As chocolate factories go, Borgia's was a bit of a let-down, both in size and design. Where I'd envisioned a Willy Wonka outfit, colourful and bursting with goodies, we faced stainless steel and white tiles in a room no bigger than the dipping pool at the local gym. The only colour came from the—admittedly artful—photos of the final product displayed in glossy oversized photos that decorated the walls.

"Looks yummy." The laser-bright beam of Amelie's torch slid across the images of gleaming confections. "Where's the real stuff?"

Candice bent over a vat with some sort of screw inside. "Come on, you ate two lemon tarts before we left."

"Just to get into the mood. Which I now am. A girl can't ever have enough chocolate. You should try as well, would make you less cranky."

Candice snorted.

"Girls, stop your bickering," I said. "We've got a job to do."

I had parked the containers with our equipment into the middle of the room. Stopped to get my bearings. The rich sweetness of vanilla crept into my nose, with a tantalising overtone of caramel. How was a woman supposed to concentrate in this place?. It might not look much, but it smelled delicious.

"Hah." Amelie sauntered across to a large glass pane that bordered on the shop and pointed. There, in glass counters, lurked the little objects of desire: powdery and glittery balls, little chocolate squares and oblongs, all lovingly displayed on purple velvet.

"Guy has class," Amelie said, her nose flattened against the glass, her breath steaming up the pane with ghostly lust. "If I ever need to haunt something, this is a good place to start."

"Yeah, right." The beam of Candice's Maglite skittered from the vat to the large commercial fridges on the other side of the room, then back to the steel tables and from there to the pictures on the walls. "Gimme Lin-Su's fish shop any time."

"According to Borgia, his shop isn't the problem," I said. "I still think we should start out there."

"Why?" Candice asked.

"Yee-haw," Amelie said. She must have seen my expression and grinned. "Okay, okay, girl. I'll cool it. Just having a bit of fun here."

"Glad to hear that. Help me with the fourth-dimension scanner, will you?" I grabbed the handle of the heavy wheelie-box. A sharp pain stabbed into my wrist. Shit, I had forgotten my medication again.

"I still don't get why you want to start off in the shop. Can't we just scan the ghosts here where they are supposed to create all the merry mayhem?"

Amelie could be a real pain in the patootie when it came to following procedures. The woman was the creative brain behind Third Eye Investigations, but to get her to stick to the rules was like making a baby suck cod liver oil.

Yuck. Where had that come from?

"Give it a rest," Candice said. "She's right. We need to collect some data for comparison."

"Exactly. Remember Morrison's sauna?"

Amelie and Candice groaned.

"Good. We don't want that sort of clusterfuck again."

"We got the little bastards in the end. And that's what counts." Amelie returned to the equipment heap and reached for the violin cases, stacked on top of each other.

"What do you want with the blasters, now?" Candice asked. "A bit early, isn't it?"

Amelie winked. "Now Sandra mentioned Morrison's sauna, I'm going for firepower."

If we continued in that vein, we'd be here until daybreak. I dragged the wheelie-box after me, into the shop. If the confectionery behind had smelled heavenly, this was paradise. Almonds, coconut, roses, fudge, marshmallow, praline...so many different scents, all of them turning into the sweetest symphony on Earth.

"Cripes, how am I supposed to concentrate?" Amelie moaned, the pupils of her eyes dilated.

"You don't," I said. "You'll run the cross-check on the antimatter graph next door."

"Hey, that's torture."

"Nope. Keeping you in here would be."

Amelie blew me a kiss, swung her ample hips at me, and returned next door, the beads in her long braids clicking.

I eyeballed the pistachio-coconut fluffs topped with violets. Just one. One tiny sweet. There should be some perks in this whacky job.

"Don't," Candice said. "Baaad for your teeth." Her grin sat rather oddly on all that Madonna-like beauty.

"Love, love your almond eyes."

"That's racist, sweetheart. And cruel, since I might think you're hitting on me. Okay, back to business. You're the expert here. How does one set up this baby?" She held the telescopic foot of the scanner in her hands.

"Put it on the floor and pull out the legs. Mind your fingers. There you go."

I removed the square, black apparatus from his rubber-foam box and fixed it to the stand. Candice stuck in the cable.

"A kingdom for a socket."

"Over there, next to the ice-cream box. Do you think they make their own ice-cream here?"

"Probably. Bad for your teeth and your stomach." She plugged in the cable.

"Are you two finished this side of doomsday?" When Amelie hollered, her voice filled the room.

"Probably, but it will be a close shave," I said. "Right, I'll switch this on, but keep it unfocused. You tell me the readings."

I pushed a button on the left. With a soft ping, the machine became alive and alight. Little needles crept across their dials, quivered, and dropped again. LEDs flickered green and red and went black. From somewhere deep inside the box came a hissing noise.

I twiddled the big red knob that sat in the middle. Nothing. That was good, actually. The machine was still calibrated; no need for re-tuning.

"Readings?" I shouted

"A spike, followed by a flatline." Amelie shouted back.

"Good. We're in business."

"Between the two of you, there's enough noise to scare a whole army of ghosts." Amusement drifted through Candice's voice.

"I hope we won't get quite that many. They're so cold. Okay, I'm now scanning this room for a neutral reading. Stand by."

"I'm sitting down, girl. My feet hurt like mad."

Her own fault. Why did she insist on wearing high heels to a mission? And Amelie wasn't exactly small, but almost as tall as I was.

I let my fingers dance over the keyboard I had placed on a side table (no chocolate here to distract me, only meringues), and started the scan.

"Readings?"

No response.

"Amelie?"

"Ah sorry, I'm here, I'm here. Okay, this is as flat as these French pancake things. With orange liqueur and sugar."

"You talking about Crêpes Suzette. Fine, means there's been no ghostly activity in the shop, and we now have a comparative reading. Let's haul the scanner back into the workroom and see what we get."

What we got was little spikes jiggling all over the screen of Amelie's smartphone.

"Shit, the little bastards were here all right," she said.

"Look at the bright side." Candice adjusted the bandanna in her hair. "They're not here now. But there seem to be quite a lot of them. Run their activity past me again, will you?"

"They mess with Borgia's production."

"Mess as in..."

"Chocolate disappears. Ready-made product disappears. Recently, they've swapped to sabotage. The moulds get broken, and ectoplasm smeared all over the walls."

"Yuck," Amelie said. "Should be forbidden."

"See, I told you the stuff wasn't healthy." Candice grinned.

"Perhaps, they've just got a sweet tooth" I scratched my head. "Regular donations to pacify the buggers might fix the problem. Just like in the Smith and Wesson case."

"No way," Candice said. "They escalated afterwards. That's typical for blackmailers. You give them a finger, they lop off your arm."

"In the end, that's Borgia's decision," Amelie said. "First, we need to work out where they're hiding. There's not enough resonance for them to show up here for very long at one time." She tapped her phone. "Must be the ghostly equivalent of a smash'n grab job."

"Well, let's get moving, then. The night's not getting any younger." Nor was I. And the bloody arthritis didn't help. I rubbed my aching wrists, covered in kinesiology tape.

Ridiculous at your age. Just turned thirty and then...that.

"Okay," Candice said. "I'll run the first scan. Where does this lead to?" She pointed at the door at the end of the workroom.

I consulted my tablet for the plans Borgia had given me. "Corridor, some offices, backyard, toilets, Nothing to write home about."

"Any stories about resident ghosts?" Amelie asked

"Nope. Means they're not resident."

She sighed. "What is it with these mobile hauntings recently? It's bad enough that every person who ever got stuck on this plane shows up. But now they seem to escape the ban as well."

"If they're old enough, they're not bound to the place of death anymore, and you know it," I said.

Amelie waggled her middle finger, covered in three gold rings where one would do. "If they're old enough to do that, they're so jaded, they don't have two brain cells to rub together. They go poltergeist, then they dissipate. Otherwise, this world would drown in the buggers. Girl, how did you ever pass your exam?"

"Like everybody else, I cheated. For a hundred quid, I'll even tell you how."

"When you two are done with your kaffeeklatsch, I suggest we follow the trail and see where they come in. Or lie. The latter I would prefer."

Candice opened the door, peeped into the corridor, then extended the hand with her scanner through the entrance. "Shit, there's nothing."

"Did you programme the ectoplasm profile?"

She stared at her scanner. The thing always made me think of forehead thermometres. They worked the same way, they only measure ghostly vibes in the air, rather than body temperature on somebody's head. Unfortunately, they only worked if they had been fed a profile to find. Many a foolish ghost hunter had been caught short that way.

Terminally. Some of them had joined their former prey.

"Rats. No. One of these days..." Candice twiddled with her app. "Here we go again. Ah, that's better. They've definitely been in this corridor." She stepped through the door and out of sight.

"What was this place beforehand?" Amelie asked.

The answer was just a swipe away. "Undertaker. Offices before."

"Ah, explains a lot," Amelie said. "Some, if not all of the profiles we're getting would be from the dear departed."

"Why did they remain silent for ages, and only go ballistic now? Even Borgia's has been around for a donkey's years."

Amelie shrugged. "Search me. The world's fucked, and the ghosties and ghoulies have just joined for the ride?"

"Hey." Candice hollered from the corridor. "Can you spare me a few moments of your precious chat time? I've found something."

(Wordcount up to here 3852)

Okay, this is totally cray-cray, but a lot of fun. This chapter is dedicated to @SallyMason1 another great author-friend who kicked me into action to write this one. Without here, the ghosts would still be in. 

You'll regret that (cue the maniacal laughter)