Sex, Spooks and Sauvignon (Adventures of an Accidental Medium Book 1)

by Tracy Whitwell

  That laugh again. It’s unnerving.

  ‘Too true. Right ladies, I’ll leave you to it. Don’t work too hard. And stop turning customers away or you’ll make no money. Just tell them what they want to hear. Nice to meet you Sheila and… erm…?’

  I don’t want to tell him. ‘Tanz.’

  ‘Tanz. Interesting.’

  I don’t breathe again until he leaves.

  Sheila sits and massages her temples. I run and lock the door.

  ‘He is the scariest man I have ever met. I want to go home.’

  ‘I think we should, love.’

  ‘What? Really?’

  ‘I think they bumped off that poor lady, Tanz. And I don’t know what he’s up to, but it feels very bad that he came back in here. Like he wants us to figure out what he’s done.’

  You see, I don’t like that kind of talk. It makes sense. From years of exhaustive reading, I know that loads of murderers seek attention and get caught, when if they’d just kept schtum they would have got away with it. It’s their ego or something.

  ‘Shiels, what are we going to do?’

  ‘Well, I can’t read for anyone else in here, I know that much. They’ve left evil in the shop. I’ll get the smudge sticks out when I’m next in, but right now we need to go home and work out who that poor woman is and how we can help her. Let’s cancel everyone else’s bookings and go.’

  We always take a number from clients and put it with their name in the appointments book. Fortunately, the three customers this afternoon are local and regulars. They are quickly informed of Sheila’s horrid ‘sickness bug’ then we shut up shop and leg it.

  I like my murderers to be safely locked up in prison or already executed. This is petrifying. As we speed towards Sheila’s house, her clutching her keys as a makeshift knife, me gripping my can of hairspray like a poor-man’s tin of mace, I realise that we can’t even tell a policeman if we see Dan Beck behind us – ‘Excuse me, Sheila here was about to tell a woman called Carmen’s fortune when we realised she and her fella had killed a woman. The woman’s ghost won’t stop screaming and my dead friend says we’ve got to help her. Can you please arrest Carmen and her creepy “husband” for murder? That’s him following us!’

  We are all alone in this. Well, in the land of the living we are.

  The Magic Carpet

  I buy us a bottle of red. A good Merlot. We’re both shaken up, but once we reach Crouch End Broadway we feel less intimidated as there are lots of ladies pushing uber-expensive Bugaboos and tons of coffee-shop hoppers popping into Waitrose. Saying that, neither of us are completely comfortable until we’re in Sheila’s flat with the door locked. I open the wine immediately and pour a large one each into purple goblets, while Sheila opens up the French doors and lets in the smell of greenery and road-dust.

  After half a glass, a fag for Sheila and a few wasabi peas for me, we both feel a bit better. A pig-headed part of me always refuses to be intimidated by bad people. Sheila doesn’t ‘do’ bullies. But we’re both shaken up.

  ‘What now?’

  Sheila takes another mouthful of redders.

  ‘We chat to that poor girl. Call your Frank. He’ll tell us what to do.’

  Frank arrives when I say his name; I feel him like a glow in my chest. I nod to Sheila. She sits still and closes her eyes.

  ‘Hello. She’s called Monique. Calm her down and ask her direct questions.’

  ‘Frank, slow down. Why doesn’t she stop crying?’

  ‘Thing is, she’s utterly traumatised by what happened to her and right now time has absolutely no meaning. It might as well be the same moment she died. You’ll just have to get her to speak to you. I can’t do it. Oh – her nickname might help. Everyone called her Mona…’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No bother.’

  I relay this to Sheila. We sit at the table with topped up glasses of wine and ask for Mona. Eventually we both hear her cries, as pitiful as they were before. I decide to speak to her first.

  ‘Mona, we want to help you and make you feel better. But to do that we need to know where you are.’

  Her sobs carry on as though she can’t hear.

  ‘Mona. Come on, we just want to know what happened to you. Where do you live?’

  She stammers out a reply. ‘Just outside… St Albans. We built it together, it’s my dream… our dream.’

  I get a picture in my head. A large property on plenty of land. There are stables and at least one horse. I tell Sheila, but she’s already seeing it.

  ‘Mona, your house is beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  This calms her a little.

  ‘How long did you live there with Dan?’

  I’m taking a risk here, but I’m betting she was married to Dan Beck.

  ‘Twelve years.’

  I tell Sheila, who’s pretty much getting this anyway. Neither of us is surprised.

  ‘So Mona, what changed?’

  She sobs again. ‘Our business. He went into the office and I stayed at home with the horses. I love animals. There was a girl there. His secretary –’

  Both of us are appalled, but not completely surprised by the secretary Mona shows us. She resembled Mona in hair colour and figure, but was younger, tougher, angrier and ready to take what she wanted.

  Carmen.

  As Mona gasps out her story, we learn that she knew Carmen was after Dan – or, more precisely, his money – but she didn’t believe for one minute that Dan would bite. Dan could be a shit when he was stressed, but Mona saw this as part and parcel of marriage after experiencing her own father’s fury when she was a little girl.

  When I ask exactly when things went wrong, she shows us a calendar in the office of Dan’s work. Apparently Carmen came into Dan’s life about two years ago. Mona whispers that she thought they might be ‘dabbling’, but she hoped Dan would get bored of her like he had of the others. But he became obsessed and, as far as Carmen saw it, Mona was in the way.

  When I ask her what happened when she was attacked, there is a long pause. Sheila tells her not to worry and to take as long as she wants. The sobbing starts again as Mona begins to describe a night on her own in front of the TV with a glass of wine. I see pictures in my head of the wine glass, the table, the big comfortable room. Then I see Dan coming into the living room. I see her jumping up to kiss him and him pulling back. To my absolute horror his right hand emerges from behind his back holding a large wrench. It’s such a shock, even just seeing it in my head, that I jump in my seat and nearly knock Sheila’s drink over. I can’t believe anyone could be so cold. Mona herself couldn’t quite comprehend what he was doing until the wrench connected with her head. The crunch of metal on bone is excruciating. Suddenly it’s as though I’m actually there, and it is the single most shocking moment of my life when I feel the reverberation of a giant spanner smashing me over the head, wielded by the man I love. And make no mistake, I feel it. I’m in the room. I look into his eyes to find an answer. I see blankness. I see a stranger in those empty eyes. And as I fall to the floor, bleeding and screaming, I see a woman entering. The hard-faced usurper of my husband’s affections, looking triumphant.

  God, it’s nasty. I can’t stop the tears running down my face or the shaking in my body. Carmen’s hatred of Mona is overwhelming. It’s coming over me in waves. When I try to link in with Carmen’s energy at that time, I just get a wall of malice. Mind-boggling when you think Mona’s only crime was existing. Carmen and Dan were poisonously in love and Mona had to go. I try not to think about it, but it occurs to me that Dan and Carmen’s sex life must be bloody terrifying.

  I speak to Mona as calmly and lovingly as I can, trying to keep her fear from exploding into panic again. ‘Mona, listen. You have been brilliant at telling us your story. Amazing. But you have to tell us what happened to you next? Where are you now? Do you know where they… took you next?’

  I don’t know how else to put it, how to lessen the outrage of her murder.
Now I hear her screaming again. I know Sheila is experiencing this as some kind of film show. Sheila, being clairvoyant, sees everything as a kind of mime. She hears little snippets, but mostly she sees pictures of what’s going on. And whatever she’s seeing is making her wince.

  ‘Mona, listen to me love, stop screaming… Tanz is telling the truth, it’s all right now. We’re going to help you, but please, just show me. You don’t have to tell, just show. After he hit you, what happened next?’

  That wine is disappearing fast. This is as intense as it gets. My head is spinning from Mona’s distress and that smack on the head with a wrench. She wants to help us, I know she does, but she is still so shocked and traumatised by what happened, still reliving it every second of every hour, that she’s finding it difficult to think straight. Suddenly she bursts out, ‘The rug! The rug.’

  Sheila gives a little gasp. ‘They rolled her in the carpet!’

  ‘Fuck off!’ But now I can see it. Rolling the living room rug around her like she’s a tortilla wrap. She is semi-conscious and trying to struggle. She is calling Dan’s name. When she is completely bound tight in the carpet, a rope securing it round the middle, Carmen picks up the heavy wrench and begins to rain blows down on the material, where Mona’s head would be. She keeps swinging and hitting like she’s trying to obliterate her. I am completely aghast and can’t hold back the sobs.

  Sheila grabs her wine. ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Stop. Stop, Mona. Don’t keep replaying that. You don’t deserve to be still living this nightmare. Let’s find a way to make it stop.’

  ‘Pleeease… pleeeease help me. Make it stop. Help me.’

  I can hardly get the words out through my own tears. ‘We will. We promise. We will, won’t we Sheila?’

  ‘Of course we will, darlin’.’ She makes her voice even more calm. I couldn’t do it right now: I’m too upset.

  ‘Just think. Calm down and think. When was it? When did it happen? That night. Can you show us?’

  I can feel Mona’s confusion. It was such a terrible time, maybe she’s lost some of the detail because of it? But then I hear the TV. She had the TV on. I hear the theme tune to some shitty soap. I hate soaps. That could be any weeknight, or it could be a Sunday afternoon. But it isn’t, because it was night-time, I know it. The curtains are drawn, the lamps are on… Mona can’t remember… I try to jog her memory.

  ‘Mona, did you buy a magazine or a newspaper that day? That month? Can you remember?’

  ‘I don’t know… Oh God… I don’t… Oh… Wait…’

  I can see a magazine. Grazia or something. She’s holding it in her hand.

  ‘Look at the date! Look at it, Mona… What does it say?’

  Her reply is quiet but distinct. ‘It’s November. NOVEMBER.’

  As she speaks I hear a bang. Then there’s a crash and another bang, from the past. Was there a storm? Was it gunfire?

  ‘Sheila, it was November last year. She’s been dead less than a year. And I think there were fireworks going off.’

  ‘Oh. Well, that narrows it down, doesn’t it? Brilliant, Mona. Brilliant work. Now darlin’, stay calm and think hard. What happened to you after? What happened to the carpet?’

  Mona’s voice is diminishing now. I wonder if she’s had enough. I’m not feeling her presence so strongly, she’s becoming less and less distinct. I pick up one last snippet before she completely disappears.

  ‘They put me in the ground. I was still alive.’

  Run for Home

  There’s something so fantastic about driving at five o’clock in the morning. Yeah, baby, you heard right. Five a.m. Hardly a car on the M1 (still plenty of lorries though, the massive, murderous, metal fuckers), sun still not up and a whole new day dawning on the righteous. And the wrongteous. If I ever feel out-of-control I drive up north. It’s my default.

  Sheila and I were not at our most comfortable after that performance last night. Sheila said she’d rarely come across such a distressed spirit. She said we should try to tune in to Mona another time and find out where they buried her.

  Sod that for a game of soldiers. I wasn’t feeling like tuning into anything ever again. I left in a taxi. Usually I’d walk, but no way José. Not with Deputy Dawg Dan and his evil, killer-bitch secretary on the loose. The fact that he’d come back to the shop kept playing on my mind. The fact that he was being incredibly sinister was also playing on my mind. Which is why I double-locked my front door, closed all the blinds and checked under my bed before I got in.

  I was jumpy as hell. If I’d not already had that half bottle of wine I’d have leapt in the car there and then. I didn’t feel drunk, but I knew that I’d get sleepy an hour into the journey and have to drive another three hours in the dark. I was discomfited, not suicidal. So I put on a film. Some schmaltzy Sky movie that turned out to be funny and took the edge off. I had a strong vod and ate a whole packet of seafood sticks with houmous. (Do not knock these unless you’ve tried them. Some may argue I eat too much fish. I would counter that seafood sticks are so processed they contain no fish whatsoever. But they’re lovely and comforting and they don’t make me fat.)

  Near the end of the movie, about nineish, my phone went off. For a minute I just looked at it, like it might bite me, then I checked and a strange number was flashing up. Not strange as in a numerical alphabet I didn’t recognise, just a number that wasn’t logged into my phone.

  Deputy Dawg had found my number!

  That was my first thought. But that was impossible. I couldn’t keep freaking myself out, so I picked it up. It was a girl’s voice.

  ‘Tanz?’

  I didn’t know who it was. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me, it’s Ruth!’

  ‘Sorry, who?’

  ‘Ruth! Ruth from Spain!’

  Spain’s shenanigans had escaped my mind in all the palaver of the last day or two. Suddenly it came pinging back, like a frog on a stick.

  ‘RUTH! How are you, lass? Recovered all right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine! How are you?’

  On our flight back, Rog and I had found ourselves sitting an aisle apart at the front and, mercifully, Ruth and her new beau had been many seats behind us, nursing hellish hangovers. I’d pointedly taken out my novel, forcing Rog to amuse himself with his iPod and several large Jack Daniel’s. I couldn’t in any polite way refuse to give him my mobile number just before we landed, unfortunately, though I was tempted to change a digit. Anyway, I didn’t mind hearing from Ruth. She was very magnanimous about the bruised scab on her ankle and she was touchingly grateful about our little talk.

  ‘I’m OK, thank you. Could do with more money, but couldn’t we all?’

  She laughed at this, like a little bell tinkling. ‘That’s kind of what I’m calling you about. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Crouch End.’

  ‘I’m in East Finchley tonight, that’s really close! Do you want to hook up? I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘Errrrm. Actually, if I’m honest, I’m not really in a position to come out. I’m not like you young ’uns; once I’ve nested, I don’t put my face back on, not at this time of night.’

  That’s not necessarily true. I will come out if it’s pre-planned, but I certainly couldn’t be arsed to put proper clothes back on after slipping into my jim-jam bottoms and my slipper-socks. Plus, of course, I was sort of in hiding.

  She laughed that laugh again. ‘Fair enough, I like to get my early nights in, too, keep the skin looking good… I’m dog-sitting tonight, that’s why I’m here. But listen, you know you said I had a job coming in the next six months? You remember?’

  I did, vaguely, though I do spout this stuff without really thinking about it.

  ‘Well, it was even better than you said. After we landed I slept for a day and a night. I woke up feeling like a different person. All of that stuff about Rog, it had eased. I felt better. And that’s when I got the phone call. My agent had put me up for this big telly drama, The Siren it’
s called. I’ve done virtually no TV so I usually only get seen for bit parts. Anyway, I auditioned, and today I found out I got the part of the daughter. It’s a lead!’

  Actor’s jealousy aside, this is fab. ‘You’re kidding me! Oh Ruth, that’s great!’

  ‘It is, and what’s hilarious is it starts shooting in a month for five months! Your six-month prediction was spot on. You are a genius and I love you and I want to take you out to celebrate.’

  Actors are always telling people they don’t know very well that they love them. Still, it was kind of heart-warming.

  ‘So, are they making you rich?’ I couldn’t help asking. How could I resist?

  ‘Compared to how I’ve been living since my accident, they are making me a millionaire. My agent says it’s shit money for telly, but I don’t care. I’m just over the moon that someone wants to employ me and I can have a rest from cleaning pubs for a living.’

  Oh, bless her.

  ‘I am so pleased for you Ruth, and I would love to see you. Tonight’s just a bit –’

  ‘No! Honestly, that’s fine. I’m back next week for two nights. We can do it then. I want to take you for a tasty dinner and drinks. I’m now hopelessly addicted to Zubrowka, you know! Better than hopelessly addicted to Rog, though, eh?’

  She really did sound better. A bit of affirmation, a bit of success. We’ve all been there.

  ‘That’s a date. Speaking of which, how’s the new fella?’

  ‘Who? Oh. No. That’s not… he told me he loved me when we landed in London. I’m afraid that’s a bit much after a day, even for me, so I told him I was still upset over someone else and couldn’t commit the way someone as wonderful as him would need. He started sobbing and I sped off in a cab before he could fall to the ground and grab me by the knees. I mean, who can be bothered?’

  Our call ended so amiably; I felt cheered. I still felt cheered as I crawled into bed and Inka got up beside me and curled up on the pillow, purring and touching my face with her pink paw-pads. Cheerily, I drifted off to the strains of my bedtime compilation and a tree whispering out the back.