D. I. Ghost: A Detective Inspector Ghost Murder Investigation Read online

  How can you do that now, when you never...No, that's not how I want to put this. I start again. Why didn't you show me how you felt while I was alive, you idiot? His brown eyes are moist. I wanted you to so much it hurt, I whisper to him.

  No, I’m not being fair. It was always more complicated between him and me than that because I would have died before I showed it. It’s what Belinda said, really. Working together, sleeping together. Is it ever a good idea? If Bixby had discovered there was something going on between us, there would have been hell to pay. Relationships between officers serving in the same team are frowned upon in the force. One of us would have had to put in for a transfer and I didn't want it to be me. I'd only just got that promotion. I wasn’t going to make Bixby regret recommending me for it. There was still a buzz of attraction between Nigs and me. The bickering foreplay we kept up during our shifts together was the testament to it. One day, I promised myself, one day. How was I supposed to know I'd die before I got the chance? I was only twenty nine years old. There should have been time for everything.

  He isn't handsome, Nigs, not in a traditional way. His face is one of those wonderful lived in ones but someone must have thought him gorgeous when he was a kid because that's what he exudes. He is dark and sexy, and he moves like syrup. Not that it does me much good now. I'm the ghost he is never going to lay.

  When he leaves the room, I get this daft idea about following him home at the end of his shift. What’s to stop me living with him in death as I never did in life? But before I can pass through the door after him, it opens again. He is back and this time Fester is with him. My two closest friends in all the world and we are together again. It feels so bitter-sweet. What am I saying? It feels great. I love these guys.

  There, can you smell it?

  Fester puts his nose into the air and sniffs, deeply. He shakes his head.

  Try again, Nigs instructs. It's there, I swear it is.

  I start sniffing too to see what he is on about.

  I can't smell anything, mate.

  Nigs looks disappointed. It was there. It was! Kate's perfume, I'd recognise it anywhere.

  Fester pats him on the back. Nigs doesn’t notice but there is concern in his eyes.

  One of the girls down the hall probably wears the same brand, mate. Come on, why don’t we get out of here. Let’s grab a cup of coffee in the cafe around the corner.

  He leads the way out of Bixby’s office but Nigs lingers for a moment, still yearning for a trace of me.

  I miss you Kate, he whispers, before he too walks away.

  Shit, I should have grabbed him when I had the chance. One day, he’ll find someone else and settle down with them. I’m never going to. Even better, I have an eternity in which to regret that. Isn’t afterlife great!

  What is up with you, Madding?

  I spin around in surprise. The man I see before me is exactly the same as I remember - pasty complexion, grey curly hair, drooping moustache, and a massive paunch overhanging his belt like a multiple pregnancy.

  Sergeant Ross, what are you doing here?

  I’ve never been more pleased to see anyone. Robbie Ross was my boss when I was still in uniform. He died of a heart attack, seven years ago, right in front of me, while we were taking a break in the canteen. I've never smoked a cigarette or eaten a fry up since. Although, if I'd known I was going to die at twenty nine years old, I might have.

  I should have guessed you weren’t the type for eternal rest, Madding.

  I don’t remember being given much choice, actually.

  Are you sure about that?

  That flummoxes me. What are you talking about, Sarge?

  You’re the detective, you figure it out. He starts moving away from me again.

  Where are you going? I want to talk to you.

  Go home, Madding, you're needed there, he says firmly, before he disappears.

  It is past midnight by the time I arrive back at my sister’s house. It seems as quiet as the grave. I check on the kids and pick up Caleb's teddy from the floor by his bed, where it has tumbled, snuggling it down between the sheets with his young owner. On the top bunk, Jethro stirs as I kiss his forehead but he doesn't awaken. I can't help wondering for how long my two youngest nephews will go on seeing me. Forever, I hope.

  Downstairs, in the living room, Carrie has fallen asleep on the sofa waiting for Phil to come home. The television is murmuring in the corner. It is tuned to a news channel. Curled up in his armchair, Belinda is glued to it. We seem to have acquired her as a house guest which wasn't exactly my intention when I agreed to help her find her body. For me, her constant presence contains all the awkwardness that flat sharing did when I was training, only Belinda doesn't steal my milk. It is one of the disadvantages about being dead, I'm discovering. There just isn't enough separation between work and home.

  Good day, Belinda? She was supposed to go and check out the road where her car was found to see if she recognised it.

  She nods, still fixated on the television screen.

  Well, share it with me then.

  Finally, she gives me her attention.

  The police have found my body.

  It isn't a pretty sight, although it is the knowledge of what it is that makes it so. Most people chancing upon it would probably walk straight past because the flesh has rotted away to a ruby-brown earthy substance, all but indistinguishable from the soil which partially covers it. There are still some slithers of leathery skin covering the bones, and a few tufts of mud-caked hair are visible. A couple of strips of fabric, stiffened with earth, are protruding too but not so much the casual eye would be drawn to them. A golfer discovered these remains by accident. Her ball had overshot the nearby green, landing in the bushy copse, which runs along the eastern perimeter of the course. She would have abandoned it but a hole in the fence, large enough for her to crawl through, enticed her to look around for it. She found it easily but in retrieving it from the mud, where it had come to rest, her hand came away with a matted lock of human hair.

  The white suits of the forensic officers who have been working on this grizzly find, throughout the night, move carefully in and out of the trees. They won't attempt to remove the body until they've extracted every possible piece of evidence from the immediate vicinity, square metre by square metre, in a grid of their own devising. The area is cordoned off and screened from public and press view but Belinda and I position ourselves inside this barrier.

  She is consuming the scene, voraciously. It is clear she hasn't yet realised so I tell her, bluntly: This can't be your body, Belinda.

  Why not?

  The decomposition is too advanced. This body must have lain here for months, possibly years.

  The anguish I see in her makes me feel cruel for confronting her with the truth.

  Why can't I remember what happened to me? What’s wrong with me?

  Have you ever considered it might be better not to remember?

  I need to know, Detective Inspector, she says, simply, as she turns her attention back to the grave.

  I've no idea why the police used to ask women officers to do all the emotional stuff, back in the old days. It is just as well it was before my time because I've never been any good at it. There is something I don't quite get about feelings, my own as much as other people. Why does Belinda need to know? How will it help anything? She'd still be dead.

  The forensics work, painstakingly, which for me means, excruciatingly, slowly. They dust and probe the site like archaeologists, hour after hour. While we are waiting for them to finish, I explore the surrounding terrain. I find myself wondering how this body could have been dumped in this spot. The dead weight of even a small corpse is difficult for one person to carry so lone murderers tend to dispose of their victims close to wherever they can park a car. The nearest road here – assuming a car couldn't have driven across the golf course without leaving some sign – is above the copse of trees. There's a steep incline so the killer would have had the help of
gravity to roll the body down to the place where it is buried. I go up to the road and retrace the route he might have taken. The trees are so close together, if he did roll it down, he would have had to stop every two seconds to move it in and out of the trees. It would almost have been easier to carry it, but the distance and uneven ground suggests to me that if he did, he must be incredibly strong. Strong people do exist, of course, and adrenalin pushes even the weakest ones beyond their usual limits, but I'm not convinced. Could he have used a wheelbarrow? I doubt it. The incline is too steep to control it – on one's own. That's what I keep coming back to. The position of this body would make more sense if two people had brought it down here, together. Two men? A man and a woman?

  What happens now?

  I turn to answer Belinda only to find it isn't her who is addressing me. There's a small dark haired woman by my side. She is covered with mud - her long hair is plastered to her scalp with it - and she is wearing what looks like a soiled and tattered wedding dress. Her presence is not so much harrowing as harrowed. Whatever she has been through, I doubt I want to hear about it, but I'm too curious not to ask.

  Is it you in that grave?

  Her eyes are blue and glassy. Another one. Is this how I appear to Caleb and Jethro? If so they've never mentioned it. I've only heard them describe Belinda as glassy-eyed.

  Is it you, down there in that grave?

  She nods. I was murdered.

  What is the appropriate response to that? Really? How interesting! I can't decide so I do what I usually do when I feel uncomfortable, I gabble.

  I'm Detective Inspector, Kate Madding. Or I was. Actually, I'm a sort of private detective now – not the London Eye so much as the London private eye. Yes, anyway, someone has asked me to help them find their body. She’s down there, in blue. Do you see her? She was murdered, too. Well, she thinks she was, but she doesn't actually remember.

  Would you help me?

  I examine her muddy face. She is young this woman, barely out of her teens. Her expression is fluid and self-conscious.

  Please, Detective. Would you?

  She is looking at me tentatively as though she is frightened I might hurt her. Is this how she was in life or is it something to do with the way she died? If someone hated her enough to kill her, perhaps, she has a reason to feel suspicious about the rest of us.

  But, you know where your body is.

  Even by my standards it is an incredibly stupid thing to say. She looks crestfallen, mistaking my words for the rebuff she half-expected.

  Someone strangled me, she murmurs. He called himself, Simon Says.

  Simon Says, like in the game?

  What game?

  The children's game, you know: Simon says do this and the kids are supposed do it. Simon says do something else and they do that too. Then, whichever one of them is Simon just says, do this, without the, Simon says, first, and any kid who does it is out.

  She is staring at me as though she is struggling to make sense of my explanation. Then, her face clears a little and she gives up.

  He dressed me in this gown and moved me into different positions like I was a doll. He got angry because I wasn’t doing it right. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t move on my own. I must have been drugged. But, he strangled me, anyway.

  Despite the horrors she is describing, there is an absence of emotion in her words as she speaks. I've witnessed this before in victims of traumatic crimes. It is as though they have to go to a faraway place within themselves in order to talk about it. It is a fragile solution because, sooner or later, the enormity of what has happened to them will break through their defences and traumatise them all over again. My instinct has always been to get as much information from them as I can, before they reach this point. I don’t find it easy to listen, though. I've never liked the sick details of a murder. I can cope with any amount of blood and gore, I have a strong stomach, or I used to. It is the psychological stuff, the power games, the sadism, and torture that they suffer, I can’t stand. That’s what makes me want to vomit.

  Do you remember what your killer looked like?

  He was small, muscular, but wiry, like a weasel. He covered his face with a mask but I did see it. I'm not sure how. Perhaps, it was before. I can’t remember but he had ash blonde hair.

  What colour were his eyes?

  They were bluish-grey. He had a pale complexion too and a moustache.

  That’s a pretty good description. Would you recognise him again, if you saw him?

  I might. Will you help me? I want him to go to jail for what he did to me.

  That seems like a pretty good objective to me too. I'm just not very confident I can pull it off as D. I. Ghost.

  Down at the grave, they're getting ready to move her remains. Dawn is breaking and the sky is luminous with the first rays of sunlight. A mobile canteen has arrived and a stream of the non essential white suits, hungry for their bacon butties, after working through the night, is flowing noisily towards it. There is so much life in them, I can barely think.

  What’s your name?

  Kerry Doughton. She points to the cordon around her grave. The woman in blue has disappeared.

  Damn! She’s right. Belinda has gone. I feel guilty. I shouldn’t have left her alone for so long. She must still be upset. And, she never did tell me whether she recognised the street where her car was found. I should go and find her but I hesitate. Kerry remembers so much more than Belinda, I want to pursue her case too.

  Kerry wins. I take her Bixby’s office. It is on the fourth floor of the building, and the view from his window seduces me while we’re waiting for the Missing Persons’ Database to come up on his computer. I love the roofs of London. When I was a kid these were my open spaces. They gave me a peak at a life beyond the confines of my neighbourhood. I’d sit in my classroom at school and plot my escape across them, towards an indistinct but exotic future. I never guessed it would be my death.

  I might be wrong but I think the password has been accepted.

  Yes, of course, I say, snapping to and punching in Kerry’s name. Within seconds there she is, except the woman pictured in the photograph before me doesn't look anything like the muddy companion by my side. She is very blonde and very beautiful. I print off her photograph while I am reading the information recorded here about her.

  Kerry Doughton, a student, aged 20, went missing two years ago. She was on her way back to Durham University, after arriving home, unexpectedly. She'd come home to announce to her parents that she wasn't happy at university and wanted to leave. She missed her American boyfriend, who graduated the year before and had returned to the States. Her parents never met him, nor did anyone else. Kerry kept herself to herself in the Hall of Residence where she was living and she didn't mix with the other students on her geography course either. Her parents were horrified to learn she wanted to give up her degree and they tried to talk her out of it. They believed they had by the time she set off in the car they’d given her for her eighteenth birthday. She was supposed to be headed back to Durham to complete the last weeks of her term. Then, they'd have the summer to bolster her resolve to return there again in the autumn to finish the last year of her course. They had miscalculated, however. She never arrived at her Hall of Residence. She disappeared without a trace.

  The case wasn't more than the mystery of a few days, really. It was suspected she'd run off to America, possibly covering her tracks by driving to Europe first. Her car was missing and cars don't just disappear unless someone drives them somewhere. She was listed as a missing person but her disappearance was never exhaustively investigated. Nor did the police put any resources into trying to find the boyfriend. Kerry's disappearance wasn't thought to be sufficiently suspicious to justify more than a minimum effort. Her parents didn’t make a fuss. They felt the police were right. By opposing their daughter’s plan to leave university, they'd driven her away from them. Her passport was missing so she must have meant to disappear. All they could do was hop
e she’d relent as she grew older - maybe after becoming a parent herself – and make contact with them again to let them know where she was living.

  Something else strikes me as I study her photograph. The woman beside me may not look like the one staring out from this screen but somebody else I know does. Belinda Montgomery.

  Jethro is seated at the large round wooden table in the kitchen eating his breakfast. He swings his legs and hums between mouthfuls.

  Is the other lady with the glassy eyes living with us now, Auntie Kate?

  I want to start splitting hairs with him. Since neither Belinda, nor Kerry, is actually living, they can’t be living with us. I stop myself from saying this, however. There is no benefit in arguing with a six year old. One way or another, they always win.

  Glassy eyed lady, I mutter, distractedly, as though I have no idea what he is going on about.

  The one in the wedding dress, he informs me, straightforwardly, as he fills his bowl with a second helping of cereal.