Fear No Evil (38 page)
Authors: Debbie Johnson
Absolute silence.
‘Fucking hell,’ he mumbled, ‘I’ve got a bastard of a headache.’
Betty laughed and hugged him, checking his head wound. Will crawled over, none the worse for wear apart from his soaking wet clothes and hair sticking out at very un-businesslike angles.
‘What happened?’ he said. ‘I don’t remember a thing after we sang “Kum Ba Ya”…’
I walked to Dan, fell into his arms. He held me tight, kissing the top of my head.
‘It’s over,’ he murmured. ‘They’re gone. And whatever was using them has gone too.’
I left the others to do the mopping up. Literally, in the case of the water cooler; figuratively in the case of Dan, who was holding some kind of prayer ritual on the roof, for the souls of the children and the banishment of… whatever else had been there.
I’d had enough – there was nothing left to give. Everything ached; the memory of Tish’s begging voice was imprinted on my soul forever and, of course, I had work to do.
I’ve never been so grateful to walk back into my little flat in my life. I sank down onto the sofa, still damp, and surveyed my ruined nails, blood caked into the jagged rips. I didn’t care. I was still here. Still alive, and breathing, and ready to fight another day. I called my mum and dad, gratuitously told them I loved them. I think they assumed I was going a little bit mad because of Tish, and they were probably right. But I did love them, and if there was one lesson I’d learned through this whole sorry affair, it’s that life is too short to hide from the good things.
It was just after nine o’clock. Not too late, I decided, dialling the Middlemas’s number. Rose answered, voice brisk and efficient as ever. I explained as best as I could what had happened. I didn’t sugarcoat it – there was no need. She’d known along that Joy was right. Because she loved her, and trusted her. And now she’d lost her.
She accepted it all, stopping me to ask questions about Geneva, silent when I told her about Tish.
‘I’m so sorry, Miss McCartney,’ she said. And she was, I knew. So was I. Didn’t change a thing though – she was still gone. I put the phone down, sank back into the cushions, wishing I had a cat to cuddle. Or a man to screw. Anything to bring me back to life before I sank into a nerve-filled sleep. My mobile pinged, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Frazzled to the max. It was just a text landing, a blessedly mortal sound if ever there was one. I flipped it open and read.
‘Jayne – you silly cow. Where’s your imagination? Try the name of our glorious leader,’ it said. From a number I didn’t recognise. With perfect spelling and punctuation throughout, apostrophes in the right place and everything. Only one person I knew texted like that.
Tish. My dead best friend.
I stared at it, closed the phone. Opened it again – no message. Perhaps I’d imagined it. Perhaps I was going crazy. But perhaps, just perhaps… they had cell phones in the afterlife. If they did, Tish would get her hands on the newest and the best.
I dragged myself to my feet, my body telling me that was a bad idea, and sat down in front of the laptop. Password required. Our glorious leader, the non-existent text had said. I typed in three words – Sister Margaret Mary. No. I fiddled with the cases, ran the words together. Third try, it worked, and my screen filled with icons for word documents and excel spreadsheets and jpegs. Loads of the little buggers. She was nothing if not prolific.
I clicked on one marked ‘Indonesia’, and read. It was the report she’d been talking about. A report about child labour; about exploitative working conditions, about sweat shops and modern day slavery. About kids as young as six suffering through 18 hour days for a pittance. About Deerborne Industries paying them that pittance, and profiting from their misery.
I felt a jolt of shock rock through me, a wave of nausea flooding my body. Not Will. Not the man I’d thrown myself off a building to save. He couldn’t have known about any of this, surely? He hated this stuff. He lived by his morals. He was planning to siphon five per cent of Deerborne profits into the pockets of the needy. This was not a man who would endorse unethical working practices in any way, shape or form.
I closed the file. Saw around two dozen others winking at me on the screen.
I got up to brew a pot of coffee. It was going to be a long night.
Two days later, I was woken up by a soft tongue licking my face. Wet, warm and insistent. I stretched, my senses momentarily buying into the pleasure, then jerked upright.
Mr Bean went scooting down to the end of the bed, yapping as he retreated. I glanced at the clock. 6.30 a.m. Fantastic. Pets are about as much fun as syphilis.
I staggered to the living room, opened the balcony door. Dan had rigged up some chicken wire around the wrought-iron railings, lest the little treasure should slip its skinny body through the gaps and go plummeting to a watery grave in the dock. Although, I thought, watching him cock his three-inch leg on the table, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
I narrowed my eyes at him as he trotted back in, leaping up onto the sofa and chasing his tail three times before he settled down onto the half-chewed cushion. Half-chewed by him, I should add. He might have tiny teeth, but he’d so far managed to destroy four pairs of shoes and most of my CD collection. Tish had never mentioned this kind of behaviour. Maybe he was grieving. Maybe I should take him to a doggie therapist so he could bark about his mother.
I pulled myself into my jogging gear, preparing to brace the cold winds and grey drizzle that had now firmly replaced our Indian summer. It had been a tough couple of days, and today wasn’t going to be any easier. Only forty-eight hours to go until Tish’s funeral. After that, everyone told me, the shock would finally settle in and the real pain would start. Oh goodie. Something to look forward to.
I’d read all the files on her memory stick. I’d looked at all the photos. I’d even tried to understand the financial reports before giving up when my eyes started to cross. And it had all added up to one thing: Will Deerborne wasn’t the man we thought he was.
He’d fooled everyone, but that didn’t make it any better. He’d fooled me, and that’s what really counted. Me. The all-seeing private eye, who it appeared couldn’t find her way out of a paper bag without a map. One of the photos was a grainy snapshot taken at long range, of Will visiting one of his factories abroad. Kids clearly visible inside, working with what one of the other files had informed me was a type of wood glue that gave off carcinogenic fumes. Nice.
I hadn’t known quite what to do at first. My instincts were to confront him straight away, but I realised that was only because I wanted him to deny it all. To come up with a plausible explanation. To make the pain and the tearing disappointment go away.
Then I started to wonder about other things. About the fact he always seemed so interested in what Tish was doing. About the fact that, heaven help me, I’d once mentioned to him that she was waiting on a report from Indonesia, and whether that had tipped him off.
Her murder had always felt human, much as I’d grabbed at it as an excuse to gung-ho my way back into Hart House, water pistols blazing. And the demon had pulled that memory from me, the sickening sight of Tish dying. It had taken it from my mind, from my psyche, not from its own. Which, my blinding logic told me, meant it hadn’t caused it. Someone else had. Someone else had killed my best friend and left her alone like a slaughtered pig for strangers to find.
I called Alec Jones. Shared some of my suspicions with him. He was shocked and, I could tell from his voice, worried – if what I’d said was true, his chances of solving the case were slim to zero. There’s no way Will Deerborne, with his smart suits and thousand pound loafers, would have been down at the docks with a sharpened knife in his hand. He’d have used a pro. A hit man we’d never see another trace of. The good ones knew what they were doing. They knew how to eradicate evidence. They knew how to kill quickly and leave no signs of their passing. And Will? He could afford to hire the best. He might be innocent of the Deerborne curse, but he’d updated it – a twenty-first-century take on the greed and lust for power his family had always been a slave to.
Once I’d processed those thoughts, I still wanted to confront him. But this time to kill him.
Instead, I did the next best thing. I e-mailed the Divine Richard, attaching the pertinent files. ‘Splash on a plate,’ I typed into the body of the text, ‘but keep me out of it.’ A ‘splash’ was their word for a front-page scoop – Tish’s holy grail. I made copies of everything else, and sent one to Alec Jones, and one to the Campaign for Ethical Trading. The bastard. That would keep him busy – and kill him corporately at least. I also planned to hound Alec until I knew all stones had not only been unturned, but examined under a forensic microscope. I wanted to see Will rot in jail for this, but part of me accepted he might not. He had too much money, too much power.
Too many people hadn’t been properly punished through all of this. Solitaire. Eugene Casey. Will Deerborne. Their hired killers. Too much blood, and not enough of it avenged.
But I’d done the best I could, and sat back, taking a grim satisfaction as the headlines played out. The front page of the paper, there in black and white, with Tish’s name on the byline. ‘Deerborne heir in child labour probe’. And the rest – the follow-ups, the denials, the mounting evidence, the calls for his resignation. Will, snapped by paparazzi and TV cameras as he came in and out of his offices, flanked by bodyguards and the ever-present Francesca, looking less and less groomed with each passing news bulletin.
As for me, I’d been running. A lot. It helped – if nothing else, it took some of the pain away, shut it away in a small box in my brain while my body focused instead on my aching lungs and screaming calves.
I pocketed a couple of poo bags, and headed out, Mr Bean dancing around my heels. His legs might be tiny, but he needed a ridiculous amount of exercise.
The river was flat and glassy, a dirty grey flecked with white as the breeze further out stirred it into life. I jogged slowly along the Prom, the dog pausing to sniff at the remnants of fast-food wrappers before he trotted to catch me up. The pace was a gentle stretch for me but full pelt for him, until we stopped to admire the view in the same place I’d been grabbed by Wigwam’s zombies a few days and a lifetime ago. Not that there was much of a view. The drizzle was falling in a relentless mist, a hazy curtain drawn across the landscape. Mr Bean squatted down to take an enormous crap and I laughed. How could that much shit fit inside one chihuahua?
I scooped it up and tied the top of the bag. Responsible dog owner in action. I heard footsteps approaching, glanced nervously up. Whoever it was wore a grey hood pulled close around their face, and trainers that looked fresh from the box. I tensed, prepared to fight. I always was, these days.
He drew nearer, pulling the hood down. It was only when he was a foot away I realised it was him. Will. Minus his usual genial nice guy expression. Mr Bean growled and yapped, hopping up my leg looking for reassurance.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? She sent it all to you somehow?’ he said, now so close I could see the dark circles beneath his eyes, the fatigue pulling his skin close to those fine cheekbones of his. He looked terrible. I was glad.
‘Yes. It was me. You killed her, Will. You pretended to be our friend. And you had to pay.’
‘She got too close,’ he said, breath rank. Mr Deerborne was so stressed he’d clearly been skipping on personal hygiene. ‘So I had to kill her. She wouldn’t give up. She left me no choice – it was her own fault! Tish…wouldn’t stop digging. I didn’t want to do it. I…I really liked her.’
I stared at him, listening to the self-justifying garbage he was spewing, My mind played back all the faces of Will Deerborne I’d seen: the concerned citizen. The welcoming host. The baker of cookies. The twisted, snarling features of a murderous demon.
But this? This was worse. This was the real him – cold and empty and deluded about everything other than his own motives.
‘You liked her? So much you had her throat slashed? You hypocritical fuck! And what about everything else? Your bleeding heart philanthropy? It was all a sham – your great-grandfather might have been a dab hand at sacrificing kids to Satan, Will, but you’re just as bad – there are children on the other side of the world dying because of you and your greed!’
I was angry. Furious. Boiling with rage. And it was clearly catching. Will glared at me with dead eyes; the uniform of his hoodie making him look like the thug he was, beneath the sharp suits and veneer of charm.
He lunged forward, grabbed my arms, shoved me backwards. My legs hit the wrought iron of the railings, and I felt my body sway over slightly. The tide was in and murky grey water was roiling around beneath me. Mr Bean was yapping away, snapping at Will’s heels.
It distracted him enough for me to regain my balance, and I straightened up, screaming obscenities at him. Loud and foul and full of the acid that had been eating away at me since Tish died.
I used the only weapon I had. A small plastic bag full of Mr Bean’s waste products. I slammed it into his face so hard the seams split, a metric ton of steaming dog poo smearing his features.
He yelped and I shoved him away from me. He staggered a few steps backward, then fell onto his bottom, rolling onto his side in a foetal position.
‘Tell the police everything,’ I said. ‘Confess. It’s good for the soul. The things we’ve seen, Will? After all we’ve been through together? I’d hope you realise that even you have one.’
I turned and ran before I did something we’d both regret.
The funeral was held at Tish’s parish church. The priest, who looked about ninety and as if he’d been marinated in the communion wine, twittered on about her life and work and achievements. About her love for her family, her schooldays. It made her sound like a saint, which anybody who’d known her realised wasn’t true. Over to my left I could see Sister Margaret Mary, ramrod straight, lips twitching. She of all people knew Tish wasn’t a saint, and we shared a small smile. The sinners are always the most fun. Just ask Jesus – he loved them.
