3. Cash in Your Chips #2
Gerald’s quiet for so long I begin to think he hung up. “What’s it to you?” He sounds like a different person, not the jovial, whimsical chap of two minutes ago.
My internal warning siren tolls again, but I shake the thought. There’s no such thing as ghosts. This man is for all intents and purposes, a quack and a grifter.
“I will only take the role if I’m assigned the Paragon case,” I say, putting my proverbial foot down.
He’s quiet once more. Long enough for me to start planning another route into the hotel to investigate.
Perhaps I could just check in as a guest?
But I don’t have the money for that. Maybe I could get a job as a room attendant?
But then I’d actually have to do some work, not fanny about with a pretend ghost locater.
“Are you an only child, Gary?” he asks after what must be close to two minutes.
What an odd and highly disturbing fluke question. Or maybe not a fluke.
“How did you know?” I say.
“I didn’t. Was just . . . checking something . . . and your parents, are they both still living? Do you keep in regular contact with them?”
I open my mouth, form a response, but then close it.
“My parents live in Spain.” They’re ex-pat buy-to-let landlords.
“And no, I don’t keep in regular contact with them.
” Unless of course you count the eleven hundred pounds each month I send them for the privilege to retain that mould-infested roof over my head.
Gerald sighs. It’s as though I’ve given him an incorrect answer. “Very well,” he says, his voice laced with dejection. “I’ll see you on Friday.” And then he hangs up before I can ask any more questions about the hotel or Imogen.
I was right, the Google Maps photo had shown someone relieving themselves against the wall of the pizzeria.
The entire doorway and surrounding vicinity reeks of stale piss and bin juice.
Shredded lettuce, polystyrene containers, and plastic forks litter the ground.
I step over a torn bag revealing a stack of yellow-labelled Tesco value range frozen pizza boxes.
I’m ninety-nine per cent certain that the takeaway premise is some kind of “front” for activities markedly more illicit than baked dough and cheese.
“Charlie?” a man in his sixties greets me as soon as I’ve ascended the dank, musty stairs of the ExorSquad building. He has a gold tooth and haunting milky blue eyes, and his raspy, smoker’s voice immediately identifies him to me as Gerald Pickett. He holds his hand out for me to shake.
“Gary, actually. You must be Gerald?”
He withdraws his hand before I can grasp it. “Ah. I thought . . . Never mind. You’re still set on The Paragon?”
“I am,” I say. I don’t offer him a reason. Intuition warns against letting anybody else know about my investigation.
But he doesn’t ask why I want that case, he only nods slowly, blinking. He wets his lips, and hums to himself as though he’s searching for the right words, but the silence stretches on and on, and still he says nothing.
Eventually Gerald sucks in a deep breath, looks over my shoulder, and exclaims, “Ah, Charlie. Yes, I remember now.”
A lanky, blonde guy—I’m guessing Charlie—pulls up beside me. “Hi?” he says, like a question. He seems aware that he’s interrupted something.
Gerald locks his gaze onto Charlie. Not that I blame him, the lad is infinitely easier on the eyes than I am. He slides his arm over Charlie’s shoulder. “Right, let’s have you fellas sign a couple of waivers,” he says without even acknowledging me. “And we’ll get you into training.”
“I signed mine a few days ago?” Charlie says, again like a question.
“Ope, of course you did. Of course. I recognise you now,” Gerald says, not looking at Charlie either.
Staff turnover at ExorSquad must be astronomical if this guy can’t remember a face like Charlie’s. Either that or the CEO is certifiably batshit crazy.
Perhaps it’s more the latter, going by the agency’s interior decor choices.
Gerald’s office looks like one of those Channel 5 “documentaries” about hoarders.
It’s as though a bomb’s detonated in both an antiques market and a dust factory.
There’s stuff everywhere. An oil painting of a man named Dr John Dee sits front and centre on the wall behind the desk and framed photos and newspaper clippings fill every other available space.
Bookshelves are crammed with all manner of trinkets and tatt.
Taxidermied animals, Shakespearean skulls, jewellery boxes, pill boxes, clocks, old cameras, hourglasses, broken pitchers.
My eyes land on a dusty palm-sized onyx mirror, a pair of minuscule round spectacles, and what appears to be a grenade of some sort.
I’m not familiar with handheld munitions from any era, but I’d hazard a guess this thing predates the twentieth century.
Books are stacked up on the floor so high that they’ve become plinths or tables or in this case, chairs.
“Take a seat, Gary Runcorn,” Gerald says, pointing to a tower of peeling leather?bound tomes near his desk.
I sit down. Charlie hovers awkwardly at the door for a few moments before navigating the columns of literature and finding a relatively clutter?free stack to perch on.
Gerald hands me a wedge of paper. Colourful sticky tabs poke out from the edges, presumably pointing to places where my signature is required. “Read through this. Take your time.” He also passes me a pen. Then he starts reading the newspaper.
Charlie looks at me, side-eyes Gerald, shrugs his shoulders, and slips his phone from his pocket. On the screen, I spy a social media site, before I return my attention to my papers.
Yada, yada, yada, risk of minor injury.
Blah, blah, blah, risk of severe injury.
Something, something, something, risk of death.
For real? Come on. Who’s going to kill me? The concierge? The night manager? One of the six and a half ghosts? Please.
I read on.
ExorSquad are hereby indemnified from any and all adverse circumstances arising from encounters with the unliving.
These include, but are not limited to: risk of possession, hair loss, hives, vomiting, headaches, decapitation, loss of income, loss of sanity, acne, amnesia, loss of memory, memory loss, forgetfulness, penile warts, verbal diarrhoea, regular diarrhoea, goiters, excessive fingernail growth, UTIs, talking like a Victorian peasant child, dermatitis, revocation of driver’s license, higher insurance premiums, class war, nits, zoolingualism, telekinesis, a sudden penchant for watercolours, corrugated ankles, mutton chops, thyroid problems, flatulence, an overinflated ego, and a juicy fat arse.
“A. Juicy. Fat. Arse?” I ask.
“Ooh, sign me up,” Charlie says with a giggle.
Gerald peers between the top of his reading spectacles and the bottoms of his bushy brows. “That one’s there to test that you’ve read everything.” He shoots a pointed look at Charlie, whose cheeks flame bright pink.
“I’m only signing up for the dump truck,” I say, then scribble my name in the box below.
“Very well.” Gerald sighs and folds his newspaper like he’s disappointed in me.
He whips the paperwork away, drops it into a desk drawer, and heaves a ream of A4 paper into my hands.
The front bears the ExorSquad’s ghost logo and the words, Employee Safety Manual and Operational Guidelines (Revised Edition).
“I’m supposed to read this entire thing?” My arm already aches from holding it.
“If you want to make it beyond day one,” Gerald answers, getting to his feet and pushing his chair back with a grating screech. “Let’s get you fitted in your uniforms. Charlie, have you been kitted out yet?”
“Yes,” Charlie says.
I have no idea if Gerald hears him. He’s disappeared inside some walk-in wardrobe at the other end of his office.
“You might need to roll the trouser hems up,” he says, passing me a musty black boiler suit with a hand-stitched ExorSquad ghost on the right breast pocket.
It smells as bad as the alleyway outside the pizza shop, there’s white powder around the collar and under the pits, and a crunchy rust-coloured patch at the waist.
“I think someone died in this,” I say, holding it as far from my nose as my arm will stretch.
“That’s . . . a very real possibility. It matters not, though. I dare say you won’t be wearing it for long,” Gerald says.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Gerald doesn’t answer me. “Come along, Charlie, let’s get you settled into training.” And then he’s gone, through the door, and into another room.
“Do you get the sense that by signing those forms we’ve probably fucked up somewhere?” Charlie says. But he too gets to his feet and follows Gerald.