All the Lonely People (17 page)

“And?”

A hollow laugh. “And nothing. We ate together, and I was rebuffed, naturally. Oh, in a good-humoured way, of course. As you say, she had someone else waiting in the wings. Some wealthy businessman. I didn't ask for details. I pressed her, but there was nothing doing. I was just a one-night meal ticket. She seemed happy and glad to be rid of Coghlan, so I paid the bill and left. I had a formal dinner to attend at the Adelphi, I was late as it was. I crept in and didn't bother with the main course. Concentrated on the brandies. End of story.”

“Where did she go?”

Edge fiddled nervously with his fingernail. “The police harped on about that. Frankly, I have no idea. I think she was going to meet her fancy man, but I couldn't swear to it. By that stage, I wasn't taking in much of what she said.” He risked a glance at Harry. “I have to say, I didn't tell the detectives all about - my feelings for Liz. I thought it would only complicate matters. Maggie had to know, but no one else.”

No wonder Maggie had been behaving so oddly during the past few days, had been so anxious that Harry should not ferret around, had been so willing to seize on Coghlan as a suitable scapegoat. She must have been nursing a secret fear that her husband had been provoked by Liz into murder. But was she, in her distress, over-reacting? Or did she believe that beneath Derek's unemotional exterior lurked a violent man of impulse?

Roughly, Harry said, “You realise that this puts you in the frame, so far as Liz's death is concerned?”

“Do you think that hasn't crossed my mind? I may have been the last person to see her alive - other than the murderer, that is. But I've made one or two discreet enquiries and it's apparent that the police have checked my arrival time at the hotel. Plenty of people can vouch for that. It's hardly a perfect alibi, but it's the best I can do.” Suddenly, Edge began to tremble. Harry sensed that he was about to cry. The incongruity of it seemed shocking: it was like expecting an adding machine to burst into tears.

Harry had seen and heard enough; he rose and walked swiftly through the door. Soon he was back at the Empire Dock, where he picked up the M.O. and in less than ten minutes was in the heart of unreclaimed Liverpool, threading his way through a maze of back-to-backs. As he drew to a halt, a grimy urchin approached.

“Mind yer car, mister?” The lad was carrying half a brick in his hand, a clue to the fate which might befall a vehicle whose owner omitted to invest in local security. Harry said, “You know where Mr. Evison lives?”

“Yer mean Froggy?”

“Yes.”

The small rat-like face assumed a cunning expression. “Might do.”

Harry extracted his wallet and, when satisfied with the display of cash on offer, the juvenile hoodlum said, “Number eleven.”

Harry handed over the money and, waving a hand at the M.G., said, “Guard it with your life.” But the lad vanished even as Harry walked up the front door to which he had been directed. Froggy's home wasn't one of those terraced gems with gleaming window panes and a freshly scrubbed doorstep. Torn and dirty netting curtained the windows and cobwebs canopied the door. Harry pressed the bell three times before realising that it didn't work. He rapped instead, until his knuckles hurt.

A prune-faced woman, laden with shopping, passed by. He called to ask if she knew where Evison might be. She scowled and asked, “You the man from the credit company?”

“No. But I need to speak to Froggy right away.”

She sniffed. “His missus will be out at the shops, spending money they haven't got, as usual. As for him . . .”

“Yes?”

“Probably down at the tip. Some folk have no pride.”

“Which tip, love?”

“Pasture Moss, of course. Where people dump their rubbish. He'll be on the root, if I know anything.”

One small mystery resolved itself in Harry's mind as he thanked her. So Froggy Evison was a totter, one of those who skulked around refuse heaps, scavenging. That explained the smell that always seemed to cling to him. It was the stink of rotten debris.

Chapter Twenty One

Hunched figures were spread across the uneven slopes of the waste heap. They wore ancient anoraks or duffel coats, bending double as they sifted through the rubbish that other people had no use for. Most of them wore hoods, one or two had donned balaclavas. They were not merely, Harry realised, seeking protection against the February wind, but also aiming to avoid recognition if a social security snooper came here to check on those claiming benefits from the state. Through the high wire fence, Harry watched the totters at work. He might have been observing a scene from the Third World on the television screen. But this was his home town.

Overhead, seagulls whirled, wings flapping as if in contempt for human degradation. For Harry, the sight of the filthy surface of Pasture Moss being slowly stripped held an almost pornographic fascination. He had heard of those who lived literally on and off the scrap heap, of course, but had never before seen their activities at close hand.

He walked slowly along the perimeter between the fence and the electric railway line. A teenager had died here twelve months back, he recalled, making a false move and touching the live wire. Scavenging had its risks. Soon he discovered a beaten track which led in the direction of a hole in the fence evidently made by wire cutters. Treading carefully, he crossed the line. Glad that he had taken the precaution of changing into his car-repairing gear in the hope of blending in with the landscape, he crawled through the muddy hole.

Scrambling up the side of the tip was harder than it looked.

Harry slithered in all directions, the rubber soles of his shoes unequal to the sogginess of the terrain. He was soon up to his ankles in cardboard and old newspapers, shrivelled apple cores and potato peelings. The stench made him gasp for breath, draining him more than the physical effort of keeping his foothold on the slime beneath his shoes. One or two of the rooters already had their eyes on him, assessing his progress, noting his unfamiliarity with the geography of the place. Others, busy with their work, ignored him. Finally, he made it to the brow of the heap and, putting one foot gingerly before the other, waded towards the nearest of the hooded men.

He called out, “Seen Froggy Evison today?”

“No names here, pal.” The speaker had a lidless electric kettle in his hand. He wielded it like a weapon.

Harry opened his mouth again, but before he could utter another word, he was interrupted by the noise of a vehicle engine and the incoherent shouts of several of the scavengers. A council waste lorry was drawing near. He stood back as it approached and then turned in a circle fifteen or twenty yards away. As its back lifted, preparatory to dumping, a dozen men converged upon it, as if acting out a pagan ritual. The driver ignored them.

Rubbish poured from the rear end of the lorry. The wind caught fragments of it. Some landed on the eager rooters as they ran forward to claim their trophies. Bits of old food, slivers of plastic, were brushed off heads and shoulders as the hunt continued for better pickings: copper wire, transistor radios, trinkets of jewellery perhaps.

The lorry rumbled off into the distance and Harry stumbled towards the hooded men. He decided to try again. “Know where Froggy is?”

“What's it to you?” asked a freckled youth on the fringe of the group. He had been examining the intestines of a de-gutted settee. At first sight he seemed the youngest of the scavengers; perhaps he should have been at school.

Honesty wouldn't be the best policy here. Harry made a quick guess about the kind of lie that might achieve results.

“His missus has been took ill,” he said in a congested Scouse accent, shamelessly stealing Froggy's own lie to the barmaid at the Ferry.

“Myra?” scoffed the lad. “She's built like an ox. He probably poisoned her with that tin of salmon he found here yesterday.” He addressed a grizzled older man beside him, whose smoker's cough rasped incessantly. “Wasn't Froggy here earlier on?”

“Search me, kid.”

“Reckon I saw him an hour or more ago. Before dinner.”

Harry didn't ask what dinner on the tip consisted of. “Where was he?”

The freckled youth jerked a thumb. “Down by the skips.” He gazed for a moment at a couple of soggy paperbacks that he had retrieved from the mess deposited by the lorry. Novels by Harold Robbins and Mickey Spillane, their gaudy covers smeared with what might have been excrement. Wrinkling his nose, he threw them back into the mire. “What use are books? Come on. I'm headed down there now meself.”

Harry followed as his guide traced a path through the tin cans and the slush of wet paper. “Glad to gerraway, actually” confided the lad. “That cough. Honest, it makes me want to puke.”

Harry couldn't ignore the fetid smell all around. “Doesn't everything here?”

The lad glanced back over his shoulder, grinning. “Got to you, has it? Yer first time?” When Harry nodded, he went on, “It's not so bad after a while. You stop noticing it. Me name's Geoff, by the way.”

“Harry.”

“Pleased to meet you. Won't shake hands, mine are a bit mussed up, know what I mean? Can't be too fussy about what you touch round here.”

By now they were within fifty yards of a row of yellow-painted skips, each marked domestic only. “Keep yer eyes skinned,” advised Geoff. He seemed to be relishing his veteran's role, giving the benefit of his experience to a newcomer. “The fellers on the compactors are all right, but you have to watch that foreman, he's a tight-arse.”

With a quick look to right and left, Geoff approached the skips and clambered up to inspect their contents. Harry gazed round. The place was quiet. A handful of the men who worked at the site were having a cup of tea in a Portakabin. The rest of the totters were back on the waste mound, scrabbling through heavy duty debris which bore a disconcerting resemblance to stuff Harry had seen exhibited at the Tate. He wandered towards the corrugated iron sheds which stood below the iron bulk of the incinerator and the crusher.

Geoff called him back. “You won't find Froggy that way. Nothing for the likes of us there. Too close to the buildings. And will you look at this? Criminal, what some folk throw out.” He held aloft a man's double breasted jacket in a bilious shade of green.

Spots of rain began to fall. “No sign of Froggy here,” said Harry. “I'd best be off.”

“What's he done?” asked Geoff.

“I told you,” said Harry, “it's his wife.”

“Gerraway. I'm not soft.”

Harry dropped the accent, which had already been wearing thin. “I need some information from him, that's all.”

Geoff grinned. “It'll cost you then, if I know Froggy. Always on the make, that feller. No self-respect.”

Harry gazed back at the tip and the thin dark line of scavengers, strung out along the horizon. Some of them had started a fire, perhaps to burn the plastic casing off a worthwhile haul of copper wire. The smoke drifted up into the sky and the wind took it in the direction of the distant rows of council housing.

“Thanks anyway.”

“No sweat. When you find him, tell him about this. He'll be sick as a pig, will Froggy. Been on the look out for a decent jacket for ages, he has.”

Harry returned to the main road via the public entrance. Nothing would induce him to endure that stink again today at such close quarters. He had to skirt round a diversion caused by a gang of labourers working lethargically on the repair of sewers that lay beneath the road and by the time he reached the M.G., the drizzle had become a downpour. But on Pasture Moss, the rooters' work went on.

He drove straight back to Baden Powell Street. The brick-carrying infant was nowhere to be seen and he reached the door of number eleven unmolested. He banged on the cracked wooden panels and heard a woman bellow, “Wait yer hurry.” After half a minute she answered the door, a large woman with short brown hair and an air of truculence. Geoff's comparison hadn't flattered the ox.

“Froggy in?”

“And who might you be?”

Acting the well-intentioned simpleton, Harry invented a story about a bet placed at the Ferry Club; he owed Froggy a tenner and now he was in a position to pay. Trying to find this man was beginning to strain his imagination, but however implausible the line, big Myra was sufficiently impressed to offer to take the cash and hand it over to her bloke when he came in. Harry explained that this wasn't enough; he wanted to have a private word with Froggy.

Losing interest, she shrugged. “Can't help you, mister. You say he's not down at Pasture Moss? The bookies' then, or the boozer. But don't ask me which one. I'm past caring.”

“When he comes back, can you ask him to give me a ring? My name's Harry Devlin. From Empire Dock. The number's in the book.”

“If I remember,” she said and banged the door shut.

As he drove back to the city centre, he attempted to gather together in his mind the various scraps of the puzzle. Liz claimed to have been involved with a wealthy, married businessman, but there was no proof that the man had ever existed. She was trying to disentangle herself from Coghlan, but had found time for some sort of fling with a roughneck called Joe Rourke. Rourke might be connected with Coghlan; then again, he might have been the father of the unborn child. She had spurned Derek and never taken Matt seriously. Froggy knew something about Liz's link with one of her lovers, or else about the circumstances of her death. He might have been the man who had followed her, though Harry was sure that his had not been the voice of the masked assailant outside Empire Dock. More and more, it seemed that Evison held the key. In his absence, it might be worth having a further word with Matt.

He parked in the multi-storey by the Moat House Hotel and walked over to the Freak Shop. An old man with bloodshot eyes was taking a close interest in the exotic lingerie. Behind the counter, Matt Barley raised his eyebrows at Harry's expression.

“Can we talk in private, Matt?”

He summoned a purple-haired girl called Tracey to take over and led the way through the bead curtain into his inner sanctum. Shifting a pile of sex aids supposed to help the incapable to achieve the physically improbable, he squatted on a chair and said, “And what can I do for you?”

“Maggie told me that you'd mentioned Liz was being followed. Or believed she was, at least. It rang a bell in my mind, because she did say something of the sort last Wednesday night, only I was too preoccupied to pay much attention.”

Matt nodded. “Whether it was true or not, I dunno, but she certainly said it. I thought if there was someone hanging about, he might have been one of Coghlan's runners. Or even a private detective of some kind if he was wanting to check up on whether she was playing away from home.”

“The details, the description - did she say anything more?”

“Can't recall. Your first instinct was probably right. If she was killed on purpose, Coghlan must have been behind it. There's no one else.”

Harry scratched his nose. “Do you know someone by the name of Joe Rourke? I think he was involved with Liz recently.”

The little man stared. “Never heard of him. And how do you mean “involved”?”

Harry told him about his visit to Aneurin Bevan Heights. Matt didn't hide his disgust. “Yet another stud?” He pointed a finger at Harry. “Now will you admit the truth and take her off that pedestal?”

“Never mind about that. The truth about her death is what I'm looking for.”

“Christ! Why don't you open your eyes? She was a whore, Harry, a gorgeous whore, and we all knew it.” The roundface blazed with rage. “Admit it! She made a laughing stock out of us all.”

Harry said quietly, “I hadn't appreciated that you felt so strongly, Matt. Did you hate her so much?”

The little man was shouting now. “I loved her, you oaf! Worshipped her. From the time she was the kid who lived next door, wearing a sensible school skirt and knee-length socks. She was fun, she was generous to a fault. She could wrap me around her little finger and I'd have done anything to make her care for me a tenth as much as I did for her. But she was a whore all the same, that was her nature. We are what we are, and that's what killed her. It's the truth.”

They glared at each other for a moment. In the space of a few hours, Harry thought, both Derek and Matt have told me that they were crazy about her. She teased them and, as if that were not enough, tried to tempt Jim from the straight and narrow. When she fancied a bit of rough, she picked up Rourke in the Ferry Club. Couldn't she leave any man alone?

He bit his lip. This was the wrong time to row with an old friend. Aloud, he said, “I'll be making tracks, Matt. See you around.”

He strode out without another word. So far his enquiries had yielded a battering and a sick realisation of the extent of Liz's wantonness. Once again, he had half a mind to abandon the hunt to the professionals who knew what they were doing. He wouldn't give up, of course, to do so was not in his nature, but as he paced Mathew Street he realised he needed a break from his self-imposed task. Forget about her for a few hours, he urged himself, come back to it fresh tomorrow morning.

Calling in on the office, he skipped round Lucy's well-intentioned questions about his accident on Monday night and exchanged a few gruff words with Jim. At five he pushed the non-urgent mail to one side and headed back to the Empire Dock.

Brenda popped round as soon as she arrived home and didn't conceal her delight at the invitation to dine at the Ensenada. “That's marvellous,” she said. “Of course I'd love to, but what shall I wear?”

Harry laughed. A normal, foolish conversation with a woman. That kind of thing had been in short supply for too long. They chatted for a while about matters of no consequence. Brenda seemed more relaxed in his company than ever before, less fussily anxious to please.

After leaving her to get ready, he shaved and changed into the only suit he possessed which was unlikely to make Pino sniff with dismay. He was adjusting his tie in front of the mirror when the doorbell rang. Brenda was there, wearing a body-hugging black velvet dress beneath a long red cape. Pearls glinted at her neck. She looked ten years younger.