Death by Soup Read online

  I edged down the first few stairs. Grandad stopped, then turned and whispered, though I wasn’t sure why as no one else could hear him except me. “There’s someone creeping about down there. Look!”

  I listened with bated breath. There was nothing for a few seconds, then the sound of furtive rustling, followed by a few light footsteps. The footsteps of someone trying to make as little noise as possible. Perhaps it was just one of the staff, but why would they be moving about in the dark? Surely they just would put a light on?

  Grandad floated down to the foot of the steps. “Down here, Jayesh!”

  I tiptoed down to the bottom to join him, then stopped.

  The silence was broken by a loud SMASH. The crash of a heavy object connecting with glass. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  This was followed almost immediately by the ear-trembling shriek of an alarm going off nearby.

  WEE-WAA-WEE-WAA!

  “Owww!” I cupped my hands to my ears.

  A black shape came at me out of the darkness. Someone’s shoulder collided heavily with my own.

  “OWWWW!” I tumbled to the ground.

  “Jayesh!” Grandad shouted.

  I lay there, dazed, before Grandad’s greenish face loomed into mine. “Jayesh? You OK, boy?”

  The footsteps raced away. I groaned and pulled myself to my feet, just as the lights were switched on.

  Mr Shand and his wife were standing at an open door marked ‘PRIVATE’.

  He was in his dressing gown and she had her curlers in, and her face looked ten times more frightening than any ghost.

  They glared at me, shocked and horrified, then followed the trail of smashed glass from my feet to the display cabinet.

  The plinth for the Brightburgh silver bell now stood empty.

  “Uh-oh.” I gulped.

  Other guests were appearing at the top of the steps too, rubbing their eyes.

  Shand’s glare turned back in my direction, his face screwed up in anger.

  “Uh-oh indeed,” said Grandad.

  Chapter 9

  The Inside Job-eth?

  DI Fallon had the look of a man who’d been forced out of his bed at one o’clock in the morning – tired, disheveled and bristling with hostility, mainly towards me.

  A huge bear of a man, with a freckled face and a carpet of ginger hair, he squashed his large rear end into a bucket seat, his coat tails puffing up around the sides. “Right, tell me again, laddie,” he growled.

  “Look, there’s nothing to tell,” I said, holding up my hands. I sat facing him on one of the sofas in the lobby. “I heard noises downstairs, so I came down. Then I heard the crash. Someone barged into me, and I fell. When I got up, the lights came back on, and he was standing there.”

  I gestured at Shand, who sat beside the Inspector. He jabbed an accusing finger at me. “You were asking about the silver bell earlier, when you arrived. You even talked about stealing it.”

  “He has got a point,” Grandad called over from behind the reception desk, where I’d sent him to snoop around.

  “Oh, please belt up!” I snapped, forgetting myself.

  Shand bridled. “D-Don’t you tell me to belt up, young man!”

  Mrs Shand was behind the couch, clutching her dressing gown. She leant in and now she too jabbed a finger in my direction. “See, I told you! Riff-raff.” She sniffed. “I did say no riff-raff, Timothy.”

  Mum was sitting beside me, her arm wrapped round my shoulder. The alarm hadn’t woken her. To be fair, no alarm in the world could wake Mum up. She went to sleep listening to whale noises, which were a million times more annoying. They had to physically barge into her room and shake her awake.

  Now she leapt to her feet and fixed Mrs Shand with a terrifying glare. The good-natured, earth-loving people-person evaporated. She snorted, flared her nostrils and flexed her fists. She was like a prize fighter squaring up for a fight. “Who are you callin’ riff-raff, ya boot?” she snarled in broad Glaswegian.

  Granny had been standing beside the sofa too, her arms folded, watching everything through narrowed eyes. She leapt in the air like a mountain cougar pouncing upon its prey and landed right in front of Mrs Shand, one hand steadying herself against the floor and the other balancing in the air. She looked up from under her eyebrows and growled. “You’re gettin’ it, blancmange heid!”

  Mrs Shand touched a quivering hand to her hair, then scurried back through the door marked ‘PRIVATE’. Even Fallon looked a tiny bit terrified, and he was a copper.

  A mushy grin came across Grandad’s face and he clapped his ghostly hands in front of his chest. “Ah, what a tiger she is, that granny of yours.”

  “Look,” I said to the Inspector. “If I’d nicked the silver bell then where is it? I don’t have it. I mean, what am I supposed to have done with it? Hidden it in my pyjamas?”

  Fallon scrutinised me from under his huge ginger eyebrows, then he turned to Shand. “How long was it between the alarm going off and you switching the lights on?”

  “Not long, a few seconds. Our bedroom is just through the back there.”

  “Hmm.” Fallon rubbed his stubbly chin with his giant hand. He flipped open his notebook and scored something out, then he sighed loudly, as if my lack of guilt was an inconvenience. “The laddie is right.”

  “What?” Shand was disappointed.

  Fallon grunted, then prised himself out of the chair. “It might have been one of the local hoodies. I’ll round them up and we’ll see whit’s whit.”

  “Hoodies?” I asked, confused.

  “Aye, laddie. Hoodies. Gangs of boys that hang around street corners wearing hooded tops. I don’t like hoodies much.” Fallon evidently hadn’t finished, as this soon turned into a rant. “I mean, what kind of fashion statement does that make? I’ll tell you what kind of statement that makes. It says, ‘I’m up to no good’.”

  Grandad floated out from behind the reception desk. “Huh! A man was poisoned and he’s going on about jumpers! Tell him, Jayesh! Tell him a man was poisoned.”

  I glanced over at Grandad and shook my head. Fallon didn’t know that. Not yet. He was here to investigate the silver bell being stolen. As far as he, or anyone else was concerned, there was nothing suspicious about a man dropping dead in his soup over dinner. They might pick the poison up in a few days in a post-mortum. Then again, they might not. I could have told them about Starkey, but that would just throw more suspicion on me.

  Grandad suddenly spotted something near the display case. “Jayesh, come over here!” He pointed at the floor. “There’s a feather. Here on the floor. Could that be important?”

  It might be, so while Fallon and Shand were talking, I strolled over, knelt down and had a look. It was a feather, sure enough. Tiny and white, the kind you get inside a… “Pillow,” I said.

  “What?” growled Fallon.

  “I think there might be something over here, a feather. It’s from a pillow. Whoever smashed the cabinet tried to muffle the sound, but it didn’t really work.”

  Fallon fixed me with a steely, assessing stare then nodded, turning to Shand. “Where would they get a pillow from?”

  The manager shrugged. “There’s a laundry cart down the corridor there, but it’s kept in a store cupboard when it isn’t in use.”

  Shand led Fallon down the corridor to show him the cupboard, while Grandad danced behind the reception desk to show me something else. “One of the drawers in here has been broken open with a crowbar. I bet you it is where they keep the cash. Do not tell them, mind you, because they have not noticed it yet. It will just give them another reason to think it was you.”

  “A-ha!” I whispered, leaning out of earshot of Mum and Granny. “So, whoever the burglar was, they knew where the cash was kept, and they knew where the laundry cart was too. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Grandad scratched his head. “Uh… it was a thief with an interest in housekeeping?”

  “No, it was an inside job. Either one of th
e staff, or one of the guests.”

  “A-ha! Exact-amundo!” said Grandad. “An inside job.”

  “What’s that, dearie?” Mum called over.

  “Oh, nothing,” I replied.

  Fallon and Shand returned from the corridor, while a uniformed officer entered from the kitchen. The officer touched Fallon’s arm and whispered in his ear.

  Fallon nodded, and turned to us. “We found a broken window pane on the kitchen door. It seems that’s how the burglar gained entry.” He led Shand through the back.

  “Oooh, how exciting,” said Mum. “I want to see this, I’m going with them.” She trailed after the two men.

  “Me n’all,” croaked Granny, rolling up her sleeves and following close behind, leaving me and Grandad alone.

  “While they’re gone,” I eyed the suit of armour nearby, “why don’t you ask that ghost if he saw anything?”

  “What, Sir Bampot? No thanks.” Grandad shook his head.

  “Oh, go on,” I whined. “It’s important!”

  Grandad sighed, then blinked his eyes. “There. You ask him!”

  I found myself staring at the grotesque face poking out of the helmet visor, one jelly-like eyeball swinging loose.

  “Fine,” I said. Up close, I could see the skull had tiny phantom maggots crawling out of it. “Excuse me, sir. I don’t suppose you saw who stole the silver bell?”

  “I saweth naught!” the spectre growled. “It was too darketh!”

  “Are you sureth?” Oops. Adding ‘–eth’ to the end of everything seemed to be catching.

  “Are you mocking how I speaketh?!” he hissed. “How dareth you challenge me! Cometh here whilst I smite you.”

  “See! He’s at the smiting again!” Grandad backed away. “You’ll get no sense out of that one.”

  “Do you know what,” I said, throwing up my hands, “Grandad, you’re right. This is useless. This witness is useless.”

  “Useless-eth,” corrected Grandad. He blinked, and the other ghost was gone.

  “Hmmm…” I propped myself against the back of one of the armchairs. My mind was whirring like clockwork. I imagined pieces of a jigsaw emerging from a mist and shifting around, trying to find their place: the Yummy Cola letter, Sharkey’s poisoning, that Chase woman poking around in Starkey’s room. And now this, a priceless silver bell, stolen. All of it must be connected, but how? Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence that all of this had happened on the very day we’d arrived? Try as I might, nothing fitted together. Not yet.

  “OK,” said Grandad attempting to lean against a sofa, but failing. “The Yummy Cola letter was probably fake. Which means someone wanted you here, but why?”

  “Oh, so now you agree, the letter’s fake?”

  Before Grandad had the chance to reply, I felt the armchair behind me move. It seemed we weren’t alone.

  You’re a strange boy, aren’t you?” It was Mrs Hackenbottom, sitting with her feet up, wearing a pink fluffy dressing gown and matching slippers, and reading an Agatha Christie book. I had no idea she was there, and neither did Grandad, because he jumped. When the alarm had gone off earlier, lots of the guests had appeared, milling about in the lobby for a bit before the alarm was shut off again and the excitement died down, when most of them returned to bed. Mrs Hackenbottom must have been sitting there the whole time, listening, snooping. I had to hand it to her for her detective skills. If even I didn’t notice her, that was some top-level sneaking.

  “Talking to yourself?” she continued.

  “Och! Not that old bag!” cried Grandad.

  Mrs Hackenbottom hauled herself noisily to her feet, and waved her book around. “I’m quite the amateur detective too, you know. Why don’t we investigate this matter together?”

  “Erm, I…” The old crone had caught me off guard.

  She hobbled round the armchair and linked her arm in mine. “So it’s a deal, we’ll solve this case together.”

  “No way!” Grandad shook his head. “I am not investigating anything with that woman. She’s too nosy for her own good, and she spits food when she eats!”

  “It’ll be fun,” Mrs Hackenbottom cackled, crinkling her mouth into a satisfied grin.

  Chapter 10

  The Reeky Ruins

  Morning finally arrived, and I rolled out of bed and rubbed my eyes. The sun was streaming through the gaps in the curtains, and Grandad was reclined on an armchair, floating, his hands clasped behind his head.

  “Thought you’d never wake up!” he quipped.

  I glanced quickly over at Granny’s bamboo roll mat. It was empty. She’d probably been up for ages. She usually woke at dawn for karate training.

  “Did you manage to find anything?” I’d asked Grandad to keep an eye on things overnight, and try and speak to some of the ghosts. He hadn’t been very happy about that.

  “Not really,” he said. “The place is stinking with ghosts, but most of them are just phantoms.” From what I could understand, there weren’t many ghosts like Grandad, who you could have a conversation with, and who behaved pretty much like they did when they were alive. Most of them were just imprints, reflections of people reliving moments from time gone by – phantoms, as Grandad called them. You couldn’t communicate with them, and they didn’t communicate with you.

  “There is one guy wandering around the first floor with a cigar and wearing a smoking jacket, who looks like he might have been shot. And there is another man, a tall man, who haunts the kitchen carrying a pail. I think he took kicking the bucket literally. There are a few more, but they are all like our friend in the suit of armour.”

  “You got nothing out of them? Nothing at all?”

  He shrugged. “There is a strange Grey Lady. Horrible she is. She stands outside, in front of the window, her face pressed up against the glass, staring in. She seems to want me to follow her somewhere.”

  “You should have gone with her,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? Follow a strange ghost? Not on your nelly.”

  “How about Starkey’s ghost? Isn’t he still here?”

  Grandad shook his head.

  There was a knock at the connecting door. “Jay?” It was Mum. “You coming for breakfast?”

  “I’ll see you down there,” I shouted, and started pulling on my clothes and trainers. Then I flicked through the pages of my notebook. “We need to know more about Starkey. Someone wanted him dead. We need to know why.”

  “Dead men don’t talk,” Grandad declared wisely. “Maybe he knew something… about something.”

  “Useful. But no, I’m pretty sure it’s all linked to the hotel,” I said. “There’s the burglary, then the fact that Shand is bankrupt and trying to sell the hotel. We should think about motive. Who’s got the motive to poison guests, and who’s got the motive to steal the silver bell?”

  Grandad clapped his hands together. “How about that Lord Brightburgh guy?”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking.” I threw open the curtain to see Granny in the middle of the wide lawn, furiously going through her karate moves while a peacock strutted around her, spreading its feathers. “He said it was disgraceful, what they’ve done to this place. Maybe he wants them to go out of business so that he can take back his old ancestral pile.”

  “Ooh, he could have staged the break in,” suggested Grandad. “You cannot get more of an inside job than the old Lord of the Manor who lives next door.”

  “I bet he’d love to get that silver bell back – for sentimental reasons. It must be very hard seeing someone else walk off with the family silver and then flaunt it in your face. Except, he was away last night. Edinburgh, he said. If that’s true then he might have an alibi.”

  “Hmm…” Grandad stroked his chin like the detectives on the TV shows he liked to watch. “So how could Lord Brightburgh have stolen the bell if he wasn’t around?”

  Downstairs in the lobby, the glass from the shattered display cabinet had been cleaned up, and there was no sign of any police.
There was a chill in the air, as if someone had left a back door open somewhere. Shand was sitting at a desk behind reception, while the receptionist, Lucy was stomping around slamming drawers and fuming.

  “You can’t talk to me like that!” she growled through clenched teeth.

  “I only asked you to pass the stapler,” replied Shand.

  “Oh, well, one day,” she seethed, jabbing her finger at him, “things are going to change. Maybe I’ll be the one ordering you about.”

  She landed the stapler with a dunt in front of Shand, and then stomped off out the back.

  Shand threw out his arms in protest. “WHAT?!”

  Grandad shooed me away from the reception desk towards the front door. “I want to show you something.”

  Outside, the sky was blue but the air was chilly, and a lone crow cawed in the trees. “Up there.” Grandad pointed up at some old ruins clustered round a hillock a few hundred yards away. The glistening waters of Loch Lomond, and its forested islands, stretched out behind. “That’s where she wants me to go.”

  “Who?”

  “The Grey Lady, the one I told you about.”

  “Oh.” Apart from the view up the loch, the ruins themselves looked bleak and uninteresting. Arek, the porter was nearby, leaning over the boot of a hatchback loading up suitcases.

  “I’ll ask,” I said, and walked up to Arek. “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?” Arek looked up, breathing heavily.

  “See those ruins?” I pointed up at them. “Any idea what they are?”

  “That is just the old tower.” His face darkened. “I would not go up there if I were you.”

  “Why not?”

  He sniffed. “It is not safe.” He pointed his finger at a red danger sign hanging on the fence. Then he heaved another suitcase into the boot.

  “Did something happen up there?”

  He wiped his brow with his sleeve, and spoke quietly. “The lady died up there a few years ago. They said it was a freak accident. Part of the ruins collapsed. They say it is safe now, but I for one would not go up there.” He shivered.