The lunch-hour crowd was just finishing up and drifting away by the time Lil, Abe and Margaret arrived at the Nite Jar Cafe. As atmospheres went it was as far from the morgue as you could get; the juke box was belting out ragtime jazz and the air was warm and smelt of ground coffee and sweet pastries.
They took a corner booth at the far end, and peeled off their frosted macs. Abe dumped his on the chair beside him and Lil hung hers over the back of the seat. Velma came over with her notebook to get their order.
Abe squinted at the baked goods in the glass display domes along the counter. ‘Can I get a sausage roll, two apple Danish –’ He gave Lil a querying look and saw her shake her head in reply. ‘One apple Danish,’ he revised the order, ‘and a cup of java, please.’
‘Sure.’ Velma worked her jaws around the gum she was chewing. ‘What will it be for you, Lil?’
‘Just a glass of water, please.’
Velma held her fingers, tipped with frosted pink varnish, softly against Lil’s brow. ‘Are you OK, honey? You’re as white as a sheet.’
Lil nodded and gulped.
‘She’s had a shock,’ Abe explained.
Velma gave him a look. ‘What kind of shock?’
Abe raised his shoulders, preparing to explain but then realising mid-gesture that the truth would sound worse than anything Velma could imagine, then let them drop with a defeated sigh. ‘A pretty bad one, but she’ll be OK.’
Velma returned a moment later with their order.
As soon as they were alone again Lil let her head drop into her hands. ‘I’m so embarrassed.’
Abe crinkled his eyes at her. ‘Don’t be hard on yourself. No kid should see something like that, no matter how tough they are.’ He began dismantling the sausage roll and alternately eating bits and dropping bits onto the floor for Margaret. ‘I’ve known plenty of hard nuts crack up when they see their first dead body.’ He gave Lil a concerned look. ‘You knew her?’
Lil nodded. She couldn’t seem to talk.
Abe continued, ‘I knew her a bit myself, back in the day; she used to be a singer in the Two Deuces. Fell on hard times, harder than most.’ Lil nodded again. ‘There was an article about her in the Klaxon recently.’
‘I know,’ Lil began and then faltered. ‘I – I read it.’
They sat in silence for a few minutes while Abe chewed on the sausage roll and Lil stared out of the window. Then he pushed his empty plate away and knocked back the last of the roll with a glug of coffee. ‘So, Monbatsu’s copycat theory – what did you make of all that?’
Lil chewed her lip thoughtfully. ‘You know that second prisoner he mentioned, the poisoner, Carrick? I’m pretty sure he’s dead too. A couple of days ago. Another victim of the epidemic at the Needle.’
‘Well, he must have been in his nineties so I’m not surprised he got sick.’
‘That’s two dead criminals with very specific M.O.s followed by two crimes with their exact hallmark. I don’t think it is a copycat.’ Lil leant across the table. ‘I think those criminals have been sprung. Sprung into the afterlife, and if I’m right and it’s their ghosts we’re dealing with, then I’ll bet Gallows is behind it.’
Abe looked at Lil and she stared right back. ‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘When Nedly gets back from tailing Starkey we’re going to head over to the library and do some digging. Find out who exactly has died and when.’
‘Are you sure you feel up to it?’
Lil swallowed hard and nodded. ‘What are you going to do?’
Abe found a crumb on the table and stared at it. ‘Well, I’ve got to meet Naomi in an hour, so …’
‘Fine, leave all the investigating to me and Nedly. We’ll let you know.’
From below the table they heard a low growling noise. Then, with a sound that only Lil could hear, like a zip being pulled, a flickering of the overhead lamp and a slight feeling of dread, Nedly materialised beside her. Lil scooted away from him, towards the window, her heartbeat racing a little.
‘Sorry!’ Nedly was taken aback at her unusually wan face. ‘Are you OK? Did I scare you?’
‘Yes. No.’ She paused to take a sip of water and shook her head. ‘It’s not you.’
Abe got the measure of the conversation, glanced around and then with one hand over his mouth he explained, ‘She’s had a shock,’ to the space beside Lil.
‘Can you stop telling everyone that?’ Lil snapped. ‘I’m fine now. Even a tough nut can crack up.’
‘Right,’ Nedly agreed uncertainly.
Lil stuck her fists in her eye sockets and gave them a rub. ‘It was Delilah. She’s dead!’
She looked up, blinking, and saw Nedly’s face as it fell.
‘Dead?’
Lil nodded. ‘And she’s not the only one … You should have seen her …’ She went green around the gills as the memory flooded back. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Nedly looked relieved. ‘I don’t want you to talk about it.’
‘It was horrible,’ Lil continued. ‘She was lying there, her face –’
‘Please don’t talk about it.’
Lil stared into the glass and her own disturbingly rippled face looked back at her. ‘I can’t help it; it’s all I can think about.’
Abe tapped the table with his rubber hand. ‘You can fill Nedly in on the morgue later, when you’ve got your shine back. Now, how about we change the subject?’ He fixed his gaze more or less on where Lil had been looking, and cupped his other hand over his mouth again. ‘Nedly, how did you get on?’
Lil tucked her hair behind her ears and took a deep breath. ‘Right. Of course. The Paranormal Society, sorry, Nedly.’ She grabbed her notebook and pencil from her rucksack and settled down to business. ‘OK, ready when you are.’
Nedly leant across the table, conspiratorially; Lil leant forward too while Abe tried to casually retreat, away from the incoming creeps. Margaret took the opportunity to nip the edge of Abe’s mac between her little teeth and pull it onto the floor where she made a nest in it.
‘So,’ Nedly began slowly, ‘I followed him to this club called the Masonic Rooms, down on the west side, by that old swimming pool. They had only just opened up and the man behind the bar was wiping down the tables and shining up the glasses.’
Lil echoed his every word, relaying the story to Abe but with a lot less expression because she was busy writing too.
‘The barman seemed to know Starkey and gave him a sympathetic nod when he walked in. He took a pew at the table beside the juke box. It was playing a kind of …’ He lost confidence in this line when he saw Abe’s gaze drift down to the apple Danish. ‘So, anyway, he pulled out a paper plate and a packet of biscuits –’
Lil cut in. ‘What kind of biscuits?’
‘Is that important?’ Abe frowned at her.
‘It might be.’
‘They were custard creams, I think.’
‘Custard creams.’ Lil raised the Cryptic Eyebrow. ‘Value pack?’
‘No, one of the small ones. And before he laid them on the table he opened the top.’
‘But didn’t shake them out onto the plate?’
‘No, he just left them on the table like that.’
Abe knocked back the last of his coffee. ‘I appreciate the detail, kid, but get to the point.’
Nedly sat back awkwardly. ‘Sorry.’
‘He’s just setting the scene,’ Lil said defensively. ‘It’s his first real report; who knows what kind of information will be important at this stage?’
She glanced over her notes. ‘So far, from the intel that Nedly has collected we know that Starkey doesn’t have much money: custard creams are the cheapest of the fancy biscuits, and you don’t get many in a packet so he wasn’t expecting lots of people, but maybe he was expecting at least one, and he wanted to make them welcome. Although he wasn’t entirely sure they were definitely going to show, because he didn’t shake them out of the packet.’
Nedly was staring at Lil with a look of amazement.
‘Don’t you think?’ She raised her eyebrows.
For a moment he didn’t say anything at all but then he cleared his throat and said, ‘Yep, exactly that.’
Lil smiled encouragingly. ‘Go on, then what happened?’
Nedly leant in again. ‘Well, nothing for thirty minutes. Every time the door opened he looked up hopefully, but otherwise he just sat there nursing a glass of ginger ale, which the barman gave him, on the house – I think he felt sorry for him and he said something like, “No show again, Irving?” and Starkey offered him a biscuit. But the barman didn’t take one. I think I might have accidentally given him the creeps.’
Lil nodded. Abe sighed.
‘But maybe he just didn’t like custard creams. Anyway,’ Nedly added quickly, trying to speed up, ‘so nothing happened again for a bit.’
‘So it was a waste of time then?’ Abe suggested.
‘No, one thing did happen. At ten to eleven, when Starkey had been sitting there for almost an hour, guess who walked in?’
Lil’s eyes widened. ‘Cornelius Gallows?’
‘What!’ Abe sat up suddenly.
‘Sorry, no, that was my guess. He said, “Guess who walked in?”’
Abe huffed with impatience.
‘Gordian?’ Lil tried again.
Abe’s fuse was growing shorter by the minute. ‘Was that another guess?’
‘Yes,’ Lil replied to Abe.
‘No,’ Nedly told Lil.
Abe clenched and unclenched his jaw again. ‘Can’t he just say who it is without you guessing?’
‘It was Craig Weasel!’ Nedly blurted out. ‘Mayor Dean’s old bodyguard!’
Lil let her jaw drop then she shook her head in a scandalised way and wrote it down.
‘Who was it?’ Abe asked eagerly, trying to decipher Lil’s scribble upside down.
She let him stew for a minute and then put down her pencil and told him. Abe trawled back through his memories. ‘The pea-head with the red hair and the silk pyjamas?’
Nedly nodded. ‘The very same – only now his hair is snowy white.’
Lil thought for a moment. ‘Weasel must be Starkey’s source; he was there that night when we apprehended LeTeef. He must have known that the house was haunted. I bet he got spooked and that’s why he ran, and lived to tell the tale. So, what did they talk about?’
Nedly looked uncomfortable. ‘That I don’t exactly know. The thing was, Starkey isn’t sensitive to me at all so I could sit with him, no problem, but Weasel was a different story. He had the creeps straight away; he got really twitchy and he wouldn’t sit down. Starkey tried to reassure him, even offered to lend him his glasses, but Weasel wasn’t having any of it – so I had to move away a bit and watch them from afar.’
‘And?’
‘Well, they talked for a while, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.’ Lil gave Nedly a disapproving look. ‘I couldn’t help it! But I did see one more thing – Weasel gave Starkey a folder.’
‘What kind of folder?’
Nedly shrugged. ‘Cardboard, I think.’ Lil let her head drop back and sighed. ‘But when Starkey opened it his eyes went really wide and he started sweating. I know that because I saw him mop his head with the serviette from his drink. He nodded at Weasel and then he grabbed the folder really tightly in his fist, so his knuckles were almost white – like he’d really got hold of something.’
‘What was in the folder?’
‘Paper of some kind, I think. I wish I knew what was written on it. Something important, I’ll bet,’ he added earnestly.
Lil gritted her teeth in an effort not to say ‘obviously’. ‘So, once Starkey had the information in the folder, whatever it was, where did he go next?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nedly said, ‘because I came straight here to tell you about Weasel and the folder.’
Lil took a deep breath and then relayed the information to Abe in her most neutral voice. Abe squeezed the apple Danish he was about to take a bite out of so tightly that some of the filling oozed out and hit the table with a plop. In a flash of fur Margaret leapt, sucked it up and then disappeared again.
‘OK, well,’ Lil said. ‘Good work – for the most part. We’ll just have to see how this plays out now.’
Abe rubbed his jaw pensively. ‘We better keep an eye on this Starkey character. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’
Nedly frowned. ‘I feel sorry for him. He wants so badly to know that ghosts are real.’
He stared out of the window, at the large flakes of snow that were falling past.
Lil looked too, though hers was the only reflection she saw in the glass.