Melody Bittersweet and The Girls' Ghostbusting Agency: A laugh out loud romantic comedy of Love, Life and ... Ghosts? (13 page)

‘Sorry,’ I mumble, trying to ignore the fact that Douglas is now circling Fletch, taking in everything from his deep-blue shirt with obligatory rolled-up cuffs to his slightly inappropriate-for-work jeans and boots that could do with a polish. It’s a look that once again makes him seem caught halfway between business and pleasure, and one I’m trying very hard not to appreciate.

I watch them for a second. They were probably born almost a century apart, but it strikes me that they would likely hit it off under different circumstances. They both have that uber-cool-guy thing going on, that ‘picked first for the team’ look that you just can’t fake. I can easily imagine them having a beer and watching the match with much macho back-slapping. I’m disturbed by the fact that I’m enjoying this little fantasy, considering one of the guys can’t drink because he’s dead and I’d usually be throwing a beer over the other, rather than drinking it with him.

Hot under the collar, I decide to get out of there. I doubt if there’s much I can learn about the house from listening to Donovan Scarborough’s sales spiel, so I head towards the staircase. ‘Actually, I think I left something upstairs last time I was here. I’ll just quickly nip up and grab it, then I’ll get out of your hair.’

Scarborough shrugs, unconcerned, but Fletch watches me with too much interest for my liking. I leave them chatting in the hallway and slip up the stairs, pausing on the landing to get my bearings and then head up the second staircase to the attic room.

A
s I expected
, I find Isaac up there again, this time gazing out of the window.

‘You didn’t bring any books,’ he says. ‘I watched you climb from that van and you didn’t bring any books.’

‘I have them in the van,’ I whisper quickly, pulling a small notebook and pen from my pocket. ‘I couldn’t really come in laden with things while your nephew is downstairs, could I?

Isaac huffs in distaste. ‘He’s not my nephew.’

‘What?’ I step closer, confused.

‘My family blamed me and then disowned me, remember? Well, that works two ways. I disowned them too.’

I can hear decades of bitterness in his words. ‘I want to help you, Isaac,’ I say quietly. I cross the room to sit on a dusty wooden dining chair opposite him. He watches me as I lay the note pad down on the rickety side table next to his chair and then place a new pen on top of it.

‘If I’m going to search for a murder weapon, I need to know where to start. Make a list for me? Anywhere you can think of, you must know most of this house’s secrets after all of these years.’

He laughs, but his eyes are fixed on the middle distance and I get the impression that his mind is miles away. ‘They were like chalk and cheese growing up, those boys, both in looks and in attitude.’

I nod, hoping he’ll go on and wishing it wouldn’t seem rude to make notes as he speaks. As it is, I sit on my hands and concentrate hard in order to commit his words to memory.

‘Douglas and Lloyd?’ I don’t really need to say this because who else can he mean, but I throw it in to keep Isaac talking.

‘One lived for sport so the other automatically had to hate it. One had his nose forever buried in a book and the other read only under duress. One adored the stage, the other couldn’t hold a note. Introvert, extrovert.’ He shakes his head at the memory. ‘That’s just the way they were.’

I don’t need Isaac to elaborate for me on which was which. Any man who gets caught for eternity in a smoking jacket is clearly given to theatrics.

‘They were a couple of years younger than you, weren’t they?’

I know this is true because I’ve studied their family tree. Isaac nods and twists his slim hands in his lap. I wish he didn’t look so generally unloved and unkempt, it makes me want to buy him a comb and a good dinner, even though he would have no use for either.

‘Two years,’ he confirms. ‘I was always the outsider, always separate. Isaac and the twins. Isaac and the boys.’ He huffs softly at the memories. ‘I was a little boy too.’

How I’d love to be able to pat Isaac on the knee right now, anything really to show that I’m listening and I understand.

‘It’s unusual for twins, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Generally you hear only about their similarities, not their differences.’

‘Hard to put my finger on even one similarity,’ he says.

‘Did you get along with them?’

I force my voice to be ultra-casual, even though I am really keen to hear Isaac’s opinion of his brothers.

‘Again, I was different to them,’ he says, shuffling his feet on the bare floorboards beneath his threadbare armchair. ‘More serious, our mother always said.’

‘And were you?’

Isaac shakes his head. ‘It was difficult to compete with them. Lloyd was always so theatrical and demanding, and Douglas was the blue-eyed boy who could do no wrong in our mother’s eyes.’

He looks up at me for a few moments, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he can actually hear the cogs moving in my head, casting him as the jealous, overlooked sibling who finally snapped.

‘Don’t play the amateur sleuth again, Melody, jumping to obvious conclusions. I may not have liked either of them all that much but I didn’t kill Douglas.’

‘I didn’t think that,’ I say. I totally did. ‘Anything you can think of, note it down. I’ll be back later today hopefully, tomorrow at the latest. Your nephew,’ I pause and then correct myself. ‘
Donovan
is pushing for this to be sorted out soon, even though he doesn’t really have a clue what he wants sorting.’

‘He’s Lloyd’s grandson. I’m afraid that makes him genetically predisposed to being a theatrical buffoon.’ Isaac laughs without humour and I notice the slight shake to his hands as he reaches for the notepad and pen I’ve put on the side table. ‘I’ll have a think about that list,’ he says, and with a heavy sigh he leans his head back and closes his eyes. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Melody. Resolution has been a long time coming.’

I watch him rest, and I hope like hell that I can unravel this tangled web. This isn’t about making the house saleable. It’s about three brothers trapped in time by a crime that’s gone unsolved for over a century, about unlocking the real reason they’re imprisoned here in limbo when they should be long gone. In the past I’ve encountered plenty of ghosts who are more than happy to hang around; look at my grandpa. He’s as happy as a pig in muck to be eternally bound to his bedroom and to Gran, but that isn’t what’s going on here. The Scarborough brothers are unhappily tethered to the house in Brimsdale Road because of their unfinished business, and none of them will know a day’s peace until it’s sorted. When I first set foot inside this house there was a distinct staleness to the air, a lazy malevolence borne from years of not being able to communicate with the living aside from terrifying them. My arrival, and undoubtedly Leo’s too, must have been like a shot of pure adrenalin for the brothers. We could see them, and we could talk to them, and because of us there is renewed energy in the house today, a sense of potential in the air.

‘I’ll try to come back later for the list,’ I murmur, and even though ghosts can’t sleep, I pick my way across the cluttered floor as quietly as I can.

As I step out of the room and pull the door closed behind me, I hear a creak on the attic stairs and seconds later Fletch joins me on the little upper landing.

‘Talking to the fairies again?’ he asks, his hands shoved into his jeans pockets.

‘I wasn’t talking,’ I say, as much to annoy him as anything else.

‘I heard you.’

‘What do you want me to tell you, Fletch? That I was chatting to a ghost? Will you believe me if I do?’

‘You could start by telling me why you said my name downstairs.’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I say, pressing my default sarcasm button because I can smell the scent of his skin from here and it’s unexpectedly sexy. Kind of like a weird mix of being in a woodland in springtime and an expensive bar late at night, leather and spice and fresh rain.

He nods. ‘You find me irresistible?’

‘You got me.’ I shrug, aware that we’re closer than we’d usually be because of the confines of the landing. ‘You’re a sex god, Fletch. I can barely keep my hands off you.’

He leans back against the wall beside the attic door, for all the world like the most achingly cool boy at school. I feel about fourteen. ‘You’re pretty fucking hot yourself for a lying, scheming ghost-hunter, Bittersweet.’

I stare at him, dumbfounded, and he stares right back. I’m temporarily silenced by his reply, it came at me out of nowhere, like a meteor across a clear blue sky.

‘Well, I’m glad we got that sorted,’ I say eventually, aiming for uber-cool and hitting uber-dorky.

‘Doesn’t change the fact I won’t sleep until I run you out of town.’

His tone of voice says bored, but the glitter sprinkled in his green eyes tells me that he isn’t. He confuses the hell out of me, so I revert to sarcasm.

‘My family has been here since before you were born, Fletch, and we’ll be here to sing at your funeral.’ I smile, over-bright, and then I leave him there on the landing, trying not to breathe in his scent as I brush past him in case I falter, bury my face in the open neck of his shirt, and then accidently snog his irritating face off.

* * *

I
’m lying
in the bath, a huge glass of wine on the windowsill beside me, my iPad in my hand. I want to read, to relax, to stop thinking about the fact that I couldn’t tell whether Fletcher Gunn was being genuine or not today. He blindsided me, and I don’t even want to admit this to myself in the privacy of my own locked bathroom, but the way he looked at me for a couple of seconds made the bottom drop out of my stomach. I’m accustomed to his barbs and his put-downs; I was so wrong-footed by his compliment that it’s a miracle I didn’t tumble down the stairs to my own untimely death. God, I’d have made it my business to haunt him something rotten.

It’s just been a crazy mixed-up few weeks, and in amongst the drama of our finding our first case and the excitement of getting the agency up off the ground, my romantic life has taken a backseat. Not that it’s taken much of a front seat for quite a while, not since Leo, but I’ve been trying to dip my toes recently for fear of becoming a crazy old cat lady who talks to ghosts.

It’s a bit of a problem to my heart that the agency is probably going to bring Leo Dark back into my orbit on a regular basis, and it seems that I’ve gone and fallen ever so slightly in lust with Fletch, which is wrong on just about every level I can think of. Maybe I should have given my mother’s tiny friend in the dickie bow more consideration. He wasn’t actually that bad when we got talking, although anyone who lists competitive dog grooming as one of his hobbies has to be approached with a healthy degree of caution. That’s how my mother came to meet him in the first place; he’d been a guest on the radio show that aired right before hers, and he’d stuck around because he hoped there was a chance she’d be able to communicate with Cleopatra, his recently deceased toy poodle. As it turned out, Cleopatra turned up at the dinner party instead to visit her owner. He knew instantly that we weren’t faking it because she arrived just as she’d died; primped and painted in orange and black tiger stripes for a jungle themed competition they’d recently placed third in.

So anyway, the point is that my love life is miserably non-existent and the agency is going to mean that I move more directly in the same circles as Leo and Fletch once more, both of them walking, talking egos. I close my eyes and allow myself to indulge in a fantasy where they’re duelling on a cliff top, all swords flashing and eyes glinting in the low, late afternoon sunlight as they battle for my hand. It’s a hot day so I make them strip down to their breeches, and lo and behold, their bodies are gleaming with a manly sheen of sweat. Oh lord, Fletch has amazing shoulders. I’m itching to climb up and ride him piggy back. Wait, what’s that I hear? Is it hooves? Why yes it is, Poldark has just jumped down from his horse and thrown his tricorn hat into the ring for my heart too. God, this is a good fantasy, even for me. I don’t have a clue which of them I want to win, in fact I think I’d prefer it if they just kept brawling. Movement in the skies overhead catches my eye, and a smile tips my lips as Superman swoops down and balls his fists on his hips for a moment before throwing himself into the fray.

‘Took your time, hero,’ I murmur, feeling around on the shelf for my glass as I sink further down into the bubbles. As I take a good gulp of wine, Douglas Scarborough strolls onto the cliff top, pristine and ready for action with his cricket bat over his shoulder.

And therein lies the heart of my troubles. Real life can never measure up to fantasy.

W
e have better
luck when we pull up in Brimsdale Road the following morning; Scarborough House looks quiet and deserted.

‘That’s more like it,’ I say, relieved. ‘Artie, can you grab the TV from the back, please?’

Marina and I carry the rest of the stuff between us and we all troop around the back and into the kitchen. As befits a house of this size, the kitchen is cavernous and lined on all sides with huge cupboards, and a broad cast-iron stove fills the high-mantled fireplace on the chimney breast. A long oak table runs down the centre of the room, and it isn’t difficult to imagine a starchily uniformed maid prepping mounds of vegetables there for a family dinner party.

Artie cranes his neck to peer at me over the top of the large TV box. ‘Where do you want this?’

‘I’m not sure. We need to check which room has an aerial cable.’

He lays it flat on the table and flexes his fingers. ‘Shall I go and look?’

‘The sitting room,’ Isaac says, appearing in the doorway.

‘The sitting room,’ I relay.

Artie frowns. ‘How . . .?’ Understanding dawns across his face and he glances nervously around the room. ‘I’ll, um, take this through there then,’ he says, picking the heavy box up again and crabbing away.

‘Marina, Isaac is here,’ I say, keeping her in the loop. She digs in the bags and pulls out the box set of books.

‘These would be for you then, Isaac.’ She tears off the cellophane and shakes them out onto the tabletop. Flipping one over, she reads the blurb then shudders. They’re not her cup of tea at all; she’s strictly a rom-com kind of reader. ‘I hope you don’t scare easily.’

Isaac crosses the room and pushes the books so they all move along an inch or two, making Marina jump. A tiny smile touches his lips, probably the first one I’ve seen since I met him. It transforms his face, and I glimpse a trace of the man he might have been had his life taken a different course. Had he not been, you know, accused of murdering his own brother.

‘Tell her I hope she doesn’t scare easily either.’

I relay his message and she smirks. ‘A ghost with a twisted sense of humour. Just what I need.’

‘I made the list you asked for,’ he says, and his eyes move to the windowsill. ‘It’s beneath the plant pot.’

I see the corner of the torn out sheet of lined paper sticking out beneath a terracotta pot and tug it out. Isaac’s writing is spidery and unsure, but I can easily make out the words. It’s a fairly long list, some obvious places, some he’s going to have to direct me to as we search. It must have frustrated him greatly over the years to not have the strength or dexterity to do this himself. He’d died an elderly man, and he’d remained in the house as an elderly ghost with those same physical limitations.

I lower my voice to a confidential level. ‘Do the others know about the list?’

He shakes his head. ‘Best not.’

‘That’s what I thought too,’ I say. I’m trying my best to stay open-minded and impartial, but of the three brothers Isaac is definitely the one who is giving me the most leads and information to build the case around. Lloyd goes out of his way to make me unwelcome, and Douglas is forever twenty-one, rakish and handsome without a serious bone in his dead body. His only request has been to watch the odd game of cricket, which is entirely in keeping with the carefree young man he was. It suddenly strikes me that as well as the cricket, he’s going to have access to any number of TV channels. What will he make of modern society? He’s been dead for over a century, and the most recent resident here was an elderly man who lived alone for at least the last twenty years. There must have been a TV here in the past because of the presence of the aerial, but I doubt very much if
Murder She Wrote
and John Wayne westerns will have in any way prepared Douglas for modern movies or music. Oh God, he might find the music channels. What will he make of Ariana Grande gyrating her teeny hips at him, or Little Mix swinging their hair extensions and demanding girl power? He’s in for the shock of his afterlife. I wonder if there are parental controls I can switch on to protect him. I’m starting to doubt the wisdom of bringing a TV here; he might become addicted to
Hollyoaks
and decide that he’s perfectly happy to hang around for the foreseeable future, thank you very much.

‘I think I’ve done it.’ Artie’s voice carries into the kitchen a few minutes later, and Marina, Isaac and I all decamp into the sitting room as the screen flickers into life and messages flash up telling us to leave it in set-up mode.

‘Well done you,’ I say, smiling at Artie and giving him a celebratory fist bump.

‘Yes. Bravo.’ I turn at the sound of Douglas’s voice. He shoots me a barely-there little hello wink as he walks past me and flops elegantly into one of the armchairs by the French doors. It felt like an intimate greeting, just for me, which is weird given that I’m the only one alive who can see him.

A flicker of movement in the corner of my eye snags my attention, and a sense of dread settles over me as Lloyd materialises through the wall. For the most part, the Scarborough brothers have chosen to behave as if they are still alive around me, probably for my benefit, or possibly because being able to communicate with me makes them feel a little more alive and they enjoy the novelty. They use the doors, even though they could just as easily pass through the walls, and they come and go in the regular way even though they could just appear and disappear at will. Perhaps that’s why Douglas in particular makes my heart race; he’s like a glamorous olde worlde movie star hiding out here. He’s James Dean in his own living room and my heart flutters suitably.

Lloyd looks as ill-tempered as ever, striding across the room in a way that makes his burgundy smoking jacket swish with agitation. ‘Have you been hiding a pen in the attic, Isaac?’

‘Not everything in this house belongs to you,’ Isaac responds wearily.

Lloyd’s laugh is unpleasant. ‘I rather think it does, seeing as the present owner is my great-grandson rather than yours, old boy.’

I jump in to diffuse the situation, tucking Isaac’s list safely into the pocket of my jeans.

‘It’s mine. I mean, I left a pen here by accident a couple of days ago. There’s more of them in the kitchen, hang on, I’ll grab them.’

‘I’ll go,’ Marina is quick up out of the armchair she’s been sitting in while she followed the conversation as best she could, and returns a couple for moments later with her hands full.

‘Pens,’ I say, and she holds the pack up as evidence before laying it down on the table.

‘And a puzzle book.’ I shrug as she extends her arm over her head and shows it around the room before placing it down beside the pens.

‘I feel like an airhostess. Shall I point out the emergency exits too?’ she hisses under her breath, and then picks up the garish purple plastic Polly Pocket diary with a sweetheart lockable plastic key, holding it up for inspection. Hmm. It might have been better if we’d let that particular item go unmentioned.

‘I wanted to give you a diary, Lloyd, but May is quite late in the year to try to buy one . . .’ I trail off as he steps nearer to where Marina is holding it out. The look on his face could not be more withering or affronted. I’m surprised he doesn’t bat it clean out of Marina’s clutches.

‘What use have I for a diary?’ He curls his lip. ‘I neither wake early nor go to bed late, I no longer dine with my wife in the latest restaurants, and I don’t go to the theatre, the opera, or the cinema. What, precisely, would you like me to record, Miss Bittersweet? Dust motes, and the fascinating movement thereof? The weather outside, even though I feel neither the warmth of the sun nor the bite of the north wind? Or perhaps you’re hoping for a signed confession of murder?’

‘It has a lock,’ I murmur, feeling ridiculous. Marina turns the little golden key and extracts it, holding it in the air like Exhibit A.

‘It’s a child’s toy, and I refuse to play your childish games.’

He stalks towards the door, then pauses to speak again without even having the courtesy to look at me.

‘Leave the pens and the puzzle book on the table when you go.’

Oh, I will, and I’ll leave the diary too, because despite his apparent fury, I think Lloyd wants it really quite badly.

A
mazingly
, the TV works like a dream after Artie has fiddled around with it, and I consult the TV guide I brought with me to see when the cricket is next on.

‘You’re in luck. There’s live coverage this afternoon,’ I say, and Douglas’s dark eyes flare with excitement.

‘You’ll have to remember to turn the TV off if anyone but us comes to the house,’ I warn him. I’ve yet to work out a cover story to explain why I’ve installed a TV in the sitting room, but one thing is for sure; it isn’t going to involve Douglas wanting to watch the cricket.

‘There’s swimming,’ Artie says, flicking through to the sport channels. ‘Or snooker.’

‘Swimming.’ Douglas stares at the screen with wistful eyes. ‘God, I loved to swim. Remember, Isaac, when we used to go and swim in the lake? Take a picnic?’ A playful smile crosses his lips as he rests his head back against the chair. ‘The girls in swimsuits were quite one of the best things about summer.’

‘I recall you were always very popular with the ladies.’ Isaac nods briefly towards the TV. ‘Not in suits like those though.’

Douglas stares at the modern pool and the, no doubt comparatively tiny, bathing suits of today in fascination, whilst Marina, who hasn’t been privy to their trip down memory lane, grabs the remote and flips channels.

‘I was rather enjoying that,’ Douglas says mildly. ‘Do you like to swim, Melody?’

I shrug, very aware that right now he’s probably imagining me in a scanty swim suit. ‘Not often these days.’

Marina has settled on her choice of channel, and Artie looks sideways at her, surprised. ‘You like snooker?’

‘So what if I do?’ Even though it’s only Artie, she’s still immediately on the defensive; snooker isn’t something many twenty-something-year-old women like to watch.

‘Nothing,’ he shrugs. ‘What do you think of O’Sullivan’s chances this year?’

A tiny smile brushes Marina’s mouth, and her shoulders relax from around her ears. ‘Fair to medium, he’s having a decent season. You?’

‘Is this billiards?’ Douglas says, sitting forward in the edge of his chair to study it.

‘Similar,’ I say. ‘Marina, Artie? Could you please explain the basics of snooker for Douglas? He’s just here.’ I indicate the seat, and try to imagine how it is for them to not be able to see him. It must be like green-screen acting to an empty room, but to give them their due they take my request on face value and start going over the basics, correcting each other every now and then.

Leaving them settled, I turn to Isaac. ‘Can we sit down for a few minutes and run through the list?’

He leads me away from the group of chairs around the TV to the sofas grouped around the fireplace at the top end of the room. I dig out his list as I sit down and smooth it out on my knee.

‘So, this is quite long,’ I say, turning it over. As I suspected, his cobweb writing continues on the back of the paper.

I run my finger down the list, checking I understand each one before I move to the next. Some of them are quite self-explanatory; ‘under the cold slab in the pantry, behind the water boiler in the upstairs landing cupboard’.

Then there’s things like ‘make a thorough search of the bedroom Lloyd hangs out in, the room he shared with his wife Maud when he was alive.’ I agree, but it’s going to be tricky to get in there with Lloyd breathing down my neck. Or not breathing down my neck, but you know what I mean.

‘Your parent’s bedroom?’ I say, moving down the list. ‘Show me which one it is?’ I glance towards the others chatting on the chairs grouped around the TV and call ‘Just going upstairs for five. Hang out there and keep Douglas company.’

Artie lifts his hand and waves in acknowledgement whilst Marina points out something on the screen, clearly enjoying explaining the finer points to Douglas regardless of the fact that she can’t see him and he can’t answer her back. Thinking about it, that’s probably a good thing for both of them.

I
follow
Isaac as he heads into the hallway, up the stairs and along the shady first floor corridor to a closed door at the end.

‘I’ll wait for you to open it rather than just walk through it,’ he says, stepping aside.

‘Cheap tricks
are
best avoided unless you’re dealing with a rookie,’ I agree, hiding my smile as I turn the brass doorknob and push the heavy door open.

‘It’s changed quite a bit since my parents’ day,’ he says, even though to my eyes the bedroom is already a time warp. It looks as if it was last decorated in the 1970s, retro blonde wood wardrobes and furniture with sexy curves and simple lines. I like it, actually – it has cool, stylish appeal that wouldn’t look out of place in a home interiors magazine on sale today. The orange and lime wallpaper would make Orla Kiely swoon, and I’d like to roll the puffy, dull satin eiderdown up and take it home for my own bed. It’s deliciously kitsch, and quite different to the rest of the house.

‘Lloyd’s son let his wife Barbara redecorate it.’ The distaste in Isaac’s tone is clear.

‘Lloyd’s son . . . so that would be Donovan Scarborough’s father? The guy who recently passed away?’

Isaac nods. ‘He allowed his wife free rein in here, and this was the result. I’m sure you can appreciate why she was never allowed to decorate the rest of the house.’

Privately, I’m imagining that Barbara might have made a rather fabulous makeover job of it and feel quite sorry for her that she wasn’t given more freedom. I bet she spent a fair amount of her time up here in this room.

‘Okay, so I should ignore all of the recent additions, the wardrobes, the dressing table, etc,’ I muse. ‘What’s here that would have been here back in 1910?’

‘Nothing.’

I look at him, doubtful. ‘That’s not a lot to go on.’

Isaac shakes his head. ‘My dear, if you’re going to be a sleuth, you need to think like a sleuth.’