FEAR NO EVIL

DEBBIE JOHNSON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Avon an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780008121945

Version: 2016-03-23

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

About the Author

Also by This Author

Avon Social Media Ad

About the Publisher

Prologue

‘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.

Chapter 1

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.

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.

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?’

I narrowed my eyes at him. Was he trying to put one over on me? Having me on for a laugh?

‘No. It’s all true,’ he said, getting up and pulling two more cans out of the fridge.

Fuck. He could read my mind. He was like Father Doheny after all. Except, you know, forty years younger and a million times better looking. I was going to have to be cleaner in thought as well as deed if this carried on.

I took the lager from his hand and cracked it open. One wouldn’t hurt. I wasn’t sure what a yardarm was, but I was pretty sure the sun was past it.

Chapter 5

We took our beers outside into the sunshine. Father Dan dragged a couple of chairs with us, and an ashtray for his roll-ups. Not very priestly of him, but nobody’s perfect.

‘So tell me about your case,’ he said, fiddling with a tobacco pouch and a pack of Rizlas. I wondered briefly if he was going to reach for his stash of wacky backy and make it a spliff. That would at least have explained some of the insanity.

‘Similar family situation to yours – only child, worshipped and adored. Bright girl, came to Liverpool to study to be a vet, all going great until it wasn’t. Now she’s dead – took a shortcut out of a fifth floor window, in the halls where she was living. Hart House. No witnesses, she was in the room on her own – but also no sign of a struggle, no fingerprints that shouldn’t be there, door locked from the inside, no obvious clues as to any wrongdoing. It was June, and there was a seat in the bay window. There were some books left there, open, like she’d been reading them before it happened. She had exams coming up.’

I’d got all of this from my conversation with Mr and Mrs M, together with their copy of the coroner’s findings. I knew there’d be more out there, extra forensics reports, initial call-out notes, instincts and gut reactions that never even got written down. I just had to track down the right boys in blue to find it.

‘Her mum and dad are convinced she was pushed by a ghost. Apparently she left notes about it in her diary, but my feeling is she had mental health issues. Wouldn’t be the first time an academically gifted student has lost the plot, especially around exam time, or the first time grieving parents grasped at delusions.’

‘What are they like? Flakes? Hippies? Mentally unstable?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘just the opposite. Solid, middle class types. Probably in the Rotary Club and on parish councils. About as far removed from nuts as you could possibly imagine…’

I saw a vaguely satisfied look on his face as he lit up.

‘You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?’ I asked.

‘Yep. Because if they had been flakes or hippies, you wouldn’t have looked twice at it. And I also suspect that deep down you believe them, and you find that worrying in case it means you might be deluded too. Am I right?’

He blew a small cloud of smoke out and it immediately drifted off on the breeze, disappearing up to the tips of the conifers that were touching the sky. Yes, he was right. But I’d be buggered if I was going to admit it. Self-doubt is like hot chocolate fudge-cake – best consumed alone.

‘What was her name?’ he asked, after a beat of silence. He looked sad and angry and determined all at the same time. I suspect I just looked wistful – I gave up smoking on my thirtieth birthday and still missed it.

‘Her name was Joy. Joy Middlemas. She was nineteen years old. Look, I’m sorry to ask, but why the hell should I believe any of this? It’s insane.’

‘It is, isn’t it? Completely insane. Do you believe in God? And give me your first answer, not the one you’ve thought about and analysed.’

I felt a slow blush creep over my skin. I don’t know why it felt embarrassing, but it did. Like getting your first smear test and pretending you’re cool about it, chatting to the nurse about your holiday plans with your legs in stirrups.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes I do. If you insist on the first answer, anyway.’

He nodded and smiled. He had a dimple too. Just the one. On the left. It looked better on him.

‘I know. Feels wrong, doesn’t it? Like something an intelligent woman in the modern world shouldn’t admit. But it’s part upbringing – I’m guessing Liverpool Catholic with you – and partly instinct, faith, call it whatever you like. So, if you believe in God, do you believe in the Devil?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘probably not as a cloven-hooved bloke with horns. But I’ve seen enough evil in the world to know it exists. Why? Are you going to tell me he’s down your well, too?’

‘If only. And as for the cloven hooves, haven’t got a clue. Much like I don’t know if God sits on a cloud and never shaves. But the point I’m making is that if you find it possible to suspend your disbelief long enough to believe in a benign all-knowing creator, why do you struggle with the opposite? With the bad stuff?’

‘I don’t struggle with bad stuff. I just struggle with… ghosts. They don’t even exist, never mind kill teenagers.’

‘And you don’t believe in them because, what – you’ve never seen one? Like you’ve never seen God?’

He raised an eyebrow and grinned at me. He could tell my logic was tying me up in knots and seemed to find it amusing. I wondered if it was too early in our relationship for me to tell him to fuck right off. I reminded myself that he was a priest – former – and I certainly wouldn’t tell Father Doheny to fuck right off. But there were a lot of things I wouldn’t do to Father Doheny that I’d certainly consider doing to this man.

‘Do you want another beer before I say any more?’

‘I better had,’ I said. ‘You’ll be making out Santa doesn’t exist next, then I’ll have to top myself.’

He strode off into the house again. I watched his arse as he went. God is in the details, I thought. And the Devil’s in my mind.

‘I don’t expect you to believe it straight off,’ he said, returning with another chilled can, ‘but if you stick with this case and see it through, you might.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘ghosts exist.’

‘Yes,’ he said unwaveringly.

‘And demons – what about them?’

‘Yes, definitely.’

‘Fairies at the bottom of the garden?’

‘Don’t be stupid. They live at the top of the garden. Behind the shed, in fact.’

I glanced over unconsciously. It looked normal enough, no little pink tutus or iridescent wings popping out from behind the brick. Although there might be if I carried on drinking. I was already on to my second beer, which meant no more for me. I felt deeply sad about that, and may have sighed.

‘Look,’ said Dan, leaning towards me so his face was disconcertingly close to mine. ‘Why don’t you stay? There’s a lot to explain, and none of it’s easy. There are things you need to know if you’re carrying on with this. And if you’re not, I might take it over. But it’s not something I can fill you in on in the space of an hour.’

I must have looked hesitant, and he added: ‘Don’t worry – there’s a spare room, your virtue’s safe.’

Silly man. It wasn’t my virtue I was worried about. That went a long time ago, unless you believed my grandma.

‘Okay, thanks. I’ll do that. I keep a spare everything in the car anyway, in case I get called away for work.’ Or in case I get lucky and pull, I added silently.

‘Great. Now you’re staying, I’ll bring out the cool box. Believe me, you’re going to want to drink. A lot.’

Chapter 6

Three hours, several beers, and one chicken casserole later, I was lounging on one of Dan’s sofas, taking a trip into the Twilight Zone of his life.

The sitting room was small, crammed with two couches and a collection of old books and carvings, piled onto cluttered wooden shelves. The walls were painted a very pale shade of lemon, and big, green potted plants the size of small trees were sprouting in the corners. No telly, though. That in itself was cause to question someone’s mental health – I mean, didn’t he ever need to watch ‘Songs of Praise’ or anything?

Dan was lying stretched out on the sofa across from me, his long legs sprawled, feet propped up on the arm-rest. He had odd socks on, which didn’t surprise me. His arms were folded behind his head, and his biceps were winking at me.

‘So… let me get this straight. Katie Bell was killed by a ghost, and you think Joy might have been as well. And these aren’t one-offs?’

‘Yes, yes, and no,’ he said, stifling a yawn. ‘I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of strange things. Maybe I was more willing to believe them than you, but even so, to start with I was cynical. The Catholic Church has conflicting views on it all. At the higher levels, there’s a Chief Exorcist, but on a local level, people are still likely to think you’ve got a screw loose.’

I didn’t answer, and he turned to look at me, raising an eyebrow at my silence.

‘Sorry – I’m sure your screws are all fine,’ I said. Freudian slip. Quickly brushing over it, I asked eloquently:‘So are you trained to do all this… stuff?’

‘Technically, no. I suppose you could say I learned on the job, starting with the first time I encountered a problem.’

‘Like in “Ghostbusters”?’

‘Without the catchy theme tune. Or the fun. None of this is fun, and if you stick with it, you’ll find out for yourself. I’m guessing that Joy started to deteriorate before she died – uncommunicative, not taking care of herself? I bet her parents were already worried, weren’t they?’

I nodded, wishing he wasn’t right.

‘You might find this is related to the building. It could have happened there before, and you should be able to find out with your contacts. Or it might be specific to her – she could have pissed off the wrong spirit.’

‘Are you telling me they have mood swings now? Undead PMT?’

‘Don’t be so sexist. But in a way, yes. All people are different – why assume that changes once they’re dead? You can come across spirits that exist perfectly happily with the modern world. Maybe a bit mischievous, but not harmful. What kind of place do you live in?’

‘A very non-haunted one,’ I replied firmly, hoping he wasn’t about to suggest a psychic sweep of my broom cupboard.

‘Is the building old, though? That increases the chances.’

‘Modern refurb of… yes, a pretty old building. But nothing spooky happens there, honest. Nothing much happens there at all.’

Um. Not quite the successful woman-about-town image I was aiming for, but there you go.

‘Do you lose your car keys a lot? Find the answering machine’s cleared messages without you listening? Plants you’ve watered dry up and die?’

‘No, absolutely not. And I don’t do plants.’

I was scowling at him now. I probably didn’t look very attractive. But I was starting to get a prickly feeling between my shoulder blades – because while none of those things happened in my flat, thank God, they did happen in my office. All the bloody time. Doors I leave locked are open the next day. Files I’ve organised alphabetically switch round so my Zebediahs are in my Aardvarks. And no matter how many times I decide on a ‘special’ place to put my keys, I always find them somewhere else. I’ve had that office for the last three years, and I’ve never once managed to leave it without a full-on purse search. All this time I put it down to me being a bit ditzy, and occasionally a bit pissed, and now rent-a-ghost over there was telling me it could all be down to some ‘mischievous’ spirit?

I shivered a bit. The temperature had dropped right down; I must have been cold. It couldn’t possibly have been because I was spooked.

Dan slinked off the sofa and on to his mismatched feet. I know ‘slink’ isn’t a word you often associate with six foot two inch males, but he does move in a way that’s… graceful, I suppose. He stretched, then headed out of the door, returning a few minutes later with mugs of tea and a packet of Hobnobs. God, the man knew how to live.

A scrawny black cat followed him back in, weaving round his ankles. It sat and stared at me with narrowed eyes. One narrowed eye, to be precise – the other socket was empty, and grown over with grizzled grey fur. He only had one ear as well, and even that was sticking out at a funny angle, like it had been broken and reset by a drunk vet. It was the kind of manky creature you’d call Lucky for a joke.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked, staring it down.

‘That’s Balthazar. He’s my familiar,’ answered Dan. I felt a churn in my stomach.

‘Nah, not really,’ he added, looking at my stern expression. ‘Where’s that famed sense of humour you Scousers are supposed to have? That’s just Bert. No idea where he lives, or who thinks they own him. Appears now and then looking for food.’

Bert gave me a cat sneer, and leapt up into the windowsill, keeping one careful feline eye on us in case we made any sudden moves.

As well as bringing the tea, Dan had a multicoloured woollen blanket slung over his shoulder, which he brought over and threw across me.

‘It’s getting colder, and the heating’s bust,’ he said, tucking me in. I jumped as I felt his fingers accidentally brush the inch of bare flesh that was peeping between my T-shirt and my jeans.

He smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and retreated back to his own couch.

Was he flirting with me? Or just taking the piss? I couldn’t tell, so I dipped my biscuit into the tea. Left it there way too long, until it fell to pieces, and I burned my fingers trying to scoop the biggest chunks out.

‘Do you want me to help you?’ he asked, expertly withdrawing his biscuit, totally intact.

‘No, I’m all right, ta,’ I said, ‘I don’t mind a few crumbs.’

‘I didn’t mean with the tea. I meant with the case. I have certain strengths, but I’m not a qualified investigator. Together we could make everything move along much quicker, and the sooner we sort this out the better. What do you say? We’ve got the right names for it. And I could even help you improve your dunking technique if you like.’

Part of his face was obscured by the steam floating up from his mug. But I knew there’d be a grin lurking there.

He was definitely, definitely flirting. And I was definitely, definitely enjoying it.

What would Father Doheny say?

Chapter 7

‘Pass us that bag of 50ps, love,’ my mum said, too tired to move off her armchair. It was a comfy armchair, old and squashy, covered in worn brown velour with burnt orange tassles dangling off it. It would have looked right at home in the living room of any granny flat, parked in front of the telly. Which is exactly where I wished I was, after spending a restless night at Father Dan’s cottage.

Instead, it was behind the counter in my mother’s ‘boutique’. The boutique in question was actually a set of trestle tables in Liverpool’s ‘famous’ Riverfront Market, down at the docks.

The Market takes place in a barely converted former warehouse every weekend. It’s damp and cold and very, very old. But it’s still one of my all-time favourite places in the city, and judging by the crowds that flock there, I’m not alone. There’s nowhere like it for atmosphere, and you can buy anything from second-hand crime thrillers to brand new designer trainers. Not only can you furnish your whole house, you can get your eyebrows done and have your Tarot read, all under the one moist, cavernous roof.

My mum, Mary McCartney, has had a stall there for donkey’s years. She’s like one of the fixtures, but less rusty. She sells what she terms ‘clubwear for the curvaceous clubber’. In other words, a lot of brightly coloured lycra for the bodyshape-challenged.

She’d done a roaring trade that day – Halloween is a big clubbing night in town these days, and she’d had my creative cousin Susan whipping up a special range of low-cut mini-dresses with fluorescent skeleton bones painted on them. They glowed in the dark, and went up to a size 28. Who says we have no class in Liverpool? I suspected it was the first time some of these ladies had seen their ribs in a while, so I wasn’t surprised they were popular.

The day was drawing to a close, and the traders were all packing up, boxing their gear and loading it into vans and storage. She was having her traditional post-business cuppa while she cashed up. I was in charge of fetching the tea, and counting copper – I get all the good jobs.

She took the bag of coins from my hand, holding it in her palm – she always says she can guess how much just from the feel of it. The bag probably weighed more than she does – despite being a purveyor of plump party frocks, she’s built like a sparrow herself, with delicate features and jet black hair. The latter comes out of a bottle, the same brand she’s used since she was twenty-four. She has no clue what her real hair looks like underneath it all now (neither do I), and is convinced if she stopped colouring it, she’d go bald.

‘Twenty-eight quid,’ she pronounced, then tipped the coins out onto her lap and started counting. She can talk while she counts as well, which makes her some kind of savant in my eyes. I finished the tower of tuppences I was working on and sat down on a far less comfy bar stool, next to a plus-sized mannequin draped in a diamanté bikini and a feather boa.

‘So this fella claims the girl could have been killed by a ghostie, does he?’ she said, piling the coins up in small stacks on the bulky arms of the chair. I nodded, expecting a tirade of cynicism and warnings about lunacy being catching.

‘Well, you never know, hon. There are stranger things in heaven and earth, and some of them have stalls here. But be careful. Your Auntie Doreen always claimed your Uncle Les was possessed by a demon.’

‘Uncle Les was possessed by the bottle of Thunderbird he kept hidden in his glovebox, Mum, and we all know it. Don’t you think it’s a bit far-fetched?’

‘’Course I do. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. I know nothing about all this ghost crap, but I know you, and you’re a good judge of character. If you think he’s talking sense, he is.’

‘That’s the problem. I’m not sure he is. But then again, I have clients – paying clients – who want to know what happened. Even if they don’t like the answers, it’s my job to find them, which means working with Father Dan. At least he’s easy on the eye.’

She snorted and finished her count, scooping the coins into individual bags ready for banking.

‘I was 50p out,’ she said, ‘must be losing my touch. Look, love, while I’m not sure about the spirit world, I am sure about one thing – fancying the priest is wrong. Knock it on the head, will you? I don’t want my only daughter sent to hell – it’s already going to be full of my offspring when the boys get there.’

‘He’s not a priest any—’ I started to protest. She cut me off by holding up her tiny hand and saying ‘Shhh, I’m counting’. Which was a lie – she was communing with a plastic bag of pound coins.

‘One hundred and two quid, dead on. Why don’t you ask Mystic Melissa? She’s heading over now. Must have sensed your presence.’

I groaned and went back to the copper. Mystic Melissa – real name Clive Bottomley – was a psychic drag queen who ran a fortune-telling booth at the market. He was five foot eight in height, almost as much across, and was forever on the scrounge for suitably spacious gear at my mum’s stall. He also fancied me something rotten, and I can’t tell you how disturbing that was.

He bustled over, sporting a ginger wig and wrapped in a sequinned fuchsia shawl. He was wearing more eyeliner than Twiggy in the sixties, and white shag-me stilettos that squeezed his feet so tight the fishnet stockinged flesh spilled over the edges. I tried to ignore him, but he made it hard for me by giving me a bear hug. Seriously, I’d rather have been hugged by a bear. With a flatulence problem.

‘Looking limber as ever, Jayne!’ he said, going for the lips and getting a slap, ‘and still feisty as fuck, I see!’

‘Clive, our Jayne’s got a bad case of the supernatural. Can you help her?’ said Mum, starting in on the chunkies, heaping them into ten-pound piles. I could happily have choked her.

‘Oooh!’ he said, raising his plucked-to-oblivion eyebrows. Shaped brows, mascara and five o’clock shadow. It just doesn’t work.

‘Depends what’s in it for me, doesn’t it?’ he said, giving me a coquettish wink and a nudge so hard I almost fell off my stool. I was about to tell him where to stick his sequins when Mum butted in.

‘That’s enough of that, mucky pup. You help Jayne, I’ll give you one of those sexy skeleton dresses for nothing. I saved one for you in case you came by. I must be a mind reader.’

He eyed up one of the frocks hanging on the rail, glowing in the fading light.

‘It’s a deal. I’ll be irresistible to man, woman and beast wearing that thing. So, Jaynie-Waynie, sit on Mystic Melissa’s lap and tell me all about it.’

He’d propped himself on the trestles, which groaned under his psychic power – that or the extra six stone he was carrying – and slapped his knees. I ignored the suggested seating arrangements, but did tell him about the case. I needed all the help I could get.

As I drew to a close, I noticed an expression I’d never seen on Mystic Melissa’s face before – concern. Jesus, I was being taken seriously by a clairvoyant trannie. I really needed to get a new line of work.

He pursed his big fat lips together. Like a pair of mating slugs, they were, with bright red gloss sluicing off into the tiny wrinkles around his smoker’s mouth. He blew out a breath and shook his head, ginger fringe waggling from side to side.

‘You need to talk to Dodgy Bobby,’ he said finally.

‘Who’s Dodgy Bobby? And why do I need to talk to him? And how dodgy is he?’

‘Nothing nasty, love – you wouldn’t have encountered him when you were working for Her Majesty, if that’s what you’re worried about. But he’s psychic, is Bobby. The real deal. So he’s used it the best way possible – dodging gainful employment for the whole of his life. At least the kind you pay taxes on. He does a bit of this, bit of that, all the time he’s on the sick. Claiming a fortune in benefits due to his bad back. It’s all a crock of shit, he’s fit as a whippet, but he never gets caught – always knows when those benefit types have their beady eyes on him. Always packs in whatever he’s doing, and starts wandering around with crutches and a neck brace. They know there’s something going on but they can’t catch him – nearly did once when he was doing some fork-lifting at the scrap yard, but he whipped on the collar just in time, made out he was visiting his uncle.’

‘Sounds like a very noble way to use his gift,’ I replied, narrowing my eyes at Clive. ‘And what do you mean, he’s psychic? What about you, Melissa?’

‘Don’t give me that face, love. I’m about as psychic as a horse’s arse and we both know it. My punters know it as well – they come for the drama, the giggle, the glamour. I camp it up and tell ’em they’ll meet a tall, dark stranger in the bogs at the Pan Am bar and they go off happy. Worth every penny, I am. But Bobby? He’s different.’

‘Okay, let’s say for argument’s sake I’m believing any of this – why should I go and talk to him?’

It was a valid question. When had my life turned into something where I was considering taking advice from a man called Mystic Melissa about another one called Dodgy Bobby?

‘He’ll give you the details, Jayne, but a few years ago he got taken on by Eugene Casey. Well, taken on is too kind a way to phrase it – he got told he was going to help out.’

Now he really had my attention. The Caseys were one of the biggest crime families in Liverpool. They’d been at it for generations – stolen goods, organised car theft, drugs, prostitution – and by now, they were getting really quite good at it. You were nothing on the Force if you hadn’t felt a Casey collar. But you were really something if you made it stick – witnesses had a strange way of becoming amnesiacs as trial dates drew closer, inevitably gaining a freshly sprayed motor to help them recover. If they were lucky. Some just ended up with a broken kneecap. The Caseys also had enough poke to employ one of the cleverest, nastiest lawyers around, a rat-faced little charmer called Simon Solitaire. Not his real name, we suspected.

‘What did Eugene want with him?’ I asked. Eugene was the Big Daddy of the lot – clan leader and self-appointed elder statesman of the city’s underworld. He wore sharp suits and ties, slicked his hair back like a 1950s wide boy, and talked a lot of pseudo-Krays crap about honour amongst thieves and the way the Caseys helped keep the streets clean. Yeah, absolutely spotless – if you ignored the crack whores and no-go zones and babies born addicted to methadone.

‘Did you know he had a granddaughter? Has two actually, but this was Sean’s girl. Eugene doted on her, decided she was going to be the exception to the rule and not go into the family business, like. So she was sent off to a posh private school, taught to speak proper and everything. Skiing holidays with her friends and their families, all dentists and doctors and barristers, not knowing where she came from. She ended up at the Institute, studying law – which is ironic isn’t it? Maybe she’d have ended up in the family business one way or another.’

Yeah. She’d have saved them a fortune in legal bills if she’d qualified. Somehow I suspected this wasn’t going to end with photos of a smiling girl in a cap and gown, though.

‘Anyway, long story short, she’s dead. Accident. Just after she’d done her finals, and was due to graduate. Tripped down the stairs and broke her neck. They say it was quick, but who gives a fuck really? Still dead. Sean went ga-ga. His missus did a runner. Eugene did what comes natural – set out to slice someone’s bollocks off. That’s where Dodgy Bobby comes in.’

‘What? He sliced his bollocks off? And him, just a poor old cripple?’

‘Nah, Bobby’s bollocks are safe and sound. Not that I’ve seen them up close, I hasten to add – despite appearances, my sweet, I’m 100 per cent red-blooded male.’ He cupped his groin and gave it a little heft up for me. Ugh. I moved my hands in a wind-it-on gesture. Mum was so engrossed she’d stopped counting, but I wanted to get to the crux of the matter.

‘Turns out the girl – Geneva, would you believe? – had confided in her cousin, Theresa, that she’d been having a few problems with unwanted attention. Music to Eugene’s ears – someone he could beat the crap out of and send to that butcher’s shop in Kenny to have ground up and fed to the pigs. But then things got a bit weird – ’cause Geneva had told Theresa that her stalker was a frigging ghost. Now, Eugene knew about Dodgy Bobby’s rep, so he got him brought in. Combination of a kick up the arse from the heavies and the promise of mucho casho if he could get to the bottom of it. And Bobby really will have to tell you the rest – because he’s never spoken about it ever again. In fact, he’s barely been seen again. He’s lying low, and Casey still has a bloody big itch to scratch.’

Quite a story. If any of it was true. And definitely something I was going to have to check out. At least dealing with the scum of the earth would be more familiar territory for me.

‘So how do I get to Bobby?’ I asked.

‘I’ll text you his details later, love.’

‘No you won’t, because you don’t have my mobile number, and I have no intention of giving it to you. Just write it down on a bit of paper and bugger off with your new frock.’

He pouted at me, but took the carbon copy receipt pad Mum handed to him. He scribbled and passed it back. I glanced at the address, making sure he hadn’t just drawn a picture of two ferrets making love or scrawled down his own vital statistics.

‘Now listen, love – not many people know where he is, and that’s the way he wants it. So keep it under your knickers, will you?’

I nodded. It’d definitely be safe there.

I looked down at the address. Great. Dodgy Bobby lived in one of the dodgiest parts of town – on what looked like the top floor of the tower block from hell. What were the odds the lifts weren’t working?

Chapter 8

Before I tackled Dodgy Bobby, I decided to go home and do some research.

I needed to find out more about the history of the building Joy lived in, and I needed to bully one of my former police colleagues into handing over the background information on the case. Plus, I now had to find out more about the sad demise of Geneva Casey, and why I hadn’t heard about it before. It should have been big news, a Casey popping her clogs. Or probably her Jimmy Choos, given the amount of dosh the Caseys had hidden under their collective mattress.

I started with the straightforward approach – the Institute website, flicking through the halls of residence until I found Hart House, Joy’s last known abode. Once I saw the photo I knew exactly where it was – on the southern edge of town, set in a scrap of grass that had probably once been sumptuous parkland before the city caught up with it. It more than likely had a deer park or something, back in the day, but land values now were too steep to indulge in such frivolities. It was described on the page as being ‘historic’ – which in my mind now meant ‘ghost-infested’, thanks to Father Dan. I was practising calling him Father in my mind so I could stop fancying him – my mum was right, really, I should knock it on the head, especially as I was going to be working with him.

We’d arranged that I’d come back to Liverpool to start off the investigation, while he tied up a few loose ends at home in the Lake District. I don’t know what he meant by loose ends – maybe he had a possessed sheep to exorcise.

He wouldn’t like the look of Hart House, that’s for sure. I wasn’t sure I liked the look of it either, and it definitely wasn’t a Hall I remembered from my time at the Institute. Then again I was there for less than a year and spent much of that time in an alcoholic stupor, so I’m probably not the world’s best witness.

The website didn’t give much detail about exactly how historic its history was, and instead focused on its intercom security device, 24-hour concierge and its forty-six en-suite rooms, all with individual spyholes in the doors. To put the mind of the worried parent at rest, I suppose.

The building probably belonged to the Institute, bequeathed by some rich merchant family from days of yore. But it was worth a double check, so I logged on to the Land Registry site and typed in the details – for a few quid you can download all kinds of juicy information about absolutely any property in the country. Amazing, isn’t it? Annoyingly, though, I’d forgotten that even in the electronic age, it was closed to inquiries on Sundays. And I couldn’t harangue anyone from the Institute itself for the same reason – bloody lightweights.

I called Corky Corcoran to start my illegal harassment of the police service, but got put straight through to voicemail. I left a threatening message instructing him to call me back straight away or say goodbye to his chances of fathering any more children. Although as he already has four under the age of six, I’m not sure if that wasn’t less of a threat and more of a promise. I also fired off an e-mail to Mr and Mrs Middlemas, informing them that I was progressing my research. Not how, or who with, but enough to reassure them I hadn’t banked the cheque then gone on a week-long booze cruise to the Balearics. Which was actually looking more enticing by the moment.

Bugger, I thought, slouching back onto the couch. There really was nothing else left to try for the time being. Eagle-eyed private eyes and market traders seemed to be the only people working.

I stood up, and grabbed my jacket. I might as well visit Dodgy Bobby – in my experience, minor league crims and wasters had little respect for the Lord’s Day. Or anybody else’s, as a matter of fact.

By the time I’d parked up by Thelwall Towers, fitted the wheel lock and clicked on the car alarm – none of which would do any good at all if someone took a shine to it – it was lashing it down. None of that ‘fine drizzle that gets you really wet’ rubbish – a complete deluge that gets you even wetter.

I ran for the entrance to the tower block. There was an old intercom system next to the front door, where visitors could press the buzzers next to buttons. Only insane people ever left their buzzers on in places like this, or they’d get the local youth passing on their regards 24/7. Anyway, I could tell it wasn’t working from the fact there were wires hanging out of it, and the heavy metal and glass door into the building was propped open with an empty Strongbow can.

I pulled it open, striding in out of the rain as confidently as I could. A couple of feral kids were loitering in the lobby, and I could smell spray can in the air. On a school night as well. I eyeballed them with my best bobby look. They flicked me the Vs, showing me how terrified they were, and went back to vandalising the raw brick wall.

I didn’t want to touch the lift call button, it was so disgustingly coated in greasy smears of God knows what. I pulled a face and poked it with the tip of my nail. I was going to have to start carrying bacterial spray in my pocket.

‘’S not werkin’,’ one of them piped up in his best can’t-talk-right accent, ‘someone fucked it up.’ Yeah, and I wonder who? They looked too smug for it to have been anybody else. Oh well. It would have been fragrant with eau de piss anyway, and I didn’t have much need for a used needle. I took the long way.

The downside was twelve floors of litter-strewn stairs, stone silent apart from the disjointed buzz of flickering neon lighting. Not a sign of another human being. A bit spooky, truth be told. And disgusting – there was crap in one of the corners as I turned up the eighth storey. I hoped it came from a dog.

The upside was nobody followed me, mugged me, or tagged me with a spray can to turn me into a live art installation. And I was pretty much dried out by the time I got to the twelfth, and found the number Clive had given me.

I knocked, hard, on the wood of the door. It was painted a puke green, with a small square panel at the top made out of smoky reinforced glass. No lights, no sounds, no answer, nothing. I walked over to the flat opposite, with its identical door, and pushed open the letter box. It was stuffed with old junk mail and a free weekly paper that had been delivered three months before. I suspected all the flats would be the same. Nobody lived in this block – they’d probably all been moved out into the much nicer new estate that’d been built half a mile, and a whole world away.

All except one. The letter box of Dodgy Bobby’s place was free of clutter, and when I wiggled my fingers through it, they felt warm air circulating. If it was uninhabited, it would have been cold. Damp. Frigid. I could see tiny curtains either side of the glass panel, and I managed to run my fingers over them when I twisted my hand up at a socket-popping angle. No dust.

He was in there. And he had known I was coming early enough to pretend otherwise.

‘Bobby!’ I yelled through the letter box, ‘come out now or I’m fetching Eugene! I’ve got my mobile here, and if you don’t talk to me, I’ll call him – he’ll send the lads round and kick this bloody door down!’

I might not be psychic, but I do have good hearing. There was a scuffle and a rattle from inside, and eventually the door edged open an inch. I shoved it as hard as I could, and Dodgy Bobby flew backwards, hitting the woodchip wall with a thump.

‘What do you want? What does bloody Eugene want? I’ve done everything I can!’ he said, his voice an anguished, nasal whine that seeped out of his nostrils and the tiny slit in his thin, clamped lips. It looked like he was in a room full of toxic gas and was trying to keep his mouth closed when he spoke.

I strode into the living room. Tiny. A beige shagpile decorated with ash, a velour sofa that looked like it was a match for my mum’s shabby market armchair. Three bar electric fire, switched off but the elements still shining orange. A portable black and white telly, with an aerial made out of a wire coat hanger. A copy of the Racing Post and an enormous fish tank, stuffed completely full with cigarette butts. It stank to high heaven.

The only redeeming feature of the whole place was the view – a magnificent vista of the city at night, the glitzy shopping malls and the cathedrals and the beacon of St John’s tower, sticking like an antenna 400 feet into the air.

I turned to stare at Bobby. He looked pretty dodgy, that was for sure. A small man, narrow shoulders hunched in on themselves, trying to appear even smaller. His face was long and thin, with an enormous bulbous nose taking pride of place.

‘Go on then, love,’ he said, sticking his hands into the front pockets of his baggy beige cardigan, ‘do yer worst. What does he want? ’Cause I’m not going back to that place, I don’t give a fuck what he threatens me with.’

I could see his hands shaking inside the pockets, and his left eye was twitching uncontrollably. Bobby had probably spent much of his life in fear of one kind or another, but this time he was obviously terrified.

‘I lied. I’m not from Eugene,’ I said.

He looked relieved, and plonked himself down on the sagging sofa.

‘Thought not,’ he said, ‘you look more like a bizzy to me. That right?’

‘Maybe,’ I replied, not really wanting to give away more than was strictly necessary. I looked round for somewhere to sit. There was no way I was getting on that filthy, sagging couch – my bum would hit the floor and I’d never make it up again without a crane. I grabbed a hard-backed kitchen chair, and pulled it close enough so I could stare him down and scare him, but far enough that there was no danger of me accidentally touching him.

‘I was sent here by Mystic Melissa – Clive. He’s a friend of mine.’ That was stretching a point, but it clearly helped Bobby relax. He even cracked his lips open a quarter of an inch in a yellow-toothed smile.

‘He thought you might be able to help me with something.’

‘Yeah? Happy to help, queen. But what’s it worth to me? Quick blow job?’

He leered up at me, and it suddenly seemed like a very sensible idea to beat the crap out of him. But not yet – I had work to do.

‘In your dreams, Bobby. Put that thing anywhere near me and I’ll neuter you – a service to humanity. But if you help me out, I won’t kick your arse, and I’ll make it worth your time.’

I pulled out the twenty quid note I’d ready prepared in my pocket. He snatched it out of my hand with remarkable speed – it was like one of those frogs scooping up a fly with their tongue at ninety miles an hour. Yuk. He rolled the note up, and popped it behind his left ear. The right one was already occupied with a ciggie.

‘Tell me about Geneva Casey,’ I said, and saw his face scrumple back up in fear.

‘Don’t know nobody by that name,’ he muttered, holding his knees steady with his palms.

I shook my head, and replied: ‘Bobby, that makes me sad. I’ve been straight with you – mostly. I’ve given you some of my hard-earned cash. Now I expect something in return. I’m sure you wouldn’t want any problems with the law, would you, nice fella like yourself?’

‘Cunt,’ he hissed, without opening his lips at all. I leaned forward and smacked his forehead with the heel of my palm, hard enough to make his skull wobble like it was on a spring.

‘Don’t swear at me, you fucking bastard,’ I said. Possibly somewhat hypocritically.

Bobby shook the slap away, his eyes watery, and stared off at the fish tank.

‘Not Casey,’ he said eventually. ‘Geneva Connelly. Stuck with her mum’s name for, you know, privacy reasons.’

Ah. That made more sense – it explained why I hadn’t heard anything. If the Caseys had kept their profile low when it came to the prodigal granddaughter, and let the mother deal with it all, the connection might not have been made. They’d have made her lie, talk to the police as though she was a single parent so the family name didn’t get dragged through the mud. Heaven forbid the Caseys get associated with anything as shady as higher education.

‘Go on,’ I said, softening my tone. ‘I won’t hurt you, Bobby – and if you’re hiding from the Caseys, I won’t tell them where you are. I know something happened to Geneva, something bad, and I’m trying to stop it happening to anyone else. At the moment I know nothing – so enlighten me.’

He looked back at me with narrowed eyes, which made him look even more like a rat. ‘What do you mean, you know nothing? There’d be a file, wouldn’t there?’ I met his gaze steadily.

‘Oh. You’re not with the pigs at all, are you?’

‘Never said I was, Bobby. Bit disappointing you didn’t figure that out, considering you’re supposed to be this psychic superstar. Now tell me all about it and I might even have another twenty for you. I can see you’ve not been able to get out and work much.’

‘Nah. It’s me bad back,’ he said, stroking his spine as though it had suddenly started aching. Yeah, right.

‘Okay,’ he sighed,’ but you’ve got to promise me you won’t tell them where I am. This place only has leccy for the next few weeks so I’ll be moving on anyway. Been all right here – no bloody people disturbing my peace.’

‘I swear, Bobby – if anyone finds out about this place, it won’t be from me. And you know Clive wouldn’t have passed on your details if you couldn’t trust me.’

‘’Spose so,’ he said, sniffing up a nose full of stray snot.

‘Well, I got the call out from Wigwam. Do you know him?’

I nodded. Of course I knew him. Wigwam was the stuff of legend in Liverpool. Eugene Casey’s number one enforcer; black father, white mother, probably Peter Sutcliffe as an uncle. To be found on his nights off doing a stand-up routine at the basement comedy club down Churchill Street. I kid you not – a thug with a sense of humour. And believe me, everyone laughed. They didn’t dare not to.

‘He made me one of them offers you can’t refuse – get every bone in me body broke, or earn a couple of hundred knicker. I might not be winning Mastermind any time soon, but I’m not thick, am I? I took the money, and got driven for a meeting with Eugene at his office. He was fucked up, love… what’s your name, anyway?’

‘Jayne McCartney,’ I said. Bobby didn’t ask the usual question about my family connection to Sir Paul. I suppose he already knew the answer.

‘His boy, Sean, was there. Couldn’t speak. The missus was in the corner, looked like she was drugged up to the eyeballs, chain-smoking and hitting the vodka as well. Eugene was crying, not even trying to hide it. It was a bad scene, queen, I tell you.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘I don’t know what Clive told you about me. Don’t know the truth of it myself, or what the name is for what I can do. Got called plenty of names in my time, none I’d want to see on me gravestone. But I’ve always been able to sense things. I can look at someone and know what they’re thinking – not all the time, and not on demand, but just a flash, here and there? And especially when it relates to me, if they’re thinking of finding me or doing something to me. I suppose that comes from the early days, when I was a nipper. Life wasn’t exactly a party for me back then.’

I felt a vague tugging of my heartstrings, but knew he was doing it deliberately. And I really don’t like being manipulated.

‘Yeah, yeah, spare me the tales of woe and get on with it Bobby. Wigwam. Eugene. Geneva Connelly.’

‘Hard-faced bitch, aren’t you? At least you’re trying to be. Not true though, is it, deep down? Bit of a soft touch, you are.’

‘Bobby. Shut the fuck up, and talk,’ I said.

‘All right, all right, keep your wig on. So Geneva had been killed, fallen down the stairs. Her cousin Theresa was there as well, sobbing her mascara off, saying Geneva’d been having problems. With, you know, a ghost.’

He looked up at me expectantly, obviously waiting for a reaction – disbelief, fear, amazement, I don’t know. He didn’t get any, so he carried on.

‘They took me to the building where it happened. It sometimes works with buildings or objects. Sometimes I can touch a thing and know stuff about it, or the people who’ve touched it before. Nothing that makes sense, just feelings, like. I have to be dead careful – bit like getting one of them static shocks, but in the brain.

‘Wigwam walked me through. We did it at five in the morning. He’d bribed the security bloke to go and have a fag, and in we went, while there was no bugger else around. All the pretty young things tucked up in their beds by then. Jesus, it was awful.’

He reached for the cigarette from behind his ear, and tried to light it. His fingers were shaking so much he couldn’t strike the match, and I reached out to do it for him. I didn’t care too much about his upcoming emphysema, and I needed him calm enough to continue. He nodded his thanks and took his first drag. I thought he might inhale the lot in one go, he was pulling so hard.

‘I could feel it straight away. There was something evil in that place. As soon as we started going up the steps, my hair went up. Right up, floating in the air. Made Wigwam laugh, but I didn’t think it was very funny, ’cause I knew it meant something bad.

‘When we got to her room, it was there. That… thing. It was everywhere – getting up my nose, in my mouth, filling up my ears. Like… like cotton wool being shoved everywhere at once, all my senses were blocked with it. I couldn’t hear or see or smell anything else – and it was evil, it was all rotten, getting into every part of me, choking me. I thought I was going to die!’

His hands were shaking so hard now that ash from his cigarette was zig-zagging off to the left and the right in black arcs. Tears were streaming down his face, and he was poking his finger into his ear, like he was trying to unblock it after a bath. He was falling to pieces in front of me.

‘Bobby! Calm down!’ I said, reaching out to hold his wrists steady. He stared up at me, and nodded. Like I’d reminded him of reality. His skin had faded from its ruddy, pock-marked glow to a putrid yellow, and his breathing was coming in short, sharp bursts. I swear I could hear his heart thumping – and mine along with it. Dodgy Bobby was no longer faking anything – this was genuine 100 per cent terror. And it was contagious.

‘All right, love, yeah, all right. But have you ever had that? That cold feeling? Goosebumps? Just knowing something’s wrong?’

I nodded. I had. Many times. If you’re in the police, you soon learn to listen to that instinct. I associated it with the sound of my own footsteps on the concrete verandahs and walkways of the city’s more enterprising council estates. Always dead quiet, creepily silent, blank faces staring you down as you passed. Every corner you turned, every door you pushed, could be your last. We lived with goosebumps. It’s why we drank so much.

‘Well that’s nothing compared to what happens to me. With me it’s not just some feeling, it’s real, it takes over my whole mind. And this… this was like being held face down in a barrel of shit, little kids’ voices whispering in me ear all the time, telling me over and over again I’m going to hell… that they knew every bad thing about me, that I’m worthless scum and I’ll die screaming. Pictures of my ma, before she died, saying she was burning in hell as well. Of my little sister, saying she was next. She’s only twenty four for Christ’s sake, but in my mind, she’s there, hooked up to machines, no bloody hair. Fucking awful.

‘Then I fell over, legs couldn’t hold me up any more. I was lying on the carpet, face down, trying to block it out. Had burns on me face for days afterwards where I’d scraped the skin off, didn’t even notice at the time. And fucking Wigwam’s kicking me in the ribs and yelling at me. He got down next to me, slapping me round the head and shouting in me ear. Made no difference. Their voices were louder, singing and laughing. Louder than anything I’ve ever heard, straight into my brain, drowned Wigwam out completely. He was going nuts, effing and blinding at me, but it made no odds.’

‘What else were they saying, Bobby?’

He was still crying, his whole narrow, malnourished body jerking with sobs.

‘They was saying they wanted her. Geneva. Saying she was theirs. Saying terrible things, about how they were angry because they didn’t get to finish their game…’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know what it fucking means, do I? By that stage I had blood coming out of me ears and nose, and frigging Wigwam dragged me out of there by me boots, banged me arse all the way down the pissing stairs! Next thing I knew we were out on the street. He had me lying down on the seat at one of them yellow bus stops, shaking me, like that was going to help. He was furious – with hisself I think, ’cause he was scared as well. He chucked me in the backseat of that wagon he drives round in and took me back where I was living then.’

He sucked in breath, and I could hear it rattle round his blackened lungs. I’m not psychic – but I had the horrible feeling Dodgy Bobby wasn’t long for this world. Even as the thought crossed my mind, he looked up sharply.

‘You might be right, love. And I’m terrified of what comes next. I’ve been hiding out ever since, and I’ve been going to St Anthony’s every day and confessing. But none of it works – I can still feel it. Like smoke that’s got on my clothes and won’t wash out. It did something to me. It… claimed me. Like no bugger else has ever wanted to do.’

He was staring at the fish tank again now. His hands had stopped jolting, and some colour was creeping back into his cheeks. I exhaled, without realising I’d been holding my breath. Fuck. What a horrible story. From a horrible man. In a horrible place. I needed a beer, and possibly a Valium.

‘Bobby,’ I said, ‘last question then I’ll leave you in peace. Where did Geneva live? Where did all this happen?’

‘You’ll know the place, love,’ he said, ‘big old building on the edge of town. Don’t ever go there if you can avoid it. Hart House.’

Chapter 9

‘What do you mean I need to speak to the press office?’ I squeaked, annoyed that my lies weren’t working.

It was just after 11 o’clock the next day, and I was on the phone to the Head of Archives at the Liverpool Institute.

I’d made up a great story about working for the Gazette, and wanting to write a feature about the history of the Institute’s buildings, focusing on Hart House. My Land Registry search had come back listing a corporation called Stag Industries, which I’d never heard of. It was probably a commercial subsidiary of the Institute, but I was going to have to talk to somebody at Companies House later in the day to find out more.

In the meantime, I used the local journalist ploy. It worked much better a few years ago, I can tell you. People were impressed and interested and wanted to get their names in the papers. These days they either wanted paying, signed up to Max Clifford, or referred you to some corporate relations guru with a 2:2 in Media Studies and perfectly manicured nails. The state of the bloody nation.

There was a knock at the door, and I glanced up as it opened. Dan walked in. Father Dan, I mean. I had to really work on that Father Dan business, especially when he looked like he did today – sex on a stick, as my mate Tish might say.

He nodded hello, and lingered in the doorway, filling up the frame with Levi-clad legs, broad shoulders and a leather jacket, his dark blonde hair kissing the collar. I smiled and pointed at the phone in a ‘one minute’ gesture, while the Head of Archives continued to waste my time.

‘Well I don’t see what use the press office would be. I bet they don’t know about the history of Hart House, do they, not like you do with your experience? I’m sure they’d want you to talk to me – a feature in the Gazette would be a real boost for them and their fundraising drives… what? Are you sure? Oh. Okay, I’ll hold.’

I didn’t. I slammed the phone down, hard enough to make my pencil holder shake. I had no desire to talk to the press office. They’d probably want to call me back at the Gazette. I could arrange for Tish to help me, she’s a writer there, but it’d take time to set up and I was hoping to not be arsed with it all. I was slightly aggrieved, and frowning deeply.

‘Isn’t there some kind of law against that?’ said Father Dan, easing himself down into one of the creaky leather chairs, stretching his legs out in front of him and crossing his ankles. He was wearing very nice brown suede boots, I noticed. Still with odd socks, though.

‘Against what?’

‘Impersonating a member of the free press?’

‘No, there’s not, and I’d know if there was, wouldn’t I? When did you get here anyway? Where are you parked? Does that T-shirt have a hole in it?’

I was fudging it. There may well have been a law against what I’d been doing. Now was not the time to ponder.

He looked down at his own chest – and who could blame him? – spotting the ragged tear that hovered over his stomach. He pulled at it a bit, then shrugged.

‘Looks like it does. Sorry – didn’t realise there was a dress code. Nice office, by the way. Pretty old, isn’t it? What was this building used for originally?’

He gazed around, taking in the high ceilings, original coving, and the enormous picture window. Parquet flooring, dating back to the days when it was fashionable first time round; filing cabinets tucked away in an alcove that looked like it could originally have been home to a Roman bust or a priceless oil painting. Everything coated liberally with cobwebs to give it exactly the shabby chic air I was going for. Honest.

‘Oh, don’t start with that crap, we’ve got work to do,’ I said, bustling things around on my desk. I really didn’t want to have that conversation. When I arrived at the office that morning, I felt nervous, which in turn made me a bit pissed off.

I’d opened the door, found my desk drawer sticking out, as usual. The pencils were out of the pot and scattered on the surface. The files all looked in place, but when I went in to the loo, the toilet brush was submerged in the toilet.

‘Okay, you fucker,’ I’d said, to the four walls and empty air and potential ghost, ‘stop messing me around. I am going to put my keys here, safely, next to the phone. And they are going to stay there Or Else – do you understand me?’

I’d used my very best kick-ass voice, but couldn’t help feeling stupid. I wasn’t just talking to myself, I was shouting at myself. Things could go rapidly downhill from here. I’d be one of those people you avoid sitting next to on the bus, carrying a plastic bag full of documents and wearing my dinner.

‘All right, Little Miss Bossy,’ said Dan, apparently and annoyingly finding me amusing, ‘let’s do some work. Have you got the diary?’

I pointed at a brown-paper wrapped package perched on the corner of the desk. It had come special delivery earlier that morning, but I’d been too busy to open it. Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. I felt a reluctance to open it, if I was honest. Something was throwing me slightly off balance – Dodgy Bobby’s tale of terror; Father Dan’s assertion that the world wasn’t quite what I thought it was; the fact that my bloody office appeared to be haunted. Every time I’d reached out to tear off the packaging, my fingers had snatched themselves away and got busy with something else. Like my hands and the diary were two magnets, repelling each other.

I felt embarrassed and ashamed about my reaction. That diary was a crucial piece of evidence in a case I was working on. I should be desperate to read it, not finding excuses to avoid it. I also had the full police file on Joy, snaffled from Corky Corcoran, to get through – but somehow that, with its safe science and familiar terminology and photos of a battered and bleeding teenaged body, felt less daunting.

Dan was staring at me, his ice blue eyes slightly narrowed.

‘Do you want me to open it?’ he asked. I nodded in return, and he picked the package up.

‘Don’t worry. You’re a lot more sensitive to this stuff than you want to admit. Do you feel edgy, like you don’t want to touch it?’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ I snapped, getting up to do some dusting. It urgently needed doing – that bookshelf was an absolute disgrace. I used my shirt sleeve to wipe the top of it over, buying myself a minute to Get A Fucking Grip. I took a deep breath, and went back to sit down. I pulled out the police file, reassuring in all its manila-foldered glory, and started from scratch. I was aware of Dan unwrapping the diary, and frowning as he flicked through the pages.

We both worked silently, with me occasionally sneaking a peek at him as he read. His face didn’t give much away, but for all I knew, he wasn’t at the juicy bits yet. Maybe he was reading about Joy’s nights at the local wine bar or her trips to the cinema with cute boys from the medical school.

I, on the other hand, was reading about how she was seen cartwheeling from her window at 8.02 a.m. on June 13th. The poor traumatised witnesses – cleaners walking home from mopping floors in a city office block – saw her land on the concrete path that led up to Hart House. I turned forward to the photos, and the gory details that Mr and Mrs Middlemas wouldn’t have had access to.

Joy was lying crumpled on the ground, one leg bent beneath her like a brutalised mannequin. Her head was surrounded by pooling red blood, her long brown hair trailing cobwebs through it. Not the best way to see someone for the first time, but you could tell she’d been a pretty girl. A touch of make-up. One high-heeled shoe on, the other flung a few feet away.

Bleeding in the brain; fractures to the pelvis, arms, legs; crush injuries to the chest, a break in the spinal cord. I’ve seen fall victims survive bigger plunges than hers, but even if she had made it, she’d have been left paralysed and brain damaged.

Forensics checked her room. Nothing out of place. The textbooks on the bay seat suggested she’d been revising for her second year exams. I made a note of the titles – ‘Dissection of the Dog’, ‘Clinical Anatomy of the Cat’, ‘Biochemistry of Domestic Animals’… perfect light reading. If I was ever suffering from insomnia, I knew which part of the library to head for.

Joy’s window was open, banging to and fro in the breeze. No sign of a break, a push, a shove. It was unlocked, untampered with, no fingerprints other than Joy’s, and others who’d been accounted for, like cleaners and maintenance men and some of her friends. No indication at all that she intended to do herself in. Everyone seemed to have done a thorough job, from the first bobby on the scene through to the D.I who followed it through.

D.I Alec Jones. I knew the name, but the computer in my brain hadn’t filed a photo next to it. Probably meant he arrived after I’d resigned, but I’d heard the others mention him. Maybe met him at a retirement do or something. I made a note of his number so I could pursue him later. I flicked on through the file. I noticed a new surge of activity towards the end, extra pages tagged in after the inquest date. No mention of a ghostly bad guy, but it timed perfectly with Mrs M reading Joy’s diary and getting a giant bee in her bonnet about it.

From what I could see, the D.I had done his best. Re-interviewed, re-visited, re-thought. Still nothing to dissuade him from the theory that Joy had leaned back on the window, forgetting she’d left it open, and fallen to her death. Rose Middlemas was bitter and angry about the way the police had performed – but Alec Jones had gone above and beyond on this one, when he was probably struggling with a leaning tower of Pisa of other cases at the same time.

A few things were bugging me, though, and I jotted them down to talk to D.I Jones about as soon as I tracked him down. I was betting he’d be less than thrilled to have this one come back to haunt him. No pun intended.

‘How’s it going, Father Dan?’ I asked, looking up at the glowing hunk of sex appeal sitting opposite me.

‘Stop calling me Father Dan,’ he said, without even raising his eyes. It seemed to annoy him, which I found very enjoyable. Naughty me. He finished reading the page he was on, then closed the book and placed it back on top of the desk. It was a hardback journal, covered in a delicate purple floral design. A pretty book for a pretty girl who came to an ugly end.

He looked agitated, and ran his hand through his hair, leaving it displaced in thick blonde furrows.

‘Let’s go to Hart House,’ he said.

Chapter 10

Half an hour later we were standing outside. It was another warm day, but we were in the shadow of Hart House, where the air was cool and breezy.

It was even uglier in real life – all neo-Gothic red brick arches and gargoyles with ironically raised eyebrows. The top floor was edged by fake castellations, with a turret at each corner. There might have been a roof garden up there at one time, or an observation point for looking out over the Mersey.

Students bustled in and out of the front doors, books tucked under their arms, backpacks hanging from their shoulders, all looking unfashionably earnest. This must be the Hall for Hard Workers, which might explain why I never lived here. I was firmly in the Hall for Slackers, where the heaviest thing we carried round was a four-pack of Stella and a bad attitude.

There was a bike park to the left of the main entrance, and I noticed the residents using plastic swipe cards to get in and out of the building. The patch of grass outside was bald and faded, like a threadbare carpet, its only decoration a litter bin. The concrete path leading up to the grandiose double doors was clean apart from a few globs of chewing gum, and completely unmarked by the fact that only a few months ago, Joy Middlemas was lying there with her brains splattered all over the paving, bleeding out her last moments on earth.

Dan had been quiet and moody on the drive over. The few times I asked him a question, he snapped back at me, so I gave up. I suppose reading the diary of a dead girl could make the jolliest of souls testy. I couldn’t complain – so far I’d wussed out of reading it at all.

I snuck a look at him. The ‘something’ he’d needed to grab from his van turned out to be a black shirt and trousers and a dog collar, all of which he was now wearing.

‘Isn’t there some kind of law against that?’ I’d asked sarcastically when he emerged from the loo, transformed. ‘Impersonating a member of the priesthood?’

‘Possibly, but I assume you’d know,’ he said. ‘Personally I don’t care, and I don’t think God does – it helps me get in to places. Nobody likes to be rude to a priest.’

I was about to prove him wrong on that point, but he’d pre-empted me by walking out of the door without another word. I consoled myself by being rude to a priest’s back, with two of my fingers.

The security at Hart House wasn’t too bad at all. As well as the swipe card system, I could see CCTV cameras at strategic points, and there was a uniformed guard visible behind a small desk in the lobby. The car park off to the rear had another swipe card entry system, with a barrier that swung up and down on demand. Nothing that would stop anyone serious about their trade, but enough to deter a passing thief or pervert.

‘Come on,’ said Dan, striding ahead. I wasn’t sure if I was glad about the dog collar thing or not. On the one hand, it made it easier to think of him as Father Dan. On the other, it made me feel even more guilty that I was admiring the length of his legs as he disappeared off towards the door. It was a moral dilemma. Or potentially an immoral one.

A girl came out of the door, about nineteen, pretty as a picture with flowing blonde hair and huge blue eyes. She was wearing bell bottom jeans and a fur-fringed suede jacket. Back to the seventies. She looked up as Dan approached, did a slight double take, then smiled at him. Dazzled by his priestly splendour, or maybe that one dimple of his, she held the door open for him. So much for the swipe cards. Security is only as secure as the idiot using it.

‘Thank you,’ I mumbled as she passed, although she clearly hadn’t even noticed I existed. I wasn’t sure I liked the way I was becoming invisible in the presence of the man in black.

The guard glanced at us as we entered, and I saw his eyes clock the dog collar immediately. He was middle-aged and looked like his two favourite hobbies were drinking beer and watching telly.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Dan, confidently, walking past as though he had every right to be there.

The guard nodded and smiled. ‘Afternoon, Father,’ he said, going back to his copy of the Daily Star.

‘Told you it worked,’ he said as we headed to the stairs. Smug bastard. I was sure I’d have got in somehow, probably by telling some kind of big fat fib and carrying a clipboard. For some reason people always take you seriously if you have a clipboard.

Inside, it was cool and calm and dark. The floor of the lobby was parquet, stubbed by a million toes; the staircase probably killed off an entire forest of oak at some point. Now the steps were hidden by shabby brown carpet, and the banisters were untouched by the hand of Mr Pledge. The stairs were quiet – the students, being by definition brainy types, were all using the lift instead of trekking up and down by foot.

Joy had lived on the fifth floor, from the address her parents had given me, and I knew that’s where Father Dan would be heading. I’m pretty fit, but he’s a lot taller, and was taking the steps two at a time. I lost sight of him as he turned the bend up onto the fifth, then put a spring on to catch him up. He’d stopped dead on the top step, which opened up onto the same small landing we’d seen on numbers one, two, three and four.

I stood just behind him, getting an eyeful of a perfectly formed arse hovering two stairs above me.

‘Can you feel it?’ he asked.

I stayed quiet. I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t his arse.

It did feel a little colder here. No breeze, but a slight drop in temperature that, now I came to think about it, was giving me goosebumps. Dan had gone silent again, and there was no noise from outside filtering through the sound-proofed windows. Deadly quiet. I started to feel the fine hairs on the back of my neck tingle, and pushed past Dan to distract myself.

Four doors, all painted a vomitous shade of beige, each with a number painted on them in that military-style font that reminds you of army surplus or prisons.

I stopped next to him, feeling my heart beating faster than usual in my chest. Dan was still quiet, staring at the door to Joy’s room as though he was magicking up X-ray vision to look through solid wood. I planned something a bit more straightforward, and marched over to knock on it just in case someone else had moved in.

No reply. I banged again, for good measure, and to create some noise. All this quiet was spooking me, as was Dan’s expression. He was frowning, concentrating really hard like he was trying to remember his nineteen times table while balancing a sherry trifle on his head.

‘In her diary, she talks about this hallway,’ he said. ‘About coming up those stairs, or out of the lift, and feeling the cold hit her. She noticed it when she first moved in and reported it to the maintenance staff. They checked the heating and nothing was wrong. They all felt it was cold as well, but when they gauged the temperature, it showed the same as the rest of the building. To start off with she just mentions it, in passing. Later, she says it “got into” her room. Those are the words she used – “it got into my room”. That was a couple of months before she died, and after that she was always cold in there. Always.’

I couldn’t stop myself from shivering. I reached out and tried the door handle. Locked.

‘Can you get us in there?’ he asked abruptly, face set like stone.

I considered protesting, and explaining that would be an invasion of someone’s civil liberties, but one look at him changed my mind. He wasn’t scared, like I was. He was furious. Something here was making Dan mightily angry, and I had the feeling he’d shoulder-charge the door until he knocked it off its hinges if I didn’t intervene.

I’m halfway ashamed to admit this, but I carry lock picks round with me. They’re rarely used for anything other than breaking into my own flat when I’ve lost the keys, but it’s a good set, made for me by a professional locksmith called Lenny the Slipper. Slipper because he was always slipping into places he shouldn’t be. Lenny could never resist the temptation of other people’s houses. He never took anything – just looked around, rifled through the odd knicker drawer, played a few mind games, like eating leftovers from the fridge. He came a cropper when he was caught nosing round the squillion-pound home of a Liverpool Football Club striker. The window cleaner saw him taking a dip in the pool and called us out. He ended up doing community service – litter picking round Anfield, funnily enough. When I resigned and set up shop on my own, I paid him fifty quid and got my picks and a masterclass in return.

I pulled the small wallet from my back pocket and got the two tools I needed. I kneeled down, fiddled until I got a feel for it, then slid the slim edge of the pick in, popping up the pins until the cylinder turned. It took about forty seconds. I gave a little snort of pleasure – one of my quickest yet. It’s the small triumphs that keep you going in life. I avoided Dan’s eyes. It was probably wrong to be so proud of something so bad.

I stood up and gently pushed the door, checking for a chain.

‘Hello! Repairs!’ I shouted as I walked in. Just in case there was a comatose student in there after all, stoned to oblivion or passed out with his head in a copy of A Vet’s Guide to Dog Poo.

I needn’t have bothered. Nobody lived here. Bed stripped bare, open wardrobes empty apart from dangling wire coat hangers; bookshelves clear of anything other than dust. It was also so cold I was chilled to the bone, and wrapped my arms round myself to try and keep warm.

Dan followed me in, opening up Joy’s diary and reading out loud. Which was just what I needed.

‘June 2 – stayed in the library until it closed at 11 tonight. Couldn’t bear the thought of coming back here. It’s so cold. And there’s something here. I know there is. I look in the mirror and I feel something watching me. I take showers in the sports block now; I can’t stand being naked in here. I’m scared of going to sleep. I hear the laughing, all the time. At first I thought it was from another room, coming up through the heating pipes or something. But it’s not. It’s in here. It’s laughing at me, and the more I look round, the more it laughs. It. They. Sometimes it sounds like a man, sometimes like a bunch of school kids. I’m considering getting a boyfriend, or sleeping with that awful bloke from downstairs, just so I don’t have to stay here. Sophie says I’m just stressed and I work too hard. I’m not stressed. I’m scared.’

I walked over to the mirror, stared at my own reflection. Felt nothing but the cold, and the received fear that oozed off Joy’s words. There was still a toothbrush in a holder on the shelf. Probably hers. I touched it with one finger and it clinked against the glass.

Dan sat down on the bed, and carried on reading: ‘June 11th. I don’t know if I can carry on. Everyone thinks I’m nuts. She doesn’t think I know, but Sophie’s told Dr Wilbraham I’m losing it. They want me to see some kind of guidance counsellor. And this thing, here. It wants me to die. I know it does. I hear them at night, whispering at me. Things have started to move now – the books fly off the shelves, and my covers get pulled off me, and they sing. Bloody nursery rhymes. I’ve asked for a transfer again, but I keep getting told there’s nowhere until next term. I think I might ask Mum and Dad for the money to rent my own place. I’d rather live in a cardboard box than here. Sometimes I sleep over on Sophie’s floor. I pretend I’m drunk and passed out. But now she’s seeing Lawrence, so I can’t do that as much. I need to get out.’

I wanted to tell him to shut up. I wanted to leave this room. I wanted to dump this case and wrap myself up in a duvet with a bottle of Bushmills for company.

Instead I wandered over to the window, examining the locks and comparing the descriptions from the crime scene report to what I was seeing. It all tallied – a straightforward sash jammer, tiny key dangling on a string from the handle. I tried to turn it – locked. I sat on the bay seat, leaned back against the glass. Seemed solid enough. Freezing cold though, and dripping with damp. The chill seeped through me, like I was lying on an iceberg.

It felt like it was reaching into my chest and gripping my flesh, fingers made of ice squeezing my heart… I felt choked, coughed slightly, feeling a sense of panic press down on me. Every time I sucked air in, it stuck in my throat, solid as stone, like I was swallowing frozen pebbles. I was freezing from the inside out, and clutched at my neck to try and warm my skin.

I must have imagined it, but I thought I heard something then. A child giggling, small hands clapping together…

‘Get away from there!’ yelled Dan, jumping up and grabbing my hands. He tugged at me, hard, and I flew forward against his chest. I let my head rest there for a minute and took a few deep breaths. My pulse was hammering and I could feel blood rushing through my veins like a tidal wave.

‘I don’t know what the fuck just happened,’ I said, mildly embarrassed now I’d stopped hyper-ventilating.

‘Look at the window,’ said Dan quietly, gesturing behind me. I turned round.

It was wide open, pane banging against the frame in the wind. The lock I’d checked less than two minutes ago was now turned, the tiny key still dangling, handle pointing down.

If I’d leaned back too hard, I’d have been out of that window, and following Joy to my grave.

Chapter 11

I felt my senses soothe as soon as I walked into the Pig’s Trotter. It’s a dark, gloomy hole; steeped in the smell of decades of drinking and smoking. You couldn’t light up in here these days, but the tobacco brown ceiling and nostril-wrinkling odour paid tribute to the times when you could. I’d left Dan outside with a roll-up. I was tempted to join him, but it had been too bloody hard to give up the first time.

‘All right love?’ said Stan, wiping his hands on a tea towel that looked like it’d been used to clean the Suez Canal. He had a grey beard, hair that straggled to his shoulders, and was currently wearing a Motorhead T-shirt, Lemmy’s face stretched over his beer belly.

‘Stan. Get me a JD. Double. Pint. Lager.’

I could tell when Dan arrived by the way Stan’s eyes widened. They didn’t get many priests in the Pig’s Trotter.

‘Friend of yours?’ he asked as he pulled the pint. I nodded, not wanting to get dragged into any explanations. I had no desire to tell the landlord of my local that Dan was a former priest, part-time demon hunter, and my ally in the search for a dead girl’s equally dead killer.

‘Good-looking bloke,’ he said, passing the drinks over, ‘reminds me of myself in my youth.’

Yeah, right. I thanked him and carried the glasses over to the copper-topped table Dan was sitting at. The tremors were still there, and I slopped some of the beer over the sides.

Dan pulled off the dog collar, tugged open the top two buttons of his shirt. I was suddenly glad Father Doheny was about a hundred and looked like a Smurf with a liver complaint – the way priests should look.

‘Okay?’ he asked.

I nodded, and downed the whisky in one. It stung as it went, and the fire and warmth spreading through my throat was heaven.

‘I saw this bloke,’ I said. ‘Dodgy Bobby. Supposed to be a psychic. He told me about another girl, Geneva Connelly, died in Hart House a couple of years ago. Same way. Is it connected?’

‘Was he?’

‘Was he what?’

‘Psychic.’

I paused, gave Stan the eyeball across the room so he’d know to get me another drink.

‘I’d like to say no,’ I answered, ‘but I have to settle for maybe. He’s a petty- minded sod who’s never done any good in his whole pathetic life. But he knew… he knew I was coming. There was no buzzer, no lift, no warning. He had no way of expecting me – but by the time I knocked on his door, he’d already turned out the lights and switched the telly and the fire off, and was pretending not to be in. So, definitely maybe.’

‘Isn’t that an Oasis album?’

‘Aren’t you a fucking priest, not a connoisseur of the Britpop era?’

‘I’m not a priest any more,’ he said, calmly, like he was talking to a five-year-old, ‘and anyway, priests can like music, too. They’re not deaf. On rare occasions you might even find one that likes Formula One, or watches Benny Hill.’

‘Not you, though, I bet.’

‘No. Not me. I have no life, and sleep in a coffin when I’m not out ghost-hunting.’

No life, maybe, but definitely a sense of humour. The banter was calming me down. I suspected that’s why he did it.

‘So what else have you learned, about Hart House, and about Geneva Connelly?’

‘Hart House is owned by a company called Stag Industries, which is registered to a London address. Either that’s something to do with the Institute, or they lease the building. Geneva Connelly fell down the stairs, after claiming to her cousin that she’d been stalked by a ghost. And I don’t expect Geneva Connelly was the type to spook easily, as she was raised in one of the most hellish families in Liverpool. In fact, if she’s anything like her grandpa, the ghost would have apologised for existing and pissed off back to the underworld.’

I was trying to stay cynical. It made me feel better. Stan delivered the whiskey, and I saw him register the missing dog collar. I knew the way his brain worked – he’d now assume I was shagging Dan, and would spread the word with the regulars later that night. Oh well. They’d all be glad I was getting some. Franny Diamond, the Neil Diamond impersonator who sang there every Friday, told me the week before I was a ‘grouchy cow who needed a good seeing to’. All because I’d booed his ‘Sweet Caroline’.

‘We need help with this. We need to know more about Hart House. I can make some calls. What about you?’ Dan said.

‘I can make calls too,’ I replied, ‘and maybe your people can talk to my people.’

And maybe if they did that, I could carve out some time to do some talking of my own – I wanted to track down Sophie, Joy’s BFF. She’d been mentioned in the diary, and Mr and Mrs Middlemas had suggested her as a good source as well.

After my meltdown in Hart House, I had more of a sense of urgency about this case. It had gone from weird and intriguing to scary and threatening. I wanted to solve this one quickly – and get back to the normality of my usual, non-terrifying life. Time to phone a friend. I was thinking of two people in particular: Adam Stone, the world’s fittest librarian (although there’s admittedly not much competition in the world of the professional book lender), and Tish Landry, girl reporter. She’s like Lois Lane with acrylic nails. We’d known each other since the fourth year at school, when Tish got kicked out of Madame Snot’s Academy for Scouse Princesses and ended up at my local school.

I also needed to speak to D.I Jones, get hold of any case notes on Geneva Connelly, and make contact with Wigwam. Not to mention file two reports on cases I’d closed the week before, and send out a batch of invoices. Ideally all within the next hour. I felt a headache coming on, and badly wanted another whiskey. I resisted the urge. I was already too tiddly to drive – but I could at least still walk. A few more and Father Dan would be carrying me home.

‘Where are you staying?’ I asked, as the thought suddenly occurred to me. I didn’t really want him in my place if I could avoid it. I like my own space, and hate the idea of somebody hearing me pee in the morning. Tasty morsel he might be, but I’d lived alone since I was 19 – and I am a creature of habit.

‘With a friend,’ he said, ‘don’t worry.’

‘I wasn’t worried,’ I lied, ‘and who’s the friend?’

‘Are you always this nosy?’

‘Yes – are you always this evasive?’

He gave me a slow, lazy, dimple-popping grin, and I felt a little sizzle between us. First time I’d had so much as a measly spark for months. I might go up in flames like one of those Australian bush fires if I wasn’t careful.

‘I’m staying with Father Kerrigan in Everton,’ he said, ‘we go back a long way. He has the entire Clash back catalogue, if you’re interested.’

A punk priest. Who knew?

‘And does Father Kerrigan know you’re… a…’

‘Barking mad, demon-obsessed lunatic?’ he finished for me.

‘Well, yes, that’s a good way of putting it. Does he?’

‘He does. And he sympathises. He’s also seen some strange things in his time.’

I bet he had, I thought, living in Everton.

‘Do you fancy another drink? Somewhere else?’ I said, standing up and trying not to wobble. First the shakes, then the wobbles. I was turning into a human jelly.

He frowned slightly and glanced at his watch.

‘All in the name of detective work,’ I added, in what I hoped was a reassuringly professional tone.

Ten minutes later we were standing in a back alley, looking at the closed-up doors of the You Craic Me Up. It’s an Irish comedy club, in case you hadn’t guessed. All their jokes start with ‘Have you heard the one about the English man, the Scots man and the Welsh man?’

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