Fear No Evil

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.

So, glass of a nice, crisp white in my hand – the gourmet’s choice to accompany pizza – I sat down, expecting nothing. And certainly not expecting one really good, big fat hit – an entry dated a couple of years earlier made by a ‘Dan 666’, ha bloody ha.

He’d dealt with a similar case, in Oxford. Another young student, Katie Bell, had fallen from her bedroom window on the third floor of her lodging house. Her parents alleged she had been pushed – by a murderous hand from the Other Side. She was probably just pissed, but it was worth a shot, so I read on.

At the very least it made me feel like I was justifying the cheque Mr and Mrs M had handed over. I’d love to skive for a bit, maybe watch the audition show for American Idol and laugh at the strange people singing ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’, but I was genetically incapable of it. My parents would thrash me if I ever lost my work ethic. It’d be considered almost as bad as voting Tory, and I’d never be invited for Sunday tea again.

Finding Dan 666 should be a lot simpler than finding my supernatural bad guy, as everyone who subscribes to pi.share submits contact details. I clicked on his profile, and sure enough a few sketchy facts appeared. No photo, but a full name. Dan Lennon. Lennon? I stared at the screen for a second – was I being set up here? Was this all some sick joke my former colleagues had plotted for a laugh? Would Corky Corcoran and half of Ball Street CID leap out of the wardrobe any second? Probably not. It was too clever for them.

Dan Lennon. Hilarious – maybe we could form a double act and do tribute shows for sixtieth birthday parties. We could buy moptop wigs, a couple of sharp suits, and we’d make a fortune.

I jotted down his address details – an easy drive up the M6 to the Lakes. Then I did the obvious: Googled him. What can I say? Even us fully trained crack professionals slum it sometimes.

Strangely enough I couldn’t find anything much at all for Dan Lennon. It was similar to when I Googled myself – come on, we’ve all done it! – a mishmash of real-life stuff that was relevant and a huge array of ephemera about Paul McCartney and a completely different Jayne. When I edged out all references to John Lennon and Steely Dan, assuming he wasn’t actually a member of an American jazz rock band from the seventies, I was left with very little, and most of it referred to a Father Dan Lennon. I instantly felt guilty for being half-drunk in charge of a laptop.

Father Dan, it seemed, was a priest – in some place I’d never heard of between Kendal and Windermere. Resorting to my favourite search engine that begins with ‘G’ again, I found out it fit – it was close enough to the address given on pi.share to make it fairly certain that my ghost-hunting super sleuth was, in fact, Holy Joe. Or Holy Dan, in this case.

That should certainly make tomorrow interesting, I thought, popping the wine back in the fridge. No more for me. Not when I had a copy of the Coroner’s Report to read before bedtime, and a long drive ahead of me the next morning – not to mention a date with a Man of God.

Chapter 3

The next day dawned bright and crisp and way too soon. Watery sunshine was fingering its way through the blinds, and I forced myself up and out of the duvet, dragging on my running gear.

It was late September and we were experiencing one of those beautiful autumnal weeks where the world feels fresh and perfect. I pounded along the dockside paths, completely alone apart from a few other poor joggers and the occasional delivery man wheeling crates of booze into the back doors of the bars.

The sky above the city was a flawless pale blue, streaked white with seagulls gliding and circling over the river. On the home stretch I passed the marina, where Scouse millionaires had moored their yachts, masts bobbing and flags fluttering in the gentle breeze. By the time I showered and left, I was two coffees and a three-mile waterfront run in. By my reckoning that earned me at least a two-doughnut breakfast on the journey.

The drive was relaxed and easy – apart from the traditional disagreement with the snooty bitch in my sat nav, who was constantly insisting on me doing a U-turn. Does telling your dashboard to fuck off and hitting it with a rolled up newspaper make you crazy? I have my suspicions she secretly wants me to end up dangling from my seatbelt, upside down in a ditch. She reminded me of Rose Middlemas.

Eventually I pulled up into the driveway of a stone-built cottage. Not a chocolate-box cottage, but a ruddy, rugged, sturdy cottage, weather-beaten and solid. It was built of blocks of rock that looked like they’d been hewn from the centre of the earth by prehistoric midgets covered in woad. The kind of building that would still be standing when the rest of us had disappeared up our own globally-warmed backsides.

There was a neat, small garden outside – no flowers, no fiddly pots, just grass and a few small shrubs. And no, I can’t tell you what they were. I’m a city girl and I don’t do greenery. I’ve been known to have trouble sleeping at night without the sound of sirens and breaking glass, and I was already starting to feel a bit edgy surrounded by all this green space and nature. There was just so bloody much of it.

I made a quick check of appearance before getting out. Never good to do these things with lettuce between your teeth or panda eyes from last night’s mascara. Growing up with five older brothers made it nigh on impossible to escape a whole day without being told I was looking, acting or sounding like an idiot, so I’ve learned to pay attention to such matters.

I’m thirty-four, look roughly thirty-three and a half in my opinion, and have shoulder-length dark brown hair and green eyes. I’m told that my best quality is my smile, which features a set of dimples I’ve never come to terms with. Dimples equate with cute, and I wasn’t even cute as a child, never mind in my thirties. I tried dumping them as a teenager, when I managed not to smile for a whole year, but they proved resilient. Despite extensive research, I’ve yet to find a way to remove them permanently.

I have to admit, they have their uses when charm is needed. Father Dan would probably be a wrinkly, old-school Catholic. That was good, because wrinkly old-school Catholics always loved me. And my dimples.

I climbed out and beeped my keys to lock the Suzuki. Okay, I know it was unlikely to get stolen from the garden of a priest in the sleepsville that was the Lake District. But when you’ve seen cars go walkabout from petrol stations with the pump still in them, old habits die hard. Maybe I could programme the sat nav cow to shriek at anyone who touched it – that’d be the alarm to end them all.

I strolled over to knock on the door – inches thick wood painted a deep and shining blue, with a brass knocker that I could hear echoing inside as I slammed it up and down. No response. I squatted down, held open the flap of the letter box and stared through. A wide hallway, black and white tiles on the floor, a coat stand draped with all kinds of outdoorsy gear. Raincoats, umbrellas, walking boots lying on their sides. But no people, no telly, no radio. No Rottweiler either, which was encouraging. Dimples are no defence against a mad dog.

I stood up and knocked again for good measure. Still no answer. Hmmm. Well, I hadn’t come this far for nothing, I thought, glancing around to make sure a dog-collared octogenarian hadn’t mysteriously appeared from the bushes bearing a trowel. Shielding the door with my body, I tried to turn the handle. Locked. How very suspicious of Father Dan – bearing in mind we were in a very isolated spot. Maybe he had something to hide.

While I am shamefully proficient at breaking and entering, I do try to save it for special occasions. Instead, I reached my arms up, pretending it was a travel-weary stretch, yawning in case anyone happened to be watching me from a passing spy satellite. I let my fingers do a surreptitious run along the top of the door ledge – no keys. There were too many plant pots to look under and maintain any level of innocence, so I decided to have a gentle snoop around the grounds.

Gravel crunching beneath my feet, I headed to the side path trailing around the bulk of the cottage. At first all I could hear was the sound of my own footsteps, but as I walked on, I paused to strain my ears – there was definitely something going on back there. A dull, regular thudding, with small beats between. It could be an active priestly type doing some DIY. Or hacking somebody’s head off with an axe.

On that pleasant note I proceeded, walking round into a large garden. Well, you couldn’t really call it a garden – it was vast. It was the wilderness. It was the kind of place Ray Mears would go to make first contact with native tribes. The clearing was set against the backdrop of a huge hillside, covered in pine trees so dense it looked like a prickly, deep green picnic blanket had been thrown from the sky. A stream tumbled downwards, gurgling and bubbling its way towards the lower ground, and sheep were dotted on the slope at improbable angles, like tiny balls of off-white cotton wool that could blow away at any minute.

The area immediately behind the cottage was obviously functional – a neat vegetable patch seemed to be producing carrots, potatoes and other green-topped mystery items. There was a small greenhouse. A well, with a wooden bucket dangling over its brick-edged rim. A weather-battered stone shed that probably contained tools I wouldn’t know how to use. And right smack bang in the middle of this rural idyll was a man. He was holding an axe, but thankfully he was chopping logs, not heads. Which was a real bonus on the health and safety front.

I say ‘a man’. But that wouldn’t be quite accurate. In all honesty, this wasn’t so much a man as a Greek god made flesh incarnate.

The sunlight was streaming down like a spotlight from the angels, splashing gold over a rippling, muscular back as he moved. Stripped bare to his jeans, he had the broad shoulders and narrow waist of a swimmer, and his arms were perfectly sculpted as they rose and fell with the axe. His Levis rode low on his hips, and a tiny trail of golden hair ran down his torso, over the six-pack (approximately – I didn’t count), and disappeared off into the denim waistband to…well, I can only imagine.

Getting a hold of myself as best I could, I coughed gently and he straightened up, using a lean, corded forearm to wipe the sweat from his brow. I was rationally thinking that with a body that good, he was probably cross-eyed or missing his front teeth – in my experience nature has a way of evening these things out. But no, nature was playing silly buggers with this one – he was truly blessed – arctic blue eyes, of the classic Paul Newman variety. Dark blonde hair, slightly too long, plastered down to his forehead and neck with sweat.

A strong nose, aquiline, saving him from prettiness. A wide mouth with sensual lips, skin lightly sun-kissed from all those hours outdoors – chopping wood, digging the soil, romping naked in the forest…

Dragging my mind out of the gutter and back into reality, I reminded myself this was a man of God and I was a very, very bad girl. The Almighty would definitely know if I was imagining one of His servants stark naked and spread-eagled on a Caribbean beach. Or even in a rent-by-the-hour hotel bedroom on the Dock Road.

‘Father Dan?’ I asked, not quite believing that it could be. A man who looked like this facing a lifetime of celibacy? I’d be forced to get a petition up, or write a letter of complaint to the Vatican. But maybe this was just Father Dan’s handsome gardener. Or his illegitimate son – come on, we all know it happens!

He swung the axe down, hard, to lodge it in the tree stump that was obviously its home. It wobbled slightly from side to side. I knew how it felt.

‘You can drop the Father,’ he said, ‘I haven’t been a priest for six years now.’

Chapter 4

‘Can I help you with something?’ he asked, in a deep, touch-of-gravel voice that almost made my bra strap pop open of its own accord. Hmmm. Yes, I thought, you certainly can. You can help me scratch that itch I have inside my—

‘Hi,’ I replied, cutting short that line of thought and holding out my hand to shake his, ‘my name’s Jayne McCartney, and I’m a private investigator based in Liverpool.’

I paused, waiting for the ‘are you related?’ eyebrow to pop up. Nothing. A man of steel. Maybe he hadn’t caught on yet. He probably didn’t get asked it as much without a Scouse accent on the side.

He wiped his hand on one denim-clad thigh, which I watched with great interest, before reaching out to take my fingers in his. Yikes. He was firm and hot, in all kinds of ways.

‘I wondered if I could talk to you about Katie Bell?’

His grip tensed slightly, and my metacarpals made a little ‘eek’ noise as he squeezed a bit too tight.

He stared at me for a few seconds. His expression was bland, but I knew he’d be taking in every flaw, every nuance, every hint as to my intentions. Defrocked or not, he was clergy by training, and in my experience they’re pretty canny judges of character. Father Doheny, our parish priest, could get a job with the United Nations after refereeing the neighbourhood Scouse Catholic mafia for thirty years. He could also read minds – mine at least. I was fairly sure that wasn’t the case with Father Dan, or he’d have locked himself in the shed by now.

‘You’d better come in, then,’ he said, turning and walking towards a back door into the house. He held it open, gesturing for me to follow. The corridor was cool, dim, and smelled of something herby and spicy and more nutritious than my entire weekly shop.

‘Wait in there, I’ll be back in a minute – help yourself to a drink,’ he said, pointing into the kitchen. I heard his footsteps pounding up the stairs over my head as I nosed around. A large room, flooded with light from the garden. Pale stone floor, worn smooth by hundreds of years and dozens of cooks making the journey from stove to table and back. Something that probably had vegetables in it was simmering in a pan, making my tummy rumble. It’d been a while since those doughnuts.

The windows were open, and the breeze ruffled the curtains inwards slightly. A squat glass jam jar full of sprigs of lavender was perched on the ledge, and a wasp from outside was trying to reach it. I glared and tried not to show my fear – stingy things make me poo my pants. I got one stuck under my helmet once when I was on patrol in Anfield on match day, and I had to let it repeatedly sting my scalp rather than show the crowds we were failing to intimidate that I was bothered. Nothing says ‘authority’ quite like a squealing woman running down the street swatting her own head.

I leaned over the sink, reached behind the taps, and tried to pull the window shut. The bastard saw me coming. I swear to God it was staring at me, stinger at the ready. I snatched my fingers away and knocked the jar over, clattering it into the Belfast sink, where it splashed plant water all over my T-shirt, and smashed in half. Perfect.

I grabbed up the two pieces of the jar, and wondered if Father Dan would notice if I put them in the bin or threw them in the garden. At the very least it’d give me something naughty-but-not-too-sinful to admit during my next trip to the confessional. Better that than the fact I’d been trying to size up Father Dan’s boy bits from the bulge in his jeans.

I was saved the moral dilemma by the creaking open of the door, and the return of my host. Fortunately, for the sake of my shoddy morals, fully dressed. He stopped and stared at me, grasping two broken halves of a jam jar, covered in water and looking decidedly guilty.

‘You could have just used a glass,’ he said, taking the shards from my hands and placing them back in the sink.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘it was a wasp.’

‘Really? It must have been a mutant to knock that thing over. Beer or Coke?’

‘Beer… no, Coke!’ I replied, as he opened the fridge. Beer is always the word that comes out of my mouth first, but I had a long drive home ahead of me. As well as dealing with some very unwanted hormone rushes.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked, pulling open the ring pull on his lager. A slight hiss and a hint of froth. God, that smelled good. I felt my nostrils twitch like a Bisto kid who’d failed rehab.

I nodded reluctantly, and sat down at the kitchen table. Dan sat opposite me, taking a gulp from his beer.

‘So, you wanted to talk about Katie?’ he said.

‘Yes. I saw your entry on pi.share. I have two clients who think their daughter was murdered by a… a…’

‘Ghost? Ghoul? Gothic creature of the night?’

‘Erm… yes. Possibly they’re mad. Possibly I’m mad for listening. But here I am. Is there anything you can tell me about your case that might help?’

‘No, they’re not mad,’ he said, putting down the can and shoving his hand roughly through his hair. He looked distracted and vague, staring off into space over my shoulder. I took a sneaky sideways glance. Nothing there. Not that I could see, anyway – but Father Dan could be witnessing a choir of celestial angels dressed up as Boy George and singing ‘Karma Chameleon’ for all I knew.

He snapped his eyes back to me, sat up slightly straighter. His T-shirt had been washed a few too many times and was stretched a bit too tightly over his shoulders.

‘It’s not mad,’ he repeated, making piercing eye contact with me, ‘because it’s probably true. Things that go bump in the night? They exist, and they can kill. Most of the time we find other names for it. We blame accidents, or bad luck, or too much booze. In Katie’s case, it was a spirit. A pretty bloody unhappy one at that. She wasn’t pleased with being surrounded by gorgeous young girls, all very much alive, when she was dead. So Katie got a shove. She wasn’t the first in that building, but she will be the last.’

He took another gulp of his beer, finished it off, and crushed the middle of the can with his hand. A slight smile tugged at the corners of his lips. He seemed utterly convinced by what he was saying. Maybe nature had walloped him with the loony stick to make up for the face and body.

‘So,’ he said. ‘This is the bit where you start to wonder if I’m a lunatic planning to cudgel you to death and hide your corpse in the well. After I’ve sliced off selected body parts to eat with a nice Chianti.’

Ha bloody ha. I wasn’t scared. Much. He might be big and think he was tough, but I was small and knew I was tough. Except when it came to wasps, obviously.

‘Are you a leg man or a breast man, then?’ I asked, picking up my Coke. ‘I was wondering which body parts you’d go for.’

Which, I realised, could be taken in more ways than one. Accidental flirting.

He rocked back in his chair and laughed. It was a big laugh, honest and loud. It made you want to join in. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I get it. You’re not about to run screaming from the house and into the wild blue yonder.’

God no. I’d be more scared of the wild blue yonder than I would a psychopathic serial killer, but he didn’t need to know that.

‘Look. I’ve come a long way to talk about Katie Bell – have I wasted my time?’ I asked in my best don’t-mess-me-around voice. He might be eye candy to infinity and beyond, but I was here for a reason. A not particularly amusing reason.

‘No. If you think you’re up to it, I’ll tell you about Katie.’

I nodded. I was definitely up to it.

‘ She was nineteen, bright young thing, apple of her parents’ eye. She was originally from up here, in Cumbria, which is how I got involved. I’d done some investigative work before; other… unusual occurrences. But Katie’s was the first where I… solved it, I suppose you’d have to say.’

‘Solved it how?’ I asked. ‘There was no case closed marker on pi.share.’

‘Solved it with a really big, dramatic exorcism. Flashing lights. Bleeding eye sockets. Full on fire and brimstone. Sure you don’t want that beer?’