Melody Bittersweet and The Girls' Ghostbusting Agency: A laugh out loud romantic comedy of Love, Life and ... Ghosts? (20 page)

I feel a pang of sympathy for him and wish I could just go and crash on the chairs with him and watch the game; underneath it all he’s just a guy who wants to watch some sport and share a couple of laughs. I can’t stay with him right now, but I know a couple of people who can.

I relay the request, and I encompass both Artie and Marina in it because it’s useful to me if they’re kept busy together. I want to go in search of Isaac alone, and I’d much rather do it knowing that they’ve got each other’s back downstairs. This house had seemed benign at the beginning of the case, but since then we’ve been left for dead in the cellar, Lloyd has so far been nothing but unpleasant, and I’ve been caught up in a book-tornado. God, I hope Isaac’s calmed down. Up until Saturday he’d seemed the gentlest, most introspective of the three Scarborough brothers; hopefully he’s recovered his equilibrium. I guess there’s only one way to find out.

I
knock
on the attic door. I don’t know why because Isaac is hardly in any position to stop me from entering, but all the same it feels appropriate to afford him the courtesy.

He doesn’t answer, so I push the door quietly open anyway and head inside. As I expected, he’s there in his chair, and he has one of the thrillers I gave him open in his hand.

‘I take it you’ve come to ask me about Charles,’ he says, without looking at me.

‘Yes.’

He lays the book down and closes it slowly, then folds his hands in his lap and studies them. He doesn’t speak again for a little while, and I don’t rush him because it’s obvious that he’s working himself up to something important.

‘Well, there’s nothing I can tell you.’

Really? After almost two minutes of complete silence, I confess to expecting something more useful than nothing. God, in two minutes I could have had the most brilliant fantasy involving chocolate eclairs and Spiderman, and Isaac comes up with
nothing?
I’m going to have to ask him some pointed questions.

‘Was Charles your son?’

He looks up at last. ‘How did you say you found out about him?’

‘We found a bundle of your mother’s diaries in the cellar. She recorded his name and his birth date in Hull, and beside it she wrote
my first grandchild
. From what I can see she didn’t write anything further about him.’

He lapses back into silent contemplation, and again, I wait.

‘Then you know as much as I do,’ he says. ‘I never saw Charles.’

‘Well, no, I don’t know quite as much as you do,’ I say, slowly. ‘Isaac, who was Charles’s mother?’

A faraway smile crosses Isaac’s face. ‘Cilla.’ He fills the small word with a whole world of love. ‘Her name was Priscilla, she was the most beautiful girl in the world.’

My heart trips a beat for him, and for Priscilla, whoever she was, because the look on Isaac’s face is
that
look; the one my mother has whenever she speaks of my father, and the one my gran has when she refers to my grandpa. It’s the look of big, extravagant love, and I cross my fingers as I drop down on the dusty chair opposite him, hoping hard that he’s going to reveal something that helps me unravel the long-held secrets of Scarborough House.

I
saac takes
me back to Autumn 1910, back to the aftermath of Douglas’s murder. Thrown out of the family, he fled the Midlands without any real plan and ended up finding work as a dock-labourer in Hull. It was from there he volunteered himself for the army, early on during the First World War, and it was to the Naval Infirmary in Hull he returned afterwards, one of many injured soldiers from the Great War.

‘Priscilla was one of the nursing sisters,’ he says, that faraway smile evident again when he mentions her name. He tells me how she’d tended to his broken leg and shrapnel-fractured shoulder, and how she always took the time to read the newspaper to him at the end of her shift each day.

‘I knew,’ Isaac says, shaking his head in wonder at the memory. ‘I knew she was the one for me. As soon as I opened my eyes and she was there on that very first day. Like an angel, she was.’

He grew stronger and they grew closer, and in time Isaac and Priscilla became engaged to be married. But as the date drew nearer, he just couldn’t find the words to tell her about his family, of the filthy slur of the unproven murder accusation hanging over his head. He wanted to tell her, desperately so, but when she fell unexpectedly pregnant a month before the wedding he saw the situation for what it truly was. Hopeless.

‘I was a selfish man, Melody. I let myself pretend I could have a normal life, but what kind of a man does that to the woman he loves?’

Too late, he’d realised that to marry Priscilla would be to condemn her to a life as a suspected murderer’s wife, and their child would live under the same black cloud. It would catch up with them, and it would slurry them and, God forbid, they might believe it and turn their backs too.

‘I expect she thought I didn’t love them enough in the end,’ Isaac whispers, so quiet and painful that I have to strain to catch his words. ‘Wasn’t true though. I left because I loved them too much to let them carry the burden too.’

* * *

‘
P
riscilla Elizabeth Henson
,’ I say Charles’s mother’s name for about the hundredth time since we got back to the office. ‘All we know is that she would have been a nurse in Hull after the First World War, and that she gave birth to Charles Frederick, presumably Henson, on June 22
^nd
, 1920.’

‘My mum loves this stuff,’ Artie muses. ‘She’s well into it, she’s traced my grandpa’s line all the way back to the 1300s, or something like that. It’s on the wall in our hallway.’

Marina and I look up at him slowly. We don’t really have a clue where to start, but it seems that Artie is sitting on an ancestral mastermind.

‘My great, great, great, great, great uncle, Cuthbert, died of the black death,’ he goes on with grave authority. ‘That’s why mum lets me feed rats to Pandora.’

I shudder. ‘Pandora the Python, I presume?’

He nods. ‘Dad named her after Pandora from
Adrian Mole
because she was his first crush.’

I’ve learned that sometimes in life you need to just nod, and this is one of those times. I glance up at the clock and close my laptop.

‘It’s gone five, folks. Artie, do you think your mum would have a look and see if she can spot anything? She sounds as if she’ll know the best places to start.’

He nods, excited. ‘Mum loves a bit of sleuthing.’

They bang the door noisily behind them, leaving me alone with Lestat. ‘Just you and me again,’ I say to him, and he moseys off and disappears around the back of the sofa. When he emerges from the other end, he’s carrying one of Nonna Malone’s cucidati cookies. I throw a pencil at him in disgust, but as he settles down to demolish it, I swear he’s laughing.

I
’m not a big drinker
, but I feel the need for brandy before I hit the pillow tonight. I’m unsettled in almost every damn element of my life, and I hope that the brandy will calm my thoughts enough to at least let me get some proper rest. My dreams, when they come, are full of wartime heroes and superheroes, facts jumbled with fiction, fantasy sliced through with desolation. I can’t remember the details, but I wake with damp cheeks, and it’s nothing to do with the fact that Lestat is licking my face because he needs to pee.

* * *

‘
R
ight
, so let’s get this Tuesday morning off to a good start,’ I say, swinging my seat to point my finger at Artie over by the fridge, who freezes with the milk bottle in his hand. ‘Artie, give us some good news on the family research front.’

I watched an early-morning re-run of
The Apprentice
and I’m running this business Alan Sugar-style this morning. Well, I mean I’m not going to fire anyone, but I’m the boss and the buck stops with me. This agency is mine to build, and there’s no way I’m going to be cowed into sharing my success with Leo Dark.

Artie looks horrified at being put on the spot and scratches nervously at his neck.

‘Err, she had to go out last night,’ he says. ‘But she’s doing it today. Probably right now as we speak,’ he assures me, and the wobble in his voice makes me wonder if I came on a bit too strong with my Lady Boss thing. I didn’t mean to scare him witless and his mother isn’t even on my payroll.

‘I like the sound of that, Artie,’ I say. ‘Top work.’ He sags with relief and sloshes milk into the drink he’s just made.

‘Marina?’ I swing to face her, and see no trace of fear in her eyes. I’m not surprised, Marina is scared of pretty much nothing and no one, least of all me in megalomaniac mode.

‘Melody,’ she lifts her eyebrows into her dark fringe, and then reaches into her bag and pulls out Nonna’s tin.

‘I asked Nonna to make another batch of cucidati cookies.’

God, she’s good, she plays me like a piano. I swallow hard as she lifts the lid and shows me the double layer of iced fig biscuits. Lestat’s flat face starts to twitch and he scuttles past me towards Marina. I grab for his collar but he’s a slippery customer on a mission. Not that he’s successful; Marina snaps the lid on smartly and wags her finger at him until he slumps forlornly on her shoes.

‘Not this time, puppy dog.’

I nod at Marina in a job-well-done fashion, and then pick up a pen and tap it on the desk as I launch into a case summary.

‘Right. So here’s where we’re at. On Saturday, Scarborough gave me one week only to finish solving this case. It’s now Tuesday, which gives us five days, maximum. The way I see it, the brothers are trapped in the house because of the unsolved murder. Douglas is self-explanatory, one of his brothers plunged a knife into his back. That’s a damn fine reason to stick around.’ Marina and Artie stare at me, hanging on my every word. ‘I don’t struggle to see Isaac’s reasoning either. He absolutely refuses to let go until he clears his name. So far, so straightforward.’ I’m encouraged by their nods. ‘Lloyd though . . . he’s the complicated one in this. He stalks around the house in that damn silk dressing gown, straight-backed and haughty, glaring at everyone as if it’s the last place he wants to be.’

That’s my issue with Lloyd, and the whole case really – surely if Lloyd wanted to leave he’d just fess up to killing Douglas and then they could all be on their way. It just doesn’t make any sense.

‘So I vote that we step up the search to find the knife used to stab Douglas in the back. My gut instinct is that it’s still in that house somewhere, and our mission now is to recover it and hope that something about where and how we find it triggers the dominos to start falling.’

Marina laughs lightly. ‘I was with you right up to the dominos thing.’

‘Too much?’

‘You don’t need to go all Agatha Christie to impress us,’ she says, sliding her fingers into the tin to sneak me a cucidati cookie without rousing Lestat. ‘Because from where I’m sitting, you’re doing a pretty damn amazing job just as yourself.’

I take the cookie and bite it, glad forever that I met Marina Malone.

* * *

P
eople can say
what they like about Babs, but as far as I’m concerned she’s one of the team and then some. By rights she should be either languishing in a scrap yard or else turned out to pasture in the care of some old boy who’d polish her hubcaps for her, but instead she’s putting in hard-labour every day, doing it for the girls (and the boy). Right now we’re all three strapped in and juddering at the traffic lights on our way to Brimsdale Road, and although it feels a bit like we’re working through a power plate session, I have no doubt that Babs will make sure that we get to our destination, be it Scarborough House or actual Scarborough.

Marina sits beside me scanning the list Isaac made of potential places to look.

‘The cellar alone is going to take the week,’ she muses, chewing a hangnail and frowning.

‘I vote we leave the cellar until last.’ I’m not being a scaredy cat, but the thought of going back down there again fills me with trepidation.

Marina nods, and murmurs a distracted ‘No arguments there’, as she folds the paper up and, on autopilot, slides it into her bra beside her phone.

‘Mum said she’ll ring me if she finds anything interesting about Charles,’ Artie chucks in from Marina’s other side. ‘Although she’s out this morning, she sings at the old people’s home around the corner on Tuesdays.’

I mull on this. Both Marina and I come from huge, eclectic families who are larger than life and always fighting for the limelight. In contrast, Artie’s family unit seem to be the exact opposite; quiet and unassuming, a tight, small circle of three who look after each other and other people without fanfare or the need to be acknowledged.

‘
A
ll quiet
,’ Marina says, gazing intently through the windscreen at Scarborough House ten minutes later.

‘That’s something.’ I gather everything we need to take inside. Black bags for any mess we make, a hammer and chisel in case we need one, and some of our trusty latex gloves.

Artie watches me as I tool myself up. ‘You do realise that you’ve assembled the classic murderer’s kit there, right?’

‘I hope you’ve got twin-sized bin liners,’ Marina says darkly as we tip out onto the footpath and head around the back of the house to let ourselves in.