The old lady retreated against the wall as the crowd stepped back in shock. She was crumbling.
“And you…” I continued, stepping towards her, “planted that packet of wolfsbane in Mr Shand’s pocket.”
“And how would I have done that, young man?”
“I spotted you earlier today, crawling behind the reception desk on all fours. Mr Shand’s coat was hanging there. That’s when you did it.”
“Ha!” she cried. “Impossible. I made sure no one was around when I did tha—”
She suddenly halted, her eyes wide.
“She has given herself away!” Grandad cheered. He began to do a celebratory Bollywood-style dance. I was glad no one could see him but me. “That is game, set and match, son.”
“A-HA!” I cried.
Fallon stepped towards her. “Ms Hillingdon, I think.”
Realising the game was up, something very strange now happened to the old lady. She began to transform in front of the crowd’s very eyes. Her back straightened, and she lost her hunch. She began to pull at the sagging skin on her face, peeling it off in ribbons. It had been a very convincing prosthetic mask.
“Yuck! This is making me feel sick.” Grandad looked even greener than he usually did. “It is almost as bad as watching that seagull with the penne pasta all over again.”
Finally, she reached up, grasped the hair at the top of her head and pulled. Off came the wig and Mrs Hackenbottom’s grey curls were tossed to the floor. Vienna Hillingdon’s own hair was clasped back against her scalp. She shook it free. It was grey too, though fine and straight, with a healthy sheen.
When she’d finished her transformation, the decrepit old lady was gone. In her place stood a striking woman of about fifty, with high cheekbones and hardly a wrinkle in sight. She flung her cane at Fallon, who raised his arms to block it. “You’ll have to catch me first!” she cackled, leaping over the sofa and bolting to the open front door. She was remarkably agile. She even had time to stop and turn, gloating at all the staring faces in the lobby. “I have a helicopter waiting nearby. I’ll be in Brazil by tomorrow. You’ll never catch me!”
She cackled again, and turned to leave. Only someone was barring the way.
Someone small and fierce and packed full of karate power.
Granny had somehow sneaked past everyone in the commotion. She swung her leg in the air, scything across Hillingdon’s chin…
“HI-YAAA!”
…knocking her opponent to the floor. But Hillingdon wasn’t finished yet. The heiress staggered to her feet and leapt past Granny.
Grandad took the deepest of breaths and blew, his eyes bulging with the effort.
The front door slammed shut in Hillingdon’s face. She crashed into it and fell back, just in time for the pursuing officers to grab her.
“Whoop, whoop!” cried Grandad. “See that karate goddess over there? She’s my girl, my girl, my girl.” And he continued singing and dancing up the hall. “Look, Jayesh!” He blinked, revealing all the ghosts in the hotel. There was the man in a 1920s-style smoking jacket that Grandad had told me about, complete with bloodstain. There was the tall hairy bloke in medieval garb carrying a pail of water and wearing a hatchet in his skull. And then there was Sir Bampot himself. They were all looking on and cheering.
“Bravo!” they shouted.
“RRR-RRRR!” cried Sir Bampot through his rotten jaws.
All the ghosts. Except one…the Grey Lady. Her face, sad and desperate, peered in from the lobby window.
Chapter 23
The Grey Lady
“So, that is another mystery solved,” sighed Grandad.
We were back in my hotel room, staring out the window at the police cars as they drove off into the night, taking Vienna Hillingdon with them.
“Not quite,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
Just then, I heard the creak of a floorboard outside the door. A piece of paper had been pushed under it. I picked it up, then flung open the door and peered out, but whoever had left it had already disappeared.
I flipped it open to find a note typed in block capitals:
“Pff!” said Grandad. “Who is it from? What do they want?”
“Oh, I know who it’s from,” I replied. “You see, I couldn’t get everything to fit together. The bell – it just didn’t, it wouldn’t, it couldn’t…unless…”
“Oh, stop it!” cried Grandad.
“Unless there was more than one crime being committed at once, and more than one criminal.”
“Seriously? So there’s someone else?” He sighed. “I am too dead for all of this. You are not actually going to go, are you?”
“Yes, I am,” I nodded. “But with one teensy tiny little tweak to the instructions.”
*
An hour later, I tramped across the grass towards the ruins, shining a flashlight ahead of me. The moon was out, and the only sound to be heard was the distant chop-chop of a helicopter in the night sky.
“Are you sure about this?” asked Grandad. “Could be dangerous. If I let anything happen to you, your granny will kill me.”
“Lucky you’re already dead.”
“That would not stop her!”
I halted in front of the silent ruins, in the same spot we’d been standing earlier that day. I shone the torch towards the trees.
“Look.” Grandad pointed back towards the house as a figure approached, also carrying a flashlight. It was Lord Brightburgh, holding up the piece of paper that I’d slipped under his door half an hour earlier.
He stared at me for a second, deeply suspicious. “Well, you wanted to meet. Here I am.”
“I know what you did,” I announced.
“What the ruddy nora are you talking about, young man?” he replied.
“The silver bell. I know you have it. Where is it?”
He laughed, a nervous, high-pitched laugh tinged with a little bit of panic. “Is this a joke?”
“It must be very hard for you, the possibility of seeing your beloved family estate pass yet again into someone else’s hands, like a used car. But to see a ghost from your past return to haunt you, the woman you jilted at the altar all those years ago, Vienna Hillingdon, well, that must have been doubly hard. Too hard in fact. The silver bell was your limit. A priceless family heirloom, and you were determined that it at least would remain yours.”
“That’s just ridiculous!” he exclaimed. “I have an alibi. I told you, I was in Edinburgh, staying with one of my friends, who, by the way, is a high-court judge. The police came to see me on the morning of the burglary. I was still wide awake and playing bridge when the burglary took place, and my friend confirmed it.”
“Hmm.” I rubbed my chin. “That’s true, very conveniently true, but your accomplice didn’t have an alibi.”
I heard footsteps behind me, and another figure emerged from the ruins, a female figure in black. She’d added bright yellow streaks to her dark hair.
“Lucy!” Lord Brightburgh looked surprised.
She regarded me with cold, narrow eyes. “My note said ‘tell no one’.”
I shrugged. “I’m not the only one who can slip anonymous notes under people’s doors.”
She stalked around me. “You’re a nosey boy, aren’t you?”
“Ho ho. She is right about that,” smirked Grandad.
“No,” I replied. “I’m just observant. I notice things. For example…” I turned to Lord Brightburgh. “That moment last night when you came into the reception, when you set eyes on Mrs Hackenbottom, you could see through the disguise right away. You knew it was Vienna Hillingdon. You took Lucy outside on the pretence of needing help loading up your car, even though all you had with you, as I noticed this morning, was a small overnight bag, which you could have easily loaded up yourself. It was at that moment you asked for her help. You made a pact. You asked her to steal the silver bell for you.
“You went off to Edinburgh, as you already planned to do, and spent a pleasant
evening with your high-court judge pal. Meanwhile, your accomplice staged a break in at the manor house and nicked your priceless family heirloom, providing you with the perfect alibi.”
“Nonsense! I mean, why would she go to those lengths for me?”
“I thought about that. It nagged me for a while, but then it’s amazing what you can tell from someone’s face if you really look. You have the same eyes, the two of you – icy blue. Oh, and your noses, you’ve got a kind of aquiline thing going on there. It’s quite striking.”
“Ah! I see it now.” Grandad nodded.
“You could only be related, right? You could only be, what – father and daughter?”
“Lady Brightburgh and I never had any children,” Lord Brightburgh protested.
Lucy hissed at him, “Stop it, Father! It’s useless. He already knows.”
“Yes, a secret daughter, one that nobody else knew about,” I said. “When I was in your cottage I passed one of the bedrooms, painted bright yellow, and I saw a child’s drawings. They seemed to have been taken out of the drawer and spread around, almost as if you were showing them to someone, persuading them. Did she need a lot of convincing?”
“I didn’t need any,” growled Lucy.
“Lucy, please!” snapped Lord Brightburgh.
“Yup,” I continued, turning to the girl, “I recognised your mother from one of the photos in Lord Brightburgh’s hall. And I’m guessing you weren’t always a goth. Sunflowers, yellow walls, yellow doors, yellow hair.” I nodded to the colourful streaks in her dark locks.
Lord Brightburgh’s shoulders sank, but he never took his eyes off his daughter. “Yes, yellow was always your favourite colour. And sunflowers were always your favourite flower. She… was my sunshine girl.”
They gazed at each other in sadness.
“Wait, the sunshine girl! Did he say ‘sunshine girl’?” cried Grandad.
Lucy circled me like a lion about to go in for the kill. “You’re a smart guy,” she spat.
“Oh, wait,” Grandad said suddenly. He was staring at a spot near the wall. “There she is again, the Grey Lady.”
“A-ha!” I turned back to the lord. “Lucy might be your daughter, but there’s one thing I’m not sure she’s told you. Your wife’s death. It was no accident.”
He stared back, confused, while his daughter stopped in her tracks. “What?”
“She is coming through more clearly now,” said Grandad. “Oh, aye, I can see her. She’s clearer than she has ever been.”
“What is all this?” Brightburgh looked desperately from Lucy to me, and then back again.
“This is where she killed your wife,” I explained.
“But… But, my wife died in an accident,” he said weakly. “The stones, they fell on her.”
I rolled over the broken head of the stone gargoyle with the toe of my shoe. “The wall was pushed from behind. She used a long pole, a bit like the kind you use to shut high windows.” I turned to Lucy. “Am I right? Like I heard you say yourself, you’re stronger than you look.” Then I turned back to Lord Brightburgh. “Once the deed was done, and your wife lay here dying, Lucy simply tossed the pole down the hill into those bushes.”
“Yes! That is why the ghost took us down there,” said Grandad. “That is where it is. I bet it’s still there. If we searched we might still find it.”
Lucy was staring at me, her face even paler than usual. “How? How could you possibly know?”
“Toppling walls on people seems to be your modus operandi…”
“Ooh, fancy word!” said Grandad. “What does it mean?”
“It means, the way you like to do things,” I continued. “Cos you tried the same thing on me down at the abbey today.” I touched the bump on my forehead, which was still throbbing dully. “You spotted me spying on you and your father from behind the hedge earlier on. You spotted me following you into town. You spotted me outside your house. And you were obviously troubled enough by my attention that you thought it was worth causing another wee accident. What did you use to prise away the stone?”
She turned towards the ruins and bent down, grabbing something from behind a wall. A metal crowbar. Part of me was a little bit impressed by how prepared she was. Her eyes took on a menacing look.
“Lucy!” Lord Brightburgh exclaimed, shock and horror in his voice.
Lucy stared at him, her blue eyes cold and her mouth twisted in a vicious scowl. “She hated me, your wife. She tried to keep you and me apart. She tried to stop us being together!”
“No! NO!” Lord Brightburgh flung his hands to his head. “I don’t believe it! It can’t be true!”
Now Lucy turned to me, and her eyes seethed with anger. “You! You’re just a boy. Who’s going to believe you, anyway, and on what evidence? Either way, I might just have to shut you up all the same.”
“Uh-oh,” gulped Grandad.
I stepped back towards the crumbling wall.
“Lucy, stop this!” cried Lord Brightburgh.
She stopped and turned to him slightly, appealing with her arms. “You have to understand! I’m doing this so that we can be together.”
Lucy turned back to me and advanced, wielding the iron crowbar.
“Grandad! You’re up!” I called.
“I cannot stop an iron bar,” he said. “No one said a weapon was involved.”
“Then stop her instead!”
“Ha!” she sneered. “Talking to yourself won’t save you.”
“LUCY!” yelled Lord Brightburgh, crumbling to his knees.
Grandad puffed out his cheeks and blew, but it was no good. It seemed he’d already used whatever spooky strength he had helping to catch Vienna Hillingdon earlier.
I took another step back, then stumbled over a rock, falling on my bum. I felt the cold, damp earth pressing up, wondering if pretty soon I’d be underneath it.
Lucy raised the crowbar above her head. “You should have kept your nose out of this.”
I had just enough time to utter one final word before she struck. My last word, perhaps, before joining Grandad in the world of the dead.
I shouted it, yelled it, loud and clear, so that it echoed in the darkness of the ruins.
“HOODIES!”
I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth, and awaited my fate …
Chapter 24
The Top-Secret Grandad
An ear-splitting roar and a large gust of wind brought a helicopter swooping over the trees. It hovered above, shining its spotlight down on our heads.
I was expecting to feel the sickening crack of my own skull as the crowbar hurtled down against it, but it never came. I prised my eyes open to find that Lucy wasn’t standing over me any more. In fact, she was lying on the ground underneath Grandad, screaming at the top of her lungs.
Grandad leapt to his feet under the glaring overhead light. “YESSS! I totally rock as a ghost!” Then he put his sunglasses on and broke into a kind of 1980s robot dance. It was not a good look.
A voice crackled over a loudspeaker. “This is the police. Stay where you are.” It was DI Fallon’s voice. I squinted up into the light to see his huge silhouette hanging out of the door, speaker in hand. It seemed my code word had worked.
A handful of uniformed officers were running towards us from the manor house. A few more hurtled out of the bushes.
“Phew! That was close, Jayesh,” said Grandad.
Lucy struggled to her feet, shaking and panting hysterically. “Th-th-th-hhis place is haunted. H-h-h-aunted!”
“Ha! Youuu betchya, love!” Grandad grinned.
She pointed her finger at me, accusingly. “Th-th-th-that boy, he’s evil. He’s got g-g-g-h-osts on his side.”
“Ooh, she is perceptive, that lassie.” Grandad smiled at me.
“That,” I said to Lucy, “and I’ve got this…” I opened my jacket and yanked out the microphone that was taped to my chest. “So now the police know everything.” I gazed up at Fallon, shielding my eyes in the spotlight, and
spoke into the mic. “Did you get it all?”
Fallon called down through the loudspeaker. “Aye, laddie. She’s right though, you are a nosy wee boy.”
I smiled. I’d phoned DI Fallon the minute I got the note through my door. I told him all about Lady Brightburgh (I left out the ghosty bits, obviously) and we put together a plan that would allow us to catch a thief and a murderer at the same time. In case you hadn’t noticed, ‘Hoodies!’ was my choice of code word for back-up. Oh, how Fallon had loved that. Lucy sank to her knees beside her father, but he pushed her away.
“Murderer!” he snarled.
The uniformed police officers arrived, dragging father and daughter away into the night. Above, I could just make out Fallon raising his hand in salute.
“Well done, laddie. But please, and I mean this in the nicest possible way – I don’t want to see you ever again,” he said, and the helicopter swooped away.
Chapter 25
The Final Question
Next morning, I woke up next to a pair of chicken’s feet. At least, I thought they were chicken’s feet. But on closer inspection they were actually Granny’s, splayed out, shrivelled and bunioned… and poking into my face. At some point during the night she’d given up on her bamboo mat in the corner and squashed into bed alongside me.
Grandad’s ghostly head poked through the door. “Ah, you’re awake!” He pulled himself through with a particularly loud SCHLOPP. “Urgh! I hate that.”
He half-danced towards the bed, his hat set at a jaunty angle. “What a night! Me and the boys, we’ve been having a ball: cigar man, bucket man and Sir Bampot. We have just been chewing the fat, setting the world to rights. You know, this weekend has turned out alright in the end.”
My stomach rumbled. It obviously didn’t agree given my lack of food over the last 48 hours. I edged out of bed and pulled on my clothes and trainers.
Death by Soup Page 11