Rattling the Bones (6 page)

‘Three flats,’ went on Jerry. ‘Three hundred grand apiece at least. Wouldya believe it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, at least they’ll be freshly done up.’

‘Yeah,’ said Tom. ‘New bathrooms, new kitchens. Don’t know about the wiring. You want to watch the wiring in these old places.’

‘Floorboards,’ said Jerry cryptically.

‘Yeah, floorboards, too,’ agreed his mate.

We’d spent enough time on interior decorating. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know you’ve been busy and not paying attention to anything but work but are you sure you weren’t aware of anyone going past? Even if you didn’t see him exactly, you might have heard him or just sensed someone was there.’

They shook their heads.

‘Sorry,’ Tom said.

‘Will one of us do?’ offered Jerry.

I thanked him and said perhaps some other time. We parted the best of friends.

I made my way back to home turf a prey to turbulent emotions like the heroine of the Victorian melodrama Ganesh liked to cast me as. I wanted to tear my hair, short though it is, and beat my breast. (I’m somewhat deficient in that department, too. I’d never get a job modelling those lace and wire confections designed to lift and separate.) All I could do was scowl at innocent passers-by. They quickened their step in alarm. Understandably people do sometimes find me strange.

I
had
seen him, dammit! There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight. I don’t indulge in banned substances. I hadn’t been hallucinating. He’d been there and he’d seen me. I knew him and he knew me. Once again, he’d proved too quick and too clever for me. Before, this had only been about Edna. Now it was getting personal. This guy was running rings round me. It was a matter of honour. I will track you down, mate, I promised.You won’t make me look like a blundering idiot. I will prove to Ganesh that you exist as some sort of genuine threat to Edna.

I called at the newsagent’s. On the way in I passed a man coming out and holding the early edition of the
Evening Standard
, but otherwise inside it was customer-free. Hari stood disconsolately by his till.

‘Ah, Francesca, my dear,’ he greeted me with the air of an undertaker. He leaned forwards and whispered, ‘Where are they?’

‘Who?’ I asked foolishly

He swept a hand around his shop. ‘The customers! Where are they? Where are the children? School is out, isn’t it? Why are they not here buying drinks and snacks and trying to pinch things, eh?’

‘Half term?’ I suggested.

He shook his head. ‘It is worse, Francesca. I have a rival.’ He pointed somewhere behind me and down the road. ‘Supermarket!’ he hissed. ‘Isn’t it enough for them they sell food and washing powder? No, they sell newspapers and magazines, crisps and Coke and chewing gum. They have a kiosk by the door. The children go there. They wander round the shop floor and it is easier to pinch things, isn’t it, from a supermarket?’

Hari seemed to have a very poor opinion of local youth. I supposed it was based on experience.

‘Here I watch them!’ he added grimly.

The lack of welcome the young customers had got here might have contributed to their taking their trade elsewhere but it wouldn’t be tactful to say so. ‘Where’s Ganesh?’ I asked.

‘In the stockroom,’ said Hari. ‘We should be so busy at this time he should be needed here, watching those children.’

If I was a school kid, I’d stay clear of Hari’s shop.

‘It is unfair competition, isn’t it?’ wailed Hari.

Ganesh was in the dark dusty stockroom armed with a clipboard and pencil and counting boxes of confectionery. He looked up sharply when I came in and then relaxed when he saw who it was.

‘Is he still moaning?’ he asked without any prior greeting.

‘About the supermarket taking his trade? Yes.’

‘Of course customers have moved there,’ said Ganesh crossly. ‘He’s such a miserable git. He’s paranoid, that’s what. He follows them round the shop. I’ve told him not to do it. You’ve got to be pleasant, make them feel welcome, that they’re individuals. Tell ’em it’s nice to see them again. Ask them how they are. It’s called customer relations. My uncle,’ said Ganesh, ‘lacks communication and interpersonal skills.’

‘Have you been reading those business studies books again?’ I asked him.

Perhaps the difficulties with Hari had inspired Ganesh to broaden his horizons; though I doubted they would result in his actually moving on. However, he had recently been compiling an impressive collection of non-fiction books. Some were the usual self-help sort: train your memory; improve your diet; get super-fit with simple exercises; transform your wardrobe and by this means your life. Some offered to plug the gaps in your education: the business studies; computer programming (Ganesh doesn’t own a computer); present-tense Latin and so on. (‘Why present-tense Latin, Gan?’ ‘So that I can read inscriptions, you know, in old churches and that.’ ‘But for that you need past-tense Latin, Gan.’) Some were reference books should you feel like checking out anything. There wasn’t a decent paperback among them.

‘I don’t need a book to tell me Hari’s problem. I live with him!’ snarled Ganesh now.

‘I’ve got problems, too,’ I told him. ‘Stop worrying about Hari and put your mind to something constructive. That’s probably in your business studies book. Don’t waste time on negative energy.’

Ganesh put down the clipboard but kept the pencil so that he could jab it dramatically at my chest.

‘You’ve been getting into trouble. I knew it. What have you done?’

‘I went looking for Edna. I told you I would.’

‘Did you find her?’

I shook my head. ‘Not exactly. I found the hostel where she’s living. The people there are pretty good.’

‘So, nothing to worry about.’ He looked relieved. He had been concened I was going to get into some scrape. It was quite a shame to destroy his rising optimism.

‘Well, Gan, there is.’ I explained to him about the second appearance of the man in the baseball cap and how he’d disappeared so mysteriously.

‘He’s pretty good at giving people the slip. He thinks quickly on his feet and uses whatever is to hand, like plunging into the street market. I reckon I’ve worked out what he did this time. He knew I was after him and if he was still in the street, I’d see him. Those two decorators were carrying stuff out of the house and they’d left the front door open. I reckon he nipped in there behind their backs, waited until I’d left and then slipped out again. They didn’t see him go in and if they saw him coming out, it wouldn’t matter. He’d spin them a yarn about me being an ex-girlfriend he was trying to dodge.
Or
he might have told them that first and asked if he could dash inside out of sight. They wouldn’t question it and they lied to me when I turned up immediately afterwards. Blokes stick together over things like that.’

‘And,’ asked Ganesh in that quiet dangerous way, ‘did you ask the decorators,
both
in
white
clothing, if either of them had walked down to the corner of the street a few minutes earlier for any reason and stood about where you might have seen him? Looking for a mate who was supposed to meet them there, for example?’

‘Ganesh! I did not see a man in a white overall! I saw that guy in the white baseball cap and white T-shirt and pants! He likes to dress in white.’

‘You’re getting obsessed, Fran,’ said Ganesh seriously. ‘You’re getting like Hari. You’ve got this fellow on the brain. You didn’t see him. You saw a house-painter.’

‘Yes, I did see him! I know what I saw. I’m not blind and I’m not daft.’

‘Why should he be there?’

I expelled my breath in a long hiss, seeking self-control. ‘Because he’s doing what I was doing, trying to find Edna.’

‘What for?’

Almost dancing with frustration, I clenched my fist and shook it at him. ‘
I don’t know why!
’

‘Negative energy!’ said Ganesh smugly.

I stormed out, Bonnie at my heels, and left him to count his confectionery stock.

I realised when I got out onto the pavement that I was very hungry and it wasn’t just being in the storeroom surrounded by snacks. It was almost four o’clock. All I’d had to eat since cornflakes for breakfast was a Mars bar munched as I trudged round the hostels. I slowed my step by the busy little supermarket which was the cause of Hari’s troubles. But on the point of going in and buying one of those chilled meals in little trays I changed my mind. It would feel like disloyalty to Hari and Ganesh, even though I wasn’t going in there to use the newspaper kiosk. I walked on and got home to discover my fridge was empty. My store cupboard (a bit of a misnomer that) only held a packet of dried chicken soup and half a packet of cream crackers which had gone soft, plus a tin of dog food claiming to be made of beef and nourishing marrowbone jelly. I made the soup and drank it while nibbling the crackers and very unpleasant it all was. Bonnie tucked into the beef, doing rather better than me. I would have to go out and buy something to eat later.

I looked at my wristwatch. It was gone five now, nearly half past. Bonnie had settled down and gone to sleep, tired by her long walk. If I went now and walked quickly I might just reach Susie Duke’s office before she closed up for the day. I would explain the mystery of Edna to Susie, get her opinion and, on the way out, pick up a kebab.

‘I’m going out,’ I explained to Bonnie. ‘But I won’t be long. Be a good dog.’

She opened one brown eye to make sure I wasn’t going to drag her along with me just when she’d got settled. She made no effort to follow me.

The Duke Detective Agency (confidential enquiry agents) run by my good friend Susie Duke was located at that moment above a Turkish takeaway outlet in a busy parade of little shops. Odours of grilled meat permeated upwards through the floor, but it had its advantages as a location, so Susie assured me when she moved the business in there. It was easily reached, it wasn’t her home address (always dodgy to give that to punters) and at lunchtime she could nip downstairs and buy a kebab as I was planning to do for my supper.

It was a tall old building. In addition to the Duke Detective Agency directly above the kebab shop there was another business, a tattoo parlour, above Susie. The Agency and the tattoo parlour were reached from the same staircase which was accessed from the street through a door next to the kebab place. The street door was unlocked during working hours to allow visitors to climb the stairs and seek a solution to their problems either by consulting a private investigator or, if they preferred, getting themselves a whole new set of tattoos.

You met some really odd-looking people coming down the stairs from the parlour. I mean, they often looked fairly odd when they passed you going up: they looked amazingly weird when they passed you going down after Michael the tattooist had done his work. Michael wasn’t a man who contented himself with ‘I Love Sheryl’ or ‘Hammers For Ever’ with a representation of West Ham’s coat of arms. Michael talked people into apocalyptic visions worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. Flames crawled up their arms and legs. Fantastic creatures played among them and rode serpents with bulging eyes, straight from a Snakes and Ladders board game. Occult symbols spattered the lot like strange confetti thrown down at a wedding.

The parlour’s clients, on the other hand, probably considered those who visited the detective agency equally peculiar.

If the two sets of customers shared anything, it was the apprehension on their faces as they arrived and the expression of mixed relief and doubt when they left. They were relieved they’d got it over with and beginning to wonder if they’d done the right thing. Either way realisation was dawning on them that it was irreversible.

The door on the first floor giving access to the Agency bore a neat little notice with the name of the business and the hours the office was open. If you passed through this door, you found yourself in the reception area. Because the whole office area was really just one big room, this reception area had been created by subdivision. A half-glazed partition screened new arrivals from the inner sanctum which was Susie’s consulting room, to borrow a phrase from the medical world.

The furnishings in Susie’s room were pretty basic: a desk, a chair and a filing cabinet. I don’t know where Susie got that desk from. You can buy computer stations, nice modern ones, quite cheap from those discount warehouses. Susie’s desk looked like something from a government department clear-out in the swinging sixties, cheap lacquered pine with burn and ink marks, scratches and doodles all over it. Possibly it had come with the office, understandably abandoned by the previous tenant. Her little laptop computer usually stood open on the top but I don’t think Susie trusted much information to the computer. Most of it was in the filing cabinet which was battleship grey of old-fashioned design and looked as if it might have come along with the desk from the same ministry somewhere in the depths of Whitehall.