Dial a Ghost

Then from somewhere above them there came a . . . fluttering . . . the sound, faint as breath, of wing beats. And then a noise so unbelievable, so absolutely amazing, that Oliver couldn’t believe his ears.

He turned his head only for a moment – but in that moment, Fulton and Frieda took to their heels and ran.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The van was back in the garage. The letters Rid A Spook had been painted out; it was just a plain red lorry now.

And the laboratories had been dismantled. The cages where the phantom mice had had their tails removed by the dreaded EEB had been sent back to the pet shop from which they came; the rest-rooms in which the tramp and the bag lady had been destroyed were once again ordinary cloakrooms.

‘That should see it through,’ said Dr Fetlock – who wasn’t a doctor at all but plain Bob Fetlock, a man who’d failed every exam he’d ever taken but had a flair for tricking people.

‘Six months in the sun!’ said Professor Mankovitch, throwing her white wig on to the table and combing out her frizzy red hair. Her name was Maisie; she was Fetlock’s girlfriend and they were off to Spain.

‘What a sucker that bloke was,’ said Charlie. His scar was real enough but he certainly hadn’t got it when a head on a platter came out of his mother’s larder in Peckham. He’d got it by roller-skating into a milk float when he should have been at school.

They’d worked on all sorts of scams, Fetlock and Maisie and Charlie, who was Maisie’s nephew, but they’d enjoyed this one particularly.

‘That was good, the bit about the villis luring my boyfriend away in the forest – I really went for that,’ said Maisie, lighting a fag. ‘Can you see me just sitting there while these white ghoulies pull off a bloke I fancied. I’d have kicked them in the teeth.’

‘It’s a pleasure to deceive such a nasty piece of work,’ said Fetlock, who hadn’t cared for Fulton Snodde-Brittle. ‘Swallowing all that stuff. Ectoplasm Eating Bacteria! What a twerp!’

Fetlock had got the idea out of a horror comic and set the whole thing up. There hadn’t been any phantom mice or rabbits or ghostly tramps, of course. The labs that Fulton had been shown round were completely empty and the great thumping vat that ‘Professor Mankovitch’ had been working on was left behind from a steam laundry. As for the stuff they’d squirted from their nozzles, it was a job lot of laughing gas they’d nicked from the back of the dental hospital. No one used it now for pulling teeth – it put people to sleep all right, but it made them so sick and silly and giggly afterwards that dentists had stopped using it.

‘Well, that’s it, then,’ said Fetlock. ‘Thirty thousand in cash should keep us out there for a bit. Got the tickets, Maisie?’

Maisie nodded and shut her suitcase. ‘What’ll happen to the spooks, do you reckon?’ She was a person who could see ghosts, but she didn’t care what became of them – she’d have done anything for money.

Fetlock shrugged. ‘Same as happens to people, I suppose. Only with them being sort of looser and woozier than us, the gas’ll get further into their brains. All the same we’d best be well clear of Fulton before they come round.’

And ten minutes later the premises of Rid A Spook were deserted – and as silent as the grave.

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Do I look all right?’ asked Lady de Bone.

‘Yes, Mother, you look fine,’ said Adopta. She rearranged a piece of liver in the spectre’s tangled hair and pulled her bloodstained skirt straight.

‘What about me?’ asked Sir Pelham. ‘Does my hoofmark show up properly?’

Addie stood on tiptoe to examine the place where the horse had bashed in her father’s head and said they both looked fine and everyone would be terrified and now it was time to start.

The de Bones were always a little nervous before the doors of Helton opened to the public and the long queues shuffled in to see the Most Haunted House in Britain. The visitors liked seeing Mr Hofmann’s withered head coming out of the dining-room sideboard and they enjoyed Grandma whooping up and down the window curtains, but it was the Shriekers who made them go ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’ and hold on to each other in terror and feel that they had got their money’s worth.

It had been Oliver’s idea to open Helton to the public so as to get money for the work he wanted to do, and it was a great success. Trevor was in charge of the car park and Oliver showed people round and Helton had already beaten all other stately homes for attracting visitors.

Three months had passed since Oliver had turned his head and seen the budgie giggling and laughing and falling about, and he and Addie were close now to fulfilling their dreams. Colonel Mersham had come to live at Helton and Matron had sent her sister down to keep house, and you couldn’t have found two nicer people anywhere. As for Fulton and Frieda, no one had seen them since they scuttled away in terror from the hall.