Fear No Evil (Debbie Johnson)

by Debbie Johnson

  I tried to keep my face straight. She was good – very good. That was exactly what I was thinking. As a former Institute girl myself, I’d seen many a young woman’s promising career path veer off into a dark, rutted country lane… including my own. And booze, drugs and men were right up there causing the most wrong turns.

  I kept my thoughts to myself – I mean, which grieving parent really wants a complete stranger telling them their daughter was probably a coke-snorting nympho with her own bar stool at the local Yates’ Wine Lodge?

  Mrs Middlemas gave me a slight nod, approving of my silence, while Roger continued to sob. His wife reached out for the box of tissues I keep on my desk, and he nestled it on his lap, blowing his nose with a fistful of wadded Kleenex.

  ‘She fell from her window,’ she said, ‘no foul play suspected. The Coroner was satisfied, the police were satisfied – and initially so were we. Devastated of course, but even we had to accept it was nothing more than a tragic accident. Until we started to go through her things – the college boxed them up and sent them to us – and we found her diary.’

  Rose leaned forward again, her bright-red bosom heaving towards me as she dared me to disagree.

  ‘Joy,’ she said, ‘was killed. She was stalked, she was terrorised, and she was killed. By a ghost.’

  Chapter 2

  Now, I’m a good Catholic girl – which means, in Liverpool terms, a very bad Catholic girl who confesses it all every few months and starts with a clean slate. Wonderful system, that absolution thing.

  I grew up in a very working class, very superstitious neighbourhood, where crossing a busy road on your way to the shops was cause for a call to Our Lady. And when I was going through my rebellious teenage phase and dyed my hair purple, my Aunt Bridget crossed herself every single time I walked into the room. I even had my Saint’s name to add to my baptised Jayne – Theresa, Patron Saint of People in Need of Grace (my mother’s suggestion – apparently she realised early on I was going to need all the extra grace I could get).

  But ghosts? I really, really didn’t think so. In my experience there was more than enough evil to go round in this dimension. We didn’t need to start importing killer ghouls from the Other Side, that’s for sure.

  The callous thought flashed across my mind that perhaps I should just show them the door and head to the Pig’s Trotter for a pint. In my experience, there are problems you can solve. There are problems you can’t solve. And there are problems that will drive you nuts if you let them get too deep a hold on you. This one, I suspected, fell firmly into that last category.

  And frankly, I could do without it.

  I eyeballed Rosemary Middlemas. It was her turn to squirm, but she didn’t. She just stared right back. This was a woman whose picture could have been placed next to the words ‘no-nonsense’ in the dictionary. I knew the type – she was strong, stout, straightforward, opinionated, overbearing. Frankly, I’d rather drown myself in a vat of monkey piss that spend the night in the pub with her. But I also knew she would always, always be honest. As she glared over at me, the need and desperation she tried to hide with her bullish attitude seemed to seep out and surround her.

  She was the strength in this marriage. She was the foundation stone for Roger, and probably had been for Joy as well. She’d lived her life honestly and respectably and with integrity. Now here she was, sitting in my office, puffed up with mighty anger and good old-fashioned outrage. Telling me that her daughter had been killed by a ghost. She believed it 100 per cent, there was no doubt about that.

  As the seconds ticked by, she visibly started to deflate from the inside, like a balloon that’s been popped by a pin. She was starting to suspect I was the latest in a long line of people who’d refused to listen to her.

  ‘Okay,’ I heard a stranger’s voice say, strangely coming from my mouth, ‘I’ll look into it for you.’

  A couple of hours later I was back at my apartment in the Wapping Dock. I think we used to call them flats, but in the Renaissance Liverpool of the twenty-first century, everything – even a one-roomed bedsit in a doss house – is called an apartment. It’s been made a civic bylaw or something. Usually, we add the word ‘luxury’ in front just for luck. It all comes down to your definition of luxury, I suppose. Some of the ratholes I’ve been in were classed as luxurious because they had a flushing toilet, not to mention hot- and cold-running heroin dealers.

  Whatever the name, it was home – a gorgeous converted nineteenth-century warehouse in the heart of the city, all exposed brickwork and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on a view to die for. On a clear day, the mighty River Mersey is a sight to be reckoned with – flowing right along with the water are the memories of a million émigrés on their way to a New World; the sights and smells of the Spice Islands and Africa and the Caribbean; the sounds of commerce and trade and of a cosmopolitan city looking out across the globe.

  These days, it was just as beautiful, just as powerful – but a lot more polished, in our newly created glamour of footballers’ wives and Scouse goddesses with their fake tans and mini skirts and world-class will to party. I love it. I may, of course, be biased.

  I’d bypassed the pub in the end. I was worried in case I had one too many and started talking about this new case to Stan, the landlord. I’d never be able to drink there again if I started yammering on about killer ghosts. Even people who dared read their horoscope at the bar got the piss taken out of them. And rightly so (I’m a cynical Virgo, so I don’t believe in such things).

  Instead, I’d stayed in the office and read through the lever-arch file of conspiracy theory that the Middlemases had left with me. Some of it was irrelevant. Letters and notes from Joy with little bearing on anything, other than making me feel sad she was gone. Copies of her first year exam results, presumably to show me how clever she was. Photos of her from birth to Freshers’ Ball, a page-by-page collage of her growing from chubby baby wrapped in a pink blanket to gap-toothed eight-year-old to a pretty teen with long brown hair and a sweet smile.

  Right at the back was the police and Coroner’s Report.

  They weren’t the real files, of course. They were merely the sanitised version given out to placate angry parents. Tox screen results, cause of death, the findings of the scene of crime guys. The real file would be bigger, and juicier, and full of gory photos that no mother should ever see. That would be where I would find my answers – or at least more questions. One was already leaping out at me: in the list of her possessions, there was no mention of a diary at all. So how had it magically ended up with Rose and Roger?

  The facts pointed very clearly to Joy falling out of her window, no matter what the diary said. The diary in question was still with Mr and Mrs M. They’d left it at home until they knew if I was taking the case or not, and had promised to have it delivered. That was bound to be a fun read.

  Eventually, as dusk fell and the streetlights outside my office started to fizzle on automatically, I’d called it a day and decided to come home, work on the computer, catch up with Corky and, very importantly, order a pizza.

  Whoever invented pizza delivery should win the Nobel Prize for Services to Womankind, I thought, as I slipped in a CD and booted up my laptop. Where would we be without those nice teenage boys knocking at the door with greasy cardboard boxes?

  I ate with one hand, and saved the other for the keypad so I didn’t get it greasy. Multitasking at its finest. Slowly, with one finger, I tapped in a search on pi.share, a website I use for work.

  A lot of my investigative work is done from the comfort of my own chair. The downside of that is you can easily fall asleep midway through. The upside is you can eat pizza at the same time. Mostly I’m found on the end of a phone, at a computer, or doing legwork, visiting offices and carrying out interviews. There’s not a lot of pacing the mean streets of the city, or making citizens’ arrests, which on the whole I’m quite glad about. Much easier to lose your double pepperoni when you’re chasing some dickhead down a back
alley.

  It’s amazing how much information is floating around out there these days, if you know how to filter it. You can pay a few well-placed subscriptions to online services for ‘research professionals’ and discover a world of detail. All the boring stuff like dates of birth, mother’s maiden name (why that’s ever used as a password I don’t know), as well as the fun facts. Like where you go for your holiday, what your football team is, when you last bought anything from Ann Summers and how often you replace the batteries… you’d be stunned, terrified, and possibly mildly embarrassed at what’s out there.

  But this site, pi.share, was just for us ‘pros’. Started by a small group of private eyes in the States, it quickly went global, and is even used by official law enforcement now. Though they rarely admit it because it threatens their collective manhood.

  It’s basically a huge database of cases – the more interesting ones, that is. You wouldn’t bother entering details on there about following a middle-aged IT manager and his secretary to the local Travelodge for a bit of afternoon delight. But anything unusual can be put on the database to share information and research. It’s particularly effective with forgery, fraud and any kinds of con trick. Next to useless for missing Yorkshire Terriers, I happen to know.

  It can take a while to filter the results you need, especially if your search terms are a little random. I’d typed in ‘fall’, ‘death’ and ‘ghost’ – it doesn’t really get more random than that. Searching for terms like that on the wider internet would guarantee you a fun-filled night in the twilight zone of other people’s bizarre lives. But on pi.share, it would more than likely bring nothing at all, as all entries are vetted to strain out the loony element first. I can only imagine what fun that was for some poor webmaster. I was just glad I was querying supernatural killers in cyberspace rather than to anybody’s face. Frankly, I’d have felt like a bit of a tit.

  So, glass of a nice, crisp white in my hand – the gourmet’s choice to accompany pizza – I sat down, expecting nothing. And certainly not expecting one really good, big fat hit – an entry dated a couple of years earlier made by a ‘Dan 666’, ha bloody ha.

  He’d dealt with a similar case, in Oxford. Another young student, Katie Bell, had fallen from her bedroom window on the third floor of her lodging house. Her parents alleged she had been pushed – by a murderous hand from the Other Side. She was probably just pissed, but it was worth a shot, so I read on.

  At the very least it made me feel like I was justifying the cheque Mr and Mrs M had handed over. I’d love to skive for a bit, maybe watch the audition show for American Idol and laugh at the strange people singing ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’, but I was genetically incapable of it. My parents would thrash me if I ever lost my work ethic. It’d be considered almost as bad as voting Tory, and I’d never be invited for Sunday tea again.

  Finding Dan 666 should be a lot simpler than finding my supernatural bad guy, as everyone who subscribes to pi.share submits contact details. I clicked on his profile, and sure enough a few sketchy facts appeared. No photo, but a full name. Dan Lennon. Lennon? I stared at the screen for a second – was I being set up here? Was this all some sick joke my former colleagues had plotted for a laugh? Would Corky Corcoran and half of Ball Street CID leap out of the wardrobe any second? Probably not. It was too clever for them.

  Dan Lennon. Hilarious – maybe we could form a double act and do tribute shows for sixtieth birthday parties. We could buy moptop wigs, a couple of sharp suits, and we’d make a fortune.

  I jotted down his address details – an easy drive up the M6 to the Lakes. Then I did the obvious: Googled him. What can I say? Even us fully trained crack professionals slum it sometimes.

  Strangely enough I couldn’t find anything much at all for Dan Lennon. It was similar to when I Googled myself – come on, we’ve all done it! – a mishmash of real-life stuff that was relevant and a huge array of ephemera about Paul McCartney and a completely different Jayne. When I edged out all references to John Lennon and Steely Dan, assuming he wasn’t actually a member of an American jazz rock band from the seventies, I was left with very little, and most of it referred to a Father Dan Lennon. I instantly felt guilty for being half-drunk in charge of a laptop.

  Father Dan, it seemed, was a priest – in some place I’d never heard of between Kendal and Windermere. Resorting to my favourite search engine that begins with ‘G’ again, I found out it fit – it was close enough to the address given on pi.share to make it fairly certain that my ghost-hunting super sleuth was, in fact, Holy Joe. Or Holy Dan, in this case.

  That should certainly make tomorrow interesting, I thought, popping the wine back in the fridge. No more for me. Not when I had a copy of the Coroner’s Report to read before bedtime, and a long drive ahead of me the next morning – not to mention a date with a Man of God.

  Chapter 3

  The next day dawned bright and crisp and way too soon. Watery sunshine was fingering its way through the blinds, and I forced myself up and out of the duvet, dragging on my running gear.

  It was late September and we were experiencing one of those beautiful autumnal weeks where the world feels fresh and perfect. I pounded along the dockside paths, completely alone apart from a few other poor joggers and the occasional delivery man wheeling crates of booze into the back doors of the bars.

  The sky above the city was a flawless pale blue, streaked white with seagulls gliding and circling over the river. On the home stretch I passed the marina, where Scouse millionaires had moored their yachts, masts bobbing and flags fluttering in the gentle breeze. By the time I showered and left, I was two coffees and a three-mile waterfront run in. By my reckoning that earned me at least a two-doughnut breakfast on the journey.

  The drive was relaxed and easy – apart from the traditional disagreement with the snooty bitch in my sat nav, who was constantly insisting on me doing a U-turn. Does telling your dashboard to fuck off and hitting it with a rolled up newspaper make you crazy? I have my suspicions she secretly wants me to end up dangling from my seatbelt, upside down in a ditch. She reminded me of Rose Middlemas.

  Eventually I pulled up into the driveway of a stone-built cottage. Not a chocolate-box cottage, but a ruddy, rugged, sturdy cottage, weather-beaten and solid. It was built of blocks of rock that looked like they’d been hewn from the centre of the earth by prehistoric midgets covered in woad. The kind of building that would still be standing when the rest of us had disappeared up our own globally-warmed backsides.

  There was a neat, small garden outside – no flowers, no fiddly pots, just grass and a few small shrubs. And no, I can’t tell you what they were. I’m a city girl and I don’t do greenery. I’ve been known to have trouble sleeping at night without the sound of sirens and breaking glass, and I was already starting to feel a bit edgy surrounded by all this green space and nature. There was just so bloody much of it.

  I made a quick check of appearance before getting out. Never good to do these things with lettuce between your teeth or panda eyes from last night’s mascara. Growing up with five older brothers made it nigh on impossible to escape a whole day without being told I was looking, acting or sounding like an idiot, so I’ve learned to pay attention to such matters.

  I’m thirty-four, look roughly thirty-three and a half in my opinion, and have shoulder-length dark brown hair and green eyes. I’m told that my best quality is my smile, which features a set of dimples I’ve never come to terms with. Dimples equate with cute, and I wasn’t even cute as a child, never mind in my thirties. I tried dumping them as a teenager, when I managed not to smile for a whole year, but they proved resilient. Despite extensive research, I’ve yet to find a way to remove them permanently.

  I have to admit, they have their uses when charm is needed. Father Dan would probably be a wrinkly, old-school Catholic. That was good, because wrinkly old-school Catholics always loved me. And my dimples.

  I climbed out and beeped my keys to lock the Suzuki. Okay, I know it was unlike
ly to get stolen from the garden of a priest in the sleepsville that was the Lake District. But when you’ve seen cars go walkabout from petrol stations with the pump still in them, old habits die hard. Maybe I could programme the sat nav cow to shriek at anyone who touched it – that’d be the alarm to end them all.

  I strolled over to knock on the door – inches thick wood painted a deep and shining blue, with a brass knocker that I could hear echoing inside as I slammed it up and down. No response. I squatted down, held open the flap of the letter box and stared through. A wide hallway, black and white tiles on the floor, a coat stand draped with all kinds of outdoorsy gear. Raincoats, umbrellas, walking boats lying on their sides. But no people, no telly, no radio. No Rottweiler either, which was encouraging. Dimples are no defence against a mad dog.

  I stood up and knocked again for good measure. Still no answer. Hmmm. Well, I hadn’t come this far for nothing, I thought, glancing around to make sure a dog-collared octogenarian hadn’t mysteriously appeared from the bushes bearing a trowel. Shielding the door with my body, I tried to turn the handle. Locked. How very suspicious of Father Dan – bearing in mind we were in a very isolated spot. Maybe he had something to hide.

  While I am shamefully proficient at breaking and entering, I do try to save it for special occasions. Instead, I reached my arms up, pretending it was a travel-weary stretch, yawning in case anyone happened to be watching me from a passing spy satellite. I let my fingers do a surreptitious run along the top of the door ledge – no keys. There were too many plant pots to look under and maintain any level of innocence, so I decided to have a gentle snoop around the grounds.

  Gravel crunching beneath my feet, I headed to the side path trailing around the bulk of the cottage. At first all I could hear was the sound of my own footsteps, but as I walked on, I paused to strain my ears – there was definitely something going on back there. A dull, regular thudding, with small beats between. It could be an active priestly type doing some DIY. Or hacking somebody’s head off with an axe.