Ghosts Know Read Free

Don’t go too far but as far as you can. You know what Frugo tell everyone who works for them.”
    “I don’t believe I’ve heard it,” I say without wanting to know.
    “Everything you do and say at work should be an ad for where you’re working. Just do everything you can to make certain you’re one, Graham. They’ll be listening to our output before they come to visit. Let’s make sure they know we’re the ones making waves.”
    She sits back to end the interview. As I stand up, drawing a sound that might be a sigh of relief or resignation from the chair, she says “It’s about time Bob was on your show again. Tell Christine to put him on next time he calls.” This halts me long enough for her to ask “Was there anything else?”
    I won’t mention Hannah Leatherhead until we’ve had more of a word. I’m turning away when Paula says “Aren’t you having your sweet?”
    I’m reminded of visiting the doctor’s as a child or of being rewarded with a sweet for some other unpleasant experience. Wrappings rustle as I rummage in the bowl and find a lemon drop. “Thanks,” I say, mostly for the sweet, and hear Paula’s keyboard start to clack as I reach the door.
    Nobody in the newsroom seems to know whether they should look at me. I unwrap the sweet into my mouth and drop the cellophane in the bin beside my desk on the way to the control room. Christine spins around in her chair as I ease the door out of its rubbery frame. “Was it bad?” she murmurs.
    She’s enough of a reason for me to keep working at Waves—the eternal valentine of her gently heart-shaped face framed by soft spikes of black hair that’s cropped to the nape of her long neck, her slim lithe body in a black polo-neck and matching jeans, her eyes alert for my answer, her pink lips parted in anticipation. “It isn’t going to change my life,” I say, which makes me aware that I’ve yet to mention Hannah Leatherhead.

3: Staging The Ancestors
    It’s Walk To Work Day, but every workday is for me. As I step out of the apartment building, where the massive lintel over the tall thick door still sports the insignia of a Victorian broker, the gilded name-plate of Walter Belvedere’s literary agency glints above my handwritten cardboard tag. Perhaps he can place my novel if I ever finish it. A train swings onto the bridge over the street with a screech of wheels on the curve of the track, and I’m reminded of the noise that made Bob from Blackley lose control. Though the sun is nearly at its peak, the street is darkened by office blocks—you could imagine the shadows are their age made visible, more than a century of it. Sunlight meets me on Whitworth Street, where a man in shorts with a multitude of pockets is parading the biggest and certainly the bluest poodle I’ve ever seen. Along Princess Street girls are cycling in the first-floor window of Corporate Sana (“We mind if your body’s healthy,” says the slogan), but Christine isn’t in the gym; she’s producing the food and news show, Currant Affairs. As I pass her flat on Whitworth Street I glance up at the windows, but there’s no sign of an intruder.
    Where Oxford Street turns into Oxford Road a Palace faces a Palace. The one that isn’t a hotel displays posters for an American psychic, Frank Jasper. Early lunchers are taking sandwiches or sushi down the steps to eat by the canal. They make me feel later than I am, and I hurry along the western stretch of Whitworth Street to Waves. The guard at his desk nods to me as the automatic doors let me in, and a lift takes me to the fourth floor, where Shilpa at Reception is on the phone, attempting to explain that there’s no prize for solving Rick’s Trick. My badge on its extending wire unlocks the door to the newsroom, where Trevor Lofthouse is playing back a television newscast on his computer. I’m making for my desk when I see the name Goodchild on the screen.
    It’s a press conference with Kylie Goodchild’s parents