He nodded and made another note. “So what happened on the walk back?”
“I was cutting through the alley behind the building when I spotted someone lying outside in the rain. I called 999 and you know the rest.”
The inspector made another note and then frowned as his mobile buzzed. He glanced at the screen. “I have to take this,” he told Fenella.
She carried the empty coffee mugs back into the kitchen as the man spoke to someone. When he hung up, she turned around with a smile on her face. It faltered when she saw the expression on his.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “But I think we have a few more things to discuss.”
“Like what?”
“Like why the dead man had one of your business cards and a full sales listing for this flat in his pocket,” Inspector Robinson shot back.
2
Fenella stared at the man for a minute, her mind racing. “What?” she finally asked, feeling confused.
“The man in the alley had a business card in his pocket. Here, I can show it to you,” he said.
He held out his phone, showing Fenella the picture he’d just been texted. She stared for a moment at the card she knew so well. A sudden wave of homesickness washed over her as she looked at the familiar seal of the university where she’d not only worked for many years but also earned her own degrees.
“It says ‘F. Margaret Woods.’ I’m assuming that’s you,” the man said.
Fenella nodded. “I always went by Margaret in the US,” she said. “Only my family calls me Fenella. It’s such an unusual name that I got tired of spelling it and helping people with the pronunciation.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem here,” he commented.
“No, that’s one of the reasons why I went back to using it,” she said. The other reason was all tied up in her desire to have a totally new start, but she didn’t want to talk about that with the inspector, especially not now, when he seemed to be almost accusing her of lying.
“Did you give the man your card when he was here earlier?”
“Of course not,” Fenella found herself snapping. She took a deep breath. “I barely spoke to him. Besides, there was no point in giving him a card when it’s no longer accurate. I don’t have that job anymore.”
“You don’t mind if I ring the university and check on that, then?”
Fenella flushed. “I’d rather you’d simply believe me,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “But by all means, call them if you want to. You can ask for Dean Treckel. She’s head of the history department. I’m sure she’ll have quite a lot to say about my sudden decision to leave.”
He nodded and made yet another note. Fenella was seized with a sudden impulse to grab the notebook out of his hand and see exactly what he’d been writing about her. Instead, she walked back to her chair and sat down, staring out the window at the sea. The wind had picked up even further and the tide had come in. Waves were now crashing against the promenade, sending walls of water crashing onto the wide path. A man on a bike was weaving his way along the promenade, swerving in and out as the waves splashed around him. Fenella wondered about his mental health, but he seemed to be enjoying himself, from what she could see.
Inspector Robinson was back on his phone, leaving Fenella with her thoughts for a few moments. When he sat back down on the couch, she forced herself to smile at him.
“Have a look at this,” he suggested. He held out the phone.
“Can you enlarge it?” she asked. She’d been wearing glasses since she was a child and she knew she now needed reading glasses or bifocals, but she hadn’t given in yet.
He did as she asked and then handed her the phone. She let herself frown now as she looked at the photo.
“This is a sales listing for my flat,” she said in an angry voice. “He even has photographs. If he wasn’t dead, I’d, well, I’d sue, I guess.”
“You didn’t let him take the photographs?” the inspector asked.
“Of course not,” she said, still angry. “I just told you, I’m not interested in selling. Anyway, if I had let him take photos today, he couldn’t possibly have made up the flyer that quickly, could he? He must have taken the pictures some time ago.”
“Maybe your aunt was thinking of selling,” the man suggested.
“I suppose that could be possible,” she said. “But you’d think Mr. Collins would have mentioned that when he introduced himself, then, wouldn’t you?”
“Perhaps,” the inspector replied.
“I can promise you that the man never set foot in this apartment today,” Fenella said. She stopped when she realized she was shouting. “Whatever happened between him and my aunt has nothing to do with me,” she added in a quieter voice.
“Did your aunt have any of your business cards?”
Fenella sat back and thought for a moment. “Can I see the card again?” she asked eventually.
The man swiped through his phone and then handed it to her. She studied the card for a minute and then shook her head. “About six weeks ago the university switched their phone lines for a whole new system,” she said. “It was a huge mess, but whatever. The number on that card was my new number, under the new system. My aunt had already passed away when the new system was installed, and I just got my new business cards about a month before I heard about the inheritance.”
“So where did Alan Collins get one from?” the inspector demanded.
Fenella got up from her chair and began to pace around the room. Aware that the inspector was watching her closely, she detoured to the kitchen and switched the kettle back on. “Need more coffee,” she muttered, as much to herself as to her guest.
“Yes, please,” the man replied.
She hadn’t actually been offering, but at least it gave her something to do while she thought. After she poured the coffee and handed the man his cup, she sat back down and forced herself to settle back in her seat. She wasn’t going to let this man unsettle her any further.
“When Mr. Quayle first contacted me about my aunt’s will, he asked me to provide several different things to him, like copies of my birth certificate. I know I tucked a few of my business cards into the large envelope that I sent him. Maybe he passed one along to Mr. Collins. As I said, I haven’t been giving them out while I’ve been here, as they’re no longer accurate.”
“Interesting,” the inspector said. “Anything else you’d like to share with me before I go?”
Fenella shook her head. “I wish you good luck with your investigation,” she said. “I didn’t like the man, but it’s still quite sad that someone disliked him enough to kill him.”
The man nodded. “I may be back with more questions,” he told her. “If you don’t mind, I’d like your mobile number.”
“Of course,” Fenella said. She had to go and get her handbag and dig out the paperwork from the mobile phone store in order to find it, but she wasn’t about to apologize. She’d only had the phone for a few hours; she couldn’t possibly be expected to remember the number already.
After showing the man out, she sank back into the same chair and stared out at the sea. The waves were still crashing against the promenade but the man on the bike had gone. Feeling as if it had already been a very long day, she looked at the clock. Not even noon.
“Maybe I can have an early lunch,” she said softly to herself as she got up and turned toward the kitchen.
“Well, you’ve managed to get yourself into a right mess, haven’t you?”
The voice came from behind her, and Fenella spun around, terrified. The woman sitting on the couch, right where the inspector had been, appeared to be in her late teens. She was wearing a long dress and her hair was pulled up into a twist on the top of her head. Fenella stared at her for a moment. She looked oddly familiar.
“I never would have left you my fortune if I’d known you were going to find yourself in the middle of a murder investigation less than twenty-
four hours after you’d arrived,” the woman told her snappishly.
“Your fortune?” Fenella echoed. “Aunty Mona?”
“Who else could I be?”
“But you look so young,” Fenella said, feeling unbelievably confused.
“Honestly, what fun would it be coming back as the ghost of a ninety-one-year-old woman? I do think I may have gone a bit too far, though. Nineteen sounded good at the time, but I think late twenties or even thirty might have been a better choice. I must remember to remedy that.”
“You’re a ghost?”
“Well, as I’m quite dead, I must be, mustn’t I?” the woman countered.
Fenella sat back down in her chair. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching out and trying to touch the other woman. Her hand passed right through the woman’s arm and hit the couch.
“Really! I do think that’s a bit rude,” the woman said.
“I’m sorry,” Fenella told her. She leaned her head against the back of the chair and shut her eyes tightly. You’re just jet-lagged and in shock from finding a dead person this morning, she told herself. When you open your eyes, you’ll be alone and everything will be fine. She cautiously opened one eye and then sighed. Aunty Mona’s ghost was still sitting on the couch, looking at her with a disappointed look on her face.
“I don’t understand,” Fenella said eventually.
“Clearly,” the woman replied. “And yet it’s fairly simple, really. When I died, I decided I wasn’t ready to simply go on to whatever comes next. I thought it might be nice to stay around here for a little while, see what my favorite niece was like now as I hadn’t seen her in what, thirty years?”
“You can do that? I mean decide not to, well, go on?”
Aunty Mona yawned. “You have several options,” she said. “And when you go you’ll get to make your own choice.”
“And you’ve decided to haunt my apartment.”
“It was my flat first. I lived nearly all of my life in this building, well, aside from when I was traveling, which was a lot of the time. Anyway, this flat was my last home and I’m quite sentimental about it.”
“It’s awfully modern,” Fenella pointed out. “I thought ghosts usually haunted old buildings.”
The other woman rolled her eyes. “Stereotypes,” she snapped. “First of all, I’m not haunting, I’m visiting, and second of all, I can visit wherever I like.”
“Excellent,” Fenella snapped back. “Then you can get out of my apartment.”
Aunty Mona narrowed her eyes. “Keep talking like that and I’ll make sure my advocate finds my other will. The one where I leave everything to your brothers.”
Fenella glared back at her. “You didn’t have another will,” she said firmly. She was just guessing, but it seemed she was right.
“I might,” the woman said, turning her head away.
“I don’t mean to be unwelcoming,” Fenella said, trying to think. “But I’m not really comfortable with the idea of living with a ghost. You must understand that.”
“I’ve been living here, quite comfortably, since I died. I’m not sure I’m happy with the idea of living with you.”
“Aunty Mona,” Fenella began again. “I suppose I can understand your reluctance to, um, move on, but really, surely heaven is better than hanging out in your old apartment watching me change everything?”
“What do you want to change?” the other woman demanded.
Fenella looked around the room. In truth, she loved the place exactly as it was. It seemed that she and her Aunty Mona had very similar styles in interior design and it took Fenella a while to find anything she didn’t like.
“That lamp,” she said eventually. “I don’t like that lamp at all.”
Aunty Mona laughed. “Your mother bought that lamp for me in nineteen-seventy-three when she came to visit me on the island. I’ve never liked it, but I never told your mother that.”
“Mom came to visit you? I don’t remember that,” Fenella replied.
“You were only five or six. Your mother was having a hard time settling in the US, and she came back here and stayed with me for a month. If I remember correctly, you and at least some of your brothers were shipped off to your father’s family for the month.”
Fenella searched her memory. “I remember going and staying with my father’s parents for a month the same year I started school,” she said eventually. “Jacob and James came with me, but John and Joseph were both already living on their own by then. I didn’t realize that mom came over here, though. I always thought she just stayed at home with my father.”
“Well, she did come over here,” Aunty Mona told her. “And she very nearly didn’t go back to the US. She really didn’t like it there.”
Fenella frowned. “That doesn’t sound like my mother at all,” she muttered.
“Anyway, you’re right of course. It is your flat now. You may get rid of the lamp if you want to.”
Fenella got up and walked over to the lamp in question. It wasn’t at all her taste, but it did look like something her mother would have liked. She sighed. “Aunty Mona, I’m just, well, this is just strange,” she said.
The other woman nodded. “For a start, maybe you should just call me Mona?” she suggested. “Aunty Mona makes me feel old, especially coming from a middle-aged woman.”
Fenella bristled slightly at being called middle-aged, even though she knew it was accurate. “Okay, then, Mona,” she said, “tell me more about this being a ghost thing. Are you always going to be hanging around, or will you come and go? Do you need to sleep? I assume you don’t need to eat.”
Mona shook her head. “So many questions,” she said. “And we’ve really only just met. Didn’t your mother teach you not to interrogate new acquaintances?”
“You’re family,” Fenella replied. “And you’ve just dropped into my living room without warning. I think I have the right to ask a few questions.” She took a deep breath, aware that she was very close to shouting.
“I don’t want to argue with you, my dear,” Mona said. “Anyway, you’re clearly still upset from your little chat with Inspector Robinson. I should leave you alone to let your mind rest for a bit. I’ll just point out that the inspector is quite a handsome man. If I weren’t so dead, I think I’d be trying to find an excuse to see him again.”
“I’m not sure that I should be taking dating advice from ghosts,” Fenella said dryly. “And what’s this I hear about you having a racy past? How could you afford this ap, er flat, anyway?”
“My dear girl, ladies don’t talk about such things,” Mona chided her. “I’ll see you later.”
Fenella watched, open-mouthed, as the woman seemed to just fade away to nothing. She rubbed her eyes and then blinked them several times. The ghost, or whatever it had been, was gone.
Crossing to the couch, Fenella patted the cushion where Mona had been. After a moment, she sat down tentatively, wondering about ectoplasm or spirit energy or whatever else her dead aunt might have left on the couch. Feeling like an idiot, she patted the cushions next to her while telling herself there couldn’t possibly be anything there. Her heart seemed to skip a beat when her hand touched something hard stuck between the cushions.
She jumped up and peered at the object. “There are no such things as ghosts,” she said aloud as she reached between the cushions and pulled out the small black notebook. As soon as she turned it over in her hands, she knew exactly what it was. It was the notebook that Inspector Robinson had been taking notes in during their talk.
“You mustn’t look inside,” she told herself sternly. She put the small book on the kitchen counter. It really was time for some lunch now. Fixing herself a sandwich on autopilot, she gave herself a short lecture.
“You’ve quite a bad case of jet lag and shock. It’s only natural that you’d fall asleep sitting in your chair. And it’s also perfectly understandable that you’d have incredibly odd dreams while asleep. Imagine dreaming that your aunt came back as a ghos
t to haunt this apart, um, flat.” Fenella forced herself to chuckle. “You’ll be much better tomorrow, once you’ve had a chance to catch up on some more sleep and get used to being in a strange place. Turning your whole life upside down was a big step. No wonder your brain is playing tricks on you.”
Having almost, but not quite, talked herself into believing that she’d dreamt the whole conversation with her aunt, Fenella ate her sandwich and turned her mind toward what to do with the notebook on her counter. Maybe the inspector had his contact information in the front of the book, a little voice suggested. Fenella decided that she couldn’t argue with the little voice, so she carefully opened the notebook. She was hugely disappointed to find that there was nothing written in it, at least not on the first page. Feeling reckless now, she flipped through the entire book. Every page was blank.
Had the inspector just been pretending to write in the book while he’d questioned her or was this simply a spare book that had fallen out of his pocket? With no way to know for sure, Fenella put the book back on the counter with a sigh. She couldn’t possibly call 999 for something as simple as a blank notebook, but she did want to let the inspector know she’d found it.
“The internet is your friend,” a mocking voice told her. She frowned at the man who wasn’t there but could still annoy her. Then she used her new phone to search for the non-emergency number for the Douglas Police Station.
“Ah, yes, hello,” she found herself stammering when the call was answered. “My name is Fenella Woods. I spoke with Inspector Robinson this morning about the, um, dead body I found.”
“Yes?” the voice on the other end said encouragingly.
“Yes, well, the thing is, after the inspector left, I found a notebook between my couch cushions. I think perhaps it fell out of his pocket. It looks very much like the one he was using to take notes in while he was here.”
“Ah, Inspector Robinson loses those blessed things everywhere,” the woman on the other end of the line told her. “I hope he owns stock in the company that produces them because he does seem to go through an awful lot of them.”
An Isle of Man Ghostly Cozy Collection - ABC Page 3