Page 52 of Unalive On Air

The question’s directed at Peter, but Jeanie answers. “No, she didn’t. That woman has been a godsend to this hotel, its reputation, and its bottom line. Guests love her. She’s really turned this place around since she’s been general manager.”

“Doesn’t mean she didn’t kill us all, though,” Stove says, his gaze flicking between Peter and Jeanie, a smile ghosting his features. “Maybe she’s addicted to the thrill, the buzz of ending a life. Look at the time span between each murder. There’s nine years between Pete and Pix, and then Elsie and Cam were maybe one and a half years apart, and between Cam and Gaz is only about . . . what, ten months? Eleven? If this pattern continues, it’ll be six months before she needs her next fix.”

Pixie scowls, but says nothing.

“What?” Stove says. I know by the smirk on his face he’s deliberately saying the opposite of what most of his fellow ghosts believe. He probably doesn’t even believe it himself, just playing devil’s advocate. And by that I mean he’s being a facetious, antagonistic cunt. “We’re all thinking it. We listened to ‘The Villain of Parlay.’ We know that someone can become an adrenaline junkie from killing.”

“The Villain of Parlay” was one of the first episodes of Unalive on Air I recorded. It was about a theatre tech who accidentally killed an actor backstage at the Parlay Theatre in Salisbury. He then developed a hard-on for murder, and went on to repeat the process several times. The length of time between each attack grew shorter and shorter, and in the end he was discovered only because his increasing insatiability made him sloppy.

It’s flattering that Stove would cite my own work to me to prove a point, and there’s a non-zero chance he could be on the money here, that Helga is indeed addicted to taking lives, but somehow it just doesn’t feel right. I don’t say any of this out loud. Least of all because I spent my entire time at Swindon Sounds vociferously declaring that “feels” have no place in a murder investigation, but also because I don’t want to accidentally solve the case and have half the ghosts suddenly disappear on me. I only have a handful of people I can converse with now, and as hard as I tried never to speak to anyone when I was alive, I’d rather not whittle down my options to myself, the magician, the teenager, the edgelord, and Magnus, who I’ve yet to meet. It’s not even as though I can talk to a mirror any more.

“Give Gaz enough time, and he’ll prove my theory about Hels,” Stove says. He looks at me. “Just don’t take any longer than six months, or you might not be the new kid on the block by then.”

“Please don’t call me Gaz,” I say. “I really hated that name in school, and I’d prefer not to be called it in my afterlife too.”

“Sure thing,” he replies, and then under his breath I’m certain he says, “Gazzy-boy.”

I pretend I can’t hear him, because it’s just easier that way, and I address the group instead. “So, everyone here either doesn’t believe in unfinished business, knows their unfinished business is something else entirely, or is willing to take the risk of being vaporised into the next realm by finding out whodunnit?”

“Yeps” and nods fill the space, and it’s only now that I realise Franny had left a while ago and us ghosts are crammed into the tiny storage cupboard for no reason.

I leave in order to find her, and the other spirits follow behind me. Peter abandons his anthill of magical items on the floor. “Okay, well, if you’re all cool with . . . that, I’ll continue my investigation.”

“Excellent!” Jeanie claps her hands together.

“Franny’ll be in her office now if you’re looking for her,” Trystan says.

I smile at him, but he’s playing with the button on his Hawaiian shirt. “Thanks.”

“No, thank you for . . .” he whispers, not bothering to finish his sentence. Finally, he meets my eyes and gives me this half-nod, half‑grimace gesture. “It’s just through this wall.” And then he disappears.

I follow him through the wall—not my first rodeo with interbrick transportation—and find myself in a cool, dark space filled with books, blurry bird photos, and an ungodly amount of surveillance equipment. Lining one wall is a multitude of CCTV screens from various vantage points around the hotel. Some cameras are static, fixed to one spot, others seem to rove transversely, and some monitors flick between pictures. They show the lobby, the car park, the auditorium, the dining spaces, and a plethora of identical‑looking corridors.

Fran’s desk is positioned in front of the wall of screens, and she’s sitting at her chair, but she’s not watching any of them. Instead, she logs onto her desktop computer, spelling out her password as she types it in.

“L I T T L E O W L. Nineteen.”

I look at the ghosts.

“She always does that,” Trystan says. “Think maybe she’s getting a little forgetful.”

“Wait till she starts arguing with internet strangers,” Stove says, rubbing his palms together with poorly veiled excitement.

As predicted, into the search bar, Franny types the address of a social media website commonly used by people of a certain age.

On the wall to her immediate left are shelves and shelves of telescopic lenses, binoculars, and what appear to be leather‑bound journals. I float over to them and inspect the devices more closely.

“Only a killer would have this many spy gadgets. Or a spy. She ain’t a spy, by the way,” Stove says.

“A moment ago you were convinced the murderer was Helga,” I say, though I think I’m getting the measure of Stove and his boom mic.

He simply shrugs, proving my suspicions about him. Though he brings up a valid point. Why does sixty-eight-year-old Franny Driscoll need such a high volume of spy gadgets—I mean, surveillance equipment—and yet doesn’t even bother to look up at the twenty or so screens displaying almost every angle of the hotel?

“I. Know. What. I. Saw. Deb-bor-ah,” Franny says, as she smashes the keypad with her fingers. For someone who’s lived in the southwest of England for more than half her life, her Northern accent is still a main character of her persona. “And you can tell that bloody husband of yours to shove his opinion up his jacksie.”

“Ooh, what did you see?” Stove asks, crouching at eye level to the monitor and obscuring my view of Fran’s feed.

A squashy red sofa and a grease-stained armchair rest in the other corner of the office, and a DAB radio leaks some kind of tropical birdsong in the background. And it all clicks into place—the chirping, the posters, the peeping Tom’s arsenal.