‘Now, not long after she died, she did something most surprising. She returned. Not to me.’ Crawler glanced at Scanlon. ‘To him. And this was fascinating, granted, but also completely useless. What use are ghosts? I thought to myself. Ghosts don’t put crystal glasses on the table. Until one day, when I saw something that helped me realise how Scanlon’s skill could be used.’ His face shone with an eerie, passionate zeal. ‘I saw a queue.’
I choked back a snort. Big whoop.
‘Made up of at least a hundred people, jostling each other impatiently, desperate to be first in line. And it wasn’t for the CuppaGrubba Drive-thru. It wasn’t even for the toilets, although that queue was also pretty long. It was for a fairground ghost train.’
I looked again at that snake-like construction coiled next to Crawler in the gloom. Saw the mechanical levers at the front.
‘In that queue,’ Crawler went on, his voice getting faster and more animated, ‘I saw excitement. I saw potential. I saw money.’
Crawler looked into the shadows with glittering eyes.
‘I said to myself: if people are paying to be scared, that means there’s money in it. And if there’s money in fake ghosts, just think how much money you could get with real ghosts. And that’s when I had my idea. One that would change our life.’
Crawler’s voice grew gentle and his entire body relaxed. I realised that he wasn’t really talking to us at all. He was recounting his plans and schemes just for the pleasure of hearing them aloud. Perhaps it was the first time he’d done so. Either way, he was practically floating with satisfaction.
‘The two pauper boys were our first catch. Scanlon spotted them wandering around a block of residential flats in Camberwell, on the site of the old workhouse they died in. He was only seven back then, which was quite an advantage, in fact, as he was able to capture their sympathy and earn their trust in a way a grown man may not have done. Back then, of course, he didn’t know what I had planned, so their friendship grew very strong, quite organically. He had no guilty conscience, you see. Proper pals they were, weren’t you, son?’
Scanlon hung his head.
‘The woman came next. Er … Vanity? Valerie?’
‘Vanessa,’ said Scanlon.
‘Hello, poppet,’ said Vanessa with a delighted wave. ‘Where did you get to?’
‘That ghost we found roaming the lobby of the bank where she’d worked. It took a bit of a shine to my boy, as it missed its own daughter, apparently. Scanlon was nine then. It confided in him about how it died – a vending machine landed on its chest, back in the 1980s.’
‘It swallowed up my only coin,’ sighed Vanessa, ‘and I’d promised to get a Twix for Giles the accountant. But I didn’t want to return to him empty-handed. So I gave it a shake, hoping to dislodge some chocolate anyway – and it landed on me. Silly me.’
‘Bad luck,’ I whispered.
‘Thanks.’ She smiled. ‘Although Giles sent some lovely flowers for the funeral, so that’s nice.’
‘Scanlon found the toddler up in Glasgow, all by itself, crawling out of an empty tenement somewhere near Pollok. We’re not sure about its origins at all. Apparently it can’t speak properly, and let me tell you, that’s a blessing. Blank spaces are wonderful opportunities for audiences to imagine their own stories, put their own imaginations to work, and that’s gold dust in this trade. Can you imagine all the tragic harrowing backstories punters are going to dream up for it? Plus there’s the fact that it’s a baby crying for its mother. People are going to go wild for it.’
As if on cue, the little girl with the grubby red bow said, ‘Ma … Ma …’ again, and Theo looked at her adoringly.
That was when it really sank in.
We weren’t just prisoners. We were entertainment.
CRAWLER CHECKED HIS watch and looked at us again. ‘Isolde, the Iron Age hag, came all the way from Swaffingham in Norfolk. A local man had written to the local news churn saying he’d heard the sound of thundering wheels driving through a playground. I consulted my books and realised that playground was all that remained of an ancient wood – one that had, twenty centuries ago, been home to an Iceni tribe. Well, you can imagine how exciting that was.’
We all turned to look at the woman with the plaits, and she scowled at us and made a threatening motion with her spear. We looked away.
‘Capturing it took a few months, but Scanlon was able, eventually, to gain its confidence by building a fire and roasting a squirrel to eat. It couldn’t resist abandoning its chariot and wandering over to tell him he was doing it all wrong. Now, Isolde’s quite hard to understand, on account of it speaking the Moronic language—’
‘Brythonic,’ muttered Scanlon.
‘But, frankly, I think its non-verbal aggression will go down very well. So, after six painstaking years of hunting, I had the workhouse boys, Valerie—’
‘Vanessa,’ said Scanlon.
‘… the Scottish baby and Isolde. But I knew I needed someone very, very special to complete the display. I wanted someone unlike the others. I wanted a ghost with oomph. Oh, I looked long and hard for someone like you, Frances Ripley. In fact, I’d almost given up on ever finding a poltergeist. Until one of my sources …’ he tapped the side of his nose, ‘tipped me off about you. Reports of supernatural disturbances, he said, down in Dorset. Unexplained wreckages. Old house. It was textbook. And then – well, you know the rest.’ He threw a proud look in my general direction. ‘We caught a poltergeist. Exceptionally rare, almost impossible to find, let alone trap. You’re the icing on the cake, Frances. Top-drawer stuff.’
I saw the other ghosts look at Scanlon then. Saw it dawning on them, as it had dawned on me, the lie that their friendship
