Stiff Lips

Here Robert turned his big brown eyes on her and looked soulful. 'Poor Ann-Marie.'

'How awful.'

He became brisk. 'That's one version, anyway. There are others. Some people say it was murder, others that it was suicide. Ann-Marie threw herself out of the window to get away from whatever was going on inside the room. These guys, they were into some weird stuff.'

'You mean drugs?'

'I mean Devil worship. Amateurs, the lot of them, but they really dug black magic, idolized people like Aleister Crowley. There were rumours about a hidden message on their album. Play it backwards, and you had a hotline to Satan.'

'And was there a message?'

Robert burst out laughing. 'Those boys didn't have a clue. They wouldn't have known Satan if he had come up and bitten them on the bum.'

'You can't possibly have ghosts,' I said to Sophie.

'Why not?'

I wanted to say, 'Because you're not creative enough.' But that would have been excessively cruel, so instead I told her she was too sensible.

'No, I'm not,' said Sophie. 'I like ghosts. They remind us there's a spiritual side to life, that death is not the end. We're all too hung up on material things.'

Look who's talking, I thought. Sophie was the original Material Girl. Her idea of a spiritual experience was walking through Harrods and being squirted by six different perfume saleswomen at once.

'They don't frighten you any more?'

'Not in the least,' said Sophie. 'They're noisy, but harmless.'

'How do you know they're harmless? That might be exactly what they want you to think. And then, just when you think it's safe to go back into the living-room…'

'These ghosts aren't capable of being devious,' Sophie said. 'They're stoned all the time, like your friends Dirk and Lemmy.'

'Pity you can't ask them to play something classical.'

'Don't be silly,' said Sophie. 'They're ghosts, not DJs.'

'You're so sure there's more than one of them?'

'Robert said it was the whole group. Plus poor old Ann-Marie.'

I counted them out loud on my fingers. One — the singer who oh-deed. Two — the drummer who lost his head in a car crash. Three — the guitarist who set fire to himself.

But that accounted for only three.

'What happened to the bass player?' I asked.

Sophie looked at me as though I'd gone mad. 'I haven't a clue. I never asked. I'm not a ghoul.'

'Maybe he's still alive,' I said. 'Maybe you could track him down.'

'Why would I want to do that?'

'Don't you want to find out everything you can?'

Sophie shook her head. 'He can't be alive, otherwise they wouldn't be haunting my flat, would they? Anyway, Robert's already done all the research that needs to be done.'

An interesting new thought occurred to me. 'Yes, tell me about Robert,' I said. 'How old did you say he was? Did he ever play in a rock band?'

'He's not a Drunken Boat, if that's what you're thinking,' Sophie said quickly. 'He thought they were awful. He sneered when I mentioned them.'

'Maybe that's just a front,' I said. Robert being an ex-Boat was altogether too neat an idea to be abandoned entirely.

'He's a writer,' Sophie reminded me. 'A poet'

'So you said. Has he read you any of his poems?'

'It's only a matter of time.'

'I'm sure it is,' I said. 'I expect he'll compose an ode to your hair, or something.'

'Shut up,' said Sophie. But she was smiling.

It was nearly three o'clock in the morning when we finally slid beneath the duvet. Sophie had established a strict territorial line down the middle of the bed, as though she thought I was going to jump on her.

'Perhaps I should move in with you,' I hinted, without much hope of success. 'And then you wouldn't be on your own in the dark.'

Sophie reached out and turned off the bedside lamp. 'I don't think that will be necessary,' she said, and I could almost hear her smiling to herself. 'I'm not on my own any more.'

Chapter 9

The next time I ran into Dirk and Lemmy, I mentioned Sophie's living-room. Dirk protested they'd been round three times that very week. They'd been painting radiators, and putting finishing touches to picture rails and skirting boards.

When I say 'ran into' Dirk and Lemmy, it had actually been the result of what amounted to a planned campaign on my part. Sophie had once again backed out of our latest lunch date, but I wasn't about to forgo my regular taste of W11 just because my best friend imagined she was in love, and so I tootled across town anyway and combed the local pubs looking for Lemmy and Dirk. It didn't take a great deal of combing to find them; as usual, they were in the Saddleback Arms.

I bought them drinks and packets of bacon-flavoured crisps. We sat next to the jukebox, which Lemmy fed continually with coins, though he never managed to hit the right combination of buttons. A German Shepherd sat on the floor nearby, chewing empty lager cans.

'Look at that dog, man,' said Dirk, impressed.

The dog cocked an ear, but carried on chewing.

'So,' I asked, 'have you met Robert yet?'

'Robert?' queried Dirk.

'Sophie's new boyfriend.'

'Oh, yeah,' said Dirk. 'We met Robert. Lots of times.'

I sighed. 'Just like you met the Drunken Boats.'

Lemmy thumped his glass rhythmically on the table. 'Down there,' he sang, 'down there down there'

I tried again to get some sense out of them. 'Did you know the Boats used to live in Sophie's house?'

'Yeah, we knew that,' said Dirk. 'Course we knew that. It's historical, that house.'

'Middleton weimaraner archipelago,' said Lemmy. 'Acker pilkington Sophie's pad.'

I appealed to Dirk.

'Lemmy reckons that Sophie's house should have a Black Plaque on it,' Dirk said.

'What's a Black Plaque?' I asked.

'It's like a Blue Plaque,' Dirk explained. 'Only black.'

Over the next couple of weeks, I peppered Sophie's answering machine with messages. Occasionally, just occasionally, she deigned to call me back, but it was all rainchecks and do-you-mind-awfully-Clares and Robert this and Robert that. She couldn't talk about anything else. It seemed that his bad habits hadn't been sufficiently disagreeable to prevent her from going to bed with him. I was sick and tired of Robert Jamieson before I'd even met him.

But if Sophie really did have ghosts — and now I was no longer on the spot, hearing the music for myself, I was sceptical — then I thought she was neglecting them shamefully. She had no interest in investigating their origins, or finding out what made them tick, or asking whether their presence had a scientific or psychological basis. Whenever I tried to broach the subject on the phone, she would answer impatiently, as though the entire business were already ancient history. She seemed to regard the spectral infestation as little more than an unusual matchmaking device which, having performed its given task, was now redundant.

I couldn't help feeling bitter about it. It should have been me, not her. I should have been the haunted one. I was the one who had been through the Gothic phase at college, until Sophie had persuaded me to knock all that nonsense on the head and strive for the beige ideal.

But some of us couldn't afford flats in the sort of houses where creative bohemian types had led interesting lives and died even more interesting deaths.

Some of us were still stuck on the wrong side of town.

Still, there was nothing to stop me from following up some of the leads. I played the Drunken Boats album again and again, and, if the sound quality didn't improve, at least I began to grasp an inkling of what they'd been getting at. The musicianship was crude. The lyrics were your basic schoolboyish take on decadence: torture, transvestism, necrophilia. But they had an energy and an appetite that made me feel almost jaded.