Fear No Evil (Debbie Johnson)

by Debbie Johnson

‘No it wasn’t,’ said Will, putting the now half-empty bottle down on a smoked-glass coffee table, and settling himself on the floor. He leaned back against the sofa and sighed, long and hard.

  ‘It wasn’t like that, Jayne. We had God on our side. And that’s like the ultimate big gun, isn’t it? Whatever it threw at us, we had the edge. It was terrible – but we’re all here, in one piece. My hands haven’t stopped shaking since we left, and I’m convinced my heart will never go back to its normal rhythm, but we’re alive. I’m just sorry I couldn’t be more use to you, Dan – standing in the background doing an acapella version of “Morning Has Broken” probably wasn’t that helpful…I’m hardly Arnold Schwarzenegger when it comes to these things.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said, laying a hand on his shoulder and giving it a reassuring squeeze. ‘You were brilliant. Without you—’

  ‘I’d be dead,’ said Sophie, in a tiny voice, her hand creeping out of the over-long towelling sleeve to find Justin’s.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Dan. ‘You saved her, Will, when I failed – and don’t ever underestimate the power of a good hymn. But maybe Jayne has a point. I’m used to this. You’re not. What happened tonight – the abuse, the foul language – I’ve been on the receiving end of that before. You haven’t. You need to know more. We’ll do some… training, I suppose you’d have to call it.’

  ‘Oh God,’ groaned Tish. ‘Please don’t tell me it’s going to involve a flipchart and some role play sessions…’

  We all laughed, far more than the joke merited.

  ‘Listen, guys,’ she said, standing up and stretching so tall she almost touched the ceiling. ‘It’s been a blast – but I need to get home. I have a dog to walk. Jayne – call me tomorrow.’

  ‘Will do,’ I said, giving her a small wave. Dan was the only one of us still on his feet, so she walked over and hugged him. Her head lay on his shoulder for a fraction longer than necessary, and I could tell she was still scared, and exhausted, and probably worried sick about what was going to happen next. But she’d never show it – bravado had always been her default setting. She’d go home, cuddle Mr Bean, and work herself into the ground.

  ‘It’s late,’ said Will, getting up on his slightly unsteady feet. ‘We all need some rest. Why don’t I see Tish out, then go and check on the sleeping arrangements. I’ll have breakfast sent up for us at about seven? Does that sound okay?’

  Sophie looked slightly taken aback at the idea of a seven a.m. start, but we all had a lot to do. She’d decided to go home to Scotland for a few days, and I really didn’t blame her. After everything that had happened, I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t come back to Liverpool at all.

  Dan was standing in front of the fireplace, lost in thought, impossibly blue eyes staring intensely ahead.

  I was tired to the core of my being, and unsettled in a way I’d never been before. All the evidence was suggesting it was kids. It was kids, doing all that evil shit. Killing Joy. Killing Geneva. Killing God knows how many others before a pattern was noticed. Kids who used to be innocent and pure and vulnerable. Kids who were taken from their homes and murdered, sacrificed to someone’s twisted idea of a religion. It was sad and sick and sorrowful.

  Will came back into the room and told us everything was ready. I didn’t need much prompting, I was dead on my feet. I got up, said my goodnights and went off to my room. I was sharing with Betty, and she trailed in a few minutes later, smelling of cinnamon. Like fresh cookies. Unlike me, who’d fallen under the duvet without so much as brushing my teeth. Slattern.

  ‘You okay?’ she said, climbing in to her own bed and lying on one side so she was facing me.

  ‘Yeah. Not too shabby considering. Betty, what was that tonight? And are you used to that kind of thing?’

  ‘That was a demon. Not sure how it relates to the children. Probably just uses them, their energy and their memories. Underneath all that distraction, there’ll be a demon, and we’ll find out who it is.’

  ‘What – demons have different names?’

  ‘Oh yes. There’s even one called Leonard, which always makes me giggle. It didn’t work tonight, but Dan never gives up. To answer your other question, I don’t get used to it, no. That’d be odd, wouldn’t it? To get used to something like that. But I have got less surprised by it. The shock of the first time is always the worst – a bit like having a baby, I suppose.’

  In an evil, unnatural, stomach-curdling way. Which is exactly how I view the process of childbirth already, come to think of it.

  ‘Do you have kids?’ I asked, realising how little I knew about her. Until tonight, I’d thought her and Justin were a couple. They might still be – but Justin was sleeping in the same room as Sophie, at her insistence. She’d imprinted on him like a baby duck.

  ‘I do. I have four. I know,’ she said, catching my shocked expression. ‘I started early, and the youngest are twins. They’re at home with my partner.’

  ‘Oh. That’s not Justin, then?’

  ‘No. He’s not my type.’

  ‘What, you don’t fancy scary baldy biker blokes?’ I said.

  ‘No. I don’t fancy men.’

  ‘Oh… oh. I see.’ Didn’t see that one coming. Betty Batty had me foxed at every turn. ’So what does your partner do? Is she a hypnotist too?’

  ‘What do you mean, a hypnotist?’ she asked, grinning at me over the top of the duvet. ‘I’m not a hypnotist, I work part-time as a traffic warden! And Rebecca’s a physics teacher. Hardly Paul McKenna.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m tired. But the way you dealt with Arthur the security guard – you kind of… soothed him. So much so that he seemed to have completely forgotten how upset he’d been by the time we got back down, and he didn’t even give Sophie a second glance, even though she looked like something out of a horror film.’

  She stretched out her legs, and her toes popped out of the end of the bed. Toenails painted a gorgeous deep aubergine.

  ‘That wasn’t hypnotism. That was… just me. My mum’s the same. She’s from Mali originally, and they do a lot of talking there. Stories are told, lessons learned, history remembered – all via the human voice. I’ve seen her hold a whole room spellbound with just a few words. I don’t know what it is – a tone of voice, a manner of speaking, or something more, like Dan thinks it is – some kind of spiritual influence that convinces people to listen. I’m not sure. It comes in handy, though.’

  ‘It must do. Especially as a traffic warden.’

  I stifled a yawn. Nothing to do with her, and everything to do with the bone-jarring fatigue that was sweeping through my whole body. I wouldn’t be forgetting Kieran’s eighteenth in a hurry.

  ‘How did you meet Dan?’ I asked.

  ‘I was a friend of his sister, Emily. Has he told you about her?’

  ‘Kind of,’ I replied. He’d told my dad, so via the link of father-daughter DNA, he had. ‘But I don’t know much,’ I added, feeling instantly guilty at almost lying.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll talk to you about it sometime. I can tell he likes you.’

  ‘Really? How? He seems to take the piss out of me quite a lot, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly what I mean. I’ve not seen him do that since… well, since his last girlfriend, Henrietta.’

  I was so surprised I thought I might roll out from beneath the billion thread-count covers and land with a clunk on the carpet. A very gentle clunk, obviously, as it was several inches deep shagpile made from the fur of rare Algerian mink or something.

  ‘Girlfriend? Father Dan?’

  ‘Jayne, he’s not been a priest for six years now… and since then, he’s not lived like a—’

  ‘A monk?’

  She half-giggled, half-yawned. ‘Exactly. Now, I really need some rest. You’re feeling very, very sleepy…’ she said, in a mock-McKenna voice. I was gone before the last syllable.

  Chapter 21

  The baby couldn’t have been more than ten months old. She was weari
ng a pink all-in-one suit covered in Dolce and Gabbana logos, and had a headband propped around her three strands of hair. It was also pink, and had what looked to be a Swarovski crystal embedded in it. She was being pushed around in one of those Bugaboos that Gwyneth Paltrow uses. Designer baby, head to toe.

  Her mum, however, was wearing pyjamas and slippers, and her only accessory was the fag hanging from her mouth. Her hair was scraped back in a mega-tight ponytail that’s known as a Scouse facelift. She was busy texting on her mobile while the baby tucked into a bag of Quavers. Oh well. I was raised on bags of Quavers. Never did me any harm.

  We were sitting in the Suzuki at the side entrance to the park, watching the world go by and waiting for the arrival of Jason Quillian, drug dealer to the stars. Dan had wanted to come earlier, not really grasping the notion that the likes of Jason wouldn’t stir from his pit until noon at the earliest. No point. His customers wouldn’t be up either. Will’s beds had been so comfy I could completely understand.

  There were already small gangs of skinny kids gathered on their bikes. In the old days they might have been doing paper rounds for extra cash. Now there was an alternative – and the big estates used the cycle kids to deliver a lot more than a copy of the Mirror. Wigwam had been right. This park was No Man’s Land these days; littered with smashed bottles, used condoms, syringes poking out of the bushes. The swings had been twisted round the bar so many times the seats were sky high and unusable. The slide was smeared with what looked suspiciously like shit. And the seesaw had been decorated with a giant sprayed-on dick-and-swinging-balls combo. Lovely.

  ‘You get this stuff in Cumbria?’ I asked Dan, who’d been quiet for the last twenty minutes or so. He couldn’t have been comfortable, with his long legs squashed into the front seat of a car the size of a postage stamp, but as ever, he looked totally at ease.

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ he said. ‘The countryside isn’t immune. There’s a lot of poverty; a lot of boredom, not enough jobs. Drugs aren’t confined to the cities. I suppose the difference is we have a lot more space to spread it over, so it’s not quite as in your face. Makes it easier to turn a blind eye for a lot of people.’

  ‘There’s a lot of blind eyes here as well, except they have to squint a bit harder not to see it. You can spend your whole life trying to pretend it’s all beautiful architecture and posh restaurants and waterfront apartments. Until your apartment gets robbed, or you’re mugged on the way home from your night out, or some bloody insurance company ups your premiums ’cause you have an “L” at the front of your postcode. Drives me nuts when people try and separate it – it’s all one city. It’s all one Liverpool. Everything affects everyone, sooner or later. You can’t inoculate yourself against the rest of the world just because you don’t like it.’

  Dan nodded, seemed about to answer, when his phone rang. He opened it, checked the number, and answered.

  ‘Hi. Yes. Hang on.’

  He passed it over to me. Justin.

  ‘Sophie’s gone, but she left you a message,’ he said. ‘The books were wrong.’

  ‘Sorry Justin, but that’s a bit too cryptic for me. Use more words.’

  Admittedly, it was more words than I was used to from him - but they still didn’t make sense.

  ‘The books. That Joy was supposed to have been reading, for her second year exams, in the window. They were wrong. They were her first year books. She wouldn’t have been using them.’

  He hung up.

  ‘Is he always like that?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s shy,’ said Dan, shrugging. ‘You get used to it. Good man to have round in a crisis. Or when your pipes burst. What did he want?’

  ‘To tell me something I already knew. Joy Middlemas wasn’t sitting in that window revising the day she died. It never felt right anyway, this just adds to the evidence.’

  Evidence. As if. There was no way this was case was going to be bagged, tagged and taken to court. I reminded myself to call Alec later, fill him in on what was going on. In as gentle and non-Satanic way as I could.

  ‘Is that him?’ Dan asked, nodding towards a flurry of activity from the bike kids. They were wheeling round a battered wooden bench, and sitting on it was a short, squat figure dressed entirely in black, apart from his dazzling white trainers.

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Wait ’til the kids have moved off, and we’ll go talk to him. Won’t take long.’

  Within minutes he was sitting alone on the bench, phone clamped to his ear, legs stretched out in front of him, occasionally hawking up glistening gobs of spit. He was aiming them at the scrawny pigeons that were pecking round on the litter-strewn grass. What a charmer.

  We walked over. I sat down next to him, slightly pissed off about the fact that I’d probably need to burn these jeans afterwards. Dan stayed upright, tall and broad and blocking the sun, casting a shadow over the whole bench.

  ‘Jason Quillian?’ I asked, smiling at him. Trying for good cop.

  ‘Who’s asking?’ he said. He had a squashed-up face, all his features compressed into three square inches on the front of his fat head. Looked like his mother had slammed it against the bog walls when he was born and the bones never grew properly.

  ‘I am, fuckface. And I already know who you are. Wigwam told me.’

  Oops. Good cop didn’t last long.

  He stayed quiet, but his fists clenched into chubby balls and his pisshole-in-the-snow eyes got even smaller. Wigwam had that effect on people. He glanced up at Dan, and you could almost hear the cogs turning, weighing up if he could take him if he needed to: big bloke, but not from round here. Too much hair for a start. We needed to watch Quillian carefully. He was the type who never left home without a knife.

  ‘He’s got a black belt in arse-kicking,’ I said. ‘Trained with the SAS. He could kill you with his little finger.’

  ‘Yeah? Like to see him try,’ said Quillian. The words were tough, but his tone was down. He didn’t like his chances. Dan chose that moment to move slightly to the left, and a stream of late September sunlight suddenly poured through, temporarily blinding our new friend. He was forced to shift around, shield his eyes with his fingers, and still couldn’t really see. Nice trick.

  ‘Tell us about Dodgy Bobby,’ said Dan.

  ‘Nothing to tell. Useless fuck, like all of the druggies.’

  ‘He wasn’t a druggie,’ I said. Unlike Quillian, who might not have been a smackhead, from the size of him, but was definitely big on the dope – his tracksuit bottoms were covered in tiny burn marks from fallen roaches.

  ‘Yeah, how do you know, you stupid cow? Giving him one, were you?’

  Dan reached down and slapped him across the head, hard. It left fingermarks on his cheeks, and tears in his eyes, and was way more humiliating than a punch. I couldn’t have done better myself.

  ‘Listen, I didn’t even know the tosser. But I sold him some gear. Then he was dead. Thought it was my civic duty, like, to tell that nice policeman about it.’

  ‘And that would be Sgt Moran.’

  ‘Yeah. Him. He says it’ll be taken into account when my case comes up. I’m a man of previous good character and all that, never committed a crime in my life.’

  ‘You mean you’ve never been caught committing a crime, Jason. Big difference. And if you think Jack Moran is going to save your bacon, you’re dumber than you look.’

  ‘Which makes you very dumb indeed,’ added Dan.

  Quillian huffed and puffed and folded his arms in front of his chest defensively. He was stupid. Like a pig trotting to the slaughterhouse, thinking he was heading for a spa break. Even if he didn’t go down this time, he would the next, or the one after that. Or he’d get shot. Or he’d buy into his own product and lose a lot of weight using the amazing H Plan Diet. There were no happy endings for people like Jason Quillian. No happy beginnings or middles either, come to think of it.

  ‘Listen, knock me about as much as you want, I can’t tell you anything more. Speak to my brief if you lik
e.’

  ‘Who would that be?’ I asked.

  ‘Solitaire,’ he said proudly. ‘Simon. Fucking. Solitaire.’

  Chapter 22

  We left Quillian and got back into the car. I felt polluted, and drove us over to the park on the new estate. I wound the window down and breathed in the fresher air, away from the stench of desperation and dirt and slow death I’d been inhaling at Thelwall.

  The new park was full of green spaces; brightly coloured play equipment; a gaggle of young mums shrieking with laughter as they watched their kids play and swapped stories about how crap their fellas were. It was clean and fresh, and the only sounds coming from it were of little people giggling and their parents chatting. The way park life should be. I saw one of the mums looking over at us, pointing us out. They all turned to stare; presumably checking we weren’t drug dealers or paedophiles. The vigilante mums Wigwam had mentioned. All power to them. Nobody started lobbing rocks at the car so I presume we passed the test.

  ‘That’s better,’ I said, hitting the button to bring the window back up.

  ‘What’s bothering you?’ Dan said, turning his body round so he was looking into my eyes.

  ‘You mean apart from the fucking diabolical state of human society?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Apart from that. What did Quillian say that bothered you so much?’

  ‘Solitaire,’ I replied. ‘Solitaire is the Caseys’ lawyer. And Wigwam said Quillian wasn’t one of theirs. So Solitaire shouldn’t be representing Quillian. Which means that someone is lying to me.’

  ‘Right. Wigwam?’

  ‘Maybe. It’s not like he’d have a problem with lying to me. In fact he probably sees lying to me as a moral duty. But I can’t see his reason for lying about this. I can’t see what he’d have to gain by it. Which worries me. It means there’s shit going on I don’t know about.’

  ‘Hate to break it to you, but there’s a lot of shit going on you don’t know about,’ said Dan.