A Spookies Compendium

by David Robinson

  Wilcox’s tone was calm and matter of fact. “Wasn’t me. If I’d run you off the road, you wouldn’t be here talking about it now. Besides, Sylvie don’t drive and last night I was too drunk.”

  “What about Groom and Lawson?”

  “Tommy doesn’t drive,” Wilcox said, “and Lemmy is a professional. He does a proper job.”

  “Funny that, Wilcox,” Pete commented. “I’m a professional too, and I do a proper job, and right now, I’m gonna do a proper job on you, your goons here, and your club unless you start to talk fast. You ran me off the road last night and cost Sceptre her car.”

  “Now look, Brennan, I’ve told you once, it’s nothing to do with us. You say one more word, I’ll call my lawyer and sue you for every penny you’ve got.”

  Pete grinned. “And how far will you get on 68 pence?”

  Wilcox raised his voice. “For the last time, we had nothing to do with your accident. You think I’m the only one in this town with a beef against you? There are lots of people out there who’d like to see you snuffed, and I’m only one of them, but unlike the rest, I don’t have time to bother with slime like you. I’m too busy running this place. Now get out before I call the filth.”

  Pete showed no inclination to move. “And how many of that anti-Brennan brigade own a dark-coloured pickup truck?”

  “Not me for one, and I don’t know of anyone else. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who rids us of you should be given the Queen’s Award for Industry.” Wilcox reached for the phone. “You’ve got ten seconds before I bell the law and have you arrested for harassment.”

  Puzzled and irritated, certain that it had been Wilcox and his crew, Pete backed off. For once, Wilcox’s words had a ring of truth about them. “If I find out you were linked to it, you’d better book your seat on the next flight to nowhere, because I’ll come gunning for you.” He drew in his breath as Wilcox put down the phone. “Let’s change the subject, shall we, and I’ll ask again about Bilko.”

  “I told you yesterday, I haven’t seen him for months, now push off.”

  Pete made no effort to move off. He played with a glass dish full of peanuts. “I have it on the best authority that Bilko made a telephone call from this place the night before he was killed. You say you haven’t seen him for months, and yet he was in your bar the night he disappeared. That doesn’t sound right to me.”

  If Wilcox was worried, he did not show it. He gestured at the large room, chairs and table neatly arranged in a semi-circular pattern, centred on the small stage.

  “Do you know how many guys we get in here of a night? Hundreds. Bilko could have been here and I wouldn’t notice because I’m too busy. Busy working, Brennan. You know what I mean by work, don’t you? I mean actually getting something done instead of harassing law-abiding citizens.”

  Pete did not rise to the bait. He cast a glance at Groom and Lawson. “What about your two clowns?”

  Groom particularly took umbrage at the insult. “Just give us the word, Ronnie, and we’ll teach him some manners.”

  Pete laughed with genuine pleasure. “You? Take me apart?” He traced the outline of the bruise on Groom’s forehead, fading now after a couple of days. “You have short memories, don’t you? Less than 48 hours ago, I showed you how easy it is to fly … off the end of my fist. Now what about Bilko?”

  “We never saw him, right?” insisted Lawson.

  Pete detached himself from the bar. “I find out you’re lying, any of you, and I’ll be back. And next time, I start to take this place, and you lot, apart piece by piece.” Without glancing back, he marched out of the room.

  *****

  From the Germ Factory, Sceptre and Kevin climbed into his van for the journey to Benny Stringer’s shop across town. He started the engine and as they drove off, Sceptre asked, “Have you come up with a suitable name for our business venture, yet, Kevin?”

  “I’ve had ideas,” he assured her, turning right out of the end of the street. “Banish Your Banshees?” He glanced at her to judge her reaction. Sceptre’s face told him all he needed to know. “All right, how about Poltergeist Punishment Pack?”

  “Kevin, I appreciate …”

  He cut her off. “Sceptre, I said before, if you want to be a success, you have to find something that people will remember. What about The Ghost Gang?”

  She chuckled. “You make us sound like a mob of children. Keep it simple, Kevin. Have you considered something along the lines of Brennan, Keeley and Rand, Paranormal Investigators?”

  Kevin gave a disdainful sniff. “Bit boring.” A light came to his eyes. “You’ve given me an idea, though. I’ll get back to you.”

  He concentrated on his driving, taking them off the Cranley Estate and up towards Ashdale town centre, but before they got there, Kevin turned off into an area of terraced housing. Eventually they reached a secondary road, a shortcut between two main arteries. He turned left onto it and, a hundred metres farther on, pulled in outside Stringer’s Electrical.

  Wire-grilled windows protected a stock of TVs, satellite and cable decoders, hi-fis and a range of accessories from headphones to jacks, antennae to blank videotapes. When they entered, they found the wall displays littered with mobile phones, portable radios, cassette and CD players, while glass stands showed off his latest range of quality electrical apparatus.

  Bent Benny looked up from the morning’s racing pages as they came in. A hunched, middle-aged individual with a wizened face, he wore a pair of narrow reading glasses that added to his weasel-like appearance. He smiled up at Kevin: a smile of avarice. “Kev. Again. Nothing wrong with the gear I supplied, was there?”

  “It’s fine, Benny.”

  “What can I do you for, then?” Benny rubbed his hands together, as if warming them to accept money. “How about a nice new satellite dish with a smartcard by-pass? A hundred quid to you, no subscriptions, no questions asked.”

  “And no guarantee, I’ll bet.”

  Stringer grinned. “It didn’t fall off a lorry, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No? Nicked direct from someone’s house, huh?” Kevin declined the offer and got straight down to business. “We need a favour, Benny.”

  The electronics man shrugged. “Bit short this week. Had to pay the missus her child support.”

  “I said a favour, not a loan.”

  “We need an audio tape enhancing,” Sceptre said, announcing her presence.

  Benny gave her a hungry smile. “We?”

  “This is Sceptre Rand, my partner,” said Kevin.

  Benny was surprised. “What’s a gorgeous dolly like you doing with this Teletubby?”

  “We’re business partners, nothing else,” Sceptre explained.

  Benny perked up, his face twisting into a leer. “Oh right, so there’s hope for me yet?”

  Sceptre looked him up and down and suppressed a shudder. “I shouldn’t think so.” She held up the audiocassette. “Can you enhance this recording?”

  Benny dropped the wolf act when confronted by his true love: electronics. Taking the tape, he placed it into a cassette recorder, hit ‘play’ and listened to the hiss of white noise and the faint whisper somewhere in the background. His eyes narrowed, and his brow knitted in concentration. Eventually he came from behind the counter, crossed to the shop entrance, dropped the lock, and turned the sign around to read ‘closed’.

  “Come into the office,” he invited, leading them into a rear room where a mass of electronic equipment, computer-driven multi-deck tape machines, equalisers and mixer boards lined the walls and workbenches.

  Stringer shifted the cannibalised innards of a CD player from the bench, sat before his array of machinery, and switched everything on with a single flick of a wall socket. Dropping the tape into a slot, he began to play it, watching the LED displays dance before him.

  “You’ll be able to help us?” asked Sceptre.

  “By the time I’ve finished,” he boasted, “you’ll be able to hear two flies havin
g it off on the ceiling.”

  “As long as we can hear the voice,” said Sceptre primly.

  Benny’s eyes focused on the oscilloscope and graphic equaliser readings.

  “Definitely something there,” he muttered. He fiddled with switches, slides and dials, and the white noise filling the room began to fade into the distant background. He turned up the gain, and there came the unmistakable sound of a human voice, but flat and phased as if generated by a synthesiser.

  “Can you bring that voice up?” asked Sceptre.

  Benny fiddled with more knobs. Suddenly the voice came through clearly.

  “WIGJAM... WIGJAM... WIGJAM... ”

  Kevin’s brow creased. “See. Wigjam again.” He smiled at Benny’s puzzlement. “I keep getting this as a text message, too.”

  Benny looked up at them. “Wigjam? New pop group, is it?”

  “This,” said Sceptre proudly, “is a voice from beyond the grave. Make a recording of it, please, Mr. Stringer.” Sceptre turned a smile on Kevin. “We need to think about this before we go back to Melmerby Manor.”

  Kevin gulped audibly. “I’d rather think about a cosy night in with a bacon slicer.”

  “Don’t be such a baby,” Sceptre smiled. “The spirits won’t harm you.”

  “I dunno,” said Benny, slotting a fresh cassette into the recording deck. “You should see me after a night on the rum and cokes.”

  Kevin did not find Benny’s remark amusing. “You keep telling me this,” he reminded Sceptre, “but the spirits don’t seem to be doing a bad job of making you look a total liar.”

  Before they could get into a proper argument, Benny started the machinery again, and once more the eerie voice filled the room. “From beyond the grave, eh?”

  “Electronic voice phenomenon,” said Sceptre, “There are many documented cases of EVP, not always associated with hauntings, either.”

  “Wigjam,” said Kevin, ignoring both her and Benny. “That reminds me of something, but I can’t think what.”

  Sceptre, too, pondered. “I’ve heard it somewhere before, too. But where?”

  Benny handed over the two tapes, Kevin handed over £10, and the investigators left.

  *****

  The moment he had let them out of the shop, Benny dropped the locks again, removed a second copy of the mysterious voice from the machinery that had been surreptitiously running in the background, and grinned to himself. He picked up the telephone and dialled.

  “Mike McKinley,” he demanded when he was put through. “Hello, Mike? It’s Bent Benny. You looking for a story?”

  At the other end, McKinley sounded sceptical. “As long as it’s kosher, Benny.”

  “This is the real thing.” Stringer chuckled greedily. “How much will you pay for your first recording of a voice from beyond the grave?”

  *****

  Tony ‘Sherlock’ Holmes saw Pete’s car pull up and tried hurriedly to lock the door, but Pete got there first and forced his way in.

  Slightly shorter than Pete, Sherlock was a rangy, skinny individual with shifty eyes and a nervous habit of running a hand through his untidy, dark hair.

  “Morning Pete. Can’t hang about, mate, gotta go out.” He glanced anxiously at the door.

  “Not just yet, Sherlock.” Pete kept his voice deliberately friendly. “You’re the man I’ve been looking for. Let’s have a little chat, huh?”

  “Sorry chum. Like I said, I’ve gotta dash. I’ve …”

  “You’ve gotta find five minutes for me, Sherlock. That’s what you’ve gotta do.” With a friendly but unbreakable grip on Sherlock’s arm, Pete led him back to the desk.

  The front of the premises looked like any other shop on the row, but the interior was set up as an office. The walls were adorned with photographs and one or two diplomas. When Pete checked the photographs, they were all of Sherlock. Sherlock shaking hands with the mayor in front of the town hall on the day he was awarded the contract for guarding the Housing Department’s material stores. Sherlock with the chairman of Ashdale Athletic FC. Sherlock with the Director of Ashdale Coliseum Theatre. The diplomas were all NVQ certificates in security, and all bore Sherlock’s name.

  “Doing well for yourself, pal,” Pete commented.

  Sherlock glowed in the praise. “Well, you know. Busy, busy, busy. Always been the same, Pete.”

  “So you have,” Pete agreed with a judicious nod. “And all thanks to Kev Keeley.”

  With a couple of convictions for theft in his younger days, Sherlock had served a six-month sentence as a dole cheat, and when he came out, Kevin had cooked up a false background, and Wilf Mannion provided an accommodation address, both of which helped Sherlock secure a job with a well-known security organisation. Two years down the line, Sherlock cut loose from his employer and set up on his own. Now, two years further on, he was well established in the town.

  But he disagreed with Pete’s analysis. “Kev? All he did was give me the references, Pete. I did the rest myself.”

  “True, but without those references, you’d never have got a job in the first place, and your trusting employers wouldn’t have paid for all those training courses you took. So you do owe Kevin, really.”

  Sherlock’s face turned to a look of determined anger. “Now look, if you’re after the inside info on some joint so Keeley can rip it off, you can forget it. I’ve too much at stake to give it away casing joints for you.”

  Pete laughed, but there was no humour in his voice. “You know me better than that, Sherlock. I just need the answers to a few questions, buddy. Like, what do you know about 25,000 missing pirate DVDs and a dark pickup truck running me off the road?”

  Sherlock swallowed hard and checked the door, assessing his chances of getting out. He decided it would be backing a loser. “I’d like to help you,” he wheedled, “but I can’t stay, I’ve gotta…”

  “Answer me, Sherlock, or I might lose it.”

  “No, look, I’m due at …”

  “Forget the excuses, just answer me.”

  “I dunno what you’re talking about.”

  Pete pushed him back, round the desk and into his chair, then perched on the edge of the desk. Leaning menacingly over his suspect, he drove his fists hard into the chair arms. Sherlock began to sweat.

  “Let me spell it out. You were paid to keep an eye on Jimmy Tate’s lock-up where these hooky DVDs were stored. They went missing and subsequently turned up at Melmerby Manor, before going AWOL again. When they disappeared for the second time, Bilko’s body turned up in their place. Someone had caved his head in. Me and my partners were accused, released and then run off the road, and the only lead we have is Tony ‘Sherlock’ Holmes because he was the one paid to guard the lock-up where the DVDs were stored before they went walkabout.”

  Sherlock was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his tones were friendly and interested. “So how did you get on at Melmerby Manor? Find any ghosts, did you? Only I heard …”

  “Sherlock,” Pete snapped, “you’re not with it, are you? This is serious stuff. I’ve got Locke and his new sidekick, piano tuner …”

  “You mean keyboard.”

  “Keynes,” Pete corrected. “I’ve got them breathing down my neck, and you know what Locke is like with me. He has a special rope in his office, with my name attached to it, and if he can, he’s going to hang me for nailing Bilko. Then, as if all this is not enough, some berk ran me off the road and burned out my partner’s car.”

  Holmes gave a sympathetic tut. “Some drivers, eh?”

  “Exactly,” agreed Pete. “I get the feeling that people don’t like me and that makes me so sad, I get angry. Now I wanna know what happened to the DVDs.”

  “I don’t know,” yelped Holmes. “Honest, Pete. I don’t have a fixed guard at Jimmy Tate’s lock-up. It’s checked every half hour by patrol, and on that night I covered the patrol myself.”

  The admission only made Pete more suspicious. “I figure it must have taken them at least an hour to
load those DVDs onto a lorry, and that must account for two, maybe three calls, so I have to ask myself, what happened to the regular calls during that time?”

  Sherlock blushed. “Well, they, er, kinda got missed. I had a flat tyre.”

  Pete said nothing. He continued to stare Sherlock in the eye, patiently waiting for the rest of the tale.

  For his part, Sherlock felt the pressure of the silence more keenly than if someone were leaning on him. He looked around, looked out onto the street where pedestrians passed by, muffled up against the cold, drab, dreary weather. He checked the door again, but he had to lean over and look round Pete to see it and he knew that looking at it was as close as he was going to get.

  Running a sweating hand through his hair, he turned once more to pleading. “Aw, come on, Pete, you can’t expect me to grass a guy up.”

  “I do.”

  Holmes stared at the walls, seeking further inspiration. His eyes fell upon a photograph of him and his wife on their wedding day. He smiled secretively. “Tell you what. The wife. She’s always fancied you. I’ll send her round to your drum and you can …”

  Pete cut him off. “I’m not interested in your wife. I’m not saying she’s ugly, but The Elephant Man would have run away from her. Now I’m getting tired of this dithering, so let’s have it all before I turn nasty.”

  “All right, all right.” Holmes’ face was a picture of dejection. “Jimmy Tate’s place was on a thirty minute schedule while the DVDs were stored there. One night, early last week, I gets a call. Skip two checks and I cop for five hundred sovs.”

  Pete worked out the schedule. “So the place was unguarded for an hour and a half while they loaded them onto a truck?”

  “Yes. When I got there, the job had been done and the doors were left open for me to find.”