“I have to confess,” Skulduggery Pleasant said as he took his hat off in the dead man’s living room, “I have no idea what’s going on here at all.”

Valkyrie Cain nodded up to the corner of the room. “What’s that bit?”

“It’s his head,” said Skulduggery. “You can see the rest of it there, hidden behind the curtain.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s disgusting.”

“Nobody ever said being hit by a train was a neat way to die.”

Valkyrie turned to Scrutinous. “And you’re sure that’s what they said?”

“Oh, yes,” Scrutinous answered. “Neighbours reported hearing an old-fashioned train. Like a steam engine, they said, with the ‘choo choo’ and everything. The walls of every house on the street rattled as it passed.”

Skulduggery murmured something to himself. The living room was small and tidy, the furniture in place, the TV still on with the sound muted. It was three o’clock in the morning and the lamps gave the place a gentle, warm light. It would have been a perfectly good room in which to spend an evening were it not for the man who had been splattered across every imaginable surface.

“Well,” Skulduggery said, “purely to get this out of the way, I’ll just go ahead and say it. There does not seem to be any sign of a railway track on the carpet or, indeed, a train hiding behind the sofa. And I don’t think one could have fitted through the door.”

“Maybe it was a ghost train,” Valkyrie said. “Do ghost trains exist?”

“I’ve seen two,” Scrutinous said. “But I’ve never heard of a ghost train that could run over anything living. A ghost train would be able to run over a ghost, not a man.”

“And yet something big killed him,” Skulduggery said. “And it was powerful and fast-moving. Just like a locomotive.”

Valkyrie examined a couple of framed photographs on the mantelpiece. “Who was he? He wasn’t a sorcerer, was he?”

“His name was Brendan Cassidy,” Scrutinous said. “From what I can gather, he was a perfectly normal mortal. He worked as an assistant manager of a local store. Nothing whatsoever to do with us or anyone in our community.”

Skulduggery took a bag of powder from his jacket and threw some into the air. It fell as a light cloud, shimmering with faint colour. “Definite traces of Adept magic,” he said, “but I’m not getting a read on an exact discipline. Which only proves that he didn’t explode of his own volition.”

Scrutinous watched the two of them work, and tried not to get in the way. He wasn’t a detective, after all. He worked in Public Relations – he convinced mortals that they didn’t see what they actually saw. All this looking-for-clues lark was a tad beyond him. He liked to think of himself as a simple man.