Читать книгу Fear No Evil - Debbie Johnson, Debbie Johnson - Страница 12

‘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?