Risking It All (10 page)

‘Then I’ll give you a lift to the Tube station.’

Fair enough. I guessed he wanted to check on me a little more. He looked pretty sharp. He probably knew there was something I wasn’t telling.

He carried the tray into the kitchen and came back to bid farewell to his aunt. I withdrew discreetly to the hall. I could hear the murmur of their voices. I wondered if he was saying anything about me, but before I could put an ear to the door, he came out of the room.

‘Right!’ he said briskly.

He had one of those small four-wheel-drive vehicles. I clambered up into it and he said, ‘I’m quite happy to drive you home if you want. I’ve got nothing else to do today.’

But that was too transparent. If he wanted to know where I lived, he wouldn’t find out as easily as that. In fact, I was determined he wouldn’t find out at all.

‘Just the Tube station will do,’ I said firmly.

He gave a sort of grin. He knew I’d rumbled him. Yes, he was smart.

As he pulled out into the road, a greenish-blue car drew out ahead of us, perhaps a hundred yards away. It dawdled along but Ben showed no urge to overtake it.

‘Your aunt’s very proud of you,’ I said, deciding that if we were going to continue our conversation about me, I’d let him know it wasn’t going to be all one-sided. People are often more keen to ask questions than answer them. They think twice if they realise they’re going to have to respond in kind.

But Ben just grinned. ‘I’m proud of her. She’s been getting progressively more infirm for years and she’s never given up. She’s got wonderful spirit.’

‘The sister she’s just been to visit,’ I said, ‘would that be your mother?’

The grin was turned off, just like pressing a wall-switch. ‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘Aunt Dot is technically my great-aunt. She’s my mother’s aunt.’

I should have been able to work out something like that for myself. It wouldn’t add up for Mrs Mackenzie to have a nephew of Ben’s youth any other way.

‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said now.

I said, ‘Yes,’ which was weak but there wasn’t much else I could say. I couldn’t tell him how she’d walked out when I was seven.

He said, ‘Varady, that’s an unusual name.’

‘They were Hungarians, my family,’ I said. ‘That is, my dad’s parents brought him here in the nineteen fifties as a toddler.’

‘How’s your dad taking the situation with your mother?’

‘He doesn’t have to,’ I said bleakly. ‘He died quite a while ago.’

‘That’s tough,’ he said sympathetically.

I could have told him life is tough. We don’t all have doting great-aunts who let you play at your favourite hobby in their back gardens. That was unfair. But I’d been on my own since I was sixteen. I miss Dad and Grandma Varady and I’ve got them on my conscience, because they brought me up and I wish I’d repaid them better than I did. To this day I don’t know how they managed to scrape together the money to send me to that private school from which I got slung out. I moved on to the dramatic arts course at a local college after that. My father and grandmother were convinced, of course, that a brilliant stage career lay before me. I thought it myself. But Dad died, then Grandma, and I was slung out again, this time by our landlord. Since then I’ve mostly lived in squats and my acting ambitions have been on hold. The flat I briefly rented from Daphne, on highly advantageous terms to me, was the only decent home I’d had in years. But you can see why I’d always felt it couldn’t last. Nothing good ever does.

‘What about your parents?’ I asked. ‘Are they happy you want to go in for gardening?’

‘They don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Once they got used to the idea. They’re both high-flyers in the business world. At first they thought I might just be reacting to their lifestyle, like kids do. You know the kind of stuff. They think nothing of jetting halfway round the world to meet another bunch of business suits, then whizzing back to stagger off the plane and have a working breakfast with a home-grown lot. Who needs that? I don’t. I’ve worked out what I want. I drew them up a business plan, something they could understand. I showed them where I wanted to go with the gardening. After that they were OK.’

Something told me this was the end of our conversation. Now he put his foot down and overtook the car still dawdling along ahead of us.

I don’t know what made me look at the driver’s window as we passed by him. Being, as I was, in the four-by-four, rather higher up, I got a good view of the interior and the driver.

‘Shit!’ I muttered. I hadn’t meant to say it aloud. But I’d been caught unawares. The colour of the other car should have rung a bell with me, but with my mind on other things, it hadn’t. No doubt about it. The car was being driven by Rennie Duke.

He was wearing a sheepskin cap, his idea of a disguise probably. But it was Rennie, I was sure of it. Perhaps if I’d seen the car myself before, and not just had Ganesh’s description to go by, I might have spotted him earlier.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Ben quickly.

‘Nothing, I just remembered something. It’s okay, really.’

He wasn’t convinced. I saw him look up at the mirror and take in the car now on our tail.

I was furious with Duke and sorry I couldn’t ask Ben to pull up so I could jump out, storm back to the following Mazda, bash on the bonnet and give the PI a piece of my mind. The last thing I needed was his weaselly presence dogging my footsteps as I tracked down my sister. Wasn’t it all difficult enough? When things are bad, we’re always encouraged to believe they can only get better. Not in my experience, they don’t. They can and generally do get worse. If I wanted an example of that, here it was.

Or rather, now it wasn’t. Duke’s car had dropped back; perhaps he feared he’d been spotted. By the time we reached the Tube station, it had long disappeared from view. Had it all just been a weird coincidence? I thanked Ben and jumped out before he could repeat his offer to drive me home or ask me any more questions.

He drove off. I stood just inside the entrance to the Tube station, concealed by a pair of chatting London Transport workers, and waited. After a few moments, a jade-green car appeared and stopped at the traffic lights. The driver, the fur hat jammed ludicrously down to his ears, was hunched forward anxiously over the wheel. He scanned the entry to the Tube station and the open area in front of it. I’d no doubt now it was Rennie Duke. I pressed back against the ticket machine. I didn’t think I could be seen, or at least not well enough to be identified. The lights changed. He was in a flow of traffic now and couldn’t hang about. He drove on and I heaved a sigh of relief. With luck, Rennie had lost Ben at the traffic lights. But even if he caught up with him again, he would follow Ben all the way home to wherever he lived before he rumbled I wasn’t in the four-by-four.

I now knew it wasn’t coincidence that had put him outside the Mackenzie house. He was following the same trail I was and I could make an educated guess as to what had put him on to it. I knew he’d visited my mother in hospital. Sister Helen knew him. Suppose, on one visit, my mother had fallen asleep, or been drowsy from drugs? And there, sticking out from under her pillow, was the comer of an envelope, the letter she’d written out for me. Someone as nosy as Rennie Duke couldn’t have resisted that. A bit of water from her bedside jug dabbed along the glue line, peel it open, read the interesting contents, composed so carefully for my eyes only, but containing an address and a request. I could imagine Rennie’s features twitching like a rat on the scent of food. Press it back down while it was still damp and let it dry. It’d stick again, well enough for her not to notice. Rennie was a good PI. Not a nice one, but a good one. He’d probably been waiting in the road, wondering what to do, when I waltzed up and rang her doorbell. So he’d shelved his immediate plans and decided to follow me instead. For the foreseeable future I’d be looking over my shoulder. I groaned aloud.

‘Who’re you dodging, love?’ asked one of the LT men, amused.

I emerged from behind him. ‘Just an old boyfriend,’ I said. ‘If he’s anything like my ex-wife,’ said the man, ‘he’ll find you in the end.’

All I needed. A Job’s comforter. ‘Great,’ I said.

I spent the rest of the day at the housing department. There were advantages in going there late: fewer other applicants. On the other hand, first come, first served. They probably didn’t have a herring box left to offer me, even if they’d wanted to.

I sat on a hard chair, staring at the scuffed and scratched paintwork around me and the door of the toilet with its notice advising anyone thinking of using it to contact security at once if they found any syringes in there. Security was a small depressed man in navy trousers and blue shirt. He kept looking at his watch. It was getting near the end of the day.

A fat woman with greasy hair was berating the official at the counter. She was accompanied by a younger version of herself, bottle-blonde and spotty, with a bulging waistline. A grimy toddler in a buggy completed the unattractive trio. He was sucking a lollipop.

‘There’s eight of us in the house. It’s too bloody many. My daughter needs a place of her own. She’s got a kid and another on the way.’

The woman at the counter took details in a weary way. It had been a long day. Mother, daughter and grandchild departed. The kid dropped his lollipop on the floor as he passed me. The security man said, ‘Oi!’ in an aggrieved way, but only got a dirty look from the two women. They disappeared from view. The security man and I stared at the lollipop and then at each other, as if each willing the other to pick it up. Heck, it wasn’t my job. It wasn’t his either. The cleaner would be coming in shortly. The lollipop stayed where it was.

The woman at the counter listened to my tale of woe. She said she’d put me down for a place in a hostel though there was no guarantee. I said I didn’t want a place in a hostel. She told me, nicely, not to be choosy.

‘Have you got somewhere for tonight?’ she asked. She was trying to be helpful. But there wasn’t anything she could do.

I told her I had somewhere for that night and she gave me a look which asked what I was doing bothering her, then. I’d forgotten the lollipop, and as I tramped out I stood on it and it stuck to my boot. I had to pull it off and drop it in the waste bin. The security man was grinning from ear to ear.

‘It’s nice to know I’ve made someone happy,’ I said to him sourly.

‘That’s all right, love,’ he said kindly.

I walked home, the sticky patch on the sole of my boot attracting loose paper, cigarette ends and dead leaves. I had to keep scraping the lot off on the edge of the kerb. It had been an eventful day. I’d got a lead on the Wildes but Rennie Duke had got a lead on me. All in all, life was getting extremely complicated.

Chapter Five

I trailed along the streets, taking my time about getting home. ‘Only worry about one thing at a time!’ Grandma used to say. Fine, but how do you decide which pressing worry is at the front of the queue? Should I be beating my brains out over going to see the Wildes? Or working out what Rennie Duke was up to and where he was going to appear next? Or how I was going to explain to Hari that I wouldn’t be getting a council flat? In fact all these concerns were pushed into the background by thoughts of my mother, lying in the hospice, trusting me to be successful, to find Nicola and do it somehow without upsetting the Wildes or letting Nicola find out the truth. I decided to think of my sister as ‘Nicola’, the only name the poor kid knew she’d ever had. And then to come back and tell her all about it. To come back
in time
to tell her all about it. I couldn’t muck about. I had to get on with it.

I was so lost in these thoughts that I almost walked into someone. I was vaguely aware of a figure, stooped like Mrs Mackenzie had been, but over a waste bin, and poking about in its contents. I managed to avoid him and was going to step round him when I recognised Newspaper Norman.

‘Hi, Norman!’ I said.

If you saw Norman you’d think he was just another old wino dossing on the streets, occasionally rescued by the Salvation Army, cleaned up, fed, kitted out and five minutes later back to his scruffy unwashed self. Norman is certainly grubby enough. He has long hair and a beard, unwashed and uncombed. He wears a dirty raincoat of the sort that used to be known as a flasher’s coat, over striped pants from a morning suit and a pullover full of holes. But you’d be wrong. Norman isn’t just another old down-and-out looking for a pile of paper to make his bed that night or seeking to earn a few pence from returned copies or waste paper. Norman is a great British eccentric.

Hearing me say his name, he looked round crossly, still hunched over the waste bin, but seeing who it was he straightened up and replied graciously, ‘Good morning, my dear.’ He then glanced up at the sky and asked, ‘Or is it already afternoon?’