Asking For Trouble (7 page)

‘Did he have a car?’

‘If he did, he hadn’t parked in this street. But he was definitely looking at the houses and it could have been yours.’

I thought about this for a while. That there’d been no car parked in the street didn’t surprise me because no one who had a decent car and any sense would park it around here. He might have been an estate agent or a property developer or any of the people connected with the proposed redevelopment. It was more than likely that’s who he was. I suggested this to Ganesh.

‘I thought of that. He wasn’t making any notes or taking any photos. He looked shifty, as if he didn’t want to be seen.’

‘Then he probably
was
a property developer!’ I got up. ‘Show me exactly where you saw him.’

We went back into the street and Ganesh pointed out the spot. The pillarbox is about twenty feet from our house, on the other side of the street. The stranger could well have been watching our place. I know it was a squat but I still called it ‘ours’.

‘I think he realised I’d spotted him,’ Ganesh went on. ‘Because he stooped and made out he was reading the collection times on the box. He wasn’t any great actor, I can tell you! Think I ought to tell the police?’

‘Perhaps you should.’ I was more worried by the news than I wanted to let on.

Just then a car turned into the street and pulled up sharp by us. I recognised it as Euan’s Fiesta. He got out and came over to us, glancing worriedly down the street towards the activity outside the house.

‘There you are, Fran!’

‘Suddenly everyone’s looking for me,’ I murmured.

‘You forgot about the court, didn’t you?’ He gave a wry grimace. ‘So did I – nearly! We got our order for immediate possession. But I don’t suppose that now you want to stay in that house? Not now this has happened.’

‘Yes, there’s been a murder!’ Ganesh broke in angrily before I could speak. ‘And still you lot come harassing her, wanting to throw her out on to the street!’

Euan had reddened angrily but he wasn’t going to argue with Ganesh who was a by-stander and not, in Euan’s view, involved. He turned his back on him and went on to me, ‘But cheer up, Fran. I’ve got some good news for you. We’ve got you temporary accommodation.’

So I’d been told correctly at the police station. But I still asked suspiciously, ‘What sort of accommodation?’

‘A flat. Only for six months, mind!’

‘Oh, great!’ Ganesh burst out. ‘So this is what it takes for you lot to offer her somewhere decent to live? A violent death?’

‘It’s not marvellous,’ Euan warned me, still ignoring Ganesh. ‘But it’s somewhere. Come over to my office and I’ll give you the key.’

He drove off and I said goodbye to Ganesh. As I was walking off, however, I heard someone calling my name. I turned round, and saw Mr Patel hurrying after me.

‘Francesca!’ He came up panting. ‘I wanted to say to you that I am truly very sorry about shouting like that and the carry-on.’

‘It’s OK, Mr Patel,’ I told him.

‘No, no!’ he said excitedly. ‘It is not OK! It is terrible, terrible! Such a crime! But you are all right, my dear. That is good. You are not hurt.’

‘I’m not hurt,’ I assured him.

He waved his hands. ‘You see, it is very difficult for us, for my wife and myself. You are obviously of good family and an educated young woman. An education is a fine thing. But you should not be living like that, in that place. You see what happens in such places?’

I told him I appreciated his concern but he shouldn’t worry about me. He looked at me in a lost way as if he couldn’t think of anything more to say, much as he wanted to say something, a worried man with a balding head and a Biro stuck behind one ear, trying to make sense of something beyond him. Then he gave up and went back to the shop.

I knew what he wanted to say. He couldn’t understand how someone like me, who was neither deranged nor a criminal, could end up living on her own or with a group of other loners in a condemned house. It puzzled him that I hadn’t any family or anyone to care for me. It seemed all wrong to him and it presented a threat. Most of all, he was worried about the effect I had on Ganesh.

I could have told him that I wasn’t the cause of the problems he had with Ganesh.

About six months ago Ganesh’s sister, Usha, had married a chap named Jay who was in accountancy and had prospects. Ganesh had been mooching about scowling ever since. He felt he was being left behind here. ‘One more year!’ he’d told me privately, ‘One more year and I’m out!’

But he hadn’t told his people that yet. They knew though. They were putting pressure on him. He hadn’t said so to me, but I guessed what their answer to the problem would be. It would be a pretty sixteen-year-old with beautiful manners and a dowry. They thought I’d be the obstacle. They were wrong.

I started wondering and worrying about Euan’s promised flat.

Chapter Four

Euan was right. The best you could say about that flat was that it was somewhere. It was on the fifth floor of one of a pair of condemned tower blocks. The building was already half empty and pretty well all vandalised. The lift didn’t work. The staircase was graffiti-covered. There was a hole in the corridor ceiling outside my door with funny stuff hanging out of it which looked to me like asbestos lining. So he was also right to say it wasn’t marvellous.

My heart sank when I saw it, but I knew I couldn’t stay in the house where Terry had died. This would have to be it for a few weeks, anyway. Euan had come with me and I told him thanks.

Naturally I offered the hospitality of my new roof to Nev and Squib. Nev accepted gratefully. Squib, a natural loner, looked uneasy. Living with others had already shown itself too likely to attract attention. We went to Jubilee Street in another attempt to collect our belongings. Either the council or the police had boarded up the house and we had to break in at the back. We put everything portable into black plastic rubbish sacks and took them over to the shop so that Ganesh could ferry them in the van to my new abode. He wasn’t able to do it straight away, so while we waited for him to be free, Squib and Nev went to the pub and I went for a last walk round the neighbourhood I’d got to know so well, or what the developers had left of it. Not that I was going far, but even a block or two is moving away.

I was walking through the graveyard when Edna jumped out from behind a headstone, doing her Magwitch impersonation.

‘Where are you going in such a hurry, dear?’ she asked.

‘Nowhere,’ I told her. ‘I’m not in a hurry.’ Even the thought of not being waylaid by Mad Edna any more made me feel sad. I sat on a tomb. She sat down beside me and began rummaging in her grubby coat. She had an excited air about her, like a child who has learned a new trick and is going to try it out.

Eventually she produced a gold-coloured Benson and Hedges cigarette packet, very clean and not crushed. She held it tenderly in her mittened hands and touched it with a yellowed nail sticking through the chopped-off ends of the glove-fingers. She stroked it reverently a few times, then opened it with infinite care and very hospitably offered me a cigarette.

I declined but she continued to push the gold box at me, peering up into my face to make sure I’d noticed how beautiful it was, if only card. If it had been real gold, she wouldn’t have been happier and she wanted me to share her pleasure in it.

I said, ‘It’s nice, Edna!’ but still refused a cigarette.

She looked disappointed but took one herself.

She’d got matches, too. One of those little booklets you get for free in bars and restaurants. Watching her struggle to light it, I offered help, struck the paper match for her and lit her smoke.

Before handing the booklet back, I read the name on it. It came courtesy of a wine bar in Winchester. She didn’t like me studying it, or even holding it, and snatched it away, tucking it and the precious gold-coloured packet away in some best-not-to-think-about place. The mittens didn’t hide how rheumatism had swollen her knuckle joints. She oughtn’t to have been living rough in a graveyard. But I knew anyone’d have a dreadful job moving her out. She liked it there. She smelled a bit high, though, and I moved along the tomb as far as I could.

Two of the feral cats lounged nearby in the long grass watching us through half-closed eyes. Another was curled up asleep on a grave. Wherever Edna sat, a cat or two was generally nearby. She was part of their extended tribe.

As she was puffing happily on her cigarette, I told her I was being moved into a temporary flat.

‘Why don’t you get yourself a little place in Chelsea?’ she asked. ‘Chelsea is interesting. Wonderful parties. Although some people think living there rather fast.’ She gave a rasping cough. She wasn’t used to this amount of fresh tobacco.

Mentally she was back in her débutante days again, whenever they’d been. I had no idea how old she was. She always appeared incredibly ancient.

I told her I depended on the council and had to stay in the borough. She mumbled at that and began ferreting among several plastic carrier bags she always had with her. Smoke curled up into her eye and made her squint. Knowing that Edna normally collected her smokes from bins and gutters, I wondered about the gold packet and asked, ‘Splashing out, Edna? Buying the ciggies in a proper packet now?’

‘He dropped it,’ she muttered. ‘He didn’t see. I saw, though. He didn’t see me. He walked through here.’ She waved the cigarette at the path through the long grass and tipsy headstones.

‘Who was he?’ I wasn’t really interested, just making conversation with her. She seemed reasonably sane today.

‘Smart young fellow,’ she said. ‘Stranger. Well set-up. He’d left his car over there . . .’ This time she pointed behind us to an open patch behind the buildings in the road beyond, accessible through a gap, which the Church of the Beauteous Day had cleared so that the Reverend Eli could park his purple transit van there.

‘I don’t like strangers. They keep coming these days and telling me I can’t live here any more. Where should I live? What about the cats? I’ve told them, I’ve got to look after the cats. So when he came through, I hid and watched him. He was up to no good.’

The hairs prickled on the back of my neck. ‘How do you know, Edna?’

‘He looked it. Dodging about from headstone to headstone, didn’t want to be seen. So busy hiding himself away, he didn’t spot me. I was over there.’ She waved at a jumble of overgrown bushes.

It didn’t surprise me the stranger hadn’t spotted her. In her dirty coat and with her amorphous outline, she blended perfectly into her surroundings. I’d often passed by her myself, and jumped out of my skin when she’d greeted me. She had a trick, like the cats, of sitting perfectly still and watching. I’d seen her sitting on the grass, quite surrounded by them, just blinking her eyes at them as they blinked back. I’d sometimes speculated whether they were the spirits of the dead buried in this place. That Edna could communicate with them didn’t surprise me in the least.

‘When was this you saw the man, Edna?’

She looked vague. Days were all the same to her. ‘Must’ve been yesterday,’ she said uncertainly.

I asked her if it had been morning or afternoon but she couldn’t remember. She wasn’t, however, completely out of touch. Unexpectedly, she asked, ‘Is that right the girlie hanged herself, dear?’ She peered at me with a flicker of interest in her rheumy old eyes.

‘That’s right, Edna.’

She puffed on the cigarette, staring ahead. It was impossible to say what she made of it. She didn’t seem surprised or frightened. Even her curiosity, now I’d confirmed the rumour, was cured.

It was hopeless. She may have seen the same fellow Ganesh saw. We’d never be able to establish it for sure.

She came to life and leaned towards me confidentially. ‘Got something to show you!’

My spirits rose briefly. What else had she found? I should have known better.

She took me to a corner of the graveyard and proudly showed me some new kittens, mewing blindly but safely inside a ramshackle stone tomb. The tomb’s inscription commemorated Josiah and Hepzibah Wilkins who’d died within a week of one another of the influenza in 1819, leaving seventeen children. There had been enough money to build them a decent monument so I suppose there’d been money to take care of the seventeen children. Perhaps the older ones had looked after the younger ones.

The fact remained that if anyone asked questions of Edna, they’d get nothing sensible in reply. She might or might not be a vital witness. Her only concern was for the cats and what would happen to her and to them, if the developers succeeded in levelling the surrounding monuments.

I gave Edna all the loose change in my pocket and she squirrelled it away in another hiding place in her grubby old coat.

‘Call again!’ she invited, as I walked away.

We were allowed to remove our furniture, such as it was, from the house. We ferried it over to the new flat in several lots, using the Patels’ van. Between us we manoeuvred it up the filthy staircase and staggered with it along open windswept balconies lined with unwelcoming doors. Some flats were abandoned and boarded up. Others, though still inhabited, were nearly as well barricaded, like medieval castles. It didn’t promise a spirit of neighbourliness.

The flat itself had been cleared and swept out, but still looked as if a major riot had taken place in it. The walls were pitted and scarred; parts of the skirting had been ripped out. There was something very odd about the kitchen sink unit which was at an angle. Anything placed on the draining board simply slid down into the basin.

Squib, looking more than usually perplexed, wandered around rattling loose fittings and opening cupboards. Eventually he said, sounding pleased, ‘Got it!’

We waited apprehensively, expecting him to turn round, holding some furry creature he’d found lurking in the corner.

Instead, empty-handed but triumphant, he declared, ‘Worked it out. It’s the wrong place. The council gave you the wrong key, Fran.’

I told him I wished that could be true. Sadly, I thought it wasn’t. This, despite all appearances, was home sweet home.