Debbie Johnson - Fear No Evil

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.’

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.