Fear No Evil (Debbie Johnson)

by Debbie Johnson

  I knew she was the same age as Geneva, and must be in her early twenties, but she was so petite she could have passed for a fifteen-year-old. A rebellious one with a very stinky attitude.

  She was buzzing with hostility, and I tried to figure out whether it was aimed at me, or Eugene, or Wigwam. I decided the only way to find out was to take the other two out of the equation, and stood up to leave.

  ‘I’m taking Theresa out for some fresh air,’ I said. ‘And I’ll have her back within the hour. If she wants to come back, that is.’

  Wigwam was watching Eugene, waiting to take his cue. I’d either get another smack in the chops, or I’d ride off into the sunset with my prize. Which, looking at Theresa eating her own fingernails, might be of the booby variety.

  ‘All right love, just you make sure you look after her. Apple of my eye, that one,’ said Eugene. Something about his words made Theresa bristle, and I nodded my farewells and scooted her out of the door. Wigwam followed, and held me back while Theresa got in the front seat of the car. I noticed her checking her reflection in the mirror. That black lip-liner must be a bastard to keep on straight.

  ‘Be gentle with her,’ he said, without a trace of irony.

  ‘I’m planning on talking to her, not popping her cherry,’ I snapped.

  Lordy… something about this whole situation was really bringing out my inner bitch. I think it was being in such close proximity to Casey and not trying to arrest him. It didn’t feel right to be on the same side as him, so I was lashing out to make myself feel tougher. Dancing to their tune had me on edge. Or maybe everyone was right, and I really did just need to get some.

  ‘Sorry. I will, okay?’

  I got into the car, started the engine and drove at a recklessly high speed towards the electric gates. There was no way I was stopping for another interrogation, and I really hoped the dumb-asses in the security booth pressed the button in time, or there was going to be a Suzuki-Swift-shaped dent appearing sometime soon. Very silly to play chicken with an iron gate, but well, I won. So there.

  Theresa smirked next to me. ‘That was wicked,’ she said, which were the first words out of her mouth so far.

  ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,’ I replied, swerving the car round the road like I was in the ‘Italian Job’. Luckily there was no other traffic at all.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ I asked.

  ‘The pub,’ she answered. A girl after my own heart.

  ‘Not the one on the High Street, or the one on the road to the airport. They both belong to him, and everything we say or do will find its way back to the old bastard.’

  Okay. I think we’d safely established which way her hostility was blowing.

  We found a boozer that was acceptable to her, and sat at a quiet corner table. It was lunchtime, but there was hardly anybody in. It wasn’t the kind of pub that served food, other than mini Cheddars freshly pulled from their cardboard display stand. And if it had served food, you’d only eat it if you fancied suicide by scampi.

  Theresa stared around her, sucking her alcopop through a straw and taking a ridiculous amount of interest in the framed prints of dogs playing poker in nifty waistcoats. She was nervous and edgy, and every now and then either an eyelid or her fingers twitched. I knew she couldn’t maintain the tough-girl stance for long.

  ‘So, what do you want?’ she asked, finally.

  ‘Just to talk to you, Theresa. About Geneva. I know it’s a painful subject, but I’m trying to get to the truth. I think it happened to someone else, after her, and I don’t want it to happen again.’

  ‘The truth?’ she sneered. ‘Nobody’s interested in the bloody truth. When I told them that stuff about the ghost, they all thought I was fucking mad. They’ve always thought I was a bit loopy anyway. Speak to anyone in my family and they’ll soon tell you I’m not right in the head.’

  I stayed quiet. Lorraine had already implied as much, and I felt sorry for Theresa. Most of us can escape our family if we don’t like them, and choose a new one in the form of our friends. But that wouldn’t apply to her – she’d be stuck there for the rest of her life, surrounded by people who thought she was a few ciggies short of a full packet.

  ‘You seem fine in the head to me,’ I replied. Apart from the awful dress sense. ‘And I believe you.’

  She tapped her black fingernail against the side of her bottle in a rapid-fire staccato that would have put Ghandi’s nerves on edge. She was chattering her teeth together in the same rhythm, and I could see her knees bouncing up and down too. A one-woman percussion section.

  ‘Geneva was my best mate, and now she’s dead. Do you know what that’s like?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said, truthfully. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘It’s like shit. It’s like every day I wake up, and for the first few seconds, everything’s all right. Because I think she’s still here. Then reality crashes in and I just want. To. Die. That’s what they’re all so worried about. They think I’m going to top meself so I’ll be with her in the fucking afterlife or something.’

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘No. Maybe. I don’t know. But I don’t know how long I can carry on living there, without her.’

  ‘Living there? With Eugene? Why don’t you live with your own parents?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ she said, smiling without a trace of humour. ‘My ma’s touched as well. Too many years of the old marching powder, I suppose. And me dad… well, he’s busy, isn’t he? Being a businessman, and all that. After what happened with Geneva, Eugene got all protective. Decided he didn’t want to lose two granddaughters, even though he barely fucking noticed I was alive while she was around. Nobody noticed me while she was around. She was prettier than me and cleverer than me and funnier than me. Not that that takes much.’

  I wondered how that had felt – growing up in the shadow of your less-loony cousin, the adored heiress, the light of Eugene’s life. Theresa looked like a bonny enough girl under the slap, but she didn’t exactly have winning ways; the easy charm that girls often use to twist the world round their little fingers. I sympathised. Growing up defending myself against five big brothers, I never developed it either. I spat in the face of cute. Literally. And poor Theresa seemed the kind who discovered self-harm the first time she whacked herself on the head with her bottle as a baby.

  ‘That was okay by me,’ she added. ‘I was lucky to have her. She was the best. She didn’t mind the way I am. She always said I should be myself and screw the rest, and when she was in charge, things would be different.’

  Ambitious, then. No chance of Geneva running off to France with her mum, that’s for sure.

  ‘Tell me about the ghost. Or whatever she thought it was.’

  The toe-tapping got faster, and Theresa was now also biting chunks out of her lower lip. Spots of blood were bubbling to the surface of the skin as she chewed it.

  ‘At first Geneva was just angry. It started getting really cold outside her room, and she was always on at them to fix the heating – you know she was a rep for the building?’

  I nodded. Could only imagine how efficient she’d been, with her shoot-first-ask-questions later outlook on life.

  ‘Then it got cold in her room. Bloody freezing. Geneva was… well, she was tough. Always was, even when she was little and pretending to be scared when we played games. I always knew she’d beat the crap out of the bogeyman if she found him under her bed. But this did scare her. A little bit.’

  ‘Books flying round the room, loud noises, kids laughing?’ I asked.

  Theresa stared at me and nodded. ‘And she said she thought someone was trying to get in bed with her. Loads of cold hands, all over her. She got her head round the fact she thought it was a ghost, and then she got pissed off, started shouting at it and screaming at it. Didn’t work. They just laughed. She was really, really angry.’

  ‘Why didn’t she tell anyone else?’ I asked.

  ‘Can you imagine? Telling Eugene about
that? He’d send Wigwam round with a fucking meat cleaver! They just wouldn’t get it. She was going to sort it out herself. Said she was going to do some research into the building, find out more about it and what had gone on there. Then she was going to make it stop. Except, like, she didn’t, did she? It made her stop instead.’

  I wondered how far she’d got – if she’d approached anyone at Will’s company about it? It seemed like the kind of thing she’d do, and I made a mental note to check. She probably wouldn’t have made it as far up the ladder as Will himself, but there might be a record of it somewhere. Anyway, time to change the subject.

  ‘Theresa, was Geneva seeing anyone?’

  She fell still for the first time in minutes. It felt like a tornado had left the room. I hadn’t realised how much all the tapping and twitching had been annoying me until it stopped.

  ‘Yeah. She was. But don’t ask, ’cause I don’t know. It was all a big bloody secret.’

  She sounded bitter, and still hurt that her best friend had kept something from her. And it was strange – girls love a bit of secrecy to add to the spice mix, but they usually tell their best mates. When I’d been having an illicit romance with my tutor at the Institute, it had been a huge secret. Partly because he’d lose his job, partly because he was married with two kids. The second part had also been a secret from me. But even in those circumstances, I told Tish. She didn’t count – that was like talking to myself.

  ‘A boy from college? Someone from her childhood? What do you think? You must have had your theories.’

  ‘Nobody I knew, I don’t think,’ she said, moving her attention to tearing tiny strips of skin form the sides of her nails. ‘And knowing Geneva, it’d have to be someone with a lot of poke. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t exactly a blushing virgin before, but she’d never been arsed with blokes really. Never found anyone she thought was good enough. But this was different. She changed – didn’t talk to me as much. It wasn’t just the ghost thing. That was freaking her out, but she talked about that all the time. But not about him. It was like she’d… found someone else to be herself with.’

  Ah. The Holy Grail of young love – the ‘he really gets me’ syndrome. Throw in a bit of lust and a bit of melodrama, and even someone as focused as Geneva could be sidetracked. Enough to mess up on the contraception front, which Theresa clearly didn’t know about.

  ‘Why do you think she kept it a secret?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe she enjoyed it. Maybe he was married. Maybe she didn’t want Eugene to go round and blow his head apart with a sawn-off. I don’t bloody know. It was serious though – whenever I asked her about him, she’d giggle, and say she couldn’t tell me his name, not yet. But she thought he was the “one”. Like in crappy love stories on the telly. She’d found the “one”. Never saw her as the settling down type, but she was well gone, believe me. Love’s young fucking dream.’

  Yeah. Apart from the part where the expectant mother ends up lying dead in a pool of her own brain matter at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

  Chapter 29

  I was going to ask the guy if he’d noticed anything weird about his room, but I guessed from the fact he was in disguise as Shaggy from Scooby Doo that he wouldn’t have noticed if there was.

  His sandy brown hair was long and floppy, obscuring one eye and trailing down to his scrawny shoulder. The visible eye was blue and bleary, its lid too knackered to stay fully open.

  ‘Okay Tim,’ I said. ‘Well, thanks for letting us in. We really appreciate it.’

  ‘Uh. Yeah. No problem,’ he said, with a surprisingly posh voice. The words ‘nice but dim’ sprung immediately to mind. ‘How long d’you think you’ll be, guys? So, you know, I can figure out where to hang.’

  Float, more like, I thought, as he packed up his Rizlas into an old-fashioned tin tobacco box. It was so old the gilt-edged letters had been rubbed off. Maybe it was a family heirloom – passed down from doper father to doper son. He stuffed it into a small embroidered purple satchel that was as unmanly a manbag as I’d ever seen.

  ‘We should be done in an hour at most,’ said Dan, steering Tim towards the door. ‘But we’ve got your number so we’ll give you a call if there are any problems.’

  ‘Cool. That’s cool. I think I’ll go to the pub, then. And guys? Be careful, okay? This is one weird building. I know, like, I’m out of it a lot of the time, but some crazy shit happens here. Even without the old herbal remedies.’

  He grinned at us and left. Crazy shit indeed. When I was a student, we’d at least had the good grace to hide our drugs.

  ‘So,’ I said, gazing around me. ‘This was Geneva’s room. I don’t feel anything… odd. Do you? It’s not cold or anything.’

  Justin was wandering around sniffing the air like a bloodhound. A very ugly two-legged one.

  ‘Watch it Justin,’ I said. ‘Inhale too much of the atmosphere in here and you’ll be high as a kite.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the plan,’ he muttered. My God. Was that a flicker of a smile crossing Godzilla’s face?

  Dan was oblivious to this spurt of near-Olympic level of banter from Justin. He was communing with the spirit world or something, and it seemed to involve a lot of staring into space and pacing around. He looked pretty, but I soon got bored with watching him and started rummaging in drawers. Didn’t want to get caught staring anyway, especially with the lingering embarrassment I still felt about our balcony encounter.

  ‘What are you doing? This is Tim’s room now,’ he said. That bloody moral burglar alarm of his pinging off again. I needed to put him on mute.

  ‘Yeah. Well. I’m sure Tim wouldn’t mind. In fact I’m pretty sure Tim wouldn’t notice. And perhaps Geneva left something. Some trace of herself that would tell me who the father of her baby was. And how she died.’

  ‘You know how she died,’ he replied. ‘And you know it was nothing to do with her being pregnant. So why the obsession with finding out?’

  Defiantly, I opened Tim’s snack cupboard, and a tin of tomato soup fell out and landed on my head. Ouch. Divine retribution.

  ‘That’s just the way I’m made, Dan. You’re doing whatever the fuck it is you’re doing, and I’m investigating. That means I want to know everything there is to know about her life, in case it had any bearing on her death.’

  I poked around in the cupboard. Christ. The boy ate nothing but tomato soup. There were about fifteen cans of the stuff, stashed in irregular heaps. Even for a student, this was a low.

  ‘What you mean is, you’re being nosy,’ said Dan.

  ‘Thorough,’ I countered, closing the cupboard door and moving on to the bathroom. I tried to put myself in Geneva’s shoes, knowing the way she’d grown up, the things she’d seen. How she’d react in a stressful situation; how she’d hide something secret.

  Joy was raised honest and open – it was all there for the world to see in that diary of hers. But Geneva? Different planet.

  I lifted the cistern lid and poked the ballcock around. Nothing stuck to the porcelain, no waterproof bags taped to the side. I looked behind the wall mirror. Mouldy chewing gum sculpted into the shape of a scrawny penis.

  I climbed up onto the toilet lid so I could reach the extractor fan on the wall, and pulled the Phillips-head screwdriver out of my pocket pack. Two minutes later I was the proud owner of a broken nail, a spare spiderweb and a prize for the most swear words ever uttered in a thirty second period.

  I went back into the living area. Justin was staring out of the window. Dan was staring at the Stairway to Heaven poster on the wall. They were both wearing black, and both looking dour.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I said. ‘Are you planning on forming a U2 tribute act or something? Lighten up.’

  I swapped the Phillips for a flathead, and started unscrewing the light switch fittings. Just in case she’d hidden a teeny tiny paternity test in there or something.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Dan, standing so close I could feel the warmt
h of his breath on my ear. I pulled the plastic panel off. It came with a jerk, and I whacked him in the chin with my fist. That’d teach him. Never breach the personal space of a mad woman with a screwdriver.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, insincerely. ‘Looking for magic pixies,’ I replied.

  ‘Mmmm. None there,’ said Dan, seeing the empty space, rubbing his chin. ‘Which isn’t surprising because they don’t exist.’

  ‘Shut up and go have a séance or something,’ I said, slamming the panel back on and fumbling the screws slightly. Dan had a habit of making me feel marginally less competent than usual. It’s probably oestrogen poisoning.

  I up-ended the mattress and checked the springs. That turned out to be a bad idea, but at least it put my mind at rest that Tim was practising safe sex. His used condom collection was so awe-inspiring it could have been the star exhibit in a sex museum in Amsterdam.

  ‘Where next, Sherlock?’ asked Dan, smirking at my ‘eugh’ sound as I let the mattress drop back down.

  I ignored him, and ran my hand over the space under the bottom drawer of the Ikea-style blonde-wood set. I didn’t look inside the drawers. They were undoubtedly packed full of Tim’s extra packs of Durex and emergency tins of Heinz finest. What a life. Sex, drugs, soup ‘n’ roll.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, getting up from my knees and wiping dust over my jeans. ‘That’s my bit done – what about you two? Have you achieved anything other than perfecting your mean and moody reflective looks?’

  ‘She’s not here,’ said Justin.

  ‘And we already had our mean and moody looks down pat,’ added Dan, striding towards the door.

  I caught air with my attractively open mouth for a couple of seconds, then chased them out onto the staircase.

  ‘What do you mean she’s not here? Who? Geneva? She’s dead, why would she be here?’

  Justin was several steps ahead and didn’t answer. Not that it would have been guaranteed even if he’d been standing next to me. Dan gave me a look that implied I’d just been crowned Simpleton of the Day and raised his eyebrows.