It was not an unusual afternoon for a busy London hotel. Adrian was in the lobby watching the comings and goings in the busy bar. Middle Eastern and western businessmen, weary travellers, checking in after everlasting long-haul flights... there seemed to be so much going on.

He was with the chief of security, a burly, six-foot-tall former police inspector called Burrows.

A lady who was obviously one of the guests walked over to them: “You’re Mr Burrows, aren’t you?” He looked at her, not recognising her, but his polite look of interest soon turned to amazement. The lady was none other than Betty Shine, a well-known healer and psychic.

She and her husband Alan had gone to sleep in their room the previous night, but at around 3am she had been woken up by the sound of rattling ice cubes.

Next to the ice bucket in the corner, she made out the shape of a spirit, holding the bucket and shaking it for all its worth. She shook her husband awake but he wearily assured her that there was nobody there. He was used to Betty; she had already written several books about her experiences with healing and psychic phenomena.

Betty waited and, sure enough, the spirit started to communicate with her. He explained that he had died of a heart attack in that very hotel. She described him as being in great distress. She approached Burrows to find out whether he remembered the case.

Burrows did not believe in the paranormal, dismissing these things as “absolute rubbish”. But this story really disturbed him – he realised that the story must be true as he had been the one to get the dead man out of the room, just down the very same corridor in which Betty was staying.

The man had died three years before to the very month. In spite of his tough exterior, the incident had really shaken Burrows – and he had done his best to forget all about it.

The man had died three years before to the very month

The story spread through the hotel like wildfire and the staff were all curious to find out more. Wherever Betty went the next morning, curious eyes followed her, whether at breakfast or in the foyer. But till then, there was little more to tell.

The next night, however, she was again woken up by the man’s ghost rattling the ice bucket. This time she described him as being in his late 40s, with dark hair and quite good-looking.

He explained the cause of his distress: he had not said goodbye to his daughters and he wanted to speak to them. He gave Betty part of an address before he disappeared. His request was simple: to tell his daughters that he was alright, that they should get on with their lives.

The next morning, she duly passed the address on to Burrows, and even though incomplete, he knew it to be correct as he had had to contact the aunt who had lived there after the man’s death.

Burrows admitted that his scepticism was being sorely tested – the details that she had recounted were all exact.

Could she have found them out from anywhere else? Burrows certainly did not think so. The files on the case were – as are all guests’ – confidential, and the death had not attracted undue publicity at the time.

It emerged that the man had only been in England on a visit and his two daughters had actually been waiting downstairs in the hotel lobby for him at the time of his death. The reunion never took place.

When he failed to show up after an hour, the security guard had gone up to the man’s room with the two daughters and he had been found dead in the bath.

Betty and Burrows talked about the incident and decided that the spirit wanted to pass on his message to the daughters, but to that day, he never had the heart to do it.

Is the man’s spirit still in distress? Perhaps not. Or perhaps he is still waiting to find someone to pass on his message...

This is the ninth in a series of short stories The Sunday Times of Malta is running every Sunday. It is taken from The Unexplained Plus (Allied Publications) by Vanessa Macdonald. The first edition was published in 2001 and reprinted twice. It was republished, with added stories, as The Unexplained Plus. The Maltese version of the book, Ta’ Barra Minn Hawn (Klabb Kotba Maltin), is available from all leading bookstores and stationers and from www.bdlbooks.com.