Page 6 of Crazy Spooky Love

“I can’t believe you bought this thing.”

Marina makes her point by silently running her painted fingernail along the length of a fraying split in the tan plastic bench seat. I push the foam that pokes out of the rip back in place and grin. “It’ll look a million times better once we get our sign painted on the side.”

“We have a sign?”

“Not yet,” I say, still cheerful about potentially bagging Scarborough House as our first job. “Arthur looks artistic, I’m going to make it his first job in the morning.”

“The only way you can make this van look any worse than it already does is by letting Arthur loose on it with poster paint.” Marina flicks the sun visor down to check her already perfect red lipstick, then sighs heavily at the dusty, empty hole where the mirror presumably used to sit. “I’ll paint it.”

“You will?” I wiggle the key into the ignition and pull the choke out to the max as I coax the engine into life. I’d been banking on Marina offering to paint the van because she’s a wiz at arty stuff, but it’s far better that she thinks it was her idea rather than mine.

She narrows her eyes at me. “Don’t think you can fool me, Bittersweet. You knew I’d say that.”

I laugh, rumbled, and then we both yelp in surprise as the van goes from zero to hero in two seconds flat and fires itself down Chapelwick High Street like a rocket.

“Jesus, Melody!” Marina peels strands of her hair from where it flicked violently forward and stuck to her lipstick. “Do you even know how to drive this thing?”

“Babs is cool. You just need to get used to her.” I ease the choke in slowly and the engine quiets and settles to a more appropriate speed. “See? Perfect.”

Marina pauses, and out of the corner of my eye I can see her staring at me. “Tell me you didn’t name the van Babs?”

“It came to me just now.”

“Should I even ask why?”

“Because she reminds me of one of Nonna’s limoncello babas. She’s pretty, she’s lemon, and she’s lethal for our health.”

“She doesn’t smell like Nonna’s buns.” Marina wrinkles her nose. “In fact, she smells more like a big hairy mechanic.”

“That would be because she’s spent the last ten years languishing in a dirty yard owned by a big hairy mechanic. Beneath this faded yellow paint lies the beating heart of Babs, the newest member of The Girls’ Ghost-Busting Agency.”

Marina shakes her head, resigned as we lurch to a halt at the traffic light. “Babs it is.” She reaches out and twiddles hopefully with the heater knob.

I laugh at her optimism as I grapple with the huge, loose gear-stick and then wave vaguely toward the radio that clearly hasn’t worked in decades. “Stick the postcode for Brimsdale Road into the GPS, would you?”

She laughs under her breath and pulls her phone out from inside her blouse.

She’s stored it in her bra since she was about fifteen, maintaining that it’s the only reliably safe place in her always overcrowded house.

Between you and me, Marina’s no slouch in the chest department.

I’ve had more than one call from her bra when she’s been overexcited watching snooker.

Don’t judge her; it’s one of her foibles, a hangover from a childhood spent hanging out with her beloved grandpa, or Nonno, as she calls him.

Fifteen minutes later, we sidle stealthily along Brimsdale Road.

At least, that’s what we do in my head. Given that Babs wheezes and grunts like a strangled cow, what we actually do is bone-shake, rattle, and roll our way along, crossing our fingers each time we go over a speed hump that we haven’t left our rusty chrome bumper behind us on the tarmac.

“It’s that one there,” Marina hisses, pointing at a grand-looking house and sliding down on the bench until only her eyes are above dashboard level.

I glance at her. “Get up! You’ll draw attention to us.”

Marina laughs. “Yeah. That’s right. I’ll draw attention to us. Because no one would notice Babs otherwise, would they?”

I pull the van over to the pavement a little way down from the house in question. In actual fact, Marina’s slouching doesn’t really matter all that much, because between the still-present TV crew’s huge black van and Leo’s entourage, there isn’t much chance of us drawing people’s attention.

“I think they’re getting ready to leave,” I murmur, watching the camera guy packing his equipment away on the pavement.

I avert my gaze in order to keep Nonna’s limoncello babas safely in my gut; for a man whose job involves a lot of bending over, he has yet to master the art of choosing clothes that don’t flash his hairy butt crack.

Marina pulls herself back up again and peers over the dash at the house.

“What do we do, wait it out?”

I drum my short, navy-blue-lacquered nails on the edge of the huge steering wheel as I try to think like a sassy businesswoman, rather than take my usual haphazard approach.

“Reach into the glove box, will you?” I nod across the dash towardit.

Marina presses the button on the hatch and nothing happens. “It’s stuck.” She presses it repeatedly like an impatient child then huffs when it gets jammed in. “Babs says no.”

I stretch across and bat her fingers away. “I think you’ll find Babs just needs a firm hand.” I give the glove box the one-inch punch and the door pops open. “See?” Reaching inside, I pull out my Magic 8 Ball.

“Seriously? This is how we’re going to make our decisions?” Marina is more than well acquainted with my reliance on my Magic 8; I’m surprised she’s surprised. “You know that most of my big life decisions have been made with this ball. Why change now?”

“Umm, because it makes you look like a thirteen-year-old girl rather than a tax-paying adult?”

I think back to the purple hair and dodgy goth makeup that featured heavily in my early teens. “I was fabulous back then and you damn well know it, Malone.” Shaking the ball, I glance up sharply. “I have to pay tax?”

“I don’t actually have a clue.” Marina shrugs. “Write it on the ‘jobs for Glenda Jackson’ Post-it.”

“The list got too big for a Post-it. It’s now six sheets of A4.”

We both peer at the little window on the Magic 8 as the froth of bubbles slowly clears.

“How many times do I have to tell you not to shake it?”

“Habit.” I say, sighing. I know the martini rule applies to the Magic 8 Ball; it’s supposed to be stirred rather than shaken because it foams up like a washing machine otherwise, but I like the heightened anticipation of waiting for the bubbles to burst before it reveals the answer.

I genuinely love this thing. The only way they could improve on it is if it boomed out the answer in a deep, mysterious voice like my own personal genie.

Or maybe not. If I’m going to use it to make actual grown-up business decisions, which it seems scarily like I am, then better that it does it in silence so I can at least pretend the ideas are mine.

“Outlook good.” I pass Marina the Magic 8 Ball. “The ball says yes. Shove it back in the glove box.”

She glances at the dashboard and then delivers a swift kick with her high heel, laughing when the hatch pops open immediately and heat starts belting out of the side vents. “You’re right. Our Babs likes it rough.”

I shake my head at her. “You should have more respect for your elders. You pretty much just karate-kicked a pensioner.”

Marina slams the glove box shut. “Only after you gave her the death punch.”

“Come on. We’ve assaulted an old woman and consulted the Magic 8 gods. It’s time we got to work.”

I jump out of Babs and slide the door closed with an ill-advised flourish, given that she’s held together by rust, hand-applied layers of paint, and sheer luck.

“Let’s take a casual walk past first, get the lie of the land,” I say, as Marina joins me on the leafy pavement and links her arm through mine.

“You should have a coat on.” She rubs my forearm briskly.

“It’s almost May, I’m making a point,” I say, huddling closer to her and her fake fur as we attempt a nonchalant stroll.

Camera guy has thankfully hauled his equipment and his backside into his truck, so we amble as if we’re just two friends out for a walk in the admittedly chilly late-spring sunshine.

“Right, so we know this one’s Leo’s.” I incline my head toward the flashy sedan with blacked-out windows and a vanity license plate, darking1, that marks him out as egotistical.

“I’d never have guessed if you hadn’t said.” Marina rolls her eyes at his personal number plate. “Am I allowed to drag my nails down his paintwork?”

“Does that say undercover to you?”

She sighs and pats my hand. “He’s on my kill list.”

“I know,” I soothe. “I’m working on forgiving him though, so you should try to too.”

She snarls. “I hold a grudge.”

“Of course you do.”

I shuffle us sideways on the pavement to remove her from temptation.

“This probably belongs to that Scarborough guy, the owner of the house?” We sidle past an expensive-looking white Mercedes with an equally knob-worthy license plate parked halfway across the pavement at a jaunty angle.

“He parks in a way that says he has an overblown sense of entitlement.”

Marina peers in his window and wrinkles her nose in disgust. “And he smokes like a chimney then chews gum to mask the smell.”

She’s really getting into this Cluedo-style sleuthing; I make a mental note to ensure she doesn’t buy a beige mac or a newspaper to cut eyeholes out of.

“If we’re as good at analyzing the dead as we are the living, we’re going to be millionaires.

” We drag our feet as we reach the boundaries of Scarborough House, masked by old rosebushes and a heavily laden blossom tree.

“Ssh.” Marina flattens herself violently against the fence. “I can hear voices.”

“We really don’t need to be so furtive. We’re not doing anything wrong,” I say, picking velvety pink cherry blossoms out of my hair. I look sideways at her, and she has the same floral crown going on. We look like a pair of casual bridesmaids. It’s not eye-catching at all.