25. Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
twenty-five
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
Jeanie is quietly losing her mind. She glances between Pixie and me like we’re two opponents at a Wimbledon match, and if she keeps chewing her thumbnails the way she is, she’ll be at risk of exposing ghost metacarpals.
“What happened?” Trystan asks. He knows there’s something unsaid between Jeanie, Angel, and Peter, but it wasn’t my place to tell him.
“Angel’s been arrested, keep up,” Stove says, bopping Trystan on the head with his boom mic.
Trystan simply sighs and looks to Pixie for the actual answer.
“Apparently, there was a tip-off. Somebody told the police to look into the medical records just after the time Jeanie went missing. There’s a hospital admission record a couple of days after August nineteenth.
Kelsey Cobbledick got treated for dog bites to his leg and hands that were turning gangrenous,” Pixie says.
“How did you find this out?” I ask.
“Two officers were chatting about it next to Jeanie’s burial site. They were keeping their voices down, obviously so the press and public didn’t hear them, but they didn’t count on it not being a ghost-free area.”
“No, Angel wouldn’t . . . It’s just not possible,” Jeanie whines. She sits folded in two on her cabriole settee. Her eyes lift to mine, pleading.
“Angel has an alibi. He wasn’t even in the county when Jeanie went missing,” I say.
“How do you know that?” Peter asks.
I take a subtle step away from him. Now that I know what I know about him, I can’t look at him the same way. Not only did he try to end his wife’s life, but when it came to owning his mistake, he took the coward’s way out and fucking died.
I can’t explain that Angel can see and communicate with ghosts, so I form a different plan. “Josh?”
The fifteen-year-old looks up from his phone. “Yeah?”
“Can you look something up on Google for me?”
“What is it?”
“Can you search for the undertakers’ conference Glasgow ninety-five?”
Josh’s thumb flashes over the screen. “Do you mean The International Funeral Director’s Convention?”
“Probably.”
“Okay . . . Okay . . .” He frowns down at the screen, his neck bending over like a wilted flower stem. “Here it is. Yada yada yada, Glasgow, nineteen ninety-five. Saturday the nineteenth and Sunday the twentieth of August.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t prove he was actually there,” Stove says, and ordinarily I’d find his “devil’s advocate” stance irritating, but now it’s welcomed. I need every stone turned over and triple checked. I failed to ask for the evidence of his alibi yesterday and that’s on me.
“Can I see that, Josh?”
Josh hands his phone over, and I scroll through what minuscule information there is on the conference.
Skim-reading the list of guest speakers and mentions of attendees, I don’t spot the name Cobbledick anywhere, and I’m starting to think maybe Stove had a point until I land on an old-school website gallery section.
Wow, okay, I know it was ninety-five, but honestly, some of these photos look like they belong in a museum.
Was using the focus really such a crime back then?
There’s a group photo of all attendees, but even when I pinch the screen and zoom in as far as I can, there are no recognisable faces.
I flick through each picture one by one, knowing I’ll reach the end of the roll any moment now until . . .
“There he is!” I say, brandishing the phone like a trophy. For Jeanie’s sake, I’m so utterly relieved.
The photo shows a man in his mid to late thirties.
He’s tall and broad and has a whole head of chestnut brown hair and a short, thick brown beard.
He’s wearing an almost identical fisherman’s jumper to the one I saw him in yesterday.
It’s Angel alright. The most unnecessarily handsome undertaker ever to have existed.
“Still doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Jeanie,” Stove says, and annoyingly, I find myself nodding along.
“She could have gone for a walk or something, maybe got lost, passed out somewhere, and later Angel found her. Maybe he took her back to his palace of death, had his wicked way with her, then while she was face down in the pillow . . . SMACK! clobbered her over the head with whatever instrument it is he beats up dead bodies with.”
Jeanie sighs. Camille swears in French.
“What is it with you, Stove? Fuck’s sake. Why do you always take it to the gutter?” Pixie asks.
I don’t say anything because there’s a possibility, however remote, that’s actually how things had played out.
“Sorry,” Stove says, and I can’t tell for sure, but I think he genuinely means it.
“Maybe somebody else kidnapped Jeanie and took her to Angel on his orders. This whole undertaker’s festival seems awfully convenient.
We don’t actually know when Jeanie was killed, and he was a Peggy in the Middle stalker mega fan.
He could have kept her as his prisoner in his body?storage room, then brought her to the pet cemetery a few days later under the cover of darkness. ”
“You have been listening to too much Unalive on Air,” Camille says.
“I hate to add fuel to the fire,” Trystan says, and both Jeanie and I glare at him.
He shouldn’t be anywhere near me whilst I’m figuring all this stuff out.
What if I accidentally solve the mystery while he’s around and finish his unfinished business?
“But there’s a direct path from the back of Angel’s funeral home, right to the edge of the hotel.
Gabe and I used to ride our bikes up and down it all the time when we were kids. ”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Jeanie whimpers from her foetal position on the settee.
“Wouldn’t he?” This comes from Pixie. I see the sadness in both of the women’s eyes.
One of two things is happening here. Either Angel killed the love of his life, buried her in the pet cemetery, and to this day continues to fuck her ghost.
Or . . . someone has it out for Angel.
A memory surfaces.
“Angel, the person who runs it is, well, they’ve got beef with me. With the hotel maybe. I don’t know. I don’t fully understand it. Do you ever just get the sense that somebody doesn’t like you, but you’ve never had any cross words with them?”
Helga said those exact words to me the day I met her. I wonder if that beef is mutual.
I take the note out of my pocket and stare at the names of deceased and missing for what must be the twelve millionth time. Why did you make this list, Helga? What’s the purpose of it?
I puff out a breath, and I’m just about to shove the damn thing back into my overalls when I spot it.
5. Josh Little.
7. Camille Ciel.
Where’s six? Where’s the sixth name?
“Okay, everyone needs to bugger off so I can do some thinking,” I say, largely aiming my shoo gestures towards Stove, Peter, and Trystan.
“This is my room!” Jeanie says.
“Everyone except Jeanie and Josh.”
Josh stops in his tracks, his shoulders slumping. “What did I do?”
The other ghosts turn to leave, but I grab Trystan’s arm. I don’t say anything to him. I only give him that look. The look that speaks a million things and yet says nothing.
“I apologise for excluding you.”
“But it’s for both of us.”
“Maybe later we could pick up where we left off.”
“I already miss you.”
“I’ll wait on the beach for you,” he whispers, so quietly I wouldn’t have heard him if I hadn’t been staring at those lips.
That’s the second time he’s said those words to me. I want to get them tattooed on my heart.
“It’s meant to rain later,” I say.
Instead of answering, he smiles, winks, and floats away through the window.
I don’t trust that everyone has fully left the space, so I grab Jeanie with one hand and Josh with the other and float down through the ceiling.
We end up in a part of the spa. It’s nice.
The air is warm and moist and smells of lavender and eucalyptus.
I remember this is Camille’s haunt, but in all honesty, I’m not worried if they overhear.
“Jeanie, tell me about the interview you gave before you went missing,” I say. “Helga said you did a piece for daytime TV or something, and that was the last time anyone ever saw you alive.”
“Okay, but what has this got to do with me?” Josh whines before Jeanie gets a word in edgeways.
“Honestly, mate, you’re just here because I need your phone. If you want, you can leave it with me and go into the steam room for a bit?”
He thinks about my proposal for a second. “No, I wanna hear this too.”
“Then . . .” I press my finger against my lips, shush him, and turn to Jeanie.
“Well, it was such a long time ago. I’m not sure I remember much,” she says.
I refrain from rolling my eyes. “Do you recall what organisation it was for?”
She hums to herself. “A daytime telly thing. My producers had given them the exclusive reveal. Oh, Bright Mornings TV, I think. Tilda Mason was the presenter.”
“Excellent, excellent. And what was it about?”
“A new programme I was due to start filming in September. Nothing special or groundbreaking. Basically, a Peggy in the Middle spin off called Peggy on the Left, but with a few new characters. My friend Lucy, who played Drusilla, wanted to step back from show business for a while and concentrate on her family. The producers thought it might be refreshing if, for the new series, they brought a male love interest in for Peggy.”
It all sounds innocuous enough. “Did anyone ever see the interview?”
“No, they never broadcast it. It was meant to air on the Monday morning, but out of respect for all the police activity happening, they suspended it.”
“Who did they cast to play the male lead?” I ask.
“Oh, it was my friend from Barking. The producers really liked the rapport I had with Lucy and they thought, if they brought in a bloke I’d known for a long time, it would have the same kind of . . . hmm, what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Vibe?” Josh suggests.
Jeanie smiles at him. “Exactly.”
“Do you think there’s a chance that your . . . real life romantic interests could have been jealous of the male lead?”