Keeping Bad Company (23 page)

Malcolm reciprocated my feelings. It was mutual dislike on sight. Grandmothers Tring and Varady engineered one more meeting and then, a stroke of luck, Malcolm had to go into hospital for his adenoids, and that was that.

I don’t think Grandma V. ever quite forgave me. Not even when the furniture business burned down eighteen months later. It was in the
Standard
, and arson was suspected. So perhaps it hadn’t been doing all that well. I always knew those pearls were false.

Jeremy offered the kind of reassurance to concerned families that Malcolm had appeared to offer. No doubt the marble cherub business was doing well. Every home should have one. Szabo probably saw in this young entrepreneur something of himself when younger. Jeremy would guarantee Lauren a nice big house and a generous personal spending allowance. Jeremy wouldn’t stray and he wouldn’t ask where Lauren spent her money or her afternoons. Business would always come first with him, women a long way back second. I was even prepared to bet Jeremy Copperfield was an only child.

The scepticism in my face succeeded in rattling Copperfield. He flushed and said loudly, ‘We were about to announce our engagement!’

By ‘we’ he meant himself and his prospective father-in-law. I doubt Lauren was in full agreement.

‘Then you’ll want to find her,’ I said.

The flush turned to beetroot. ‘I would feel any other suggestion to be insulting, Miss Varady!’

‘I want to find her too.’ I ignored the huffing and puffing. I wasn’t here to listen to Copperfield’s bluster. I was here on business.

My voice must have told him so and it was an attitude he respected. His own manner changed. The flush faded, he sat up straighter in the executive chair, folded his plump hands and asked crisply, ‘And what would be your interest? You don’t know Lauren personally. Is Szabo paying you?’

It was possible Szabo thought he was. I didn’t. ‘My interest,’ I said, ‘is in what happened to an elderly man whose body was taken from the canal yesterday morning early.’

Copperfield’s small sharp eyes gleamed behind the lenses. ‘Has this any bearing on what’s happened to Lauren?’

‘I think so.’

‘I’d appreciate your reasons,’ Copperfield said.

‘Fair enough. I believe he saw Lauren snatched off the street. The men involved knew he’d been a witness. They arranged his death.’

There was a silence. Then Copperfield said carefully, as if picking his way through a verbal minefield, ‘You are suggesting murder. That’s a very serious matter. Where do the police stand in all this?’

‘You’d better ask them,’ I retorted.

‘I shall, believe me.’ He unfolded his podgy paws and tapped the armrests of his chair. ‘And what do you think I can tell you, Miss Varady, that the police or, indeed, Vincent Szabo can’t?’

‘I had wondered,’ I confessed, ‘whether Lauren had told you of anything unusual that had happened to her lately, during the time leading up to her disappearance. Had either of you made any new acquaintances? Started going to new places? Had anyone been asking about her, making some excuse or other?’

‘Much as you are doing?’ His cheeks shuddered as a sarcastic smile rippled away from the edges of his mouth.

‘OK then, much as I’m doing. Was there anyone?’

‘If she’d told me any such thing,’ he said, ‘I’d have insisted she report it to the police.’

Time to shake him up a little. ‘Did you know,’ I asked innocently, ‘that she was a regular volunteer helper at a refuge for battered women in the area where she was snatched?’

I was wrong in fancying that would bother him. He looked annoyed, but not surprised. ‘The police have already investigated that angle, as I understand it. I’ll be frank with you, Miss Varady. I didn’t approve of such good works, laudable though they might have been. The simple fact is that when a young woman stands to be heiress one day to, well, not exactly a fortune perhaps, but certainly a comfortable amount, she has to accept the risks that go with having money. She becomes a prey for spongers, spinners of hard-luck tales, penniless young men and unsavoury elements in society of all kinds. Her family and friends will try to protect her but she must also protect herself.

‘I knew she gave her time to the refuge, amongst other similar hostels. I tried to dissuade her. The very nature of such a place is that she must meet all kinds of riffraff there and that sooner or later, one of them may try to gain advantage from the situation.’

I couldn’t let that pass. I nearly jumped out of my chair to remind this well-heeled slob that the women at the refuge had received horrendous treatment. They weren’t there by choice. They were there often because their very lives were in danger. To describe them as ‘riffraff’ was unacceptable and I’d be glad to hear him withdraw it.

‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘What you’ve just said confirms my view. The women in those places are there because of violence. They are associated with violent men. So it follows that anyone associated with those women is also likely to become the target of violent men.’

I remembered the broken window and damaged door at the refuge and reluctantly conceded he had a point. ‘So you’re saying,’ I said, ‘that it’s through her voluntary work that Lauren became known to her eventual snatchers?’

‘I think it’s highly likely, don’t you? I fancy the police think so too. Look, Miss Varady . . .’ he consulted an expensive-looking wristwatch, ‘I’ve given you quite a lot of my time this afternoon and frankly, I can’t see to what purpose. There is nothing I can tell you that isn’t more properly learned from the police. In fact, I suspect the police would be strongly opposed to my talking to you at all.’

He wasn’t going to talk to me any further, he was saying. So I could just get out. I got up and prepared to go, but I had one last query.

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘that cherub thing out there,’ I pointed at the door and the reception area beyond. ‘Is it really worth fifteen hundred smackers?’

‘Cherub?’ He looked puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean the zephyr! Yes, a lovely piece. Exquisite. Italian Renaissance and established provenance. It was salvaged from the ruins of a pleasure villa on Lake Garda at the close of the Second World War.’

‘Salvaged’, I suspected, might be a euphemism. ‘Trophy of war?’ I asked.

‘Certainly not!’ His full lips pressed together and disappeared into a thin line. The flesh around them had turned white with anger. ‘Good day, Miss Varady,’ he said, opening the door.

There was a motorcycle courier in the outer office. It was a tribute to the soundproof quality of the office doors here that I hadn’t heard him arrive. Leather-jacketed, metal-helmeted and high-booted, he was a space-age vision, even more out of place in these surroundings than I was, even though he was here on proper business, not part-time detecting.

The Ice Queen handed him a package. He growled, ‘Right!’ and clumped away, casting me no more than a dismissive glance. If he wondered about my presence, he didn’t show it. Perhaps I hadn’t even registered with him. A man who spent his days weaving in and out of London’s packed traffic probably didn’t worry much about anything except staying upright.

The receptionist gave me a glance that was only marginally more aware than the courier’s.

‘Mr Szabo is waiting for you downstairs,’ she said, and returned to her work, wiping my presence from her mental screen.

Vinnie Szabo was standing in the doorway, sheltering from the draught that cut through the alley. Perhaps he also wanted to avoid the scrutiny of any passer-by who might glance down the narrow way and wonder what he was doing lurking there.

‘Hi,’ I said dourly, because I was cross with him.

We left the alley awkwardly, obliged to walk in single file. I went first. The courier had made it out into the main road, mounted his machine and was already zigzagging away. There was no sign of Szabo’s car or the muscular driver. He wouldn’t have found it easy to park around here. Perhaps Szabo had wisely taken a cab. He edged out of the narrow entry behind me, and stood unhappily on the pavement. He was wearing his overcoat and it looked even more oversize than it had in the car. His small hands barely poked out of the sleeves and the skirts nearly reached to the pavement.

He peered up at me, Mole from
The Wind in the Willows
. ‘You’ve seen Jeremy? Did he – Was there anything?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But then he knew exactly who I was and why I was there. I thought we’d agreed I’d say I was a friend of Lauren’s?’

‘But he phoned me,’ he protested in dismay. ‘I had to tell him.’

‘I might have got more out of him if you hadn’t,’ I said, still feeling sour about it.

‘He wouldn’t have spoken to you at all,’ Szabo defended himself. ’When he phoned me, he was worried you might be an emissary of the kidnappers.’

That certainly hadn’t occurred to me!

‘Never mind,’ I said, conceding the point. ‘He wouldn’t have believed the other story anyway. He doesn’t know anything. I don’t think Lauren would’ve told him if she’d had anything on her mind.’

‘She certainly wouldn’t have wished to worry poor Jeremy. He is devoted to her.’ We’d fallen into step and he spoke these words confidently as he scurried beside me.

I wasn’t getting into an argument over that one. I’d have been surprised if Lauren spoke much to Jeremy about anything.

We’d reached the corner of the street and parted with a minimum exchanged of farewell words. I promised to ring Vinnie if I learned anything but it was clear from his expression he no longer held out any hopes of my turning up any information of value. He’d been desperate when he’d contacted me. That I’d failed him hardly made any difference. He hadn’t really expected much.

He headed off in the direction of Mayfair, a small dejected figure in a too large coat, padding along the centre of the pavement. An air of loneliness and loss hovered around him and I knew what it was that niggled at me whenever I looked at Szabo. In his own way, he reminded me of Albie, a lost soul, someone out of whose life the heart has been wrenched.

I set off in the opposite direction, making for the Underground and home.

Back on home turf, there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do. But I hadn’t forgotten Jonty and, wanting to do something, even if I knew I was wasting my time, I went looking for him again.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t see any sign of him. I hoped the poor old fellow was all right and polluting the environment somewhere safer for him than around here. I was in two minds whether to go to the shop and talk to Gan, but I remembered that tomorrow was the day of the art exhibition in which I was to figure, literally. It would be best to avoid Ganesh until it was all over.

Suffering from severe doubts about the whole project myself, I went to Reekie Jimmie’s instead. I was hoping unrealistically that I’d be told Angus had unexpectedly been called back to Scotland and the proposed display was off. Suddenly even the prospect of thirty quid didn’t compensate for looking an idiot all day.

Chapter Twelve

As a hope, it’d only been an outsider and not surprisingly, it never got out of the starting traps. Angus, apparently, had been in that morning doing his mopping out stint, and was all keyed up and worrying about keeping the vegetables fresh.

‘Can’t talk about anything else but tomorrow, the lad is that excited,’ said Jimmie. ‘He reckons it’s his big chance. He’s counting on you, hen. We all are, eh? Ah, we’ll show the auld enemy where he gets off!’

He beamed at me fondly. Somehow or other I’d become the focus of Scottish aspirations, in this part of London, anyway. But something he’d said sounded an ominous note.

‘Veg?’ I asked hollowly.

‘Aye, to pin on your wee costume. Would you like a cup of tea or coffee, on the house? It’s bottomless cup tonight, you’ll have seen the notice.’

He pointed to the wall behind him where, above the microwave, was a poster showing a steaming coffee cup and emblazoned ‘Special Promotion. One night only. Pay for first cup! Refills on us!’

I accepted a bottomless cup of tea and began to wonder how Angus was proposing to fix a couple of pounds of mixed veg to a body stocking without making it sag disastrously. I hoped Jimmie had got it wrong. I didn’t think we got our vegetables from the rain forests.

Jimmie had left me to take some orders. The café was filling up and trade threatened to become a rush. This couldn’t be, surely, because of the special promotion?

‘Friday night,’ he told me when he rejoined me. ‘Lot of’em got paid and the weekend starts here!’