Page 96 of Dead Serious Case 4 Professor Prometheus Plume

As for Mr Pennington, I think it’s safe to say his writer’s block is well and truly over. After his interviews were done, he holed himself up in the study—the scene of the initial crime—and has not stopped writing. Whether it turns out to be any good is anyone’s guess.

The Nakatomis were very disappointed when they tried to show their photographs to the police to find none of them showed anything more than strange light flares despite Roger the ghost channelling his internal Twiggy and endlessly posing for them. He knows damn well ghosts won’t appear in photographic evidence; I think he just enjoyed the attention.

Essie and Martha are very enamoured of the hotel and the ghosts and couldn’t stop singing their praises during their police interviews. They’ve actually been making plans to give up their home in Tyneside and move into the hotel as permanent residents, a prospect that seems to thrill Ellis. The sisters appear to have adopted him and Rosie as de facto grandchildren, having never had children themselves.

The rest of the players from the murder mystery cast—Mr Meadow, Major Dick, and Mrs Snow— had no choice but to revert to their real names of Eddie Harris, Dennis Lang, and Portia Wimpole during the police interviews. The three of them bickered like siblings the whole way through the process, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find them seriously reconsidering their career paths after this weekend.

“Come on.” Danny finally rolls off the bed and stands. “I’ll wash your back if you wash mine.” He winks.

I chuckle and reach for his hand as he practically drags my boneless body off the bed. “I am going to miss that shower when we go home.”

* * *

I awaken groggily,not sure what disturbed my sleep. The room is dark so it’s clearly still the middle of the night. And although the few hours’ sleep I’ve had so far has burned off some of the alcohol, I still feel a little drunk.

“Tristan,” a familiar voice says. A ghostly hand shakes me.

Oh, I realise,she shook me.

“Dusty?” I push myself up onto my elbow, instantly worried at the tone of her voice, and fumble for my glasses on the bedside table.

I shove them on and reach for the lamp, blinking blearily at the sudden light. Danny continues to snore beside me, out for the count. As my eyes begin to focus on Dusty’s face, though, I can see it isn’t Dusty at all.

It’s Dustin.

My anxiety ratchets up a hundredfold, and my stomach churns with panic. Dusty almost never appears out of drag. But as Dustin crouches by the side of the bed, his natural short brown hair exposed, his body clad in jeans and an old David Bowie T-shirt, his nails unpainted, and his face free of makeup, I push myself up into a sitting position, now fully awake.

“What is it?” I ask, taking in his red-rimmed eyes and his mouth etched into a thin line of worry. “Is it my dad?” I manage to choke out.

“No.” He reaches for me and I feel the pressure of his hand gripping mine. “It’s not your dad, he’s fine.”

“What is it, then? What’s happened?” I ask, trying to keep the fear from my voice.

“You need to come with me,” he says urgently.

I climb out of bed and grab the hotel robe from the chair, pull it on over my naked body, and tie the belt securely.

“Wha–” I begin to ask, but my voice dies away when he steps to the side and my gaze locks on a figure in the corner of the room, her back to me.

My heart rate picks up. I don’t need her to turn around to instantly know who it is. The long, wavy hair streaked with grey. The floaty tie-dyed dress and Ugg boots. Although she wears her usual dozens of silver wrist bangles, the usually unblemished skin of her hands and forearms are covered in strange symbols and writing that seems to be in a different language, a language I’ve never seen before.

There’s only one reason she could be standing in my hotel room miles from home and accompanied by Dustin, and as the implications of that seep through my alcohol-laced brain, my stomach churns and my eyes sting with tears.

“Viv?” I say softly, my voice heavy with grief. “Vivienne?”

Seeming to hear me, she turns slowly and when she faces me, I can’t stop the loud gasp that bursts from me. The ornate, curved ivory handle of some sort of ceremonial knife is protruding from her chest, directly over her heart, and if that isn’t horrific enough, the same symbols and words that stain her hands and arms creep across her collarbones and up her throat.

But it’s her mouth that’s the most shocking.

Because it’s no longer there, just smooth skin where her lips should be, as if she were an unfinished drawing and the artist had simply forgotten to add the rest of her features. Over that smooth swath of skin, in lieu of a mouth, is a single symbol that I don’t recognise. It looks like it’s been tattooed into her skin in thin, elegant, black lines.

“What happened?” I step towards her, but I don’t think she understands. Her unfocused eyes stare into nothingness. It’s like she’s been lobotomised. I cover my mouth with my hand to stop a sob from escaping, and all the joy and sunshine I’d felt and basked in only hours before fades and turns to ashes.

“Bruce and I found her body on the floor in the bookshop. I went to Sam and told him. He’s dealing with the police, but then I found Viv wandering aimlessly around Whitechapel,” Dustin says. “Tristan, something bad is happening, I can feel it. This is worse than when Chaos was trying to gain entry through the gateway in the bookshop last summer.”

Worse?What the hell could be worse than a potential apocalypse?

I open my mouth to speak, but his next words have my blood running cold.

“This isn’t a normal death cycle she’s trapped in.” Dustin looks at me, his eyes dark and filled with worry. “This is no ordinary murder. Her soul has been bound. Someone is using dark magic, and whoever it is”—he looks back at the zombie-like form of Madame Vivienne—“they don’t want her talking.”