Melody Bittersweet and The Girls' Ghostbusting Agency: A laugh out loud romantic comedy of Love, Life and ... Ghosts? (16 page)

C
offee steaming beside me
, I take a seat at the dining table and awkwardly unravel the strings that bind the diaries together with my canary-yellow-gloved fingers. I lightly trace the faded golden numbers swirled into the front cover of the top volume. 1908. Over a hundred years ago. I can barely imagine how life must have been for the Scarboroughs back then, and how wonderful the house must have looked in its heyday. It feels like snooping to even open the diaries, to read Lloyd’s private thoughts and hopes. I’m nervous; I don’t like him very much, and I fear that this glimpse inside his head is going to make me like him even less. I lift the top volume from the pile; they’ve been sandwiched tightly together for decades and it peels away with a reluctant squelch from the one below it. Angling my reading lamp so it highlights the diary, I take a deep breath and slowly open the cover. The first page is tipped with a gilt-framed border, and inside it, in beautiful peacock-blue ink, copperplate type declares that these are the secret hopes and dreams of the owner. Except they’re not Lloyd’s secret hopes and dreams.

The diaries were written by Agnes Scarborough.

‘
T
hey’re
their mother’s diaries?’ Marina does a double take as she slings her tiny denim jacket at the coat stand. ‘Shit!’

‘No shit,’ I murmur, and Glenda pauses typing for a second to eye me over her glasses. She’s been with my family long enough to have known me at an age where swearing got me a smart swat around the back of the head, but I’m all grown up now and she’s going to hear far worse in here from Marina.

Marina squats down on her haunches and lets Lestat stand on his stumpy back legs to fuzz his flat face against hers. ‘How was your first night in your new home, my sweet little vampire boy,’ she babies him, screwing her nose up when he licks it.

‘Oh, he had a whale of a time,’ I say, not hiding the sarcasm in my tone. ‘He stole my crisps, peed and crapped all over the floor, then crashed out like Jabba the bloody Hutt on my bed. I ended up on the sofa because his snores could give a girl tinnitus.’

‘Nooo,’ she croons, as if I’m lying just to make him look bad. ‘Were you scared, little one? Is that what it was?’

I conjure up the image of him blissfully passed out and snoring like a drunk at 4.00 a.m. this morning. Nope, he definitely wasn’t scared.

‘Is he going to live in here during the day?’ Glenda enquires politely, sweeping her ankles to the other side when he makes a beeline for her. When I nod, she pulls up a web site and clicks on an offer for a jumbo bottle of odour-removing disinfectant spray. My gran’s insistence that she clean up vomit has clearly had a lasting effect. Glenda is nothing if she isn’t efficient; she arrived this morning with, not one but three, boxes of latex gloves. One for Blithe Spirits, one for us, and one for spares, because you just never know around here.

Artie flies through the door at 9.10 a.m., bending double with his hands on his knees as he pants.

‘Artie, what happened?’

He pauses to catch his breath. ‘Missed the bus.’ He stops again. ‘Snake escaped.’

All three of us look at him, horrified, and even Lestat seems to understand because he drops onto his belly and lays his jowly face on my Converse.

‘Did you catch it?’ I can hardly bare to ask. Am I the only one of us scanning his body for signs of an errant python? I check his shirtsleeves, his collar, and the bottoms of his trouser legs. All clear.

To my relief, he nods. ‘In next door’s washing basket. She said he was seconds away from a boil wash with her husband’s long johns,’ Artie tells us, eyes wide. Personally I feel more concerned for his neighbour than the snake. I’d never be able to face shaking my smalls out again.

‘Holy shit,’ Marina shudders. ‘Remind me to never visit you.’

Glenda doesn’t seem so offended by the bad language this time; in fact, I fully expect to see her order up a snake-catching net or something similar in the next few minutes, just in case.

‘
G
love-up
, everyone, it’s time to read Agnes’s diaries.’

Marina, Artie and I gather around my desk after lunch, diaries and latex gloves at the ready. We’re all stuffed full of the chicken and chorizo paella that my mother appeared with after a successful trial run for a dinner party she’s planning to throw at the weekend. It’s the first I’ve heard of it, but I don’t question her because a) she hasn’t invited me and b) the paella smells divine. We’ve all demolished large bowls full, Lestat included, so much so that he sat down and stared at Artie disdainfully when he jangled his lead at him afterwards. Right now he’s crashed again; I should probably be more grateful that he’s deigned to use the tartan, padded bed I bought especially for him and is snoozing quietly on his belly rather than noisily on his back.

‘He’s like the Garfield of the dog world,’ Artie says, gazing at Lestat affectionately. From what I recall, Garfield was a lazy, lasagne-eating oaf of a cat. Yup, Lestat is indeed his canine double.

‘We have 1908 through to 1920, but there are a couple of years missing, notably 1910.’

‘The year Douglas was murdered,’ Marina murmurs, and we all nod. It was too big an ask to find the events all neatly recorded.

‘1909 is here though, and 1911, so we should get a good flavour for how things were for the Scarborough family before and then not long after Douglas’s death.’

I hand Artie 1908, Marina 1909, and I take 1911.

‘Go through and make notes of any dates and events that might be worth us all reading. Look for any comments you think might matter, no matter how small.’

Artie straightens his notepad, and it strikes me that I could see him as a copper in the future, or maybe even a reporter. I don’t tell him though; I don’t want Fletcher Gunn getting his hands on my protégé. Artie is of course free to follow whatever career path he chooses . . . as long as it’s not as a reporter alongside Fletcher Gunn. In fact, he should stick to ghost-hunting, but absolutely not for Leo Dark. So, err, yes. Artie is free to do whatever he wants to as long as it’s ghost-hunting for me.

On the whiteboard behind my desk, I’ve written Agnes Scarborough’s name and ‘I made a terrible mistake / diaries’ beside it. I’ve already relayed the story of my early-hours astral visitor to Artie and Marina, and we all know her words needs to stay uppermost in our minds as we examine her journals.

Companionable silence settles over the warm, morning-sun-filled office as we all set about our task. Marina makes a note almost instantly, and I peer across to see what she’s written.

Buy funky coloured ink
.

I shoot her a
really?
look, and then finally, I take a deep breath and dive headlong into 1911.

G
od
, Agnes was so terribly, terribly sad in 1911, it’s breaking my heart to read her words. She was in her mid-forties, and Douglas had died at the beginning of the previous summer. Her diary reads like one long, poignant love letter to her lost child, and I have to keep pausing to wipe my eyes. I even walk Lestat up and down the alley to clear my head, much to his disgust. Agnes’s grief at losing Douglas is unfiltered and harrowing, a tangible thing, so all-encompassing and undiluted that it reaches out and spikes icy shards of fear through my heart. I don’t know how she survived it. Douglas was her beloved boy, forever twenty-one in her head now. She wrote of her precious memories; her joy at his first faltering steps with a huge grin on his baby face, her elation when his first word was ‘Mamma’, and how carefully she’d watched over him through every step of his life to keep him safe. How could that have all been for nothing? It didn’t make sense. How could all of those wiped tears, softly-sung, middle-of-the-night lullaby’s and sticky, beautiful childhood hugs have not been enough to keep him safe? Her emotions swung between violent anger and grief so palpable that I’m surprised her tears didn’t wash away her words as she wrote them. She said that her heart had turned coal-black in her chest, as if someone had set fire to it. She said that every second of every day afterwards she fought against the urge to claw at the earth that covered his body so she could hold him to her once again. She said that her doctor had told her she must drink more water because she’d wept the tears of a village. She didn’t care if she dehydrated, if she shrivelled and dried out or if she died, because it couldn’t possibly be more painful than being left alive in a world when her child was not.

But Agnes didn’t lose only one son in 1910. She lost two. She was so entirely desperate for answers that she allowed her grief to manifest itself as anger towards the person everyone believed to be the killer. Isaac. How could one brother bring himself to kill another? She couldn’t fathom it. He’d left because she told him to go. She’d taken a knife from the kitchen drawer and stood in front of him in the hallway of Scarborough House, and she’d begged him to hack out her heart too because it had stopped working. She couldn’t feel, and she couldn’t love and, most of all, she couldn’t love him. She couldn’t even stand to look at him, or to know that he was still breathing when Douglas wasn’t. Isaac had taken the knife from her hands and laid it carefully on the table, and then he’d walked out of his family home for the very last time.

I’m none the wiser as to who actually killed Douglas by the time I reach December 31
^st
, 1911, but I’m utterly exhausted. I close the diary gently on the desk and glance up at the clock on the wall. It’s after 5.00 p.m., and I’ve never felt more in need of a huge glass of wine and a restorative soak in the bath.

‘Will you be okay?’ Marina asks, rubbing the back of her neck where she’s been bent over, studying the diaries. For once she doesn’t ration Nonna’s almond ring cookies.

I nod. ‘Did you find anything?’

‘Nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow,’ she squeezes my hand on the desk. ‘Let’s pick this up again in the morning. Lift, Artie?’

He checks the date he’s up to in the diary he’s reading and notes it down, then closes the journal and nods. They both look how I feel; subdued and more than ready to put this particular working day behind us.

* * *

I
take
my mum the empty paella pan back after I’ve finished up in the office, and on impulse I hug her to me. She isn’t much of a hugger, but she pats my back gamely because I’m clinging on and then finally she holds me at arm’s length and stares at me intently.

‘Is it the dog?’

I shake my head and half laugh, half cry.

‘Is it a man?’

‘No,’ I say, wiping my cheeks with the heels of my palms. ‘It’s nothing like that. Just a hard day in the office.’ I could elaborate. I could say a hard morning locked in a dark cellar and an even harder afternoon immersed in Agnes Scarborough’s grief, but I don’t because I can’t face going over it all again now.

She looks for a moment as if she might be about to say ‘I told you so’, but if she was she thinks better of it.

‘No one said it would be easy,’ she says, and then she sort of pats me on the head. It’s enough to soothe me.

I
amble back
up the cobbled alley at the side of Blithe Spirits a few minutes later, warmed by the late-evening sunshine on my back and the comforting thought of a deep, hot bath. Lestat can’t get me in the bathroom. I’m miles away, planning how best to manage the night so that I get some proper, contented, baby-sleep, and I don’t notice that there’s someone leaning against my office door until I’m almost standing in front of them. In front of him. In front of Fletcher Gunn.

‘Cute dog,’ he says.

I stall for a second, confused. If he is trying to compliment me, then he needs to go back to dating school because that was actually quite insulting. Then I remember Lestat, but he is a long way from anyone’s definition of cute and he’s not even here; I left him snoozing in the office while I nipped round to return mum’s dish. Then, finally, I remember the video clip I text to Fletch, of the dog relieving himself on Fletch’s face.

‘You seemed to require evidence that I have a dog so I sent you some.’

He’s doing that lounging against the door with one foot up thing again. Well, he might fancy himself as Danny Zuko, but I’m no Simpering Sandy. I don’t even like pink. Not that he’s dressed like a T-Bird, either; he must be fresh out of work because he’s rocking that sexy, end-of-a-hard-day, ruling the world with the rolled up shirt sleeves look he excels at.

‘I got you something.’

He pulls a lime-green pooper-scooper from behind his back and holds it out to me. ‘In case your dog gets the urge to shit on my head next time.’

Maybe it’s because I’ve had a traumatic day, but I’m as touched as I am annoyed. ‘You’re the last of the die-hard romantics,’ I say. ‘I’ll think of you every time I use it.’

He studies my face and frowns. ‘Have you been crying, Ghostbuster?’

‘No.’ I roll my eyes. ‘I just took part in the world onion-chopping competition. I won.’

‘Congratulations. What’s the prize?’

I cast around for an answer. ‘A year’s supply of shallots. I’m going to pickle them.’

He laughs softly under his breath. ‘You’re a terrible liar,’ he says.

‘And you’re a terrible gift-giver,’ I say, looking at the neon plastic scoop.

‘I can be more romantic,’ he offers, and I just look at him because I absolutely cannot read his expression. His eyes are shaded by the long, evening shadows cast by the building, but something about the sigh that leaves his lips tells me that his day has probably been as trying as mine has. I don’t move a muscle when he reaches out and strokes the back of his fingers along my jaw. I can’t move a muscle, because he’s rendered me temporarily catatonic with lust. As long as he stops there, it’ll be okay. I’ll recover the power of speech in a second and we can both forget this ever happened. I can hear cars down on the High Street in the distance and catch enticing wafts of takeaway restaurants firing up for the evening, but back here Fletch and I are suspended in our own little world.

‘I knew your skin would feel like that,’ he says. ‘Too soft for all of your hard edges.’

I frown. ‘I don’t have hard edges.’