To my guest reviewer: Thank you. I hope you continue to enjoy the story. :)


Episode 6: For the Ghost, Chapter 4

"What exactly do you hope to achieve with those?" Cassandra sighed and rolled her eyes as Ezekiel caught his balance yet again stumbling over rocks and pebbles on the shore. He was wearing the filter fitted goggles that Jenkins had made them way back when they investigated the strange goings on at Collins' Falls.

"They picked up ghosts before, maybe they will again," replied the thief, stealing across the beach towards the crime scene.

Metal spikes with yellow tape tied around them marked the place where the body had lain. Time and tide hadn't waited for the permission of the forensics teams, though, and the stony ground had been washed clean. Even now, the tide had turned and was heading inland. Cassandra had been counting the minutes they had left before they started to get cut off. Time was ticking away. Time they should be using to look for sensible clues, not tottering about with obscured vision hoping to see the potential murderer. She surveyed the scene, letting her synaesthesia analyse the dips and troughs created by the impressions of the stones on the sand, and, hopefully the impression of the body. A few lines flickered into view. An arm here. A foot there. Nothing concrete. Nothing whole. She could confirm he had landed hereabouts, but that was all.

"You do remember that they were not, technically, ghosts," said Cassandra, crouching down by the yellow tape and looking up at the cliff top. "They were simply out of phase with our reality. Those goggles weren't designed for real ghosts."

"Research has shown extensive links between high levels of electromagnetic activity and supernatural activity," rattled off Jones. "These goggles may not have been designed to pick up ghosts per se, but they were designed to detect a part of the electromagnetic spectrum we can't usually see. It's worth a shot. What have we got to lose?"

Cassandra watched, nonplussed, as a loose stone rolled beneath the thief's feet and sent him sprawling. "Your balance, apparently," she smirked.

A shout drew their attention up to the cliff top. "Ahoy there!" Flynn called down, waving. "Anything interesting?"

Cassandra shook her head. "Not really. But we were right about the fall: there's no way he could have landed this far out if it were an accident. He would have had to have taken a running jump."

"I'm sorry, who was right?" Jones piped up, now seated on the rock that had broken his fall, wiping sand off his grazed palms.

"Fine, Ezekiel was right," Cassandra corrected herself, still calling up to Eve and Flynn. "Ezekiel is also trying to see ghosts with the phase-shift goggles."

"It might work!" Ezekiel protested.

"I highly doubt it..."

"You thought this was an accident..."

"I just said the evidence was inconclusive..."

"Can you tell if he jumped or was pushed?" Baird called down, bringing the subject back on track.

"No," Cassandra shook her head. "The stones have been washed clean already and none of them are probably where they ought to be. I can barely even detect where the body landed, never mind how."

"The newspaper didn't say much about it either," agreed Jones. "If it were closer in it wouldn't matter so much, but this far out it would make a lot of difference whether he landed face down or face up."

"It's pretty difficult to take a running jump off a cliff backwards," agreed Cassandra. "What do you see us there?"

"Not much," called down Baird. "If there was a struggle here, it can't have been much of one. It looked to me like we just followed a path made by police. Straight, clean and easy to follow. No fuss. Definitely no running or altercations."

"He must have jumped then," said Jones with a shrug. "He ran in a straight line and jumped, and that's the line that the police, in their wisdom, enlarged on their way to see if they could work out where he jumped from."

"No," mused Cassandra, looking up and the cliff and down at the faint impressions in the sand and stone. "No, that doesn't work. I can't see much, but I can make out roughly what way he was pointing. If he'd run in a straight line and jumped his head would be round here and his feet round there," she pointed with a piece of driftwood. "No, if he jumped from the cliff, it must have been..." Cassandra let the lines of light fill in the blanks for her and followed the sketched trajectory up the cliff. And up. And up. "Oh my!"

Ezekiel followed Cassandra's gaze up, spotted something else and dived for the redhead. A shower of sand and splintered rock erupted from a spot just behind where she had been standing. Dragging Cassandra to her feet as he rose, Jones hustled her over to the shelter of the cliff. Up on the cliff top, he could see Baird with her gun out and pointed upwards, and Flynn scanning the parapets.

"Jones! You good?" Baird shouted down to them.

"We're fine!" Ezekiel called back, more confidently than he felt. "Go."

With a nod, the couple darted away, still watching the roof line of the building. Beside Jones, in the lea of the cliff face, Cassandra was muttering under her breath. "...is the square of the hypotenuse... Splatter pattern suggests an impact angle of eighty one point two five degrees... Distance twenty centimetres... Tangent is the opposite over the adjacent... Tangent of eighty one point two five equals x over twenty, therefore x equals twenty times the tangent of eighty one point two five..."

"Hey!" Ezekiel shouted, realising too late what she was doing and shaking her to make her look at him. "Don't go there."

"Too late," she smiled apologetically. "X equals one hundred and thirty centimetres." Cassandra tapped a hand in the centre of her chest. "It would have hit here."

"Please do not ever do that," said Jones seriously, still holding Cassandra's shoulders. "We don't worry about what could have been. We have enough to worry about with what is!"

"You should know by now," Cassandra smiled weakly. "Math problems are like catnip to me!"

"Maybe, but at least we know one thing for sure," sighed Jones.

"Which is?"

"Ghosts don't bother with guns. This was murder pure and simple."

"But if there's no ghost to deal with," began Cassandra. "Why would the Library call us in?"

"Maybe he was killed for something magical," shrugged the thief. "Maybe there's an evil cult. Maybe he stumbled upon some monster and its keeper found out. Maybe all three."

"Whatever it is, I hope Baird gives the all clear soon," said the redhead, straightening up and looking past Ezekiel's shoulder. "Look."

Jones turned and looked along the beach. The tide was coming in, and the gap between cliffs and waves was now only filled with treacherous rocks at the shore's highest point. At it's lowest, the water was already threatening to cut them off entirely.

"Ah," winced Jones, then smiled brightly. "Don't fret: I have an idea!"

"Why do I get the feeling I'm not going to like it," replied Cassandra suspiciously.

"You're the one who is convinced the ghosts are harmless, and with the automatic satnav in her head," grinned the young man. "You should be fine with this!"

"You've been waiting for an excuse haven't you," groaned Cassandra, realising what was coming. "That's why you brought the goggles."

"What? The locks on these things are ancient! They're too easy not to pick!" Jones shrugged cheerfully. "Then we just follow the tunnels to wherever they come out, presumably up in the castle somewhere, and hey presto! We're back on terra firma!"

"These ghosts might be friendly but generally they still don't like you in their space," Cassandra told him. He gave her a look. "So I've heard," she added.

"Well, I'd say 'stand back and watch this'," said Jones, "but just in case he's still up there you'd better not. Just give me ten seconds..."

XXXX

"Hi, Eve Jones, party of four, booked in earlier today. NATO Counter Terrorism unit. Please don't freak out but there's a sniper on your roof and we need past right now," said Eve, the words falling from her mouth in quick succession like bullets from a machine gun. The startled National Trust volunteer glanced at the NATO badge with wide eyes and waved the pair through, making frantic gestures at her colleague on the other side of the hallway to lead the couple where they needed to go.

Accompanied by their guide, and collecting security men as they passed, Flynn and Eve made their way to the roof. The lead covering the rooftop was too cold at this time of year to have left any impressions. If their sniper had used the doorway they were at, he had left no sign of it. There were other doors though. Eve waved their entourage away. Silently ordering the security men to stay with the door. Others of their number had already been sent to the other two doors. With only Flynn beside her, Eve turned to the roof.

"You have no weapon," she whispered. "You should stay with the guards, or go see if you can find some security camera footage."

"And leave you here alone?" Flynn retorted. "I won't even dignify that with an answer."

"Thought not," she muttered. "Stay close."

"Always."

XXXX

"How can you possibly prefer an Andy Warhol to a Vermeer?" Stone exclaimed. "He's important, sure. He brought the whole field of art and illustration out into the twentieth century. He revolutionised printing as an art form and he made pop art what it is today. But if I wanted to buy a serigraph, I'd go looking for someone like Woody Crumbo. If I wanted to buy an image of the Mona Lisa, it wouldn't be Warhol's!"

"But he was innovative!" Leonardo argued. "He created a new genre of art. Nobody thought of doing things the way he did, before he did them. He had the spark of creation that a real artist needs. Not just the ability to copy features and landscapes, but the ability to change the way we see those features and landscapes. The ability to see the simplistic beauty in a can of soup! The courage to use colour in a way it had not been used before. He was the Van Gogh of his time!"

"Van Gogh was a genius!" Stone cut in. "He was unique. There is no-one like Van Gogh."

"All great artists are unique," da Vinci waved away the comment. "All are genii, in their own unique way. Take Picasso..."

"I'd rather take Dali," muttered Stone.

"Him too," continued Leonardo. "Dali, Picasso, Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Hunt, Millais, Rosetti, Caravaggio, Michaelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Canaletto, Titian, Rubens, Van Dyke, Cavallino, Giotto, Tintoretto, all of them! How can you, the critic, tell the difference between a landscape of Camille Pissarro or that of William Turner? Between the fantasies of Bosch and Rousseau? A portrait by Rembrandt or by Holbein? It is precisely because they are unique that you can identify them. Each one has the creativity, the skill and the courage to make their own mark on the artistic world. Their own, individual, utterly unique mark. And that is what marks out their genius."

"You certainly seem to have kept your eye on the art world, wherever you've been hiding," Stone commented.

"Not hiding, my boy," corrected Leonardo, sharply. "Living. Free to study my own art as much as that of others. You may have studied to become an art historian, young man, some of us lived it!"

XXXX

Baird held out a hand, holding Flynn back behind her. He didn't argue. He knew better. They had searched the roof methodically from one end to the other. There had been no trace of their shooter. With a motion for him to stay still, Baird moved forward around the last corner. Nothing.

"Clear!" Baird called out. Flynn was at her side looking down over the edge in an instant. She pointed down at a chip in the edge of the parapet. "You think this is what Cassandra was looking at when Jones spotted the gun?"

"I assume you mean the roof, not the chip," replied Flynn. "Impossible as it is to see damage to the top a roof like this from below."

"You assume correctly," Eve smiled, relaxing a little.

"I would say that is a fairly probable conclusion, then," mused the Librarian. "An adult male body pushed with force from this height would certainly arc out further. Depending on the force, he would have landed more or less where our victim did."

"More to the point, if we know he came from this direction, where else could he have fallen from?" Baird pointed downward. "There's no ledge. Nobody could have walked along there then had a physical fight with someone and been pushed so far out. The momentum would have taken both over, probably without either of them even trying."

"There's the windows," suggested Flynn, looking down.

"None are broken," replied Baird. "What are the chances they open wide enough to send someone out of them at speed?"

"If I know my National Trust, probably pretty good," said Flynn. "They usually take reasonably good care of their properties. Never mind that, though: we have a new problem."

Eve looked where Flynn was pointing. The tide was in. The beach below was entirely cut off. "Cassandra?" Baird shouted down. "Jones?"

A baseball cap was waved at them from under a rock ledge. Baird felt her phone buzz. It was Jones.

"No luck with the gunman then?" Ezekiel's voice grinned through the phone.

"None," Baird stated. "The tide is in. Hold tight and we'll get a rope down to you."

"No need," the voice continued grinning. "We've made our own entertainment, as they say. We'll come up through the tunnels."

"The haunted tunnels?" Baird flicked the phone onto speakerphone.

"Ezekiel, do not try using the haunted tunnels," ordered Flynn. "They're locked for a reason. There has been more than one cave in there. You do not want to get trapped."

"Well, somebody's been using them," the thief returned. "I headed straight for the biggest lock, thinking it would be easiest to break through the rust on, and I find somebody has been there before me! It took me half the time I thought it would to pick it! We were just waiting to hear from you first. Didn't want to pass on the message in the middle of a fire fight!"

"Jones, do not use those tunnels!" Baird ordered. "You have no idea where you're going. You are going to get the pair of you trapped!"

"Chhhh... What's that, Colonel? Chhhh..." Ezekiel replied. "Can't quite chhhhh... You're breaking up chhhhh."

"What did Colonel Baird say?" Cassandra asked, eyeing the young man suspiciously.

"She'll meet us on the other side," lied Jones.