Page 11 of Crazy Spooky Love
Chapter
Four
“I can’t believe you bought this thing.”
Marina’s face is a perfect reflection of the distaste in her voice as she slides into the passenger seat of the business vehicle I’ve bought for the agency. Okay, so maybeboughtis a tiny white lie; it was actually more a case of rescuing the van from the jaws of the scrapyard crusher.Vintagewould be the kindest way to describe the 1973 Ford Transit;a shocking knackerwould be more accurate. Nonetheless, I find it quite charming; what it lacks in working parts it makes up for with its faded lemon drop and white two-tone cuteness, to me at least. Marina, however, is Italian. She hails from the land of fire-engine-red Ferraris and sexy white Lambos; she practically genuflected with shock when she first laid eyes on our new wheels. “I don’t know what you’ve got against it.” I click my seatbelt on and pat the scratched wooden dash carefully so it doesn’t fall apart. “It’s got loads of room for all of our stuff in the back, and these seats are genuine leather. Probably.”
Marina makes her point by silently running her painted fingernail along the length of a fraying split in the tan plastic bench seat. I pushthe foam that pokes out of the rip back in place and grin. “It’ll look a million times better once we get our sign painted on the side.”
“We have a sign?”
“Not yet,” I say, still cheerful about potentially bagging Scarborough House as our first job. “Arthur looks artistic, I’m going to make it his first job in the morning.”
“The only way you can make this van look any worse than it already does is by letting Arthur loose on it with poster paint.” Marina flicks the sun visor down to check her already perfect red lipstick, then sighs heavily at the dusty, empty hole where the mirror presumably used to sit. “I’ll paint it.”
“You will?” I wiggle the key into the ignition and pull the choke out to the max as I coax the engine into life. I’d been banking on Marina offering to paint the van because she’s a wiz at arty stuff, but it’s far better that she thinks it was her idea rather than mine.
She narrows her eyes at me. “Don’t think you can fool me, Bittersweet. You knew I’d say that.”
I laugh, rumbled, and then we both yelp in surprise as the van goes from zero to hero in two seconds flat and fires itself down Chapelwick High Street like a rocket.
“Jesus, Melody!” Marina peels strands of her hair from where it flicked violently forward and stuck to her lipstick. “Do you even know how to drive this thing?”
“Babs is cool. You just need to get used to her.” I ease the choke in slowly and the engine quiets and settles to a more appropriate speed. “See? Perfect.”
Marina pauses, and out of the corner of my eye I can see her staring at me. “Tell me you didn’t name the van Babs?”
“It came to me just now.”
“Should I even ask why?”
“Because she reminds me of one of Nonna’s limoncello babas. She’s pretty, she’s lemon, and she’s lethal for our health.”
“She doesn’t smell like Nonna’s buns.” Marina wrinkles her nose. “In fact, she smells more like a big hairy mechanic.”
“That would be because she’s spent the last ten years languishing in a dirty yard owned by a big hairy mechanic. Beneath this faded yellow paint lies the beating heart of Babs, the newest member of The Girls’ Ghost-Busting Agency.”
Marina shakes her head, resigned as we lurch to a halt at the traffic light. “Babs it is.” She reaches out and twiddles hopefully with the heater knob.
I laugh at her optimism as I grapple with the huge, loose gear-stick and then wave vaguely toward the radio that clearly hasn’t worked in decades. “Stick the postcode for Brimsdale Road into the GPS, would you?”
She laughs under her breath and pulls her phone out from inside her blouse. She’s stored it in her bra since she was about fifteen, maintaining that it’s the only reliably safe place in her always overcrowded house. Between you and me, Marina’s no slouch in the chest department. I’ve had more than one call from her bra when she’s been overexcited watching snooker. Don’t judge her; it’s one of her foibles, a hangover from a childhood spent hanging out with her beloved grandpa, or Nonno, as she calls him.
Fifteen minutes later, we sidle stealthily along Brimsdale Road. At least, that’s what we do in my head. Given that Babs wheezes and grunts like a strangled cow, what we actually do is bone-shake, rattle, and roll our way along, crossing our fingers each time we go over a speed hump that we haven’t left our rusty chrome bumper behind us on the tarmac.
“It’s that one there,” Marina hisses, pointing at a grand-looking house and sliding down on the bench until only her eyes are above dashboard level.
I glance at her. “Get up! You’ll draw attention to us.”
Marina laughs. “Yeah. That’s right. I’ll draw attention to us. Because no one would notice Babs otherwise, would they?”
I pull the van over to the pavement a little way down from the house in question. In actual fact, Marina’s slouching doesn’t really matter all that much, because between the still-present TV crew’shuge black van and Leo’s entourage, there isn’t much chance of us drawing people’s attention.
“I think they’re getting ready to leave,” I murmur, watching the camera guy packing his equipment away on the pavement. I avert my gaze in order to keep Nonna’s limoncello babas safely in my gut; for a man whose job involves a lot of bending over, he has yet to master the art of choosing clothes that don’t flash his hairy butt crack. Marina pulls herself back up again and peers over the dash at the house.
“What do we do, wait it out?”
I drum my short, navy-blue-lacquered nails on the edge of the huge steering wheel as I try to think like a sassy businesswoman, rather than take my usual haphazard approach.
