Displeasure Island E-Book

Alice Bell

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Grave Expectations
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 490

Beschreibung

'Warm, smart and laugh-out-loud funny' Andrea Mara 'Delightful' Stuart Turton 'Alice Bell writes with real verve' Janice Hallett Professional medium turned detective Claire, her best friend Sophie (a 17-year-old ghost) and their pals are enjoying a much-needed cheap holiday in an unfinished hotel on Spike Island off the coast of Ireland. Claire is flattered to be asked by the local ghost of a pirate captain to investigate the theft of treasure from the shipwreck that stranded him there several hundred years ago. But just when she thinks she is closing in on the culprit, a murder takes place, and Claire and her friends quickly become the chief suspects. Can they recover the treasure, solve the murder and clear their names before all is lost?

Leseprobe

Also by Alice Bell

Grave Expectations

Published in Great Britain in 2024 by Corvus,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Alice Bell, 2024

The moral right of Alice Bell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Map artwork by Jeff Edwards

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 843 5

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 844 2

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 845 9

Printed in Great Britain

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To the Word-Appreciation Pals:

Harry, Rules, Deano and No Relation,

‘It’s better to light a candle than curse the Peter.’

1

A Crime Scene

The extraction fan whirred with gentle insistence. Claire peered into the bathroom from the doorway, leaning a bit awkwardly to avoid stepping over the threshold. It was quite a shocking sight. The bathroom was tiled in white over all four walls, the ceiling and the floor. Claire had always hated the claustrophobic design: it made her feel like she was inside a giant tooth.

But today every shining white surface was spattered with red. There were small dots, smeary streaks, little bits of spray that looked as if they came from an aerosol can. There were even long, elegant, looping lines that dripped down, like you’d see on the more lurid kind of police-procedural show (which were obviously Claire’s favourite kind). There were red spots on the bottles of shampoo and conditioner, on the white shower curtain pulled half around the bath and on the narrow mirror reflecting the scene back doubly. Everywhere you looked you saw more. The taps, the hand-towel, the soap. Like noticing an ant on a paving slab and, as you relax your eyes, suddenly becoming aware of dozens of them over the entire pavement. All the spatter in a bright, deep arterial red.

A body was lying half in and half out of the bath. Legs and a skinny bum in similarly skinny – and offensively lime-green – jeans were hanging out over the side and partially splayed over the fluffy white bathmat, while the head and torso were slumped on the inside, mostly held up by the body’s head being wedged against the bottom of the bath.

There was a rush of cool air as Sophie, Claire’s closest friend and constant companion for more than fifteen years, stepped past Claire and into the room. She whistled.

‘I’m impressed,’ she said. ‘This mess is, like, comprehensive. LOL.’ Sophie pronounced it el-oh-el. She looked round the bathroom with interest, the action setting the brown curls of her hair dancing in their tight, high ponytail.

Sophie wore a turquoise velour tracksuit of the kind that was popular among teenage girls in the early- to midnoughties, and the acid brightness of the colour against the white walls, the green legs and the red splatter made Claire wince. She’d finished off a bottle of white wine the night before, ploughing on despite the fact that it had started to go a bit vinegary. It wasn’t really an ideal morning to confront… this.

‘You need some of those little crime-scene booties. Come and have a look, Weirdo,’ said Soph, beckoning her in.

Claire stepped gingerly around the sticky marks on the floor. It was a small room and there was barely enough space for both of them to fit around the legs that cut across most of it. Claire looked into the bath and saw that the inside was almost completely red, turning rosy at the sides as it faded out against the white of the basin. A bottle of vodka was turned over next to a lifeless pale-pink hand.

Basher was still standing in the doorway. He had been a fairly seasoned police officer – a detective and everything – before quitting a couple of years ago. Now he held his hand over his mouth.

‘It is… just… barbaric,’ he murmured, in his peculiarly deep, soft voice. ‘I cannot even conceive how this happened. The white will never be properly white again.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Sophie. ‘It’s going to leave some stubborn stains, for sure.’

‘Yeah, this tooth… has got some serious gum disease,’ said Claire.

The other two stared at her.

‘Because… because the room is like… Er, never mind.’

‘Ohmigod. Every day I question the decision to let you out into public, Weirdo,’ said Sophie.

‘Well. Um. Anyway,’ said Claire. ‘Why did you call, Bash?’

‘Because,’ said Basher. He paused to sigh and rub his eyes in frustration. This was a habitual gesture, Claire had noted, as he spent much of his life frustrated in one way or another. ‘Because I tried a couple of times, but it seems I am not up to moving a dead weight by myself. Being completely honest, I found them slumped on the floor. They are only in the bath because I dropped them. You are the only person I could think of to call for help who would not be—’

‘Judgey?’ suggested Soph.

‘Too sensible to say no?’ said Claire.

‘You have to admit this is not the strangest thing we have dealt with together,’ Basher replied. Claire noted that there were dark hollows under his grey eyes. He looked more tired than usual.

‘Can’t we just leave them there?’ she asked. She was not a fan of physical activity, and this sounded suspiciously like it would require a lot of effort. Plus, she didn’t want to get red on her clothes. She was wearing the first new jumper she’d bought in ages and it was a pale-sage colour that wouldn’t do well, in the circumstances.

‘We cannot. Because that would be incredibly irresponsible. If you help me, you can have a cup of tea and a custard cream.’

‘Ugh! Two cups of tea and at least four custard creams.’

‘One cup of tea and two chocolate digestives.’

‘Yeah, all right. But I’m taking the legs.’

‘That seems fair.’

Claire and Basher manoeuvred around one another, so that he could grab the body in the bath under the armpits and she could hoist up the ankles. In this way they managed to roll the body over and out of the bath and then carry it down the hall, where Basher nudged a door open with his foot to reveal a room that was possibly a bedroom and possibly an explosion at a charity shop.

They alley-ooped the body onto the heap of clothes covering the bed. The body rolled over onto its side and started snoring.

Basher, quite tenderly, smoothed away the damp strings of newly red hair, revealing the pale, delicate features of Alex. Basher was Alex’s uncle, but had been in theoretical loco parentis since Alex had moved in with him in lieu of going to university. The position had been solidified recently, owing to the fact that almost all the rest of their family, the Wellington-Forges, had been arrested on suspicion of murder about six months ago. Basher and Alex had started going by the last name Forge to disassociate themselves from the whole thing, which was understandable.

Alex was only nineteen, but had inherited the fine, high-cheekboned structure that ran in their family, and the soft grey eyes that their maternal great-grandmother had also given to Basher. They still had growing to do, but Alex was already cultivating the kind of good looks that could be described by modelling agents as ‘ethereal’. The good looks were only partially diminished by the open-mouthed hangover drooling. Owing to Alex’s teenage propensity to get blackout drunk and to dye their hair whatever colour they wanted sometime around 3 a.m., they could also easily be pigeonholed as ‘alternative’.

Claire eyed Alex with a little concern. ‘Er, do we need to put them in the recovery position or something?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Basher. He leaned over and jabbed Alex in the side a couple of times. They made a noise that sounded like ‘geafucffzs’ and rolled onto their other side. ‘I think it would be all right to leave them be. I will check on them later.’

‘Okay. You owe me some biscuits.’

Basher raised his hands in a gesture of defeat, then stuffed them into the front pocket of his faded blue hoodie and sauntered off to the kitchen. Alex loved colour and unusual combinations in their clothes, but Basher dressed to disappear into the background, all sun-faded hoodies and tattered jeans. Claire’s own vibe was, she self-assessed, sort of scene kid in ’06 trying to fit in at the office: badly maintained bottle-black hair with about two inches of roots at all times, old boots, skinny jeans ripped at the knees, but amorphous sensible jumpers on top. She had a lot of warm jumpers.

Claire followed Basher, after beckoning Sophie away from peering at the new odds and ends on Alex’s desk. Their room was like a tidal pool for general art stuff, with new things appearing and disappearing all the time – although Alex stuck most faithfully to embroidery and altering clothes.

The three currently conscious occupants of the flat waited for the kettle to subside – an ancient and, Claire suspected, demonically possessed machine, which spat and roared, but which Basher insisted was very well made and would last for years, if he descaled it regularly.

‘Aw, look,’ said Sophie. She was watching Basher pour out two mugs of tea. ‘He’s using the one you got him. See, maybe he doesn’t actually think you’re the worst person in the world.’

Claire had found the mug in a charity shop. It said:

If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!

There was a picture of a mug of coffee underneath the quote. The little mug was smiling and blushing, and though it clearly contained coffee, there was also a teabag label hanging out of it. The label had a heart on it. The quote was from the character Sebastian in Twelfth Night. Basher – whose actual first name was also Sebastian – loved Shakespeare, which was why Claire had bought it; and it was a very confusing mug, which was the other reason she had bought it.

‘So, er, how is the sale of The Cloisters going?’ Claire asked, referring to what was technically Basher and Alex’s ancestral home, which had been left to Basher by his grandmother, skipping his parents. Because of the aforementioned murder issue, The Cloisters had become a crime scene, and Basher was not enjoying being the owner. He’d also found out that the family was property-rich but cash-poor and was trying to reverse this.

‘Not too terribly, I have to admit, although it was always going to take quite a long time,’ said Basher. He pulled the sleeves of his hoodie down to cover most of his hands and wrapped them around the mug. ‘I thought Mum might try and block a final sale, but I think they all have other things on their minds at present, so I’m clear to accept the hotel’s offer.’

‘The lower one, is it?’ asked Claire.

Basher nodded. Owing to the aforementioned crime-scene status, the hotel that had initially offered to buy the estate had lowered its offer, on the basis that murder goes in the column marked CONS rather than PROS. The back and forth had been all he’d talked about for weeks.

‘So you’re having to decide whether to make a quick buck now and get it over with or hold out for more in the long term,’ summed up Sophie.

‘Yes. I am a toddler with a marshmallow. I can eat it now or wait around for the possibility of two marshmallows from someone else. But in this instance it is a marshmallow that causes significant psychological distress, the longer I go without eating it.’

‘What does Alex say?’ asked Claire.

‘They just keep laughing and suggesting that I “kick that sour-faced old git in the balls” – the sour-faced old git in question being the representative of the hotel chain. I have explained that assaulting the other negotiating party is not the way to resolve a financial conflict. Or, indeed, any conflict.’

Claire wasn’t sure about this. She had always wondered why people didn’t do this more in movies or on TV. Many times in Murder Profile (her favourite TV show, in which a team of universally perky and quirky FBI agents tracked down wizened gnomes who committed weird murders, which they insisted weren’t about sex, but were definitely quite a lot about sex) an agent had been locked in a life-or-death struggle with a perp over a gun. It always seemed to her that the situation would easily be resolved by one party punching the other in the dick. Nobody cared about realism in cinema any more.

‘History is written by the victors, Basher,’ she suggested. ‘Nobody need know that you kicked him in the balls.’

‘I fear it would easily be found out. And, in any case, I would know. Either way, I am leaning towards taking the low offer, just to be done with it all.’

The only things Basher had rescued from The Cloisters were some Royal Doulton porcelain figurines and a rose plant dug up from the garden. It now lived in a big pot in the corner of the living room, where it was constantly in bloom, with large, preternaturally beautiful flowers.

Basher watched Claire stuff a biscuit into her mouth, sighed and got a small plate out of a cupboard. He held it under her chin like she was a child, until eventually she rolled her eyes and took it.

Much to his growing and often loudly stated chagrin, and despite the fact that Claire was a couple of years older than him, Basher was sloping into the role of being their little group’s dad. He was sort of naturally a middle-aged librarian: he was clean, read a lot of books, watched documentaries about art theft, had opinions about biscuits, went to great lengths to crowbar Shakespeare quotes into conversation in a way that made you want to drive a thin blade into his kidneys, and was basically a decent person. Thinking about it, there was probably a bunch of librarians who did shave their heads and dress like nineties skaters with depression – and Basher took pills for that, from a weekly organizer Alex had made him. It was covered with diverse and lovingly sculpted penises made from polymer clay.

They went into the living room, where Basher put a coaster under Claire’s cup as she put it down. Sophie, already bored again, went to look out of the windows. They were almost floor-to-ceiling, and since every other flat on the street had similar ones, Sophie could easily gawp into other people’s front rooms.

‘While you’re here anyway, Strange…’ said Basher, watching with a slightly alarmed expression as Claire forced another digestive into her mouth like an anaconda swallowing a piglet, ‘there is something else I have to ask you. Or possibly tell you.’

‘Those are very different verbs,’ said Claire, with some difficulty.

‘Yes, true.’ Basher sighed. ‘Hmm. Where to start. So, as you know, Alex and I were left some money by our grandmother. No, wait. Let me back up further. As you are aware, almost all of my and Alex’s family are out on bail, pending a murder trial.’

‘Yes.’

‘Big LOLs,’ added Sophie.

‘You might not be aware that if pre-trial is dragging on, you sometimes have to have repeat bail hearings every few months.’

‘Right. And?’

‘And the next bail hearing for most of them is coming up. Alex has decided they don’t want to be anywhere near the proceedings and that they need some time away.’

‘Probably wise,’ said Claire, nodding.

‘Ooh, maybe Bash wants us to house-sit!’ said Sophie.

‘What? Why would he want us to house-sit?’

‘As it happens, the flat will be empty. You see, Alex is nineteen years old and dealing with an ongoing fraught emotional situation. Benders at home are fine, but I am not currently sanctioning remote benders with other nineteen-year-olds,’ Basher went on unperturbed.

‘Really? I mean, Alex is technically an adult,’ said Claire, aware that even if she did want to accidentally co-parent, she wouldn’t know where to start.

‘Yes, and you also just had to help me move them from my absolutely ruined bathroom and hoist them onto their bed,’ replied Basher. His tone was very even. Maddeningly reasonable in fact. ‘They have had weekends away before, and will again. But I prefer to be with them right now. Which is where the compromise comes in.’ Basher had spread his hands in supplication.

‘Ohmigod,’ said Sophie, who was beginning to grin. She had always been quicker on the uptake than Claire.

‘So, er… what is the compromise?’ Claire asked.

‘The compromise is that, if Alex has to go on a trip with me instead of four days in Greece with their friends, they would like to invite you as well. On the basis that I am not fun, whereas you are much more fun.’

Basher looked embarrassed. Claire maintained eye contact until he looked away.

‘Um. They didn’t say I was fun, did they?’

Basher sighed. ‘I confess that no, they did not.’

‘No, they didn’t!’ echoed Sophie, hopping from one foot to the other. She started to giggle.

‘They said Sophie was fun, didn’t they?’

‘Yes. Sorry.’

‘People used to say that at school, too,’ said Sophie. She was outright laughing now.

‘Ugh! Well, I’m not saying yes—’ Claire started to say.

‘You bloody are! I’m bored off my tits,’ shouted Sophie.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Claire snapped back. ‘You don’t get a say.’

‘Yeah, technically, but you know I’ll make your life a misery if you don’t say yes.’

Basher watched Claire with one eyebrow raised and waited patiently.

‘Anyway,’ she said, turning back to Basher, ‘I’m not saying yes, but where would we be going? I’m not up for day-long flights out of the country.’ And, she added to herself, could not afford one.

‘How would you feel about hour-long flights out of the country?’ asked Basher. ‘I assume you’ve heard of Ireland.’

Claire had. It was one of those countries that she said, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to go there!’ about, but when it came down to it, that was a lie because Ireland was right there, and the flights were so cheap and short that the plane barely had time to get in the air before it was time to land again, and yet she still hadn’t been.

Basher sorted through the mess of the coffee table, which was always a mixture of piles of books (which he was either reading, had just finished reading or was thinking about reading, rotated in and out on an hourly to weekly basis) and small drifts of Alex-ephemera that had escaped from their room. Eventually he located a foldy-outy brochure. On the front was a glossy drone-shot of an island in a jewel-blue sea – a largely grassy place, but with some trees near the bottom shoreline and what looked like a flat, star-shaped castle in the middle. On top of this picture was printed ‘SPIKE ISLAND WELLNESS RETREAT’, in a font that was sort of going for ‘modern’ and sort of going for ‘rustic and/or Celtic’ and landed, as a result of this collision of influences, on ‘confused’. It seemed likely the graphic designer had given up on the brief after getting a number of increasingly conflicting pieces of feedback from a client, because this was all the front of the leaflet said, though there was an inset photograph of what looked like some very small whitewashed terraced cottages. Claire flipped it open, in the spirit of enquiry. So the front had, she supposed, sort of worked.

Inside were photos of people laughing in a hot tub, and people laughing while doing yoga at sunset, and people laughing while standing in the doorway of one of the aforementioned cottages. Some more text explained that Spike Island was a famous and very historical prison-slash-fort, now home to a newly updated and refurbished wellness retreat.

‘It is a small island, just off the coast,’ said Basher. ‘The prison bit is a tourist attraction, and had an attached quaint village where the workers used to live with their families, which was falling into picturesque ruin. Whoever owns it sold some of those buildings, which have been refitted and rebranded as a lovely getaway, with many additional relaxing activities and luxurious catering, and so on.’

‘Oh, cool,’ said Claire, brightening up. She was currently living in a tiny flat near Brighton station that was incredibly cheap and had bills included, because it was a windowless basement underneath a newsagent’s and, even during a housing crisis, including bills was the only way the landlord could get anyone to live there. Everyone leaving the newsagent’s used her stairwell as a bin, so she had to walk through a drift of Twix wrappers and empty Fanta cans. A spa break didn’t sound the worst.

‘Yes. Of course we would be going in a couple of weeks, in the off-season, when it is a small island hotel with most of the facilities shut down, for much cheaper.’

‘Oh. Right,’ said Claire, returning to normal luminosity. She folded out the last page in the leaflet. ‘An island with a dark history!’ she read aloud.

‘Yes, it is actually quite interesting. It has a storied past, because Cork harbour would be a very good way to invade Ireland and Spike Island is right in the middle of it, making it an attractive strategic property. Hence, fort. Then it was a prison. Before all of that, it was some species of monastery. I believe what has most interested Alex is a story that the Spanish Armada sailed all the way round Scotland and Ireland and lost a lot of ships along the way and’ – here Basher waved his hand vaguely – ‘there are rumours that maybe one was sunk near this island. Or possibly a pirate ship. Lost treasure, et cetera. They have been looking online.’

‘Not sure I believe all of that,’ murmured Claire, reading a story about how lamps were tied to donkeys’ arses to trick ships during storms. She squinted at a small map printed further down the page. ‘I mean, I knew about the Armada, but I’m not sure wherever this island is would be the right area at all for that. And most people doubt that wreckers actually ever existed anyway. There’s no contemporaneous evidence of people doing it. It’s a cool story, though.’

‘I always forget you studied history,’ said Basher. ‘Whatever the case, Alex thinks it sounds very exciting.’

‘Oh, right, I see,’ said Soph. ‘I bet you a million pounds the island is still haunted by lads searching for their lost treasure or whatever, and Alex wants us all to go on a treasure hunt, without thinking it could in fact end with us sitting about getting rained on, on an island we can’t leave. I’m in. That sounds mega-fun. Or at least more fun than moping around Brighton with you.’

‘There are apparently a lot of ghosts,’ said Basher. ‘So perhaps one more can’t hurt?’

Claire sighed and looked at Sophie. She was standing in the sunlight beaming through the windows, so she was washed out and almost see-through – but was still very clearly sticking out her tongue at Claire.

‘Oh,’ said Claire, ‘I think you’d be surprised.’

2

Have Ghost, Will Travel

They took off from Gatwick at 9.25 a.m. on Tuesday morning and landed at Cork airport a scant hour and a bit later – a short flight that was still long enough to demonstrate they were all very different flyers. Claire had only been on an aeroplane a couple of times in her life and found the whole thing very exciting; Alex was the type of relaxed that would get to the gate a minute before it closed; and Basher was extremely nervous and sat bolt upright, fists clenched in his lap, for the entire flight.

Similarly, Claire had a black-and-white chequerboard Vans rucksack, which Alex had got her as a present, and a scruffy holdall for anything that wouldn’t fit in the rucksack; Alex was lugging a suitcase with broken wheels and a zip held closed by safety pins, and which was so full it was seriously in danger of triggering an extra weight payment; while Bash had a compact grey case that conformed exactly to flight regulations.

Sophie, of course, travelled very light, and had to sit in the aisle.

Claire was the only person who could see or hear Sophie, which was inconvenient, because it meant she had to relay everything Sophie said. Unless she decided she wanted to edit her, Claire spent a lot of time repeating Sophie so that she could be involved in, for example, discussions of islands and buried treasure. Claire did not edit Sophie that often, because each instance was followed by between twelve and thirty seconds of Sophie complaining about being edited, which tended to drag conversations out.

Historically, Sophie had been something of a barrier to Claire forming long-term relationships of any kind, but luckily Basher and Alex had caught a glimpse of Soph once. It had been during a storm and at night, though, and would have been very easy to put down to a trick of the light, so while Alex enthusiastically believed, Claire sometimes thought Basher was humouring her when he talked to, or about, Soph.

Claire, however, was in no doubt that Sophie existed. She had been haunting Claire for a long time, ever since Sophie had disappeared when they were both seventeen, and then reappeared as a ghost that only Claire could see, right in the middle of a candlelit vigil for… herself. Claire and Sophie were still the only two people who knew that she’d been murdered – well, three, including whoever had done it – but Sophie couldn’t remember any of what had happened to her. Neither of them particularly liked to think about the circumstances. (The murderer, if Claire’s favourite TV shows were any indication, probably did like to think about it and kept Sophie’s head in a jar in the fridge, but Claire thought it would be in bad taste to mention this to Soph.)

Fortunately – or very unfortunately, depending on what mood Claire was in – Sophie’s return meant that Claire was suddenly able to see and hear all the ghosts hanging around everywhere. This meant she was able to become a medium. She was a mostly unpopular one, who didn’t have a slot on talk radio or a twenty-four-hour TV channel, because she was a bit too matter-of-fact about the whole thing; she didn’t even have a crystal ball, but she did make enough money to pay for rent, pasta and cigarettes. Slightly more pasta than usual, now that Alex had persuaded Claire to move out of London and down to Brighton.

The downside, of course, was the actual seeing of ghosts. It was probably more accurate to say that Claire had to become a medium, because being able to see ghosts rendered her too weird and distracted to do anything else.

Initially her new enforced psychic status had come with all the therapy and angst that you’d expect. When it had first started happening, Claire had told her parents, and they naturally assumed she was having some kind of grief-related breakdown. But now, after so many years, the seeing-ghosts-thing was mostly very annoying. Claire found the majority of ghosts to be morose, but desperate to tell her why because they didn’t have many people to talk to; there are also more ghosts in general than people would be comfortable knowing about, so Claire was very good at avoiding eye contact. She had specific issues with Sophie always being around, but these were different and complex and did not bear talking about. It is very hard, for example, to successfully close a date if a dead seventeen-year-old is watching you – let alone any furtive and even more private nocturnal activities. Sophie’s response would, no doubt, be that she never got the chance, and wasn’t that a terrible thing for someone who was perpetually seventeen, but also thirty-two?

Making and keeping friends was something of an unknown quantity to Claire. As soon she said she was a medium, the people who tried to self-select into her life became quite intense. Many of them were people who claimed to be mediums as well, but the fact that they couldn’t see or hear Sophie, when she was sticking up the Vs right in front of their faces, meant Claire realized what they actually were was liars. Those who tried to self-select out of Claire’s life assumed she was one, too.

But she also didn’t make great company. Claire was prone to: binge-drinking cheap cider; binge-drinking cheap spirits; binge-watching the same police procedurals and true-crime documentaries, repeatedly, in cycles; chain-smoking; biting her nails; eating different kinds of instant noodles for all meals; not washing up her bowls of instant noodles; general antisocial hermitry; suppressing all intense emotion – be that negative or positive – and therefore coming across as completely detached; anxiety; and not changing her pillowcases often enough. She also talked to thin air and had very cold hands all the time.

She said that all these things, and more, were because of Sophie haunting her. The last two definitely were, at any rate.

Now, though, Claire was dealing with having the sort of friendship where you got invited on a holiday. She was unsure how you were supposed to behave in this situation.

‘Ohmigod,’ said Sophie, as they wheeled and/or hauled their way out to the airport bus stop. ‘Remember when we went on that school trip to France and they’d just brought in the new rules, and that utter bastard threw away my new liquid eyeliner?’

Claire did. It was a grievance Sophie had brought up for weeks afterwards, and every eighteen months or so in the years since. You don’t collect that many new grievances when you’re dead.

‘Don’t look now,’ Sophie added, ‘but our designated grown-up looks like he’s going to be sick.’

Basher did indeed look green around the proverbials. Claire hesitated, then squeezed his shoulder. ‘Um, you all right?’

Basher nodded, thin-lipped, in reply.

Alex looked up from their phone. ‘Poor Uncle B is like the soft fruit of your choice. Doesn’t travel well. He’s a little stress ball, basically, the whole day of a flight. I should be more sympathetic, but he woke me up at five a.m. to check I knew where my passport was.’

‘Did you?’ said Claire.

‘Not at all,’ replied Alex cheerfully. ‘Found it in the end, though. Anyway, he won’t be happy again until he’s had a shower and a biscuit at the other end, which won’t be for a while, cos according to his terrifically anal schedule, we have to get a bus and a train and a boat first.’

‘What, really?’ asked Sophie.

‘How did you think we were getting to an island? Did he not email Claire his whole itinerary? He even printed one out for me. I’m being dramatic – it’s only an hour from here.’

They fished a bit of paper out from their pocket. They were wrapped in their favourite black faux-fur coat, and it fairly crackled with static. The disastrous dye session from a few weeks before had taken well, and the bright blood-red of their messily tied-back hair contrasted with the coat, to great effect. They also appeared to have five-o’clock shadow, and Claire couldn’t tell if it was by accident or design, but either way it was adding to the elegant-yet-distressed vibe of someone who had just crawled out of a coffin after a hundred years and wanted to join a rock band. Alex held out the paper so that Soph could read it too, which was the sort of thing they regularly did that made them Sophie’s favourite.

‘Jesus, all this to get there?’ Claire said.

They did indeed have to get the bus, then transfer onto a train for a half-hour journey somewhere else, and then wait to meet someone called E. McGrath in a town right on the mouth of the wide estuary. The Mystery McGrath would take them on a boat out to Spike Island, which lay off the coast but still enough inside the harbour not to count as being properly in the sea.

‘You’re crossing the fucking Rubicon,’ Soph went on. ‘Has anyone ever come back from that place alive? How do you know you’re not going to be turned into some kind of human-pig hybrid by a reclusive scientist?’

‘Would make no never-mind to you,’ murmured Claire, hoping nobody noticed her talking to herself.

‘It would be very boring. At least…’ Soph paused to consider and tipped her head on one side, sending the shining curls of her high ponytail falling over one shoulder. ‘Huh, can’t decide if you’d be more or less dull as a little piglet.’

Claire stuck out her tongue in lieu of a ruder response.

It would not be ideal to be hybridized, because when Sophie got bored she had a habit of shouting in Claire’s ear or loudly singing poorly-remembered song lyrics (out of tune) until Claire paid her attention.

Fortunately the bus and train journeys were short enough that she didn’t completely go off on one, and after another couple of hours they decanted from a train onto a single-platform red-brick station that looked directly out onto the water. It was very sunny, with fluffy white clouds scudding across a blue sky. Following the directions on Basher’s phone took them down the road into a ridiculously picturesque seaside town, with houses all painted in different colours along a broad, curved street. There were cobblestones, and a park with a bandstand right on the water’s edge – and the top of a tall spire looming over everything, which gave Claire a bit of the Fear, as if she had a hangover.

Alex insisted they were starving to death, but Basher was keen to finish the journey and said they could eat at the hotel. They followed him to the end of a T-shaped pier that formed one wall of a little square harbour.

‘He’s going to be sick,’ said Soph.

Claire glanced sideways at Bash. He was paler than usual and there appeared to be a cold sweat on his forehead. She hesitated, but then patted his forearm in what she hoped was a reassuring way. This was not as fraught an action as it would have been even six months before, when Claire had been nursing a crush on Basher and touching him would have made her twitchy and excited. He was, it was fair to say, a good-looking man, even if it was by accident; he constantly had, for example, a kind of catwalk-ready stubble highlighting his cut jaw, but this was because he was blond and didn’t shave much, not because he thought it looked good. But whatever else he was, Basher was also gay, which Claire had discovered through the surprisingly expedient method of trying to kiss him. Rerouting her feelings towards friendship had been quite easy for Claire, as it turned out, and had left only a lingering feeling of catastrophic embarrassment.

‘This town is fascinating you know. It’s a shame we can’t stay here longer. I thought you would have heard of it already, C. It’s right up your street – all history and that,’ said Alex.

‘Um, it’s not like I know all of recorded human history,’ said Claire.

‘Well, whatever, I looked it up as part of my research into the area,’ they went on. ‘This was the last port of call for the Titanic. Next stop: bottom of the Atlantic. Isn’t that bananas? And there’s loads of other wrecks and stuff around this coast. The Lusitania sank sort of around the corner, and all the bodies were brought here.’

‘Oh, yikes. It sounds like we are lucky there aren’t loads of depressed deados hanging around. Apart from the one I bring with me.’

‘I’m not depressed,’ protested Soph. ‘I’m, like, totally affable. I’m affable as fuck.’

Basher snorted when Claire repeated this. ‘If Claire’s reportage of your comments is accurate, I would say you have a tendency to be quite… barbed.’

‘See, Basher has only known you a matter of months and he can already tell you’re a terrible bitch.’

‘You need me, and you know it, Weirdo,’ said Soph, her voice even. ‘Ask Alex about the treasure. Nobody has explained the pirate-treasure aspect yet.’

‘Oh, Lord, don’t ask them about that,’ said Basher. He ran a hand over his face. ‘They won’t shut up about it.’

‘Well, actually I am so glad you asked, because—’

Alex suddenly fell silent, because a man had arrived. The arrival was so silent it was as if he had stepped out of thin air, in defiance of all known physics. Previously there had been no man. Now, here was man. He had a big, fulsome, but tidy chestnut beard, correspondingly bushy brows over dark-brown eyes and, as if in deliberate contrast, a close-cropped haircut. His nose prevailed right, from about halfway up the bridge, in a way that suggested it had been soundly broken at some point. In general he projected an aura of gruffness; it said that here was a fella – definitely fella as opposed to man, and definitely not boy – who did not have time for your shit, no matter what it might be. He looked down at Basher, standing a head taller than him and Claire.

‘How’s it going? Forge, is it?’ Claire realized he’d said, after about a second and a half of processing.

Like many (or indeed all) English people, Claire’s experience of Irish accents was limited to:

Category: Northern Ireland

Category: Dublin comma Bob Geldof shouting

Category: Dublin comma Andrew Scott shouting

Category: Dublin comma Colin Farrell frowning

and sub-category: Americans doing accents in film and television.

The Cork accent presented a new and unfamiliar option. It was very sing-song, the sounds rising and falling around the central thread of the words like a chirruping nursery rhyme, and always hooking up at the end of the sentence. It was the Australian accent of Irish accents. The bigger issue was that everyone they’d spoken to in Cork so far also spoke very quickly indeed. It took time for Claire’s brain to catch up, and she felt like she was on a satellite delay.

The man seemed content to wait, though, and pulled a rollup from behind his ear. He tried to light it with a fitzing lighter. Basher looked nonplussed.

‘Er…’ Claire tried. ‘Hello… Mr McGrath…?’

This turned out to be the wrong and right answer simultaneously, because he nodded, but also grimaced.

‘Jesus. Just call me Eidy, would you?’

Claire thought she’d also seen the minute eyebrow-raise and seamless transition to talking slightly more slowly that she’d noticed in other locals the instant they registered her own accent. It seemed they all came with a separate setting for talking to English people.

Alex held their own lighter up, deployed with their most winning smile and the practised ease of someone who definitely pulled this move on people outside nightclubs. The man took it, but exchanged it for what Claire assessed to be a quite ungrateful ‘Thanks a mill’ as he lit up.

‘Christ,’ said Soph, regarding him critically, ‘what a barrel of fucking laughs. Odds on him drowning us all in the bay?’

Claire did not repeat this. Even if they hadn’t been in public, she did not repeat Sophie’s assessments of most people because, as Basher had noted, even if they were insightful, they were also often cruel, especially about people she liked.

‘Right, er, Eidy. I’m Claire, that’s Alex. And Basher.’ She pointed, for clarity.

Eidy looked at her. He took a drag on his cigarette, then shot the smoke out of one side of his mouth.

‘It’s, um, it’s short for Sebastian.’

‘Okay.’

Claire realized that both Sophie and Alex were snickering, and, in a rare turn of events, it was Basher who rolled his eyes. He extended a hand towards Eidy, who shook it.

‘Nice day for it,’ said Basher. ‘I was afraid we’d be rained on for the whole time we’re out there.’

‘Mmph. Maybe stay afraid,’ said Eidy. He squinted into the sky, which was presently still bright. ‘If you don’t like the weather here, you’ve only to wait ten minutes and it’ll change.’ He looked at the four of them – or the three that he could actually see, anyway – and his eyebrow twitched as if he was only now taking them in properly. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have pegged ye as parents,’ he said, motioning at Claire and Basher. He then seemed surprised at his own frankness.

‘Rude!’ said Alex, with a grin. They went to punch Eidy on the shoulder and he flinched a little. ‘Basher’s my uncle.’

‘Yeah, um, Basher and I aren’t together. We’re friends,’ explained Claire. She immediately regretted this, because she knew it would open up room for Alex and/or Soph to make fun of her for trying to kiss Basher that one time a few months ago.

‘Not for want of trying, eh, C?’ said Alex, entirely on cue.

‘We will never let it die, Weirdo,’ added Soph. ‘Like me, it will haunt you for ever.’

Basher rolled his eyes and said, ‘Let’s just go, shall we?’

Eidy nodded, once, and stomped off to a metal marine bridge that led to a pontoon. He walked as if he had a grudge against the planet, the heavy sound of his footsteps exacerbated by the big waterproof wellies he was wearing. If it weren’t for those, he would have fitted in favourably in any craft-beer pub in London: heavy-duty cargo trousers and a blue thick-knit jumper with the sleeves pushed up his forearms.

In other circumstances, Claire wouldn’t have been surprised to hear this man espousing strong opinions around the Campaign for Real Ale. He would wear one of those little beanies that barely covered his whole head, and would be loudly feminist and say things like, ‘Guys, the change has to start with us, yeah?’; except that a few years later it would turn out that he was basically a sex predator – and the fallout would cause a schism in the group because his friends, although they said they hashtag believed women, would be able to find enough reasons that either it was all a misunderstanding or it was a crazy ex lying to trash his relationship, but enough people took against him that the local scene was irreversibly affected because he was a big name in—

‘Oi!’

Claire looked up as Sophie shouted, and realized she’d nearly walked off the side of the pontoon.

Soph tutted at her. ‘I dunno where you disappear to these days,’ she said. ‘It’s ghosts that are supposed to forget who and where they are as time goes by, right? What’s your excuse?’

‘Frustration with my present circumstances,’ Claire replied, under her breath.

‘Huh?’ said Eidy.

‘Er… what?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

Soph watched this exchange. ‘Yes, in fairness, I can see why you would be frustrated at being you,’ she said.

Claire ignored her.

Eidy had progressed down the metal bridge and was presently doing some nautical fussing around a medium-sized green-and-white boat, joining two other men who were also doing presumably critical things with ropes. They were, Claire surmised with her well-honed detective skills, probably supposed to follow him and get on the boat, but they stalled at the top gate of the bridge because a couple was trying to go down it ahead of them, each with their own luggage. The man nodded at them in exaggerated delight.

He was tall of height, square of jaw, and cowboy of hat. An honest-to-God cowboy hat. Claire looked down and, yep, blue jeans, a prohibitively large belt buckle and proper cowboy boots. He was wearing a red-and-black checked shirt, the collar of which was held closed by a bolo tie. He was very tanned. He was a cowboy.

‘Hoo-eee, that there wind is really kicking it up a notch and no mistake!’ said the cowboy. He talked like… well, like a cowboy. Like if someone said: do an impression of a cowboy, his was the voice you would do.

Claire was only surprised that he didn’t crack a whip or click spurred heels together to punctuate his speech.

‘Say, you fine folks ain’t heading on over there [thar] to Spike Island [Spahk Ay-land], are you?’ he went on. ‘Only, well, my Tiffany here and her mates have the place for a private function.’

Here he paused to swipe off his cowboy hat and thwack his own forehead.

‘You must think I’m about as mannerly as the last whippet in whelping season!’ he exclaimed, a metaphor that made Sophie stare at him so hard in disbelief that she nearly went cross-eyed. ‘I must introduce my princess, my angel on Earth, Miss Tiffany Thomas. She’s a blogger and an advocate, and I’m just so proud of her every day. She makes me a better man.’

‘Tiffany posts long Instagram stories about the climate, sure,’ said Sophie, distinctly unimpressed.

The afore-indicated Tiffany was a sort of honey-blonde Rosie the Riveter cosplayer, in denim overalls and with her hair tied up in a scarf; and both overalls and scarf were clearly very expensive, rather than from Primark’s current seasonal stock. Claire was unsure how blogging and advocating paid for visible Louis Vuitton logos, but her boyfriend and his absurdly chiselled face provided the likely answer.

‘And me? I’m Ritchie Walker and, well, I’m a simple Texas oil [ohl] man, and that’s seen me right.’

‘There’s no way that’s his name,’ said Sophie. ‘Might as well be called Tex McShortrib.’

‘That’s your real name?’ said Alex, equally fascinated.

Ritchie blinked at them in the polite way some Americans have when confronted with certain kinds of English sarcasm.

Tiffany stepped in. ‘Yes, yes, nominative determinism. But he’s right – there aren’t supposed to be any other guests this week.’

As she moved closer, Claire caught a whiff of strong floral perfume and noticed that Tiffany had a round, cute face that she camouflaged as snatched and glamorous with impressive make-up techniques.

‘You lot are going to have to find somewhere else to stay,’ she added. Tiffany had the arch, confident voice of someone who had been the most popular one at school.

‘If I could just advocate for us,’ said Alex, wiggling their eyebrows, ‘I will say that we’ve paid and have confirmation and everything.’

‘We shall ask Eidy,’ said Basher calmly.

‘Yes, let’s,’ said Tiffany and marched ahead, as Ritchie tipped his hat at them.

But Tiffany was to be disappointed, because Eidy insisted that the boat was taking all of them, and if she didn’t like it, then she and her boyfriend could stay there. In this he was as immovable as an angry, bearded little bollard, and his case was strengthened when one of the other men whistled and said something about the tide. At this, Eidy stepped into the boat with practised ease and gestured impatiently for them all to follow, in a way that suggested there would be no further argument about it.

‘Mind yer back, C,’ said Alex. They swung their large case around Claire and heaved it into the boat with a thud, then jumped in after it, with no hesitation. Alex was very good at being at ease anywhere. They helped Claire by pulling her holdall in, because Claire was not confident enough to throw anything – including herself – into a boat.

She crouched and sort of crab-walked into it, because she had not been in a boat before and was suddenly very aware of that fact. Basher got in like a normal person, followed by Tiffany and her tame cowboy, Ritchie, who also got in normally, although they were not, Claire suspected, entirely normal people.

Most of the boat was taken up by a large covered section with bench seating and would fit quite a few people. Basher said he thought it was probably the boat that took weekend tourists out to visit the prison on the island. Because it was a nice day, the six guests all sat at the back of the boat, which was open to the elements. Eidy was there too, leaning against a tall roll cage like Claire had seen staff pulling around Sainsbury’s, full of yogurts and packs of sliced ham.

To Claire’s surprise, even though the boat was comparatively small next to, for example, a massive cruise liner, there wasn’t a lot of movement once they got out onto the water. The bay was as flat as a pane of glass, one huge, broad sweep of mirror reflecting the sky and sun back at them. No wonder Eidy had a ruddy, raw outdoorsman tan over his nose and cheeks.

This did not, of course, stop Claire feeling nauseous almost immediately, and she began to yawn and hiccup to try and clear the feeling. Basher nudged her and gave a questioning thumbs-up, a reversal of the situation just minutes before.

‘How long does the boat trip take?’ asked Alex. They were attempting to peer round Eidy’s shoulder, with some interest, to look at the contents of the roll cage.

‘It’s only fifteen minutes, like,’ said Eidy. And then, as sort of a consolation: ‘’Tis a good view of the town and the mainland once we get a bit further out.’

‘Ohmigod,’ said Soph, in tones approaching genuine awe. ‘He’s not wrong.’

As they got further and further away, they could indeed look back at the town they’d been standing in minutes before and see all the colourful painted houses at once. It was the sort of image that would decorate the front of boxes of novelty-flavoured fudge. This far out, you could see that most of the town was crawling up a steep hill that moved back away from the water. It was all crowned by an incongruously huge cathedral: massive, grey and built on top of a sheer wall that seemed to be holding the hill together, so that the building appeared at least half as tall again. It looked like someone had made a living collage by sticking an absurdly gothic cathedral from a horror film right on top of a picturesque holiday postcard.

‘A town fit for Dracula to land in,’ said Basher.

Claire shivered, even though the sun was still out. It did look impressive, and she knew she should think it was breathtaking and beautiful – the sort of sight you’d take a photo of and send to your family WhatsApp group, to which your aunts would respond with a confusing series of emojis. Claire didn’t have a family WhatsApp group because, while they weren’t exactly estranged, she and her parents were in a period of prolonged uncertainty, owing to Claire’s continued insistence that she could see ghosts and was a medium. Unfortunately her reality was operating on a parallel line to everyone else’s, as she couldn’t not see Sophie, which ultimately resulted in her parents operating on parallel lines to each other and getting a divorce.

But this association wasn’t actually what unsettled Claire about the cathedral. As she looked at it, she couldn’t stop imagining it falling on the town. This didn’t help the nausea.

She turned her head away and looked at the roll cage with Alex. Sophie was right. She was spending a lot of time… not in the present. She’d always been prone to daydreaming, but since the time last year when she’d been chased through the night by Basher and Alex’s family, had dug up a half-skeletonized corpse and pushed herself to exhaustion and fainting in the process, her imaginings were becoming more and more intrusive.

‘Here, Weirdo,’ Sophie said. ‘Ask him where Spike is. Like, how far away is it?’

Claire put Soph’s question to Eidy, and he snorted. ‘I said the trip is fifteen minutes, didn’t I? Lucky ye arrived when ye did or it’d take longer. Spike is in front of us. Past that, you go out to Roches Point.’

‘Oh! Oh!’ said Alex, like a child in class. ‘That’s where the Titanic anchored.’

Eidy didn’t respond. The town continued to shrink behind them. There was an uneasy half-silence, as Tiffany and Ritchie talked quietly with their heads close together, not wanting to be overheard.

‘Er, why would it take longer?’ Claire asked.

‘What?’ said Eidy.

‘You said it would take longer if we’d arrived at a different time.’

‘Sandbar,’ said Eidy. ‘Right across here. Tide gets too low, you’ve to go the long way around the estuary. Right now we can go straight over, more as the crow flies, like. The currents are dangerous, though, specially when the tide turns, so no pissing about sea-swimming once you’re ashore.’

This lengthy speech seemed to exhaust Eidy, because he asked them to move away from the edge of the boat as if he were a bus driver reminding them to stay behind the line.

As they moved further out from the port, the boat began to rock in the swell of waves. Alex pointed out a huge green cargo ship coming in, loaded with a Jenga tower of shipping crates. Claire wondered what was in them. Coffee? Wool? Wellington boots? Novelty Minion-shaped dog toys? What if the crate full of dog toys fell off? Then it would be like that town where the river was full of rubber ducks. Or was it a beach full of Garfield phones? Or alarm clocks? It probably wasn’t alarm clocks. Garfield was a terrible alarm-clock character, because he famously did not like Mondays, so he would not be convincing at waking you up on a Monday. She remembered Sophie had had a Wallace and Gromit talking alarm clock, which was pretty good because Wallace had many ingenious ways for getting up and at ’em – except the alarm clock was only an alarm clock, and did not provide you with mechanical robot hands that got you dressed and made you toast. Also it only took AAA batteries and when they’d run out, Soph’s mum kept forgetting to get more, so then it was just a big lump of plastic.

She blinked. The cargo ship was past them and heading further up the river.

Tiffany got up and stretched theatrically, then came over to her. ‘Well, I suppose this is happening,’ she said. ‘You coming to the island, I mean.’

‘She’s the brains of the outfit, you can tell,’ remarked Sophie, who was leaning over the side of the boat in what was technically a dangerous way – for a living person.

‘Er, yeah. Sorry,’ said Claire. ‘I didn’t really have anything to do with booking it, so I don’t know what any of this is, really.’

‘It’s a very exclusive resort – or at least it will be. It’s not finished yet, but I’m old friends with the owner, Minnie. A few of us were going to have a private mini-break here – the first people ever to use the place,’ replied Tiffany.

Claire had not asked for this explanation, but Tiffany seemed to want to show off about it. She raised an eyebrow at Claire and waited for a response. Claire had only recently started to hang out with people who weren’t dead teenagers, so she was a bit rusty at how conversation worked.

‘Oh, right. Very cool, yeah. How do you all know each other?’ she asked.

‘We were all in the same society at university – Edinburgh – and we all still meet up for trips. Or at least we did. It’s been a while. Look, here…’

Tiffany got out her phone and brandished it at Claire. Sophie came to lean over and look at the photo on the screen with her. It showed a group of half a dozen – mostly women – standing on a beach doing the smiles that people do when someone behind the camera says, ‘Smile!’ about three seconds before they actually take the picture.

‘That’s a few of us at the last one, but it was ages ago now,’ said Tiffany. ‘We got scuba certifications, isn’t that fun? It was George’s idea – that’s him there in the middle, and of course it was before I met Ritchie, and Dan and Ashley couldn’t make it. But that’s Minnie, on the left.’

She pulled the phone back and swiped busily for a few more seconds, before it was thrust under Claire’s nose again. This time the picture was of a bunch of students smiling in a bar, slightly washed out by a too-bright flash. Claire could date the picture because she had studied history, and short-sleeved tees over long-sleeved ones, or V-necks over lacy strap tops on the girls, were artefacts from the noughties with which she was personally, regretfully familiar. Sophie had been delighted when Juicy Couture velveteen tracksuits like her own became old enough that they were beginning to be in style again.

‘That’s us in the SU bar,’ said Tiffany.

Sophie looked closer. ‘Why is one of them scribbled out?’ She pointed: there was a man – a boy, really, given their ages at the time – on the far left of the picture, standing by a girl who looked like a younger, less-perfect version of Tiffany. His face and torso had been scribbled over in the photo app.

‘Who’s that?’ Claire asked.

Tiffany frowned. ‘That’s Andy. He was a big nerd, bit of a loser, and he had a thing for me. He’s not one of the gang any more.’ She whipped the phone away before Claire had time to properly internalize this. ‘I wonder what’s going to happen with you lot here. It really wasn’t planned for, you know…’ Tiffany trailed off and wandered over to Alex and Basher, possibly to do a similar smug showing-off.

‘Strange couple,’ said Sophie. ‘There’s something weird about a woman who’d willingly get on top of an actual cartoon character.’

‘Oh, stop. We probably won’t see them again after this anyway,’ muttered Claire.

The boat was approaching a pier, concrete and utilitarian, with another pontoon and a marine bridge. The shoreline was weirdly flat, and so graduated that it seemed the island was melting back into the sea. It was a forbidding place, and Claire wondered what feelings of wellness it would engender.

Soph whistled. ‘I was joking before, but you may die here. I mean, who would know?’

She was evidently not the only person to whom the thought had occurred, because Alex clapped a hand on Claire’s shoulder.