Fear No Evil by Debbie Johnson

by telling some kind of big fat fib and carrying a clipboard. For some reason people always take you seriously if you have a clipboard.
    Inside, it was cool and calm and dark. The floor of the lobby was parquet, stubbed by a million toes; the staircase probably killed off an entire forest of oak at some point. Now the steps were hidden by shabby brown carpet, and the banisters were untouched by the hand of Mr Pledge. The stairs were quiet – the students, being by definition brainy types, were all using the lift instead of trekking up and down by foot.
    Joy had lived on the fifth floor, from the address her parents had given me, and I knew that’s where Father Dan would be heading. I’m pretty fit, but he’s a lot taller, and was taking the steps two at a time. I lost sight of him as he turned the bend up onto the fifth, then put a spring on to catch him up. He’d stopped dead on the top step, which opened up onto the same small landing we’d seen on numbers one, two, three and four.
    I stood just behind him, getting an eyeful of a perfectly formed arse hovering two stairs above me.

    ‘Can you feel it?’ he asked.
    I stayed quiet. I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t his arse.
    It did feel a little colder here. No breeze, but a slight drop in temperature that, now I came to think about it, was giving me goosebumps. Dan had gone silent again, and there was no noise from outside filtering through the sound-proofed windows. Deadly quiet. I started to feel the fine hairs on the back of my neck tingle, and pushed past Dan to distract myself.
    Four doors, all painted a vomitous shade of beige, each with a number painted on them in that military-style font that reminds you of army surplus or prisons.
    I stopped next to him, feeling my heart beating faster than usual in my chest. Dan was still quiet, staring at the door to Joy’s room as though he was magicking up X-ray vision to look through solid wood. I planned something a bit more straightforward, and marched over to knock on it just in case someone else had moved in.
    No reply. I banged again, for good measure, and to create some noise. All this quiet was spooking me, as was Dan’s expression. He was frowning, concentrating really hard like he was trying to remember his nineteen times table while balancing a sherry trifle on his head.
    ‘In her diary, she talks about this hallway,’ he said. ‘About coming up those stairs, or out of the lift, and feeling the cold hit her. She noticed it when she first moved in and reported it to the maintenance staff. They checked the heating and nothing was wrong. They all felt it was cold as well, but when they gauged the temperature, it showed the same as the rest of the building. To start off with she just mentions it, in passing. Later, she says it “got into” her room. Those are the words she used – “it got into my room”. That was a couple of months before she died, and after that she was always cold in there. Always.’

    I couldn’t stop myself from shivering. I reached out and tried the door handle. Locked.
    ‘Can you get us in there?’ he asked abruptly, face set like stone.
    I considered protesting, and explaining that would be an invasion of someone’s civil liberties, but one look at him changed my mind. He wasn’t scared, like I was. He was furious. Something here was making Dan mightily angry, and I had the feeling he’d shoulder-charge the door until he knocked it off its hinges if I didn’t intervene.
    I’m halfway ashamed to admit this, but I carry lock picks round with me. They’re rarely used for anything other than breaking into my own flat when I’ve lost the keys, but it’s a good set, made for me by a professional locksmith called Lenny the Slipper. Slipper because he was always slipping into places he shouldn’t be. Lenny could never resist the temptation of other people’s houses. He never took anything – just looked around, rifled