Fear No Evil. Debbie Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ