Page 38 of Crazy Spooky Love
Chapter
Eleven
“Let me just get this straight,” Glenda Jackson says, looking at me over the top of her horn-rimmed glasses.
It’s almost 9:00a.m.on our second Monday morning, and she’s spent her first half an hour in the office whipping up a filing system that makes my head spin, even though we only have one file.
She’s just opened a big navy-blue folder I haven’t seen before, which from here on out will be known as our expenses ledger.
“You’re filing receipts for a twenty-four-inch television, a Harlan Coben box set, a Polly Pocket lockable diary, six blue rollerball pens, and a puzzle book, under essential supplies for job 001?”
Job 001 is Brimsdale Road. Or at least it is now that Glenda’s here. I’m glad she started this week instead of last, we’ve had a few days’ grace to bed ourselves in so she doesn’t think we’re complete imbeciles. I nod, aware it sounds sketchy. I’m not even sure I’ll take the diary I picked up for Lloyd, the writerly ghost; it was the only one I could find, seeing as we’re already more than five months into the year, but even still, I’m not sure I’m brave enough to give a Polly Pocket diary to a grouchy ghost in his eighties. I breathe a sigh of relief when Marina flings the door open and she and Artie clock in.They’re laughing about something but pull up short at the sight of Glenda installed at the second desk.
“Artie, this is Glenda Jackson,” I say, ushering him across to meet her. I think she’ll like him, and I’m damn sure he’ll be terrified of her. Her copper-gold hair is piled up on top of her head, and her on-point lipstick application would make Marilyn Monroe bow down and kiss Glenda’s sassy, high-heel, T-bar shoes in awe. Like many men before him, Artie goes a bit stupid, and he seems to want to salute her before I pull his arm back down by the elbow and whisper, “Too much.”
“Nonna made biscotti,” Marina murmurs, sliding the tin on top of the fridge. The second desk is generally hers, but she pulls the client chair to a spare end of my desk and sits there without complaint. She knows you don’t tussle with Glenda.
I clear my throat, suddenly nervous. “Now that we’re all here, I’d like to first of all officially welcome Glenda on her first day at the agency.”
Glenda smiles genially, ripping the cellophane from a new A4 book and writing “meetings book” on the front. Cracking the spine and clicking her pen open, she writes the date at the top of the first page, then notes down item one, “Welcome Glenda,” and looks up expectantly.
“Please, go on.”
I swallow, dry-mouthed. Being the boss last Monday wasn’t as daunting as this week with Glenda in the room.
“Item two,” I say, nodding briefly toward the new meetings book, and Glenda writes it down. “A recap of where we are with the Brimsdale Road case.”
I take a couple of minutes to bring Glenda up to speed on everything that happened last week. She doesn’t bat an eyelid at any of it, not even the part where Gran practically morphed into one of the Knights of the Round Table. I relax a little into my seat. Glenda has worked for our family for more than ten years. There isn’t another secretary in Chapelwick who could write down the salient points ofa case like this without balking or at least needing to check she’d heard correctly. In fact, I’m not sure there’s another secretary in the whole of the UK who’d make notes as efficiently as she does whilst also discreetly handing Artie a wipe for the tea he didn’t even realize he’d spilled on his knee and passing around Nonna’s biscotti. She’s a quiet one, Glenda Jackson, but once she’s in place you wonder how your world turned without her.
“You went to Scarborough House on your own?” Marina looks startled when I mention my visit on Saturday.
She has to wait for my reply because I’m in biscotti heaven. “The Magic 8 Ball made me do it.”
“Did you shake it more than once?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “You know how shoddy that makes me feel.”
On the very rarest of occasions, once or twice a year at the very most, I’ll re-shake the Magic 8 Ball if I strongly disagree with its answer, but Marina knows full well that, by and large, I tend to abide by its decision; it wouldn’t be worth having, otherwise.
She concedes gracefully. “So how did it go?”
I nod toward the pile of new purchases beside the office door. “The Scarborough brothers made demands.”
“Oh my God! That lot’s for them? You’ve been hustled by a pack of ghosts.”
“Ghosts can watch television?” Artie says, shaking his head in wonder.
I look at him, shocked. “There’s a whole subplot written intoEastEndersjust for them. Did you not know?”
“Queen Victoria’s ghost runs The Queen Vic,” Marina chipsin.
I nod, snagging another biscotti before they get hidden from me again. “And Elvis manages the launderette.”
Artie looks slowly from Marina to me, and then at Glenda. “You didn’t write that down.”
“That’s because it isn’t true, Artie.” She says it in a kindly, matter-of-fact way.
“I knew that,” Artie says, even though he very clearly didn’t.
