Ghostcatcher

by Sophie Green

  Closing the front door as silently as possible, she took off her mac and shoes in the hall. She said goodnight to Nedly at the airing cupboard and he slipped through the door to sleep amongst the warm and freshly laundered sheets, while she climbed up the second staircase. A thin strip of light shone under the door at the top of the landing. Lil trained her eyes on it and took another step. A shadow split the light. She put her hand on the door knob, sucked in a deep breath, and then twisted it. From inside came the faint sound of something being moved and then she swung the door open.

  Naomi Potkin was sitting on the bed. She was wearing her pyjamas and dressing gown and her hands were locked anxiously round her knees.

  She looked at Lil from over her spectacles. Her eyes looked a little red and glassy. She said: ‘I was worried.’

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Mum,’ Lil said as she sat down beside her. ‘But I was OK. I was with Abe.’

  Naomi took her hand, laced their fingers and kissed it. She sighed. ‘Lil, Abe Mandrel is a good man but he’s no better at keeping out of trouble than you are.’

  Lil bit her lip. She wondered what her mum had been doing before she arrived. How long had she been sitting there? The wall of newspaper clippings was opposite, where Lil tacked all her favourite stories, the picture of A. J. McNair’s silhouette in the middle of it. Her dressing table was stacked high with books, detective fiction mostly gleaned from bookshelves around the house. Her wardrobe doors were open but there was nothing in there but clothes.

  Naomi gave her hand a squeeze. ‘So, what were you up to?’

  ‘You know, just helping him out,’ Lil murmured vaguely. Her eyes went down to the floor. There, under the bed the corner of her blue scrapbook was just visible. ‘We were investigating something.’

  Lil pushed the scrapbook out of sight with the heel of her boot.

  ‘Well, you should probably get some sleep then.’ Naomi tucked Lil’s hair behind her ears and kissed her on the forehead. Lil saw a tiny crease appear between her mother’s eyebrows. She held Lil’s head in a nutcracker hug for a second, kissed her again on the top it, and whispered, ‘Goodnight.’

  Lil waited until her mother’s footsteps had reached the first-floor landing and then she quickly peeled off her damp clothes, put on her pyjamas and climbed into bed. She lay there for a moment; her heart still felt as though it was racing so she leant over the edge of her mattress and reached round until she found the corner of the scrapbook and dragged it out from its hiding place. She pulled the covers round her, and by the low light of her bedside lamp opened the scrapbook.

  In the centre of the first page was the photograph of the McNair reporters, a hurriedly made photocopy that Lil had taken from the framed picture in the office of the Klaxon HQ. The reflection from the glass had darkened it, so it was almost impossible to make out any details, but Lil looked closely at the man with the short beard, whose hair was dark like hers but slightly wavy and parted to one side with a cowlick at the front. His white shirt looked crisp, even though the sleeves were rolled up and the top button was undone. Lil had never known what colour his tie was; it looked dark, maybe blue or red, but there wasn’t any pattern on it; it was just plain.

  Roland Selznick. Lil tried to imagine what his face would have looked like in real life. Then when she was almost ready to fall asleep she turned to her favourite story and began reading. It was an exposé on the union racket in the Blue Sky Paint factory, where daring young reporter Selznick had broken his first story by going undercover. Lil read it, even as her eyes were drooping shut, and she fell asleep there, propped up on her pillow with the scrapbook laid out across the bed.

  Chapter 6

  Long Overdue

  The following morning Lil and Nedly left early so that they had plenty of time for research before Lil’s volunteer work started. The sun had only just risen and a haze of fine rain floated down from the low clouds.

  They took Lil’s bike, with Nedly perched on the handlebars, entirely weightless, but even so adding to the chill that was freezing the raindrops clinging to Lil’s hair.

  ‘Of all the places,’ he said despondently, ‘it had to be Rorschach Asylum.’

  Lil skidded slightly in a puddle and had to drop one foot and then push off on it to stabilise them. ‘I don’t like it either.’ She frowned. ‘But as secret hideouts go it’s got form.’

  ‘Do you think they know about Gallows and what he did there?’ Nedly shuddered and Lil jerked the handlebars involuntarily. A car horn blared at her.

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s just land to them, somewhere private.’

  ‘Of all the places,’ he said again.

  ‘I know,’ said Lil, and swung the bike into the courtyard at the back of the Peligan City Public Library.

  She heaved herself up onto the windowsill, clambered through the peeling frame, dropped down onto the toilet cistern on the other side and waited for Nedly to follow suit, holding the window open while he gingerly lowered himself into the cubicle. It would have been so much faster if he just came in through the wall but he still hated passing through solid objects.

  Once they were inside the atrium, Lil entered the four-digit code into a keypad at the side of a sturdy door that was signposted ‘Reading Room’. They heard the familiar buzz and some metallic clunking and the door swung open.

  Lil checked they were alone and then whispered, ‘OK, we know what’s coming in and we know who wants it. The question now is, why is it so important?’

  ‘And why do they need so much of it?’ Nedly walked quickly alongside her. ‘The invoice I saw at the docks read: twenty-seven crates, black tourmaline. T.O.U.R.M.A.L.I.N.E.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Lil.

  ‘Me neither, but it looked like some kind of stone. And it was shiny. Maybe it’s precious? Maybe we’ve stumbled on a jewellery smuggling ring?’

  Lil raised her eyebrows approvingly. ‘Maybe that’s how Ghostcatcher are funding their equipment. Selling stolen jewels?’ She pulled out a pencil and gave it a good chew. ‘That would be a great story. But wouldn’t they just hand it straight over to the buyer?’ She flicked through the card index file.

  Nedly searched the air for answers. ‘Maybe they had to polish it first?’

  ‘That’s not out of the question.’ Lil pulled out a card and studied it. ‘Nedly, the newspaper archive isn’t going to cut it this time. For the kind of stuff we need we’ll have to look up there.’ She let her gaze drift upwards to the mezzanine that encircled the domed ceiling. ‘In the reference library.’

  The reference library was reached by a heavy wooden staircase that cut across the wall in the far corner. The floor was carpeted thickly to absorb the noise of footsteps. An outer ring of shelves with free-standing bays stood at regular intervals, like the hour marks on a clock face. The inner ring, which looked down onto the main library, had strong wooden railings. High-level sloped reading desks were at the end of each bay for customers to rest the huge reference books with spines that were several inches thick. There was a smell of wood polish with a slight undercurrent of mustiness.

  Lil crouched down and stared through the railings at the room below. The wheel of shelves radiated from the study area like the rays of a sun. She looked past them to the door to the librarian’s office.

  ‘You can see it all from up here.’ The sound echoed around the chalky-looking plasterwork of the domed ceiling. ‘This would have been a great place to keep watch from.’

  Nedly looked at her doubtfully. ‘I don’t know – you’d have to keep pretty quiet.’

  ‘I can be quiet.’ Lil’s voice bowled around the dome like a pinball and Nedly grinned at her. She took the pencil out of her mouth but all that chewing had made it too small to write with so she chucked it into her rucksack with the other stubs and then pulled out a spare and her notebook and laid them on one of the tilted reading desks. A dog-eared index card fell onto the floor. Nedly stared at it, pointed the tip of his glowing finger, and the card ro
se into the air.

  ‘You dropped this,’ he said.

  Lil glanced up. She tried to suppress a fleeting look of panic and made a grab for the card with a muttered ‘Thanks’ but Nedly swiped it away for a closer look.

  He stepped out of her reach as he twirled it around and floated the card in front of his eyes. ‘This isn’t the one for black tourmaline. It says here, “Selznick, Roland”.’

  Lil lurched forward, snatched it out of the air and stuffed it into her pocket.

  Nedly’s eyes widened. ‘You’re not supposed to keep hold of those – what if someone else needs it?’

  Lil looked pointedly round at the empty library.

  ‘I mean in the future.’ Nedly held her gaze.

  ‘I’m only borrowing it. I just need to use it a lot and I thought it would be easier if I kept hold of it, temporarily.’

  ‘So Logan knows you have it?’

  Lil rolled her eyes at him with a puff. She had worked out a cover story weeks ago for just this kind of eventuality.

  ‘The fact is I’m thinking of writing a book about him, so I’ve been reading the reports he made before he was published under the pseudonym McNair, along with all the other Klaxon reporters. Once I get familiar with his style I bet I’ll be able to identify which stories were his and then I can use them to tell the whole tale, about the Klaxon and McNair and him being rubbed out – all of it.’

  Nedly thought about this for a moment. ‘Won’t that be dangerous, for the other Klaxon reporters, if you expose them?’

  ‘I won’t publish it. Not yet. Not until it’s safe, but I will write it.’

  ‘Sounds plausible.’ Nedly gave her a lopsided smile and the tips of Lil’s ears reddened. He pointed at a pencil and rolled it around a bit. ‘I thought you were going to say it was because you wondered if maybe he was your real dad.’

  The pencil rolled off the desk and pinged on the floor with a crack that echoed around the mezzanine. Lil held her breath and then said, ‘I suppose there’s that too.’ She looked sideways at him. ‘He’s probably not. It’s just that my dad isn’t around, for whatever reason, and neither is Selznick, because he’s dead, so that’s a pretty good reason not to be around, maybe the best reason of all.’ She raised her eyebrows hopefully. ‘Anyway, that’s my theory. I’m going to follow it, see where it leads.’

  ‘Why don’t you just ask your mum?’

  ‘I don’t know; why doesn’t she just tell me? Why do I have to ask? Anyway, I thought maybe she was in love with him.’ Lil shrugged awkwardly. ‘If she really liked him, I suppose she’s pretty sad about it all.’

  ‘Maybe, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t want to talk about him.’

  ‘I like reading about him in any case. I just wanted to do that for now and if it’s not him, then I don’t want to know. Not yet.’ She outstared Nedly until he shrugged and then said, ‘Come on, we’ve got work to do.’

  Lil referred to the other index card. There were three entries under black tourmaline: qualities; uses in crystal healing; uses in folklore and mythology. She ran her finger along the spines of the books until she found the number that corresponded to the first reference: The Handbook of Gemstone Identification by Professor Percival Somerset and flicked to the relevant page. There was a picture of a shiny black crystal, ridged slightly, like a boiled sweet, something liquorice-flavoured.

  Nedly nodded confirmation. ‘That’s the stuff.’

  Lil scanned through the paragraph below:

  Black tourmaline is rarely used as a decorative gem but has an ability to generate electric charge under mechanical stress or change in shape when voltage is applied. It is naturally polarised and as a result can contain large electric fields.

  ‘Electricity! So maybe they’re not selling it at all – maybe they’re using it themselves for something.’

  Nedly’s eyes widened. ‘As some kind of fuel!’

  ‘I’m pretty sure that the backpacks they use are battery-powered. Maybe they need the tourmaline for charging them up?’ Lil tore a strip of wood from the end of her pencil and chewed on it thoughtfully. ‘We should run it by Monbatsu; he’s an egghead. He might understand all this science.’

  Nedly frowned. ‘But why do they need so much of it all of a sudden?’

  The next reference was for The Secret Power of Crystals and How to Use Them by Janessa Ngata.

  Lil found the book and flicked to the right page. She propped her head on her hand and read aloud.

  ‘Black tourmaline is the most commonly recommended crystal for protection, a powerful absorber of negative electromagnetic energy. It will create a boundary between the wearer and any unsavoury manifestation.’

  The echoes of her words chased each other around the dome. Nedly looked troubled. ‘A manifestation … like a ghost?’

  Lil screwed up her face. ‘I’m not sure. Ghostcatcher are all scientists … would they believe in the healing power of crystals?’

  ‘Maybe they’re mass-producing bracelets or something out of the tourmaline? People could wear them to protect them from things like –’ his face fell – ‘me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lil sighed wearily. ‘This is all beginning to sound a bit far-fetched.’

  There was one last reference and the book was Sorting Through Shadows: Thirty Years’ Experiences as a Ghost Hunter by Milkwood James. Lil gave Nedly a look that said, This will be the one, and stuck her pencil in her hair. The section they needed was only a couple of bays away. Lil scanned the shelf, reading the numbers aloud. Then she backtracked. ‘It should be right here.’ She checked the shelves three times and then the ones above and below to be certain. The books were loose, as though one of them was missing. ‘Nedly, it’s been stolen!’

  ‘Or maybe someone borrowed it?’ he suggested.

  ‘Maybe.’ Lil narrowed her eyes. ‘But who?’

  She knocked firmly on the door to the librarian’s office. Logan opened it just enough to stick out her head, framed as ever with short steel-grey hair and green-rimmed glasses. Several feet below, Milton, the library cat stuck his sleek head out too, took one look at Nedly and hissed. Logan gave Lil a look that said, You’re early and then raised her eyebrows and Lil handed her the index card – tapping the entry for the missing book and shrugging.

  Logan sighed. She hesitated for a moment and then stepped out of the office and closed the door and went over to her desk. She opened a drawer and pulled out a thin wooden tray packed with faded blue cards, selected one from the middle and drew a large leather-bound tome out from a shelf under the counter and flicked through it. The book was filled with lines and lines of pencil writing with dates, titles and names. Logan’s eyes scanned back and forth across the page and then stopped. She turned the book to face Lil and pointed.

  Sorting Through Shadows had been checked out fifteen years earlier and never been returned. Lil followed the entry along to the borrower column and read the name that was written there.

  It was Irving Starkey.

  Chapter 7

  The Peligan City Paranormal Society

  Irving Starkey was Peligan City’s own amateur ghost hunter, even back when no one else believed in ghosts. Recently Starkey had passed a stolen file to the Klaxon so they could break the ‘Haunted’ story: the scoop that got everyone wound up about the Final Ghost in the first place. Nedly had felt sorry for him and Abe had thought he was a crank, but none of them could have predicted just how much trouble he would cause – until it was too late.

  Abe, Lil and Margaret left the Zodiac behind the old derelict lido in Peligan City, and Nedly led them between the rows of lock-ups to the last building standing at the end of the road, an olde-worlde inn known as the Masonic Rooms.

  Abe swung the door open and Lil stoppered it with her foot, silhouetting the trio against the grey morning light. They stood there for a moment taking in the almost empty bar, the carpet and wallpaper both heavily patterned but in opposing styles, and the padded seating upholstered in red velour
and edged with brass tacks. There was a stuffiness to the air and an old malty smell laced with the tang of vinegar.

  The barman placed his palms wide on the highly polished wood counter and said, ‘What can I get you?’

  Abe propped up the bar and ordered two lemonades and a bag of crisps while Lil and Nedly browsed the jukebox.

  When the drinks arrived, Abe paid up, took a sip and then said casually, ‘We’re here for the –’ he dropped his voice – ‘Paranormal Society.’

  The barman paused in his polishing and gave them a relieved grin. ‘You’ve come to the right place.’

  ‘Happen to know if Irving Starkey still runs that show? We were hoping to bump into him.’

  The barman’s smile dipped and he eyed Abe suspiciously. ‘I hope you’re not here to make trouble; Irving’s all right.’

  Abe gave the barman a look like he wouldn’t know how to make trouble if he tried and flapped an expired warrant card at him like a big leather moth. ‘We just want to ask him a few questions.’

  The barman looked sideways at where Lil was sitting. ‘You and that kid?’

  ‘I meant we, the police in general, want his help with our enquiries.’

  ‘Well, he shouldn’t be long.’ The barman sighed. ‘He’s always here.’

  The lights in the room dimmed a notch and the jukebox came on with a medley of banjo renditions of popular tunes.

  Lil raised her eyebrows at Nedly. Margaret whined.

  ‘I didn’t mean to choose that one,’ he protested.

  ‘Can you make it stop?’ Lil muttered.

  The record scratched to the next song. ‘Hey!’ the barman warned. ‘Don’t mess around with that.’

  Lil held her hands up in surrender, gave Nedly a dark look and then they trailed over to join Abe at the small table.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Lil, tearing open the bag of crisps and laying it flat for everyone to help themselves. Nedly nudged one out of the pack and across the table and over the side, where it dropped into Margaret’s zone. Abe picked up yesterday’s edition of the Herald from the next table and opened it to give them cover.