Risking It All (2 page)

‘They don’t buy magazines. They don’t watch videos. They sit in front of that damn box playing with mice.’

He reads all the newspapers in the shops and worries about each and every item. ‘See here? Some poor child has turned orange because of something she drank. I sell cold drinks. Suppose someone drinks something he bought here and he turns orange or pink or whatever it is and sues me?’

‘It’s not going to happen, Hari,’ we tell him. ‘It’s about as likely as space debris falling through the roof.’

‘Hah! You think this can’t happen? One piece fell on a cow in America and killed it stone dead. You think it can’t fall on me or you?’

I think he actually likes worrying. It’s a sort of hobby.

Anyway, the whole row with Ganesh had taken place the evening before events really began happening. Perhaps it was an omen heralding some sort of bug like the millennium one but only targeted at me and designed to mess up my life (again). Perhaps my stars were out of true, and if an astrologer had drawn me a personal map the planets would’ve been zig-zagging around like dodgem cars.

When Bonnie and I had finished the fried rice, I settled down in my sleeping bag and slept very badly. I don’t like being at odds with Ganesh, who is the best friend I’ve ever had or am ever likely to have. He’s always there, and although we have the occasional bust-up (as then), when things quieten down we pick up where we left off. When I first knew him he was helping his parents out in their greengrocer’s shop in Rotherhithe and I was squatting in a condemned house. In the end, developers knocked down both the squat and the little parade of shops which included the greengrocery. Mr and Mrs Patel moved out to High Wycombe because a cousin was already in business there, and anyway, people in the commuter belt have more money and buy expensive upmarket items like avocados and lemon grass. In Rotherhithe they sold an awful lot of spuds, onions and the smallest, cheapest bananas and oranges. ‘Lousy profit margins,’ explained Ganesh to me gloomily.

There wasn’t room for him in High Wycombe so he’d gone up to Camden to help his uncle in the newsagent’s. I did ask whether he’d ever contemplated working for someone not a family member but he got tetchy and said I didn’t understand. Saying I didn’t understand was Gan’s way of closing off any argument he was losing.

In our Rotherhithe days his family had always been nice to me and I’d helped out sometimes at weekends in the shop, rather as I’d been doing for Hari up here in Camden. (This family business is creeping, like ivy.) The trouble is, I don’t have one, a family, I mean. I think that’s what worries the older Patels most. It’s something they just can’t understand. I’m young, single, female and batting round on my own. It both shocks and worries them. Someone, they feel, should be looking after me. Only they don’t want it to be Ganesh. They doubtless have their own plans for him, although so far they’ve been keeping them up their sleeves. This does tend to make him jittery and he’s happy to be out of their way.

The next morning, when I woke up, still tired and fed up, I realised I was going to have to do something to patch up the quarrel, straight away. If it meant going up to the shop waving a white flag, so be it. I decided to go about a quarter to eleven. Hari and Gan usually take a coffee break then, after the early-morning paper rush. But being Saturday, the rush would be on all morning and they’d be grateful to have someone make the coffee and stand in for them in turns while the released one drank his reviver.

I went in the back way, from my garage home, through the cluttered yard and in the back door which leads to the storeroom. The storeroom is a treasure house which looks as if a whirlwind has hit it. Boxed sweets of all kinds are wedged higgledy-piggledy on the dusty shelves. Cans of soft drink are stacked in wobbly towers. In between all these are boxes of oddments like ballpoint pens and sellotape rolls, last year’s diaries (don’t ask me why; perhaps Hari hopes that somehow the date will come round again . . .) and unsold Christmas wrapping paper which Hari is definitely planning on selling next season. It looks chaotic, but believe me, Hari knows the number and location of every bar of peppermint cream or disposable cigarette lighter. I wove my way between it all and emerged into the shop.

I’d caught a brief lull between customers. Hari and Ganesh were huddled in the corner by the till, apparently arguing about something, and I was nearly upon them before either of them became aware of it. Hari saw me first. He made an urgent flapping movement of his hand to shut Ganesh up and hailed me.

‘Fran, my dear!’

Ganesh gave me a shifty look. Right, I thought, they’ve been arguing about me. Gan has been moaning about my being in the garage when I could be a lodger in the flat. Hari is starting to worry how long I’m going to be in the garage and is even more worried that if he brings me indoors the family will be on his neck. I got annoyed because I felt I was being discussed as if I was a stray cat they might adopt or not.

As it turned out, I was both right and wrong. They had been talking about me, but not about the suitability or otherwise of my accommodation.

Ganesh mumbled, ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘No, I’ll make the coffee,’ I said. ‘And then we can all three of us sit down and sort it out in a civilised way.’

‘Sort out what?’ He scowled at me.

‘My being in the garage, isn’t this all about that? You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll find somewhere else.’

A customer came in and Hari turned to him with the deeply suspicious look on his face he reserves for customers he hasn’t seen before. He’s only marginally less mistrustful of the ones he knows. Gan followed me into the washroom, where I was filling the kettle from the tap. Okay, I know it doesn’t sound very hygienic, but since Gan had the whole washroom completely renovated, while Hari was away in India just before Christmas, it’s all very clean and nice in there. There’s even a plastic air-freshener dispenser so you get overpowered by Woodland Fern as you step in.

‘We weren’t talking about that, as it happens,’ said Gan in that way he has when he’s still cross with me; sort of critical and reproachful together. It means he’s about to tell me something, for my own good, I don’t want to hear.

I plugged the kettle into the wall socket and said, ‘Oh, right?’

‘Yes, right!’ He paused, then asked in a different voice, sounding a bit embarrassed, ‘Look, Fran, you’re not in any kind of trouble, are you?’

‘What, me?’ The kettle hissed gently as it came to the boil. I put the mugs ready on the little shelf there for that purpose and spooned Nescafé into them.

‘Be serious, Fran. There’s been a bloke here asking about you.’

That shook me up. I stood with the teaspoon in one hand and the coffee jar in the other and stared at him. ‘Who?’

‘No one I’ve ever seen before.’

‘DSS checking on me?’ That seemed the obvious answer. ‘Perhaps they think I’m drawing the dole and still working here.’

‘You can have your job back when business picks up,’ said Ganesh, diverted. Then he said, ‘No, it wasn’t them. Anyone can recognise them straight away.’

‘Not the cops?’ I was beginning to get just a tad nervous.

‘Not the regular sort. Here, he left his card.’ Ganesh fished a battered piece of white card from his jeans back pocket and held it out to me though I hadn’t a free hand to take it. The kettle boiled.

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. I made the coffee, put down the spoon and took the card.

‘This is a wind-up,’ I said when I’d scanned it.

‘He’s got business cards printed, how can it be? He must be who he says he is.’

‘Gan,’ I said patiently, ‘no one, but no one, has the name Clarence Duke.’

‘Why not?’ Ganesh was genuinely puzzled.

‘Because he was the bloke who drowned in a cask of malmsey. The Duke of Clarence, I mean. I know my Shakespeare.
Richard the Third.’

My ambition, yet to be fulfilled, is to be an actor. I know I didn’t actually complete the dramatic arts course I went on after being expelled from school, but that, as they say, was for reasons beyond my control.

‘What’s malmsey?’ asked Ganesh.

I said I thought it was a sort of sweet wine. Gan said he’d never seen that one in Oddbins. I asked if he’d ever looked. Anyway, it was something they drank in the Middle Ages. Gan said he thought that was mead.

‘And he must have been pretty well tanked up if he fell in and drowned.’

‘The story has it, he was pushed.’

‘Not another one of your murders,’ groaned Ganesh.

We were getting off the point here but I didn’t want us falling out again. I didn’t even argue that the murder investigations I’d got caught up in were not, in any sense, ‘my’ murders. What am I? Lizzie Borden?

‘This Duke,’ I said, tapping the white card. ‘If he’s a private detective as it says here, he may be using an alias.’

‘He uses a Mazda 323,’ said Ganesh, being difficult. ‘A jade-coloured one. And he wants to find you, Fran.’

‘Ha, ha. What for? Hey, perhaps I’m heiress to a fortune and don’t know it.’

‘More likely they want you for a witness. Private eyes do a lot of work for solicitors these days, digging out missing witnesses and so on. Have you been on the scene of any trouble lately? I mean, since the last lot.’

I studied the card.

INVESTIGATIONS OF ALL KINDS UNDERTAKEN.
WE ARE KNOWN FOR TACT AND RELIABILITY.

Who were ‘we’? I was willing to bet that Clarence Duke, if that really was his moniker, was a one-man band. His card looked the sort you print out yourself at one of those machines. Perhaps I ought to print some for myself. I’m by way of being a private detective. Oh, not a proper one, no office or anything like that. That means National Insurance contributions and tax returns, things which haven’t figured very large in my life so far.

I’ve had a lot of other jobs, all sorts, while working towards getting my Equity card. Whatever I do, it never seems to last more than a few weeks, so that’s why I thought I’d be an enquiry agent. That and the fact that I’ve had a little experience in these matters. (What I call ‘experience’ Ganesh tends to call ‘trouble’.) Anyway, I’m prepared to take on enquiries (‘run into trouble’, in Ganspeak) for people who can’t go through the usual channels. Now, Clarence of the business card, he was one step up from me. He’d got stationery and probably an office in his front room and perhaps his wife or girlfriend manning the phone. That last was guesswork but I’d bet on it. One thing I was sure of, I didn’t want to meet him. I said so.

‘What did you tell him, Gan? And what exactly did he ask, anyway?’

‘He understood we’d employed you in the past. Did we have a current address for you? I said you hadn’t worked here since the Christmas rush . . .’

‘Rush?’ I interrupted. ‘In this shop?’

‘Hey, we do all right. Could be better but we do all right. I told Duke I had no address for you, and the way I see it, I wasn’t lying. I couldn’t have told him you were camped out in Hari’s garage, could I? Even if I had been prepared to tell him anything, which I wasn’t.’

‘Was he satisfied?’

Ganesh looked uneasy. ‘I think so.’

I took Hari his cooling coffee. ‘Ganesh has told me about the private detective,’ I said.

‘A very strange fellow,’ said Hari disapprovingly.

‘What did he look like?’ It suddenly occurred to me that I might have run across Clarence Duke, under some other unlikely name, at another period in my eventful life.

Ganesh wandered up and he and Hari exchanged looks. ‘Short,’ said Hari, taking first turn.

‘Moustache,’ added Ganesh. ‘Bit straggly.’

‘Jeans and a leather jacket,’ said Hari, brightening. ‘Yes, yes, I remember.’

‘Bad teeth,’ said Gan. ‘Needed to see a dentist.’

‘Why do I get a private eye who looks like a health warning?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t I get the ones who look like Jonathan Creek?’

‘This is real life,’ said Gan.

‘They must be out there somewhere, the dishy ones.’

‘Probably, but they’re not interested in you, Fran.’

That’s what friends are for. To destroy your fragile self-esteem. I thanked them both for not telling Clarence Duke where to find me, and resolved to avoid anyone short with a moth-eaten moustache and galloping halitosis.

As it happened, Hari wanted to leave the shop for a couple of hours that afternoon and asked if I could put in some temporary time. We agreed I should be paid cash, just to avoid awkwardness – should Clarence Duke be working for the DSS after all.