The Dead Speak Ill Of The Living (The Dead Speak Paranormal Mysteries Book 1) (41 page)

  
“Oh yes, of course, I’ll theme a whole room around it.”

  
“In that case eighty is fine.”

  
Dee and Joe turned to smile at each other, and Polly smiled at them too.

  
“I can’t believe we’re reduced to this,” Nazir complained as he stepped out of
Dee’s car and looked around.

  
“We are not reduced to anything, this is a good idea.” Dee was getting out of
the driver’s position, and she looked round at the target before them.

  
“It’s like going to your customers instead of waiting for them to go to you,”
Joe explained.

  
“You sound like someone off the Apprentice. Both of you.”

  
“I watch the Apprentice,” Pohl revealed.

  
“I suppose there aren’t enough tentacles for Joe” Dee smiled at him.

  
“That’s Hentai, I watch science fiction.”

  
Dee was going to make a comment along the lines of ‘you watch it you lying
perv’, but the situation was still one of recovery for Joe, so she left it
alone.

  
“The key thing is not to seem suspicious as we walk around,” Dee instructed
instead, “keep as a group, as if we’re talking to ourselves.” Then she turned
and walked into the graveyard.

  
It felt large, seeing as there was row after row of headstones in a
monochromatic white, black or grey. Colour was provided by the neatly cut green
grass and the flowers left behind. A few people were already walking to the
graves of their loved ones, but the quartet started on a slow circuit of the
place.

  
“I still think we should be checking strip joints and nightclubs.” The others
shook their head at Nazir. “Look, if I find a lovely restaurant, we are so
checking that out.”

  
“Someone shot a pizza boy at his shop the other day, that doesn’t mean we’re going
there.”

  
“Pizza?”

  
“Shit pizza.”

  
The machine now started to hum with a background chatter, so Joe asked a
hesitant, “can we help anybody? We’re private investigators.”

  
A few spirits came over to have a nose, and soon the group were informed the
handful of spirits which inhabited this graveyard were following them.

  
“Would you be able to tell me if Liverpool have won a title since 2001?” one
asked.

  
“Err, yes, Nazir can google that for you, but basically we’re focused on crimes
that need solving.”

  
“Like murder?” one voice asked.

  
“Exactly like murder,” and Joe said proudly, “we have a great success rate in
locking murderers up.” He left off ‘in a mortuary.’

  
“Good, I was killed,” the voice said matter of factly.

  
“You were?”

  
“Yes. Quite recently.”

  
“When?”

  
“Six months ago.”

  
“You could have told me the football results all this time?”

  
“Let’s stick to the matter in hand,” Dee said. “Who killed you?”

  
“My wife was having an affair with a boy from her school.”

  
“Doesn’t that only happen in the movies?”

  
“He was under age and all, so you should be able to get her bang to rights.”

  
Don’t people only say that in films? They all thought.

  
“Right, give us the details and we’ll get solving. How did he kill?”

  
“Stabbed me. My last memory is bleeding out on the kitchen floor we’d just had
installed.”

  
“I hope you had Lino.”

  
“That’s not helping Nazir.”

  
There came a knocking at his door, so Chairman Malveo shouted ‘come in’, at
which point his secretary opened the door.

  
“Ah, Steve, how nice to see you, is there a message for me?”

  
Malveo wasn’t exhibiting Sherlock Holmes like power, Steve was holding a sheet
of paper.

  
“Yes sir, just been sent in.”

  
“And who will I be reading,” he said thrusting a hand out, into which the paper
was swiftly shoved.

  
“It’s from our team monitoring the graveyards. He’s discovered some suspicious
activity.”

  
Malveo’s face raised both eyebrows and couldn’t decide whether to be interested
or annoyed.

  
“Let me take a quick look,” and he skimmed the paper. “This doesn’t look like
spiritual activity, he looks like real people.”

  
“That’s correct sir. Our agent has spotted a group of four, two men, two women,
one of non-traditional British heritage, visiting many of our target sites.”

  
“How many,” Malveo asked reading in more detail.

  
“Actually, all of them.”

  
“I can see why that would be a cause for concern. However, if I am reading this
correctly, I would be forced to conclude they were a bunch of ghost hunters.
Nothing more than useless, EMF detector waving, orb spotting ghost hunters of
no interest to the project.” He sounded like his cat had just vomited up a bird
on his shoes.

  
“I also feel that way sir, but I have to bring you anything of interest.”

  
“Oh, of course, of course. Keep up the good work, but file this under no
threat.”

  
“Do you think we should get a promise of payment before we solve the mystery or
after?” Dee pondered as she swung the car into the graveyard.

  
“Rather than relying on people’s generosity?” Pohl checked.

  
“Yes. It seems to me people are just as stingy in the afterlife as they are in
real life. We need to start charging, getting an up-front fee system.”

  
“You really have been watching the Apprentice.”

 
“Shut up Nazir.”

  
“The problem is,” Joe explained, “that the dead don’t have many assets. Not
everyone had some money hidden under a floorboard, all they have is what they
were buried in. We need a better way of turning talking to the dead into cash.”

  
“We are not holding séances,” Dee protested.

  
“I’m not saying séances. I… well…”

  
“We’re here, let’s get the good news out there.”

  
The group climbed out and walked into the middle of the graveyard, where a
cluster of benches had been paced for the grieving.

  
“Hello,” Joe said as he turned the machine on. A babble of voices came through.

  
“Is Mr. Clarke there?” he asked. The babble went on, and on. Then finally
someone said “why do you want him?”

  
“Well,” and Joe grinned, “we have been able to prove his wife is a paedophile
and her lover killed him. Both are now in custody awaiting trial, and we’ve
even bought a copy of the newspaper to show you.”

  
“That’s…good.”

  
“That doesn’t sound like Clarke,” Pohl said, screwing up her face.

  
“I’m not Clarke.”

  
“Well who are you, and where’s Clarke? It’s not like he’d have wandered off.”

  
The chatter now came to an end. “Tell them,” someone whispered.

  
“Clarke went missing a few days ago.”

  
“Missing? Disappeared?”

  
“Yes. But worse than that, he was taken.”

  
“Go on,” Dee said as the group zoned in. “Did someone dig him up?”

  
“No. There was a van, and a group of people, two men and a woman. They had some
sort of machine with them, and they were able to, well, err, grab Clarke and
take him away.”

  
“Someone kidnapped a ghost?” Nazir didn’t believe it.

  
“Exactly that.”

  
“What sort of machine?” Joe asked.

  
“We don’t know, we weren’t paying attention at first, why would we, we just
live here. But Clarke went over to see what was happening, they turned it on,
and the next thing we know he was trapped and they all left.”

   “Do
you have a registration number?”

  
“No, just a big blue van.”

  
“It didn’t have anything written on the side?”

  
“We’re dead, not stupid, we’d have remembered that.”

  
“Sorry, sorry. So a stolen ghost.”

  
“Will you find him?”

  
Joe smiled, “of course we’ll find him.” He didn’t add ‘because I want to learn
all about this rival machine and get some answers’, although he thought it, and
everyone else in the quartet knew he was thinking it too. Some even starting
thinking it themselves.

  
“We’ll get a reputation,” Pohl protested as Dee pulled the car up at a new
location.

  
“We’ve already got reputations,” Dee sighed.

  
“We sure have,” Nazir grinned. “I’m considered a country wide expert in…

  
“Yes, alright, we get it, you love cock.”

  
“I was going to say electronic subterfuge, but clearly another reputation
precedes me.”

  
“Are you really that renowned?” Pohl asked.

  
“Yes, although under an assumed name of course. I’m not stupid enough to log on
under Nazir.”

  
“And what is your assumed name?” Dee decided she’d indulge him.

  
“Panda.”

  
“Panda!?”

  
“What’s wrong with Panda?”

  
“It’s not exactly Skull Beast 600 or whatever people usually have in the web.”

  
“I did consider Thundercock.”

  
“Now that’s more like you,” Dee admitted and got out of the car.

  
They were in another graveyard, and this one was the closest they could find on
their maps to the place where Clarke was taken.

  
“What are we looking for again?” Pohl checked.

  
“We’re going to ask this lot if anyone’s been stolen. I’m sure they’d have
noticed.”

  
The group walked on in, this time finding a stone pavilion along with the
benches. “We’re not classy enough to be buried here,” Dee moaned as they sat
down.

  
“It’s okay Dee, the worms will still eat you,” Nazir retorted.

  
Joe switch on and a crowd of spirits gathered to ask what the machine was,
could they hear, and could they take messages to the living, which soon filled
up a side of Dee’s notebook. But it was then time for business.

  
“Have any of you gone missing?” Dee asked.

  
“Missing? Like we don’t know where they gone?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“No.”

  
“Well that didn’t work then.”

  
“But two of us got kidnapped.”

  
“That’s what I…” she breathed, “okay, they were kidnapped. By who?”

  
“Two men and a woman in a blue van. Clean van, not your average van.”

  
“Did you get a registration number?”

  
“Yes, yes,” and there was a conflab, before one was handed over.

  
“Excellent, that will help us greatly.”

  
“Are they to do with you?” the spirits asked.

  
“No, our project is much smaller and, Nazir why are you pulling a funny face?”

  
Nazir was indeed scowling, and he’d pulled his phone out. “That registration
number is funny, let me just check something…”

  
“He puts those of us who’ve lived here all our lives to shame,” Pohl concluded.

  
“…right, here we go, and…it’s not a real registration number. It just looks
like one, to fool people glancing, but it doesn’t exist.”

  
“Why would anyone do that?” Pohl wondered.

  
“Must be to stop idiots like us running a check on it.”

  
“But what if the police saw it? Aren’t they going to realise? Or if they went
into London, they’d get picked up.”

  
“I know Joe, and here’s what I think. We’re dealing with someone really
paranoid about being found out, so paranoid they’d cut this van loose if they
were caught.”

  
“Presumably the machine isn’t incriminating?” Pohl checked.

  
“Unless it’s got plutonium in it, how many police are going to realise they’ve
caught a ghost?”

  
“Right, right, so we’re dealing with total paranoid bastards. That’s got to be
an advantage, right?” Nobody agreed with Nazir.

  
Chairman Malveo was sitting at his desk drinking a peppermint tea, when he
heard a knock. There could only be Steve around at the moment, so he shouted
for his secretary to come in. He did so, and had a piece of paper in his hands.

  
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this message?”

  
“It’s from our agent in the field. He has detected something unusual about the
group we thought were ghost hunters.”

  
“I see, unusual ey?” and he took the paper. “What exactly constitutes unusual?
God forbid a group of amateur bunglers actually sees a ghost.”

  
“More talks to them.”

  
“What? Talks…” and he read the paper. Then read it again. “This says the
quartet are able to speak with the spirits via a machine they are carting round
with them.”