Tomorrow's Ghosts Page 5

  Except that he isn’t.

  Nor is he in evidence at breakfast the following morning. Not that this is unusual or of any concern to Xanthe who just uses his absence as an opportunity to boast, at Dannii’s expense, about Sebastien’s “huge popularity with his enormous circle of really fascinating friends,” before going on to add that unless Dannii makes more effort with her personal appearance and social skills, she risks being left on the shelf and becoming an old maid by the time she is thirty.

  “Yeah, right,” thinks Dannii, “and Seb’s popularity wouldn’t have anything to do with the way he chucks his money around – correction, his trust fund’s money – to buy some credibility and to try to keep in with his enormous circle of really fascinating friends!”

  Needless to say, Dannii’s father steadfastly ignores Xanthe’s comments, preferring instead to concentrate on eating his Kellogg’s Bran Flakes rather than say anything supportive about his daughter.

  “No change there then,” notes Dannii, who is by now so used to Xanthe’s sly digs that she’s developed a thick skin and just lets the insults ride over her. But, it did hurt at first.

  The day drags on.

  Lunch comes and goes but still no sign of Sebastien. Nobody worries as he often returns late the following day, after a night of clubbing in Ipswich. Of course Seb inevitably tries to pretend he’s spent the time making out with some hot chick or another though Dannii doubts any girl could ever be that desperate.

  But then the police arrive.

  It is around mid-afternoon, just as Xanthe and Dannii’s father are plugging in their iPods and settling down to their daily meditation hour.

  Sebastien, it transpires will never be coming home again. Well, at least not in one piece. At that very moment Sebastien is ten miles away. Lying dead at the centre of a clearing in Rendlesham Forest, surrounded only by police crime scene yellow tape and forensic investigators clad in white, disposable coveralls.

  Dannii watches, emotionlessly, as Xanthe goes to pieces and begins sobbing hysterically, while her father flaps around ineffectually. “Just as useless and lacking in any empathy for her as he is with me,” she thinks. And so it is that, after making a large pot of tea for everyone, Dannii finds herself being ushered into another room and being asked to help the police with their enquiries.

  Directly in front of her sits the senior officer: plain clothes, male, middle-aged, overweight, a detective chief inspector by rank and with just a touch of sour body odour. To his right is a uniformed officer: sergeant’s stripes, female, youngish, dyed jet-black hair, in a shade unknown to nature, scrunched back tightly to create a pony-tail-meets-Essex facelift effect. She is wearing too much mascara and has an ever-so-slightly turned up nose that reminds Dannii of a pig, which is appropriate in an inappropriate kind of way.

  The sergeant fires the first shot by asking Dannii about her relationship with the rest of the household.

  “Easy peasy,” says Dannii, “I’m the barely tolerated stepdaughter who was foisted on this household after my father divorced my mother. My father didn’t have much choice about the matter. Either take me in with his new wife or see me put into a home by social services. Thank God I got good grades and a scholarship to Uni, so I only have to tolerate them during the vacations. I’m like Harry Potter back from Hogwarts and having to spend his holidays with the Dursleys.”

  This clearly throws the two police officers, who don’t know whether to laugh or frown although it doesn’t deter DCI Plod from trying to go for the jugular with the next question.

  “You are asking me if I was jealous of Seb’s trust fund? Wow!” exclaims Dannii, “you have been doing your homework haven’t you? Or, let me guess, Seb’s reputation for being a fool with Xanthe’s first husband’s money had already come to your attention? He certainly attracted some dodgy hangers-on. Of course it would have been nice if my father had been a little more generous with me when he dumped Mum to run off with Xanthe but, hey, you can choose your friends but God picks your relatives. Besides, doesn’t the trust fund revert to Xanthe now?”

  The sergeant changes tack with the next question. “Did you and Sebastien share any interests?”

  “Incredible,” thinks Dannii to herself, “they are trying the Good Cop, Bad Cop routine. Don’t they know we’ve all seen this on TV?” before replying “No, not really. He was your typical spoilt, thick rich kid who wanted to be a party animal whereas I’m more of your geeky Goth chick who stays up half the night surfing the interwebs and listening to obscure emo bands nobody has ever heard of. Little Miss Danny-No-Mates is what Sebs calls me, I mean used to call me.”

  The two police officers say nothing and continue to stare expectantly.

  “However,” adds Dannii, “a couple of days ago I did spend some time with Seb helping him set up his new iPod. He’d lost his old one – or more likely had it nicked by one of his mates – and needed assistance setting up some new playlists, restoring his iTunes account and searching the web for other music download sites. Out of term time this bloody family treats me like their live-in IT support desk. That’s a joke by the way.”

  “Can you remember which sites he visited?” asks the sergeant, clearly unimpressed by Dannii’s attempts at humour.

  “Lighten up lady,” Dannii snaps back. “I’m nineteen-years-old. I come from a broken home. My stepbrother has just been found dead. And, despite the fact I even went to the trouble of making the pair of you mugs of tea, you have the nerve to start giving me the third-degree! Oh, and before you start lecturing me on my attitude, you maybe should have checked your facts a little more carefully. Then you might have spotted I’m studying law at Uni and you two are bang out of line when it comes to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

  “But, since it doesn’t matter one way or the other, no, I don’t know which sites Seb visited. We don’t, correction didn’t, share the same tastes in music – or anything else much. Seb being Seb, though, he’d have tried to find something that was free. He was a tight sod with his money when he didn’t have an audience to watch him spending it. Why don’t you check his browser history or see if he bookmarked any of the sites?”

  3. Blood in the Muesli

  Dannii, her father and the two police officers are in Sebastien’s bedroom hovering over his laptop, examining his most recent web browsing activities. The history shows all the usual suspects: iTunes, FMA, Last.FM, Napster, Amazon, Jamendo, SoundCloud and MP3 Unsigned plus something unusual.

  “That one,” says the DCI pointing at the web address SatanicMajesticRequests listed in the browser history. “Isn’t that the title of an old Rolling Stones’ album?”

  “You’re thinking of Their Satanic Majesties Request,” replies Dannii, “but Sebastien wasn’t into the Stones. Besides, I think that’s one of those Pirate Bay/Silk Roadie-type illegal file sharing and downloading sites.

  “Used to conceal illegal activities, such as copyright infringement?” asks the sergeant.

  “Exactly,” says Dannii. But it is irrelevant anyway for when she hits the Go button, the browser throws up a 404 Page Cannot Be Found error message.

  “Now what?” says the DCI.

  “Sebastien was bragging how he’d found a play-now-pay-later site that allowed you to rip and burn tracks for free.” replies Dannii. “You remember Dad, we were arguing about it over breakfast the other day. I said he must be mad because those sites are run by out-and-out criminals and there is always a catch. And a price you might not like to pay.”

  “Wasn’t that the day he cut himself on a knife?” adds Dannii’s father.

  “Oh yes, he managed to get blood all over his muesli,” replies Dannii, trying not to snigger.

  4. Hobnobs and Cloven Hoofs

  Later the next day, back at the Woodbridge police station, where the incident room had been set up, the DCI is discussing the case with his sergeant.

  “Weird. Apart from some animal tracks, cloven-hoofed so it must have been sheep or goats or something, there
was just the one set of footprints at the scene and they belonged to the deceased. The way the grass was all flattened and bloodied, it looked like he’d just danced and danced and danced around in circles until he dropped down dead.”

  “Drugs?” the sergeant suggests.

  “My first thought as well, particularly as he must have been in agony as the flesh on his feet started to strip away but the blood tests and toxicology all came up negative. However forensics did find abnormally high levels of lactic acid in the body.”

  “That’s a by-product of excessive exercise. It’s called anaerobic respiration, or something,” says the sergeant. “But don’t you normally get a bad bout of the cramps to warn you to ease off?”

  “Exactly but he just kept on going and going until a combination of heart failure and the shock from the blood loss killed him. How on earth did he manage to keep on dancing?”

  “There are also those curious marks on his wrists: heavy bruising consistent with something tightly gripping him there. I suppose that whatever caused them could have kept dragging him round?” suggests the sergeant.

  “But we’ve already been over this, there were no other footprints found at the scene,” her colleague replies, before slumping back in his chair to finish his mug of tea and the last remaining Hobnob biscuit in the packet.

  5. The Witch in the Horsebox

  “Let’s just go over the known facts one more time,” says the DCI, as he and the sergeant discuss the case. “This kid has a brand new iPod. He was still wearing it when we found him. Yet the battery was fully discharged and there was not a single tune to be found in any of his playlists despite the fact we know he had spent some of the previous day downloading files? So does this mean he spent the entire night dancing himself to death listening to an empty MP3 player? Or that on the point of death he somehow contrived to delete his entire playlist?”

  “I’m not sure you can even do that with the iPod Nano model Sebastien had with him,” interrupts the sergeant. “You need to have it connected up to a computer and running the right software or else synced with iTunes. Well something like that. Perhaps the player was defective?”

  “No,” her colleague replies, “forensics checked that out too. Apart from the dead battery, it was in perfect working order.”

  “Aren’t there some other weird stories associated with Rendlesham Forest?” the sergeant asks.

  “You’re thinking of the UFO sightings in 1980? You are not suggesting the culprits were little green men?” says the DCI.

  “Well, you do hear these reports about people being abducted by aliens and subjected to medical experiments and of cattle mutilations at the scene of flying saucer sightings?”

  “Don’t even think of going there. We’ll have a media circus, and the chief constable, down on our heads like a ton of bricks faster than you can say alien anal probes. Next thing, you’ll be telling me all those Saxon burials at Sutton Hoo were really just sacrifices to Ancient Astronauts and early extraterrestrial visitors!”

  “Well, it does makes you wonder.”

  The two officers sit back and crack open another packet of Hobnobs.

  “What about the step-sister Dannii? She’s a right stroppy little madam. If she’s like that now, she’s going to be a total pain in the arse if she ever qualifies as a lawyer and gets to appear in court. She also seems to know an awful lot about the dark side of the internet, all that stuff about illegal download sites.”

  “Keep your hair on sergeant. With hindsight, I don’t think we handled her as best we could or should have. It wasn’t until we were halfway through the interview that the penny dropped and I realised where I’d heard her name before and who she was. By the way, she’s had a change of heart. She phoned up a few minutes ago to apologise. Said she was sorry for the way she behaved yesterday but had been under a lot of stress at home recently, what with the awkward relationship with her stepmother and now Sebastien’s death.

  “She also said she’d thought of something else that might help us with our investigation and would be coming over here later today. Funny girl, there’s something odd about her but I still feel sorry for her. There again, her mother is a witch.”

  “What! You are kidding me? I know when I first put in to transfer up here to the Suffolk Constabulary, my old muckers in the Essex force warned me I’d be going back in time to a land that modern policing had forgot. But I didn’t think witchcraft was still on the charge sheet. So tell me, what is the mother like? All slinky in revealing, black satin nightgowns and gold pentacles, casting runes wherever she goes? Like Caroline Munro out of a 1970s Hammer Horror movie?”

  “I’ll choose to ignore that remark about the land that time forgot but you couldn’t be more wrong if you tried. Dannii’s mother’s not into Black Magic. No, she claims she’s a hedge-witch practising Green Witchcraft. You know, making potions and lotions from plants and herbs found growing in the hedgerows and fields around here. She’s what people in this part of the world used to call a Cunning Woman. All harmless stuff although I think she’s actually more interested in getting high on magic mushrooms and home-grown wacky-baccy. As for slinky black satin! More of a New Age Traveller happy-hippy Earth Mother type. Hair in dreadlocks, smelling of patchouli oil. You know the sort.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve had to deal with more than my fair share of them! But go on, don’t hold out on me. Tell me more.”

  “Well,” says the DCI, it was a couple of years ago. The mother had pretty much split up with Dannii’s father by then and was travelling to all the festivals and raves, flogging home-made love potions and casting magical spells out of the back of a converted horsebox. One of those old wooden bodied ones with some living space in the front.

  “Anyway somebody decided to hold an illegal rave on the beach at Dunwich to celebrate Midsummer and next thing we knew there was a New Age Travellers’ camp squatting in the local car park. We were called in to help the bailiffs when the court granted them the eviction order. That’s when I first encountered Dannii’s mother. Rapped on the van door to tell her to move off the site but someone inside shouted ‘Fuck off, you fucking pig’ so I went inside. She was lying in bed, half out of her head smoking a joint. But, when she saw me, up she leapt and started whacking me over the head with a wooden stick.

  “Naturally I nicked her for possession, as well as assaulting a police officer in the course of his duty and she got three months for her trouble. Funny thing was that when her case came up before the magistrates, she seemed more worried about what had happened to the lump of wood she’d been hitting me with. I’d bagged it as evidence however she said it was her magical staff and that if we didn’t return it, she’d take us to the European Court of Human Rights for discriminating against the religious beliefs of Wiccans.

  “Unfortunately, this is where it all kicked off for Dannii. Until then the parents had been playing pass-the-parcel, shuttling her between the family home, where her father was already shacked up with Xanthe, and her mother’s horsebox. After the mother was sent down, the father began divorce proceedings and as part of the settlement he was awarded custody of the kid. Not that he had much choice in the matter, as otherwise social services would have taken Dannii into care. I bet having Dannii move in permanently went down like a cup of cold sick with Miss Xanthe del Monte. By the way, what kind of name is that for a woman with a Geordie accent?”

  “Actually inspector, I checked her out on the Police National Computer. Guess what, she has form. She has a Geordie accent because she’s a Geordie chancer. First nicked when she was fourteen for shoplifting Rimmel mascara from a Newcastle branch of Boots. She was just plain Sandra back then.”

  “Then what?”

  “She’s smart, that’s what. Realised she could scrub up well and started sleeping her way up the social ladder. The usual. Footballers and Z-list celebrities. Somewhere along the way, Sandra became Sandie and finally Xanthe. Struck lucky with her first husband, he was into computer software and when they split,
she scored herself a nice settlement, as well as a trust fund for the lately departed Sebastien.

  “As for Dannii’s father? He’s into property development though possibly not as well-heeled as he’d like to make out. Caught out by the property market crash and now sitting on a pile of negative equity. Let’s hope Xanthe never discovers that thanks to his life insurance policies, he’s currently worth a lot more dead than he is alive.”

  “Yes, let’s hope so indeed,” says the inspector with a faraway look in his eyes. In fact he is so distracted that he fails to notice the Hobnob he’d been dunking in his tea has started to dissolve.

  6. Blood on the Keyboard

  Dannii hates it when that scheming, gold-digging tart Xanthe refers to her mother as a troublesome witch. How dare she? Of course her mother is a witch but that isn’t the point. It is the derogatory way Xanthe talks about her, completely ignoring the fact her mother belongs to an ancient tradition dedicated to easing human suffering and bringing joy into the world.

  She smiles to herself. As much as she loves her mother, Dannii knows most of the stuff she spouts about witchcraft is just New Age bollocks. As for bringing joy to the world, her mother had become a bit of a sad sap whose main interest was bringing joy into her own life, ideally by getting high.

  “And whose fault is that?” asks Dannii to herself. “Her bloody weak-willed father and that bitch Xanthe, that’s who! If they think my mother is a troublesome witch, then by Abaddon they ain’t seen nothing yet. I’ll give them a lesson in troublesome witchcraft they’ll never forget.”

  All that time Dannii had spent rattling around in her mother’s crappy horsebox hadn’t been entirely wasted. She’d watched carefully as her mother had mixed her magic potions, crafted her spells and cast her runes. Late into the night, when everyone thought she was fast asleep in the space above the horsebox’s cab, Dannii had listened to her mother discussing magic with other members of her craft. She’d also found and read from cover-to-cover three books, containing what her mother quaintly referred to as forbidden knowledge, that had been hidden away from prying eyes in a secret compartment beneath the horsebox’s front seat. It was the same compartment her mother used to hide her best quality marijuana.