Page 22 of Crazy Spooky Love

“Let me just get this straight,” Glenda Jackson says, looking at me over the top of her horn-rimmed glasses.

She’s just opened a big navy-blue folder I haven’t seen before, which from here on out will be known as our expenses ledger.

“Artie, this is Glenda Jackson,” I say, ushering him across to meet her.

I think she’ll like him, and I’m damn sure he’ll be terrified of her.

Her copper-gold hair is piled up on top of her head, and her on-point lipstick application would make Marilyn Monroe bow down and kiss Glenda’s sassy, high-heel, T-bar shoes in awe.

Like many men before him, Artie goes a bit stupid, and he seems to want to salute her before I pull his arm back down by the elbow and whisper, “Too much.”

“Nonna made biscotti,” Marina murmurs, sliding the tin on top of the fridge. The second desk is generally hers, but she pulls the client chair to a spare end of my desk and sits there without complaint. She knows you don’t tussle with Glenda.

I clear my throat, suddenly nervous. “Now that we’re all here, I’d like to first of all officially welcome Glenda on her first day at the agency.”

Glenda smiles genially, ripping the cellophane from a new A4 book and writing “meetings book” on the front. Cracking the spine and clicking her pen open, she writes the date at the top of the first page, then notes down item one, “Welcome Glenda,” and looks up expectantly.

“Please, go on.”

I swallow, dry-mouthed. Being the boss last Monday wasn’t as daunting as this week with Glenda in the room.

“Item two,” I say, nodding briefly toward the new meetings book, and Glenda writes it down. “A recap of where we are with the Brimsdale Road case.”

I take a couple of minutes to bring Glenda up to speed on everything that happened last week.

She doesn’t bat an eyelid at any of it, not even the part where Gran practically morphed into one of the Knights of the Round Table.

I relax a little into my seat. Glenda has worked for our family for more than ten years.

There isn’t another secretary in Chapelwick who could write down the salient points of a case like this without balking or at least needing to check she’d heard correctly.

In fact, I’m not sure there’s another secretary in the whole of the UK who’d make notes as efficiently as she does whilst also discreetly handing Artie a wipe for the tea he didn’t even realize he’d spilled on his knee and passing around Nonna’s biscotti.

She’s a quiet one, Glenda Jackson, but once she’s in place you wonder how your world turned without her.

“You went to Scarborough House on your own?” Marina looks startled when I mention my visit on Saturday.

She has to wait for my reply because I’m in biscotti heaven. “The Magic 8 Ball made me do it.”

“Did you shake it more than once?”

I narrow my eyes at her. “You know how shoddy that makes me feel.”

On the very rarest of occasions, once or twice a year at the very most, I’ll re-shake the Magic 8 Ball if I strongly disagree with its answer, but Marina knows full well that, by and large, I tend to abide by its decision; it wouldn’t be worth having, otherwise.

She concedes gracefully. “So how did it go?”

I nod toward the pile of new purchases beside the office door. “The Scarborough brothers made demands.”

“Oh my God! That lot’s for them? You’ve been hustled by a pack of ghosts.”

“Ghosts can watch television?” Artie says, shaking his head in wonder.

I look at him, shocked. “There’s a whole subplot written into EastEnders just for them. Did you not know?”

“Queen Victoria’s ghost runs The Queen Vic,” Marina chipsin.

I nod, snagging another biscotti before they get hidden from me again. “And Elvis manages the launderette.”

Artie looks slowly from Marina to me, and then at Glenda. “You didn’t write that down.”

“That’s because it isn’t true, Artie.” She says it in a kindly, matter-of-fact way.

“I knew that,” Artie says, even though he very clearly didn’t.

“They really can watch TV though,” I say. “Douglas asked for the TV, to watch cricket. And the books are for Isaac.”

“Is that a Polly Pocket diary?” Marina asks doubtfully.

“For Lloyd.”

“Did I miss the part where the grumpy-old-man ghost turned into an eight-year-old girl?”

“Can they do that?” Artie says, unguarded, and then sighs when Glenda gives him her little headshake again.

“I don’t suppose you can install the TV, can you, Artie?”

He looks pained, so I take that as a no. Glenda leans back on her chair to read the TV box.

“It already has Freeview built in. It should be a simple case of plugging the coaxial aerial lead into the back of the TV and leaving it to tune itself.”

See what I mean about Glenda? She knows everything.

“I knew that,” Artie says again.

“Good.” I smile. “You can be in charge of it when we get over there later, then.”

“Is that the plan for today, to go back?” Marina asks, and I nod. Glenda starts a new line and looks up with her pen poised.

“I take it your client has signed a legally binding contract with regards to your payment terms?”

“Well, not exactly legally binding,” I say, scratching the back of my head. “Well, not at all, to be honest. I should have done that, shouldn’t I?”

Her raised eyebrows and faintly disappointed look remind me of my mother.

“I’ll get something over to him this morning.” She slides her glasses down her nose and lets them fall loose on their golden chain around her neck. “Is there any other business or shall I close off this entry?”

I brush my hands together briskly and stand up. “Close it, please, Glenda.” I glance at Marina and Artie. “Come on, troops. We have a murder weapon to hunt for.”

The first thing I notice when we arrive at Scarborough House is that the front door is ajar.

I know that I didn’t leave it that way because I don’t have a key, which must mean that either Leo Dark or Donovan Scarborough is here.

Bugger. I can hardly waltz in there and install a TV with either of them poking around, can I?

Leo would mock, and Scarborough would probably think I was claiming squatter’s rights and take his key back.

“There’s someone in there,” Artie says, leaning forward against Babs’s windshield and ducking to get a better look.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “I noticed.”

At that, an annoyingly familiar Saab pulls up in front of us and Fletcher Gunn unravels himself from the driver’s side. He looks at us all piled inside Babs and shakes his head before strolling away down the front path of Scarborough House.

“You know something?” Marina says. “He definitely wants a piece of your ass. I see it in his eyes. He tries to hide it, but I can see right through that big, tall drink of water, and I’m telling you that he wants you bad ways.”

I try not to observe the broad set of his shoulders as he proceeds down the path. “Marina, if that man had a gun and only a handful of bullets, he’d use one of them on me.”

“Totally. And your mother, and your grandmother too,” she agrees.

“I didn’t say he liked you. I said he has the hots for you.

It’s completely different, isn’t it, Artie?

” She looks at him, and he gawps at me, wide-eyed and aghast at being asked for a male opinion on matters of the heart.

I pat his knee to excuse him from answering, and Marina shakes a tab of gum into her hand as we all watch Fletch tap the door then disappear inside the house.

“He’d probably look away while he shot you though, whereas he’d save his last bullet for Leo Dark and draw perverse pleasure from firing it right between his subtly made-up eyes. ”

I’m caught by indecisiveness. There isn’t much point in us all going into the house while other people are in there, but I want to know who those other people are and why Fletch has turned up.

I reach for the ignition key to drive away and come back later, and then think better of it because I might miss something of vital importance going on in there.

“Hang on here while I just go and have a quick nose,” I say, grabbing the pack of pens and a small notepad. “No point us all going.” I pause long enough to tear open the pen packet with my teeth and pull one free.

Marina smirks. “You just want to get Fletcher Gunn on his own and test my theory, don’t you? Artie, give her your spare condom from your wallet.”

He goes as red as the mailbox over the road. “I don’t have a spare condom. Or an essential one, for that matter.”

I shoot Marina a withering look as I toss the pack of pens at her and slither down onto the pavement. “Just ignore her, Artie. She’s being a smart-arse again.”

She bats her wide, innocent eyes at me. “Just looking out for you.”

I take the high ground and ignore her, and as I lay my hand on the garden gate, she winds the window down and calls out “Remember the rules. No tongues on your first kiss.”

I turn back to give her a filthy look. She responds with a double thumbs-up and blows a huge bubble with her gum whilst Artie sits beside her with his head in his hands.

I make a mental note to ask him if he feeds his python live mice and, if he does, to put one in Marina’s handbag for me as revenge.

I pause by the front door of Scarborough House and press my ear to the gap to listen, hoping to glean something unannounced.

“Didn’t your mother teach you that it’s rude to eavesdrop?” Fletch pulls the door wide and catches me stooping. “Of course she didn’t,” he goes on, deadpan. “She was too busy teaching you sleight of hand and how to con old ladies out of their pension money.”

If I allow his barbs to rile me, he wins. “Whereas your mother clearly taught you to be polite to ladies,” I say, smiling sweetly.

“I am polite to ladies, ” he says inferring that I’m anything but. Marina has definitely read him wrong when it comes to me. He’d place a bullet in my forehead and then a second one through my heart just to make sure I was dead.