Fear No Evil (2 page)

They say everyone has a flaw. I myself have a vast range of them. One of the very worst is the inability to say ‘no’ in the face of human sadness. As a result, I give away ten per cent of my earnings to those Albanian women who travel all the way to England to be homeless, and I’m terminally incapable of dumping a boyfriend. Instead I make up elaborate lies about moving to Aberdeen to nurse a sick cousin, or becoming a lesbian. None of which rings true when they see you two months later in the pub, singing ‘Big Spender’ on the karaoke and snogging a truck driver.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty tough. I don’t mind a fight, and I love a good argument. I was trained by the best – a Scouse Irish family with six siblings vying for airspace round the dinner table. But give me the big eyes and the tears, and I start to sink.

There weren’t any tears involved here yet, thank Christ. And to prevent them from appearing and really spoiling my day, I did the only thing I could – I listened.

Anyway, my existing cases were about as interesting as watching a jelly set, so what did I have to lose?

‘Okay, Mr and Mrs Middlemas, tell me all about it…’ I replied; pen in hand, paper ready and waiting. I could practically inhale the relief from the couple sitting opposite me. I was, it seemed from their reaction, their one and only hope. Lord help us all.

I gave them my trustworthy smile and waited, expecting the ‘usual’. Now, I’m not so cynical that I see the death of a young woman as anything other than tragic, but when a Liverpool student has a serious – or not-so-serious – fall, there are a few possibles that immediately spring to mind. Like alcohol. Drugs. Frayed stair carpets in shoddy student housing. More alcohol. Sleepless nights due to exam pressure. Unfeasibly high-heeled shoes in greasy-floored nightclubs. And again, alcohol.

So, reasonably enough, I expected one of these. I expected wrong. Very wrong.

‘Our daughter was killed by a ghost,’ said Mrs Middlemas, glaring at me with those beady eyes as if daring me to laugh out loud. Okay, I thought. You’ve got me. I’m interested – and possibly a little freaked out. Insanity has that effect on me.

Now the battle for my attention was won, Mrs Middlemas sat back, took her husband’s pale hand, and let him do the talking.

‘Well, first of all, let me tell you a bit about Joy,’ he said. ‘Joy was our miracle, Miss McCartney. We’d always wanted a baby, but it seemed like we were never going to be blessed. Do you have children?’

God, no, I thought. And I’d rather plunge red-hot kebab skewers into my own eyeballs than go through childbirth. I love kids. As long as they’ve clawed their way out of somebody else’s body and I can give them back once the sugar rush hits.

‘Sadly no, Mr Middlemas,’ I said, ‘not as yet.’

Yeah, right. Presuming I ever had sex again. And presuming I was drunk enough to get accidentally knocked up as a result.

‘Anyway, I was a manager at the local bank and Rosemary here, she was a teacher at the Primary school…’

Small internal pause: I knew it. Bloody teachers. Brrrr.

‘…we tried for years and eventually we gave up hope. Then along came Joy. That’s why she got her name. We know Joy isn’t very fashionable. She should really have been a Gemma or a Georgia or some such. But she brought us joy. And we treasured her so much. When it came time for her to go off to university, we didn’t feel ready to let her go, to say goodbye…’

Mrs M patted his hand as he started to falter, staring at his own lap in a bid – I realised with horror – to hide the fact that he was starting to cry. I could see big, fat tears blobbing down, the splashes absorbed into ever-increasing moist circles on the fabric of his grey cotton-mix trousers. Oh my.

Unsurprisingly, Rosemary the Scary Teacher Lady was made of much sterner stuff.

‘No, we didn’t want her to go,’ she said, ‘but she was a bright girl, and she wanted to be a vet. She’d always loved animals, she was one of those girls who insisted on bringing home every stray dog or injured bird she came across. The Liverpool Institute wasn’t so far away, so we convinced ourselves it would be fine.

‘To start off with, it was. She called, visited. She was living in halls, working hard, had a nice group of friends. It was the end of her second year when the problems started – fewer calls home, excuses as to why she couldn’t make the mammoth hour-long journey back to see us. The few times we did visit, she looked awful – she’d lost weight, her hair was greasy, she had spots. Her clothes were dirty – and believe me, that is not the way she’d been raised. Now, I know what you’re thinking, Miss McCartney – drugs, booze, or men.’

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.