Asking For Trouble (8 page)

He shook his head. ‘Can’t be. Look, they condemned our house and it was better than this. They got it wrong, Fran.’

He took some persuading and, finally accepting my argument, became offended and muttered, ‘Well, I’m not staying here.’

I found that hurtful, considering I’d generously offered him the shelter of my roof. For Squib, of all people, to object . . . But he said he’d been offered a place in a hostel and he’d try it out. The police had told him he had to stay there so they could find him again. But if the hostel made a fuss about the dog, he’d leave.

I suggested that if the hostel wouldn’t take the dog, Mad Edna might look after it for a while. The dog would probably like being in the churchyard and Edna, in her crazy way, could be relied upon for something like that.

But Squib wouldn’t even think about being parted from the dog, even temporarily. Besides, he thought the cats were quite capable of ganging up on a dog. He’d seen them do it.

I leaned over the balcony to watch him walk across the wasteland between the condemned blocks, his rucksack on his back and the dog trotting nicely by his heels.

Euan, whom I liked more and more, had promised to try and rustle up some extra furniture. He had a friend in the Salvation Army. At least the hot water was working. It was ages since I’d lived in a place with hot water. While Nev dragged our existing furniture around trying to make the place look habitable, I spent an hour cleaning out the bathroom before I got in the tub and lay there in the steaming water, just looking up at the cracks in the ceiling and another hole in the plaster where the lavatory cistern was coming away.

As it turned out, Nev only stayed twenty-four hours before his parents descended on the place. I wasn’t surprised to see them. I don’t think Nev was, either. He’d had the air of a condemned man about him since walking in the door.

His father stood in the middle of the sitting room, heels together, bolt upright, hands clasped behind his back as if he were reviewing the troops. His mother looked at me just as my old headmistress did when I was being carpeted for something.

I’ve mentioned my school before. My mother ran off and left my dad and me when I was seven, so I was brought up by Dad and my Hungarian Grandma Varady. I think my father felt he owed it to me somehow to give me every opportunity he could because my mum had left. I always told people she was dead, because we didn’t know where she was and for me, it was as if she was dead. So they scraped and saved, Dad and Grandma Varady, and paid for me to go to this school for young ladies.

I was in and out of trouble from the first day I went there and by the time I got to be fifteen they told my father it really wasn’t worth keeping me on there. They meant they wanted me to go.

They wrote a final report on me. It read, ‘Francesca is extremely bright but lacks application. She has consistently failed to take advantage of the opportunities offered by this school.’

I have never been so ashamed of anything in my life as I was the day I watched my father read that report. He and Grandma Varady had gone without virtually every luxury to keep me at that school and I’d let them both down completely. I was sorry, but it was too late. I loved them both and wouldn’t have hurt them for the world, but I had hurt them.

If they’d been angry, shouted and stamped up and down, it would have helped, but they didn’t say anything. Dad even said, ‘Never mind,
édesem
,’ and hugged me because he was afraid the report might have hurt
my
feelings. Grandma Varady had to be forcibly restrained from marching round to the school and socking the headmistress. She came of a long line of Austro-Hungarian hussars. We had faded sepia portraits of some of them, waxed moustaches, tight jackets with frogging, tighter pants and shiny boots. She firmly believed that the answer to every problem was a cavalry charge.

I went away and shut myself in my room and howled. Afterwards I made a resolve that never again would I ever act as plain stupid as that. But I suppose I have.

Anyhow, the upshot of the visit from the Porters was that they frogmarched poor Nev away with them, back to that luxury gaol they called home. The way they talked to him, he might just as well have been four, not twenty-four. Even worse, they told him their very good friend, some high-powered head-doctor, had a whole set of bright new ideas for treating Nev’s nervous breakdown.

As he left he said, ‘I’ll be in touch, Fran. I’ve left you my books.’

I said, ‘Thanks!’ but I knew I’d seen the last of him. So I just added, ‘Good luck!’ He might just as well have left me the books in his will. It was that final.

His mother gave me a really nasty look. His father didn’t look at me at all during the whole time he was there. He was pretending I wasn’t there. Anything he couldn’t handle, he pretended didn’t exist – like poor Nev’s illness.

I knew that, for better or worse, my life had changed for ever. Probably for worse.

Chapter Five

I was on my own. I hadn’t lived completely on my own for quite some while. It was a strange feeling, rattling around that depressing flat. But, although I might be alone, I certainly wasn’t forgotten, not by the police at any rate. Janice Morgan was presumably busy on more important matters and I was left to the tender mercies of Sergeant Parry. His expression of sceptical disbelief at whatever I said and his ginger moustache began to haunt my dreams.

‘You’re getting paranoid,’ said Ganesh, heaving a sack of potatoes around, preparatory to slitting it open and emptying it into a bin.

‘How can you say that?’ I’d been having my usual moan but still felt I’d every right to sound incredulous. ‘Parry’s on my neck from morning till night. Always the same questions, dished up in different ways. What do the police think I know?’

‘How about Nev and Squib, are they chasing them in the same way?’

‘That’s what I came to tell you this morning. I tried to phone Nev last night and his father told me Nev is in a private clinic. They’ve got him hidden away where the police can’t question him. As for Squib, I went over to the hostel yesterday. It’s run by some kind of religious group. They smile all the time and their skins look as if they’ve been sitting in the bath too long.’

‘Hey!’ interrupted Ganesh disapprovingly. ‘They’re doing their best, right!’

‘All right. Anyhow, Squib wasn’t there. They said he’d be back this evening and, if I wanted, I could leave a note pinned on a corkboard they’ve got in the entrance. So I did, though I don’t suppose Squib will even look at the corkboard and I can’t count on anyone telling him I was there. They call him Henry,’ I added. ‘Just like the police do.’

‘It’s his name.’ Ganesh can be very irritating. ‘You can’t expect them to call him Squib.’

I wasn’t going to argue about that. I had other things on my mind. ‘Let’s face it, Gan, I’m the only one the Bill can really get at, and I’m the one getting the treatment. They can’t seem to get it into their thick heads that it’s wasting everyone’s time and getting none of us anywhere. It’s certainly not going to find out exactly what happened to Terry, if we ever do that.’

Ganesh grunted and tipped out the spuds. They rolled and bounced down into the bin with a strong smell of earth.

Grumbling to Ganesh worked off some of the frustration but I couldn’t pretend the continual police questioning wasn’t worrying me. They were starting to wear me down, which was the name of the game as far as they were concerned, I suppose. I was beginning to get confused in my own mind. They’d managed to convince me I hadn’t told them everything or that I’d forgotten something of great importance. I’d started racking my brains in the still of the night.

‘Quiet today,’ I offered Ganesh. The shop had been empty but as I spoke a woman came in with a grubby child in tow and started picking over the vegetables.

Ganesh glared at her. ‘Who’s doing any business with half the houses emptied around here? You want those beans or don’t you, love?’

She moved away from the beans and stared mistrustfully at the newly decanted spuds. ‘I want potatoes but those are covered in mud.’

‘They grow in the ground,’ Ganesh told her. ‘What do you expect?’

‘I expect them cleaner than that. Mud weighs, mud does. It’s heavy. I’m not paying for mud.’

Ganesh sighed and pushed the top potatoes around. ‘These are cleaner.’

‘I’ll pick ’em out, thanks!’ she said crossly, shoving him aside. She began to pick out one potato at a time, peering at each for signs of mud or damage.

‘I ask you,’ said Ganesh to me. ‘Who wants to be a greengrocer?’

‘Beats being a police suspect,’ I told him. ‘Leave you to it, Gan. See you later.’

There was a car parked opposite the shop, outside the graveyard. Someone, a woman, was attempting to talk to Edna. Our resident baglady was huddled in a heap among her plastic bags and I could tell she was pretending to be deaf. When I appeared the woman lost interest in Edna, who scurried away among the tombs. The newcomer called out to me, ‘Francesca!’ It was Inspector Janice.

‘Glad to see you,’ she added as I joined her.

‘What is it now?’ I asked grumpily. I really had had enough.

‘Nice to know you’re pleased to see me, too,’ she retorted.

‘Don’t take it personally,’ I told her. ‘But I’m not. I’m out of a job, living in a set left over from an old Hammer movie, and every time I turn round, there’s a copper wanting to ask me questions.’

‘No questions,’ she assured me. ‘I was going to suggest we take a drive.’

It was an unmarked car and she was in plainclothes. Janice liked her clothes very plain. She was wearing a sort of blazer today, with broad navy stripes. It made her look as if she’d been leaning against newly painted railings. However she dressed, and had she been riding a tricycle, no one around here would have had any doubt who or what she was.

‘Give me a reason,’ I suggested.

‘I’m trying’, she said, ‘to get you off the hook. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘Go on.’ I had justification in feeling suspicion. Greeks bearing gifts, and all the rest of it. The way they worked, Parry had been sent to wear me down and now I was at rock bottom, Janice was moving in for the kill.

I winced as the last word crossed my mind. But Janice was smiling, conciliatory today in voice and manner. Softening me up.

‘You told us you were out of the house for the whole of Monday afternoon and early evening. You were in Camden with Porter, so you say. I’d like to believe it and we’ve done our best to check it out. But so far, anywhere we’ve asked, everyone has denied knowing either you or Nevil or seeing anyone like you on that day.’ She waited.

I sighed. ‘They would. They don’t want to be involved. You can’t blame them.’

She hunched her shoulders. ‘I thought we could drive around there. You might see someone. Look, I’m in my own time. I don’t have to bother with this!’

I got in the car.

‘Theresa Monkton’s family has been in touch,’ she said casually, as we drove off.

That startled me. ‘You found them?’

‘They found us.’ She explained that apparently the family had been trying to find Terry for some time. She’d left home before but this time they’d feared something had happened to her. They’d kept a sharp watch on the news reports concerning any unidentified young women. The best they were hoping for was an amnesia victim. The worst – the worst of their fears had come true. I felt sorry for them.

We drew a blank around Camden High Street. We called at the house where we’d had the Mexican bean stew, but the people Nev knew had left, or so the others there said. I thought they were lying. They just didn’t want to get involved, just like all the others Janice had already asked. I wasn’t surprised but, what with one thing and another, my life at the moment was akin to trying to paddle a canoe with a tennis racket.

It was a nicer day weather-wise than it’d been for a while. Pale sunshine inspired shops to put out racks of clothes on the pavements. But Camden was having one of its grotty days, nonetheless, its gutters choked with litter. There were a couple of stalls with fruit and veg in side alleys, adding to the debris with dropped leaves and squashed fruit. They made me think of Ganesh and I wished I hadn’t bothered him with my troubles. He had enough of his own. There were plenty of people about but no one and nothing of any help to me.

‘We’re wasting our time,’ I said, exasperated. ‘I can’t prove we were here. But it’s the truth.’

We carried on looking without much joy. Then, just as we were giving up, I did see a couple I recognised, a man and a girl. The man was called Lew, I knew that, but I couldn’t remember the girl’s name. I leapt out of Janice’s car and raced after them, yelling, ‘Lew!’

They very nearly took off, but I managed to grab his arm. His girlfriend misinterpreted my enthusiasm at seeing him and took a swing at me. It took a fraught few minutes trying to explain. She was quite a bit taller than me and several pounds heavier, and neither Lew nor anyone else seemed inclined to intervene, although a few gathered to watch and cheer us on. Eventually, I managed to make them both understand that I wanted some help from them, not to break up their one-to-one relationship. As our fight broke up, the onlookers drifted away. One or two left small coins on the pavement, perhaps under the impression we’d been taking part in some Street Theatre.

During all the time I was in active danger of getting seriously done over by an enraged Amazon in fishnet tights and combat boots, Janice had been hanging about in the background, not making any effort to come to my rescue, much as all the other gawpers. When she saw things had calmed down, she joined us. Grudgingly they told her they’d seen me and Nev on the Monday afternoon at Camden Lock and we’d had a coffee together. I could see neither of them liked being asked to give me an alibi. But at least they didn’t issue flat denials and perhaps their reluctance made Janice more inclined to believe them.

I told them thanks and that I was sorry I’d had to ask them. They weren’t very gracious about it, but at least supplied names and an address before the Amazon hauled her man away like a hunting trophy. It wasn’t my fault but I knew they didn’t see it that way, and if I knew what was good for me, I’d stay away from that part of town. I’d had my last free meal of beans.