Walking with Ghosts

For the greater part of her life she had paid lip service to middle-class good taste, but since getting involved in the PI business she had let all that go. This morning she wore a wide-brimmed hat, shades, and a bright red T-shirt under a black velvet trouser suit. She’d clipped a thin gold rope around her neck, and she had rings on seven of her fingers. Her lips were outlined with peachy pink lipstick, which somehow contrived to highlight the slight gap between her two front teeth.
    ‘You look stunning,’ Sam told her.
    ‘I know, and it took a long time,’ she said, ducking under his arm and heading for the stairs. ‘How’s Dora?’ It was a rhetorical question, which Sam didn’t attempt to answer. Celia was sixty-nine years old, she drove an ancient black MG with no heating, and she only listened when she wanted to.
    At the top of the stairs she stopped and turned around. ‘I know where everything is,’ she said. ‘I don’t have anything else planned today, so take your time.’ She flashed him a smile designed to melt an iceberg. *
     
    *
     
    Geordie was using the Montego, so Sam got his bike out of the shed. Diana had found the address for Pammy Shelton, the girl who had been keen on Billy before he did his disappearing act. Although it was seven years ago, the telephone directory still had Pammy’s parents listed at the same address. Sam had resisted the temptation to telephone, knowing from long experience that a face-to-face was the best route to information.
    He took the cycle track along the river, leaving it at Water End and carrying his bike up the stone steps. The house was large, five bedrooms at a guess, built of custom bricks with a slight sheen to their surface. Carefully tended roses were blooming in the garden, on both sides of the path. The net curtain in the ground-floor window moved slightly as he approached the front door.
    He hit the bell and listened to an old-fashioned chime, like the prelude to Big Ben’s gong. Kind of thing would drive you crazy if you lived with it. Unless you didn’t get any visitors.
    There was a scratching sound on the other side of the door, then it was opened wide by a handsome woman in her forties. Dark hair with the occasional grey wisp. What looked like dried mud on her jeans, and behind her a chemical smell, some kind of air freshener.
    ‘Mrs Shelton?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘My name’s Sam Turner. I’m looking for Pammy Shelton. Your daughter?’
    The woman’s face changed. It was as if the blood had been sucked out of her in front of his eyes. She reached forward and put her hand on the door-frame to support herself. But it wasn’t enough. Her knees buckled, and Sam took a step forward and offered his arm, fearing she would faint. There was a chair in the hallway, beside a telephone table, and he lowered her into it. ‘Can I get you something?’ he asked. ‘A glass of water?’
    He left her in the chair and went through to the kitchen. He found a breakfast mug with a picture of a cherry on it rinsed it under the tap and half filled it with water.
    ‘I’m going to need something stronger than that,’ said Mrs Shelton. She had left the hallway, closed the front door and followed him into the kitchen. Now she walked through an alcove to a sitting room and took a bottle of vodka from a glass cabinet. She waved the bottle at Sam. ‘You’ll join me?’
    ‘No, thanks. Are you OK?’
    ‘Give me a second.’ She poured a double and a half into a leaded glass, took a good swallow and let herself sink into a deeply upholstered black leather chair. ‘Sit down,’ she said to Sam, waving with the bottle in the direction of a low settee.
    There were eight bottles on the floor, beneath the cabinet. A group of three, then a gap and a group of two, then another gap and a single bottle. After that there was a flute case and two more bottles. Sam had a look-see what they were. The first group were Côtes de Luberon, a Navarra, and Bulgarian Russe, all from Sainsbury’s.
    Then there was a Santa Ema 1990, and a Beaujolais Villages. The Santa Ema wasn’t from Sainsbury’s. The single bottle was La Mancha. After the flute case was a bottle of Campari with only two inches in the bottom, and two thirds of a bottle of Ginger Wine. We weren’t talking serious drinking here.
    Sam settled himself into the low settee, watching a shoal of brightly coloured tropical fish travel the length of an aquarium that spanned the wall behind Mrs Shelton. She took another