Betty leaned forward for a long sniff. “Ah, lovely. The French kind! Ooh, I loved these! Much better than those Whatsit Brothers ones our gran used to give us.”

I let the sisters enjoy the scent for a while. That was about all they could do, but judging by their noises of rapture, that was plenty. Then I asked them if they knew anything about a revenant named Smyler, and told them what I knew of his history—at least, through his first two deaths.

“Don’t think so, dear,” Betty said after some consideration. “There was a fellow they used to call The Smiler, but that was years ago in England and he was a tall, tall fellow. Lovely teeth, too. Dead since Queen Victoria’s day, everyone said, but he had a set of pearlies you could read by on a dark night. Still, he’d done his victims with arsenic, hadn’t he?”

“Cyanide, dear.”

“Right you are, our Doris. Cyanide. It wouldn’t be him, would it?”

I said I didn’t think so.

“Then there was Moaning Sally, but she was a girl, wasn’t she? She stabbed her lover and some of his family with one of those bayonets. Quite a lot of stabbing, altogether. They said she killed herself in her prison cell, then came back and hung about the street near St. Chad’s in Birmingham, but that’s all part of that awful ring road now, isn’t it, Doris?”

“The Queensway. Dreadful thing.”

“So it probably wouldn’t be her, not all the way over here in America. Wait, you said it was a fella you were looking for, didn’t you?”

I could see they weren’t going to be able to help me much with Smyler himself, so I tried a more general question. “But how would something like that happen at all? Have you ever heard of somebody dying once, then coming back, then being exorcised or whatever you’d call it . . . ?”

“Watch your language, dear,” said Doris primly. “We’ve got feelings, you know.”

“Well, let’s just say ‘dispatched’ a second time and then coming back again. Have you ever heard of anything like that? How could that happen?”

“To be honest, love, I’ve never heard of anything like it. Have you, Betty?”

“No, dear. And I feel terrible after you bought us these lovely pastilles, and we’ve had such a nice visit. But no. I’m afraid you’ll have to find somebody a bit more qualified to answer that. Have you tried the Broken Boy yet?”

I hadn’t, and I didn’t really want to, but I was beginning to think I might not have a choice. That’s the problem with ghosts. Sometimes they’re a lot of help, sometimes worse than useless, but it always takes a long time to find out, because most of them like to talk and they all tend to be a bit loopy.