Page 54 of Crazy Spooky Love
“You bought a one-eared pug called ‘Lestat’ from Tom Jones.”
“Not the actual Tom Jones,” I say. “And I didn’t have to buy him, just make a donation to the shelter.”
“I’d call him Plug,” Gran says, picking a prawn from her salad and tossing it down to Lestat, who hoovers it up noisily.
“Plug the pug?”
“Easier to remember than Lestamp,” she says, giving him a tomato. It follows the prawn, and I start to see what Tom Jones meant about Lestat’s appetite. I don’t correct her mistake, because I know full well she’ll never remember his name anyway. She’ll probably just ply him with food from her plate and call him Plug forever, and from the way he’s just laid his head on her knee, I don’t think he’ll mind a bit.
“I think we should probably stick to the food the dogs’ home gave me,” I say doubtfully.
Gran bats her hand at me. “Your grandpa never fed Beefcake anything different from our food and look how well he turned out.”
What I really want to say at this point is that Beefcake, my grandpa’s bulldog, was spectacularly fat and lazy, as evidenced by his gargantuan body, which my grandpa had preserved by one of London’s leading taxidermists because he couldn’t bear to part with him. When it transpired that Grandpa Duke’s ghost was to be tethered for eternity to Gran’s bed, it took four men to haul the glass display case up two flights of stairs to ensure that one man wasn’t parted from his dog, even by death.
“Right, I think I’ll take him up to my flat and get him settled in.”
Oh my God. I nowknow why Tom Jones called him Lestat. He might be a couch potato by day, but at night this dog goes batshit crazy. It’s just after 11:00p.m.and so far he’s deposited the contents of his bowels on the living room rug, stolen and eaten a family-sized bag of cheese and onion crisps, and he keeps chasing his tiny, curled-up tail, as if it’s a thistle stuck to his ass. He’s thoroughly uninterested in the lush new bed I’ve bought him, preferring the comfort of the sofa or me. He’s run the pair of us ragged, and now he’s lolling on his back with his legs akimbo on the opposite end of the sofa. He tried his luck at my end but I’ve banished him on account of his manky crisp breath. I wouldn’t be surprised if he picks up the remote control in a minute and turns off the movie I’m half watching. It’s like I’m suddenly in a relationship with the dog equivalent of Homer Simpson. I don’t want to be his Marge. “Look, Lestat,” I say, and he rolls his eyes back in his head like a bored teen, “you and I need to establish some ground rules. The first one being, you stay on the floor, not the sofa.”
The sofa already has a fine new coat of Lestat-colored hair and he’s only been here for six hours. Predictably, he makes no effort to budge.
“And the peeing and pooing thing. We don’t do that in the house. It’s not polite.”
Amazingly, he seems to understand what I want, because he huffs and dutifully climbs down from the sofa. I pat him on the head and then watch as he shuffles over toward his bed. I almost feel sorry for him, right up to the moment where he lowers his pudgy little backside down and squats on the oak floorboards. I squawk and lunge for the nearest thing to shove under his bum that I can find, which just happens to be Mum’s newspaper that I’ve brought up from the office to read.
I get undeniable satisfaction from watching Lestat’s pee seep slowly into Fletch’s smug-faced snapshot. I can’t help it. I grab myphone and snap a little video, apologizing to Lestat for filming him whilst he’s indisposed. Though I don’t feel that bad about it, to be honest.
It takes me precisely two minutes to find theShropshire Expresswebsite on the iPad, locate Fletch’s page, and text him the video on the number he handily mentions about five million times in case anyone has a scoop for him. The only scoop he’ll be thinking about when he watches this is a pooper-scooper. It’s Fletcher Gunn’s fault I have this dog. The least he can do is watch it pee on his face.
Lestat doesn’t snore like afreight train. He snores like a goddamn Eurofighter is hovering over my bed—where, of course, he is sleeping right beside me, flat on his back. He has his head on the pillow and his balls are swinging low and free over my Ikea comforter.
“Melody?” someone says, and for the first time in forever I’m actually glad to be interrupted by a ghost. I flick the lamp on and sit up. There’s a woman in my bedroom, wringing her hands as she stands close to the bed, looking anxious. I’d put her age at midfifties or thereabouts, and I’d say she probably died around the 1920s, if her clothes are anything to go by. She looks quite well-to-do; I’d hazard a guess that her wartime stocking seams would have been silk rather than drawn on with eye pencil.
“Your dog is terribly loud,” she remarks, as if he’s inconveniencing her. I mean, to be fair, he probably is, but no more than she is inconveniencing me. In fact, they’re both inconveniencing me hugely; it’s 4:30a.m.and I want to be sleeping like a baby, not trying to make myself heard above Lestat the Thunder Pug.
“I’m Agnes,” she says. “Agnes Scarborough. You’re investigating the death of Douglas, my son.”
“Mrs. Scarborough.” I sit bolt upright and wish I was less tired.
“This is really quite difficult,” she says. I don’t know if she meansshe’s finding it hard to concentrate because of Lestat or that she’s finding it tricky to say whatever it is that’s brought her to my bedroom.
“It’s about the diaries,” she says, sounding anguished. “I made a terrible mistake.”
Then, in the most frustratingly ghostly manner, she vanishes, as if she was never there in the first place. It happens like that sometimes. When a spirit makes the effort to visit me, they can find it hard to hold themselves together for long enough to actually communicate. They usually come through most strongly if they died recently and urgently need to relay a message, such as Artie Elliott Senior. He couldn’t leave until he’d taken care of his boy. But Agnes Scarborough must have died more than ninety years ago, and if this is her first time trying to communicate with the living, then I don’t hold out much hope of seeing her again in the near future. What could she have meant about Lloyd’s diaries? “I made a terrible mistake,” she said. What did she mean?
I look over at Lestat and decide that there’s little point in trying to get back to sleep. I can’t wait a moment longer to make a start on those diaries. We’d reluctantly resolved to hold off until tomorrow when Glenda arrived with the new supply of latex gloves, but I’m itching to know what secrets lie between those pages. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a pair of Marigolds under the sink somewhere.
Coffee steaming beside me, Itake a seat at the dining table and awkwardly unravel the strings that bind the diaries together with my clumsy, canary-yellow-gloved fingers. I lightly trace the faded gold numbers punched into the front cover of the top volume. 1908. Well over a hundred years ago. I can barely imagine how life must have been for the Scarboroughs back then, and how wonderful the house must have looked in its heyday. It feels like snooping to even open the diaries, to read Lloyd’s private thoughts and hopes.I’m nervous; I don’t like him very much, and I fear that this glimpse inside his head is going to make me like him even less. I lift the top volume from the pile; they’ve been sandwiched tightly together for decades, and it peels away with a reluctant squelch from the one below it. Angling my reading lamp so it highlights the diary, I take a deep breath and slowly open the cover. The first page is tipped with a gilt-framed border, and inside it, in beautiful lavender-blue ink, copperplate type declares that these are the secret hopes and dreams of the owner. Except they’re not Lloyd’s secret hopes and dreams.
The diaries were written by Agnes Scarborough.
Chapter
Fifteen
“They’re their mother’s diaries?” Marina does a double-take as she slings her tiny denim jacket at the coat stand. “Shit!”
“No shit,” I murmur, and Glenda pauses typing for a second to eye me over her glasses. She’s been with my family long enough to have known me at an age where swearing got me a smart swat around the back of the head, but I’m all grown up now and she’s going to hear far worse in here from Marina.
