My dad, the only immediate family I had left, had been kidnapped by monsters. I desperately wanted to do something, to get out there and do some real damage, but I couldn’t afford to blunder around with only anger and fear on my side. I had to knuckle down and get smart about this, find what we needed in the archives and then we’d have a chance of saving lives.

Time, though, was the enemy. I needed to find him now, not later, not when it was too late. Not Leon, not Dad, not the guy with the waistcoats and the good intentions and sadness. I didn’t want to be without him.

I couldn’t sit still. I tried, but I squirmed and shifted until even Rani cast an irritated look my way. After that I got up and read while I paced up and down, only stopping to bend and make notes on the sheaf of papers I had on the table.

My hand shook when I wrote.

The longer it took, the more I whipped myself, urging myself to read faster, to find that important detail, to discover the mention that could unleash us in time.

Bec shot to her feet. ‘Got it.’

‘You’ve found something?’ Rani leaned over to look at Bec’s laptop.

‘Several somethings have come together because of one super juicy finding.’ Bec fired up the projector. ‘I’ve cross-matched old newspaper reports – thanks, Trove – and accounts buried in the Marin archives. Brace yourself for alarming stuff that puts the Ragged Sisters here in Melbourne at the time of a massive ghost outbreak in nineteen ten.’

Old newspapers came up on the screen and Bec pinpointed grisly details with the laser pointer, proving that old-time gruesome was just as gruesome as today’s gruesome.

‘Nasty,’ Kirsten said, making a face.

‘That’s no coincidence, right?’ I asked.

‘Definitely no coincidence.’ Bec flashed up a copy of the Argus, one of the old Melbourne newspapers. It was hard to read because layouts back then were totally weird. No photos, no pics, not even real headlines, simply a whole lot of articles run together. Bec, though, was in control. She zoomed in. ‘I hunted down reports of a series of horrible murders in September nineteen ten. It was about the time that one of the Marin great-great-uncles or aunts got some correspondence from an Adelaide-based ghost researcher asking about a massive ghost outbreak they’d heard of in Melbourne. Snap.’

‘These murders,’ Rani ventured in a tone of voice that said she knew the answer and wasn’t that keen on it. ‘They didn’t involve chains and something like a ritual, did they?’

‘It’s hard to tell from the newspaper reports, but after some superhuman efforts I uncovered mentions in one of the more sensational journals that hinted at something like that.’

‘Sounds like the Ragged Sisters to me,’ Jamie said. ‘Or close enough, anyway.’

‘Correlation is not causation,’ Rani pointed out.

‘I’m not saying that the Ragged Sisters caused the ghost outbreak,’ Bec said. ‘If my reading of the timing is right, my theory is that they came to take advantage of it.’

I put my hand up. ‘Why, Miss?’

‘That, I can’t tell you.’ Bec rubbed her real eye wearily. ‘Lots of ghosts could be useful to them? They collect ghosts the way some people collect ceramic elephants? I don’t know. I get the feeling that there’s more here than we know about.’ She brightened. ‘In a funny way, all this is background. Most important is what I’ve found, just this minute. When they were here last time, the Ragged Sisters were posing such a threat that the Company of the Righteous sent a troop out all the way from England to deal with them.’

‘But wasn’t this before the Marins split from the Company?’ I asked.

‘Yep, but the archives still cover the period. The Righteous army came out here, located the base the Ragged Sisters were using, and eliminated them.’

‘I don’t suppose the Company of the Righteous toyed with the possibility of letting them off with a stern warning?’ I asked.

Jamie and Kirsten scoffed.

‘Nope,’ Bec went on. ‘Nor did they think about locking them away forever. This was well before the phrase “terminate with extreme prejudice”, but I imagine that’s the type of instruction they got from head office.’

‘Any other details?’ Rani asked.

Bec tilted her head from one side to the other. ‘You mightn’t be totally rapt to hear this, but the Company of the Righteous sent a full troop – probably about fifty experienced veterans. Half of them never made it back to London, and they were only dealing with a dozen Ragged Sisters. Seems as if the Sisters had some assistance from a particularly vicious sort of ghost.’

‘Zombie ghosts,’ Rani guessed.

‘Looks like it.’

‘Good thing Tanja told us how to deal with them,’ I said. ‘Means we have a secret weapon that the Company of the Righteous didn’t have.’

Jamie leaned forward. ‘And you wouldn’t mind sharing that with us, would you, laddie?’

I told them about Tanja’s insight into the nature of zombie ghosts, and how they could only be dispatched if their creator was incapacitated.

‘Incapacitated?’ Kirsten grinned. ‘We can work with that.’

They put their heads together for a moment. ‘Still,’ Jamie said, fingering his beard, ‘fifty of them couldn’t take twelve? Poor effort, that.’

Fifty battle-hardened Company of the Righteous soldiers going up against a small gang of Ragged Sisters and half of them were killed? That’s the kind of result that has a coach shaking her head and saying, ‘I’m not sure if we came out to play today.’

Tanja had better be on the money about the weakness of the zombie ghosts.

‘That’s the bad news, anyway,’ Bec said. ‘The good news is that I know where the Ragged Sisters’ base is.’