Page 2 of Dead Serious Case 4 Professor Prometheus Plume
“Who did you get?”
“My boss, Mr Baxter, a sixty-seven-year-old confirmed bachelor. All he does is nap and readAngling Times. It’s not like I could buy him a box of chocolate penises.”
Dusty cackles in delight.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” two voices sing out. I don’t need to look to recognise the two accents, one American and one Scottish, but I glance at them anyway, still holding the heart carefully.
Ian and Dave, two spirits who seem quite content haunting the mortuary, stand at the end of the table, grinning at me. Both wear Christmas party hats, but Dave now has a small party horn between his lips. He puckers his mouth and blows, letting the paper tube unfurl with a pathetic toot.
“Merry Christmas.” I place the heart onto a set of scales and make note of the weight and dimensions.
My attention is drawn back to them and I find myself puzzling over the pair of them, which I seem to find myself doing a lot lately. It’s not that I mind them haunting my place of work. I really like them actually, and they tend to be good company.
Dave gives a twitch and blurts something random as he usually does. While alive, he had Tourette’s and coprolalia, which meant he not only had a noticeable tic but also uncontrollable bursts of inappropriate language. Being a spirit doesn’t seemed to have changed that.
As a couple, they really are an enigma. Dave is a small, pale Scotsman with jet-black hair and blue eyes. He appears as he did when he died, dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and wearing a pair of socks and no shoes. He’s always dripping wet, leaving a trail of muddy water wherever he goes, since he died by taking a nosedive into the Thames while under the influence of more than one too many Jägerbombs.
As for his partner in crime, Ian is the day to Dave’s night. Tall and blonde, tanned like a surfer, and wearing grey sweats, socks, and a t-shirt. He also appears as he did when he died, covered in clumps of blue wax and shards of glass from an exploding lava lamp. A heavy cloud of weed seems to follow him around, and when he speaks it’s with a comfortable laid-back drawl.
The fact that they continue to appear as they died should mean they’re locked in death cycles, unable to change and move on without solving their unfinished business. But, more than six months on from their respective deaths, I’m still no closer to figuring this mystery out.
They seriously don’t seem to have any unfinished business. They’re both ridiculously well-adjusted, considering the circumstances. But now, seeing them both in party hats, I wonder if they can actually change some aspects of how they appear. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect it’s something else entirely that’s keeping them here. But what that is, I have no clue.
I blow out a breath and turn back to the dead guy on the table—who really should be getting my full attention, not the two dead guys at the end of the table who have found a sprig of mistletoe from somewhere and are now kissing.
“Aww, you guys are so cute,” Dusty coos at them. “Who says being dead’s a drag?”
Ian pulls back and grins across at her, lifting a hand to high-five her while his other arm stays wrapped around a blushing Dave.
I shake my head. It’s been well over a year since I started seeing spirits and there are days when I still don’t understand any of it. I turn back to my job at hand while the three ghosts cluttering up my workspace continue to chatter.
“Oh my god!” a new voice exclaims loudly.
“What now?” I look up to find a man standing to the side of Ian and Dave and staring down at the body on the table…hisbody on the table.
“Great.” This is just what I need, another ghost. I’m never going to get out of here tonight. Danny’s going to be spending Christmas Eve on his own at this rate.
The man who has just appeared looks to be in his mid to late thirties. I glance over at my notes to check his name and date of birth. Okay, he’s thirty-nine.
He’s wearing a maroon Adidas tracksuit, the hoodie of which is stretched over his ample paunch, and on his feet are neatly laced white trainers. But his personal style is not what draws my attention. His thick, brown, bushy hair is standing on end, poofed out like a toilet brush and it’s smoking.
Spidery red lines fan out on his neck, and the palms of his hands are marred with electrical burns, the same ones that are evident on his corpse. His cause of death was pretty obvious the moment they wheeled him in, but I still have to perform a post-mortem to determine the exact cause.
“Er… Terrance Connell?” I say, recalling his name from the notes.
“Terry,” he corrects absently, his eyes still firmly rooted on his body.
“Terry.” I nod. “Well, this is Ian, Dave, and Dusty.” I point to each of them in turn.
His eyes widen as he stares at the two ghosts, one dripping wet and the other covered in flecks of glass, but when his gaze tracks over to Dusty, he does a double take. Then again, it’s not every day you see a six-foot-tall drag queen dressed like a Christmas tree in the middle of a mortuary.
“Oh my god,” he says again. His gaze dips to the burns on his hands before returning to his corpse. “Am I dead?”
“I’m afraid so,” I say as gently as I can given that I currently have just put my hands back in the guy’s chest cavity.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Removing my hands from his body, I grip the edge of the table.
“I was doing some re-wiring in the kitchen,” he mutters.