Mixing With Murder (20 page)

‘What the hell is going on, Fran?’ Mickey’s voice crackled in my ear.

‘Ivo’s dead. Honestly, I don’t know anything about it.’

‘What was he doing in Oxford?’ crackled the voice.

‘How should I know?’ Allerton was Allerton but my nerves were frayed and I was losing my awe of him. All this was his fault, whichever way you looked at it.

‘I want Lisa kept out of this!’

‘She is out of it. Believe me, Mr Allerton.’

‘You’d better be right, doll.’

‘Mr Allerton? Do you still want me to try and persuade her to phone you?’

There was a pause. ‘Yeah, I do. But be careful. Give it a day, see what the cops do.’

‘I don’t want to stay here,’ I said miserably.

‘And I don’t want my bloody doormen turning up in rivers!’ snarled the voice down the line.

‘If you didn’t send him,’ I retaliated, ‘didn’t you miss him? Shouldn’t he have been at work?’

‘He said he had a cold.’ Even Mickey Allerton seemed to realise that he’d accepted the feeblest of excuses for Ivo taking time off. ‘If the stupid bugger wasn’t dead already,’ he said with more emotion than I’d ever heard him use, ‘I’d screw his ruddy neck myself!’

That I did believe.

‘I think I will have that brandy, after all, Beryl,’ I said when the phone link had been disconnected.

‘I’ll join you,’ said Beryl. ‘How about you, Mervyn?’

‘Yes,’ said Filigrew, straightening his tie with nervous fingers. ‘Make it a double, Beryl. This is going to get worse before it gets better.’

As it turned out, I didn’t need to phone Ganesh. He phoned me. Thames Valley Police, the local Oxford lot, had sent a diver into the river that same day. He’d found the phone and, hoping for an identity for their corpse, they’d traced the owner at once and got on to the Met. They’d sent someone round to the shop.

‘Hari’s a gibbering wreck!’ yelled Ganesh down the line to me.

I was taking the call in the hall and hoping neither Tom nor Maryann appeared.

‘We had a couple of flatfoots from the local copshop here, saying Thames Valley colleagues had informed them I’d drowned in flipping Oxford. I had to prove who I was. Look, I said to them eventually, this guy who’s been found in the river in Oxford, is he Asian? So then they checked back with the police in Oxford and it turned out the drowned man is blond and blue-eyed and it isn’t likely his name is Ganesh Patel.

‘You’d have thought that was that, but no, it got worse. Oxford police had found a mobile in the river and traced it to me. That was why they’d got on to the Met about me. So then they asked, had I been in Oxford that day or recently? No, I perishing well hadn’t, I told them. They just looked at me and asked if I was sure, which means they thought I was lying. So I had to prove that, too. Hari swore I’d been in the shop all day, of course, but they didn’t believe him because he’s my uncle. Fortunately the cook from the Greek restaurant across the road had been in the shop twice during the day and remembered me. Did they leave after that? What do you think? They moved on to a new lot of questions. What was my phone doing in the river with a dead guy in Oxford? I told them I’d like to know that, too! You must have some idea, they said, how your phone got to Oxford without you. Did the description of the drowned man mean anything to me? Had I, perhaps, lent him my phone? Because it was found directly underneath the body and it did not have the appearance of having been in the water very long. No, the description didn’t mean a flipping thing to me! I told them. But they kept on and on so I had to tell them something. I nearly said I lost the phone, because I didn’t want to drag you into it. You’ll note, I hope, that even in the difficult situation I was in myself, my immediate instinct was to protect you from awkward questions whereas you, on the other hand, have no scruples in dropping me right in it!’

‘I hope you didn’t tell them you lost the mobile,’ I interrupted anxiously. ‘Because I told the police here I’d borrowed it from you—’

‘Yeah, well, luckily I’ve always believed in being straight with the law. Unlike some people I could mention. So I said, I’d lent it to you but
you’d
probably lost it. Still trying to protect you, see? Fran, what is going on? How did my mobile get into a river?’

‘You won’t like this, Ganesh,’ I warned.

‘Ho, ho, ho. What a surprise. Won’t I? Fran -
what have you done now
?’

‘Why,’ I wailed in despair, ‘does everyone always assume I’ve done something?’

‘Francesca,’ said Ganesh in that lecturing voice he sometimes assumes, ‘has it never occurred to you that things happen to you that just don’t happen to other people?’

‘It does cross my mind, from time to time, as it happens. Cut it out, Gan, will you? I’m in enough trouble without you getting at me. How is Hari now?’

‘I told you, a wreck. He’s drinking herbal tea and phoning every relative we’ve got. My dad’s coming up to town tomorrow. My mum’s had hysterics. Usha and Jay have both been round here asking me if I need a good solicitor because Jay’s got an uncle who’s a top-notch lawyer. Jay ruddy well would!’

The last words were snarled. Jay is the sort of upwardly mobile professional Ganesh wishes he was. But he drew the short straw and ended up working for Hari.

‘Get his name and number,’ I advised. ‘I might need him.’ After all, Filigrew hadn’t struck me as being any Perry Mason.

Ganesh groaned. ‘Spill it.’

‘You remember I told you about the bouncer at Mickey’s club, not Harry, but the really weird bodybuilder? He’s dead - here in Oxford. He’s the man the two coppers from the Met were describing to you. I was walking by the river and there Ivo was, floating along. That’s not quite true. He wasn’t drifting; he was resting up by some stone steps. I fell in the river trying to pull him to shore. That’s when I lost your phone.’

There was a silence. ‘You know,’ Ganesh said in an odd sort of voice, ‘I sometimes think all this happens to me because of something rotten I did in my previous existence.’

‘Please don’t turn religious on me, Ganesh.’

‘I am not. I am just looking for an explanation. I’m a quiet, law-abiding newsagent. I’m a good son and nephew. I’m vegetarian and I don’t drink - well, only the odd pint. I don’t smoke or do drugs. I’ve never had so much as a parking ticket against me. So, why me?’

‘What do you mean, why you?’ I snapped, losing it. ‘It’s not you, it me! I’m the one in trouble!’

‘Somehow, at this end, it doesn’t feel like that. Or perhaps I only imagined those two coppers round here today giving me the third degree and giving my uncle a nervous breakdown? He’ll never get over it,’ concluded Ganesh passionately. ‘Neither shall I.’

‘What about me? I’m sorry Hari’s upset and I’m sorry I got you involved, but I’m the one who found the stiff.
I’ll
never get over it!’ I yelled down the line.

‘You see? That’s what I mean. Why do you do these things, Fran? Find bodies—’

I slammed the phone down on him and turned away.

Vera the waitress was sitting on the stairs watching me with interest, her chin propped in her hands and her mop of black hair falling over her forehead.

‘What are you doing there?’ I snapped. I do snoop myself when it’s required in a good cause but that doesn’t mean I accept being snooped on. ‘Don’t you know it’s rude to listen to other people’s conversations? How long have you been there?’

She considered this, frowning beneath the fringe of hair. ‘I only came now, just one half a minute ago. You were shouting. I think something is wrong. I came downstairs to find out. Something is wrong?’

‘Yes.’ I made an effort to calm down. ‘I’m sorry I was shouting and disturbed you.’

‘Is all right,’ said Vera. Her snub nose twitched and her brown eyes peered up at me bright with curiosity. ‘You have trouble? What have you done?’

‘Oh, not you, too . . .’ I groaned.

Chapter Eight

I spent a sleepless night haunted by visions of Ivo’s blank staring eyes and white, waxy skin. In my memory the first signs of rigor had made the eyeballs bulge and retracted his lower jaw. The flowing current washed into his nostrils and gaping mouth and river flotsam decorated him with grotesque confetti of leaves and twigs. Perhaps my imagination painted the scene as even more lurid than it had been in reality. Certainly my mind began to sprawl in a dozen different directions but at the end of every new alley was Ivo. I began to imagine him, not just as I’d seen him last, but as he must be now, lying in a steel mortuary drawer, neatly slotted away with a tag tied to his big toe reading ‘unidentified’. But no, perhaps that was wrong, too. Perhaps by now the post-mortem examination had already been carried out. That was a nightmare too far. I thrust it away.

To escape the images which formed in the darkness, I switched on the bedside light. I hadn’t brought a book with me and the only available reading matter was the stack of tourist leaflets and an old copy of a women’s magazine on the lower shelf of the cabinet. I read the article on nutritious and economical meals but it featured a large picture of a dead fish, which brought me back to Ivo. I tried the fashion pages and the beauty hints and even ‘this month in your garden’. I read the short story and completed the crossword puzzle. I studied the readers’ letters. Nearly all of them were from women in unhappy twosomes. I wanted to say to the writers: ‘Why not just dump the guy?’ But they wouldn’t because rather than face a new situation they wanted to cling to the imperfect one they had. I thought that, ramshackle and unpredictable though my life was, I’d rather have it than mind-numbing routine and relationships which were clearly going nowhere but down the pan. The agony aunt replied with predictable words of advice which couldn’t be implemented. Why not talk it over with him? Because the creep is a liar and a conman, that’s why.

Now I wasn’t so sure that their sad lives were any more fraught than mine. They at least knew in their hearts what the end of their problem would be. He’d leave, either with a new love or to go back to his wife if he’d got one. Nothing so straightforward would solve my dilemma.

In the way that Ivo refused to leave my head, I now began to wonder what Jasna would do when she heard of his death. Had they just been co-exiles or closer? What of Ivo’s family back home in Croatia, assuming that to be his country? Perhaps he had a dear, grey-haired old mother and venerable father, depending on the wages he sent home—stop it, Fran!

It’s easy to wonder about people and come up with the wildest scenarios. People wonder about Ganesh and me. But we’re friends. Yes, of course it could go further if we let it but we don’t. We like what we have and we know the dangers of tinkering with it. Ganesh’s family like me but they would never see me as bride-material. I wouldn’t want to be the one to come between him and them. He grumbles about his family but he’s very much a part of them all. One day, I suppose, we’ll have to make a decision. We put it off. Worrying about things doesn’t help. In the end, most decisions make themselves.

I studied the advertisements in the magazine. I didn’t want two skirts with elasticised waists for the price of one. I wasn’t yet in line for a stairlift and I couldn’t afford a home foot spa. Anyway, I’d spent enough time in water, thanks.

I put aside the magazine, lay back with my hands behind my head and stared up at the ceiling. What was Ivo doing in Oxford? If Mickey hadn’t sent him, who had? If he was down there on Christ Church Meadow it could only be because he was spying on me and on whomever I might meet. But how did he know I’d be there? Somehow or other, if I could rearrange all the pieces, it would make sense. But it was like doing a jigsaw with three or four vital shapes missing. There was a gap in all of this, a missing link. I wondered if Darwin had felt similarly frustrated. I fell into fitful sleep, tossing to and fro, unable to get comfortable, unable to rid myself of Ivo’s unwished ghostly presence, wondering what would happen next.