How to Seduce a Ghost

by Hope McIntyre

  “I won’t sleep,” she sniffed. Had she been crying? Were her eyes a bit puffy? “It’s all getting a bit nerve-wracking. Someone was killed out there, Lee.” She nodded in the direction of the garden. “I think about it just as I’m about to fall asleep and then I lie awake for hours. Your father called by the way.”

  So that was it. That was why she was upset.

  “Was he calling you or me?”

  “Who knows?” She shrugged. “But I behaved badly. I was shrewish with him. I snapped at him. I was sarcastic. All the things I swore I’d never be—”

  “Mum,” I said gently, “you’re entitled to feel bitter. It’s allowed. Dad’s left you for another woman. Just admit to yourself how angry you are with him and you’ll feel a whole lot better.”

  It made a change, me being the one doling out advice rather than the other way around. I felt quite superior.

  She looked at me dubiously.

  “I didn’t realize quite how angry I was. I’ve been pretending to myself that our marriage just sort of came to a natural break, that I didn’t care about Josiane, but”—she paused and there was a catch in her voice—“I think I do. It’s odd. I don’t want him back—at least not right now. I’m too angry with him for that. But I feel a bit dog-in-the-mangerish. I don’t want him to have Josiane either. She’s too young and—I don’t know—she’s too French!”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Would it be any better if she were Greek or Norwegian?” But I knew what she meant. A French mistress was somehow a bit of a cliché.

  “It’s odd how your father is still so interested in sex,” she continued. I wasn’t entirely sure I was comfortable with the direction she was going but I had to let her get it all off her chest. “I have zero interest in that department these days, I have to tell you. I suppose that’s why Ed drifted towards Josiane in the first place. I thought he was just like me, happy with just a cuddle every now and then. I thought we’d put all that stuff behind us and were ready to settle down to a nice calm old age.”

  “Well, you did say you were bored with Dad’s conversation,” I pointed out. “Maybe you were just bored with him full stop. You need someone new to get you going again.”

  She looked quite horrified at the thought. “I just don’t have the energy. I’m too bored with myself to think anyone else might have any interest in me and as for sex, quite frankly, the thought of baring my arthritic old body to anyone fills me with disgust. You know something, Lee? I’m ashamed of myself. I’ve grown old while I wasn’t looking and now there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m sure if I’d been paying attention, I could have done something about it.”

  “Like what?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Well, instead of bossing your father around all the time, instead of rushing round trying to run everyone else’s lives, I could have sensed that maybe he needed me—you know, like he used to.”

  “Mum,” I said softly, “you’re beautiful and you’ll find someone just like he has. If you want to, that is.”

  “Well, that’s just it. I don’t. I can’t conceive of it. That’s what’s making me feel so weird. It’s all over for me now and the strangest thing of all is that I’m accepting it so readily.”

  “I think you’re just very, very tired. What you need is a good long sleep and you’ll see things differently.” I was aware that I was talking to her in exactly the same jolly, no-nonsense tone she used to adopt with me when I was a truculent teenager, convinced the world had nothing to offer me. “You go up and get into bed and I’ll bring you up a hot drink to help you sleep.”

  To my surprise she obeyed me, quite meekly. “I can’t tell you what it means to me being here with you,” she said as I helped her to her feet and she held on to my arm for support as we went up the stairs. “I have to confess I find I’m rather relieved that Angel child has gone. Now I can have you all to myself.”

  I wished I’d had Tommy’s Aiwa stashed in my pocket to record those words. I hugged them to myself as I went downstairs to boil some hot milk but when I returned with the drink, she was already fast asleep. I bent over and kissed her on the forehead and remembered when she used to do the same thing to me when I was a little girl feigning sleep.

  She had loved me then. But I loved her now.

  Cath didn’t call but at two A.M. I was awakened by the sound of the doorbell ringing and there she was with Max Austin right behind her.

  This was a Cath I had never seen, out of control, flailing her arms in front of her as if lost in a fog. In fact she was resisting the attempts of Max Austin to guide her into the kitchen. She was trying to tell me something but she couldn’t seem to get the words out in any kind of intelligible fashion. Her mouth worked silently, like a baby’s searching for its mother’s nipple, and her eyes pleaded with me to understand. I wrapped my arms around her and held her, letting her sob and heave against me. And then she was pried away from me, gently but firmly. I assumed Max Austin had taken over but it was my mother, woken by the doorbell and the commotion downstairs.

  “Cath,” she said in a voice that brooked no argument and that was all it took. Cath allowed herself to be led upstairs to be soothed by my mother. When they reached the landing on the first floor I distinctly heard my mother say, “And I hear you’re going to have a baby. What a wonderful piece of news that is.”

  I moved to join them but Max Austin restrained me.

  “Leave them to it,” he said. “She needs mothering right now. She should have gone to her own wherever she is but she said she wanted to come to you. You were the first name out of her mouth. You may—I mean, if it’s okay, she might need to stay with you for a few days. She shouldn’t be on her own.”

  I nodded again. She could have Angel’s room.

  “Richie’s dead?” I said it bluntly, wanting to know the worst.

  Max looked quite taken aback. “No, no, no. Absolutely not.” He paused. “Well, not quite.”

  “What happened?”

  “You got any whiskey?” He nodded in the direction of the kitchen.

  I poured him a glass, pulled out a chair for him.

  “He’s not dead but he’s in a pretty bad way. Actually, he’s in a coma.”

  I didn’t say anything, just waited for him to go on.

  “The irony is he got beat up right outside my house.”

  “Beat up?”

  “He took a blow to the head. He was in pursuit of this bloke who turned round and belted him with a bit of lead piping, whacked poor Richie on the temple. I thought he was fine at first. He got up good as new and walked back to my place and then half an hour later he keels over and blacks out. I called an ambulance and they took him to the hospital and he hasn’t come round since. Blood clot to the brain, so they say.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’ll either disperse and he’ll be fine or he’ll—” He put his glass down slowly on the table. “It’s a bloody stupid thing to happen to someone like Richie.”

  “Or he’ll die?” I asked.

  “Well either that or—you know—brain damage. Vegetable.”

  I wondered if he knew about the baby.

  “Why would someone go after him with a bit of lead piping right outside your house?”

  “It was in the mews round the back, underneath the railway line. There’s this row of lockups in the arches. Most of them have been turned into garages, remodeling of old cars, that sort of thing. But there’s one lockup, number nine, that I suspect is being used for something pretty nasty. I sometimes wonder if the whole area will have the curse of Christie hanging over it forever.”

  “What is the curse of Christie?”

  “Don’t you know the story behind Wesley Square?” he asked. He seemed to have gone off on a tangent.

  I shook my head. It was just up the road but I’d only walked through it once or twice. To me it was just another modern housing estate, rather better designed than most. This was the sort of thing that exasperated Cath about me.
I lived in a neighborhood rich in history but I hid myself away and didn’t bother to learn any of it.

  “You’ve heard of the serial killer John Christie? Ten Rillington Place?”

  “Of course.” Everyone had heard of 10 Rillington Place. “He murdered loads of women in Notting Hill Gate back in the forties, right? Cut them up and buried them in the garden. Strangled his wife too, didn’t he? Then he gave evidence against someone else who was hanged for the crime. But they got Christie in the end, didn’t they?”

  “Yes they did. But do you know where his house is—or rather was? Ten Rillington Place? It’s where I live. After the murders all the people living there in those Victorian terraces found they couldn’t sell their houses. No one wanted to be anywhere near there. So the council tore it all down and rebuilt the whole area.”

  “Wesley Square?”

  “I thought it was a rather appropriate place for me to live given my line of work. After Sadie was mur— After Sadie died I wanted to move somewhere else. I couldn’t bear to stay in our old flat. I was looking to buy to be honest but I couldn’t afford Wesley Square prices even back then. You can’t own a house there on what a copper makes. The place is stiff with lawyers and TV producers, designers, architects, and the like. But then the real estate woman asked me if I’d considered renting and that’s what I did. I’ve got a little studio at the top of one of the houses, belongs to some journalist who’s living in New York. It’s not a fancy place like this.” He waved his arm round the room, shaking his head. I bristled a little. Was he taking a leaf out of Cath’s book, having a go at me for being a snotty middle-class woman?

  To my relief, he smiled. “It’s just the one room and a kitchen and bathroom but I love it. The Metropolitan Line runs along the back of the houses and I lie in bed and listen to the trains rumbling by. I find it comforting, I don’t know why. Everyone thinks I’m mad to live somewhere so small. They left me alone to begin with. I can imagine the sort of things they said about me. He needs his space after the tragedy of what he’s been through.”

  He smiled again, or at least his mouth did. His eyes seemed to have an expression of permanent sadness. He’d changed out of his smart clothes from what I could see beneath his scruffy raincoat. Maybe his date had canceled. Did that happen a lot? Poor lonely Max.

  “But then they got it into their heads that I wasn’t taking care of myself. Richie’s taken to coming round to check up on me. He thinks I don’t notice him taking a quick peek into my fridge every now and then. It’s getting worse as a matter of fact. I think Cath puts him up to it. That’s why he was there this evening. He came round with a takeaway about twenty minutes after I brought my washing home, wanted me to go for a pint afterwards but I’m afraid I sent him away with a flea in his ear. My bloody pride getting the better of me. Told him if he wanted to do something useful, he should take a look at what was going on in the arches. Next thing I knew he was back with a bloody great gash in his temple.”

  “What is going on in the arches?” Had he eaten Richie’s takeaway? Should I offer to cook him scrambled eggs? I could understand Cath and Richie’s concern. I was beginning to worry if he ate properly.

  “I can’t say for certain but I reckon there’s a bit of child prostitution going on.”

  He said it in such a matter-of-fact tone—This is what I have to deal with on a day-to-day basis—that I felt sick. Surely I hadn’t heard right.

  “I’m not saying there’s another Christie at large, no bodies buried under the park in Wesley Square or anything like that. But a few days back I noticed one of the locks had been broken and there were some strange comings and goings. The lady next door said she’d seen these young girls hanging around there during the day. She said they couldn’t have been more than about twelve but when she asked them what they were doing, they told her to fuck off. Poor old dear, she was really shocked at their language. But she’s got guts. When they’d gone, she sneaked up and took a look in the lockup through the window and saw a couple of mattresses on the floor.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “How does something like that happen?”

  “It’s all crack related,” said Max. “They give the girls drugs. I’m pretty sure that lockup was a crack house at one point. There was a shooting down the road last year. You think the Yardies are at a safe distance up in Harlesden in the next borough but they’re all over nowadays. You see them with their bling-bling flashing.”

  “Their what?”

  He looked at me and shook his head. “Where have you been? All that jewelry they wear, rocks and diamond stud earrings. They call it bling-bling. You know, like Puff Daddy.”

  “P. Diddy,” I corrected him. “At least I think that’s what he calls himself now, but he’ll probably change that tomorrow.” I might be up to speed on P. Diddy but I still felt like a total ignoramus. All this action going on so close to me and I was barely aware of it. I had no idea that such a thing as child prostitution existed in London. The only crime I knew about involving kids was the constant muggings and stealing of mobile phones.

  “Who was it who hit Richie?”

  “He gave me a description. He was walking towards the lockup as a bloke was coming out of it. He took off when he saw Richie. Richie gave chase, cornered him under the railway bridge, and that’s when the man suddenly came at him with the lead. Richie hadn’t even seen it in his hand. I’ve got a load of men going through the whole area right now. We’ll get the bastard soon enough.”

  “What about—?” I stopped. It seemed a little self-centered to ask about my fire when Richie was fighting for his life, but poor Fred’s demise was always lurking at the back of my mind.

  “What about your case?” Max gave me another faint smile. “Don’t worry. I hadn’t forgotten about you although it’s going to set it back a bit with Richie being in this state. I mean I can bring in someone else in his place but he was in the middle of a line of questioning I have a feeling might turn out to be quite productive and he hasn’t brought me up to date on it.”

  I waited for him to tell me what it was but instead he said:

  “So have you had any more bright ideas like the one about Buzz Kempinski?”

  I glared at him.

  “No, I’m serious,” he assured me. “You got it wrong, he had an alibi, but you were thinking along the right lines. I’m curious to know in which direction you’ll go next.”

  I looked at him, not quite sure if he was taking a piss. Then I decided to take the risk.

  “Selma Walker said she went to visit her family in New York over Christmas but in the tapes I’ve been transcribing for her book she states that she has no family left in the world.”

  “Have you asked her about it?”

  “Not yet. But if you think about it, she has—you know—she has a motive.”

  I waited for him to make some snide remark about my amateur detection, to produce some cast-iron reason why Selma couldn’t be the murderer but to my surprise he said, “Tell me about it,” and poured himself a bit more Scotch. “By the way if you want to get back to bed, just give me a shout. I only intended to stay a second, make sure Cath was okay with you.”

  I shook my head. I was tired, no question, but I was too wound up about Cath and Richie to contemplate going straight back to sleep.

  “Two fires,” I noted, counting them off on my fingers. “Astrid McKenzie and Angel—at least we assume Angel was the intended victim. Both women were—are—sleeping with Buzz. Selma’s his wife.”

  “It’s a good point,” he conceded. “I’ll check the airlines for the day she left and returned—or said she did. See if she was listed going to New York. That’s where she said she went, right? Does she strike you as a killer?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not even as a woman scorned? Maybe you’re next on her list.”

  “She doesn’t know about me and Buzz,” I said.

  “How do you know?” said Max and he was right. “Do you like her?” he asked,
catching me off guard.

  “I’m not sure,” I said and it was the truth. “I have no reason to dislike her but I just don’t feel entirely relaxed with her. It always happens when I meet someone whose book I’m going to ghost for the first time, I can feel them sizing me up, asking themselves if they can trust me. It’s natural. But she seemed more suspicious than most. Of course, given what she had in store to reveal to me, I can understand why. She had to know I wasn’t going to go running to Buzz.” I felt a little guilty not being entirely pro-Selma. I’d actually begun to feel a distinct loyalty toward her and in fact she was the last person I wanted to see as a suspect—apart from the fact that if she was, I’d be out of a job.

  “Ironic under the circumstances,” said Max. “I hope for your sake she never finds out about you and Buzz, that he doesn’t go and do a shitty thing like tell her.”

  I shuddered and he reached across the table and patted me on the shoulder.

  “Don’t worry. She decided to trust you and she was right. You’re not going to talk to Buzz and even if she did find out what happened between you, my guess is she’d know you weren’t entirely to blame, that it happened before you found out what a monster he was. But tell me, do you trust her?”

  “I think she’s fucked up. I think she’s doing a very brave thing with this book, using her fame to reach out to other women in her situation but I’m not sure her story will come across as entirely rational. She still loves him, you know. She’s still pretty much under his spell.”

  “But isn’t that where you come in?” he said. “You’ll make sure she gets her message across, you’ll make her sound sane and wise and all the rest of it.”

  Listening to him, I had a sudden flash of ghastly inspiration. What if I were to ghost his story? The detective whose wife was murdered, how he coped.

  “I’m going to make a cup of tea. Want one?” I stood up and reached for the kettle, as much to stifle my train of thought as anything, but I didn’t hear his answer because my mother came crashing down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  “She’s asleep,” she said. “Poor, poor Cath. Will he live, do you imagine?”