The Grapples of Wrath E-Book

Alice Bell

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

Seitenzahl: 442

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

The unputdownable cosy crime mystery set in Brighton about pro-wrestling, ghosts and much murder ______________________________ 'Come for the spooky humour, stay for the satisfying twists' Kristen Perrin 'Alice Bell writes with real verve' Janice Hallett 'Agatha Christie meets Ghosts' J M Hall ______________________________ THIS MYSTERY HAS THEM IN A CHOKEHOLD... Medium turned private investigator Claire Hendricks is excited to embark on her first official case. Pro-wrestling manager Ken King is convinced that his late father, Eddie, is haunting the gym and show venue in Brighton. Ken hires Claire to help, unaware that her ghost best friend, Sophie, comes as part of the package. But Eddie is adamant he did not die of natural causes, and tasks Claire and Sophie with bringing his killer to justice. In the world of pro-wrestling, can they work out what's real, who's faking and unmask the killer once and for all? ___________________________ Readers love the Grave Expectations series... 'Brilliantly funny!' 'Witty and smart' 'Cosy without being twee' 'Loved every minute' 'Loads of clever twists'

Leseprobe

Also by Alice Bell

Grave Expectations Displeasure Island

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2026 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Copyright © Alice Bell, 2026

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.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

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.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 80546 343 6

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 344 3

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 345 0

Printed in Great Britain.

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To Uncle Daver, I will eat sugared almonds x

1

Opening Curtain

With the benefit of much hindsight, Basher’s first mistake was to say, ‘Do not, under any circumstances, bring home a dog. I do not want to open the door and find you holding a dog when I get back.’ Claire did not need hindsight and realized immediately, upon the words exiting Basher’s mouth, that he had made a fatal error. She had been friends with Basher and Alex for less than a full year, but it was very obvious that if you forbade Alex from taking ownership of a dog from someone who had advertised online that they needed to divest themselves of a dog, then Alex would, in fact, make it their business to become plus one dog at the first opportunity.

Sophie, who was Claire’s best friend and had been more or less constantly by her side since they’d been at school together, also knew this.

‘I look forward,’ she said, glancing between Basher and Alex as they all sat at a table in a mid-bougie Brighton café one sunny morning, ‘to helping Basher and Alex come up with the name for their new dog.’

Thus neither Claire nor Sophie was at all surprised when they called round to the flat Alex and Basher shared, early on the evening of the same day, and Alex opened the door with a small but energetic Jack Russell terrier under one arm. It was white, with large caramel-coloured splotches.

‘This is Wyatt,’ said Alex, grinning very broadly. ‘She’s a year old, so not a proper grown-up yet.’

‘Yes, you have that in common,’ said Basher’s voice, floating through from another room. He sounded much put-upon. But then he usually did.

Alex was an extremely outgoing nearly-twenty-year-old and lived with their uncle, Sebastian, because each was the only member of the extended family the other still talked to. Alex bore Basher’s style of theoretical parenting in good humour, while Basher insisted that Alex was pushing him to some sort of nervous breakdown.

Alex – who was growing into themself enough that they were no longer gangly, and was currently sporting hair that was dyed deep pink down one side of their parting and their natural pale blond down the other – moved aside so that Claire and Sophie could walk down the narrow hall of the flat. They found Basher in the front room, slumped on the sofa with one hand over his eyes. Bash was shorter and stockier than Alex, but they both had clear grey eyes and the kind of natural high-cheekboned facial structure for which people would pay a cosmetic surgeon many thousands of pounds. Basher, an ex-policeman and a perpetually tired, bookish Shakespeare enthusiast, was less adventurous with his own blond hair and kept it shaved close to his head. He usually had a day’s growth of stubble as well, giving him the air of a very attractive peach.

‘Could you put the kettle on, Strange?’ he asked, employing his nickname for Claire. He didn’t open his eyes or turn his head. ‘I fear they have killed me this time.’

Despite saying this, Basher made no objection when Wyatt, released by Alex, ran and jumped onto his lap. He scratched her behind the ears, and she began to playfully chew his thumb. It was evident that Wyatt would be a permanent fixture.

Claire went to the kitchen and flicked on Basher’s kettle, which was so ancient it was probably an antique and vibrated and roared so loudly that she had been given to wonder several times if it was not some sort of medical Victorian sex aid that had been repurposed. Sophie followed her and pointed out Alex and Basher’s favourite mugs in the cupboard.

‘Remember, sugar for Alex…’ she said.

‘… and no sugar for Basher – right, I know, I’ve done this loads,’ Claire muttered. She used Sophie as a sort of portable external hard drive for storing data on, such as passwords, birthdays and days on which she had promised Basher she would go to the cinema to see a special screening of a Hungarian film about a stuffed whale, and therefore couldn’t lie in bed eating Twiglets and listening to her favourite episodes of true-crime podcasts. Claire was aware that Sophie was much smarter than her – even though Sophie always dressed in a bright turquoise velveteen tracksuit, which was the uniform of someone who was cool in 2007, not someone who took homework seriously – but she did find it a bit galling when Sophie acted like Claire didn’t know how to do normal, everyday tasks. Granted, she did have trouble navigating the interface on the Sky Box to find the shows she had recorded, but she’d be able to figure it out, if Sophie ever gave her enough time to do it herself. Anyway, Alex was on at her to get rid of Sky. They said it was unethical to let Rupert Murdoch into her home, let alone pay him for the privilege.

Claire tried not to get too annoyed, because she had a suspicion that Sophie was actually attempting to be nice and helpful. They’d had a huge falling-out at the start of the year over two different but entirely unsuitable men, and Sophie had behaved worse over it. To the extent that she had nearly got Claire killed. Even though it was now nearly summer, there was an unspoken sense that Sophie still hadn’t made up for it.

They went back into the front room. Claire sat on the sofa and found space amid the piles of books that lived on the coffee table, and which Basher was about to get round to reading any day now, to put down the mugs. Basher picked his up and put Wyatt down on the floor, because she was trying to put her whiffling little dog snoot into his tea.

‘Alex has promised to train her properly,’ said Basher, eyeing the dog. ‘But I am sceptical.’

‘I would be too,’ said Sophie. She nodded for emphasis, which set the chestnut-brown curls of her hair, swept into a tight, high ponytail, bouncing.

‘All right, fucking hell! I s’pose I shouldn’t be surprised it’s “have a go at Alex” day, because that’s every day. I have enriched our lives,’ said Alex. They bent over to look at Wyatt. ‘Haven’t I? Haven’t I enriched our lives with the best dog in the world? Yes, I have. Yes, I have!’

Wyatt snorted in agreement and came up to Claire to start investigating her trainers.

‘Have you personally enriched your bank account by getting a job?’ asked Basher.

Alex had quit their part-time job in Brighton Library a few months ago to focus on their weird pop-culture embroidery projects, a venture that hadn’t yet taken off. But Basher could literally afford to give Alex some leeway, because he had succeeded in selling his family’s old country house to a hotel chain and thus also paying off the mortgage on his flat. Claire, for whom having close friends beyond Soph was a new experience, was happy for him, but she and Sophie paid rent to live in a basement flat under a newsagent’s, next to a busy road and a set of traffic lights. Every time Alex and Basher did anything that she believed was an unconscious demonstration of their inherited wealth – such as not having to get a job – Claire chiselled the chip on her shoulder a little deeper. But she was fairly sure that neither Basher nor Alex knew this and wouldn’t mind if they did, because after much anxiety that they didn’t want to be friends with her, Basher had succeeded in persuading Claire that they did in fact like her and wouldn’t hang around with her so much, if they didn’t.

To everyone’s surprise, even possibly their own, Alex pointed their finger at their uncle. ‘Aha! I have,’ they said, in triumph. ‘Well, sort of. Maybe,’ they added, after thinking about it for a second and apparently deciding they needed to revise expectations down. ‘I’ve definitely got Claire a job anyway. I’ve got one for me a bit.’

Claire perked up. ‘You have?’ Her income as a freelancer was variable and subject to more competition in her field, since she’d moved to Brighton.

‘Sorry, how can one have a job a bit?’ asked Basher.

‘And why does your dog have a name like someone from Texas?’ said Sophie, who had apparently been considering this point for some time.

‘Hmm, who should I answer first? Decisions, decisions…’ said Alex. They flopped on the floor, and Wyatt came over and rolled into their lap, where she promptly fell asleep. ‘Wyatt is named after a wrestler. So you know I got Wyatt off of some randomer? Turns out he’s not a randomer, he’s the owner of a local indie wrestling promotion, Sussex Wrestling Federation, and they were all practising there when I went to pick up Wyatt. And it was so cool! So he says I can enter their training school when the next intake starts in a couple of weeks, and I can help set up and tear down before and after shows. And if I’m good enough, I might end up performing sometime, and then I get a cut. Isn’t that cool?’

‘I am going to predict that this training school will cost money,’ said Basher. He raised an eyebrow.

‘Well, yeah, you can’t expect people to train you for free,’ said Alex.

‘Right. I think that what you’re describing sounds very much like the opposite of a job,’ continued Basher.

‘Speculate to accumulate, Uncle B,’ said Alex cheerfully. Chisel, chisel, said Claire’s treacherous brain.

‘What sort of training is it? Like, for regionals? For the Olympics?’ asked Claire.

‘Ohmigod,’ said Sophie. ‘Can you imagine Alex leading Team GB, waving a flag?’

‘Not that sort of wrestling,’ replied Alex. They sat up a bit straighter. ‘We, my friend, are talking about pro-wrestling. The magnetic and dangerous world of sports entertainment. That’s a whole different bowl of potato salad.’

Basher rolled his eyes.

‘What, like… that guy who goes “Wooo!”, and The Rock, and all that? It’s fake, but not fake, and they get cross if you say it is. Really?’ asked Claire.

‘Bit out of date with your references, C, but yeah, broadly speaking,’ said Alex. ‘It’s fake in that they decide who wins the match beforehand and they’re not really trying to hurt each other, but the heroic feats of strength and hurricanranas off the top rope are all real, innit.’

Alex pulled up a video on their phone and then made it appear on the big TV screen. A man who resembled a sort of oiled Stretch Armstrong doll, glistening like the tears of gods, walked down a huge ramp as lights strobed and fireworks went off around him. He waved a hand in front of his face. The crowd screamed. Alex switched to another video, this time of a man who looked like the lead singer of an emo band, circa 2005. He climbed to the top of a metal ladder, which was balanced inside what looked like a boxing ring, and then leapt from it in a beautiful reverse swan-dive. He seemed to hang in the air for a second before he flipped over and went straight through a pane of glass set up on the outside of the ring. It was apparently there for the sole purpose of causing this man bodily injury, and it shattered in spectacular fashion. Claire was alarmed and impressed in equal measure.

Alex was in the habit of encountering a hobby or subculture that was hitherto unknown to them and then getting terrifically excited about it in short order, and learning all the necessary information to be an expert. They stuck at new special interests at a rate of about 10 per cent, which was why they were a very skilled embroiderer and could alter clothes, but no longer had any interest in baking olive bread or knitting fingerless gloves. It was more than possible this passion for pro-wrestling would wear itself out in about three weeks, but it was unwise to mention this to Alex when they were in their honeymoon period with it.

‘I wouldn’t have thought pro-wrestling was very you …’ Claire said, with some caution.

‘Pro-wrestling as a theatrical performance of heteronormative masculinity is post-ironically cool,’ said Alex, with a withering glance. ‘Besides, there are a bunch of gender-diverse wrestlers now, and a history of performers being subversive and inclusive. And, like, at what point do you not just have to be the change you want to see in the world?’

‘Right. Should have known, I suppose,’ replied Claire, suitably chastened.

‘I think it’s well cool,’ said Sophie. ‘And Alex’ll probably be quite bad at it, which will be funny,’ she added. She sat down and started waving her fingers at Wyatt in a futile attempt to get the dog’s attention.

‘I will be as graceful as a gazelle,’ said Alex, who was quite confident for a young person and had never run into anything they wouldn’t try once, short of heroin – and even then Claire wasn’t sure Alex wouldn’t decide they’d be able to do it once and then stop. This sort of devil-may-care attitude was possibly why Basher worried so much about Alex as they took their first steps into the world as an adult.

‘What’s this other thing about Weirdo here getting a job?’ asked Sophie. ‘I wouldn’t have thought pro-wrestlers would have much call for a freelance medium who isn’t very good at it.’

‘They’re quite superstitious actually,’ said Alex. ‘And that’s exactly where C comes in. This guy – Ken, he’s called – his dad died a few months ago and he reckons he’s being haunted now.’

Claire was interested, despite herself. ‘What, by his dad?’

‘That’s what he says. Should be easy enough to sort out, right?’ responded Alex.

Claire looked over at Sophie, who shrugged. ‘Could be fun. Like Alex said, either his dad is hanging around as a ghost or he isn’t. Being haunted is kind of a binary issue, LOL.’

Claire was about to reply, but then Wyatt surprised everyone by running full pelt at Sophie and trying to leap on her. Because Sophie wasn’t physically there, the poor dog skidded into the wall, turned and began to growl at Sophie in obvious affront.

‘Er,’ said Claire, ‘can your dog see dead people?’

2

The King is Dead

As a natural-born Popular Girl, Sophie’s attitude towards most things she encountered in life was to be aloof. She had grasped far more quickly than other teens that if she acted like nothing anyone did or said impressed her, many of her peers would only redouble their efforts to do so. The fact that Sophie had died young meant she never got old enough to test this behaviour in adulthood. Most people who do so find out that it offers diminishing returns.

Claire had never been confident enough to use this tactic in the first place, and approaching her mid-thirties and being haunted by the ghost of her best friend, who was forever trapped as a teenager and had an extremely short attention span, had not increased her ability to socialize. When Soph had been alive and had, for reasons still unclear, decided to make Claire her best friend on the first day of big school, Claire had developed a circle of other friends by osmosis; when Soph disappeared six years later, at the age of seventeen, she no longer provided a layer of insulation between Claire’s natural bent towards being a bit anxious and odd, and everyone that Claire came into contact with. The oddness and anxiety were only reinforced by suddenly being able to see ghosts. Quite apart from the unexpected reappearance of her missing best friend precipitating a nervous breakdown – Sophie had turned up at Claire’s elbow a few weeks after she’d gone, at a candlelit vigil for herself, loudly expressing disappointment at the numbers she’d pulled – from that day on, Claire could see all ghosts, everywhere. She became an even more strange, cold, twitchy sort of a person, often caught talking to thin air and, before she got good enough to tell a ghost apart from a living person on sight, avoiding eye contact. When ghosts figure out you can see them, they become more desperate for a conversation than, as Claire had recently found out, a Sky customer-service rep when you try to cancel your account.

Claire was working on being more assertive and self-confident, though, and, especially with Alex’s encouragement, had accepted the idea that she was good at stuff and had things to offer the world. These things were perhaps very specific, but still.

Anyway the point was that, because she had been dead for a period of more than fifteen years, Soph had never encountered a living creature that didn’t get on with her. And it was extremely clear that Wyatt, though she did not have the knowledge or ability to say as much, thought Sophie was a hideous affront to nature of the sort that should not be walking the Earth. Whenever Sophie went near her, she growled and yipped until Alex picked her up.

They were presently walking along a quiet-enough street in north Brighton, which Basher had parked at the end of, and Wyatt was getting so agitated that Alex had to ask Sophie to move further away. Alex couldn’t hear or see Sophie’s reply themself, of course, but Alex was the only person Claire had met who cheerfully acted as if they could, no matter the situation. Although Claire sometimes suspected that Alex could… not hear Sophie exactly, but pick up impressions of her meaning sometimes. It was the nearest thing to another medium Claire had ever run into, and she was keeping a close eye on the situation to make sure she wasn’t imagining it. In any case, Alex’s attitude was quite embarrassing for Claire, who usually did the opposite, but in conversations with Alex and Basher she did at least repeat what Sophie said and did, for their benefit; it was usually rude. In this case Sophie stuck her tongue out at Alex and Wyatt.

They passed some rundown mixed-use units – the sort with an off-licence, hairdresser and purveyor of definitely real handbags on the ground floor, and little pebble-dashed flats on the first floor. Alex took them past the corner and down a little walled lane that was mossy at the edges, and Claire had the sense that if you walked down it during the night you’d feel a bit edgy, because there were no street lights. Alex turned off at the end of the lane and before them was a sort of village-hall-meets-barn kind of building, with breezeblock walls covered in thick white paint and a tin roof.

Above the door was a sun-faded sign, with the letters S.W.F. emblazoned on it in large black letters. Underneath, in slightly smaller ones, it said ‘SUSSEX WRESTLING FEDERATION !’ The kerning between the N and the exclamation mark was slightly off, and it made Claire immediately ill-disposed towards the owners.

‘Bogey at ten o’clock,’ muttered Sophie. She’d seen another ghost.

Claire glanced over and saw a short, balding white man in wide-legged jeans and a dark hoodie, which was covering the kind of taut, low beer-belly that made him look like he was smuggling a basketball. His whole vibe spoke of someone who had only stopped wearing a wallet chain because his long-suffering fiancée had told him she wouldn’t go through with the wedding unless he did, and Claire really did not want to have a conversation with him. He was holding a notebook and was approaching them with what Claire considered to be an expression of horrible intent.

Luckily Alex had already barged through the door of the SWF – which was their favoured way of going through any portal – and stopped short, because the room was empty and there was, therefore, nobody to whom they could make a dramatic entrance. Basher quietly pulled the door closed behind them all, and the clunk of the handle was very loud in the quiet room. Claire noticed with relief that the other ghost had not followed them, which suggested that he couldn’t, for some reason. Alex dropped Wyatt on the floor almost immediately, and Basher, with similar speed, scooped her up.

‘Oh, would you relax? She used to live here,’ said Alex.

Wyatt did, indeed, look quite bored, although she began to growl again as the relatively small size of the room forced her into closer proximity with Sophie. The air started to get cold, as it did when a ghost was in an enclosed space. Claire pulled down the sleeves of her jumper without thinking about it. She owned and wore a lot of warm clothes.

She was actually surprised at how small the place was, though. It was basically the sort of office you get when you move into an office that used to belong to a different company and make minimal changes. The carpet was faded blue and the texture of a Brillo pad, and towards the back of the room was a single wooden desk and an old computer. The walls had T-shirts hung up, with big, bold designs reminiscent of band-tour shirts. Sophie walked over and examined one section that had tees saying ‘PNK’ in Barbie-pink neon, others reading ‘CPN’ in gold and yet another that said ‘PINK CHAMPAGNE’ in elegant, sparkly script.

Soph tipped her head. ‘Tag team maybe? Right?’ She turned to look at Claire, who shrugged.

‘Beats me,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know anything about this. Why isn’t anyone here?’ She looked around again. It really didn’t look like the sort of venue where you could watch two muscly beefcakes throw each other around.

‘They’re probably all out back in the main bit,’ said Alex. ‘Let’s just go through there.’

‘This is not our building. We will wait,’ observed Basher. His serious tone was only slightly undercut by the juvenile terrier in his arms, which was squirming around and trying to lick his chin.

‘I’ll go and look,’ said Sophie, and she strode out through the desk and the back wall with the directness you can only get when physical objects pose no barrier.

Claire started to shout, ‘No, wait!’ but Soph moved too fast. Claire staggered forward and into the desk, knocking over the computer screen. There was a muffled ‘Ohmigod! Fucking – ow!’ from the other side of the wall, matching Claire’s own furious and pained swearing.

Neither Claire nor Sophie was exactly sure how, or why, Sophie was a ghost – or why anyone was a ghost really – but they had established some basic rules of hauntings through years of observation. The most important of these was the first one:

1. Ghosts are stuck in one area, usually where they lived or died, and a variable radius around that point.

In Sophie’s case her area was, for some reason, Claire. They were tied together via a sort of force that Claire thought of as the tether, like an invisible thread of steel wire attached around her naval. A few months ago, while on a disastrous holiday, they had managed to stretch it to the point of breaking, which had caused them both a phenomenal amount of pain, and now it was extremely short and still very sore. When Claire had explained this to Alex and Basher, Alex had said it sounded like a footballer’s hamstring, and Basher said that Alex didn’t know anything about football and was just trying to show off; and then Alex asked who would they be showing off to – none of us like football anyway?

‘Arses,’ said Claire, with some feeling. She rubbed her knees, because she wasn’t altogether sure the impact hadn’t relocated her kneecaps to the back of her legs; and if that were the case, she’d have to walk like a goat, and people would film her in public to put on TikTok, and then probably very intense mothers’ groups in America would accuse her of being the Antichrist, which was the last thing she needed.

Claire’s runaway-thought train was interrupted by Alex coming over and starting to reset the bits and pieces that Claire had knocked over. Closer inspection revealed that the computer was merely a screen that wasn’t attached to anything, and basically everything on the desk was the sort of stuff that was there because nobody had got round to throwing it out. Alex casually nosed in the desk’s single drawer and Claire heard the rattle of a load of pens.

Basher, who was a former police detective and annoyingly good at accurately assessing the seriousness of a situation, asked Claire if there was any harm done, but in a tone of voice indicating that he already knew she was fine. ‘Close that drawer this instant,’ he added. ‘And that pencil pot was on the other side of the stack of packing envelopes.’

‘Yeah, but it makes way more sense where I put it,’ replied Alex, the chaotic, vibes-based yin to their uncle’s yang.

Sophie had by this point returned to the office and was doing slow breathing, like a yoga instructor during child labour.

‘Sorry, Weirdo,’ she said. ‘That was a bad one. I keep forgetting.’

She was being unusually contrite about this one specific issue because it was inarguably entirely her fault. It was the same reason she was being nice and helpful.

‘There’s a guy coming, anyway,’ Sophie continued. ‘He’s wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, so I assume he has no friends or they would have grabbed the scissors from him.’ About most things, she was still offhand and rude.

Seconds later a man did indeed come through the door in the back wall. He was a short, fake-tanned white man – and was, as described, wearing a black SWF-logo T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, the better to give out free tickets to the gun show. In the small room he seemed approximately as broad as an articulated lorry, if lorries could be made out of beef. He was so big-featured and good-looking that he would have horseshoed back around into being bland and unforgettable, were it not for the terrifying size of him on the horizontal plane.

‘It’s like looking at a giant sack of oiled pumpkins,’ said Sophie, in a tone of some respect. ‘There’s a horse hospital somewhere missing its entire supply of steroids.’

‘Oh, hi again, Alex,’ said the Jolly Orange Giant. His voice was deep, but he immediately switched to a widdle baby-talk voice to greet Wyatt, who had started to wriggle in Basher’s arms. ‘Hello, best girl! Who’s the best girl in the whole world? Yes you are!’

He tickled Wyatt under the chin and she made a spirited effort to lick his entire hand in one go.

‘Oh, sorry – I’m Ken King, operator of the Ess Doubleyoo Eff.’

He stuck out a hand the size of a loaf of bread, and Claire and Basher introduced themselves. Claire had expected her own hand to be crushed, but Ken carried himself with the careful and gentle air of a man who did actually know his own strength.

‘Training school doesn’t start for another week, Alex,’ Ken went on. ‘And you probably shouldn’t be bringing Wyatt back here this soon. Poor kid’ll get confused.’ Ken seemed not to be registering how cold the office room was. He showed no signs of feeling temperature at all. His skin was so hairless and shiny that it was possible he was, like his more famous namesake, made of plastic.

‘I know, I know. But Uncle B wanted to see the place before he signed me over to you for controlled bodily harm, you know? And I brought Claire about… about the other thing, right?’

‘Oh! You’re the medium?’ Ken studied Claire with renewed interest. She was sure she would be found wanting. People expect – and sort of want – mediums to say vague but significant things, wear a lot of eye make-up and swathe themselves in scarves. Claire had badly dyed black hair, a pink-tinged nose from being constantly cold and wore big baggy jumpers and skinny jeans. She had the vibes of a standard millennial mum who was still trying to look cool, but didn’t have everything together – if a millennial mum was terrified of children, because she had no idea how to speak to them. The fact that she could see and talk to ghosts made being a freelance medium basically the easiest career path available to Claire, but because it’s hard to do theatrics when a translucent pensioner is shouting at you about how much they hate their neighbour’s son, it was also the biggest barrier to being a successful freelance medium. Which, Claire thought, was wildly unfair.

Ken was still looking at her.

‘Oh. Er, yeah. That’s me. Alex said you had a ghost.’

‘She’s honestly very good. Sort your haunting in two seconds,’ asserted Alex, in a show of support.

‘Well, I’m at the point where I’ll try anything,’ said Ken. He paused and looked back at Alex. ‘I could swear you didn’t have hair like a drumstick lolly the other day, you know.’

Basher and Sophie barked a surprised laugh at the same time. Claire thought that, by matching Alex at their own game, Ken had shown to Basher that he would, at least on one level, be able to look after Alex. The little policeman behind Basher’s eyes made a note. Claire wondered if Ken had done this knowingly, and if he was able to size up everyone he met that fast.

‘Come into the main building.’ said Ken. ‘We use this for the box office on show days and as somewhere for deliveries to leave stuff, that kind of thing.’

‘Oh, right. Er, how did you know we were here then?’ asked Claire. ‘We didn’t ring a bell or anything.’

Ken pointed to a tiny digital camera up in the corner of the ceiling. ‘We’re basically never in here, to be honest, and there’s nothing worth nicking, but just in case anyone buggers off with a T-shirt, we’d know who it was.’ He got out his phone and opened an app, and suddenly they were looking at a tiny version of themselves staring at Ken’s phone, which was displaying an even tinier version of themselves. Claire did not think about this too hard because she had a tenuous grip on reality versus fantasy as it was, and spending half an hour pondering recursion and whether the little versions of them all in the phone went on for ever would do nobody any favours.

‘See, there’s a live feed and it sends an alert to your phone if the motion sensor picks up anyone in here. Good, right? Wasn’t that expensive, either. Dad was chuffed with it. There’s one covering the door to the locker room as well, because the wrestlers leave their gear there.’ Ken tapped the screen again and brought up the view of an empty corridor somewhere else in the building, and then closed the app. ‘Okay, follow me and I’ll show you around. We’ll go into the proper office first.’ He jerked his head towards the back door, and they all trooped after him as he went through it.

The door opened directly into a large space that looked like a school gym, but Claire only got a glimpse of it before Ken led them off to the side into another office, this one obviously used all the time. There were a couple of filing cabinets, a desk with a plugged-in computer, and stacked chairs and boxes. The desk was covered in paper and the filing cabinet was partially open. Ken went over to close it and seemed, for the first time, a bit embarrassed. Here was a man who spent his time jumping around in tiny pants in front of crowds. Was he really abashed at a bit of mess? He settled in the chair behind the desk and laced his fingers together in the attitude of a businessman.

‘Do you do this sort of thing a lot then?’ he said.

‘Oh, you’re talking to me?’ Claire realized. She could sense Sophie rolling her eyes, without even needing to look. ‘Er, a bit,’ she replied.

‘Yeah, right. Haven’t done a proper seance for months,’ said Soph.

This was correct. Claire’s business as a ghost-talker had undergone a small boost when she moved to Brighton, because it was the sort of place populated by people ready to believe in ghosts; but it un-boosted quite quickly because it was also the sort of place populated by Tarot readers who were more than ready to light incense and talk about how your grandmother wanted you to know you’re worthy of love, which was the flavour of observation Claire found actual ghosts didn’t really bother their arse to make. Your grandmother was more likely to go on about the fact that you didn’t visit her enough when she had a bad foot that one time. Dying didn’t make people beatific angels, it simply made them dead. Claire was on the verge of asking Mr Przybylski, who ran the shop above her basement flat, if he had any shifts going. The commute was ideal.

‘Well, I dunno how much Alex told you, but SWF is a family business, right? My dad, my uncle and, well, the pair of them, founded this place, and now we’re the largest pro-wrestling training school in the area. We put on regular shows and we’re one of the only big indies still making a living outside London, cos a huge multinational company started its own official feed for new talent and – look, that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that my dad built this place up from nothing, and he died a couple of months ago.’

‘Was it a shock? Or, like, was it peaceful?’ asked Claire, who was just about considerate enough to know one probably shouldn’t ask a recently bereaved person, ‘Was your father’s death violent?’

‘Sort of “no” on both counts, I suppose,’ replied Ken. ‘He had high blood pressure and we were trying to persuade him to step back from in-ring performing. He’d already had a heart attack last year and was on medication for the blood pressure, so when he died here after a workout… I wouldn’t describe it as peaceful, and it was sudden. But it wasn’t exactly a shock, either, you know?’

‘Who found him?’ asked Basher. There was an edge of impatience to his voice, and Claire sensed that it was less because he wanted to get the conversation over, and more because his ex-copper instincts were kicking in and he felt she wasn’t getting enough salient facts.

‘Mum. It was the morning of a show and he’d left some paperwork behind, so she took it over and found Dad on the floor. It wasn’t pleasant for her, as you can imagine.’

Basher nodded. ‘The police cleared it fairly quickly, I imagine,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ Ken frowned slightly. ‘Why wouldn’t they? There wasn’t anything suspicious about his death.’

‘Of course. I just mean that it is routine to double-check, when someone dies unexpectedly,’ said Basher.

‘Yeah, that’s what they told Mum,’ agreed Ken.

‘Uncle B used to be filth,’ said Alex, with a helpful grin. It earned a frown from Basher and a chin tilt of acknowledgement from Ken.

‘Ah, right,’ he said. ‘Didn’t know that.’

‘Did your father die with any regrets? Stuff he wanted to see happen that didn’t?’ Claire asked.

She saw the corners of Basher’s eyes twitch, as if he wanted to smile, as she dragged the interview back to her own, more paranormal side of the tracks.

Ken raised his eyebrows in some surprise at this. ‘Wow, is “unfinished business” actually a thing? I thought that was only in stories.’

‘Unfortunately it is,’ muttered Sophie. This was rule number two on the list of Things Claire Knew About Ghosts:

2. Ghosts usually hang around if they have some kind of unfinished business. Getting rid of the unfinished business will often get rid of the ghost. The meaning of ‘unfinished business’ is, however, unhelpfully flexible. It can range from ‘being murdered’ to ‘Everton haven’t won the Premier League since the 1980s’ and ‘I wanted to call my sister a bitch one last time.’

In Claire’s experience, solving a murder was sometimes the easiest bit. But Sophie was growing more annoyed at her own circumstances, because the current chances of her own murder being solved were about as high as Everton’s. Her disappearance was officially a cold case.

‘Yeah, it can be,’ replied Claire cautiously. ‘So do you think your dad had any?’

‘Maybe,’ said Ken. ‘I suppose the first step is if you just tell me whether Dad’s here. That I’m not going off my rocker. And then we can figure out the rest, regarding you… I don’t want to say “exorcise”. But if Dad is here, he needs to move on, doesn’t he?’

‘Why do you think your rocker stability is compromised?’ asked Basher, leaning slightly forward. He often tried to pretend he was above the shenanigans that Alex got Claire involved in, but equally he often couldn’t resist poking his nose in if it caught his interest.

In response to the question, Ken rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked around.

‘Oh, he’s finally got a bit shy about thinking there’s a ghost knocking around,’ said Sophie. ‘Big, physical man like him, terrified by a bed sheet? Where’s his street cred?’

‘I was telling this lot: wrestlers are a bit superstitious, right?’ said Alex helpfully.

‘Well, yeah, with pre-show ritual stuff and that, but ghosts is a bit… Things move,’ said Ken. He was clearly uncomfortable. ‘Doors slam shut by themselves. I hear things, late at night when everyone else has gone. The performers are complaining about the temperature, and sometimes you get a proper all-body shiver. I know you can have natural explanations for all that stuff, but it’s only been happening since Dad died, and it’s not like a window has been left open. Plus, I had to get rid of Wyatt. She started tear-arsing around and barking at nothing, out of nowhere. It was driving us all up the bloody wall.’

Claire glanced at Sophie, who shrugged. They had not encountered a dog that could see ghosts before. It was possible Wyatt was just a weird dog.

‘Well,’ said Claire, ‘I can’t see anyone in this particular room, apart from us lot.’

She double-checked. Some ghosts could disappear, but every ghost made the area cold, so a sudden chill was either a ghost trying to poke you or an indication that you’d left the freezer door open. But it was also a reminder of point three:

3. It is important to sort out unfinished business as quickly as possible, if you can, because ghosts – if they hang around for too long without any purpose – start to become less human and solid-looking. They can lose their emotions, memory and eventually their voice and form entirely. Old ghosts are just insubstantial, freezing mist.

Claire hated those ones. You couldn’t even tell if it was the right ghost. Someone could have hired you to chat to their great-great-grandfather and it might as well have been a fog machine. Ken’s dad was a recent death, so if he was a mist ghost, something had gone catastrophically wrong.

‘Well, I’ve got no problem with you checking the rest of the place. If you follow the corridor around, there are toilets, a locker room and showers, but it’s mostly – well, I can show you,’ said Ken. He got his confident little grin back. He beckoned them to follow him out and they got a proper look at the SWF gym for the first time.

Claire hadn’t been expecting a huge arena with seating tiers, but neither had she thought it would so closely resemble an English primary-school gym. She got this impression because the floor was varnished wood under spot-lighting, and a handful of people in loose gym gear were practising rolls and flips on gym mats. There were a lot of slaps, and occasional grunts as someone landed heavily. Towards the back of the room was what looked a lot like a boxing ring – which is to say, a square platform about three feet off the ground, with three-ring ropes going around all four sides, making a sort of fence. Two people were in the ring and were taking turns picking each other up and flipping each other over. Every time one of them landed there was a loud bang.

‘Good, isn’t it?’ said Ken. ‘The ring itself is made of planks with padding on them, so they rattle individually, and it makes a great noise. On show nights we have live mics under the ring – gives an even better effect.’

‘I thought you said training didn’t start for a couple of days?’ said Claire.

‘It doesn’t; these are just some of the usual gang putting in extra time.’

At this juncture Wyatt squirmed so much that she sort of back-flipped out of Basher’s arms and dropped to the floor. Jack Russells were apparently very robust, though, because she bounced back to her feet and capered over to the nearest wrestler. This was a fit, muscular woman – though not so muscular that she looked like she would burst if she encountered a cactus, like Ken – who was notably very miserable.

‘She’s doing Florence Pugh sad face,’ remarked Sophie, who had been introduced to Florence Pugh, and her various expressions, only a couple of weeks ago when Alex had made them watch Midsommar.

The miserable woman became momentarily happy again at the appearance of Wyatt and immediately fell to her knees to receive a face-wash. The other wrestlers around the place made their way over too, and started cooing as if the dog was in fact a baby.

Sophie gave a little alert whistle and jerked her head. The two wrestlers in the ring were still practising, and a third person was watching them from the side. Point four of the essential nature of ghosts:

4. Ghosts can look like they did when they were alive, or like they did when they died, or like whatever state their body was in, which meant that Claire was now quite philosophical about skeletons and head wounds.

If you knew what you were looking for, ghosts were easy to tell apart from living people – even the ones that didn’t have a gunshot wound or were a bit decomposed. They went see-through in bright light and more solid in darkness, for example. Once you’d seen a few of them, you could tell a ghost from a mile off because they had a certain wrongness to them, like someone who had been green-screened into reality.

Sophie was the kind of ghost who was going to wear exactly the same clothes she’d died in for ever, including the little butterfly hairclips and the white trainers. It seemed that Ken’s dad was similar, because he was wearing nothing except a threadbare blue towel tucked around his waist.

It was a prodigious waist. King Snr was big and strong, but fat rather than muscled, and was the same pink colour as cooked ham. He was also entirely bald. It was giving Charlie Bronson.

‘Terrible fucking form!’ he shouted at the two in the ring.

They, of course, didn’t hear him, but Claire had unwisely winced at the volume of his yell, so he immediately turned on her.

‘You can see me, can’t you?’ roared Mr King, in a tone of triumph that cost him nothing in volume. ‘Don’t pretend you can’t! Right, you have to tell my boy – I’ve been trying to give him the message for weeks. That bastard Nate killed me, and I’m not going nowhere until he’s gone down for it.’

‘Interesting. We should be used to this by now, I suppose,’ said Sophie. She yawned a bit too theatrically for Claire’s liking.

‘Fucksake,’ said Claire. It was almost the last thing she’d wanted to hear from Daddy King. ‘I hope you’re not an Everton fan as well,’ she added, after a moment’s consideration.

3

Long Live the King

If Mr King – who introduced himself as Eddie, and Claire lost a few seconds trying to figure out if Eddie King was a good name for a wrestler or if he would have been better off as, for example, starting a long-haulage business, because Eddie King would look good on the side of a lorry – was correct and he had been murdered, it would technically be the fourth murder Claire had encountered in less than a year. It was upsetting to her that the average kept increasing. Previously she just had the one murder victim hanging around all the time. Technically, she supposed, she probably had run into a lot of long-dead murder victims still kicking about, because by the law of, you know, maths, a non-zero percentage of the ghosts she saw in her life would have been killed by someone else. But it’s not like she asked them all the time. It would be rude.

‘Who’s Nate?’ she asked. This seemed the most pressing information for any amateur detective to discover. Until recently Claire had been a true-crime fan of many years’ standing, and she’d always suspected that she’d be able to solve a murder if it came down to it. She had turned out to be right – a lot of help from Sophie notwithstanding – but it hadn’t made her happy. It had made her stop liking true crime as much.

Eddie opened his mouth to reply, but one of the wrestlers in the ring had heard her and said, ‘What?’

‘Rookie move, Weirdo,’ said Soph. She was right. Normally Claire only slipped up and talked to a ghost in front of other people if she was very tired or specially annoyed. She had a Bluetooth headset that she usually wore when out and about, to make it seem like she was always on the phone, but she’d taken it off to talk to Ken.

‘What was that?’ asked the wrestler again. He was a tall, lithe Black man with warm reddish-brown skin and mid-length dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail. He was breathing hard as he came over, and flopped his arms over the ropes to talk to Claire. ‘Did you ask about Nate? He’s not in today, I think he’s over checking on Trudy.’

‘Bet he is, the greasy fuck,’ spat Eddie.

‘Oh – I… I don’t actually know anyone. I, er…’ Claire tried to think of a plausible excuse.

‘Come on, I thought you were getting better at thinking on your feet,’ commented Sophie. ‘You have a legitimate reason for being here, remember?’

Claire coughed to cover a sort of nervous burp and took a deep breath in. Sophie usually offered her own commentary on conversations, but it was often unhelpful. It meant that Claire either left long pauses while she listened to what Sophie was saying or had to ask people to repeat themselves several times, because Sophie talked over them.

‘A friend of mine is going to start the training-school thing soon, maybe,’ she replied. ‘And, erm, Ken invited us to look around here.’

Claire, despite having been doing it as her main source of income for about fifteen years now, was still a bit embarrassed by having to say that her job was being a medium. Most people, reasonably, didn’t believe her and thought she was a weirdo at best, a charlatan taking advantage of people’s grief at worst. Besides, she wasn’t sure if Ken wanted to broadcast that he suspected – correctly, as it turned out – that the SWF was haunted by his dead dad.

‘Oh, right, sound. I’m Guy, this is Ruby. Rubes, c’mere.’

The other wrestler in the ring, who had been stretching her arms behind her head, came and flopped on the ropes next to Guy. She was a very tall white woman and was built like a bodybuilder, the same colour as fine porcelain, but of inverse fragility. Ruby had dark, mischievous eyes and a dyed blonde buzzcut that was uncannily similar to Basher’s hair, although Ruby looked as if she could snap Basher in half like a breadstick.

‘I bet they’re the tag team,’ said Sophie.

‘We’re a mixed tag team,’ said Ruby. Sophie looked smug. ‘We wrestle together as “Pink Champagne”.’

‘Oh, cool. We saw your T-shirts in the little storefront office-thing,’ replied Claire.

‘Yup,’ said the distractingly unclothed Eddie. ‘They’d be our biggest draw, wrestling as singles, but they insist on booking as a tag team. Anyway they’ve been off their game recently. Terrible form.’

Eddie radiated the attitude of a man who would self-describe as ‘I speak as I find’, who would call a spade a spade and, furthermore, knew the difference between a spade and a shovel. Eddie knew how to rewire a plug, put up a shelf, and when he saw what he considered shit form in the ring, he’d call it out. Claire thought he would not have been particularly nurturing as either a father or a wrestling trainer.

‘Who’s joining the school?’ asked Guy.

‘Oh, er, Alex.’ Claire pointed. ‘With the two-tone hair.’

‘Ah, they took Wyatt, right?’

‘Yup. They’re… enthusiastic.’

Ruby laughed. ‘Well, that can get knocked out of you the first time you take a bump. There are always a lot of people who sign up but don’t come back for the second lesson.’

‘Lot of kids think it’s easy,’ sniffed Eddie. Sophie shushed him, so he wouldn’t distract Claire, which struck Claire as very ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

The wrestlers’ commentary was promising, though. Alex wasn’t any kind of a gym bunny and also smoked a lot of weed, which, as substances went, wasn’t really a get-up-and-go motivational kind of drug. On the other hand, Claire was pretty sure Alex was going to fall instantly in love with Ruby and do anything to impress her.

‘Nate’ll probably be at the first lesson,’ said Guy. ‘He’s the owner.’

‘Oh, I thought Ken was the owner,’ replied Claire, realizing that she had made the classic rookie-detective mistake of an assumption. It was one of the worst things you could do as a detective on her favourite police-procedural TV show Murder Profile. It was second only to allowing a suspect to ask for a lawyer without getting them to confess first.

Guy shrugged. ‘Well, for whatever reason, Eddie left all his share of the business to his brother Nate, not his son. Doesn’t really make a difference to us, and Ken doesn’t seem bothered.’

‘Yeah, neither does Trudy,’ said Ruby, with what might be considered a definite tone. She snickered. ‘Eddie was going to retire soon anyway, so him dying sort of moved things up a bit, I suppose.’

Guy gave her an elbow and a stern look and said that they needed to get back to practising. Eddie watched them with a face like a slapped arse.