Melody Bittersweet and the Girls' Ghostbusting Agency

by Kitty French

  ‘Jesus sodding Christ!’ Marina is hopping mad when I relay this in our Monday-morning meeting around the coffee table. ‘Watch your back? Did you tell your mum that they’ve already had their first go at stabbing you in it?’

  I shake my head. ‘Mum thinks it would be best if we work with Leo to sort the Brimsdale Road case out.’

  ‘What, and let him grab all the glory on live TV just to keep Pyscho and Nutso off your back? What about the next case, and the case after that?’

  Glenda Jackson is perched neatly on the armchair, and I shake my head so she doesn’t record that particular comment in the meetings book.

  ‘She’s just worried for me. You know how she gets.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t need to be. You’ve got me.’ Marina won’t stand for intimidation unless she’s the one doing it.

  ‘And me,’ Artie says sitting beside me on the little sofa with his mouth full of one of Nonna Malone’s cucidati cookies. I look at the tin and wonder how likely it is that I can hide the rest of the iced, fig-filled biscuits, and then I watch in horror as Lestat’s head looms up over the edge of the table and faceplants into the tin.

  ‘No!’ I shout, lunging for him, but it’s too late. He’s got icing in the folds of his furry face and drool all over Nonna’s wonderful creations. I can take his snoring and his early morning wake-up calls, but he’s just pressed the wrong button and tipped me over the edge.

  ‘I’m taking him back,’ I growl. ‘Put it in the minutes, Glenda! Lestat is going back to the rehoming centre on account of the fact that he is ruining my goddamn life!’

  The dog pauses and looks up at me thoughtfully when I shout and then chows back down again. Everyone stares at me, and Glenda makes no move to record Lestat’s predicament in the minutes. I don’t think she’s taking me seriously. I go to speak, but then something terrible happens. My eyes fill with big fat tears that burst free and tumble down my cheeks. It catches me totally unawares; like a sudden nosebleed you have no control over.

  ‘Oh no.’ Marina shoots up in an instant to grab a tissue from the desk and then puts her arm around my shoulders. ‘This is about more than Lestat eating Nonna’s cucidati, surely? Because if that’s all it is she’ll bake you some more.’

  I blink to clear my vision, feeling like a fool. ‘I’m okay, really I am.’ My voice comes out in sniffly gulps. ‘It’s not just the biscuits, it’s lots of things. It’s how horrible and sad Agnes Scarborough’s diary was, and how I hadn’t counted on gaining freaky enemy twins when I started this, and how I’m not exactly sure how to resolve the case, and how I nearly had mind-blowing sex with Fletcher Gunn on Saturday night and now Lestat has eaten all of the biscuits and they were my new favourites.’

  All three of them stare at me open-mouthed.

  ‘Don’t put any of that in the minutes, Glenda,’ Marina says.

  ‘Especially the bit about Fletcher Gunn,’ I say, wishing I’d kept that particular woe to myself. ‘And for God’s sake don’t tell Mum or Gran. You know how much they hate him.’

  Poor Glenda. She is quite caught between the Bittersweet businesses now that she works for both of them.

  ‘Oh, I won’t,’ she assures me. ‘But in my experience, Melody, mind-blowing sex is not something to be passed up lightly. Fletcher Gunn is a terribly handsome man.’

  I look at her goggle-eyed; it was the last thing I expected her to say. Artie is practically humming the national anthem with embarrassment by this point. His head looks like a boiled beetroot.

  ‘I think I’m going to take Lestat for a walk up and down the alley,’ he says, lifting the protesting pug away from the biscuit tin and heading for the door.

  Glenda pulls open her desk drawer and pushes a Cadbury’s Turkish Delight bar across to me. It’s a special moment; for as many years as she’s worked for Blithe she’s kept an emergency-only Turkish Delight on hand, but I’ve very rarely seen it eaten. I don’t know all that much about Glenda’s marriage, but I can draw my own conclusions from the fact that my missed opportunity for mind-blowing sex is considered an emergency-chocolate situation.

  After lunch, Marina, Artie and I pile into Babs and hoon off in the general direction of Brimsdale Road.

  ‘Grab my Magic 8 Ball, Artie,’ I say, and he punches the glove box like a pro.

  ‘What’s the question?’ Marina asks, squished between us. ‘If it’s whether to shag Fletcher Gunn, you don’t need the magic ball to tell you “no”. You’ve got me to do that.’

  She is very against the idea of any kind of neck-down liaison with Fletch, on account of the fact that my heart is down there and could get broken again.

  ‘Not that,’ I say. ‘I need to know whether to share the case and any associated proceeds with Leo.’

  ‘Put the ball away, Artie,’ she scowls. ‘You don’t need to help Leo out of the hole he’s got himself into with the psycho Barbies; I’m not frightened of them, and you’re not either.’

  ‘I’m proper terrified of them. They look like they eat babies for breakfast,’ Artie drops into the conversation, earning himself a swift jab in the ribs. I can only nod, because, now we know that their harmless Cheeky Girl impression is a front, it’s an astute observation.

  ‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ Marina insists, resolute. ‘We’ve got their number now and the gloves are well and truly off. Every business has its rivals, Melody. Yours just happen to model themselves on the fembots from Austin Powers.’

  * * *

  Douglas is waiting for us in the kitchen when we let ourselves in.

  ‘You’ve come back, then.’ He’s not his usual laid-back self. ‘I wasn’t sure you would after Isaac decided to behave like a poltergeist.’

  ‘Douglas wasn’t sure we’d return after Isaac’s behaviour at the weekend,’ I say, for Marina and Artie’s benefit.

  ‘You’re damn lucky that we have,’ Marina says, all attitude. ‘We need to talk to Isaac.’

  I shoot her a sharp look. She doesn’t have the luxury of being able to see Douglas, but if she could I think she’d have been a little less agro. ‘Last time I checked, I talked to the ghosts?’

  She lifts one shoulder, unrepentant. ‘Just sayin’.’

  I look back at Douglas. ‘How has he been?’

  He glances towards the high kitchen ceiling. ‘He’s holed himself up in the attic and won’t come down.’

  Okay. Well, as it seems that the mountain isn’t coming down, Mohammed will go up.

  ‘There’s cricket on,’ Douglas says. ‘Come and watch it with me?’

  I feel a pang of sympathy for him and wish I could just go and crash on the chairs with him and watch the game; underneath it all he’s just a guy who wants to watch some sport and share a couple of laughs. I can’t stay with him right now, but I know a couple of people who can.

  I relay the request, and I encompass both Artie and Marina in it because it’s useful to me if they’re kept busy together. I want to go in search of Isaac alone, and I’d much rather do it knowing that they’ve got each other’s back downstairs. This house had seemed benign at the beginning of the case, but since then we’ve been left for dead in the cellar, Lloyd has so far been nothing but unpleasant, and I’ve been caught up in a book-tornado. God, I hope Isaac’s calmed down. Up until Saturday he’d seemed the gentlest, most introspective of the three Scarborough brothers; hopefully he’s recovered his equilibrium. I guess there’s only one way to find out.

  * * *

  I knock on the attic door. I don’t know why because Isaac is hardly in any position to stop me from entering, but all the same it feels appropriate to afford him the courtesy.

  He doesn’t answer, so I push the door quietly open anyway and head inside. As I expected, he’s there in his chair, and he has one of the thrillers I gave him open in his hand.

  ‘I take it you’ve come to ask me about Charles,’ he says, without looking at me.

  ‘Yes.’

  He lays the book down and closes it slowly, then folds his
hands in his lap and studies them. He doesn’t speak again for a little while, and I don’t rush him because it’s obvious that he’s working himself up to something important.

  ‘Well, there’s nothing I can tell you.’

  Really? After almost two minutes of complete silence, I confess to expecting something more useful than nothing. God, in two minutes I could have had the most brilliant fantasy involving chocolate eclairs and Spiderman, and Isaac comes up with nothing? I’m going to have to ask him some pointed questions.

  ‘Was Charles your son?’

  He looks up at last. ‘How did you say you found out about him?’

  ‘We found a bundle of your mother’s diaries in the cellar. She recorded his name and his birth date in Hull, and beside it she wrote my first grandchild. From what I can see she didn’t write anything further about him.’

  He lapses back into silent contemplation, and again, I wait.

  ‘Then you know as much as I do,’ he says. ‘I never saw Charles.’

  ‘Well, no, I don’t know quite as much as you do,’ I say, slowly. ‘Isaac, who was Charles’s mother?’

  A faraway smile crosses Isaac’s face. ‘Cilla.’ He fills the small word with a whole world of love. ‘Her name was Priscilla, she was the most beautiful girl in the world.’

  My heart trips a beat for him, and for Priscilla, whoever she was, because the look on Isaac’s face is that look; the one my mother has whenever she speaks of my father, and the one my gran has when she refers to my grandpa. It’s the look of big, extravagant love, and I cross my fingers as I drop down on the dusty chair opposite him, hoping hard that he’s going to reveal something that helps me unravel the long-held secrets of Scarborough House.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Isaac takes me back to Autumn 1910, back to the aftermath of Douglas’s murder. Thrown out of the family, he fled the Midlands without any real plan and ended up finding work as a dock-labourer in Hull. It was from there he volunteered himself for the army, early on during the First World War, and it was to the Naval Infirmary in Hull he returned afterwards, one of many injured soldiers from the Great War.

  ‘Priscilla was one of the nursing sisters,’ he says, that faraway smile evident again when he mentions her name. He tells me how she’d tended to his broken leg and shrapnel-fractured shoulder, and how she always took the time to read the newspaper to him at the end of her shift each day.

  ‘I knew,’ Isaac says, shaking his head in wonder at the memory. ‘I knew she was the one for me. As soon as I opened my eyes and she was there on that very first day. Like an angel, she was.’

  He grew stronger and they grew closer, and in time Isaac and Priscilla became engaged to be married. But as the date drew nearer, he just couldn’t find the words to tell her about his family, of the filthy slur of the unproven murder accusation hanging over his head. He wanted to tell her, desperately so, but when she fell unexpectedly pregnant a month before the wedding he saw the situation for what it truly was. Hopeless.

  ‘I was a selfish man, Melody. I let myself pretend I could have a normal life, but what kind of a man does that to the woman he loves?’

  Too late, he’d realised that to marry Priscilla would be to condemn her to a life as a suspected murderer’s wife, and their child would live under the same black cloud. It would catch up with them, and it would slurry them and, God forbid, they might believe it and turn their backs too.

  ‘I expect she thought I didn’t love them enough in the end,’ Isaac whispers, so quiet and painful that I have to strain to catch his words. ‘Wasn’t true though. I left because I loved them too much to let them carry the burden too.’

  ‘Priscilla Elizabeth Henson,’ I say Charles’s mother’s name for about the hundredth time since we got back to the office. ‘All we know is that she would have been a nurse in Hull after the First World War, and that she gave birth to Charles Frederick, presumably Henson, on June 22nd, 1920.’

  ‘My mum loves this stuff,’ Artie muses. ‘She’s well into it, she’s traced my grandpa’s line all the way back to the 1300s, or something like that. It’s on the wall in our hallway.’

  Marina and I look up at him slowly. We don’t really have a clue where to start, but it seems that Artie is sitting on an ancestral mastermind.

  ‘My great, great, great, great, great uncle, Cuthbert, died of the black death,’ he goes on with grave authority. ‘That’s why mum lets me feed rats to Pandora.’

  I shudder. ‘Pandora the Python, I presume?’

  He nods. ‘Dad named her after Pandora from Adrian Mole because she was his first crush.’

  I’ve learned that sometimes in life you need to just nod, and this is one of those times. I glance up at the clock and close my laptop.

  ‘It’s gone five, folks. Artie, do you think your mum would have a look and see if she can spot anything? She sounds as if she’ll know the best places to start.’

  He nods, excited. ‘Mum loves a bit of sleuthing.’

  They bang the door noisily behind them, leaving me alone with Lestat. ‘Just you and me again,’ I say to him, and he moseys off and disappears around the back of the sofa. When he emerges from the other end, he’s carrying one of Nonna Malone’s cucidati cookies. I throw a pencil at him in disgust, but as he settles down to demolish it, I swear he’s laughing.

  * * *

  I’m not a big drinker, but I feel the need for brandy before I hit the pillow tonight. I’m unsettled in almost every damn element of my life, and I hope that the brandy will calm my thoughts enough to at least let me get some proper rest. My dreams, when they come, are full of wartime heroes and superheroes, facts jumbled with fiction, fantasy sliced through with desolation. I can’t remember the details, but I wake with damp cheeks, and it’s nothing to do with the fact that Lestat is licking my face because he needs to pee.

  ‘Right, so let’s get this Tuesday morning off to a good start,’ I say, swinging my seat to point my finger at Artie over by the fridge, who freezes with the milk bottle in his hand. ‘Artie, give us some good news on the family research front.’

  I watched an early-morning re-run of The Apprentice and I’m running this business Alan Sugar-style this morning. Well, I mean I’m not going to fire anyone, but I’m the boss and the buck stops with me. This agency is mine to build, and there’s no way I’m going to be cowed into sharing my success with Leo Dark.

  Artie looks horrified at being put on the spot and scratches nervously at his neck.

  ‘Err, she had to go out last night,’ he says. ‘But she’s doing it today. Probably right now as we speak,’ he assures me, and the wobble in his voice makes me wonder if I came on a bit too strong with my Lady Boss thing. I didn’t mean to scare him witless and his mother isn’t even on my payroll.

  ‘I like the sound of that, Artie,’ I say. ‘Top work.’ He sags with relief and sloshes milk into the drink he’s just made.

  ‘Marina?’ I swing to face her, and see no trace of fear in her eyes. I’m not surprised, Marina is scared of pretty much nothing and no one, least of all me in megalomaniac mode.

  ‘Melody,’ she lifts her eyebrows into her dark fringe, and then reaches into her bag and pulls out Nonna’s tin.

  ‘I asked Nonna to make another batch of cucidati cookies.’

  God, she’s good, she plays me like a piano. I swallow hard as she lifts the lid and shows me the double layer of iced fig biscuits. Lestat’s flat face starts to twitch and he scuttles past me towards Marina. I grab for his collar but he’s a slippery customer on a mission. Not that he’s successful; Marina snaps the lid on smartly and wags her finger at him until he slumps forlornly on her shoes.

  ‘Not this time, puppy dog.’

  I nod at Marina in a job-well-done fashion, and then pick up a pen and tap it on the desk as I launch into a case summary.

  ‘Right. So here’s where we’re at. On Saturday, Scarborough gave me one week only to finish solving this case. It’s now Tuesday, which gives us five days, maximum. T
he way I see it, the brothers are trapped in the house because of the unsolved murder. Douglas is self-explanatory, one of his brothers plunged a knife into his back. That’s a damn fine reason to stick around.’ Marina and Artie stare at me, hanging on my every word. ‘I don’t struggle to see Isaac’s reasoning either. He absolutely refuses to let go until he clears his name. So far, so straightforward.’ I’m encouraged by their nods. ‘Lloyd though . . . he’s the complicated one in this. He stalks around the house in that damn silk dressing gown, straight-backed and haughty, glaring at everyone as if it’s the last place he wants to be.’

  That’s my issue with Lloyd, and the whole case really – surely if Lloyd wanted to leave he’d just fess up to killing Douglas and then they could all be on their way. It just doesn’t make any sense.

  ‘So I vote that we step up the search to find the knife used to stab Douglas in the back. My gut instinct is that it’s still in that house somewhere, and our mission now is to recover it and hope that something about where and how we find it triggers the dominos to start falling.’

  Marina laughs lightly. ‘I was with you right up to the dominos thing.’

  ‘Too much?’

  ‘You don’t need to go all Agatha Christie to impress us,’ she says, sliding her fingers into the tin to sneak me a cucidati cookie without rousing Lestat. ‘Because from where I’m sitting, you’re doing a pretty damn amazing job just as yourself.’

  I take the cookie and bite it, glad forever that I met Marina Malone.

  People can say what they like about Babs, but as far as I’m concerned she’s one of the team and then some. By rights she should be either languishing in a scrap yard or else turned out to pasture in the care of some old boy who’d polish her hubcaps for her, but instead she’s putting in hard-labour every day, doing it for the girls (and the boy). Right now we’re all three strapped in and juddering at the traffic lights on our way to Brimsdale Road, and although it feels a bit like we’re working through a power plate session, I have no doubt that Babs will make sure that we get to our destination, be it Scarborough House or actual Scarborough.