Fear No Evil. Debbie Johnson
she said, ‘was killed. She was stalked, she was terrorised, and she was killed. By a ghost.’
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.