Keeping Bad Company (15 page)

She looked vague. ‘He might,’ she said. ‘If so, he’d be seeing to the furnace. We’ve had a lot of problems with it. It’s very old. It’s in the basement, entry outside the church. If you go out of the door there where you came in, turn right and make your way along, you’ll see the door, down a couple of steps.’

I thanked her and went to find Ben the furnaceman. If he had been the one to clear up the porch first thing, it was just possible he’d seen or found something that might give a clue to what happened here last night.

I made my way along the outside wall of the church. The area between building and street was untidily planted with shrubs and might once have been a garden. Someone, perhaps Ben, had cut the grass, but otherwise the shrubs had been left to grow straggly and misshapen. As I approached one clump, from behind it came a metallic clang and rather to my surprise, Muriel, the wizard with the vacuum, appeared. She was holding the crumpled emptied paper liner. St Agatha’s cleaning rota, economical souls, reused them. She started on seeing me and stopped, clasping the bag to her flat chest.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for the furnace room. Valia said it was along here.’

‘Oh,’ she looked relieved. ‘Yes, just behind there.’ She hurried past me, back to the safety of the church.

I saw now that the bushes served both to hide a row of refuse bins and the steps down to a low door in the side of the church. I wondered whether St Agatha’s had a proper crypt. Probably not, but possibly some cellars, one of which now housed the furnace.

I paused by the refuse bins and eyed them. If Ben, or anyone else, had found anything, it might have been tossed into one of these. Gingerly, I took off the nearest lid. A layer of grey dust, fluff and unidentifiable scraps covered the top. The contents of Muriel’s dust bag, no doubt. I peered at them.

‘What’re you looking for, then?’

The voice came from behind me, male, hoarse and suspicious. I jumped round.

He was elderly, red-faced beneath a greasy cap, and stout. He wore dark blue overalls and carried a folded tabloid newspaper.

‘Ben?’ I asked.

‘That’s me. Who’re you, then?’ He wheezed as he spoke and I saw the redness of his skin was accentuated by purple threads.

I explained who I was, what I wanted, and that Valia had directed me to him.

He snorted and went past me down the steps to unlock the door. He disappeared inside, but left it open, and I assumed I was meant to follow.

Once inside, I saw I was in Ben’s personal sanctum. Most of it was taken up with the furnace, an ancient and alarmingly rusty-looking monster. Just enough room was left for a small table, a wooden kitchen chair, a small paraffin heater and a billycan. Ben had placed his newspaper on the table and added to it a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. He indicated I should take the chair.

‘You belong to one of them charities, then?’ he rasped.

‘No, it’s – it’s personal. Ben, do you ever see any of the men who sleep in the porch or have they always gone by the time you get here in the morning?’

He prised a cigarette from the packet and lit it. Shaking both the match to extinguish the flame, and his head at the same time, he said, ‘No – not hardly ever. They clear out before they see me because they know I’d help ’em on their way with me boot.’

So much for the vicar’s charity. It wasn’t shared by his staff.

‘So you wouldn’t know an old man, rather smelly, called Jonty? Or another, a bit cleaner, called Albie Smith? I think Albie slept here regularly.’

‘Journalist?’ Ben asked, ignoring my question.

‘No, not a journalist. I told you, it’s private.’

He looked disappointed. It occurred to me that journalists have been known to pay. But I didn’t have any money. All I could do was stand my ground and wait.

‘It smelled bloody awful this morning,’ Ben observed. He didn’t seem to hold it against me that I’d not offered any money. It’d been worth a try. ‘I wish I did know who done it because if I’d got hold of the bugger I’d have made him clean it up! Gawd knows what they were doing in there last night.’

God probably did know. I was trying to find out. ‘Was there anything left behind like clothing or blankets?’

‘Just a few rags. I slung ’em in the furnace there.’ He pointed. ‘Not that it’s lit. But if I find anything what burns, I sling it in the furnace. It’s all fuel.’

Hesitantly I asked, ‘Is it possible to get them out again?’

He looked at me in amazement. ‘Think I got nothing better to do than to spend my time raking rubbish out of the furnace just to amuse you, whoever you are?’

I glanced down at the table, the newspaper and the cigarettes. He scowled but took the point.

‘It’s my tea-break,’ he said sulkily.

‘What time do you go home, Ben? I mean, what time do you lock up?’

He pointed to the ceiling. ‘When them women finish their polishing. They generally goes off around five. I lock up at six and that’s it. Can’t leave the place open. Sometimes the vicar wants it of an evening and then he lets me know. He’s got his own keys, of course.’ He shuffled about and curiosity got the better of him. ‘These rags, what do you want ’em for?’

‘Just to see them, in case I recognise any of them.’

Ben expelled his breath in a hiss between his yellowish stubs of teeth. Then he picked up a long metal rod fashioned into a hook at one end. Alarmed, I wondered if he meant to drive me off, but he inserted the hook into the handle of the furnace door and tugged it. The round metal door swung open. Ben reached in with the useful hook and poked around, eventually emerging and turning toward me. A grimy and tattered piece of gabardine, once the skirts of a raincoat, hung from the rod.

‘This ’ere’s part of it. Make you happy?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘There was a bit of blanket as well. I can try and find it.’

It meant nothing to me. I shook my head. Ben pushed the rag back into the furnace. He swung the door shut and tapped the metal behemoth with the rod. It replied with a cavernous echoing groan. ‘Pipes is buggered,’ he said. ‘Whole lot wants replacing.’

‘And that’s it?’ I asked. ‘You found nothing else?’

‘Only what you’d expect,’ he said. ‘Whisky bottle. Live on alcohol, them old blokes. No matter how badly off they are, they always manage to get themselves a drink. A bottle and a fag packet. I put the packet in the furnace and the bottle in the dustbin, one of the bins outside there.’

Crossing my fingers, I asked, ‘Would it still be there? Could I look?’

‘Course it’s still there. Haven’t been emptied, have they? Take a look if you want. Leave it all tidy, that’s all I ask. Don’t go chucking stuff around.’

‘Which dustbin?’ I’d remembered there were three of them.

He frowned. ‘End one, as I recall. Where you was looking just now.’

I thanked him again and left him settling down to read his paper as I climbed up the short flight of steps to the outer air and the lines of refuse bins behind the bushes.

I took the lid off the bin in question and stared down at the grey mix of dirt. I didn’t fancy putting my hands in that. What I needed was something like Ben’s furnace hook. I retraced my steps. He was reading the football page and looked up crossly.

‘What d’you want now? No, you can’t borrow it. I needs it.’

‘You’re not using it now,’ I pointed out.

‘Ah, and if you go running off with it, I won’t never be using it again, will 1?’

I promised faithfully I wouldn’t leave the premises with the poker. He picked it up and gazed at it as if it were made of precious metal, before handing it over to me, laid ceremonially across his two hands, like a symbol of office. Perhaps, to him, it was.

I lugged it back up the steps and began to scrape little trial trenches in the dirt. At first I turned up only crumpled sweet wrappers and other assorted scrap paper. But eventually, after much diligent probing, the metal poker chinked against the glass and the round neck of a bottle appeared. I picked it out carefully – an empty Bell’s whisky half-bottle.

I replaced the lid of the bin and made my way down to the furnace room. Ben, who evidently read his newspaper from back to front, had progressed from the sports news to the indiscretions of a politician on page two. I propped the poker against the furnace and thanked him for the loan of it.

He glanced down at it sternly, checking it was undamaged. I held out the Bell’s bottle.

‘Is this the bottle you found?’

‘That’s it.’ He nodded and lost interest. He turned over the last sheet of newsprint so that now he’d reached the front page. It was nearly filled with a photograph of the erring politician arm in arm with a leggy bimbo. Ben, sucking his teeth, studied the picture carefully and gave his verdict.

‘Oh well, good luck to ’im, anyway. I didn’t vote for ’im.’

‘You don’t mind,’ I asked, ‘if I take it away?’

‘What? That empty old bottle? Blimey, you got some funny ideas, ain’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said simply. ‘Have you got a bit of paper I can wrap the bottle in?’ I didn’t want to walk along the street holding an empty bottle. I had my standards.

Ben had decided I was a joke. He got up chuckling and began to rummage in a black plastic bin-liner in the corner. He emerged with a crumpled and grubby plastic carrier bag. ‘Here, take this. I find ’em floating around the place and I keep ’em because they come in handy.’

‘Thanks,’ I told him.

‘Just don’t come back again,’ he bade me kindly as we parted.

I set off with my plastic carrier containing the Bell’s bottle. Much as I disliked the idea of dealing with Parry again, he’d have to know about it. It supported what I’d told him, that Albie had had a half-bottle of whisky last night in the porch and not a large bottle.

Of course it wasn’t proof unless they could get Albie’s fingerprints off it. I wondered, uncomfortably, where Albie’s body was. Lying in a morgue? Would they carry out a post-mortem? I thought they probably would. Stray deaths have to be accounted for. They’d confirm he’d died by drowning and we’d be no further forward. I glanced down at the plastic bag with the bottle. Jonty would’ve handled it and after that Ben handled it and lastly I picked it up, though I’d been careful. Other rubbish had rubbed against it in the bin, unfortunately, and Ben’s hands had been like shovels. If there had been prints, they would’ve been smudged or obliterated by now.

I realised at this point that I wasn’t walking towards my flat. I was walking the other way, towards St Agatha’s refuge. It seemed I was meant to go there.

The refuge looked like a quiet, respectable house not unlike Daphne’s and in a similar street. The only real sign that anything unusual ever happened there was a wooden board temporarily nailed over the lower half of the window to the left of the door, signifying a breakage. That, and the tiniest, most discreet of notices beside the bell push, reading ‘Women’s Refuge’. I stood on the step and wondered what I could say that would sound convincing. No story came to mind so I rang the bell anyway and trusted to luck and inspiration.

The door was opened by a thin-faced woman with a wary expression. Her hair, cut in an old-fashioned, dead straight page-boy bob and dyed an unlikely reddish colour without variation in texture or shade, had to be a budget wig.

‘Come in,’ she said, without preamble, and I found myself standing in a narrow hallway that smelled of cooked vegetables. From the rear of the hall, through a half-open door, came the rattle of crockery as if someone were laying the table for the evening meal. Upstairs a baby wailed, and a sudden burst of shrill voices was cut short by the slam of a door. The air of tension about the place was palpable. I’d been surprised by the way the woman had hurried me inside without question and then I realised that possibly they didn’t like leaving the front door open. I remembered the boarded window panes. They had a bit of trouble here sometimes, so Jonty had said.

‘You want a bed, I suppose?’ The woman sounded partly resentful and partly resigned. Her gaze took in the plastic carrier. ‘Is that all the stuff you’ve brought with you? Just as well, we’ve got very little room to store personal effects.’

Embarrassed I explained that actually I didn’t want a bed, I’d only come to ask a couple of questions.

Her thin features reddened. ‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’ she snapped. ‘If you want to do a story, you might at least phone first! And in any case, we don’t want too much publicity. We get more people coming here than we can cope with as it is.’