How to Seduce a Ghost

by Hope McIntyre

“Astrid McKenzie.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Not at all. Don’t you remember, I told you I saw her at the Ivy the night she died and she acted so strange around him.”

  “I don’t remember you saying they talked.”

  “They didn’t. In fact he acted like he didn’t register her at all. And she ran away the minute she saw him. I heard it ended pretty badly between them.”

  I flashed back to the first time I’d met him. Why had he acted as if he didn’t know Astrid?

  “So how did you find out about them? How long ago was it?”

  “Several years, I think. It’s not a secret. Once one person told me I discovered loads of people knew. It just wasn’t that interesting until someone made the connection after the fire. It’ll be in the papers pretty soon, I bet. Now tell me, dear, are you going to be all right after your fire? You were insured, weren’t you?”

  Was I? Or rather were my parents? Of course they had insurance but did it stretch as far as the summerhouse? I was so ignorant about stuff like that. And what about poor Angel? Would her belongings be covered? Probably not.

  Genevieve didn’t say anything about Fred. There was a very simple reason for this. I hadn’t told her a body had been found. I don’t quite know why but I didn’t want her to know about this until she absolutely had to. There’d been a tiny piece buried in the Standard about a Frederick Fox dying in a fire in Notting Hill but if Genevieve had read it, she would have assumed it was an accident. And because I wasn’t a celebrity like Astrid McKenzie there was no mention of it being anywhere near my house. So Genevieve didn’t know that a murder might be involved and probably just as well judging by the way she’d reacted to the news about the fire. Let her make do with speculating about the Astrid McKenzie scenario for the time being.

  I walked home after lunch feeling weirdly fatalistic. Of course I could demand to be taken off the Selma Walker project but I knew I wasn’t going to do that. At least not yet. I knew that I ought to walk away from it because my entanglement with Buzz spelled nothing but trouble. I was feeling edgy because I still hadn’t reached him. Ironically, working for his wife looked like my only way of staying in touch with him.

  I made up my mind what I was going to do. I would go home and listen to her tape. If it turned out to be boring predictable stuff, then I would call Genevieve and ask her to extricate me from the assignment. But if the material was intriguing or provocative in any way, then I would hang in there, write a best-selling book, and remain in contact with Buzz.

  I made myself a cup of tea and pressed PLAY.

  Selma’s throaty voice resounded around the kitchen, telling me that all I was getting was an introduction and that she’d have more for me in a day or two. But when she started to speak, I was so completely mesmerized, I stood there with my eyes bulging in amazement until she’d finished. It was all rather flowery and melodramatic in style. It didn’t really sound as if she was speaking to me, more like she was addressing what she assumed would be her readership. It was as if she’d actually tried to begin writing the book herself, as if she was reading text she’d prepared in advance.

  “I am going to tell you a secret,” she began. “I am going to tell you something I have been wanting to share with someone for nearly three years. I kept quiet because I was afraid and I was embarrassed. But most of all I didn’t think anyone would believe me.

  “Recently I have begun to plan my escape from a world of terror. This book is a way of precipitating that escape, of forcing out into the open that which has been hidden.

  “You know me as Sally McEwan in Fraternity but of course I have a life behind the scenes as all actors do. It is a horrific life and one you will probably not be able to equate with my high profile and the fact that I am a successful woman from a wealthy middle-class background. But it is for that very reason that I have decided I must tell my story, so that people will understand mine is a problem that affects all levels of society.

  “Although this is a personal story of fear and tyranny, it begins in paradise. I was born in New York on November 9, 1946, the only child of a prominent surgeon and his wife. My mother did not work. We lived in a ten-room apartment on Park Avenue. We had servants to cater to our every need. We summered in the Hamptons and in Maine and every February we went to the Bahamas.

  “When I decided at the age of seventeen that I wanted to become an actress, two phone calls from my father were enough to secure a place for me in a series of elite acting classes. I had dreamed of a glittering career on the Broadway stage but not even my father’s money could buy the kind of talent that required, so when I landed a role in As the World Turns, my career as a soap opera actress was launched.

  “But this book will not be the story of my career. Nor will it deal with my life before I came to England. All you need to know about that time is that for fifteen years I was the mistress of a married man. I was never under any illusion that he would leave his wife. He was a devout and guilt-ridden Catholic and it was never a consideration. But even if he had taken the plunge and abandoned the marriage, I don’t think I would have been able to live with his remorse. Still, like many ‘other women’ passionately in love, I indulged in fantasies from time to time whereby his wife dropped dead and he was free to be with me.

  “My dream came true—but not in the way that I imagined. I was destined to play a role in a real life soap opera. When his wife was diagnosed with leukemia and subsequently died a painful, lingering death, he did not turn to me but married her live-in nurse with whom he had been betraying me—and his wife—for several months. In the months that followed I believed I had to be at the lowest ebb in my entire life and I believed that if I could just get myself through it, nothing would ever be as bad again.

  “I was wrong.

  “To get away from New York and all it reminded me of, I accepted a role in Fraternity and fled to London to start a new life.

  “Within a year I had met the man who would become my husband. I fell deeply in love for the second time in my life and believed I had found someone who would love and protect me.

  “Once again I was wrong.

  “Even before we were man and wife, my so-called lover and protector had begun to batter me, to appear out of nowhere, and hurl me against the wall so that my body would be black and blue for weeks at a time.

  “And, like so many women who, I hope, will read this book and find comfort in recognition, I stayed with him. I could not leave. Now, finally, I am preparing my getaway and I hope that my message in this book will encourage them to do the same before they too are battered within an inch of their life.”

  I stood there in silence, too stunned to reach down and press STOP. Either Selma Walker was a complete nutcase with a bizarre imagination or I had had sex with a man who was capable of extreme violence. What chilled me more than anything was that I never for one second doubted the truth of what Selma said about Buzz. I had been infatuated with him but I think I always sensed he was some kind of monster.

  I was scared, so scared that without thinking twice about it I took the unprecedented step of dialing Tommy’s direct line at the BBC and inviting him to move in with me.

  Five minutes later I called him back and added:

  “Don’t go getting any ideas, Tommy. It’s just for a little while—until they find out who’s been setting fire to houses in this area.”

  “Just let me pick up my hose and my helmet and I’ll be right over,” said Tommy and the relief that flooded through me gave me quite a shock.

  CHAPTER 12

  OF COURSE TOMMY BEING TOMMY, HE DIDN’T GET IT together to come over right away. Even though he had spent the last four years begging to be allowed to move in with me, now he came up with every kind of excuse to procrastinate. He needed to arrange for his mail to be forwarded, he’d have to stop the milk being delivered, and it would take him a day or two to sort out what to bring with him. He even tried to turn it around and suggest that I move back in wit
h him but I knew I’d rather face my fear of being alone in my own house than spend another minute trying to exist amongst Tommy’s chaos.

  So I was left to fret. I had to train myself not to go near the back of the house because then I would look out the window and see the devastation left by the fire. I called my mother in France but there was never any reply and that was weird. I left a message and in return I had an e-mail that indicated she knew all about the fire. I realized Max Austin must have filled her in when he contacted her to establish my alibi and I found it strange that she hadn’t called me in hysterics. But instead her instructions were brisk and straightforward. Here was the number of the insurance people and would I also get Felicity Wood around to see about repairing the damage to the garden.

  There was nothing about Fred so maybe she didn’t know there’d been anybody in the summerhouse and I was surprised by how much this upset me. I wanted everyone to mourn Fred. I could not get over what had happened to him. I kept seeing him standing there outside the summerhouse ogling Angel with such adoration it seemed all the more appalling that she appeared to have given him the boot before he died. I kept going back to the nightmare I had had while staying at Tommy’s house. I wasn’t in the habit of reliving the dreams I had when asleep let alone something like this where I had been conscious, but it had been particularly vivid. I felt absolutely certain that Fred had gone to see Angel to try and persuade her to take him back and it had turned out to be a fatal mission.

  The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that this was what had happened and that I should tell someone about it. One of the reasons I was allowing my imagination to run riot like this was because no one was giving me any concrete facts. I needed to share my dream with Inspector Austin and the sooner the better.

  Mary Mehta was having none of it.

  “Let me get this straight. You want to tell Inspector Austin what you’ve been dreaming about.” She laughed to show she didn’t mean to put me down but she wasn’t about to let me talk to him.

  “I’ll tell him you called,” was as far as she would go. “Everything else all right? Settling back into the house, are you? We didn’t leave too much of a mess, did we?”

  Well, that’s that, I thought after we’d hung up. I’ve blown my chances of them keeping me in the loop. Might as well get on with my life and try to put it all behind me.

  But Mary Mehta called back within the hour.

  “Inspector Austin would like to see you.”

  “You told him about my dream?”

  “I didn’t, actually. I thought I’d leave that to you. It must be telepathy. Right after you called he came and said he needed to see you. Will half an hour be okay?”

  I was still wearing the T-shirt I’d slept in and my sweatpants were old and faded. What do you wear for a meeting with a detective? I wondered as I showered. The Ladbroke Grove police station was just down the road. The sun was shining. It’d be a nice ten-minute walk. I put on a pair of jeans, a gray polo neck sweater that came down below my hips and a cashmere pea jacket I had splurged on in the January sales the year before. By the time I reached the police station my cheeks were glowing from the cold air and I felt invigorated, ready for anything, even running into Cath again—and this time I wouldn’t let her go.

  “What are you doing here?” Mary Mehta squeaked when I asked for her. “They’ve just left to go to your house. Oh, never mind. I’ll call Richie on his mobile and get them back here. Take a seat over there for a few minutes, will you?”

  I don’t know why I’d automatically assumed I had to go to them rather than the other way around. She hadn’t asked me to but then she hadn’t said they’d be coming to me either.

  I was all revved up by my walk and I couldn’t sit still. I got up and wandered over to look at some photographs displayed in cheap frames on someone’s desk. I can never resist being nosy like this. I have a bizarre passion for looking at total strangers and trying to figure out who they might be and what they might be like. Except one of the people in the photo was not a stranger to me. I picked up the frame and stared at Cath’s face smiling back at me, freckles all over her nose and cheeks, and her long red hair swung over one shoulder.

  Whoever sat at this desk knew Cathleen Clark and rather well by the looks of things. This was clearly the person she had come to see that day I had seen her. I tried to remember if Cath had a brother or a sister who was in the police force and all I could come up with was her younger brother Billy who had gone to live in New York. I looked around. There was a young WPC across the room looking at me suspiciously so I put down the frame and returned to my seat.

  Max Austin came in looking like thunder. He nodded at me and jerked his hand in a follow me motion and I almost had to run after him as he disappeared into his office. Glancing over my shoulder I saw Sergeant Cross pause at the desk where I’d found the photo of Cath.

  “Have a seat,” said Max Austin. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. “Very good of you to come and see us here.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic. He had lowered his lanky frame into the swivel chair, reclined a little and stretched his long legs out under the desk. You could have said he looked relaxed if he hadn’t rested his elbows on the armrests and begun tapping his fingertips together so hard they made a noise. The sound made me nervous in the way that I always winced when peopled cracked their knuckles. I thought about asking him to stop, even wondered if he was doing it on purpose. My eyes kept straying to a large pile of dirty laundry spilling out of a plastic bag behind his chair. I noticed the shirt he had on was clean but decidedly crumpled. A page torn from a notebook was pinned to the corkboard behind his head. I screwed up my eyes to read the list scrawled in pencil. Brillo pads. Milk. Parsley. Stamps. Kitchen roll. Marmalade. The parsley intrigued me. It was like those lists we were given at school. Which is the odd one out? Parsley implied that he might actually be cooking something.

  “Very nice office,” I said, parroting the small-talk tone of Very good of you to come and see us here.

  “It’s not my office. Mary’s here and Richie has a desk here but my office is over at Paddington Green.” He sat up sharply and leaned forward over the desk. “You’re a ghostwriter, Mary Mehta tells me.”

  The switch was so abrupt, I was thrown. I nodded.

  “And you’re about to start work on Selma Walker’s autobiography?”

  I nodded again. “I hope so. I haven’t actually begun the book yet.”

  “But you’ve met her, yes? And so you know her manager, a Mr. Robert Kempinski?”

  “Robert Kempinski?”

  “Maybe you call him Buzz?”

  “That’s how I was introduced to him.” I knew I sounded defensive.

  “And you met him at her house?”

  “Yes.”

  “He never came to your house?”

  Oh Christ!

  “Well, I think he walked back with me one day. She lives just around the corner, you know?”

  “Would that be . . .” He consulted a sheet of paper on his desk and came up with the date of my first interview with Buzz. I nodded.

  “But he didn’t go into your house?”

  I shook my head. Well, he hadn’t. Not that day.

  “That’s what your neighbor Mrs. O’Malley said. That he just left you on your doorstep.”

  I was going to kill that nosy cow. She must have been peeping through her curtains again. How much had she seen? How had she known who it was?

  “So he’s never been in your house?” Max Austin continued.

  I thought quickly. “Well, he might have come in at some point. I am working with him—”

  “Which rooms in the house might he have come into?” Max Austin’s tone was sneering.

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “You don’t know? Maybe I can help you out here. We found his prints in the hall, in your kitchen, on the banister going up the stairs, and in yo
ur bedroom. Mr. Kempinski was in your bedroom.”

  I knew the color rising up my face must give me away. “If I tell you about it, does it have to go any further?” I said, not looking at him.

  “Does it have to go any further?” Why did he have to keep repeating everything I said? “Miss Bartholomew, this is a murder investigation. That young lad was burned to death and it’s almost certainly related to the death of Astrid McKenzie. If what you tell me has a bearing on the case and I take it home and put it under my pillow and sleep on it, that’s not going to be of much use to anyone. Is it?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “IS IT?” he roared at me.

  “It was a one-night stand,” I said. “Everybody has them.”

  “WELL, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME WHEN I ASKED YOU WHO HAD BEEN IN THE HOUSE?”

  I glanced through the glass partition to see if the rest of the station were listening in.

  “It’s called,” he said, speaking very slowly now, as if to an idiot, “obstruction. Do you have any idea what I could charge you with? Did you think we weren’t going to find out that you had been entertaining Buzz Kempinski?”

  I stayed silent. It seemed the best thing to do under the circumstances.

  “We know Mr. Kempinski of old,” Max continued. “We’ve got his prints. Had him in years ago when he beat up Astrid McKenzie. She was his girlfriend a while back. She called us in once but in the end she said she didn’t want to press charges—they rarely do—and we had to let him go. So when he popped up in connection with your fire, being the manager of the person you’re working with, we ran a check, just to be sure and bingo! They’re his prints in your bedroom and on the can of kerosene. We got him in and of course he’s saying he’s never been to your house but now you’re saying he has.”

  “What can of kerosene?” Half a second ago I’d been worrying whether he was about to throw me in jail for obstruction but that was before he’d mentioned Buzz and kerosene in the same breath.

  “The can you keep in the potting shed by the summerhouse. The one that was used to start the fire. We sent the spaniels in and they sniffed it out immediately. I got a whiff of it when I arrived at the crime scene even after the fire brigade had drenched the place. Why do you keep kerosene, Miss Bartholomew?”