Melody Bittersweet and The Girls' Ghostbusting Agency: A laugh out loud romantic comedy of Love, Life and ... Ghosts? (17 page)

‘Yes you do. You’re all sharp edges and sarcasm and trouble, but your skin isn’t playing games. It’s smooth and warm, and it likes me much better than the rest of you does.’

And he says
I’m
trouble? ‘My skin dislikes you every bit as much as the rest of me does,’ I say, but it’s a lie. It’s not even a white lie for someone else’s benefit; certainly not for his. It’s an outright lie to myself. Not that it’s very effective, because he’s just opened his hand and cupped my jaw and my skin feels like it is actually sparkling. My skin is
swooning
. My head isn’t, and my heart isn’t, but my skin is experiencing a severe sensory malfunction. It’s flirting with Fletcher Gunn like a
One Direction
fan who just met Harry Styles.

‘What about your mouth, Bittersweet?’ he says, and Jesus, I think I’ve stepped closer to him. I look down at my feet in alarm and issue them with a direct order. Fall back, fools! Fall back!

He runs an experiential thumb across my bottom lip. I consider biting it, but he might be one of those people who gets all excited by rough stuff and drag me upstairs by my hair or something. So, instead of biting him, I sort of sigh and part my lips, which to him probably looks like an invitation to carry on when I intended it to signal boredom. It probably doesn’t signal boredom, because as he’s already observed, I’m a terrible liar and I’m not bored at all.

‘What about my mouth?’ It sounded forthright and challenging in my head, but it slides from my lips on a breathy whisper. Fletcher Gunn just turned me girly. I am Marilyn Monroe on my own doorstep, and he’s just splayed his hand on the small of my back and swayed me into him. Oh my God! My body is against his, and he’s dipping his head, and I know I should call a halt to this, but reading Agnes’s diary has left me feeling raw and vulnerable, and right now this gentleman definitely does not prefer blondes in white flippy dresses. He favours short, snarky, brunettes in jeans and
Rugrats
T-shirts. I’d stop him, but he’s holding my face between both of his hands now, and it is so suddenly incredibly sexy that I feel as if my bones have just melted into my Converse. I want him to kiss me. I want to kiss him. He’s so close his breath mingles with mine. I close my eyes and lay my palm flat over his heart; I can feel its steady beat beneath the smooth cotton of his shirt.

He’s quite a lot taller than me, and there is something in the way he bends his head to my level, in how the muscles of his shoulders bunch as he cups my face that makes me the one who closes the space between our lips, not him. I stretch up on my tip toes to meet him, and the kiss he gives me in reply is so very, very slow and sensual that I slide my other hand around the back of his neck and stroke his hair. He barely moves, as if he is containing himself. It’s the stillest of kisses; he opens my lips with the briefest brush of his tongue, and lowers one warm hand to cover mine on his chest. His heartbeat quickens, and when I slide my tongue between his lips he makes this little moan in his throat that is hands-down the hottest sound I’ve ever heard. It’s guttural, and primal, and he isn’t so still anymore. His fingers slide around my head and fist in my hair, and the uptick in tempo makes me want to climb him like a tree, to wrap myself around him and stay there. He tips my head back and, there’s no other word for it, it’s masterful. I’ll think of a better word for it later because that is entirely too Mills and Boon for a badass businesswoman like me, but masterful covers it perfectly because he overwhelms my senses with his mouth and his hands and his low, sexy moans.

‘Bittersweet?’

He says my name and I sink my teeth into his bottom lip. From the way he pulls my head up to his I’d say he liked it, and his shallow breathing tells me that he’s just as into this as I am.

‘Hmm?’ I can’t form words, because he’s kissed them all away. If he asks me if he can take me to bed I am absolutely going to say ‘yes please, do it right here and now, my bedroom is just this way’. I’m already pulling him upstairs in my head.

‘Your dog is humping my leg.’

I open my eyes, my lips now bereft of his kiss, and I repeat his phrase in my head until the words make their way through the kiss-fog he’s breathed into me. Your dog is humping my leg.
My dog is humping his leg.
Fucking Lestat! I look slowly down and sure enough, there he is on the cobbles, merrily banging away at Fletch’s leg with his beady eyes rolled back in his flat face in pure delirious bliss. Get off him, you hair-shedding, one-eared, monster-mutt from hell! This isn’t a bloody orgy, this one’s mine! I belatedly notice that the office door has swung open behind Fletch and I vow to kill Lestat in a really nasty way. I’m going to stake him through the heart with silver when he sleeps for the pleasing literary symmetry of it.

‘I’ll let you get away with kissing me this one time but only because that onion-chopping competition clearly made you overwrought.’

I put my hands on my hips and curl my just-kissed lips into a sneer as I look up at him.

‘You kissed me. You could see I was vulnerable and you took advantage.’

He pushes his hand through his hair and laughs, looking back down towards the High Street as he shakes his head. ‘You are the least vulnerable woman I’ve ever met.’

‘And you’re the most annoying man on the planet,’ I say, as I shove Lestat’s fat ass back inside the office and slam the door. The dog’s interruption had a similar effect to a bucket of iced water being thrown over me from a great height; it’s well and truly broken the sex spell and makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing.

‘Well, I’m glad we got that sorted. You’re tough as nails and I’m irritating as hell. I still think we should lay our hostilities aside for the evening and have wild sex, because I can still taste you on my lips and you’re delicious.’

I stare at him. Who says stuff like that, really? I’m reminded of my conversation with Marina, about Bazza and never meeting your heroes. It’s a shame then that we didn’t also cover what to do when a man you think you can’t stand unexpectedly becomes your sex hero, for five glorious but inappropriate minutes on your doorstep.

‘It’s cherry lip gloss,’ I say lamely, folding my arms over my
Rugrats
T-shirt. I’m aware that I’m one hot, open-mouthed kiss away from caving in, so my next words probably sound more hostile than they might have.

‘Go away, Fletch, and don’t ever kiss me again, alright? And for the record, no, I’m not interested in disappointing saveloy-sex. Not with you, or the Dalai Lama, or even with Thor.’

Also for the record, the last one was a lie. And alarmingly, it seems that the first one might have been too.

He snort-laughs and heads away down the cobbled alley. ‘You’re seriously weird, Bittersweet.’

I watch him leave, bathed as he is in the harvest-gold evening-sunlight, and I can only agree. I am seriously, seriously sodding weird. I must be to let myself end up getting kissed breathless by Fletcher Gunn for the price of a lime-green popper scooper.

* * *

I
’m going
to take my alarm clock to the charity shop. I no longer have any need for it, because Lestat licks every inch of my face at 6.00 a.m. every morning to let me know he requires a pee and his breakfast. I had naively expected that a dog would fit around my life, not that I would need to reshape my existence around his. In quite a few ways Lestat is an undemanding dog; he thankfully seems to like walking even less than I do and he’s not one of those dogs who constantly shoves a slimy, saliva-coated tennis ball in your hand. For both of these things, I’m grateful. However, I’m less enamoured by the fact that he has clearly been pampered and allowed to run amok, because he’s one demanding brute of a taskmaster. He asks for what he wants politely just once, and then waits for a maximum of five minutes before he exacts revenge for being ignored. I can almost hear his thoughts. Don’t take me out for a quick piddle by 6.05 a.m.? No sweat, Melody, I’ll just mosey on out into the lounge and pee on the rug. Don’t ensure I have a fresh bowl of kibble by 6.15a.m.? Hey, that’s cool. I’ll just find something else to eat while I wait, girlfriend. A banana still in its skin? Delicious. Your slippers? A gastronomic treat. A cork from a wine bottle? Shredded and ingested with pleasure, Melody, and a fine vintage it was too.

He’s like a tiny gangster. I have to keep him happy or else he flips, but as long as things go the way he intends them, we can both live in peace. It doesn’t bother me too much on a weekday because I’m up anyway, but today is Saturday and my bed is warm, and I changed my sheets yesterday so the quilt still has that ‘you’re actually sleeping in a warm, sunny meadow’ feel about it. I don’t want to open my eyes; I feel as if they’re glued together. I don’t want to go and shiver outside while Lestat paces up and down the alley like an impatient furry general to choose his spot. I corpse and pretend that the fact that his tongue is in my eye socket isn’t bothering me. I try, but it’s futile because we both know that I’m going to give in. I bought new slippers yesterday, fancy knitted boots with fur inside, and I like them enough to sleep with them under my pillow. He knows it, of course. You don’t get to be a mafia boss without knowing everything that’s going down in your manor, and at 6.05 a.m. I feel one of the boots start to slowly slide out from beneath my head. It’s enough. It’s a direct threat. Get up, or the slipper’s history. I open my eyes and there he is, eyeballing me with the pompom of the boot locked firmly between his jaws.

I bare my teeth and growl at him, but he just sits there. I think he’s counting down in his head.

‘Fine,’ I grumble. ‘I’ll do it, but afterwards I’m getting back in this bed for probably the entire weekend and my slippers are allowed to live, do you understand me?’

He waits until my feet have actually hit the floor before he relinquishes his death-grip on the pompom, laying it down in theatrical slow-motion.

‘Why thank you, you’re so kind,’ I tell him, hoping he’s sophisticated enough to understand the nuances of sarcasm. I stick my feet inside the bed-warmed slippers and wriggle my toes, then follow his furry little butt out of the bedroom, resigned to my fate as his human.

Half an hour later, I’m back in bed with a huge mug of coffee and Agnes Scarborough’s diary from 1920. I’m wearing my marigolds again because I can’t be bothered to go down to the office for a latex pair and I’m wearing my furry boots – please God don’t let there be a fire, or else Fletcher Gunn will have a field day when they carry my charred body out, he’ll have me down as some kinky fetishist before the fire’s even died.

We’ve worked our way through Agnes’s diaries, and even though it’s been riveting as a personal account of living through the First World War we’ve yet to discover anything of real significance to the case. I now know that like most men of their age, both Isaac and Lloyd fought for their king and country, and that Isaac was decorated for gallantry shortly afterwards. Agnes knew of this, yet she never acknowledged her awareness of his bravery to Isaac himself. She observed her estranged son from a distance, although it’s clear that she privately kept tabs on him. Even her diary entries about him are abstract; factual, devoid of maternal emotion. But they are there, nonetheless, which indicates that he was on her mind even if she didn’t allow herself the luxury of writing about him in any form other than bald fact. Maybe that’s why I am even more surprised by the entry at the end of June 1920.

‘Charles Frederick delivered safely, Hull Maternity Hospital
.’ Next to it, she has written ‘
my first grandchild
.’

I scour the diary for any further mention of the child, but there’s nothing. Who is he, and more importantly,
whose
is he. It is as if she was reporting the birth of a stranger, and she certainly didn’t break out the knitting needles. She didn’t even break out the sherry. It can’t possibly be Lloyd’s son, because her diary is peppered with mentions of his upcoming wedding to his fiancé, Maud. All of this leads me to the only possible conclusion, and a new chunk of the puzzle that I need to slot into place somehow.

Isaac had a son.

T
his feels
too important to wait until Monday. I wish Agnes would come back and see me again, but given how patchy her connection was last time I don’t think she’ll make it through a second time. I have so many questions for her now, the most obvious one being about her first grandson. Who was his mother, and did Isaac marry her? Obviously, I’m planning to put these things to Isaac, but I need to think it through first. Why hasn’t he told me this himself? Is it simply because it’s irrelevant? Maybe it isn’t important, but I can’t shake the thought that this is a vital part of the puzzle. I look at my watch. It’s only just after 7.00 a.m., but I’m done sleeping.

I have a ghost I need to quiz.

* * *

M
y heart sinks
when I arrive alone at Brimsdale Road just after 9.00 a.m. Two large, dark sedans lounge at the curb; I recognise one of them as Donovan Scarborough’s but I don’t think I’ve seen the other one before. Lestat rides shotgun next to me on the bench seat, and as Babs shudders to a halt he looks at me reproachfully.

‘Sorry, buddy,’ I say. ‘I told you you wouldn’t like it, but you wouldn’t have it.’

He’d insisted on coming this morning, and I relented in the end because I’m fast learning that it’s easier to give him what he wants than face the consequences.

‘What do we do now?’ I ask him quietly, scanning the house for movement. He stands up and puts his paws on the dash, as if he’s genuinely considering my question. It strikes me that if I go in there now I’m going to have to take him with me. It’s enough to make me reach for the ignition, but I’m thwarted by the appearance of Donovan Scarborough storming down the path. There’s no doubt that he’s seen me; he’s heading straight for Babs and there’s no mistaking his expression. He’s furious.

I surreptitiously push the door-lock down with my elbow and then slowly wind down the window as he raps on it.

‘Mr Scarborough,’ I smile. ‘Lovely morning.’

‘No, it bloody well is not!’ he says, far louder than is necessary given that his face is less than a foot away from mine. Lestat moves to stand on my lap and eyeballs Scarborough, and for a moment they’re involved in a bulgy-eyed stare off.

‘I was just about to leave . . .’ I say, but he shakes his head and rattles my door to try to slide it open.

‘No, no, no you don’t,’ he mutters, reaching his arm inside Babs and feeling around for the handle. By anyone’s standards this would be considered a gross invasion of privacy, and I’m no exception. I’m about to protest when Lestat takes matters into his own hands and lunges for Scarborough’s searching fingers. I silently vow to offer Lestat a bag of cheese and onion crisps to himself tonight; in Marina’s absence he’s stepped up to the plate as an excellent bouncer.

‘My dog would like it if you took your arm out of my vehicle,’ I say, staying just on the right side of polite. He doesn’t afford me the same courtesy.

‘Get in there and control those sodding ghosts,’ he practically yells. ‘What exactly am I paying you and Laurence Llewelyn Bowen’s dodgy brother for? Neither of you have done a bloody thing!’

I’d like to reply that he hasn’t actually parted with a penny for either of us yet, and won’t unless one of us is successful, but I don’t because he looks like he might be about to pop a vein, probably the one in his forehead that’s pulsing like it has a life of its own.

‘Is there a problem in there?’ I look towards the house, closely mimicking Joanna Lumley’s tone of voice because she’s cool and sophisticated and she can make people do whatever she wants, even politicians.

‘Is there a problem in there?’ Scarborough repeats under his breath, but he adds a manic little unhinged laugh at the end as he looks away into the distance and his fingers drum, fast and furious on the car window frame.

‘
Yes
, there’s a problem in there,’ he barks. ‘The potential buyers wanted to check over some details inside the house, and they’re now holed up in the master bedroom refusing to leave because they’re goddamn terrified!’ He bangs his fist down between his last three words for emphasis.

‘But you knew we hadn’t finished the job, yet,’ I say calmly. ‘Would you like me to come in and see if I can help?’

He’s distracted from answering by the screech of brakes, and a second later Leo jumps from his car, and runs over to join Scarborough beside Babs.

‘You didn’t need to call both of us,’ he mutters, scowling at me. ‘I told you I’d be here in fifteen minutes and here I am.’

‘I didn’t call her,’ Scarborough says irritably.

To be perfectly honest they’re both starting to piss me off. It’s Saturday morning and I fully expected to have the place to myself, yet Scarborough is acting as if I’m on his payroll and Leo’s acting as if I’m in his way. Well excuse me and my dog for breathing. Leo shoots me a filthy look and then gives Lestat a longer, curious stare.

‘You got yourself a one-eared pug.’ He speaks deliberately slowly, as if Lestat is the most shocking creature he’s ever laid his eyes on. He isn’t a dog person. He isn’t an animal person really, unless it’s cow, served medium-rare with a decent shiraz, or the mink trim on his vintage Russian Cossack hat. Leo’s world isn’t really designed to accommodate pets – it’s glamorous and he is always the centre of it; Vikki and Nikki are probably as close as he’ll get.

‘He has two ears and he can hear just fine,’ I grumble, unlocking my door and sliding it open. Lestat rolls out onto the pavement like a furry bowling ball, sniffing Donovan Scarborough’s expensive loafers with the kind of keen interest that usually means he’s about to cock his leg. I jump out of Babs and steer him away and, looking up at the two men who are now towering over me, make a mental note to get Marina to train me to walk in high heels without looking as if I’m playing dress-up. I only own one pair and I’ve never actually left the house in them, but I wish I had them on my feet right now so I could sashay away from these guys like a female assassin rather than schlep after them towards the house, with one lace undone like they’ve just picked me up from school. Lestat isn’t helping. He’s wildly interested in his new surroundings and is charging ahead of us like a small bull, whilst piddling everywhere like an incontinent pensioner to mark his territory.

‘Can’t you leave him in the van?’ Scarborough turns to speak to me as we approach the house.

‘Dogs die in hot cars.’ I shoot him a withering ‘everyone knows that’ look which silences him.

Leo huffs at Lestat as we reach the front door and makes a last attempt. ‘Can’t you at least put him on a lead and tie him up out here?’

I glance down at Lestat and hope he didn’t hear Leo. ‘He takes offence at the word lead,’ I say, mouthing the last word just in case. It’s not a lie. The resettlement pack that came with Lestat had a tick list, and someone, presumably the American Tom Jones, had scrawled
hell no!
next to the box where it asked if he was trained on a lead. I took it with a pinch of salt and bought one anyway; I’ve seen enough TV dogs go bonkers with happiness at the merest mention of walks. Not this dog. Oh, it’s fair to say he went bonkers, but not with happiness. It was with pure, unadulterated rage. He doesn’t mind the odd stroll as long as the weather’s decent, but it’s strictly on equal terms, just two guys out taking the air and chewing the cud.

‘He’ll be alright once he’s in there,’ I say. ‘He’s just excited to be somewhere new.’

Leo sighs and slots his key into the front door, and the moment he pushes it open we can hear muffled shouts.

‘How long have they been up there?’ Leo frowns as he throws his keys on a side table and prepares to head upstairs. He sounds more like a doctor on call than a ghost-hunter, and for a second I’m struck by two things: 1) I gave him the vintage Bowie T-shirt he’s wearing, and 2) despite our differences he’s undeniably a damn fine looking man. He has a brooding charisma, and although he’s polished enough to err heavily towards metro, he’s still manly enough to be able to put a shelf up or wire a plug. He could tackle a flat pack chest of drawers with a screwdriver and a lot of swearing, but I wouldn’t trust him to, say, build my kids a tree house from scratch. When I have kids, or trees. There was a time in our lives when I’d started to wonder if my children would be his children, if we’d have a garden with trees and share a bed at the end of each day. Man alive, all this from the way he threw his keys down on the hall table and acted like an actual grown up? Once this case is over, I’m going to have a stern word with myself. First I snog the face off Fletcher Gunn, and now I’m daydreaming about playing house with Leo Dark.

Can you have a selective frontal lobotomy? I’d really like it if they could just nip in and remove my faulty romance-gene by laser surgery and replace it with one that makes me attracted to men who aren’t lethal for both my heart and my business.

By now, Leo has gone on ahead up the stairs with Scarborough behind him, so I hang back and wait to see what happens for a few minutes; even I can see that running up there and trying to outsmart Leo would make me look like an idiot. I’m not waiting alone; Lestat is scoping the place out thoroughly, face to the floor and backside in the air as he inches his way around the skirting, and Douglas puts in an appearance the moment Leo is out of sight, coming out of the lounge like an actor walking on stage in a farce.

‘You must go upstairs and look, Isaac’s gone totally cray cray.’ He grins wickedly as he heads to the stairs, and when he turns back to me expectantly, I stare at him.

‘Did you just say “cray cray”?’

‘Girl, I watch the Disney channel,’ he says, and he sounds for all the world like a feisty fifteen-year-old American girl.

‘Just stick to the sport and the kids’ channels, for God’s sake.’ I dread to think of some of the late night stuff that he could come across.

Douglas’s eyes sparkle with fun. ‘Too late. I’m quite ruined, Melody, and it’s all your fault.’

He holds my gaze for a long moment, and once again I have that intimate feeling, that unexpected connection with him. It’s probably because he’s not all that different in age to me and, and I cannot stress this
enough
, he is ridiculously handsome. I mean, if he were alive right now, he’d be snapped up by a modelling agency in a heartbeat and adorning teenage girls’ bedroom walls, looking moody. Or maybe he’d be in a boyband, even though Isaac said he can’t hold a note. Anyway, the point is that he is incredible to look at, and to me at least, he looks flesh-and-blood real. Throw in the fact that I am literally the only girl in the world that he can talk to and you have the breeding ground for an entirely inappropriate crush on both sides.

I’m pulled back into the here and now by the racket coming from upstairs. It does actually sound as if Isaac has indeed gone cray cray, so I cross to the bottom of the stairs to listen to what’s going on.

‘Mr Scarborough,’ I hear Leo say, and then I hear him yelp. ‘Mr Scarborough, please! Throwing books around isn’t going to help anyone, is it? Be a good chap.’ A second later he yelps again, only a lot louder, and Douglas laughs just ahead of me on the staircase.

‘Isaac always did have a good bowler’s arm,’ he says carelessly.

I can hear banging around and I step halfway up to listen. Judging by the fact that Donovan Scarborough is hovering nervously outside the master bedroom at the far end of the landing, Leo must be in there trying to reason with Isaac.

‘Why is he behaving like this?’ I ask Douglas in quiet tones.

‘They were talking about completion dates, I think they said?’ Douglas says. ‘And I think they
might
have mentioned demolition.’

‘Ah,’ I say. I can see why that might have caused a stir.

‘You need to let these people leave. Hostage-taking is a completely unacceptable way to behave,’ Leo warns Isaac, assuming the tone of a policeman talking to someone about to throw themselves off a high ledge. ‘Now, I’m going to ask them to walk slowly towards the door, and I’m advising you very strongly not to throw anything else.’

It goes quiet for a moment, and I tiptoe up to the top of the stairs because it’s frustrating not to be close enough to see and hear everything for myself.

‘Okay guys,’ Leo says, low and authoritative. ‘Come towards me.’

I hear the creak of floorboards, and then a great flurry of bangs and squawks and a fair bit of violent sweary shouting. Leo’s voice is loudest, and it doesn’t sound to me like his cool calm commands have been met. No one exits the room, but I can hear a woman sobbing now. It’s no good. I can’t just stand here any longer. I’m going in.

Donovan Scarborough is as white as a sheet when I pass him by, and I pause in the doorway to get the measure of the situation. The last time I came in here with Isaac, I admired the cool retro furniture and funky wallpaper. It looks very different today. The first thing to note is that the previously tidy master bedroom is an almighty mess. The blond wood bedside tables are tipped on their sides, drawers have been yanked out and vintage clothing hangs haphazardly from them, and there are books
everywhere
. There’s a sizeable bookcase to one side of the chimney place and I’d say it was fully stocked before Isaac started hurling books every time anyone tried to leave the room. In the far corner, cowering, are two men and a woman, all in business dress, all terrified out of their wits by the entity trying to cause them harm. They daren’t leave their huddle, and the woman is sobbing like a five-year-old who’s lost her balloon. Leo’s sporting a fresh, bloody cut just above his eye, and Isaac himself looks absolutely wild with fury. I’ll be honest; I’m shocked to see him in such an unkempt state. His rage has strengthened him, and right now he’s a pretty powerful ghost.