The Dead Speak Ill Of The Living (The Dead Speak Paranormal Mysteries Book 1) (9 page)

  
At this two people sprang into life. Joe ran over to the workstation with
Scott’s brain and plugged a memory stick in. “I’m going to take a copy of this
device, how they did it,” he explained. “And I think it best we don’t mention
the machine to MI5, or they’ll take it.”

  
“Agreed,” said Dee, who was looking at Pohl. She was pulling wires out of the
back of Scott’s jar.

  
“You’re killing him?”

  
“Yes, I am.”

  
“Thank y…” and the digital voice went dead.

  
The sombre moment was broken by Joe handing Dee the memory stick. “Hide that in
your bra or something.”

  
“Subtle.”

  
The battle for the lab was over quickly, and without casualties. The security
guards were armed to deal with intruders, and while some of the guards had
taken part on the assault in Britain, none were prepared to fight it out with
the troops who landed, tooled up, and who’d decided to try a few warning shots.

  
Soon all the guards had been herded off, representatives from Belgian and
British intelligence had arrived, and the foursome in the central lab had been
liberated. Although all this practically meant was they were waiting in the lab
while the intelligence agencies conferred outside. Soon a man in a smart grey
suit and short blonde hair came in.

  
“Hello, I’m Peters, and I’m going to be the one to escort you back to the UK
and debrief you.”

  
“We can go?”

  
“Yes Miss Nettleship, we have negotiated with the Belgians for you to be taken
immediately back to the UK, while they deal with the situation here.”

  
“Deal with?” Pohl said suspiciously, “will someone be charged for my brother’s
murder?”

  
“I’m afraid that’s still to be decided. The Belgians would like to keep this
quiet, they don’t want another intelligence embarrassment, and they want this
Array gone as soon as possible. So what we are finalizing now is we, MI5, will
take the array to the UK, and they can tie ends up here as they wish.” Pohl did
not look happy, so he continued. “This just means no trial. I’m sure the people
who killed your brother will end up confined somewhere.” He said ‘I’m sure’ as
if the decision was already taken. Which it was.

  
“What does a debrief entail?” Nazir asked, wondering if his story would stand
up to this.

  
“Full statements from you all, questions from us, but none of it ever to be
made public. From you or us. You’ll have to agree to remain quiet on the array.
Completely silent.”

  
“I’m sure we can do that,” Joe said for them all. “Who’d believe us anyway?”

  
A week later, the foursome met in Dee’s house for a meal. As they arrived, all
bearing bottles of wine, Dee and Joe dished out a roast beef lunch they’d made,
and everyone sat down. The debriefing had taken a while, and then each had to
go back to their normal lives and explain their absences.

  
“I’ve been suspended,” Joe began. “With no one to run the project, and
everything destroyed, Monroe doesn’t know if we’ll ever be able to restart. But
rather than just sack us we’re all suspended on small pay until we know what’ll
happen.”

  
“How long will that take?” Pohl asked.

  
“No idea. What about you?”

  
Pohl poked some of the tender beef with a fork. “They slipped me into a
sabbatical. I got a warning for vanishing for a week rather than just being
ill, but when they heard my brother had gone missing they gave me all the time
I would want to find him.”

  
“Handy,” Joe replied.

  
“Well I’ve been sacked,” Dee sighed. “There’s plenty of people who want to
write for a shitty local paper, so when I went AWOL one of them got my job.”

  
“What about you Nazir?” Joe asked, completing the circle.

  
“I’ve still got my contract there if I want it.”

  
Dee had a thought. “I suppose you’re the only one of us who’s been through
something worse than this.

  
“There have been an excess of gunmen in my life,” Nazir confirmed.

  
“So, two unemployed, one on holiday, one still annoyed with tech support. What
a group.” But as Pohl finished, Dee had an idea.

  
“We’ve still got the machine right? We can still talk to the dead?”

  
“Yes?” Joe confirmed nervously. MI5 hadn’t realised what he’d been carrying,
and no one had mentioned it.

 
“Let’s monetize it!” Eyebrows were raised at Dee. “Seriously, let’s use it. We
must be able to make some cash out of speaking with the dead.”

  
“We are not holding séances with this technology,” Joe said rather offended.

  
“No, not séances but, I don’t know, solving murders or something.”

  
“It’s all getting very Scooby Doo.”

  
“Exactly Nazir, we’ll be our own group, only with no dog. Hang on, how do you
know about Scooby Doo?”

  
“We have YouTube in Syria. It’s not Mars.”

  
“Right, so, are we in?”

  
“Yes, I can see why this might be interesting,” Joe replied, hoping to put his
machine to good use and really make the last few days’ worth it.

  
“I’m in,” Nazir nodded, “Anything but dealing with people who can’t operate a
printer.”

  
All eyes turned to Pohl, and she looked at each in turn. In recent years, since
her children left and failed to make much effort at communicating, Pohl had
come to realise she’d neglected them for her studies, and wondered what life
would be like in a family group. Now, as she looked at these four young from
the same generation as her children, she thought she had a chance at forging a
replacement family. “I accept.”

  
“So does anyone have any ideas?” Dee said, looking down at a blank notepad.

  
She wasn’t alone in the room, and the targets of her question were sat around
her lounge: Joe having a coffee, Professor Pohl looking at the titles on the
bookshelf as she sipped an orange juice, and Nazir, relaxing into the comfiest
chair, joining Dee in a beer. But there was silence as brains ticked over.

  
It had soon become apparent that, after deciding their parlous work situations
would need remedying, using Joe’s machine to bring in cash wasn’t going to be
straightforward. On the one hand, having a device that allowed you to talk to
spirits without either dying yourself or messing about with a fraudulent medium
should have bought them billions. In practice they couldn’t really work out
how.

  
“We could take an advert out in the papers,” Joe suggested, “a sort of ‘can we
help?’ thing.”

  
Dee wrinkled her nose up at the thought of newspapers, for whom she’d recently
worked. “That might work, but we’d need the right paper. There’s a small number
of, err, let’s just esoteric magazines we could try.”

  
Nazir took a sip, and explained how he saw it. “Why don’t we find these
mysteries to be solved ourselves. Turn up at murder scenes, find out who did
it, solve it, bingo.”

  
“Like a detective agency?” Joe pondered.

  
“Yes, a bit like that.”

  
“We still wouldn’t be getting paid unless someone hired us,” but Dee wasn’t
throwing a huge spanner in the works. “Although, it is a good way to find cases
to work on. We just need to tighten up the money aspect.”

  
“A bit sick though,” Joe said, forgetting which room he was in.

  
“Says the man who carries his dead telephone around with him everywhere.”

  
Joe didn’t answer Dee, he just tapped the bag at his feet fondly.

  
Having been looking at books, Pohl tried something grander. “Maybe we solve a
few mysteries and write them up. We could shift a lot of books, the true crime
market is huge.”

  
“It is, I always planned to knock a Jack the Ripper book out if I had to
urgently raise some money,” Dee confessed.

  
“But we couldn’t prove any of it without admitting the machine was involved,”
and Joe looked sad. “We need to answer questions without giving anything away.”

  
Nazir summed up. “So, basically, unless we can find a ghost to lead us to
buried treasure, we’re having issues.”

  
“No one said this was going to be easy,” Dee shot back, “although we could at
least come up with a name we can use.”

  
“Now there’s something we really need to think about.” Everyone looked at Pohl.
“It doesn’t do to rush major decisions, our name will influence everything.”

  
“So you’re saving the Corpse Quartet isn’t going to cut it.”

  
Joe felt pleased with himself until Dee said “you just made that up didn’t
you.”

  
“Oh yes.”

  
“It shows. We’re agreed we’re going to mull on all this then?”

  
Three yeses.

  
The Estate Agent had been doing his job for twenty three years and seen just
about everything this part of Britain could throw at him, so this nice young
couple didn’t seem all that odd. They certainly weren’t the touchy feely sort
who had to hold hands every few minutes, and there seemed a distance between
the two, but there were also looks and glances as if some secret was below the
surface. It led the Agent to conclude maybe one of the pair had been married,
divorced, and was starting again. As to which one, he suspected the red head.
Although quite why the man seemed to be carrying a large rucksack round with
him when all they were doing is looking at an empty property he didn’t know. It
reminded him of the fellow who carted a big teddy round for the whole trip and
then asked it if the rooms were big enough.

  
For her part Dee was growing certain Joe was enjoying pretending to be her
fiancée just a little bit too much, and he’d have to be put down later. He was
being helpful, and polite, and soon they’d get to the whole point of him being
there, but she was sure he’d have held her hand if she’d let him.

  
Joe meanwhile was having a great time smiling at Dee and imagining they were
starting a life together. Which, in some way, they were, just not the one the Agent
had envisioned.

  
“And that’s the end, is there anywhere you’d like to see again?”

  
“I’d like to see the kitchen once more,” Dee smiled, hoping that some 1950s
clichés would prove believably distracting, “while my partner needs to go and
measure up the bedrooms.” At this point Joe produced a notepad and laser
measure from the top of the bag.

  
“Of course,” and the Agent believed he had a better chance of completing a sale
with Dee, “why doesn’t your partner attend to that while we talk.”

  
Joe smiled, walked slowly upstairs, and put his bag carefully down. Then he
removed the machine, switched it on, and asked “is anybody there?” He was aware
of the cliché.

  
Ten minutes later and the Agent was saying his goodbyes, and Dee was saying she
liked the property but would have to discuss it with her partner. Then the pair
were in her car.

  
“Did you really like?” Joe asked.

  
“Me? Yes, big rooms, needs work doing, which I like, a garden to potter in. All
good. I’d put an offer in if the rest fits.”

  
“Ah.”

  
“And you’re the rest, so spill.”

  
“The house is haunted.”

  
“Okay, I might be able to cope with that. Who by?”

  
“A man called…”

  
“Nope, not moving in there.”

  
“He’s a nice man…”

  
“I am not sharing my house with a male ghost. It took me four days to even have
a shower in my current flat, and I wince every time I have to take a piss.”

  
“This one didn’t sound like a peeping tom or anything.”

  
“Still no.”

  
“But you’d share with a woman?”

  
“Yes. The showers at school obviously had one use. Actually that’s a good way
of thinking about it, sharing. My roommate the ghost.”

  
“But still not him.”

  
“Nope. My tits are a guest appointment only.”

  
Joe felt like he’d never get an invite. He was right.

  
In the absence of a plan, or anything approaching a plan, the group had agreed
to meet up for a shared meal and some chat. No agenda, just four people who’d
all shared an experience, and shared a secret, relaxing in the company of the
only people they could now truly relax in. Dee’s place was chosen again,
because she’d be moving soon and they had the strangest sense that they should
get the most use out of it before it became a fading memory.

  
But while it was Dee’s house, it was Nazir doing the cooking. He’d produced a
wonderful risotto with minimal mess, which was good because Dee was hovering to
point out where all the dishes and equipment was and to be amused if he messed
it up.

  
Soon they were just waiting for Pohl to arrive down from Cambridge, and when
the door rang Dee dashed to open it.

  
“Hello, glad you could make it before we were so starved we began,” Dee joked,
grinning throughout.

  
“I’ve had a thought about that,” Pohl said, kissing Dee on the cheek and
handing over a bottle of wine.

  
“Oh?”

  
“If it’s not too much trouble, when you move, obviously when, can I move into
your spare room? It will be much easier for me to stay there than have to
travel up and down from Cambridge, especially if we need to do something
quickly.”

  
“You see Dee,” came Nazir’s voice from the kitchen, “she’s ready to react at a
moment’s notice. A coiled spring. We just need to find a ghost with problems.”

  
“Any progress on that?” Pohl asked, as she waved at Joe through the internal
doors; he was looking at one of the many books.

  
“We’ve found a few ghosts while we’ve been house hunting, but all the nice
places have weirdos or men in.”

  
“I’m glad you’re making the distinction,” Joe said to Dee without looking up.

  
“Not for you,” Dee replied.

  
Soon the meal was served and everyone tucked in.

  
“Sorry, I forgot to say, I’d love you to move in, it’d be nice to have someone
else around.”

  
You could have had me, Joe thought morosely.

  
“Excellent, and thank you. I’ll try not to act like your mother.” Although she
meant to act exactly like her mother. But she saw Dee wince and asked
cautiously, “Sorry, what did I say?”

  
“My parents, they… died young. I didn’t know my mother.”

  
“Oh dear, I’m so sorry,” and Pohl reached a hand out to touch Dee’s arm. She
wasn’t sure if people hugged at this point or not.

  
“It’s okay,” Dee explained, “I’ve had years of therapy to get over it.” But she
noticed that Joe had raised a questioning eyebrow, so she kicked him under the
table. The eyebrow went down, Dee tried to look innocent.

  
“I hope it wasn’t anything bad,” Pohl said.

  
“Is there anything which kills people young which isn’t bad?” Nazir asked.

  
“Oh…”

  
“Actually, if we’re going to be working together on this, perhaps I should tell
you. Clear the air. Joe knows, might be helpful for everyone else.” And so she
told them, about the uncertain death of her father, about the hidden memories,
about her desperate search to uncrack her mind and the shrinks who’d
accompanied her on it. Then she told them about Joe’s attempts to help, how the
machine found the soul, but how it seemed to be in pieces. And when she’d
finished, her glass has been drained twice.

  
Another morning without employment for Dee and Joe, another trip round
properties for sale. The meal the night before had included a discussion of
whether it was the right time to be changing property, given her job situation,
but Dee was adamant she wasn’t being wank fodder for a ghost any longer than
she had to, and it was lucky for Joe she wasn’t actually in his spare room.
He’d rather hoped she’d have moved a door further down his landing, but spare
room would have been a good start.

  
Dee hadn’t been put off in this quest, which was why a young lady was showing
them round a maisonette. The rooms seemed a fair size, although the property
was empty apart from built in fitted wardrobes and the occasional light fitting
which someone seemed to have forgotten.

  
“They might as well have taken the door handles off,” Dee commented, and she
could see why only daylight appointments were being accepted.

  
“Thorough,” Joe confirmed as they saw someone had taken the cork tiles from the
bathroom. “Someone’s careful with their money.”

  
Which reminded Dee, so she asked the young Agent, “what happened to the last
owner?”

  
Looking distinctly nervous, she tried to flannel, “well, err, they, err…”

  
“Stop flannelling, are you trying to tell us they died?”

  
“Yes, but really you can’t tell.”

  
We’ll be the judge of that, Dee thought.

  
It was then that the Agent’s phone went off, she checked the caller, raised an
apologetic hand, said “I have to take this,” and rushed out of the room. And
down the stairs. And from the sound of it the front door too.

  
“Let’s get on with it.” Dee instructed as Joe deposited the rucksack carefully
on the ground and took the machine out. It was on in a trice and Joe asked “Is
there anybody there?”

  
“Could you not have thought of something original?”

  
“Sorry Miss Writer For A Living.”

  
“Hello,” came the digital voice.

  
“Are you male or female?” Dee asked.

  
“Male?”

  
“Okay, turn it off, “ and Dee stood to go.

  
“Wait, wait, you’ve got to help me!”

  
That got Dee’s attention. She turned and crouched down. “Go on.”

  
“I’ve been killed!”

  
“Oh really,” and Dee started recording.

  
“My brother did it, he killed me to inherit my estate.”

  
“A large estate?” Dee did the questioning, as she was trained to do.

  
“Yes, I’d won the lottery and not had a chance to spend it.”

  
“And who killed you?”

  
“My brother.”

  
“Harsh,” Joe commented.

  
“I see, and he’s got all your money?”

  
“Actually no. He didn’t realise, but I’d left all the money to Tompkins.”

  
“And that’s your partner?”