Fear No Evil. Debbie Johnson
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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.
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