Chapter 3
SEPTEMBER
It had been a long and wearisome summer.
Despite Melissa’s constant sniping at me to economise, because now she was unemployed we’d have to watch every penny, it hadn’t stopped her from spending two weeks on the Algarve with Diccon – ‘Separate bedrooms, of course! I mean, can you imagine? Me and Diccon?’ – while I stayed at home and carried out her orders by giving the kitchen yet another fresh coat of paint, which annoyingly, she didn’t even remark upon when she arrived home.
Then, just a day after she’d got back from Portugal, she’d been treated to a few days in a luxury Oxfordshire cottage, complete with hot tub, dinner every night at a swish restaurant, and a spa day.
All courtesy of none other than Harriet Bladon, who’d invited her and another television presenter who worked for HoneyStone Television along, with the idea that they should spend the week reminiscing, brainstorming and perhaps even coming up with new projects to pitch for themselves.
Unfortunately, the holiday clearly hadn’t been a success.
Melissa was in a foul mood. Evidently, Harriet had been very apologetic but had confessed that ‘just yesterday’ she’d signed a contract ‘completely out of the blue’ for a new series that promised to be a big hit, so she wasn’t looking to pitch anything else at that time after all.
Her friend had confessed she’d never had any interest in coming up with ideas and was only there for the break away from her boring boyfriend, who she was determined to finish with as soon as she could find someone to take his place.
‘Fakes and phoneys!’ Melissa told me, unpacking her suitcase with ferocity – all her dirty clothes flying across the bedroom and landing on her deep-pile, dove-grey carpet.
‘As if Harriet had only just signed that contract out of the blue! She knew all about it weeks ago, no doubt. This was all designed to rub my nose in it. What a bitch!’
‘You have a laundry basket right there,’ I pointed out, but she wasn’t even listening.
‘Diccon did warn me,’ she admitted. ‘He told me not to trust her. That’s the trouble with showbusiness. You can never trust anyone. It’s a viper’s nest. No one’s who they seem to be.’
As I gathered her clothes and put them in the basket ready to take downstairs to wash, I thought of her mutterings and mumblings as she pretended to communicate with the departed souls at wherever she and the It’s Haunted!
team were investigating at the time, and silently agreed that she’d never spoken a truer word.
To be fair, there’d been many occasions in the past when she’d demonstrated her abilities with great flair.
She’d passed the audition for It’s Haunted!
with flying colours because she’d genuinely picked up on spirits who were lingering nearby.
She couldn’t see them very clearly, but she could sense them and hear them.
She once told me she’d had the ability to do that since she was around thirteen.
She’d always joked that her ghost whispering talent had come free with her first packet of sanitary towels. That was back in the days when she used to joke. It had been a while…
I’d wondered lately if losing her ability was linked to her hormonal changes. Melissa was fifty now and she’d been perimenopausal for four years. Since around the time the spirits started avoiding her, in fact, or at least were unable to get through to her.
Our mother had apparently once had the same ghost whispering ability but – like Melissa – it had deserted her when her hormones went haywire in her mid-forties.
Plus, she’d conceived me during the last gasps of her fertility, so that probably hadn’t helped with the hormone situation either.
Mum had finally admitted to me that losing the ability to communicate with ghosts had come as a huge relief to her.
She hadn’t liked to talk about it much as she considered talking about hormones common but had opened up to me about it one evening after a few too many glasses of champagne.
She’d confided that her first husband – an older man who was Melissa’s father and the love of Mum’s life (as she’d tactlessly admitted to me) – would have hated her gift if he’d known about it, but he’d never found out, even though they’d been married for twenty-five years when he died.
‘I felt as if my own life was over when he passed away,’ she’d said dramatically, waving a champagne glass around and slopping the liquid onto her new pale gold sofa. ‘I was a mere child when I married him. Twenty years old and so desperately in love!’
There was no doubt in my mind that she’d loved him to the best of her ability, but luckily, she’d been left a fortune from his business interests to compensate her for the sad loss.
Funnily enough, he’d never communicated with her after his death, which was probably a good thing, or she’d never have moved on, and I’d never have been born.
Eighteen months after becoming a widow, she went on a three-month vacation to California and returned home with a new husband in tow and me already on the way – much to Melissa’s horror.
My father was from San Francisco and was called Jet Black.
Yeah, really. He was in a rock band and was a bit wild, to put it mildly.
The marriage lasted two years, then Jet (I never called him Dad to his face – he said it aged him) left the marital home without much protest and moved to a crumbling stately home up in North Yorkshire.
There he played the country squire, wore tweeds, rode horses and shot game, while secretly snorting cocaine whenever his ‘manservant’ Cameron wasn’t looking.
He also indulged his passion for cheap whisky at every opportunity, using the bottles of fine and extremely expensive wines in his cellar only for target practice, much to Cameron’s outrage.
He was dead before I’d even reached my twelfth birthday.
I was upset but not heartbroken, as he’d never played much of a part in my life.
It turned out he hadn’t changed his will, so Mum got everything.
All I had to remember him by was a beautiful heart-shaped pendant, made from Whitby jet and hanging from a silver chain, which he’d bought for me one day when I was staying with him at his mansion and we’d visited nearby Whitby for the Goth festival.
I remembered that day well. He’d worn sunglasses and told me we were incognito because he didn’t want a fuss, then he’d basically swaggered round the town, hailing everyone, admiring their costumes, stopping to chat and sign autographs every few yards.
We’d even had a crowd of fans follow us into the Whitby jet shop, and they’d all ‘aahed’ when Dad picked out the heart-shaped necklace for me and agreed what an amazing father he was.
It was the last time I ever saw him.
Alive.
‘I wouldn’t care,’ Melissa was saying as I blinked and returned to the present day, ‘but I insisted on paying for some of our meals and drinks while we were away. I certainly shan’t be foolish enough to do that again.
I’ll bet you anything Harriet wangled a way to put her bill on expenses.
I’ve always been too generous and kind – that’s my trouble. People take advantage.’
She fastened her empty suitcase and turned to look at me. ‘Can you put the wash load on straightaway? I despise having a full laundry basket in my bedroom.’
I nodded and put the last of her scattered clothes on the pile, then picked up the basket to carry it downstairs.
‘So you haven’t heard anything? About work, I mean.’ As we headed into the kitchen, Honey hovered hopefully by the door, but I couldn’t pat her due to the laundry basket and Melissa didn’t even seem to notice her.
It had been a lovely time for our beautiful retriever, with Melissa away from home for almost three full weeks.
Honey and I had snuggled up together in the living room every evening, and I’d even let her sleep in my bedroom at night – something Melissa would put a stop to now she was home.
We’d gone for a good long walk each morning and evening, too, without having to hurry back to prepare Melissa’s meals. I would miss being on my own with her.
‘Not a peep. Well, naturally I’ve had the tabloids contact me asking me for my reaction to being “thrown on the scrapheap”, as they so charmingly put it, but I shan’t dignify them with an answer.’
‘Then what are you going to do?’ I called to her, dropping to my knees in front of the washing machine in the adjoining utility room, as I began sorting the piles of laundry on the floor.
‘I’m sure something will come up,’ she said vaguely. ‘Or maybe I’ll just retire. After all, I’m fifty now. As Diccon said, plenty do retire at my age, and I think I’ve earned the peace and quiet.’
I slammed the washing machine door shut and poured detergent into the dispenser, wondering why she would say something so out of character.
That certainly wasn’t the Melissa I knew.
And since when did she take any notice of what Diccon said?
He was a nice man, I liked him, and he certainly liked Melissa – far more than she realised – but she walked all over him.
I couldn’t imagine him being able to influence her decisions one way or the other.
I set the programme and headed back into the kitchen where she was sitting at the table, idly flicking through a bundle of newspapers and magazines that she must have brought back with her from the Cotswolds.
Now that I was looking at her more closely, I could see that her holiday hadn’t done her much good at all. She looked tired, and surprisingly pale considering she’d not long since spent two weeks in the Algarve.
I heard Honey whining and hurried to let her out through the patio doors in the living room. She bounded into the garden, and I left one of the doors slightly open so she could come in whenever she wanted.
‘Is everything all right, Mel?’ I asked worriedly as I returned to the kitchen.