A turtle lumbered on to a sandbar, huge blue butterflies drank in the shallows, and in the rain-washed trees a family of howler monkeys caught each other’s fleas, but the Colonel did not look up. He was completely absorbed in what he read. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘An interesting boy and an interesting idea.’ He was surprised. He had agreed to be Oliver’s guardian because he was sorry for the orphaned boy, but he loathed the Snodde-Brittles, who had been his mother’s cousins, and never went near Helton unless he had to. This boy, though, was different. He’d come upon a family of ghosts and a child who cared with all her heart for ghostly animals, and he was asking for help. ‘I want to set up a research institute for the study of everything to do with ghostliness,’ the boy had written. ‘I want to find out what ectoplasm is made of and what happens when people become ghosts – and animals too. Addie is particularly worried about the animals: she says you can tell people what happened when they pass on but you can’t tell animals, and they get muddled and bewildered and she’d like to make Helton into a safe place for them to be.
