In the Company of Ghosts (Book 1 of In the Company of Ghosts)

In the Company of Ghosts

#1 in the Agatha Witchley Mysteries

Stephen Hunt

Green Nebula

If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the Parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

- Little Dorrit. 1856. Charles Dickens.

IN THE COMPANY OF GHOSTS

Book 1 in the Agatha Witchley Mysteries series.

First published in 2014 by Green Nebula Press

Copyright © 2014 by Stephen A. Hunt

Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press

The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

To follow Stephen on Twitter: http://twitter.com/s_hunt_author

To follow Stephen on FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/SciFi.Fantasy

To help report any typos, errors and similar in this work, use the form at http://www.stephenhunt.net/typo/typoform.php

To receive an automatic notification by e-mail when Stephen’s new books are available for download, use the free sign-up form at http://www.StephenHunt.net/alerts.php

For further information on Stephen Hunt’s novels, see his web site at www.StephenHunt.net

Praise for Stephen

‘Mr. Hunt takes off at racing speed.’

- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Hunt’s imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’

- TOM HOLT

‘All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.’

- DAILY MAIL

‘Compulsive reading for all ages.’

- GUARDIAN

‘An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.’

- THE TIMES

‘Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.’

- TIME OUT

‘Studded with invention.’

-THE INDEPENDENT

‘To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement… a wonderful escapist yarn!’

- INTERZONE

‘Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks… affecting and original.’

- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

‘A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.’

—RT BOOK REVIEWS

‘A curious part-future blend.’

- KIRKUS REVIEWS

‘A ripping yarn … the story pounds along… constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked… the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.’

- SFX MAGAZINE

‘Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.’

- SF REVU

Contents

1. A Delicate Noose

2. Dancing With Niven

3. Mrs Witchley’s Other Prison

4. The Firehall

5. The Mirror Man

6. Suspicious Minds

7. The mystery deepens...

Chapter 1

A Delicate Noose

Gary Doyle was impressed. It was only a toilet, but he had to admit, it was one sodding impressive toilet. If Doyle had succumbed to the persistent stabbing pain in his side he suspected might be bowel cancer and woken up in heaven itself this morning, Saint Peter’s lavatorial facilities at the pearly gates would hardly have seemed less impressive. Taps sculpted like liquid metal. A wall-hung basin with gold inserts, a serpentine heating rail coiled with towels as soft as kitten fur. Everything discreetly stamped with unfamiliar designer names. VitrA ? Hansgrohe? Is that a bad cough or the apology a German makes after he steps on your toes?

Doyle was torn between serious bog envy and investigating the contents of the toilet bowl lurking below his posterior. Gary Doyle had become the Nostradamus of irregular bowel movements. He was the Astrologer Royal of his toilet’s contents, examining the celestial mechanics of what swirled in and out of the porcelain throne. Tea leaves to a flipping fortune-teller. And through such random spatterings of fate, he divined the level of pressure he suffered on his current case. The state of my illness. The progress of the suspected cancer that no sodding doctor in the health service seemed able to track down and diagnose. His wife, Emily, would be able to sue one day soon. She’ll assemble all the useless quacks who prodded and probed me, but who can never find the illness eating away my insides, collect them all on the steps of a courthouse. Yes, she’ll be able to take the medical establishment to the cleaners for gross negligence one day soon. Pity that I’ll be dead. But you can’t have everything. He reached out and touched the silky smooth toilet paper hanging from the platinum roller. Doyle was looking forward to emptying half the roll after he stopped doing an impression of a Shetland pony emptying its bowels over a paddock. Like wiping my arse with velvet. It was the kind of toilet paper only one of the richest people in the world could afford. I wonder where it comes from? Not Tesco, that much is sure. Not even the John Lewis Partnership. Maybe there was a craftsman somewhere, an artisan lovingly tending a paper-mill capable of this level of sorcery; producing such softness in paper. Wrapping the rolls in wax paper, hand delivering them to his client list of hedge fund managers, online tycoons and energy barons.

A hand knocked discreetly on the outside of the bathroom door, reminding Doyle that this was still work, potty break or no. Part of the dark orbit of his career, propelling the knives that slipped and stabbed his guts at inconvenient moments. The intrusion was enough to break Doyle’s reverie and make him gaze down at the yellow puddle of urine lapped at his shoes. Not his waters, not this time. It was the dead man’s urine, seeping under the toilet door. Doyle took the toilet paper, unfurling great sails of it. And why not? Forensics had already been through here, collecting every fingerprint and scrap of DNA they could Hoover up. Strutting around as though they were the stars of this particular soap opera. CSI West London. He stopped to admire the toilet’s flush. Smooth, powerful, almost noiseless. What feats of plumbing technology had been developed to accomplish something so minimalist yet cleanly efficient?

There was another knock, helping Doyle make up his mind. I won’t be availing myself of the bidet, not this time. Lord love a bidet. The blessing for everyone around the world with stress-shattered plumbing. Doyle unlocked the bathroom, pushing open the door. He stepped back into the class of office you could expect from the luxurious en-suite.

The room’s usual occupant, Simon Werks, slowly twisted around in front of the toilet door, remade into an ornament dangling from an undoubtedly priceless chandelier. His monitor had been left glowing in the office’s half-light. The flat screen on his desk was still displaying some quite dazzling filth on the screen, an HD bondage film dancing with animated adverts for correlated perversions. The lights were off in the room and wouldn’t come back on. An accidental side effect of the security lockdown the building’s guards had put in place after discovering Simon Werks’ corpse.

Helen Thorson stood on the other side of the desk, as neat and as immaculate as always, looking up at the twisting corpse as though the body was a piece of modern art she was considering buying. Thorson had the same near-quizzical look on her face that she always wore. Not quite disapproval, not quite surprise, not quite expectation. It was a look that seemed to challenge men. As if to say. I know I’m flawlessly exquisite . . . what are you going to do for me? What you got? Oh, is that it? You could put Thorson in an interrogation room with a warm-blooded male suspect and she never had to say a word. She could just shift her head and let her dark mane of hair fall down to one side of her face and stare at the man until he was possessed by an excruciating need to fill the silence.

Spads stood behind the woman, his laptop set up on a small folding metal table, cables connected underneath the desk to the dead man’s PC. You’re old school, like that, aren’t you, Spads. Paranoid enough to never trust a wireless connection when a hard line will do. Spads looked every bit the hacker, the geek’s geek. He was still enjoying his freedom. Up to a couple of weeks ago, he had fully been expecting to be extradited to the USA for his over-familiarity with the Pentagon’s firewalls. Spads wore a brown woolly hat – indoors, outdoors, hot or cold – which, he clearly believed, made him appear quite the rock star. Except that any musician’s dresser would have advised against growing a scratchy beard so weak a cat could have licked it off. And a rock star might have been able to afford a service wash for the coffee-stained green sweatshirt proudly emblazoned with the slogan, U.S.S. Sulaco. There was a strange ugliness to Spads . . . an out-of-proportion face where none of his planes or bony symmetry seemed in balance. It wasn’t quite the way a normal face should have appeared. Spads might have passed for Steve Buscemi’s brother if you squinted at him.

‘Well then,’ Doyle announced to the office. ‘I know what we’re meant to think. Captain Perv Pants here was beating his bishop to Big Jubblies Dot Com, having a gasper with a dog collar around his neck when the desk he was standing on gave way.’

Spads spoke without looking up from his laptop. Doyle had to strain to hear him. The hacker’s utterances frequently bordered on whispers. It’s like working with Marlon sodding Brando.

‘It was 4chanMovies.com.’ The hacker often interpreted his colleagues’ statements literally. Where he was positioned on the autistic spectrum, maybe that shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

‘What, you’re a connoisseur? You going to tell me what MILF stands for, I always wanted to know?’