Death by Soup Read online

  I ducked out of sight. “She’s muscling in on our investigation,” I said. She was after Shand, which was understandable. I wanted to check him out more myself, but right now we were following a hot trail of our own. “Later. Come on!” I continued down the corridor after Parek.

  At the end, I caught a glimpse of the waiter as he pushed his way through a narrow white door that looked like the entrance to a store cupboard. Why would he go in there?

  I paused outside the door and listened – nothing. I knocked – still nothing. Then I quietly pushed it open.

  Inside was an empty store cupboard. Brooms were stacked on one side. There was a manky old sink and a mirror. And there was no sign of Parek.

  “Where did he go?” asked Grandad, which was exactly what I was thinking.

  Then I saw that there was another door inside, an even narrower one. I pulled it open. A set of very narrow, very old stone steps led upwards. “Wow!” I knew this place had to be full of stuff like this. “A secret passageway!”

  “Come on then!” said Grandad, and I led the way up.

  The stairs wound endlessly upwards. I guessed that in the old days these must have been the servants’ stairs or something. Eventually we came to another door, which opened onto a silent corridor.

  Grandad floated out behind me. “Where are we?”

  “Top floor,” I whispered. I could tell because of the dormer windows looking out onto the grounds. “Also the staff quarters.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I pointed out the décor, the walls and the carpet, which were a lot less plush than the rest of the hotel. The wallpaper was faded and the carpet looked like a relic from the 1970s.

  “Ooh, nice carpet,” said Grandad, which proved my point.

  I sneaked down the corridor and peeked around a corner to see Parek halting at a door right at the far end.

  “That must be his room,” guessed Grandad. He floated ahead. “I will sneak in behind him.”

  As the waiter opened the door, Grandad gave me the thumbs up, then snuck in at his back. The door slammed shut. I crept along the corridor and stuck my ear against it, listening.

  It was only a few seconds before Grandad’s voice called from the other side. “Jayesh! You can come in, it is unlocked. But be quiet!”

  I grasped the handle and twisted gently. The door edged open and Grandad’s face peered out. “Quick!” He beckoned me inside.

  It was a large room with two twin beds: one, I assumed, for each of the brothers. Parek’s clothes were scattered over one of them. The bathroom door was shut and I could hear taps running on the other side.

  “He is definitely our chief suspect,” nodded Grandad. “You know what he just said there when he was getting undressed? He kept saying ‘I hate him! I hate him!’ under his breath, then he said, ‘I know what I’d like to do to you, Shand!’ And he grabbed a towel, like this.” Grandad made a violent twisting motion with his hands.

  “Maybe Shand’s just a really bad boss,” I whispered.

  “You know what else?” said Grandad, but before he could go on the sound of the running taps suddenly stopped. Grandad made a shoo-ing motion and I jumped behind an armchair, just as the bathroom door opened.

  The waiter was muttering to himself as he came out, “Always giving orders… Fetch this! Carry this! Lift that!” He growled with anger. “Oh, I HATE him so much!”

  “YESSS!” Grandad shouted. “I knew it!”

  I sensed Parek turning towards the window, where he had his back to me, so I peeked over the top of the armchair. Except there was no waiter there.

  It was the porter, Arek – Parek’s brother.

  “Wait!” Grandad nipped into the bathroom, craned his head round, and nipped back out again. “That is what I was going to tell you. The waiter went in there carrying the porter’s uniform. And, wait for it, there is no one else in the bathroom.”

  Arek turned back, fixing his collar, and I ducked. His footsteps crossed the room, and he flung open the door and walked out.

  “Which means…” Grandad continued.

  I stepped out from behind the armchair. “The waiter and the porter are the same man!”

  Chapter 13

  The Deadly Gargoyle

  “Oh come on, boy,” tutted Grandad as I vaulted the driveway fence, ignoring the red ‘DANGER’ sign, and marched across the grass. We were heading towards the ruins. Grandad of course didn’t need to jump the fence, he just floated through it. “You have got to admit, on a scale of 1–10 for suspicious, that Arek – or Parek – is a 9 at least.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “Plenty of people don’t like their bosses. Anyway, there’s no evidence linking him.” We’d rummaged through his drawers, finding payslips for both Arek and Parek, but little else.

  “He is a crook!!” said Grandad.

  “Yeah, he’s obviously a fraud. One guy claiming two salaries. But apart from that, I’m not sure he’s a murderer – or a thief. We just need more evidence.” Evidence that I was in a hurry to obtain, before suspicion came any closer to landing on me.

  “At least we know now why he sweats so much,” Grandad laughed.

  We came to the ruins, mostly just a pile of old stones covered in moss and lichen. Tendrils of mist were feeling their way across the deserted remains.

  “Look.” I kicked over a broken stone carving, which looked like a kind of grinning imp, resting its head in its hands and sticking out its tongue. Grandad shrugged. We took a few more steps through the mist, then he flung his arm across my chest, forgetting that I would just walk through it. “There she is again.” Grandad was staring at a fixed point a few metres away, next to the wall.

  “What does she look like?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you.” He blinked.

  Suddenly, I could see her. A faint grey figure of a middleaged woman, she looked to be wearing a wax jacket and wellies, and carrying a dog lead in her hand.

  “Can she see us? Can we talk to her?”

  “No, she is a phantom, like Chase Whitton’s ghost. And she is very faint. Almost faded away completely.”

  From what Grandad told me, most phantoms are like footprints in the sand, they slowly get washed away by time.

  The woman jerked her head up, staring at a spot where a wall might once have stood. “No!” she cried. “Not… GARGOYLE!” She threw her hands up to protect her face and screamed.

  Grandad glanced again at the grinning stone imp and whistled. “Death by gargoyle, that’s a new one.”

  “Did someone murder you?” I asked the ghost. “Who was it?” But the ghost didn’t respond. I turned to Grandad, thinking he’d be more useful, being a ghost himself. “Ask her who! Ask her who!”

  “I am trying! I am trying! But she is hardly there at all. She is just like a recording, playing over and over again to anybody who will listen.”

  “S… S… Sunshine girl!” declared the ghost, floating slowly towards us. “The sunshine girl!”

  “The sunshine girl, eh? Well, that could be a clue,” said Grandad.

  “Yes, but for what? Who knows what she’s talking about?” I answered.

  “I must tell them, I must warn them,” repeated the woman, and she passed through us, heading towards the house.

  “There she goes.” Grandad watched her with sad eyes. “Off to the house to stare in through the windows, trying to warn people of the danger. She’ll be back here in a second, just wait.”

  Sure enough, the phantom returned across the grounds, wailing, “Danger, danger!” Then she passed above the ruins and hovered over the crest of the hill, silhouetted against the blue waters of the loch, where she pointed down at something.

  Grandad floated over to the edge of the steep slope on the other side of the ruins. “She is pointing down there.”

  I joined him, staring down towards the bushes and trees at the bottom.

  “Down.” Grandad made a downward motion with his hands. “We need to go down and
see.”

  “Come on, then.” I started edging down the slope.

  “Ugh! I hate being a ghost,” said Grandad, following behind me.

  “It’s alright for you, you can just float,” I replied. “I have to climb all the way down, then climb back up again.”

  At the bottom, Grandad stopped and looked around. We were both waiting for the Grey Lady to show us, or at least be slightly more specific as to what we should be looking for, but she didn’t. Instead, she just turned and floated back up the hill, before disappearing altogether.

  “Why here?” I asked. There was nothing except rocks and mud and a few sheep droppings.

  “I do not know.” Grandad shrugged. “And I do not think you will get anything else from her. She is just a poor lost spirit. She gets squashed by a gargoyle. Then she goes to the house and she searches for someone to tell, to warn. She comes back up to the ruins, and then she goes down here.” We stood for a moment, listening to the sounds of cows mooing somewhere on the distant banks of the loch. Grandad pulled out his sunglasses and put them on. “I hate the countryside.”

  I kicked around for a few moments, nosing into the bushes. You never know what you might find. Maybe she was trying to lead us to an important clue. “I wonder,” I said. “If that ghost really is Lady Brightburgh, and she really was killed by a gargoyle, then is her death all those years ago linked to what’s going on here today?”

  “I would not bet against it, son,” said Grandad. “I would not bet against it at all.”

  Chapter 14

  The Terrible Tandem

  Grandad halted abruptly as we were halfway back across the field. “Look.”

  He nodded towards the tail end of a car that was parked round the side of the manor house, a green Triumph Spitfire. The other half of the car was obscured by a line of trees. “That car was not there when we left.”

  The licence plate read:

  “LB 1 – Lord Brightburgh. He must’ve come back.”

  I could see two figures moving about through the trees. “Come on, let’s snoop.” I ran to my left, ducking behind a hedge that ran parallel to the house. Grandad wasn’t ducking, he had no need to. “What do you see?” I asked.

  “It’s him, alright. He’s talking to that receptionist.”

  “Lucy.” The goth.

  “They’re facing the other way, so you can probably sneak a quick look, but be careful.”

  I peeked over the top of the hedge to find we were overlooking a cottage garden. A line of tall sunflowers led up to the bright yellow door of a cottage. The cottage was attached to the main house. I assumed this was where Lord Brightburgh lived.

  The two of them were standing close together next to an open gate marked ‘PRIVATE’. Closer, I thought, than you’d expect two apparently unrelated people to stand. Friendly close, like they were sharing a secret. He lifted a small overnight bag from the car’s boot. There was something nagging at me, something at the back of my mind, something I was struggling to work out.

  Just then, Lucy turned in my direction. I ducked, fast enough, I hoped, that she wouldn’t have spotted me.

  Grandad sucked sharply through his teeth.

  “Did she see?” I whispered.

  “She saw something, cos she looked right at us, but I do not think she saw you. It is OK though, she turned away and kept talking.”

  A moment later, the pair separated. Lord Brightburgh went inside the cottage while Lucy turned and stomped off, up the drive and away from the house. “Maybe she was just telling him about the silver bell being stolen.”

  “Maybe,” I said, watching her disappear. There was something still nagging at me. Call it instinct, but it was leading me after her. “Hmm, I fancy a walk, don’t you?”

  Grandad nodded. “Aye, we will take a wander. See what she gets up to.”

  We trailed her out of the drive, down the road a bit, and into the village of Brightburgh. I had to walk fast to keep up. My thighs were aching by the time we got there. It was alright for Grandad, he could zoom along at any speed he wanted.

  I felt my phone vibrate. It was an antique phone Mum had given me to stay in contact and there was only one number I could dial from it – hers. There was no way to access the internet on it either. I pulled it out to see a text from Mum asking where I was.

  2K a walk 2 da village LOLZ, I replied.

  ‘LOLZ’ is a daft word Mum uses. It’s the kind of thing that would reassure her. Reassure, as in, I’m not on the trail of a potential murderer and there’s no serious possibility of me getting bumped off.

  She came back a minute later: OK. Then she added a whole screen of emojis, each one more ridiculous than the last.

  I had absolutely no idea what any of that meant.

  At the village green, we watched from the cover of a tree as Lucy pushed through a garden gate, stopping to chat with an older woman who was tending the garden outside.

  “That where she lives, do you think?”

  There was a kind of everyday familiarity in the way she spoke to the woman that told me she wasn’t just a friend or acquaintance. This was confirmed when Lucy pushed through the marigold-coloured door of the cottage and disappeared inside, leaving the woman to continue with her gardening.

  “Must be her mum, or something,” I said.

  I took a pew on a bench under cover of the trees and waited there for a while, but Lucy didn’t appear again.

  “Come on, let’s go up,” I said to Grandad.

  As I stepped onto the pavement and strolled along the fence, I was sure I saw a flash of a face at the window, but when I looked closer there was nothing. I stopped next to the woman, who was on her knees tending to a bed of sunflowers.

  “Hello.” I gave her a broad smile.

  She looked up at me directly. You can tell a lot from someone’s face. For example, from the narrowness of her eyes and her thin lips, I could tell that she was definitely Lucy’s mother. The name on the doorplate read: ‘Blair’.

  This was obviously the family home.

  She smiled. “Hello there.”

  “You’re Lucy’s mum.” I smiled back.

  “Yes, you’re looking for her?” She turned to the door, as if to go and call her.

  “No, no!” I waved my hands about. That was exactly what I didn’t want. “I’m just one of the guests up at the hotel.”

  “Oh, yes?” she said, probably a bit puzzled as to the point of this exchange.

  A moment of silence.

  “Awk-ward,” Grandad said in a sing-song voice.

  “So,” I continued. “Here I am, just hanging about. Thought I’d just say hello in passing.”

  “Well, erm, I’m pleased to meet you,” she said.

  I held my spot for a beat, still smiling like a maniac. “Do you know the manor at all?”

  Her face hardened and her lips narrowed. “More than most.”

  “Ooh, that was a cold look,” said Grandad. “Ask her more.”

  I gave her my full-on, wide-eyed little-boy look. “I saw Lord Brightburgh. I’ve never seen a real lord before. Do you know him?”

  Her brow creased scornfully, and the edges of her mouth turned down into a scowl. Now she looked even more like her daughter. “Oh, him,” she replied. “No, he’s not very nice.”

  She turned away, signalling the end of our conversation.

  “What you thinking?” Grandad asked.

  “I’m thinking… I could murder a roll and sausage,” I replied.

  A screech of brakes, and Mum suddenly appeared at my shoulder. She was on a bike. And not any normal kind of bike, but a tandem. “There you are, Jay. What are you up to?”

  “Just admiring the flowers, Mum.” I eyed the bicycle suspiciously. “You don’t expect me to get on that thing, do you?”

  She slapped the seat behind her and grinned. “I hired this little beauty from the hotel. Now, hop on.”

  Grandad burst out laughing. “Ha! I think she does!”

  She tightened he
r helmet strap, waiting for me to leap onto the saddle, which I didn’t. “Come on! The day is young and we have an abbey to visit.”

  “A what?” I said.

  “They have a beautiful ruined abbey here, just on the other side of the village.”

  “There’s no way I’m getting on that thing.” I folded my arms in protest.

  Mum beamed. “Fine, you can walk.” She pushed down on her pedals and cycled off. “I’ll race you!”

  Grandad groaned. “Uch! More ruins. More ghosts. I wish I were dead!”

  Chapter 15

  The Deadly Abbey

  We popped into the SPAR on the way through the village, but Mum had pedalled off ahead and I only had 59p.

  “In my day that was a lot of cash,” said Grandad.

  “Well, in my day it isn’t.”

  All I could afford was a bag of crisps, which I ripped open and consumed noisily, finishing the lot before we even passed the bin outside the shop. I sighed. “It’s no good. I’m still hungry.”

  We followed the brown tourist signs to the abbey, which sat on the grassy bank of the loch. All that was left of the building was the stone shell of a medieval nave, surrounded by lawns and trees and ancient gravestones.

  Mum was sprawled on a grassy bank beside her bike, her ankles crossed, and her face angled up at the sun. “Ahh! The energy in this place, it’s magical!”

  Grandad, on the other hand, looked like he was about to have a tooth extracted. “This place is HELL!” He gazed around nervously. “It might seem pretty to her, but this place is crawling. There are pure hunners of ghosts here. Hunners! Here, I will show you.” Before I could stop him, he blinked.

  Grandad was always prone to exaggeration, but this time I could see with my own eyes that he was telling the truth for once. There were hundreds of them: medieval men-at-arms waving swords, farmers wielding scythes, toothless old hags, one-eyed monks, you name it. They were all glaring at Grandad.