‘Plenty of time for us to contact the dead,’ Jazz whispered. I had wondered all the way to her house if I was doing the right thing coming here. Maybe I would only be making things worse. But when Jazz said that, I laughed. The idea of summoning the spirits before ten o’clock was so ridiculous it chased all my fear away. While the boys got stuck into the cheesecake, Jazz and I cleared and polished her dining-room table. ‘It has to be really slidy so the tumbler can move quickly,’ she said, very matter of factly, as if contacting the dead was something she did everyday of the week. Then she produced a whisky glass filled with squares of paper. She’d obviously been busy since she’d got in from school. Each square had a letter of the alphabet printed on it, and two other squares had the words YES and NO written on them. She put the tumbler in the middle of the table and placed the squares alphabetically in a circle around it with the YES and NO opposite each other. Jazz dimmed the lights and lit candles and placed them all round the room.
