,’ Artie says, pointing up towards the ceiling. ‘Is that it?’
‘It latches from bolts on the inside, I think,’ Isaac says, frowning.
Artie stretches up, but his fingers are a good few inches short.
‘There’s bound to be a step ladder around here,’ Douglas says, surveying the heaped up crates, the tea chests and old suitcases.
‘Step ladders?’ I use short hand to pass the message on, but none of us can see anything resembling steps anywhere.
Artie drags a wooden tea chest across, huffing and puffing as he goes around the other side and shoves it into place beneath the hatch. ‘This is heavier than it looks,’ he puffs, then clambers up on it and reaches for the bolts.
‘Got it,’ he says, quiet and triumphant at finding the hatch, then works the bolts free and shoves both of his hands hard against the closed trap doors. Sunlight floods in, making us all blink furiously, and a second later the tea-chest lid creaks and Artie’s foot goes straight through it.
‘Crap. Artie, are you okay?’ Marina and I leap forward and grab an arm each to steady him, but he just grins, one leg buried up to the knee in the wooden chest.
‘I did it, didn’t I?’ His smile outshines the sunbeams shafting across the cellar.
‘You did,’ I say softly. ‘You’ve earned that egg sandwich, Artie Elliott.’
‘I might even make you a cup of tea without grumbling,’ Marina adds.
I look around the cellar, which isn’t anywhere near so frightening now it’s not pitch black. ‘We’re going to need something more secure to stand on than that chest.’
Artie wriggles his leg free, and as he begins to push the chest out of the way I glance inside it at the exposed contents. Dropping to my knees on the cold flagstone floor, I pick out the pieces of shattered wooden lid and lay them aside.
‘What’s in there?’ Marina says, peering over as I lift out several beautiful encyclopaedias.
‘Books,’ I say, piling them up carefully beside the crate. ‘And these.’ I pick up a stack of smaller books tied together with packing string. The dark blue snakeskin effect cover of the top volume is papery thin leather, with numbers stamped on the front in faded golden swirls. 1908. Diaries. My heart starts to thump as I look at the bundle. Ten years’ worth, probably more. Isaac’s words come back to me about Lloyd. ‘He was a keen diarist . . .’
Back at the office, I get straight on the phone to Leo. It comes as little surprise when it goes straight to answer phone. I’m about to leave a furious message when someone taps the door, and Artie opens it to reveal the Barbie Twins standing outside.
Marina’s out of her chair and across the room in a flash, so I click my phone off and make a dash to hold her back. Artie and I link arms with her on either side in the doorway, and I can’t be certain but I think her feet leave the floor for a few seconds and cycle in the air.
‘Ladies,’ I say.
T
heir eyes flicker nervously from one of us to the other.
‘We’re sorry,’ says the one on the left, wringing her hands.
Marina surges between us with her fists balled and we struggle to keep hold of her.
‘Really, very sorry,’ the other twin says, batting her long, presumably false lashes and sounding anguished. ‘We did a bad thing.’
‘A very, very bad thing,’ twin one adds more gravitas.
‘We could have died down there!’ Marina growls. ‘I could be . . . I don’t know, I could be diabetic and not have had my diabetic thing with me! And Melody’s afraid of the dark! You could have given her an actual heart attack.’
I waver. I’m not entirely sure I appreciate being made to sound such a scaredy cat but I hold my tongue because she plainly isn’t finished yet.
‘And Artie could have . . . fallen down the steps and broken his leg! In fact he very nearly did. Show them, Artie, show them your limp!’
Artie looks conflicted. He clearly wants to back Marina up, but on pulling up his trouser leg it’s obvious that the tiny skin graze is not going to give him much trouble.
‘You two did that. Are you proud of yourselves now?’
The twins shake their heads and look at the floor, and a tear drips from one of their faces onto the cobbles outside the office door.
‘We went back an hour later to let you out again but you’d gone,’ one of them whispers.
‘That’s quite lucky for you, to be honest,’ Artie says, without a hint of malice. ‘Because Marina wanted to wring your turkey necks until your eyes popped out of your heads.’ He glances down at Marina. ‘Did I get that right?’
She nods, breathing in deeply and then blowing out again in slow, measured breaths. I recognise it as a sign that she’s calming herself down so slowly, experimentally, I let go of her arm. After a couple of uneventful seconds, I nod towards Artie to do the same and I’m relieved to see that Marina has cooled her jets enough to not storm forward and hurl herself on the twins. I love her passion, but it’s landed her, and me by association, in more than our fair share of trouble over the years. Let’s just say the local police officers know our names, although less so in more recent times, thankfully. That breathing technique is something she picked up on one of the mandatory anger management classes she attended in lieu of a probation order.
I ask the only question that means anything to me about the whole incident. ‘Did Leo tell you to do this?’
They both look up, stricken.
‘No,’ one of them whispers.
‘Please don’t tell him,’ the other begs, tears leaving crisscross tracks in her immaculate make-up. Her face is so perfectly smooth that she suddenly reminds me of one of my favourite childhood dolls, one that you could put water in the back of and she’d cry real tears. She peed her pants too, but let’s gloss over that part.
‘He’d left his jacket at Scarborough House and asked us to pick it up on our way into work, and when we got there, well . . .’
‘What?’ I say, unmoved by their emotion. ‘You realised we were there and thought it might be fun to trap us in a damp, dark cellar and leave us there to rot?’
They flinch, and I feel horribly like I’m kicking kittens.
‘We thought it might put you off,’ one of them mumbles.
‘We just wanted to help him.’
And then I get it. The twins are fully paid-up Darklings; they saw a chance to do something they thought would aid their hero’s cause and went ever so slightly, temporarily insane. I don’t know whether to be impressed or scared by that kind of fandom.
‘Well, you couldn’t have got it more wrong,’ I say. ‘Because all you’ve done is strengthened our resolve.’
Marina sighs heavily next to me. ‘You’re not going to tell Leo what they did, are you?’
Hope flares in the twin’s eyes as they both stare at me, and I glance down and notice they’re holding hands. For God’s friggin’ sake! Where did he find these child-women?
‘Just go,’ I say, resigned. ‘And don’t ever think about pulling another stunt like that on us again. I’ll tell Leo in a heartbeat if you do, are we clear? No second chances.’
They nod and begin to back away, their stilettos unsteady on the cobbles.
Marina folds her arms across her chest and clears her throat as she stares them down.
‘I think you forgot to say thank you.’
The twins both nod, hurriedly gabbling their thank yous at her over the top of each other.
‘Not to me.’ Marina rolls her eyes and jerks her head in my direction. ‘To Melody.’ She has never sounded more Sicilian.
I smile tightly as they apologise profusely.
‘You did us a bit of a favour, actually,’ Artie says, lifting his hand to wave them off. ‘We found some important things down there, didn’t we? Those—’
Marina and I both lurch forward and slam the door shut at the same time to cut him off mid-flow and prevent him from spilling the news to the twins about the diaries, but not soon enough for me to miss the looks of complete panic that cross the twins faces at the idea that they’ve inadvertently handed us an advantage.
I look at him and grin, and then laughter bubbles up in my chest.
‘Artie Elliott, you are one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,’ I laugh, and as I catch Marina’s eye the tension finally leaves her shoulders and she laughs too. This ghostbusting lark is turning out to be more hair-raising than any of us had anticipated. I don’t know what Nonna Malone’s tea time treat is today, but whatever is I’m having at least four of them.
Artie watches us, perplexed, but pleased. ‘I’ve never been locked in a cellar before. This is the best job I’ve ever had.’
* * *
‘I think these are my favourite yet.’ I reach for a third anginetti cookie despite the fact that the lemon icing is rich enough to dissolve my teeth on contact.
‘They go lovely with tea,’ Artie says, a comment designed purely for the purpose of winding up Marina, who narrows her eyes at him as he dunks one in his mug.
‘Nonna would weep,’ she whispers, slamming the lid down and putting the tin out of his reach. Sadly, it’s out of mine too, so it looks like our break is officially over.
‘Right. Shall we take a look at Lloyd’s diaries?’ I’m dying to see what lies inside those pages.
Marina nods. ‘Do you think we should wear white cotton gloves like on the TV?’
I pause. ‘Because they’re old and precious or because they’re evidence in a murder case?’
She shrugs. ‘Both?’
We don’t have a shred of police procedural knowledge between us that hasn’t been gained from watching CSI. ‘There’s a box of those thin surgical rubber gloves under mum’s sink,’ I say. ‘I’ll go and grab some just in case.’
I find Gran in the kitchen watching an American daytime soap opera she’s addicted to.
‘I thought you’d given up on this after the character you liked went psycho and held the bank up, dressed in his wife’s underwear,’ I say, heading for the sink.
She sips from the teacup on the table that she uses to disguise her champagne during the day. ‘It was all just a misunderstanding, darling.’
I frown, wondering how you explain away robbing a bank in your wife’s red lace basque. Gran looks away from the screen as it cuts to a commercial break and shrugs. ‘It’s America, darling. They do things differently over there.’
I go to say, no, they really don’t, and I then decide not to bother defending our special friends across the Atlantic, because they’re single-handedly responsible for Jeremy Kyle. If there had been no Jerry Springer, Jezza would have never been given air-time to torment the nation on a daily basis. But then they also gave us iPhones and peanut M&Ms and Ironman, so I’m caught by indecision. Gran excuses me from the need to reply by zoning out because her show is back on, so I let the whole debate go in favour of searching under the sink for latex gloves, needed to read a dead man�
�s diaries. Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up.
‘Gran, you don’t happen to know where those thin rubber gloves have gone, do you?’
‘Shop,’ she says, or at least I think that’s what she says. I retract my head from behind the u-bend and straighten up onto my knees.
‘Did you say they’re in the shop?’
She nods without taking her eyes from the screen.
‘Silvana took them through there a few days back.’
I haul myself to my feet, and as I pass the fridge she holds her teacup out, again without looking at me.
‘This tea needs a little more milk. Would you mind, darling?’
I flip the fridge door open and extract the champagne bottle, wondering if Nonna Malone knocks back the grappa while she bakes cookies or if it’s just my bonkers gran whose blood is twelve percent proof.
* * *
I head around to the front of the building on the High Street and push open the old shop door, enjoying the familiar, mellow jingle of the old-fashioned bell. It suits my mother’s style to keep Blithe Spirits as traditional as possible, and there is little different about the shop interior to how it might have looked a hundred years previously. The wooden panelling has been carefully maintained, and the small bevelled panes of glass in the curved bay windows are all original. Jugs of fresh flowers fill the deep windowsills and the counter that runs along one side has a deep, subtle shine from decades of beeswax. My mum has added a couple of jewelled velvet armchairs in front of her impressive library of occult books, deeply buttoned and comfortable, and it’s sitting in one of these where I find her now, with the newspaper open on her lap and her glasses balanced on the end of her slender nose. Everything about her is long, lithe and pale; she must look at me and wonder how I wound up being a barely five-foot brunette. Not that she’s ever said anything of the sort; she’s never made me feel anything but perfect for her, because I have my dad’s round brown eyes and, according to her, his wide smile and dimples. We look entirely unrelated, but people who know us well tell us that we are more similar in personality than in looks.