Paranormal Investigations
EH Walter
Copyright 2011 EH Walter
Cover created by Michael Farmer of New Splicer
Chapter 1: Lost Cats and Errant Spouses
“Good morning, Paranormal Investigations,” I said in my best give-me-a-case-because-I’m-broke manner.
Snickering came down the line. Okay, I was used to that. It’s what you got when you claimed to investigate the paranormal. I say claimed because I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually investigated something, anything and all my so called paranormal cases tended to have rational explanations, even if cuckolded spouses believed enchantments were the root cause of infidelity I had to enlighten them that infidelity happens, suck it up buddy.
I pressed to end the prank call.
You may think it’s really cool to be proprietor and lead investigator of what amounts to a detective agency, it’s not. I wish I could make it sound glamorous but normally I’m too busy hocking bits of old jewellery to pay the rent. Truth be told, this was not the life I had envisaged for myself. I went to drama school dammit. I was meant to be treading the boards at The Globe as Lady M, Titania - even fairy at the back would’ve done. No, I get lumped with Great Aunt Mildred’s legacy.
The phone rang again. It was Rose, from my office – yes, I have staff! Well, a staff of one unless you count the postman and the guy who hoovers the office building. I once asked Rose why she worked for PI (she had been another inheritance from GA Mildred). “Well it was this or down the Oxfam,” she told me.
Rose was not overly familiar with modern technology and mobile phones were her least favourite device. She thought you had to shout to be heard, when Rose talked on the phone all of Starbucks heard.
“I’m reminding you about your ten thirty!” she bellowed, “Miss X.”
“I know Rose,” I replied, trying not to shout back, “I’m here in Starbucks already.” Most of my meetings were held in Starbucks, my office being a little too... everything you wouldn’t want a client to see: peeling paintwork, soiled ceiling tiles and crappy old furniture. Still, it was cheap – mostly because we were kind of squatters. Lloyds bank had rented most of the building and the landlord had never noticed we did not move out when they did. We had the whole nine storey office complex to ourselves. God bless lackadaisical landlords. That should have been their name really – Lackadaisical Landlords Limited. They were actually Georgiou and Son of Cockfosters, but whatever.
“Miss Fey?” came a quiet voice. I looked up and almost started – the thin, blonde woman in front of me looked very similar to the only girl I had dipped my toe into the lesbian waters with back at sixth form college. “You are Miss Fey?”
“I am.” How did she know? I looked around Starbucks, I was the only woman not attached to a small infant. Not a hard one then. “Miss... X?”
She nodded and slid into the spare seat opposite me.
“Would you like a drink?”
She shook her head. I was relieved, the only way I could sit here for so long was because I could just about afford £1.65 for a tea. Fancy coffees and whatnot were out of my price range. A client had once asked for a frappaccino and I had to pay for that on a very old credit card, I was still paying off the interest two years later.
She rested her skinny arms on the table, fingers clasping and re-clasping. Then she played with a turquoise coloured beaded bracelet at her wrist. She kept her eyes downcast.
“You may think me crazy,” she said softly, “but... I think my boyfriend is... cheating on me.”
I sighed. This case would be no different from any of those that preceded it. At least it might give me something to pay the rent – if there was a case here at all.
“What makes you think he’s playing around?”
She drew her lips together into a thin line. “He... he no longer wants to have sex, it’s as if he’s getting it from somewhere else – he’s always had a really high sex drive you see, but not anymore.” Her pale cheeks took on a pink tinge.
“Sometimes other factors have an effect, for example is he more stressed at work?”
“No,” she said definitely, “I know something is wrong.”
“Do you live together?”
“No, he’s just moved into this new flat over at Princess Park Manor in Friern Barnet.”
I knew it, it was expensive.
“I live in High Barnet. We used to see each other most nights, but now he says he’s too tired.” She let out a gasp that was a strangled cry and bit her trembling lip. “Please just find out so I know one way or the other. You see, I thought he was the one... I had imagined him as the father of my children. Please. I just need to know.”
I exacted a retainer from Miss X before she left, escorting her to the nearest hole in the wall. I had found out, to my cost, that sometimes people didn’t want to pay up after finding out the truth so I always asked for most of the fee upfront. She had scribbled her number down for me on the back of her boyfriend’s picture and disappeared into The Spires shopping centre, although whether so few shops ever qualified as a ‘centre’ I’ll never know.
I hopped on the bus (cheaper than parking up there) and tried to sit with the least smelly people. After a while you got to know the regulars on the bus; the lady with the baby carriage that actually contained a small Maltese Terrier (you should see people’s faces when they bent to fuss over a child and saw a dog), the man who talked to everyone as if he’d known them for twenty years and the mother and daughter who looked like cockney elves. What they thought of me, I don’t know.
The PI office building is on a busy road leading up to the M25, it is a typical seventies office gulag although built on a slight curve although it’s no Royal Crescent. Crossing the road from the bus stop can be tricky, some people really don’t know when they’re not on the motorway anymore – normally knob-ends in sports cars who play for one of the big premiership football clubs around here.
Inside the building the lifts had long since ceased to work so I had to climb the stairs to the seventh floor. From the lift there was a long corridor to our corner of the building, the floor tiles were those cream coloured plastic ones with designer grey smears, very 1970s. Reggie was there, as always, polishing the floor. I said hello and he ignored me, as always.
Our door was off the main corridor, the lock had long since broken but no one came into the building anyway. It was one of those with a half glass panel – ‘Paranormal Investigations’ was painted on the door in gold paint. GA Mildred had done it herself, it showed – the long letters had drips clinging to them that had long since hardened. I sighed as my hand rested on the doorknob, this was not my life. Every time I crossed the threshold I got a sense of unease, as if my life had gone off track and was now veering out of control and I was not sure how to reclaim it.
From the door I could hear Rose talking to GA Mildred on the phone, it was difficult not to with her voice.
“Well yes dear, she is making bit of a hash of it.” Rose was saying as I opened the door.
GA Mildred had retired to Torquay, the British version of Florida but with slightly less palm trees, however that did not stop her interfering.
“I’ll take it from here,” I told Rose and put my hand out for the phone.
Rose pushed her glasses up her nose and blinked at me.
Rose’s office was an annex to my own. You might almost mistake it for a garden centre as she had different varieties of plants in pots all over the place. I suspected some were plastic, but I had no proof.
“Bourbon?” Rose asked, proffering a plate of biscuits with one hand and passing me the phone with the other. Honestly, sometimes I think she
only worked at PI for the biscuits. I shook my head.
“Hello Auntie,” I said with little enthusiasm into the phone.
“Is it your birthday yet?” GA Mildred barked, cutting right to the point. Where some elderly female relations obsessed about potential husbands and the pitter patter of tiny feet, GA Mildred was singularly obsessed with my twenty-fifth birthday. She had one of those loud voices that demanded to be listened to, I think old boarding schools must have taught people to talk loudly and with confidence – shew your class gels!
“No Auntie. You know my birthday is at the end of the month, the thirty first of October.”
“Yes I know, twenty five on the thirty first. What’s the date today then?”
“October fifteenth.”
“Oh.” She sniffed. “Got to go. I’ve got Agatha Christie coming over for afternoon tea.”
Like many of her generation she hung off without saying goodbye.
Stupid old bint, Agatha Christie had been dead since 1976.
My office had been built in the seventies, the decade that taste forgot. It might have been quite stylish when GA Mildred first moved PI to Cockfosters. Now it was as dilapidated as the building that surrounded it. The furniture hadn't been new then and I suspected GA Mildred had herself inherited it. Some of it was Victorian, other pieces heavy pre-war oak and the rest unidentifiable clutter. GA Mildred didn't like to throw anything out and I didn't feel the business was sufficiently mine to do so myself.
On my messy desk I had a pot plant, a rubbery green thing which needed no watering as the leak in the ceiling above did that for me. The plant was the only sign of life in the office - you couldn't really count Rose, she was pretty ancient and gave no indication of a beating heart and breathing lungs - unless there was a plate of biscuits in the offing and then she had the instincts of a ninja.
I went into my office and shuffled papers for a bit. It did me good to make the office look used by moving things from one side of the desk to the other, in truth there was little work to do as the last case had been a missing cat three months ago and that situation had been wrapped up when I informed the client her cat had been adopted by, and was currently being overfed by, her neighbour. The business should really be called ‘Lost Cats and Errant Spouses’ rather than ‘Paranormal Investigations’. There was no hope of things ever getting better. You see, the problem is I don’t believe in the paranormal. It just doesn't exist. No sir. Not ghosts, ghouls, demons, aliens or anything else that might be described as supernatural. I think the name holds us back, but GA Mildred would not hear of changing it, it’s part of her legacy she says, and the name stays. Stupid old bint. I hated the fact my work was a joke and there wasn’t even a decent wage in it for me.
Two years ago I was a jobbing actor, busy failing at auditions and being told a size twelve was too fat to fit in the pre-made costumes. I was used to rejection, poverty and defeat. It was my way of life and strangely – I was happy.
For years GA Mildred had told me there was a place for me in Paranormal Investigations and for years I managed to put her off without offending her – she was practically my only family after all. Then, two years ago, it had seemed everything was going wrong – the love of my life went to try his luck in Los Angeles and I crumbled. I was not sure I had ever told Jez he was the love of my life and perhaps I should have, it might have made things take a different path. It’s hard though, when you fall into a relationship from a friendship, to make that leap into saying ‘I love you’ whatever the comeback may be. I had not taken the risk and had acted so cool at his leaving he left thinking I didn’t care at all - see, those three years at drama school weren’t completely wasted.
Heartbroken and alone GA Mildred sucked me in. "Help me out for a while," she had said and like a fool I had moved north to 'help her out'. I started by watering the plants and doing the filing. Then she had asked me to do more and more: answering the phones, meeting clients and finally stake outs when her 'varicose veins hurt too much'. Last year she had retired and left me to it. I had been out of acting too long to return and I felt I would be letting her down if I didn't keep the business going.
The next morning I was up early. I had a cheating boyfriend to catch in the act.
I ate my healthy porridge to a background of the BBC Breakfast News. Sian and Bill were wittering about some theft from the British Museum. Good luck to anyone trying to sneak anything out of there. They also informed me the Prime Minister was having 'credit crunch crisis' meetings. What's new?
Miss X had given me a photograph of the suspect and on the back had placed his details and her phone number. The photo was one of those cheesy ones of a couple in love. They were at a party, there were fairy lights in the out of focus background, and he had his arms wrapped around her. He was decent looking I suppose, but not the kind of man you would give a second glance to at a bar. She evidently adored him though, in the photo she looked a completely different person to the one I had met in Starbucks. Her eyes were alive and her face illuminated by a smile. The way she looked at him hit me in the guts. Would I ever be able to look like that at someone again?
I drove from my flat in East Barnet to Friern Barnet and parked the car on a quiet residential street. There was a wall around Princess Park Manor and I loitered behind it, hidden to anyone coming out of the large building but a curiosity to anyone on the other side at half six in the morning.
Princess Park Manor was a large and beautiful Victorian mansion - or so you would think to look at it. In truth it had been a Victorian mental asylum and had recently been converted into expensive apartments - the mad could stay there free a hundred years ago but now you needed to be rich to get a look in. Irony, I believe that is called.
The commuters gradually left their nests and I kept my eyes out for Mr X. He was one of the last to appear, just as daylight began creeping over the horizon and I was about to give up for the day. He was late, his pace was rapid although his whole body looked like it needed to crawl back into bed. It was hard to recognise him as the man in the picture - his eyes stared at the ground, his shoulders curved forward and his feet shuffled.
I followed him to the tube and then, at a discrete distance, to his place of work. We had several changes and having my face mushed against the inside door of a dirty tube train made me grateful I did not have to commute every day. People filled every available inch, some of them asleep whilst hanging on the overhead rails or reading books folded into the most impossibly tiny space.
Wearily he trudged out of Canary Wharf tube and up a long escalator into an office building. He had a pass, but I had to sign in. Luckily the receptionist was distracted long enough by flirting with a man in a shiny suit for me to 'borrow' a name out of the appointments book so foolishly left upside down on the desk. When she turned back to me she frowned in that way that receptionists do when they work for big businesses as if somehow, the size of the business reflects upon them.
"Name?"
"Abalunum Abaeze," I said coolly, "here to see Solomon and Company."
She looked me up and down, somehow doubting I was Nigerian but then surmising it might be racist to accuse me of this. She sighed and tapped her computer keyboard with acrylic nails. A pass printed out of the printer and she passed it to me between her talons.
I got lucky - in the time it took me to get through reception no lifts had arrived and there were large numbers of people still waiting in the lobby, Mr X was amongst them. I joined the clump closest to him. To be honest I got the feeling I could have put on a clown wig and tap shoes and danced in front of him and he still wouldn't have noticed - it was like he was on autopilot.
The first people I looked at in infidelity cases were work colleagues, as life so often threw temptation at people this way. I watched the people around him, but there was no one paying him especial attention or trying to diligently ignore him to avoid drawing attention. It was like he was not there.
When the lift took us to his floor his colleagues greeted him, but he barely grunted in response.
I loitered in the reception area of his offices long enough to see him slump into his office chair and rest his head in his hands.
"Can I help you?" a woman in clicking high heels asked me.
"Solomon and Company?" I asked.
"This is Fenton, Fenton and Hutton."
"Oh goodness me! Wrong office!"
I smiled at her and left. I needed to leave before the real Abalunum Abaeze turned up anyway. My next opportunity would be lunchtime.
There's not much to do in docklands if you're not busy embezzling or causing Icelandic banks to collapse - the choice comes down to the Museum of London Docklands or shopping in the mall. Instinct would have led me to the shops, lack of money led me to the free museum.
I was back in plenty of time to loiter outside the office building during the wide period of time that could be described as lunch time.
At ten minutes past twelve I saw him stumble out. His first stop was a coffee stand where he ordered a double espresso and then wandered off towards a generic eatery. After discarding the empty coffee cup he entered the eatery and picked up food items, almost at random, from the chiller cabinet before joining the queue. I sat on a tall stool behind a book and waited.
No lunch time assignations then. He sat and shovelled the food down with no sense of taste, threw down another coffee and shuffled off back to his office.
I was pretty confident nothing more was going to happen, but I need to file a complete report so I hung around until the end of the day and followed him home again.
By the time we got back to Princess Park Manor I was surprised he was still standing. His face was greyer than ever and it even seemed as if his hair had lightened over the day as well. The man looked like a shell.
I clocked off for the day when he entered the building. I would come back another night and finish up my report then. He certainly didn't look like he'd be up to any mischief tonight.
A short walk reunited me with my car. I ached from a day outside, the cold had seeped into my bones, and longed for a nice, hot, bubbly bath.
My car was safe to leave anywhere - no one would steal it. It was an old red astra, now faded to a pinkish red, stained with rust and tree sap and with dents bumped in by London drivers. To get the door to open I had to give it a good kick to get it to spring loose. I then had to sit and wait with the heating on for twenty minutes to clear the fog from the screen. Whilst I was waiting I dug my phone out of my pocket to check my messages - it had been on silent all day as I'd once been busted on a stake out when it rang just as I was about to reclaim a stolen puppy. I'd got bitten on the hand.
I had two voicemail messages and three text messages. The first voicemail was from someone trying to sell me a timeshare in Spain. I deleted it. The second voicemail message was from my father.
"Hello Leo - happy birthday! Speak soon, dad."
I gave a humph and deleted that one as well. My own father couldn't get it right. And I didn't like the reminder - soon I would be one quarter of a century old. I gave a shiver. Man, that was old.
My father is not your average father. He was never there at parents' evenings and never took me to play in the park. He was - at best - an absent father and - at worst - neglectful. I had never lived with him and he rarely visited. Even GA Mildred wouldn't talk about him - she was from the other side of the family.
He's one of those men who never seem to look any older, a bit like George Clooney. I certainly didn't get my dominant genes from him as I already had a couple of white hairs creeping through my scalp.
It was with these thoughts that I finally managed to clear the windscreen and drive the short distance back to East Barnet. Barnet is a bit like New York - the lights never go off. And that's where the comparison stops. The kebab shop and shish bar were still open and Budgens was already doing a roaring trade in Halloween pumpkins.
I parked up, locked the door and went into my flat building.
In my dream I was in a field and an angry oak tree was throwing acorns at me. I tried to duck out of the way, but they kept hitting me. I jerked awake with a gasp. All was dark. All was silent. Then I heard a rat-a-tat-tat and instinctively ducked as if there was an angry oak tree in my bedroom.
The sound came again and half asleep I looked around the room. When it came for a third time I located it to the window and padded over barefoot to have a look.
Peeking through the curtain I didn't see anything at first and then, as an acorn - yes it was an acorn - thudded on the window in front of me, I saw a small figure hiding in the shadows of the security light.
As I opened the window he crept forward and I told myself I was still dreaming. At least I hoped I was still dreaming.
In the pool of light outside my window stood a figure wearing a cable knit red jumper, a green kerchief around the neck and baggy black trousers. In his hands he held a paper bag, he dipped a hand in and was about to throw the contents at my window when he spotted me. The contents he then deposited into his mouth and he crunched loudly. His nose was a little odd and given to twitching, but what really drew my attention was the pair of small... horns? Antlers? That sat atop of his head. Didn't he know Halloween was two weeks away?
He chewed like a goat - sideways.
"Are you Morgan LE Fey?" he asked in between mouthfuls of acorn.
"Leo, I never use my first name."
"Leo," he repeated, very much like a bleat.
"I haven't had a boy throw something at my window since I was thirteen so make it good buddy."
He looked around cautiously. "I need you," he said.
All possible witty responses left me - it was the middle of the night.
"Uh-ha," I yawned.
"I need you to sort out the fairies for me," he said between crunches of acorn, "they're really mean."