9781911746164 by Smakprov Media AB

A Melody Bittersweet Novel

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Originally published in the United Kingdom in different form as an ebook as The Skeletons of Scarborough House by Kitty French by Bookouture, a division of Hachette UK, in 2016.

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This book is for my brother, to correct the terrible oversight of not having dedicated one to him before. It’s also my craziest book to date and therefore fitting.

CHAPTER

ONE“So, what do you do with your spare time, Melody?”

I look my date square in his pretty brown eyes and lie to him. “Oh, you know. The usual.” I shrug to convey how incredibly normal I am. “I read a lot . . . Go to the movies. That kind of thing.”

I watch Lenny digest my words and breathe a sigh of relief when his eyes brighten.

“Which genre?”

“Umm, in movies or books?” I’m stalling for time because, in truth, I don’t get much in the way of spare time to do either.

“Movies. Action or romance? No, let me guess.” He narrows his eyes and studies me intently. “You look like a sucker for a romcom.”

“Do I?” I’m genuinely surprised. I just scrape five foot and look more like Wednesday Addams than a Disney princess. Maybe Wednesday Addams is over-egging it, but you get the idea; I’m brunette and my dress sense errs on the side of edgy. I don’t think anyone has ever looked at me and thought whimsy. Maybe Lenny sees something everyone else has missed, me included. I quite like that

idea, mainly because everyone who knows my family has a head full of preconceptions about me.

“Four Weddings?” He shrugs. His outdated suggestion tells me that he’s not really a rom-com guy either. There’s hope.

I shrug, not mentioning that the only part of that particular movie I enjoyed was the funeral.

“The Holiday?”

Again, I try to look interested and hold my tongue, because I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear that I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than ever watch an overoptimistic Kate Winslet drag some old guy around a swimming pool again. My mother tries to get me to sit and watch it every Christmas, and every Christmas I think of a new reason to say no.

I’m relieved when the bill arrives and we can get out of there, because so far Lenny has turned out to be a pretty stellar guy and somehow I’ve managed to convince him that I walk on the right side of the tracks. Maybe this time, things will be different. Lenny pulls his dull, salesman’s sedan into the cobbled cartway beside my building and kills the engine. I don’t mind dull. In fact, my life could really use a bit of dull right now, so I shoot him my most seductive smile, cross my fingers that my mother will be in bed, and invite him in for coffee.

I tug him by the hand through the dark back door, placing my finger against my lips to signal he should be quiet as we tiptoe past my mother’s apartment and up the old wooden staircase to my place.

He rests his hand on my waist as I turn the key, and a small thrill shoots down my back. Look at me, winning at this being-an-adult thing today! Dinner with an attractive man, sparkling conversation, and now back to mine for coffee . . . and maybe even a little fooling around. It’s not that I’m a virgin or anything, but it would be fair to call my love life patchy of late. By of late I mean the last two years, ever since Leo Dark and I called things off. Well, by Leo and I, I mean Leo called things off, citing conﬂict of interests. Ha. Given that he was referring to the fact that my mad-as-a-bag-of-cats fam-

ily are the only other psychics in town besides him, he was, at least in part, right.

But enough of Leo and my lamentable love life. Right now, all I want is for Lenny to not know anything at all about my peculiar family, to keep seeing me as a cool, regular, completely normal girl, and kiss me senseless.

“You remind me of Kate Middleton,” Lenny whispers behind me at the top of the stairs. I mean, I’m considerably shorter and distinctly un-regal, but I’ll take it.

“All big brown eyes and clever one-liners. It’s very sexy.”

I’m fairly sure Kate Middleton has green eyes and isn’t especially known for clever one-liners, but I don’t even care because I think he’s just brushed a kiss against the back of my neck! My door sticks sometimes so I shoulder-barge it open, aiming for firm and graceful but, I fear, more like a burly police SWAT team ramming it down. Thankfully, Lenny seems to take it in his stride and follows me into my apartment. He probably doesn’t register the heady scent of Chanel No. 5 hanging in the air, but I do and my heart sinks.

Just when it had all been going so well. Why couldn’t I have just given him a good-night kiss in the car, sent him on his way with maybe the smallest hint of tongue as a promise? He’d have been up for a second date, I’m sure of it.

I sigh as I ﬂick on the table lamp. My mother is standing on my coffee table in a too short, too sheer, baby-blue negligee with her arms raised toward the ceiling and her head thrown back.

“Shit!” Lenny swears in my ear, clearly startled. He isn’t to blame. My mother’s a striking woman, ballerina-tall and slender with silver hair that falls in waves well beyond her shoulder blades. It isn’t gray. It’s been pure silver since the day she was born, and right now she looks as if she’s just been freshly crucified on my coffee table.

I huff as I drop my bag by the lamp. So much for me being normal.

“Err, Mother?”

She takes several heaving breaths and opens her eyes, glaring at us.

“For God’s sake, Melody,” she grumbles, dropping her hands from above her head and planting them on her hips. “I almost had the connection then. He’s hiding out in the loft, I’m sure of it.”

I risk a glance over my shoulder at Lenny, who sure isn’t kissing my neck anymore.

He lifts his eyebrows at me, a silent “what the hell?” and then looks away when my mother beckons to him like a siren luring a fisherman onto the rocks.

“Your hand, please, young man.”

“No!” I almost yell, but Lenny is already across the room with his hand out to help her down. My mother sly-eyes me as she steps from the table, keeping a firm grip on Lenny’s hand.

“Long life-line,” she murmurs, tracing her scarlet nail across Lenny’s palm.

“Mother,” I warn, but my somber, cautionary tone falls on her selectively deaf ears. I expected nothing else, because she’s pulled this trick before. Admittedly, the standing-on-the-table thing is a new twist, but she’s got form in scoping out my prospective boyfriends to make sure they’ll fit in with our screwball family from the outset. Not that her romantic gauge is something to put any stock in; Leo passed her tests with ﬂying colors and look how that ended up. I got my heart broken and he got a spot on Morning TV as the resident psychic. Where’s the justice in that? Look, we may as well get the clanky old skeleton out of the family closet early on here, people. It’s going to come out sooner or later, and despite my attempts to pull the wool over Lenny’s eyes, there’s never any running away from this thing for long.

My name’s Melody Bittersweet, and I see dead people.

It’s not only me. I’m just the latest in a long line of Bittersweet women to have the gift, or the curse, depending on how you look at it. My family has long since celebrated our weirdness; hence the well-established presence of our family business, Blithe Spirits, on Chapelwick High Street. We’ve likely been here longer than the actual chapel at the far end of the street. That’s probably why, by and

large, we’re accepted by the residents of the town, in a “They’re a bunch of eccentrics, but they’re our bunch of eccentrics” kind of way. What began as a tiny, mullion-windowed, one-room shop has spread out along the entire row over the last two hundred years; we now own a run of three terraced properties haphazardly knocked into one big, rambling place that is both business and home to not only me, but also to my mother, Silvana, and her mother, Dicey. Gran’s name isn’t actually Dicey. It’s Paradise, oﬃcially, but she’s gone by Dicey ever since she met my grandpa Duke on her fifteenth birthday and he wrote “Dicey and Duke” inside a chalk heart on the back wall of our building. He may as well have written it on her racing heart.

“Silvana!”

Speak of the devil. Does no one go to bed around here?

Gran stands in the open doorway with her hand raised as if to knock. I guess I should be glad she’s slightly more respectably dressed, if a lilac ﬂoor-length, shot-silk kimono, bearing huge Technicolor dragons could be considered as such. Her usually pin-curled red-gold hair is piled elegantly on her head and she wears a slash of fire-engine-scarlet lipstick for good measure. Most people couldn’t carry the look off, but thanks to her poise, confidence, and couldn’tcare-less attitude, my gran wears it with artful success. She glides past me without invitation and gazes at my mother and Lenny, who are still hand in hand on the rug.

God. First thing tomorrow morning, I swear, I’m going to look for a new place to live, somewhere, anywhere, that is not in the same building as my mother and my gran. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a charming old place and I love my family dearly. It’s not even as if I don’t have my own space here, because, theoretically at least, I do. Mum and Gran have the sprawling ground-ﬂoor apartment behind Blithe Spirits, and I have the smaller upstairs ﬂat tucked away at the back. In lots of ways this makes me fortunate; I get to have a nice little home of my own and stay close to my family. Which would all be fine and dandy, were it not for the fact that my family are liable

to come up and let themselves into my ﬂat—using the spare key I gave them for dire emergencies only—and embarrass the shit out of me.

“Why is Silvana entertaining a man half her age in your ﬂat?” Gran glances from me to my mother. “You should have said you were expecting company, darling. I’d have taken myself out for dinner.” She touches her hand lightly against her hair. “Aren’t you supposed to drape a towel over the doorknob or something, isn’t that the modern way to signal these things?”

She looks spectacularly amused with herself, and one glance at Lenny tells me that he knows he’s way out of his depth with these two and is in the process of writing me off as the worst date he’s ever had. His eyes slide from me to the door, and I can almost hear him begging me to let him leave unharmed.

“He’s not Mum’s date, he’s mine. Or else, he was,” I mutter, and then I’m distracted as a beer-bellied pensioner in a soup-stained shirt slowly materializes through the ceiling, his ﬂannel trousers not quite meeting his hairy ankles. Stay with me; I see dead people, remember? As do my mother and my grandmother, who also watch him descend with matching expressions of distaste.

“Finally,” my mother spits, dropping Lenny’s hand so she can round on the new arrival. “Two hours I’ve been chasing you around this bloody building. Your wife wants to know what you’ve done with the housekeeping money she’d hidden in the green teapot. She says you better not have lost it on the horses or she’s had it with you.”

My gran rolls her eyes. “I rather think she’s had it with him anyway. He’s been dead for six weeks.”

“You’re a fine one to talk, given that you still sleep with your husband twenty years after he died.” Mother ﬂicks her silver hair sharply. Touché.

Lenny whimpers and bolts for my front door, turning back to me just long enough to splutter “Something’s come up, gotta go,” before he hoofs it out and down the stairs two at a time.

I hear his car door slam and wonder what came up. Probably his dinner.

C“B REAKFAST , DARLING ?”

My mother acts as if nothing untoward happened last night when I stomp barefoot into the warm, farmhouse-style kitchen she shares with Gran.

It’s a double standard, I know. I moan about them letting themselves into my ﬂat and then breeze into theirs as if I own the place, but in my defense it’s totally my mother’s fault. She props their door open and then lures me down the stairs with the smell of home cooking; usually something sweet and irresistible. I think she’s actually found a way to pump the smell of freshly made waﬄes through the ancient heating system, a siren she knows I cannot ignore. Sugar alert! Sugar alert! Melody Bittersweet, report to your mother’s kitchen for culinary fabulousness and a grilling on your love life, immediately!

“You can’t get round me with waﬄes this time,” I grouch. I spent most of last night tossing and turning, thinking about the fact that my life is heading precisely nowhere. “Where’s Gran?”

“She’s behind you.” I turn at the sound of Gran’s stage-school growl and find her standing right behind me making Big-Bad-Wolf claw hands in the air for her own amusement. Resplendent once more in embroidered purple silk, she pours herself a strong black coffee and takes a seat at the scrubbed pine kitchen table.

“I’m glad you’re both here,” I say, pulling up one of the mismatched chairs and squirting a lake of syrup onto the waﬄes I said I didn’t want. I heap on a few fresh blueberries to stave off my guilt. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“You’re pregnant?” Gran clasps her hands in shiny-eyed anticipation.

“Given the fact that you two terrify any prospective boyfriends, it’s hardly likely, is it?”

Mother looks sanguine beside the cherry-red Aga she had installed to complete her farmhouse-kitchen fantasy. “Marry a woman, marry her family.”

I grit my teeth as thoughts of my own Miss Havisham–style fate strengthen my resolve.

“I’m starting my own business.”

The pair of them swivel their heads and stare at me with widened eyes. I suddenly feel very on-the-spot.

“In the empty room beneath my ﬂat,” I press on. Blithe Spirits is so big that several rooms have fallen into disuse, and the big one at the back on the ground ﬂoor is perfect for my new enterprise. It has its own door out onto the cobbled alleyway, which can serve as public access, and there’s an open fireplace in there to keep it warm through the chilly months. Technically, it’s in my bit of the building anyway, so I don’t expect to have to put up much of a fight for it.

“But that’s my stockroom,” Mother says, pausing with the frying pan in her hand.

I shoot her a sarcastic look. “You don’t keep any stock.”

She can’t argue with me. We deal in the dead. They don’t need shelf space.

“I’ve been known to hold a séance in there once or twice,” Gran throws in airily.

“Yes, and last time you said you would never do it again because the room has ‘negative energy.’ ”

I rather suspect it was more the fact that the séance was conducted at the behest of the local bridge club and Gran was bored stupid by both the living participants and the dull-as-dishwater spirits they attracted. No matter; her negative-energy claims suit my purposes today.

“I’m twenty-seven,” I reason. “It’s time I stood on my own two feet.”

My mother looks pointedly under the table at my black and white polka-dot painted toes and my ankle chain adorned with sil-

ver stars, clearly doubting that my feet are appropriate for, or capable of, business.

“What will you do?” Gran asks, wrinkling her nose at the waﬄes my mother offers her and delicately piercing a blueberry with the tips of her fork instead. She’s whippet-thin and eats like a bird, preferring to save her calories for the champagne she’s rarely seen without. When she dies, if she ever dies, “It’s always five o’clock somewhere” will be engraved on her tombstone.

Here goes nothing.

“Ghost busting,” I mumble, shoving a mouthful of waﬄe into my face as I study my plate.

“What was that, Melody?” Gran says, leaning in across the table. My mother, whose hearing is pin-sharp, narrows her suddenly suspicious eyes at me.

“Yes,” she says, silkily. “Say it again, Melody, only LOUDER.” She barks the last word out to demonstrate.

I sigh heavily and clear my throat. “I’m going to open an agency to help people get rid of unwanted ghosts.”

Gran clutches the lapels of her purple kimono in wide-eyed shock.

“Get rid of them?” She looks to my mother for support. “Silvana, are you hearing this?”

“It’s not all that different to what we already do,” I explain, trying to put a positive spin on it.

“Our family represent the interests of the deceased, not the living, Melody. That’s what we do,” Mum says with a frown.

She makes it sound like an advert for a family law firm for the recently departed, and I bite back the obvious response. Which is that, actually, Blithe Spirits makes a handsome profit from representing the needs of the living far more than the dead, namely in acting as the conduit between the two. We keep the lines of communication open, sort of like an astral telephone exchange, and therefore we need the ghosts to stick around. So yeah . . . I kind of expected my plans to go down like a cup of cold sick. “I know that,”

I say, keeping my voice deliberately steady and calm. “But you both know that I’m not like you, or like most of our ancestors either.”

“You’re a Bittersweet, Melody. You see them, just like the rest of us,” Gran says, chewing another blueberry.

“Yes, I do see them. I do. But the difference between you and me is that I don’t particularly want to see them. I find it bloody inconvenient that they pop up everywhere I go. I don’t want to spend my time finding out what Great-aunt Alice meant by that weird thing she said on her deathbed or passing messages from disgruntled wives about housekeeping money missing from green teapots.”

My mother looks at me pithily. I know it was a cheap shot, but she deserved it after that stunt she pulled on my coffee table last night.

“Belittling the valuable service we offer isn’t big or clever, Melody.”

“All right, maybe I shouldn’t have said the thing about the teapot. Mum, I know you provide an important service and that’s great, but it’s not for me.”

I turn to Gran. “But you’re right too.” I cover her bony, bejeweled hand with my own in an attempt to win her over. “I see them. I see them everywhere, so much so that there’s no point in even trying to get a normal job anymore.”

They can’t argue with this, because any job I’ve held down outside of the family business has always gone spectacularly wrong. My stint as a solicitor’s assistant ended abruptly because the solicitor in question’s dead mother was in residence and wouldn’t give me a minute’s peace to get any work done. She badgered him relentlessly with messages, mostly to do with the fact that she didn’t approve of his torrid affair with his secretary. I can’t say I did either, but unlike his mother I preferred to keep my opinion to myself. It came to a head when I found myself loudly telling her to knob off, and that the solicitor’s affair with his secretary was neither my business nor hers, which would probably have been okay had it not been for the fact that his wife had just turned up to take him to lunch as a surprise and

heard every word. Suﬃce to say the solicitor soon needed a solicitor of his own. Then there was the time I landed a job as a dental nurse and found myself accompanied by the long-deceased dentist who’d opened the practice decades before and couldn’t seem to let go. He was constantly in my way as I worked, and wholly responsible for the fact that I prepped the wrong set of new enamels for Chapelwick’s MP and inadvertently turned him into a Kardashian. He still blames me for the fact that he lost his seat in the next election.

“This way I’ll be providing a service to the dead too, just not in the same way you do. Can’t you see that, Gran? You and Mum, you’re like a ghost telephone exchange. What I’m going to be is more of a . . .” I cast around for a suitable definition.

“Ghost dispatcher?” My mum is not one to be easily won over. I shrug, exasperated. “If you like, yes. It’s not how I’d choose to put it, but we all know that ghosts get stuck sometimes and need help to move on.”

“So you’re going to meddle. Bittersweets don’t meddle. That’s not our job.”

I take in the stubborn set of my mother’s shoulders. It’s clear that if I hold out for her approval, I’ll never get this business off the ground.

“Gran?”

Both me and Mum look at our family elder. She spears another blueberry, chewing it slowly even though she’s more than aware that we’re both awaiting her verdict. It’s obvious where my mother gets her dramatic bent.

Gran fixes me with her beady eyes and eventually points her fork at me.

“This won’t affect the family firm in any negative way? We do rather depend on the ghosts being around, darling.”

“Not a bit. These would be ghosts who’ve got stuck here or are causing trouble. You won’t even know I’m there. Genuinely. I promise.” I shake my head and hold my breath as I silently draw a cross over my heart.

She pushes another blueberry around her plate while she contemplates, and then lays her fork down carefully.

“Champagne, Silvana. Our baby is going into business.”

I can’t keep the grin from my face and only resist the urge to hug her because Mum has gone silent, and the way she’s staring at me is unnerving.

“Is this because of the twenty-seven thing again?” she asks, soft and perceptive.

I ﬂick my eyes quickly away from hers at the mention of my recent birthday. She really is way too good at this mum stuff for me to be able to fool her.

“Because we’ve been through this,” she says. “It’s just a number, no more, no less.”

Twenty-seven might be just a number to some people, but not to me. Twenty-seven is the age my mum was when she gave birth to me, and the age my gran was when she gave birth to my mother. It was also the age my father was on the day he died, his motorbike crushed beneath the wheels of a lorry as he dashed to the hospital to be with my mum when she gave birth.

Turning twenty-seven myself, then, hit me harder than I’d imagined. I’d got up expecting a pretty normal sort of birthday and found myself hit with the most enormous, lung-crushing case of Oh my God, what am I going to do with my life? It literally stopped me in my tracks, a great big juggernaut of fear and emotion and actual tears. I thought of my mother, and how she’d already found her love, her calling, and had a child in her arms by this age. I thought of my father, the man my mother has never gotten over losing, whose life ended at this point when my life has barely even got off the starting blocks.

Up until the age of twenty-six and three hundred and sixty-four days, I was a child playing at being a grown-up. But on the afternoon of my twenty-seventh birthday, I metaphorically put away my childish things, and I made a list. I want a life that’s good, a life that’s full and rich with love and pride, to make things happen for myself rather than have them happen to me.

Regardless of the fact that it scares the living daylights out of me, I’m going to start my own agency, and I’d really love to do it with my mum’s blessing.

Gran comes to my rescue with an unexpected suggestion. “She can have Glenda for a couple of hours each morning, Silvana.”

Glenda Jackson is the secretary/center of the universe at Blithe Spirits, a veritable Wonder Woman when it comes to organization. She’s been at Blithe for as long as I can remember, the kind of woman who could run for prime minister in her spare time if she chose to. Luckily for us, she concentrates all of her efforts on keeping our ship tight; far too tight to need me as an assistant, which, having given up all attempts at working as a civilian, has been my most recent job. I was entirely redundant here, to be honest. My mother and Gran are happy to devote their time and energy to individual sittings and group sessions, and Glenda has the admin and organizational side of things stitched up tighter than a kipper. It smoothes the wheels for us that she is well respected in Chapelwick; she adds an air of normality to our screwball, Let’s talk to the ghosts business. She’s also the keeper of the Chapelwick jungle drums; if Glenda doesn’t know something, it’s not worth knowing.

It’s a masterstroke by Gran. Offering me Glenda’s services gives my mother a way to keep tabs on what I’m up to and gives me a way to get what I want. You don’t live in this family for as long as Gran has without developing United Nations–level diplomacy skills. My mother looks a tiny bit mollified, but anyone who didn’t know her well wouldn’t have been able to spot the thaw.

She huffs her cheeks out and scowls at Gran. “You can’t have champagne. It’s breakfast time.”

Gran shrugs her shoulders delicately, thoroughly unrepentant. “It’s five o’clock somewhere, Silvana.”

CHAPTER TWO

“What was I thinking? I don’t have a clue how to run a business. It’s all going to be terrible and I’m doomed to be a horrible failure. Even the ghosts will laugh at me.”

I drop like a sack of spuds into the overstuffed armchair beside the fireplace in my new oﬃce and almost disappear into the cloud of dust that billows from it. It’s only been two days since I revealed my grand plan and already the nerves are kicking in hard.

“Jesus Christ, Melody!” Marina picks the deﬂated, dust-covered bubble gum from between her lips and drops it in the bin. My best friend on the planet since infant school, Marina and I bonded over the fact that we both wore braces and came from families that marked us as outsiders, different no matter how hard we tried to hide it. She has her grandmother’s Sicilian heritage to thank for her curvy Italian beauty, and her grandfather’s Sicilian business skills to thank for the Malone family wealth and fearsome reputation. She’d turned nineteen before she lost her virginity, because she was a curious mix of knockout and terrifying that made teenage boys nervous.

Once the cloud of dust from the old chair clears, she looks at me steadily from her perch on the desk she’s spent the last hour patiently polishing up from grotty to usable.

“One, it’s not going to be terrible, and you’re not doomed to failure.”

She counts on her fingers to give me a visual aid.

“Two, so what if you don’t know how to run a business? You’re a fast learner and you’ve got Glenda Jackson helping out every morning. That woman could run Microsoft in her lunch hour.” I’m slightly bolstered, because that is actually a fact. Back when we were in school, Glenda oversaw our revision timetables with a beadier eye than Anna Wintour keeps on her junior staff. We both aced our exams, and it was entirely because we were terrified of her.

“And three,” Marina cracks open a fresh pack of gum and holds up three fingers, “who gives a fuck if the ghosts laugh at you? They’re dead and you’re not, so you automatically win. Besides, they won’t be laughing when you suck them up with your ghost hoover, or whatever it is you’re gonna use.”

I laugh despite myself. “It’s not that, but thank you.” I wish I could wake up with even a fifth of Marina’s couldn’t-give-a-damn attitude. “Do you think I should get my hair cut into something that says serious businesswoman?” I ask, and she shoots me a look that says “have you lost your freakin’ mind?”

“You’ve had the same hairstyle since we were in high school,” she laughs. “You own that bob, Melody. It’s way too late to change the system now.”

“The system?”

She wafts her hand at me. “You’re always going to be the short, cute one with big brown eyes and cherry-ﬂavored lip gloss, and I’m always going to be the slightly slutty one with too much hair, red lipstick, and a bad attitude. We go together. You cannot cut your hair; it would fuck with the system.”

The system is new to me, but when I consider it, she’s right. It’s taken us a decade to perfect our look, and for that we’ve earned the

right to rock it for as long as we damn well choose. Besides, there’s no way I can go through life without cherry lip gloss. It keeps me going in between sugar fixes. The bob stays.

I might not be changing my look, but the office has had a complete overhaul and even if I do say so myself, it’s looking pretty swish. With the obvious oversight of the grubby chair I’m sitting on, it’s been mopped, polished, and vacuumed to within an inch of its life, and my start-up budget had run as far as a new swivel chair for my clients to sit in and one of those fancy slatted blinds that all offices need to have in order to be considered professional. I’ve avoided the obvious; no coat stand or tired yucca plant, no heavy glass ashtrays from the ’70s. This place is functional, with what I’d like to call a feminine touch, right down to the jug of fresh tulips on the coffee table in the relaxation area. The relaxation area! I know! Get me and my areas! It’s actually just a little gray flop-out sofa and an old wingback chair grouped around the fireplace and TV, but it counts as relaxing, right? I’m aiming for urban chic, or at the very least something that doesn’t scream boho ghost hunter. There will be no incense burning in this office.

“Maybe you should get an incense burner.” Marina grins, and I let my middle finger do the talking for me.

She shrugs and slides from the desk, blowing me a kiss as she makes to leave.

“Gotta shoot. Places to be.” I know that means she needs to get back to take over caring for her elderly grandpa while her mother works. Marina’s folks are big on family loyalty.

“You’ll come back on Monday though?”

“You think I’d be late for my first morning at work?” She rolls her eyes. “Nine o’clock. You and me. Ghost-busting girls are a go. It’s gonna be bloody brilliant.”

She throws me a wink as she skips out the door, calling “I’ll bring donuts,” over her shoulder as she disappears. I listen to her fast footsteps recede on the cobbles and send up a silent thank-you to her last boss for firing her a couple of weeks back. I don’t know the full de-

tails, but this isn’t the first time she’s been let go. I expect Marina is one of those people who doesn’t do so well with being bossed around, even if the person giving the orders is her boss and supposed to tell her what to do. She wasn’t especially distressed about being fired; she doesn’t work because she needs the money as much as because she needs to get out of the family nest. She practically invited herself to come and work at the agency, and boy was I going to be glad of the company and the support.

So that makes three. Marina, Glenda Jackson, and me. I know Glenda’s doing only a couple of hours a day, but believe me when I say that there’s no need to count that as part-time where Glenda’s concerned.

God, I’m knackered. This chair might be dusty but it’s pretty comfortable, and I lean my head against the side wing and close my eyes. I’m just drifting pleasantly into a dream where Robert Downey Jr.—suited up as Iron Man, naturally—is on one knee proposing to me, when someone coughs pointedly. I haven’t heard the door open, so I keep my eyes firmly closed and sigh.

“Unless you’re devastatingly handsome with eyes like hazelnut espresso and a rapier-sharp wit, and hopelessly in love with me, go away.”

There’s silence, and then “I’m bald, sixty-two, and I died three weeks ago in a freak barrel accident, but I’ll give it a go if it means you’ll sit up and listen.”

I groan and open my eyes to see an aging bald guy standing by the fireplace in a hi-vis jacket. He has ruddy cheeks for a dead man; probably a beer drinker when he was alive. “You had me at freak accident,” I grumble. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“Arthur Elliott.” He extends his hand and we both stare at it, and then he slowly withdraws it when he realizes that I can’t shake it.

“Rookie mistake,” I tell him. “What was the freak accident?”

Arthur shakes his head and studies his scuffed steel toe–cap boots. “Worked for the brewery. Barrel fell on my head in the yard.”

That explains the hi-vis vest, then. I hold back from asking him

if he’d been drinking the barrel’s contents at the time. “Okay, so that covers how you came to be dead. What it doesn’t tell me is what you’re doing in my new oﬃce.”

He looks around the room, nodding with approval. “Very nice it is too.”

I’ve met enough ghosts to know that they usually want something, so his attempt at ﬂattery doesn’t get him far with me. I fold my arms across my chest and eye him steadily.

“Fine,” he says, scrubbing a hand over his shiny head. “I went up front first off to speak to Dicey and she suggested I come talk to you.”

“My gran sent you?”

What is she playing at? It’s not part of my business plan for her to send ghosts my way if she can’t be bothered to pass their messages on herself.

Arthur nods. “It’s about my lad, Arthur, see?”

“You and your son are both called ‘Arthur’?” I say, distracted. “Wasn’t that confusing at home?”

He shakes his head. “The wife called me ‘Big Art’ and him ‘Little Art.’ Worked fine until he grew to six foot two.” He smiles sadly. “No need now, I don’t suppose. He’ll probably be just Art.”

I nod, sympathetic, still unsure where I fit into the Big Art, Little Art story.

“And you’ve come to see me about Little Art because . . . ?” I prompt, since Big Art has gone misty-eyed and I know what’s likely to happen next if I don’t keep him on track. He’s freshly dead, which means he’s probably still getting used to the idea and prone to emotional outbursts.

“Just Art,” he reminds me morosely, wiping a hand across his eyes even though he’s incapable of crying.

I nod and mutter quickly, “Art.” Call me uncharitable but there’s a slim chance that if I can hurry Big Art along, I might be able to close my eyes and catch hold of the coattails of my RDJ fantasy. Iron Man could still be on one knee waiting for my answer some-

where in my dreams, but he’s not the kind of superhero to hang around for long.

“He needs a job, like.”

I narrow my eyes, starting to see where this is headed. I’m going to kill my gran.

“Art needs a job?”

Big Art nods. “He knows nothing about ghosts, ’course, but he’s a good lad and his mother worries about him. We both do, matter of fact. Think that’s why I got stuck here instead of going over. Bit of a shame really, it’s my dear old mum’s birthday today and I thought I’d surprise her, seeing as I’ve not laid eyes on her for fifteen years or more. Do they have birthday parties up there?”

I try to keep the conversation on track. “I’m not taking on staff, I’m afraid.”

He lifts his eyebrows. “Your gran said you would be. Just someone to carry your bags and make tea, that kind of thing.” Big Art looks at me as beseechingly as a dead man in hi-vis can. “You won’t have to pay him much, his mother keeps him well-fed. Just enough to cover his bus fare and pay for mice for his snake and he’ll be a happy lad. You won’t find anyone more willing.”

“Look, Big Art.” I’m practicing my diplomacy skills. “If I was in the market for a trainee, Art would be first in the queue, but I’m not. I’ll keep him in mind for the future, okay?”

Big Art’s face falls. “I’ve failed him. My only son, and I’ve gone and left him on his own, haven’t I?”

“Try not to blame yourself,” I reason. “It’s sheer bad luck to have a barrel fall on your head. You can’t predict these things.”

He puts both his hands over his bald head. “Bloody hurt, it did.”

“I imagine it would, yes.”

“Write his name down in case you get a vacancy?”

“I’ll remember it. Little Arthur Elliott.”

“You don’t know where he lives.”

Resigned, I get up from the comfort of the armchair and cross to sit behind my desk, where I open up the wide drawer. Marina has

laid out all of my new stationery as if it’s the first day of term. Fresh A4 writing pad, pristine and lined, ready to go. Sharpened pencils. Unused eraser. A neat line of blue, black, and red pens. God, I love that woman.

I pick up the pad and a pencil and write “Arthur Elliott” across the top of the paper. I transcribe the address Big Art relays to me and then smile, my pencil poised. I’m quite enjoying the feeling of writing things down at the desk, it feels like an actual job.

“Anything else I should know? ualifications, that sort of thing?”

I chew the end of the pencil and glance at Big Art, who once more looks on the verge of unshedable tears.

“None,” he whispers.

“None?” I say, far louder. “Not even an F in Woodwork or something?”

“Bloody bullies!” the words burst from Big Art’s chest. “Gentle giant, my Artie is, and they just wouldn’t leave him alone. Always on the outside, he was, never included. Me and his mother didn’t even know anything about it until we were called in to see why his attendance was so awful.”

“He was bullied at school?”

Big Art nods. “Summat rotten. ’Bout his acne, his snake, his height. You know how it is with that sort, like a pack of dogs with a bone. He’d have been all right if he’d had a mate or two, but he never really seemed to find anyone.”

No one understands the loneliness of being an outsider more than I do. If I hadn’t had Marina, my own school life could very easily have mirrored Little Art’s. I look at the mournful, ruddy-cheeked man in front of me and withdraw some proper writing paper from the drawer.

“Come and sit down, Art.”

Half an hour later, he’s a changed ghost. Together we’ve written a letter to Arthur Elliott Jr. offering him the position of apprentice ghost hunter, stating he’s been highly recommended and that he should come at his earliest convenience and identify himself to Mel-

ody Bittersweet, sole proprietor of The Girls’ Ghost-Busting Agency on Chapelwick High Street. The name has been a subject of hot debate over the last week between Marina and me. She made a strong case for The Girls’ Ghost-Busting Agency, though I do still fear customers will expect us to turn up in god-awful white jumpsuits and suck their offending ghosts into tanks on our backs.

Big Art beams approvingly at the letter as I fold it in half. “Little Art loves Harry Potter, the mystery of it will appeal to him.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have an owl to deliver it,” I say, licking a stamp and fixing it on the front of the envelope.

In front of me, Big Art is already starting to fade.

“Seems like you might make your mum’s birthday after all,” I whisper.

“Look after him for me.”

“I’ll try,” I say, carried away by the sentiment. I place the letter in the out-tray to post later on. Look at me using my out-tray! I pause for a second to soak in the mini-thrill of working at my desk for the first time, and then on second thought I pull the envelope out of the out-tray and scrawl “The management regret to inform you that reptiles are not permitted on the premises” across the bottom in red capitals. Eternal promise or not, if Arthur Elliott turns up here with a python he won’t make it past the front door.