How to Seduce a Ghost

by Hope McIntyre

  “Because I love you and I want to know absolutely everything about you. I want to know what you do when you’re alone, I want to see all your little quirks, I want to hear what you say when you talk to yourself. I want to know you inside out and then I’ll give you all the space you desire.”

  “See,” I grumbled although I was secretly touched by his declaration, “you’d drive me nuts for the beginning of our marriage, crowding me, smothering me, and then by the sounds of things, you’d get bored with me and dump me.”

  “I wouldn’t. I promise.”

  “I bet that’s what all the husbands say. Women who believe them are the ones who get married.”

  “And cynical, jaded creatures like you know better.”

  Hearing that unleashed my tears. Tommy knew what he was doing. He knew me inside out. That was what I could never make him understand. He didn’t have to move in with me to get to know me any better. He knew all about my insecurities yet still he was prepared to wait till my resistance broke down and that was what made it so hard to give him up. Would I ever find anyone else who knew me the way Tommy knew me?

  Having him here with me now when I had to deal with the shock of my parents’ divorce meant a lot to me. The thing about Tommy was that I knew I could always rely on him. Sometimes this faithful canine quality was irritating and sometimes it reminded me why I needed him.

  My father looked very sad when it came time to say good-bye.

  “I’ll get in touch when we come to London,” he whispered in my ear. I assumed by the we he meant himself and Josiane. “I was going to come over before and tell you about Josiane but your mother insisted I stay so we could have a family Christmas together and the truth is I’m glad we did. Don’t worry. Everything will work itself out.”

  I wanted to ask umpteen questions like How long has it been going on? and Are you happy? but maybe they would have to wait until he came to London. If he ever did.

  Tommy and I arrived back in London at about eight o’clock in the evening on New Year’s Eve. I felt considerably closer to him than I had when we left London. I knew that I was deliberately pushing all thoughts of Buzz to the back of my mind because the way things had gone over Christmas had left me feeling very confused about him. I knew that continuing to see him would only complicate my life even further. The shock of what had happened to my parents had left me feeling more guilty about Tommy than ever.

  But the minute we hit London it was as if the bond that had reunited us in France was severed. We had each been invited to several parties individually, which once again highlighted the fact that we just didn’t have that many friends in common, if any. We took the Heathrow Express to Paddington and on the ride in from the airport, a heated argument erupted between us because I refused to be dragged to Shagger Watkins’s home in God knows where to see the New Year in with a lot of drunken Chelsea supporters. I had invitations from some of the old crowd who referred to him as the Radio Nerd. I hadn’t wanted to subject him to their patronizing attitude so I hadn’t included him in the acceptance and this had upset him. By the time we arrived at Paddington Station he had collapsed in a major sulk, sitting slightly turned away from me. When I leapt up to grab the bags, shouting to someone to hold the doors open, he stayed put.

  “Tommy!” I yelled. “Help me. I can’t carry all these bags by myself.”

  “You don’t need to take mine.” He glared at me. “I’m not coming with you. I’m going to Shagger’s without you.”

  Oh, Tommy, I thought, as I struggled with my bags toward the taxi stand beside platform one, why does something like this always happen between us?

  It was about six o’clock at night when the cab turned off Ladbroke Grove into my street. The sky was strangely light, I noticed. There was still a kind of lingering pink glow or was I imagining it?

  “How’s the weather been?” I shouted to the cabbie. “Was it sunny today?”

  “Nah, sweetheart, rained all day.”

  “But it’s so bright outside.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he agreed. “But it’s not like that all over. Just over there”—he jerked his head in the direction of the house—“someone’s havin’ a bonfire in the garden. ’Allo. Looks like it’s got a bit out of hand.”

  He turned the corner into Blenheim Crescent and the cab came to an abrupt halt. Three fire engines were parked in the road outside my house with their lights flashing. Their hoses were snaking down the alley to the side of the house and a crowd had gathered to watch.

  I leapt out of the cab and up the steps to the front door. I had no idea what I planned to do once inside the house but I imagine I must have wanted to save whatever I could from the fire. I found myself racing up the stairs, taking them two at a time and hauling myself up by the banister until I reached the top floor where I had my office. I went straight to the cupboard where I kept my laptop and grabbed it together with the little wooden box in which I kept my disks.

  As I stood up I looked out the window and saw that the garden below me was illuminated. Suddenly I realized that there had been no sign of fire in the house when I rushed upstairs in such a reckless fashion. It was the summerhouse that was ablaze. I stood mesmerized, watching the flames leaping into the air like the ones from the bonfire the O’Malleys had built next door on November fifth. The firemen looked as if they were beginning to get it under control but it didn’t matter now, the damage was done. The place that had made Angel’s face light up with joy would soon be a mass of blackened wooden stumps and ash-covered rubble.

  “Angel!”

  I dropped the laptop and hurtled out of the room straight into the arms of a burly giant of a man who had just reached the top of the stairs.

  “Hold on, miss.” He had reached out to restrain me and I began to beat him off in panic. I didn’t have a prayer. He lifted me up, literally, and set me down in my office.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Richard Cross,” he told me. “You’re not meant to be here. We’ve got to get you out of the house.”

  “Of course I’m meant to be here. I’m Nathalie Bartholomew. I live here. It’s my house. I need to get my things.”

  “No you do not,” he insisted. “You need to leave everything here and come with me. Now.”

  “But the house isn’t on fire. It’s the summerhouse. Look.”

  “I know that, miss.” I could tell he was trying very hard to be patient with me. “But we have to get you out of the house before you destroy any evidence.”

  “Evidence? You make it sound like a crime’s been committed.”

  He didn’t say anything, just took my arm and propelled me toward the stairs. He was being gentle, he wasn’t hurting me in any way but he was exerting just enough pressure to make me realize I didn’t have much choice. I was leaving the house whether I wanted to or not.

  As I went downstairs, through the windows on the landing I could see the police were beginning to section off the back of the house with yellow tape.

  “But what about Angel?” I turned around on the stairs to face him above me. “Was she in the summerhouse? Did she get out in time?”

  I sensed him pause behind me for a second. “She?” Then he made a swiveling motion with his finger, instructing me to turn around and carry on down the stairs.

  “Yes. Angel. My tenant. She lives in the summerhouse. I mean she did.”

  “No,” he said.

  “You mean no, she wasn’t in the summerhouse or no, she didn’t get out in time?” I was frantic to know.

  But he didn’t answer, just kept propelling me down the stairs. As I came into the hall I saw two police officers go into the kitchen carrying equipment of some kind. Outside the pavement had been cordoned off with more yellow tape and the crowds had been moved back up toward Portobello Road.

  “This way, miss.” Sergeant Cross marched me across the street to a police car.

  “Hey, that’s her. She owes me a fiver.” I saw the cab driver I had abandoned on arrival.

&nbs
p; “Where are my bags?” I yelled at him. “What have you done with my bags.”

  “Who’s this?” A tall man standing beside the cab driver asked Sergeant Cross. His lean frame beside the sergeant’s huge bulk put me in mind of Laurel and Hardy. “Hey! Where are you going?” He suddenly darted across the road and waylaid the men with the yellow tape coming out of the alley. “I want that potting shed over in the corner sealed off as well as the summerhouse and the garden. And then you’ll have to do the ambulance. But most important, I want you to seal off this alleyway and any access routes you can find although if these firefighters keep on trampling over all the evidence, we might as well not bother. So.” He came back across the road, still yelling. His voice was surprisingly powerful for such a slender-looking man. “You live here?” He glared at me.

  “She got in the house before I could stop her, sir. Says it’s her house.”

  “How far’d she get?”

  “Right up to the top, sir.”

  “Fanbloodytastic!” The man scowled. “Get her taken down to the station. Get her clothes off her first. I’m going in the ambulance.”

  “Is he dead, sir?”

  The man threw up his hands in exasperation. “No, Richie, he’s not dead. That’s why we’re taking him to hospital.”

  I saw the ambulance then, parked in front of the alley. The back doors were being closed. There was someone inside. He’s not dead. It wasn’t Angel.

  “Where’s Angel?” I shouted at Sergeant Cross. “You never told me you’d found her.”

  “Oh great, Richie. You’ve been chatting away to her, have you? Why don’t you go on the six o’clock news, tell the whole bloody world while you’re at it?”

  “Sorry, sir. We’ll need you to give us your clothes.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “I want to know what’s going on. I want to know how the fire started and who you’ve got in that ambulance.”

  The tall man’s face softened for an instant. “Look,” he said wearily. “We’d like to know who we’ve got in the ambulance and the sooner we can get him to hospital, the sooner we’ll find out. I’m Detective Inspector Max Austin and this is Detective Sergeant Cross. You’re going to be taken down the police station where we’d like you to answer some questions. Thank you very much.”

  “But why?” I shouted but he’d already crossed the road to the waiting ambulance. As I got into the police car I heard the wailing siren start up and saw the red light flashing through the rear window.

  Sergeant Cross didn’t accompany me to the station and the driver just smiled reassuringly at me in the rearview mirror whenever I asked him a question. On arrival I was shown into a waiting area. I was fingerprinted and I let them take a DNA sample and then I was joined by two detective constables and their first request had me staring at them in total astonishment.

  “We’ll need your clothes, so if you’d just like to go in there and remove them for us, you can put this on instead.” They handed me what appeared to be a white paper dress as substitute clothing.

  At that point I gave up hoping I would find out what was going on. They were being perfectly nice. There was no sense of threat or menace but I couldn’t help feeling as if I were about to be tortured. I put on the paper dress and I handed them my own clothes to take away.

  And then I gave them my name again and answered their questions as best I could. Whose house was it? Who lived there? Where were those people now? Where had I been for the last twenty-four hours? On and on it went and they never indicated whether or not they were happy with what I told them. I didn’t complain. I was dog tired and past caring.

  I read through my statement and signed it and just as I was about to fall asleep, there was a commotion at the entrance to the station and the tall man who had introduced himself as Detective Inspector Max Austin walked in. The detective constables who had been interviewing me got up and went over to talk to him in his office. I saw him look in my direction several times.

  “Can I go home now?” I asked when he finally came into the interview room and I felt an ominous shiver go through me when he shook his head.

  He took a seat opposite me and said something quickly into the tape recorder between us. “Now,” he said, leaning forward, “as you know there was a fire in the summerhouse in the garden of what you say is your house.”

  “It’s actually my parents’ house. They live in France.”

  “They live in France,” he repeated slowly. “You’ve given us their contact details?” I nodded. “Okay. Why we have you here is because the body of a man was recovered from the fire and that man has subsequently died. Now I’d be grateful if you’d answer some questions for me. You’ve told my detective constable you were on your way back from France at the time of the fire—”

  He didn’t spell it out; he didn’t have to. I knew as soon as he said that the man had died that he was treating the death as a murder inquiry.

  CHAPTER 10

  I WAS SUDDENLY RAVENOUSLY HUNGRY. I HADN’T EATEN the night before. In fact I hadn’t eaten since I’d left France.

  “I’m starving,” I told DI Austin and resisted the urge to tell him he could do with a bit of fattening up himself. He looked positively undernourished. I’d never met a murder detective before but he looked more like a university professor to me, not that I knew many of those. The thing about Max Austin was that he didn’t look slick like they do on TV. He was still wearing his raincoat and he had one of those long college scarves wound around his neck. He was kind of droopy. I think it had something to do with his height. He was like a beanpole, all arms and legs and a face looking down from about a foot above me. “And I’d like to call my boyfriend,” I added.

  But what a face! He was the same physical type as Buzz, liquid brown eyes, floppy dark hair, fine features, sensational bones. But while Buzz was an eagle, fierce and impatient, this guy looked like a soft, approachable rabbit.

  “Your boyfriend?” He looked up sharply. “Who’s your boyfriend?”

  “Bu—” Looking at him had started me thinking about Buzz and when on earth I was going to see him again and how much I’d like him to come here and rescue me.

  “Tommy Kennedy. We’ve just come back from France together.”

  “Oh yes.” He seemed to know about Tommy already. “What were you going to say just now?”

  “I was going to say ‘But when can I go home?’” It was a white lie. I did want to know when I could go home.

  “When my men have finished in the house.”

  “But what are they doing? How long will it take?”

  He ignored the first question. “Could be up to three days.”

  “You’re joking?” He shook his head. “You mean I can’t go home for three days? What am I supposed to do?”

  “I said up to three days. It’ll probably be much sooner than that but we can’t let you back into the house because you might disturb the evidence. Maybe Mr. Kennedy can help? Now can we go over your statement, please. You left your parents’ house in France when?”

  He took me back over every step of my journey from France, what time had the plane arrived? How long had we had to wait for a train to Paddington? Had there been a queue for a taxi? What time had the taxi arrived at the house? Could I give him my parents’ address and telephone number?

  “Why don’t you ask the taxi driver? He’ll confirm what time he picked me up at Paddington. He’ll tell you he brought me straight to the house.”

  “I have,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t you check with Air France? They’ll confirm I was on the flight and what time it arrived and everything.” But I knew as I made the suggestion what his answer would be.

  “I will,” he said with a hint of a smile. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. I wondered if he had a wife or a girlfriend and what they thought about him being gone half the night, chasing murderers. And then I was reminded that there might have been a murder at the bottom of my garden and I started shaking. He noticed
and began to look worried so I sat up straight, stamped my feet on the ground to still them and told him:

  “Well, your Sergeant Cross can take over from there. He can tell you what time he found me at the top of the house. The fire was well under way by then, wasn’t it? And they’d found the body—who is it? Tell me, who it is, who did they find? Who died in my summerhouse?”

  “A Mr. Frederick Fox.” He leaned back and studied me, waiting for my reaction. The name meant nothing to me and the expression on my face relayed that to him.

  “You didn’t know him?”

  I shook my head impatiently. No!

  “Miss O’Leary says you did.”

  “Miss O’Leary? Oh my God, Angel! Where is Angel? Is she okay?”

  “So you know Miss O’Leary?”

  “Of course I know her. Angel O’Leary. She’s my tenant. She lives in the summerhouse or rather she did before—”

  He didn’t say anything, just looked at me, waiting for me to go on. I stared back at him and then the penny suddenly dropped. I felt a fierce jolt of pain in my head from the sudden tensing of the muscles in the back of my neck. Frederick Fox. Angel. It was Fred. Dear sweet Fred of the pimples and the bobbing Adam’s apple. Fred was dead. Dead Fred. The rhyming words reverberated around my brain, colliding with each other each time I tried to speak. Finally, I nodded stupidly.

  “I knew him. He was Angel’s boyfriend.”

  “Was he?”

  “Yes,” I said, “you can ask her about him.”

  “We have. She said he used to be her boyfriend but they broke up before Christmas.”

  “You’ve spoken to Angel already? Where is she? She never told me she’d finished with Fred.”

  Again he didn’t answer my question.

  “So what was he doing at the summerhouse if he wasn’t her boyfriend anymore? You have to tell me, is Angel okay?”

  He relented for a second. “Miss O’Leary’s fine. She’s here. We found a key on the body. It didn’t melt in the fire. She told us who had a key to the summerhouse far as she knew. Frederick Fox was the only person to have one besides her. And yourself.” He added softly, “It was a male body—”