Free In the Company of Ghosts by Stephen A Hunt Page B

easy. We’re not talking Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense here are we? I see dead people. You’re dead, I’m dead. This is the afterlife and all that bollocks.’
    ‘I’m very much alive and on this mortal coil, Mister Doyle. So are you. Sadly for Simon Werks, that’s a joy that someone has stolen from him.’
    ‘It’s all in the mind, love. Your subconscious makes the connections and joins the dots together, but if you want to believe that it’s Dean Martin appearing and singing the answers to you, well, fuck it if I can’t take a joke. Right now, I’ll take all the help I can get.’
    ‘Then we have an understanding, Mister Doyle. Just like the one that existed between Margaret and myself.’
    ‘Yeah, well she’s well out of it.’ Doyle turned his Chevy into a crescent drive, pulling up in front of a three storey-high Georgian pile, acres of white stone on the mansion’s frontage, a sweep of stairs leading up to a marble column-lined entrance that wouldn’t have looked out of place if Cinderella had been hopping down the treads on a single slipper. Doyle parked next to three identical government Range Rovers, the green of their chassis so dark they might as well have been black. Agatha got out. Behind her was a manicured lawn on a slope leading down to a river, elaborate topiary with Greek statues on either side.
    ‘Why do I feel like I’m on the set of Pride and Prejudice ?’ said Doyle.
    ‘I believe the current owner of this house is good for considerably more than four or five thousand a year, Mister Doyle.’
    ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a copper in possession of a good murder case will be in want of Saucy Simon’s twin spilling his rotten guts out to me,’ said Doyle.
    ‘Curtis Werks has just lost his brother, and twins are often very close,’ chided Agatha.
    ‘I’ll be the soul of tact and sensitivity… you might even think I’ve passed a sociology degree.’
    The imposing front doors were opened before Agatha had a chance to reach for the bell pull, not by a liveried butler, but by a tall shaven-headed man in a blue suit conservative enough for him to have run as a politician. Tight, tailored and trim. He wrinkled a nose that only a rugby player could love and touched his earphone as he motioned them inside. There was a low indecipherable buzz from a voice at the other end. ‘They’re in. Two for two. Car is stationary. Confirm no driver.’ The guard indicated a guest book on a stone-topped table. The book seemed an antiquated ritual in an age of biometric security. Agatha rummaged in her handbag for a pen and signed them both in.
    Doyle tutted in disapproval at her plump little Mont Blanc pen as she placed it back into her handbag. ‘More money than sense. What’s wrong with a forty pence Biro?’
    ‘You can’t put a price on quality, Mister Doyle.’
    Rugby man gave them the most trifling tilt of his head, then left, muttering into his earpiece and not bothering to check his charges were walking behind him. Follow the bullet-catcher, they did. Werks’ country pile loomed around them, as imposing inside as out. Their footsteps resounded loud across a large hall that could have been leased by the Natural History Museum to host a Diplodocus display, open doorways giving onto rooms with tall sash windows, period green plasterwork, polished floors and antique furniture. Shadows moved in doorways as they passed, and Agatha realized they weren’t nearly as alone as the echoing emptiness of the grand spaces suggested. Another man joined them as they progressed down the house’s main corridor along the ground floor, the newcomer sporting a grey three-piece suit, his hair running to silver around his cropped temples, a whippet to Rugby man’s bulldog. He boorishly didn’t bother to introduce himself, either.
    ‘I’ll need you not to take more than half an hour with Curtis Werks. We have other visitors due to arrive, and your presence cannot possibly