Standing outside the office building, I performed my usual pre-meeting checks: cufflinks secure, fly zipped, tie straight. After all, I really needed this job, and it might be the little details that made the difference. As I entered the building, I suddenly recalled yesterday’s conversation with the recruitment consultant. What did Tim’s comment mean? He’d left our parting conversation dangling in the air….

“There’s just one last thing before I let you go, John. The director interviewing you is a little eccentric.”

“Thanks, Tim, I’ll bear that in mind. When you say eccentric…?”

“Look, nothing specific, but don’t be surprised by the big hair. Best of luck.”

It had been an unsettling end to our call. The upcoming interview was the final one, so this was the clincher, and it really mattered. My wife, Florence, and I had extended ourselves financially when we bought our dream seventeenth-century cottage, and the package on offer for this job could make all the difference to our self-inflicted budgetary crisis. Having arrived for the interview thirty minutes early, I had already been waiting in reception for an hour. Not surprisingly, my attention wandered, and I found my thoughts drifting back to the cottage, the memory rising unbidden of events at home a few weeks earlier. We’d been experiencing some bizarre events there, and I was remembering when I’d been sitting in the lounge and Florence had called out to me from the kitchen.

“Did you just push past me?”

“No, I’ve been sitting in here for the last half hour. Perhaps it was that ghost that lives in the dining room,” I replied.

Florence’s face had turned pale. As a ghost. “Oh heavens, you’ve seen it too?”

After a hesitant discussion in which we both tried to convince each other we weren’t going mad, we concluded we might indeed have another occupant in the house, albeit one not as corporeal as we were.

I was pulled back to the present when the receptionist called out.

“Mr. Simmonds? Sorry to have kept you waiting. Tracey will see you now. Down the corridor. First door on the left.”

When I arrived at the door, it was closed, so I gave it a knock. Nothing. I waited a few seconds, then knocked again. A shrill, vaguely panicky voice replied, “Yes, yes, come in.”

Big hair? She appeared to have a bright red sheep’s fleece strapped to her head. Her face was framed by an enormous pair of yellow glasses that stretched almost from ear to ear, and she was staring at her desk. If pushed, I’d say she resembled someone about to conduct an interview, having not yet read the CV.

“Hello Jim,” she said. She looked down again. “Oh, sorry, hello…. John! Do take a seat. So you’re one of my finalists?”

I sat down. Her eyes flicked back and forth between me and the CV. A small yellow plastic ostrich was occupying the left corner of her desk, its head swinging up and down, pecking at some plastic grass.

“You live somewhere called Christmas Tree Cottage,” she said, chewing on a biro.

As she carried on reading, I glanced at the office decor. It felt like I’d been transported to a souk in Cairo; an Aladdin’s lamp here, a Bedouin knife there, a papyrus print on the wall. It was at this moment that I went with my gut instinct. “It’s haunted, you know.” Not a typical opening line for a final interview.

Her cherry-red head bobbed again. “Ooh, my gosh, that’s amazing, John. Tell me more! I love this sort of stuff. I’ve got a Ouija board at home and I’m always trying to summon up dead relatives.”

I smiled and breathed a monstrous, yet invisible, sigh of relief.

“Well,” I said, “the house is really old, so I guess a lot has happened within its four walls.”

I told her about the ghost. She placed the chewed biro on the desk, then leaned forward, as if about to share a secret with me.

“You’ve got to tell me everything. You’re the first person I’ve met who has seen an actual ghost! Were you the first people to see it?” The word ‘everything’ came out in a low, guttural growl.

“I don’t think so. We had a builder in to replace a damaged beam in the dining room shortly after we moved in, and he told us he’d carved a pentacle into the wood. When I asked him why on earth he’d done that, he said that it was for the best and then changed the subject.”

Then I told her about the visit from the ghost hunter. “We felt uncomfortable about sharing our home with a ghost, so my wife arranged for a visit from a ghost hunter.”

“A ghost hunter? Like an exorcist? Did you find them with Google…or should I say goohoohoooogle!” She emitted an extraordinary cackling noise.

“Yes. Something like that. Anyway, this woman turned up a couple of weeks later. When I returned from work that evening, my wife presented me with a bill for two hundred pounds and a document entitled ghost map.”

“What’s a ghost map?” she asked.

“Something that shows the location of all our ghost guests. Apparently, we had three. One was in the lounge, another was at the top of the stairs to our bedroom, and the third one, an old lady, was in our dining room. My wife told me that the ghost hunter had ‘probably moved them on’, although she didn’t tell me what that entailed, apart from landing us with an enormous bill.”

“I knew it! Unhappy souls, trapped on this earthly plane!”

She was in her element, and fiddling with one of her finger rings, this particular one emblazoned with a crystal skull.

“The report stated that the one in the dining room was furious about being there. It also went into a lot of detail about the one at the top of the stairs.”

I was recalling a conversation I’d had with my wife about the top of the stairs. Regardless of the temperature outside, that spot was always cold; when I commented on this to Florence, she said she also felt uneasy when she was standing there, but didn’t know why.

“The map placed the spirit of an unhappy child lurking there.”

“Three ghosts in one house, and one of them a baleful infant. Oh, my golly gosh!”

“Anyway, we did some research. The previous owners, whose family had lived in this house for a long time, still live in the village. Florence went to see them, and they told her of a relative who had passed away in the dining room. She’d become bedridden and had been moved to the ground floor. She died soon after being moved in there. It was as if she had died in protest!”

Tracey clapped her hands together. “You and I are going to get on so well!”

Then she glanced at her watch and scowled.

“Oh heavens, look at the time-it has positively flown by! I’ve got another meeting starting in five minutes. We’ll be in touch. I’m so pleased to have met you, John.”

I momentarily considered asking Tracey a couple of questions just to show willing, but my salesperson’s instincts kicked in again and I kept quiet, standing up to leave. “Nice to meet you too, Tracey. ”

As I left the office and headed back through to reception, I could hear her speaking to someone. I stopped to listen.

“He’s the standout candidate. All the right credentials. Can we get a job offer out straight away?”

I received the job offer the following morning. I put my cup of tea down and opened the letter. I’d only had the interview the day before, so Tracey must have moved fast. When I read the offer, it all looked a little too good to be true. On this salary, we could afford to turn the heating on when it got cold! And the job came with a BMW. I’d always dreamed of one! But this presented an unexpected dilemma. We desperately needed the extra money, but could I really work for Tracey? I pictured meetings where she’d reach into her desk for a pack of tarot cards to make a decision. Could I really work for someone who summoned up dead relatives in their spare time?

Florence came into the kitchen. “What’s that?” she said, pointing at the letter.

“It’s a job offer from the sheep’s fleece woman,” I replied.

“What’s the offer like?” she asked.

“Double my current salary and a BMW,” I replied.

“Double your current salary? That’s wonderful! And a BMW? You always wanted one! You are going to accept it, aren’t you?”

She gave me one of her big, doe-eyed stares. I suspect she was thinking about that dream summer holiday in Bermuda we could suddenly afford. But could I really picture myself doing a sales forecast surrounded by the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb? What if I had to introduce Tracey to a potential customer? I had a reputation that needed to survive outside of my current employers, after all. But we needed the money!

“We could afford to buy food from Waitrose again!” said Florence, heading upstairs to the bedroom, face beaming.

If ever there was a need to find a metaphorical sword to cut this particular Gordian knot, it was now. My mobile rang. It was Tim.

“Hi John. I just heard the news. You are accepting it, aren’t you?” Those same words rang in my ears.

The image of a yellow plastic ostrich bobbing from left to right, as if choosing between yes or no, appeared in my mind.

“Sorry, Tim, but I won’t be taking the job.”

He was not happy, and I suspected the same response would come from Florence. I climbed the stairs to tell her and felt a sudden cold draft in the air. I shivered and hurried past to the bedroom. Florence was looking in her wardrobe, probably picking out clothes for a vacation.

“Sweetheart, there’s something I need to tell you…..”