E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 400 Seiten
Reihe: Grave Expectations
Bell Grave Expectations
Main
ISBN: 978-1-83895-841-1
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The hilarious and gripping bestseling cosy crime debut from Alice Bell
E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 400 Seiten
Reihe: Grave Expectations
ISBN: 978-1-83895-841-1
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Alice Bell grew up in South West England, in the sort of middle-of-nowhere where teenagers spend their weekends drinking Smirnoff Ice in a field that also has at least one horse in it. She is the deputy editor of Rock Paper Shotgun, a popular PC gaming website, and in 2019 she was named one of the 100 most influential women in the UK games industry. After spending several years in London, Alice now lives in Cork in Ireland. She has probably read more detective fiction and watched more episodes of Midsomer Murders than you.
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2
A Quick Bit of Seance
The truth was that Claire was not a very good medium. Her figure was not suited to maxi-dresses, incense made her sneeze and she couldn’t be arsed with smoky eyeshadow. She also wasn’t good at coming up with significant but vague things to say about the afterlife, like ‘Ah, the energies from the Other Side are strong here.’ The only part she was good at was that she could genuinely see and talk to dead people, but as it turned out, that bit was the least important.
When Claire had turned to freelance mediuming on a full-time basis she’d swiftly discovered that nobody ever wants a real seance. Attempts to do genuine ones usually ended in disappointment and bad reviews on Tripadvisor. Really, punters just wanted something they could tell their friends about.
They did not actually want to talk to their dearly departed grandad who, even if he was still hanging around, would be more likely to ask about Tottenham’s form, and complain that they never visited enough when he was alive, than say that he loved them and was happy where he was, in heaven with Jesus and all the angels. In fact the two were mutually exclusive: a ghost could not be both in heaven (or whatever came after dying) and able to have a chat on Earth.
Claire didn’t have an especially scientific mind, but as far as she could tell some people simply stayed hanging around after they died, and that was that. It was usually someone who had regrets, either about how they had lived or how they died. Maybe they didn’t get to say goodbye to their loved ones, or their cupcake business didn’t get as much recognition as they felt it deserved, or one of their family managed to get the standing lamp they’d said they absolutely couldn’t have. If they resolved that – if they realized their family loved them anyway, that their cupcakes weren’t actually that great, or that the standing lamp was fugly – then they would disappear. If not, they just hung around, making the air cold and sometimes moaning at other ghosts (particularly the case in churchyards, where there were usually a few ghosts corralled together, nurturing petty ghost grievances that were the dead person equivalent of a neighbour not returning a borrowed casserole dish, but sharpened to acuteness over hundreds of years). Unless they made an effort to keep their shit literally together, older ghosts could get fuzzy, and eventually became nothing more than a little cloud of misty unhappiness.
That was how it was; that was what Claire had observed. In the extremely online debates about whether a hot dog was a sandwich, Claire would be the sort of person to say that a sandwich was what got put in front of you when you asked for one in a greasy spoon. Evidence suggested that a ghost was a person capable of annoying nobody except, specifically, Claire, and this rendered the metaphysics of the situation more or less a moot point for her.
Over the years, Sophie and Claire had, using a lot of trial and error, developed what were fairly good versions of fake seances, with a bit of real communication with the dead thrown in – which Claire editorialized and expanded upon, if the ghosts weren’t saying anything that interesting or nice. Technically, Claire didn’t need Sophie’s help to talk to ghosts, but the process (which involved Sophie yelling loudly to attract as many spirits as possible) went more smoothly when they worked together. Claire had an advantage over her spiritualist ancestors: cold-reading was pretty easy when everyone shared everything online, plus Sophie was able to have a good nose around their hosts’ houses without anyone knowing.
Their seances were sufficiently skilful now that Claire had a client bench deep enough at least to eat and pay the rent. But she did feel aggrieved that her ability to see and talk to dead people – which was actually a pretty bloody impressive thing to do, when you thought about it – was basically good for nothing. By rights she should be mega-rich and have a syndicated television show. But she wasn’t and she didn’t, and even if someone offered her a TV gig, she would get scared and turn it down, partly for reasons she didn’t like to talk about which had left her afraid of public exposure, but also because she didn’t have the natural confidence around people that Sophie did. Sometimes, in very quiet moments at two o’clock in the morning, Claire wondered if it would have been better if had died and become the ghost. Sophie would probably have had a recurring guest spot on by now. All Claire had was this gig at Figgy’s parents’ weird old house.
And she was possibly jeopardizing even that by chuckling like a gibbon after describing how a girl had died at seventeen and was now her invisible companion.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said, getting herself under control. ‘It’s just funny that you’re saying she doesn’t exist, when she’s right there.’
Alex, Basher and Nana looked, variously, alarmed, incredulous and sympathetic.
‘Seventeen! That’s no age,’ said Nana. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Sophie dear.’ She looked towards where she assumed Sophie was standing, and Sophie obligingly moved so that she wasn’t wrong. ‘Did you two know each other when you were alive?’
‘No-o-o. No. Nope,’ said Claire. She had learned from experience that people didn’t respond well to her spirit guide being her best friend from school, a real person whose memory Claire was – to the outside observer –exploiting for money. ‘We would have been born around the same time, but that’s it. Never knew her. She just, uh, turned up one day. It was when I was a teenager, too, so we suspect it was something to do with hormones and, er, moon energies.’
Sophie grimaced. ‘You know, I still hate it that that line actually works on people.’
‘A bit like the X-Men,’ said Alex, snickering. ‘In the films a lot of them got powers around the age of sexual maturity. Is seeing ghosts also a metaphor, do you think?’
‘I think I understand that. I got a lot of stretchmarks when I turned sixteen. I grew about a foot overnight, I remember,’ said Nana.
‘Oh, come on, Nana. You don’t seriously believe any of this is true?’ said Basher, who seemed to be getting annoyed. He would be the useful sceptic, Claire could already tell. ‘Not the stretchmarks. The talking to ghosts.’
‘Well, I’m very nearly dead, dear, and you’re talking to me,’ Nana said.
‘Before you arrived,’ Sophie told Claire, ‘they were talking about how the family should just sell the house to a hotel chain that’s sniffing around. Du-something. Du Lotte Hotels, I think.’ Claire repeated this.
‘That doesn’t prove anything!’ said Basher, his eyes flashing in the firelight. ‘You probably heard that yourself. And by the way, it’s bloody rude to listen in to private conversations.’
Sophie moved around to blow on his neck idly and make him shiver, and giggled when he did.
‘That’s her. She’s blowing on your neck.’
‘Give over. It’s cold out here – I am cold.’
Sophie next started tickling the side of Nana’s face. Nana raised a hand to her cheek.
‘Yeah, that’s her,’ said Claire, before Nana could ask. ‘She’s tickling your face.’ Claire elaborated, explaining: Sophie wasn’t a poltergeist, she couldn’t pick things up or rifle through your knicker drawer, but if you’d left your knicker drawer open or a private letter out somewhere, she’d have a proper good look. She’d been naturally nosy even before she’d died; being invisible only made it easier. If she blew on your face, it felt like you were looking into a freezer; and if she tickled your cheek, you might think a cold spider was walking across it. But that was all she could do, unless she was getting help from Claire.
‘That’s jolly interesting, isn’t it?’ said Nana. ‘Do you know, I’m quite looking forward to dying now. I’m sure ghosts don’t get swollen feet.’
‘First of all,’ said Basher, ‘can we stop talking as if you’re going to shuffle off your mortal coil tomorrow morning? And, second, have we just accepted the existence of ghosts now? Is that all it took?’
Alex shrugged and carefully put out the joint. ‘We should do a seance. Can we do a seance? I’ve never done one before, I wanna do one.’
‘Doing one tomorrow night. S’what I’m here for. What here for. When all the other guests have arrived. Midnight seance: bell, book and candle, the whole thing. Well spooky. Proper seance business.’
‘I mean we should do one Now.’
Claire looked over at Sophie.
don’t care if we do one now,’ Sophie said. ‘Figgy was right: there are a load of deados hanging around, for me to drum up for conversation. An old lady was having a blazing row with a little Frenchman in one of the rooms in the big house. Also a pervy old gardener, like, you know, a really shit version of Sean Bean in that TV series about a woman shagging her gamekeeper. On the other hand, they seem quite boring, they might not turn up, and you’re pissed and also high, so I...
