Fear No Evil
Authors: Debbie Johnson
FEAR NO EVIL
DEBBIE JOHNSON
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2014
Copyright © Debbie Johnson 2014
Cover illustration © Lisa Horton 2014
Debbie Johnson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780008121945
Version: 2014-10-14
For Sandra and Pamela
Contents
‘So, I says to him, “Who do the friggin’ knickers belong to, then, Dave? Your fancy piece?” I was thinking all sorts, obviously – mainly he was shagging someone else. Someone with an effin’ huge arse, mind. And he says to me – get this – he says to me, “They’re mine, love…I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this for a while.” Can you believe it? Married seventeen years and I’ve only just found out he’s a bloody cross-dresser!’
Dawn McGinty pauses in her rant, standing next to her friend Pat as they pull cigarette packets from the pockets of their overalls. They produce their packs – one Mayfair, one Benson and Hedges – at exactly the same time, as though linked by a psychic smoke ring. Their hands, knuckles red and scraped raw from a lifetime of hard labour and vaguely toxic cleaning products, come up to form protective shields around the flame as Pat flicks the flint on her lighter.
It’s not a warm day, just after 8 a.m. in June.The wind whipping up off the Mersey is still harsh enough to feel like a slap on the cheeks at the right angle, and certainly enough to douse the flickering flame of a five-for-a-quid lighter.
They both inhale, then pause, silently appreciating that first rush of nicotine to the brain.
‘Best of the day, this one,’ says Pat, her voice like gravel. ‘On the way home from work – leaving one shithole and heading for the next…Bernie’ll be waiting there now, expecting me to come in and do his bleedin’ bacon and eggs after I’ve been cleaning offices for two hours, whinging and moaning about his bad back while he picks his bloody horses for the day.’
‘At least yours won’t be wearing a thong and Wonderbra set while he reads the Racing Post,’ replies Dawn, as she pulls in another drag. She doesn’t really care about Dave being a tranny. In fact she’s enjoying sharing the story with Pat, in the same way they’ve been sharing stories on the walk home from work for the last eight years. As long as he doesn’t start picking the kids up from school in a feather boa or anything, she’ll cope. There are far worse habits a husband could have, she knows.
‘So, what size is he then?’ asks Pat, getting into the swing of things. ‘Big fella, your Dave. Have you got him a copy of the Evans catalogue?’
Dawn starts to answer, some quip about him having bigger tits than her, but the words die on her lips as she looks up. Something catches her eye up a few floors in that ugly old building they’re going past. The one with the students in it. The one that’s always kind of given her the creeps, with its blood-red brick and fake castle towers at the top. Looks like something you’d keep nutters locked up in, she reckons.
It was usually quiet at this time of day, but she could see a window banging open up there. Slamming backwards and forwards, the glass jarring in the frame, snot green curtain blowing out into the sky like a cloud of flying puke. And…hair. Brown hair, dangling out in the breeze, like someone was sitting on the window ledge, leaning backwards…
‘Pat,’ she says, pulling the ciggie from her mouth. ‘Can you see that?’
‘What, love?’ asks Pat, following her gaze upwards. ‘I can’t see anything. Must be going blind as well as daft.’
‘That window up there – there’s someone leaning right out of it—‘
Pat looks. She sees. Stares as the body tumbles from the window ledge like a ball of laundry, skirt flapping and hair whirling as it plummets. She sees it rotate, and sees its arms fly out to the side like a child playing aeroplanes, and sees the mouth form into the soundless ‘O’ of an unheard scream. She sees one shoe dislodge from a flailing foot and smash down to the grass, where its stiletto heel lodges firmly in the dewy earth. She sees the hands grasping at empty air; the way the head dips down to greet the ground, hair wrapped around the face like clinging seaweed.
Then she hears it. Dawn hears it too, and it makes her sick, sick to her stomach. They hear the sound of a soft, young body slamming into concrete: a dull, wet thud as fragile flesh is split and torn and twisted; as blood oozes and vital organs concertina and bones shatter and pupils blossom with deep, dark death.
Dawn drops her cigarette onto the path. The stub has burned right into her fingers.
It’s not easy being called McCartney, you know – not when the name comes with a Liverpool accent anyway.
It’s probably a breeze for the man himself – you know, Sir Paul, he of the moptop and platinum-selling album career. The country pile in Sussex and a few gazillion in the bank probably make it easier.
In my case, though, it’s a pain in the arse. I’m constantly asked: ‘Any relation?’ And the asker always has the same expression – eyebrows slightly raised, knowing it’s unlikely but really wanting me to say yes.
Sometimes, I consider getting business cards printed up that answer the question straight off, saving us all some time and minor foot-shuffling embarrassment. ‘Jayne McCartney – Private Investigator – No Relation to Sir Paul’, they’d say.
But that would be rude, wouldn’t it? It would imply that my potential clients are ever so slightly predictable. And even if they are, I have a living to make – I can’t start insulting them until the cheque has cleared. At least not out loud.
So, as I sat at my desk in my Liverpool office, flooded with sunlight streaming through the large picture window, looking at the squinting middle-aged couple opposite me, I knew exactly what was coming.
‘Are you, by any chance…’ Roger Middlemas at least had the good grace to pause, ‘related to Paul McCartney?’
I shook my head, using the surprised-but-flattered fake smile I’ve perfected over the years, and gave my stock answer: ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Middlemas – or my bank manager would be a much happier man!’
Mr and Mrs Middlemas smiled, wriggling slightly on the creaky leather guest chairs. Mr M was sixty-ish, tall and stooped, with thinning steel grey hair on the verge of a comb-over.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘you must think we’re silly – bet you get asked that all the time…’
‘No, not at all, Mr Middlemas,’ I lied smoothly. I could win awards for lying, and this was one of my better practised ones.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘we were given your name by Sgt Corcoran at the Coroner’s Office. He told us you were in the Force yourself some years ago, and that you have a good reputation for solving problems that are especially… tricky, awkward…’ he tailed off, struggling to find quite the right words. Mrs Middlemas had no such problem. She was positively bursting with words.
‘Problems that they can’t be bothered with!’ she said, her voice laced with a bitter vigour that sat uneasily with appearances. She was a plump, attractive matriarch, her large chest buttoned tightly into a bright red coat. She looked like a character from a Beatrix Potter story, a bright-eyed Robin Red Breast.
She shook off her husband’s clasping hand and leaned so far forward in her seat she must have dislocated her spine to manage it. I leaned back to buy myself some personal space, felt the quiet thud of the chair making contact with the window ledge. Any closer and I’d have to stab her with the letter opener.
My tingling spider senses were telling me she’d been a teacher at some point in her life. The kind who’d suggest you got the dog put down if it ate your homework.
‘Well it’s true, Miss McCartney. Our daughter Joy was killed three months ago. They say the fall was an accident – that’s what they decided at the inquest, with all their technology and tests and fancy words. But we know different. She was killed – and we want you to find out why!’
I gulped, hoping it wasn’t audible. Raw emotion coupled with misplaced trust – two of my least favourite attributes in a client. That kind of thing almost broke me when I was police, and since then I’ve kept it simple and solvable and decidedly non-tragic. Cigarettes going missing off the Docks, background checks on nightclub bouncers, insurance work. I even tracked down a missing Yorkshire Terrier that had been dog-napped once.
But this? It already felt too big. Mrs Middlemas’s pain was so raw it was almost my own, filling up the room and soaking through my layers of outer calm like blood through a bandage.
There was a tense moment where nobody spoke. Mrs Middlemas’s fury ricocheted off the walls like a tight rubber ball as we stared at each other. Every tick of the clock sounded ominous, and the noise of the city obligingly filled the silence: traffic roaring along the Strand; the chimes of the Liver Building ringing the half-hour; a cherry-picker crane booming construction cargo around the docks.
Right then, of course, I should have ‘done one’, as they say in Liverpool –explained this wasn’t the kind of case I took, and that the police really were their best bet if they wanted answers. Which was usually true.
Usually… but not always. They had resource issues. And short attention spans. Plus Corky Corcoran was right – I did like odd cases. I was a sucker for them, in fact. I used to obsess over every investigation, even the ones that weren’t mine to obsess over. I never rested easy with the unresolved, and outside of a TV studio, police work is frustratingly full of questions that never meet their answers. It doesn’t make for a peaceful life.