The lonely boys are always the best kissers. Your confident, cocksure types have a good idea about what they're doing and proceed to do it regardless of whether you actually like it or not. Lonely boys want to please. They'll do anything you say you like. They'll try hard, all the time. They are grateful and amazed that you want to kiss them back.

Lonely boys are the best.

I should have realised sooner, therefore, what was really going on. But I didn't, and everything that happened took me by surprise, right to the very end.

Quill Kipps and I had been working together for a few months, on and off, when we took the trip to Yorkshire that almost killed us. Up until that point we'd done smallish jobs, London based, and I'd only called him in when I needed backup. With the goggles he could see ghosts despite his now advanced age of twenty two. At my own advanced age of eighteen I had no trouble with my psychic Sight, though I knew the end was coming - when I got to my twenties it would dwindle and fade. Despite his age handicap, on ghost hunting jobs Quill was eager and brave and only moaned fifty percent of the time about the cold or the damp or the way I never let him go into a deadly haunted situation first.

After a few jobs, and one time I lost patience and told him to shut up with the complaining or he could find his own work from now on, the moaning dwindled to a manageable twenty percent.

My one woman agency brought in a good amount of work. I admit this was helped by my prior association with Lockwood. After we stopped Marissa Fittes and her plundering of the Other Side, we became minor celebrities. Lockwood, of course, was fabulously popular, even after he left the country with the other Lockwood agents, Holly and George. Me, I stayed behind. So did Quill Kipps.

I shamelessly played on what little fame I had to get jobs. Quill had been doubly punished in life - cast out by his employer for helping Lockwood, and rendered useless as an agent by age. I gave him work whenever I could. We'd never particularly been friends, but in a haunted situation, I trusted him.

And of course I still had the skull. Free of its jar, it sat on the windowsill of my tiny studio flat, and at night its ghost, the thin youth with the spiky hair, would drift into view, lounge arrogantly against my washing machine, and make sarcastic remarks as I watched telly.

He came with me on jobs, loping along beside me if I brought the skull in my bag. He notionally helped me identify psychic sources, but a lot of the time just made revolting suggestions until I threatened to throw the skull in the furnaces where dangerous sources were destroyed.

I wasn't sure he actually needed to stay so close to his source - I'd never met such a powerful spirit - but either way, he kept turning up.

I didn't mind. The undead spirit of a Victorian youth isn't much as a flatmate, but it was better than the nothing I had otherwise.

So that was my life - living alone except for a sarcastic ghost, working enough nights to make a living, sleeping late in the day and occasionally being unable to avoid news of my former employer and former friend, the brilliant Anthony Lockwood.

Then one day a maroon three-door car chugged up my street and parked on the kerb outside my flat. I looked out of my window - its sputtering noise was distinctive, not to say alarming - and there was Quill, slamming the door and then adjusting the wing mirror back to vertical after the impact. He looked up, saw me and waved. I pressed the flat's buzzer and let him in.

"You've got a car!"

He twirled the keys. "It gives us more options for work. We could take jobs out of town, earn more cash."

Rural jobs paid more because agents were hard to find outside the big cities.

"Hmmn. I didn't even know you could drive."

"Want to come for a spin?" He wore his usual plain sweater and black jeans, pointed shoes. The last vestiges of the unbearably flashy dresser he'd been in his youth.

I glanced around at my pigsty of a flat. I had a couple of options today, actually - cleaning, or doing laundry. "OK. Where to?"

"Well. I actually have a job lined up. A big one. I've come to ask for your help." He grinned at me. Quill, the bringer of employment.

"You mention the car first and then this?"

"You mentioned the car. I would have just strolled in casually -"

"Yeah right, with a massive bunch of car keys dangling from your fingers -"

"And not said anything til it was time to go. Which it is, now, by the way."

"Now?"

"If we're going to get there before dark." He hesitated, then added, "It's in Yorkshire."

I folded my arms. "I'm not getting into any car and going to Yorkshire before you tell me every detail about this job."

Quill said, "I'll put the kettle on, then."

Yorkshire is a long way away, especially in a car which refuses to go above sixty miles an hour without a lot of clacking and clunking.

We trundled up the motorway and made good time for a couple of hours. Quill appeared to be sane behind the wheel. I relaxed and looked out of the window, not that there was much to see - mostly iron clad long-distance trucks from the continent, delivering goods to remote parts of Britain.

When we left the motorway and entered rural roads, things changed. Quill rolled up his sleeves and said, "Here's where it gets fun."

"Is this mutually exclusive of getting there alive? Because as you know from my lifestyle, I can live without fun."

"Don't worry," he said. "I just enjoy driving."

And he did. He drove fast, throwing the little car into corners and powering away on the other side; we swooped down valleys and up to the crests of hills. Quill was focused, hands light on the wheel, his eyes darting side to side as he took in the road, the traffic, the terrain.

It made a change from taking the Tube, anyway.

We stopped for tea at a run down pub high up in a pass between two peaks. It had surprisingly few ghost defences.

"Don't get em up here," said the landlord. "Too high, I reckon."

"Maybe nobody died up here," Quill said.

"Oh, they die all right," said the landlord. "But they don't come back."

"Comforting." I ordered egg and chips, large. Quill hesitated.

"It's on me," I said, "since you're doing all the driving." He gave me a grateful look and muttered a thanks.

I knew he was not well off. But he had a car. He couldn't be doing so badly. Could he?

Dipping my chips into my runny egg, I watched him eat. Now that I really looked at him - not something I had the luxury to do at midnight, firing flares at ghosts with him waving his rapier about behind me - he looked starving. His face, always pinched and foxy, was thinner than ever. His skin was pale - the freckles across his nose stood out. His gingery hair stuck up in rebellious spikes and his shoulders were hunched and tired. But his eyes were bright. Grey eyes, I noticed. I'd never thought about it before.

"You all right?' he said. "Not carsick or anything?"

"Do I look carsick?" I gestured at the mountain of food we'd destroyed between us.

"You look great," he said.

"What?"

"I mean no. Just making sure you're not suffering in silence."

"Hardly likely, Quill."

"True."

"Oi!"

He just grinned.

We finished our meals and then I looked at him again and said, "Pudding? Have we got time?"

"Only if you're having pudding," he said.

"Of course." I scanned the menu. "What's tea without pudding? Spotted dick, or steamed treacle sponge?'

"Treacle. Something about the other one puts me off."

"Fair point." I ate three mouthfuls of mine and pushed the bowl towards him. "I can't manage this."

"Oh. Do you mind if -"

"Go ahead."

It was not Quill's fault he was poor. He'd helped us and been punished for it. And at his age, trying to find supernatural work was hard, even with the goggles that let him see ghosts.

Teaming up with me was probably his best source of income. And we got on OK. When he wasn't moaning.

But then, who wouldn't complain if they were hungry?

Guilt stabbed me. My business was going all right. I should formalise things, make him a proper employee. Carlyle and Kipps. Hmm. Maybe just, Carlyle and Co.

"Quill," I said, and stopped. I had always worked alone. I was good at alone. Especially now. Alone was practically my top skill.

He paused, the spoon of sponge pudding halfway to his mouth.

"Nothing," I said. "A crazy thought."

We got back in the car and he put the radio on and whistled along to it as we chuntered north.

"What's this?" I asked. The melody was all hoots and be-bops.

"A tune my mum used to sing."

"Is she..."

"No, she's still alive, just doesn't sing it anymore."

"Oh." It was funny how we never talked about personal stuff.

"How about you? Hear from your sisters lately, your mum?"

"No."

"We're up north," he said, glancing sideways at me. "We could pop in."

"They live in Northumberland. To put that into context, that's another hundred miles north of where we're going.'

"I don't mind."

"I'll think about it."

"What," he said as I lapsed into silence. "Don't you get on with your folks?"

"Yes. Well. I mean I do, but they don't get it. Why I live in London, what I do for a living. They don't understand what we did, what we all did, last year. Before Lockwood-"

I bit off the sentence.

"Went off with everyone else to South America," said Quill.

"Mmn."

"He asked me," Quill said into the silence that followed. 'He came and invited me personally. Said it would be good to have another perspective on things."

I hadn't known that. I'd always thought Quill had been forgotten. "Why didn't you go? It would have been a great opportunity. And, you know. Work."

Quill shrugged. "Didn't fancy it. Have you seen the size of the insects they have out there?" He shuddered. "I don't relish waking up with one of those in my hammock. Or waking up in a hammock at all, come to that." He glanced across at me. "I was surprised you didn't go."

"Mmn." Perhaps my monosyllables would give the clue.

He didn't take the hint. "Why didn't you?"

I stared out of my window, my face turned from him. "Lockwood and I fell out."

"Oh. Sorry."

"It's Ok."

"Not over anything serious, I hope. I mean, you two were good together-"

"Shut up now, Quill."

"Sorry."

We drove quite a way into the Yorkshire moors without speaking. I kept my face turned from him and tried to think about anything except Lockwood and what had happened between us and how he and the others were now on the other side of the world and I was here, alone, with nobody.

Well, nobody except the skull. The ghost of the thin youth appeared every so often, but he seemed able to wander, and only returned to the skull, his source, when he felt like it. Or when he felt like a right good gripe, which was more often.

I smiled.

The skull was actually in my bag on the back seat. I'd get it out when we arrived, and see if the ghost would talk. He might be sarcastic, foul-mouthed and with some disturbing tendencies, but he was good company.

Not that Quill was bad. I just needed to stop comparing everybody to-

I crushed that thought. It didn't help. Another few minutes of staring at nothing out of my window and I would be fine. Beside me, Quill switched off the radio.

Then he reached out and touched my knee. I jumped.

'The moon," he said. "Look."

I followed his pointing finger. Although it was only late afternoon in October, a huge yellow moon was rising above the trees on the hill ahead of us. Wisps of black cloud clung around it, but its unearthly light silvered the road and showed the sky as a glowing grey spread of faint stars.

Quill whistled. "You don't see much of that in London."

"You do where I grew up," I said.

"I meant what I said. I'll give you a lift up there."

"What would you do while I saw my family?" I tried to picture the urbane Quill in the tiny village in the Cheviots where I grew up, and failed.

"Look around. Never been so far north. Are there polar bears?"

"Ha, ha." I pondered, and then a marvellous feeling of what the hell came over me. "All right, let's do it. When we've done this job. I could do with the time off." I grinned. "You can stay at our house, I can watch my mum disapprove of a Londoner and you can watch my sisters fall over themselves trying to impress a man from out of town. They're all ancient, by the way. Even older than you."

"Enticing."

"Or you can sleep in the car. Your choice."

"I'll see how I get on."

Then the car, as if hearing us, stuttered and rolled to a dead stop at the side of the deserted road, as the light was fading and the moon was high in the sky.