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