Fear No Evil (Debbie Johnson)

by Debbie Johnson

  I sat down on the sofa and patted the seat next to me. Dan pulled up a chair opposite us.

  ‘Oh. This is nerve-wracking. I feel like I’m at a job interview,’ said Will.

  ‘Have you ever actually been to a job interview?’ I asked.

  ‘Well… no. But I’ve been the person doing the interviewing a few times. And you two have that look, where you’re smiling but about to ask what my business development plans are for the next five years…’

  ‘Will,’ said Dan, leaning forward to look him straight in the eyes. ‘There’s obviously something going on at Hart House. I suspect the building is infested with powerful demonic activity. That can be provoked by a lot of things, but often it’s related to the history of the building. To the people who used it, and what they used it for.’

  Will looked from one of us to the other, his hazel eyes bright with thought as he figured it out. It didn’t take long – he’s a bright boy.

  ‘My family? Are you saying my family have something to do with this?’

  ‘Had, Will, not have,’ I said. ‘It’s not your fault if your great-grandad was a raving nutter who stripped naked and slaughtered pigs for fun. And it’s nothing to do with you if there are dead babies buried under the building…’

  ‘What?! What are you talking about?’

  I never was much good at gently-gently.

  ‘Did Joshua travel a great deal, Will?’ Dan asked, getting us back on topic.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ he replied, still flustered. ‘Italy, Spain, mainly France. Obviously I never met him, but my father talked about him when he was still alive. Described him as… as a strange old goat, now I come to think of it. Oh God. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he started all this. Maybe it’s his fault these girls are dead, and goodness knows how many others that we haven’t noticed, or haven’t linked, or… have been covered up. Heavens.’

  He buried his head in his hands, elbows propped on his knees. I patted his shoulders, made reassuring ‘there there’ noises, and was unbelievably relieved when he emerged with dry eyes. Anguished, tortured, confused – but mostly dry. Thank fuck for that – it meant I could make a sharp exit without dumping Dan in it.

  ‘Okay,’ Will said, drawing in a deep breath. ‘Obviously that’s a lot to take in. But I appreciate your honesty, and perhaps there’s something in the family archives that will shed some light on matters. It also makes me more determined than ever to help. Is that still all right? Do you still want me involved if this – this thing – was caused by a Deerborne?’

  ‘Of course we do,’ said Dan. ‘And it’s not your fault. You must believe that.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he replied, still looking like pale and slightly sick, like he’d been force-fed a bucketful of kangaroo testicles.

  ‘Right. Great. Now that’s all sorted, I’ll leave you boys to it,’ I said, standing up. ‘I’ve got people to see, things to do.’

  Crime lords to insult, police officers to bully, and a visit to the Ball Street Station to rid myself of at least one major irritant.

  Jack Moran had left several threatening messages on my phone during the course of the last two days, and I needed to sort it. It was like going to the dentist – nobody likes it, apart from those weird people who have specialist websites and keep minty pink water in their fridge, but you have to do it to stop the decay spreading. And as Moran was about as pleasant as a filling without anaesthetic, the analogy was apt.

  Ball Street nick is on the edge of town, a blot on an otherwise gentrified area of revamped Georgian terraces and leafy cobbled streets; a flat-roofed, three-storeyed bunion decorated with puce-green plastic panels and black stains from dripping rain damage. It’s no better inside, and owes a lot to the era before Mission Statements and public accountability and transparent policing. A warren of small ‘interview rooms’ takes up one whole corridor, and if the walls could talk, they’d be calling for their lawyer.

  I chatted to Tony Wong, a desk sergeant who’s been there forever, and waited for Moran to appear. I knew the prick would keep me waiting – he was probably upstairs laughing as he watched me on the CCTV, wondering how long he could leave it before I started swearing and flicking the Vs at the camera.

  After fifteen minutes of shuffling my arse on scarred plastic seats, nodding to former acquaintances and avoiding the hard stares of the various bad lads reporting in as part of their bail conditions, I pulled a notepad out of my bag. Using a black marker pen, I wrote the following message in capital letters: ‘LEAVING NOW. KISS MY ARSE SOME OTHER DAY.’

  I strolled over to the desk, gestured for Tony Wong to move his head, and held it up in front of the not-so-hidden camera. By the time I’d packed up, put on my jacket, and reached for the door handle, Moran was by my side, smelling so bad even his B.O must have had B.O.

  ‘McCartney,’ he said, slamming the door shut again. ‘Come and see my etchings. Upstairs. Room 3.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘In the canteen or nowhere. I’m not sitting in an interview room with you. You smell like a sack of shit. Don’t you have any friends who tell you things like that?’

  He glared at me over his bulbous boozer’s nose, and surreptitiously sniffed his own armpits. No, of course he didn’t have any friends, and his wife had long ago walked out. For a computer programmer she met playing online Texas Hold ’Em, apparently – which says it all.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked, as we walked into the canteen. The familiar smells of toast and bacon and tomato soup from giant catering cans overwhelmed me for a minute, and I nodded. Weird how certain smells can pop you in a time machine.

  ‘What were you doing with Dodgy Bobby?’ he asked when he sat back down, sloshing hot liquid over the edge of the polystyrene cup. I mopped it up with a napkin and answered: ‘He was my new boyfriend. We were in love, and planning to run away together to the Caribbean to start a new life.’

  ‘Come on, clever bollocks. There’s nothing suspicious at this stage, straightforward case of death by needle, but your name and number about his person made me curious.’

  I could explain to Jack Moran that Dodgy Bobby wasn’t a user. That I had my suspicions he’d been murdered. That his star witness was about as reliable as a three-legged table. But it wouldn’t have done any good – Jack Moran wasn’t the type to listen to anything that made his life more complicated. Probably one of the many reasons he didn’t notice his wife had even left until the milkman stopped delivering and the phone got cut off.

  ‘All right, Jack. If you must know, it was to do with one of my cases,’ I said, thinking up a plausible lie that would give the impression he’d triumphed over a bolshy cow, and get him off my back.

  ‘I know you won’t give up, so here’s the truth – a client had hired me to look for a missing husband. You and I both know missing husbands usually go missing because they want to, but this woman? She won’t give up. Keeps insisting something bad’s happened to him.’

  ‘She filed a misper?’ he asked, referring to a missing person’s report.

  ‘Yeah, but to be honest, there’s nothing to go on. He took his car, he’s using his cash card in and around London, and his sister’s even had a postcard from him.’

  ‘Sounds like he’s just had enough then. So what’s this to do with Bobby Dodgy?’

  I needed to appear humble and embarrassed, and ideally blush. I dredged up a reliably hideous memory from when I was about fourtenn and walked in on John Paul and Olivia having a teenage bonk on top of his Liverpool FC duvet. Seeing my brother’s pimply backside jigging up and down, John Barnes’s face all wrinkled on the bed, still made me cringe. My dad had been more upset about the duvet than the sex.

  ‘Look, between you and me, business hasn’t been so good recently. Credit crunch and all that. I need the cash. She asked me to find someone with, you know, psychic powers. A mate of my mother’s suggested Dodgy Bobby, and I went round to talk to him about it.’

  Jack was smirking at me. I wanted to punch him in the mush, but that would
have spoiled the effect.

  ‘Nothing to do with drugs, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing. We’ve had our differences Jack, but you know me better than that. I talked to him about the job. He didn’t seem interested. I had no idea he was using, or I wouldn’t have even asked. I left him a twenty, and my card, and that was the last I saw of him.’

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe it was that twenty finished him off, love. Used it for the wrong thing, didn’t he?’

  The thought had crossed my mind, and I briefly wondered if I was fooling myself about Bobby. All the evidence said he’d OD’d. Maybe I wasn’t such a good judge of character after all; maybe I’d missed the signs. Maybe I had given him the cash he used to buy his last fatal hit. Then I looked at Jack Moran’s smug face, his puffed out, pock-marked cheeks, a road map of burst blood vessels. No. No way. I would have known. If Moran thought it was the truth, it had to be a lie. That was the yin and the yang of it.

  ‘Maybe so, Jack. Don’t suppose we’ll ever know. But that’s all of it from my end. If you need me to make a statement or go testify, I’ll do it.’

  ‘Never get that far,’ he said confidently. ‘Just another smackhead. One less to worry about as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be recommending the Coroner deals with it, so Corky might need you.’

  I nodded. Of course he would – that would be far less work for him, wouldn’t it? I’d love to have asked about Jason Quillian’s future, but that would have let slip a bit too much.

  ‘So,’ Moran said, staring brazenly at my chest, as usual. Just like the good old says. ‘Short of cash, are you?’

  ‘Not that short, Jack,’ I replied quickly. I’d have to be short of breath before I let him anywhere near me. ‘And look, I’ve got to go now – I’m meeting a friend. She’s found out she’s got to go in for a hysterectomy, and—’

  ‘All right, all right, I don’t want to know the bloody details – save that for the fanny doctor! Sign yourself out when you leave, okay?’

  He dragged his chair back, its steel legs scraping against the tiled floor, and heaved his beer belly out from under the table. One dour nod and he was gone. I pulled out my phone, dialled Alec Jones’ number.

  ‘Where are you, and can you get away?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m about four tables away from you, and yes,’ he replied. I gazed around, spotted his hand waving out at me from behind a concrete column. So much for my eagle-eyed powers of observation, I thought, as I waved back.

  Chapter 24

  We relocated to a coffee shop on the edge of the Institute’s campus. The place was buzzing with bright young things, brains the size of planets, and sex drives to match, looking at the outrageous flirting going on all around us.

  I felt about a hundred and eight.

  Alec was on duty, wearing the shirt, tie and jacket that formed the unofficial CID uniform. As near as it got to plain clothes. He wore them well – not up to Will Deerborne standards of tailoring, but a sexier all-round package as far as I was concerned, what with the big brown peepers and saucy smile and hands that looked like they’d have your bra strap off in three seconds flat. To put it into Tish language, Will Deerborne would probably make love to a woman. But Alec Jones would be a damn good fuck.

  I told myself off for being crude, and thanked him for coming.

  ‘And is that a file on your lap, or are you just pleased to see me?’ I asked. Shit. Back to being crude again.

  ‘This is a file, but I am pleased to see you. If I ever manage to get you into a place that sells something stronger than a cappuccino, maybe I’ll tell you how much. You definitely owe me one now.’

  ‘You mean a drink?’

  ‘Maybe. Anyway – here it is. Not much hope for a follow-up I’m afraid. It was one of Ken Mitchell’s.’

  Ken Mitchell was a decent bobby who’d retired the year before, planning to take his pension, move to Spain and take up a security job at an ex-pat villa complex. He’d dropped dead of a heart attack three days before he was due to fly out, a not uncommon tale in the world of law enforcement. Years of bad food, worse people and too much booze takes its toll in the end.

  ‘Ah. Poor Ken. I went to his retirement do…’ I said.

  ‘I know. I remember. You did a very rousing rendition of “Do You Think I’m Sexy” on the karaoke.’

  A slight and uncalled for flush crept across my cheeks. I must have been well and truly hammered.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, grinning. ‘I was on call, only popped in to show my face. We were never introduced. But since then, you’ve held a special place in my heart. Not many girls sing Rod, you know.’

  He handed over a copy of the file, and I flicked it open, grateful for the distraction. I scanned through the inquest report, speed-reading the negative toxicology findings and the results from tests on samples of Geneva’s vital organs.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ he asked.

  ‘This,’ I said, pointing at the section I’d now found. ‘She was pregnant. Eight weeks. I never knew that. Nobody seemed to know that, apart from the mother.’

  ‘I can see why you were interested. But I’m still not sure how it connects to the Joy Middlemas case. Joy wasn’t pregnant, was she? You’re not looking at some kind of serial killer babby-daddy?’

  ‘No. And as for connections, there might be none…apart from in one of those ways we discussed. The ones that you wouldn’t be able to put into a report.’

  ‘Oh. You mean the woo-woo stuff?’ he made a ghostly face and waved his fingers round. I nodded, closed the file, and looked back up at him. I really liked Alec Jones. I could tell from the effort he’d put in after Joy’s death that he cared passionately about his job, and about the people he was working for – and by that, I didn’t mean the Chief Constable. Like me, he had a suspicion there was more going on beneath the surface. But also like me, he preferred to joke about it rather than go all mystical and New Agey. That in itself merited a snog at some point or another.

  ‘There’s something you need to know about Geneva,’ I said. ‘Her surname might have been Connelly, but she was a Casey.’

  ‘A Casey? As in the Caseys?’

  ‘Yes. Eugene’s granddaughter. They kept it quiet her whole life, and carried on after she died. One of the reasons Ken Mitchell wouldn’t have looked at this one too closely was because of the mother, not pushing, not questioning, not wanting anything followed up too hard.’

  ‘How’s Eugene reacted to all this?’ Alec asked. I could see him running through the salient facts in his mind, trying to find a way it could help him in the pursuit of truth and justice. Or a really good collar for Ball Street.

  ‘As you’d expect. But because it’s all a bit woo woo, there’s not been much he can do. I’ve been dealing with Wigwam on it so far.’

  ‘Cold-hearted bastard,’ he said.

  ‘He speaks very highly of you as well, Alec.’ I leaned forward and smiled at him, whispered: ‘Especially your arse.’

  He looked startled, then laughed.

  ‘Well, he’s got a point. It is a particularly fine arse, even if I say so myself. So, what next? I saw nothing in that file that points towards anything other than an accident. Like with Joy. Except for the pregnancy bit. Does Wigwam know about that?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I intend to ask. Because if she was pregnant, there was a man. And if there was a man, I want to know who it was.’

  ‘And whether he shoved her down a flight of stairs or not?’

  I nodded, but I had the awful feeling the hand of man had nothing to do with Geneva’s fall. The hands of Fagin’s gang from hell, maybe.

  ‘Who knows? I’ll keep you posted. And by the way, if Jack Moran talks to you about any of this – don’t believe a word of what he says. There’s stuff going on here he doesn’t understand.’

  ‘There’s stuff going on in an episode of “Postman Pat” he doesn’t understand,’ said Alec, finishing his coffee and standing up to leave.

  I watched as he walked to th
e door. I couldn’t help noticing that Wigwam was right about that arse.

  Chapter 25

  Wigwam had his phone switched off. This meant he was either asleep, practising his stand-up, or breaking someone’s kneecaps. I left a message on his voicemail, along with a joke I’d heard a few days ago about two nuns stuck in a lift shaft with nothing but a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter for company.

  I checked in with Dan – he was on the road with Justin, and said he’d phone me back when he’d parked up.

  I called Tish. She was out of the office, and the Divine Richard said he hadn’t got a ‘fucking clue’ where she was, then hung up on me.

  I contacted the Coroner’s office, but Corky was officiating on a hit-and-run inquest.

  I tried Betty. But she was in the library and couldn’t talk.

  I dialled the speaking clock. It told me to go screw myself, and buy a watch on the way.

  Only joking with that last one, obviously, but I was starting to feel somewhat rejected. I decided to do what I did best – go and annoy someone.

  Simon Solitaire had his office in a dingy side street in an even dingier side of town. Untouched by regeneration, it sat above a garage on a run-down industrial estate, flanked by decrepit brick warehouses that stored nothing but broken wooden pallets and randomly scattered old tyres. The garage fixed scratches, while-U-wait. And if you left your car here long enough, you’d definitely need their services. It was probably a Casey front anyway; on hand to switch licence plates and do quick spray jobs.

  Either side of it were sunbed salons, Kwikkie Kolour and Tantastical. I glanced through the windows. No customers, just bored-looking attendants reading copies of celebrity magazines. Again, they’d probably belong to the Caseys in all but name – switch the beds on all day, pay staff, pay rent, buy equipment, shell out for an electricity bill the size of a small African republic. Add up the pennies from all those fictional clients – and hey presto, magically clean money comes out the other end.