A Spookies Compendium

by David Robinson

  The same flashing lights gave Sceptre’s face an ice-cold appearance that was genuine. “Sceptre. In fact, only my friends call me Sceptre. You may address me as Lady Rand-Epping, or My Lady.”

  Keynes ignored her aristocratic haughtiness. “You say attempted murder, I’m inclined to think drunk driver.”

  “At this hour?” protested Sceptre, pointing to her watch.

  Keynes made a point of sniffing Pete’s breath, and he scowled. “Come on, Keynes, Sceptre was driving. I only took over when that nutter rammed us. And you’re wrong. He was not drunk. He hit us deliberately.”

  Keynes was not prepared to discuss it. “Are any of you seriously hurt?”

  “No,” said Kevin, and nodded at the foam-covered remains of the Fiat Punto, “But Sceptre’s car ain’t well.”

  Keynes ignored him. “I have your statements. Leave it to us, Brennan.”

  “Oh, of course … if I never wanna hear any more. Let me give you some advice, Keynes. Make an effort to find him, because if I get to him first, there won’t be a lot left for you to interrogate.”

  Without waiting for her to answer, Pete turned away and began the 500-metre walk home. Sceptre and Kevin hurried to keep up with his longer stride.

  “What will we do without transport?” Sceptre asked. “My car’s out, the police still have yours, Pete, and I have reservations about Kevin’s van.”

  “Kevin can hire something for us,” Pete replied.

  “Great,” moaned Kevin. “I’ve already had open wallet surgery to pay back Ronnie Wilcox, and now I’ve got to stump up for a hire car. What’s wrong with my van?”

  Pete dismissed the idea. “Like Sceptre, I don’t like it, and I’m not running round in your old wreck unless you get the heater fixed. Anyway, you’re the only one with any money, and you can have it back when we pick up the reward from Jimmy Tate.”

  Now Sceptre turned on him. “Pete, we formed ourselves as a team of ghost hunters, not private investigators.”

  “And, in case you’ve forgotten, I am a private eye. Besides, there’s not a lot of difference, except that we’re more likely to get results as private eyes.”

  “And less likely to get the TV series Kevin promised me.”

  Pete snorted. “Tell you what I’ll do. You wait for Kev’s TV series, I’ll wait for you to drop your knickers for me, and we’ll see who gets there first. My money’s on me.”

  “Are you saying Kevin was daydreaming?” Sceptre demanded. “He said he had contacts in television and that he may be able to get us a series on cable and satellite.”

  Pete forced patience on himself. “Sceptre, Kev has more contacts than a printed circuit board, but the only contact he has in TV is Bent Benny, who, aside from loaning out audio-visual gear, also happens to supply knocked off cable and satellite boxes.”

  “That’s not true,” yelled Kevin as his cell phone buzzed for attention. “I do have other contacts in TV. When I worked in admin for the police, I processed the drunk driving charge against George Booth, and he was a freelance TV director. Sceptre, I stand by what I said. If we can get a result at Melmerby Manor, I’ll have a word with George, and see if we can get something on satellite.”

  He took the phone from his pocket and studied the menu. “Text message,” he said, pressing the connect button. He watched the message appear and his brow creased. WGJAMW, read the message. “That’s twice I’ve had this message. What the heck does WIGJAM mean?”

  Pete leaned over his shoulder. “Gobbledygook. Weather screwing up the satellites, I’ll bet. Who’s it from?”

  Kevin fiddled with the keypad and read the source number with a mutter. “Means nothing to me. That number is not in my address book.”

  Sceptre shushed them as they turned the corner of the street, a hundred metres from their apartment “Fishwick is trying to talk to me. Yes, Fishwick?”

  “Madam,” said Fishwick, “there is an angry spirit in your apartment. I think it’s the spirit of the murdered young man at the manor. Steven Bilks.”

  She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Can he harm us?”

  “I’m not sure, Madam. I can manipulate matter, and he can too.”

  “Speaking of which, thank you for releasing the seatbelt back there, Fishwick.”

  “It’s what I’m here for, Madam. To take care of you.”

  Sceptre turned her attention to her partners. “Be careful. Fishwick has told me there’s something terrible waiting for us in the flat.”

  Pete glared at Kevin. “Have you left a curry going cold in the microwave again?”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Kevin.

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Sceptre irritably. “Fishwick tells me there’s a lost soul in our flat. He’s violent and angry. He may do us harm.”

  “You mean a burglar?” said Pete and stared across at their ground floor flat. The place was exactly as it should be with the front door closed and the place in darkness. “You’re crazy.”

  “I do not mean a burglar and you know perfectly well that I do not,” snapped Sceptre. “I mean Steven Bilks.”

  Kevin, too, stared. His chubby features turned pale in the street lighting. “No, Pete, she’s right. Look. There’s a face at the window.”

  Pete studied the windows. “I can’t see anyone.”

  “It’s gone,” wheezed Kevin, “but I swear I saw it.”

  “Sceptre, every time you talk about your spirits, you send his brain into orbit.”

  Sceptre waved an angry hand at their front door. “Pete, there is some... thing in our flat. Fishwick is never wrong about these matters.”

  “All right. Let’s find out what.” Pete marched up the door and tried it. “Locked,” he declared. “Considerate little burglar, isn’t he, locking the door behind him so he won’t be disturbed by insurance salesmen?”

  He took out his key and let them in.

  Natural caution made them creep into the hall, where Kevin picked up the Ashdale Evening Chronicle and read the headline: Telescope Powerful Enough to see Matchbox on Comet. Kevin tutted irritably. “Which untidy sod left the matchbox on the comet in the first place?”

  Pete recognised Kevin’s attempt to cover his fear with humour but shushed his best friend. ”We don’t wanna disturb Casper, the Housebreaking Ghost.”

  Suddenly reminded of his fear, Kevin backed off and let Sceptre pass him as she softly closed the front door.

  “Has Fishcake told you where to look?” Pete asked, pressing an ear to the living room door.

  “Behind that door,” she whispered, “and it’s Fishwick.”

  Kevin gave her a sickly smile. “Ladies first.”

  Pete gripped the door handle, prised it slowly, quietly down, then heaved the door open and rushed in, followed by Sceptre.

  *****

  Kevin stayed where he was.

  Presently, he could hear them shuffling about in the living room and kitchen and suddenly realised he was just as alone in the unfurnished hall as he had been in the cellars at the mansion. Fear got the better of him, and he stepped into the living room, and then through to the kitchen, where Pete and Sceptre were waiting for the kettle to boil. He could hear them arguing again even before he opened the door.

  “I don’t care what you can sense, or what Alf Fisherman tells you, there’s no one here,” Pete was saying.

  “His name is Fishwick, not Fishcake, Fishwife or Fisherman, and you’re wrong, Pete. There is a presence with us. A distressed soul. The same soul we encountered at Melmerby Manor. Steven Bilks.”

  “Right, so Bilko’s a mobile distressed soul, is he? What does he drive? A Rolls Royce Silver Ghost? D’yer gerrit? Eh? A Silver Ghost?”

  “I wish you two would shut up,” said Kevin, reaching into a cupboard above the radio for cups. “This whole scene is giving me the ab-dabs.”

  His hand knocked a cup, which fell out of the cupboard, knocking into the radio before falling to the ground and shattering. Immediately, the radio came to life with a
hiss of static.

  “Damn,” complained Kevin and made to switch the radio off.

  “Leave it on, Madam,” urged Fishwick.

  “Wait,” Sceptre ordered Kevin. “Fishwick is telling us to listen.”

  “I’m getting sick of the Fishmonger. I wish he’d clear off to Grimsby,” Pete groaned.

  At Sceptre’s insistence, they strained their ears. All they could hear was the hiss of a radio tuned to nothing.

  “Is it that symphony?” asked Pete. “You know. Four minutes of total silence.”

  Irritably, Sceptre yanked the volume up full and static filled the room. But there was something else, something underneath: the faintest whisper of a voice.

  They all leaned into the radio to listen. Eventually Kevin, who had been bent over, listening carefully, straightened up. “What’s he saying?”

  Pete listened a moment. “Sounds like wigwam.”

  Sceptre hurried from the kitchen and returned a moment later with a cassette recorder. She plugged in the extension microphone, held it close to the radio and started recording. She allowed the tape to run for a minute, then stopped it.

  In a businesslike manner, she faced Kevin. “This TV repairman you know, could he enhance the recording? Eliminate the white noise?”

  “Bent Benny? Suppose so. He’s into all that kind of thing.”

  “Could we go see him tomorrow?” she asked.

  Kevin nodded. “Sure.”

  “Well, before you do,” said Pete, “don’t forget we need wheels, and Locke won’t let me have my car back until he’s checked it seven ways from Sunday.”

  Chapter Eleven

  A grey dawn brought a light dusting of snow on the ground, and a heavy fog enshrouded the town.

  “I think I nudged the cup and made it fall, but how did it manage to hit the radio and switch it on?” asked Kevin, as they waited for their food at The Germ Factory.

  “Perhaps it was our travelling ghost,” Pete suggested, breaking off from the football pages. “Bit of a bummer, though. He comes all the way from Melmerby Manor and all he can do is turn on the radio. You’d think he’d do something more spectacular, like the ultimate wedgie: pulling Kev’s underpants up over his head.”

  “Very funny. You should be on the TV.”

  Pete frowned. “TV?”

  “Yeah,” said Kevin. “You’d look good next to the picture of my mum.”

  “Your scepticism is depressing, Pete,” said Sceptre before a proper argument could break out.

  Wilf delivered Pete and Sceptre’s plates. Pete looked with dismay at his poached egg on toast.

  “Wilf, what the hell is this?”

  “Our new cook, Pete.” Wilf beamed with pride. “He’s fully trained, you know.”

  Kevin stared glumly at Sceptre’s bowl of oatmeal. “Trained as what? A bricklayer? This porridge looks like cement.”

  “It’s good for you,” said Sceptre.

  “Now listen, you two,” Pete said as Wilf wandered off, “this whole business is getting out of hand. The other night it was milk, sugar and a spoon at Melmerby Manor, last night it was a cup and the radio. Was this ghost in catering when he was alive?”

  “Cynic,” snapped Sceptre.

  Pete was not to be sidetracked. “Look at it logically. So Kev knocked a cup off the shelf and it hit the radio. There are a thousand possible reasons why it happened, and none of them are likely to be anything to do with Bilko’s ghost. He might have nicked the radio when he was alive, but he wouldn’t switch it on to find out if it was working now he’s dead.” He drank from his cup and swallowed a mouthful of poached egg.

  Sceptre chewed thoughtfully on her oatmeal. “And what about the signal on the radio?”

  “Sceptre, you should have studied psychology.”

  “And you did, I suppose?” she demanded tartly.

  “I did a bit, yes. All police officers do. It helps when dealing with people in distress.”

  Wilf returned with Kevin’s much larger plate. “Now, this is what I call a breakfast!” Kevin enthused as he shovelled all the components of a full English breakfast into his mouth at once. “People in distress?” he said around the mouthful of food. “I don’t understand.”

  “We’d just been run off the road,” Pete recounted. “That’s attempted murder in my book. Sceptre, particularly, could have died in that car. We were hyped up, nerves on edge. You should know: you’re the one who thought you saw the face at the window.”

  “I did see it,” his pal retorted.

  “You think you saw it. Kev, you’ve been seeing pink elephants and purple dinosaurs as long as I’ve known you.”

  Kevin chewed on a sausage and swallowed it quickly so he could come in with his next point. “Everybody sees them when they’re drunk... pink elephants and purple dinosaurs, I mean. But not everybody sees faces at windows.”

  “They do when they’re stressed out,” Pete went on patiently. “What I’m saying is that over the last 36 hours, we’ve been under severe stress. The ghost hunt and all the things that happened at Melmerby Manor, finding Bilko’s body, the smash last night. It fooled Kevin into thinking he saw a face at the window, it fooled the lot of us into thinking that we heard something on the radio: wigwam.”

  “Wigjam,” Kevin corrected.

  “Whatever.”

  Sceptre had listened carefully to the brief exchange between the two old friends. “And what of Fishwick’s warning to me?” she asked.

  Pete smiled benignly. “I don’t believe in Fishwick.”

  “He doesn’t believe in you either,” Sceptre said, trying to lighten Pete’s mood.

  “Sceptre …”

  “Pete,” she cut him off, “there’s one thing you’re missing out in all this. Suppose Kevin goes to this Benny character and he enhances the tape and we really do find a voice on it. What will you have to say then?”

  Pete put down his cutlery and sighed. For a moment, he stared through the windows at the wintry weather, while his mind ticked off ways and means of easing his frustration. “Here’s what I’ll have to say. When the cup knocked the radio on, it dropped onto the frequency used by a radio ham somewhere in the States and his call sign is W-J-A-M.”

  “Radio hams don’t use AM or FM.” Sceptre’s own frustration was obviously getting the better of her. She rattled her spoon into the porridge dish. “What will it take to convince you?”

  “A damn sight more than you’ve come up with.” Pete swilled down the last of his tea. “Let’s apply a little paranormal logic, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Your average, streetwise ghost tends to haunt his favourite place when he was on earth, doesn’t he?” He did not wait for an answer. “So far, Bilko has shown up at his own house, Melmerby Manor and our bloody flat.” He threw Sceptre a challenging glare. “Explain that.”

  Finished with her breakfast, Sceptre pushed her bowl to one side. “You are entertaining a popular misconception. An unhappy spirit will, indeed, haunt the place where he was happiest or saddest in his life, or he may haunt the place where he died. In Bilks’ case, I think he’s also trying to channel through Kevin, and in life, he knew where you lived. He may not recall how he knows, but he knows to visit our flat because he’s trying to tell us something.”

  “And Melmerby Manor?” demanded Pete.

  “I believe that is where he was killed. If not, it’s certainly where those DVDs were left, and he was strongly attached to them for financial reasons in life, wasn’t he?” She paused to let him take in her words. “Pete, there is nothing strange about ghosts turning up at many locations. How do you think mediums can channel on a stage in, say, London, and contact the spirit of a man from, say, Manchester? How do you think Fishwick keeps up with me? It’s many years since I left our ancestral home, which is where he was in service with the family.”

  “I don’t account for either of them,” Pete replied, “because I don’t believe in Fishwick and I believe all mediums are con artists. Sceptre, you’re asking me to
take something on trust or faith, and I won’t. Give me concrete evidence. Give me Fishwick, right in front of me. Let me hold a conversation with him. Let me see him. Let me eliminate every other possibility, and then I’ll believe. Until you can do that, you stick to the pie in the sky and I’ll look for other explanations.”

  “You,” Sceptre grumbled, “are totally impossible.”

  “Yes, but I’m sweet with it.” Pete grinned at her scowl, and then checked his watch. “Right, if you’re fit, Kevin, get me some wheels, then you go on to Bent Benny’s, try to sort out Radio Spooksville, while I’ll go see Ronnie Wilcox.”

  Kevin put on a pained expression. “Aw Pete, do I have to? I mean, hire cars are so expensive. Can you not use my van?”

  Pete said nothing. He allowed a grimace to do the talking.

  Sceptre frowned. “Pete, are you sure it’s wise, going to see Wilcox? Facing him alone, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Kevin. “Shouldn’t you tell Padlock and Chain?”

  “You mean Locke and Keynes? No. I don’t have enough evidence to interest the filth. All I know is, Wilcox told me he hadn’t seen Bilko for yonks and yet Jimmy Tate told us that Bilko rang him from Flutter-Bys.” Pete set his features into a determined grimace. “Don’t you worry about Wilcox. I can deal with him and his goons.”

  *****

  Leaving his hired Ford in the car park, Pete stepped into Flutter-Bys to find the cleaners finishing their morning’s work and Wilcox at the bar with his wife and two minders.

  “Brennan,” grinned the proprietor, “if you show up much more, I’ll have to insist on you becoming a member.”

  “I don’t come here by choice, Wilcox. This is business... again.”

  Seated on a high bar stool, Sylvie turned her brutal face on him and blew cigarette smoke into his eyes. “We don’t do business with your sort.”

  “According to what I’ve heard, you’ll do business with anyone willing to pay, but sad sacks who are totally blind and stupid are thin on the ground.”

  She put down her cigarette and moved off the stool, her fists clenched.

  Pete turned a threatening, gimlet eye on her. “Watch it, Mighty Mouth, or I might be tempted to jam your head up Ronnie’s jacksey and let you check out his colon.” Sylvie backed off and Pete leaned on the bar, turning on Wilcox. “I’ve laid a bet with my bookie. I’ve bet him that I can find the moron who ran me off the road last night and wiped out my partner’s wheels, all before lunchtime today. He’s given me eight to one on Chief Inspector Locke, threes on Jimmy and Johnny Tate and guess who came in at even money?”