A Lesser Evil

by Lesley Pearse

  But now John was dead, and as Frank had pointed out earlier to Fifi, it was unlikely to be pure coincidence that two people from the same street had been murdered. Nora felt that something more than gambling must have been going on in number 11, and almost certainly John was killed because he intended to expose it.

  She knew that she ought to go to the police right now and tell them about Jack Trueman, but they would ask why she hadn’t come forward before. When she was interviewed after Angela’s death she’d been asked if she knew or could describe anyone who attended the card games, but she’d told them quite brusquely that she wasn’t in the habit of watching out of her window. To backtrack now was impossible. She couldn’t name Trueman without explaining how she knew him and that would mean exposing her past and putting herself in danger.

  She walked over to the window and looked out. There was a police car outside number 13. ‘Poor Vera,’ she murmured and her eyes welled up with tears of sympathy.

  Frank spent the early part of the evening cleaning his kitchen and tidying cupboards, and only went into his living room when it was dark outside. He moved over to the window to draw the curtains before turning on the light, but paused as he saw Yvette coming out of her house. To his surprise she was hand-in-hand with a man.

  After all the misery and anxiety of the past weeks, and the news of John’s death today, the sight cheered Frank slightly. He liked the Frenchwoman and in all the years she had lived opposite he’d never known her to have a boyfriend. It was too dark to see if she was dressed up to go somewhere special, but it looked as if she was undecided about something, for she was pulling back.

  Frank smiled as the man put his arms around her. Yvette had been living like a hermit for so many years that perhaps she was reluctant to go out. But Frank drew the curtains, not wishing to seem like a nosy neighbour, and he heard the car drive off seconds later.

  He turned on the lamp and television and sat down, but as he reached for his pipe he thought he might go and knock at Stan’s door later and suggest they went down to the Rifleman. He’d become almost as reclusive as Yvette in the last few weeks, and it was time he stopped this.

  *

  The following morning Fifi left the house for work at quarter past eight. She had hardly slept at all, for images of Angela, Dan, and even John Bolton’s body being pulled from the river kept crowding into her head.

  It was drizzling and rather cold, and as she walked up the street she thought gloomily of the winter months ahead. The windows in the flat were ill-fitting, the gas fire was ancient and inefficient, and she guessed she’d be frozen most of the time. If Dan didn’t come home when he got her letter, perhaps it would be best to try to find a bedsitter, for being miserable but warm had to be better than being miserable and cold.

  She was halfway to the tube when a blue car slowed right down and cruised alongside her. There were two men in it, both in their late twenties or early thirties.

  ‘Hey, Fifi!’ the passenger called out of the window. ‘You are Fifi, aren’t you? Dan said you were tall, blonde and beautiful!’

  Fifi’s heart leaped at Dan’s name. Both men looked like workmen as they were wearing donkey jackets.

  ‘Yes, I’m Fifi,’ she said, stopping and bending down slightly so she could see the men better. The driver had dark red curly hair, and she thought he must be the carpenter Dan always called ‘Red’. He looked a bit hard and surly. The other man had light brown hair and no real distinguishing features; he was unshaven, but he had a nice smile. ‘How is Dan?’ she asked.

  ‘It is you! Thank Christ for that,’ the man in the passenger seat exclaimed. ‘We called at your house but you must have just left. We’ve seen at least six blondes so far, and two of them gave us a mouthful when we called out. I think they thought we were kerb crawlers. You see, Dan asked us to come and get you. He’s been taken ill.’

  Fifi was instantly thrown into a panic. ‘What’s wrong with him? Where is he?’ she asked.

  The passenger got out of the car and pulled his seat forward to let her get in the back. ‘Hop in and we’ll explain as we drive you there,’ he said.

  The rush-hour traffic was heavy, but the driver turned right off Kennington Road past the Imperial War Museum towards Camberwell.

  The brown-haired passenger introduced himself as Martin, and the red-headed driver as Del.

  ‘Some of us went out to do some work on Sunday for the boss,’ Martin said, turning in his seat to speak to Fifi. ‘It’s out Eltham way. Your Dan weren’t himself at all, but then he’d had a lot to drink on Saturday night. But come the evening he were worse and the boss said he’d better stay the night. Anyways, he weren’t any better yesterday and couldn’t go into work. The boss said he kept asking for you during the night, so he told us to come and get you and take you out there.’

  Fifi was very alarmed. Dan was never ill, and he was also far too independent to dump himself on anyone, especially someone like his boss. He had to be seriously ill.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she exclaimed. ‘What is it?’

  Martin shrugged. ‘The boss said he had a kind of fever, high temperature and that. He’s too weak to get up.’

  ‘Did the boss call a doctor?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno, but I expect so,’ Martin said. ‘He only called us and told us to get you.’

  Fifi had no idea where Eltham was, what it was like or how far it was. But as she asked more questions about Dan and received only very brief, occasionally rather curt answers, she got the impression the men were a bit cross at being expected to act as a taxi.

  On top of her anxiety about Dan, she was worried about not turning up at work too. It would look bad after only one day back. But Dan was her main concern, and she wondered if he could’ve slept rough on Saturday night and caught a chill. It had been wet and cold after all, and if he’d got very drunk he wouldn’t have noticed. Suppose he’d got pneumonia?

  ‘I thought Arnie lived in Essex,’ she said, suddenly remembering something Dan had told her.

  ‘Who?’ Martin asked without looking round.

  ‘The boss,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, he’s not the top man,’ Martin said airily. ‘He’s just the site manager. Ken’s the real boss, but he don’t come down the site that much, he’s more on the planning side.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Fifi said, and lapsed into silence again.

  They passed through New Cross and Lewisham, places she’d heard of but never been to.

  ‘Are we nearly there now?’ she asked as she saw they had left behind the Victorian terraces of Lewisham and were in a wider, more pleasant road with many trees and some newly built houses.

  ‘Yeah, nearly,’ Del the driver said.

  All at once they were driving along a dual carriageway in semi-countryside. There were houses, semi-detached ones built probably in the thirties or forties, with attractive gardens, but fields behind them. It was the kind of area she expected a building-site boss to live in. It reminded her of Henbury back in Bristol.

  All at once they turned off the wide road into a smaller one, then into a very narrow lane, with hedges on either side so she couldn’t see where they were going.

  It was only then that Fifi felt a twinge of unease. She didn’t know where she was, she had very little money on her, and she’d never met either of these men before today. Perhaps she shouldn’t have got into the car quite so readily?

  But she dismissed these thoughts as ridiculous. Of course they were taking her to Dan, why else would they come looking for her? It was wonderful that Dan wanted her with him, and once she got to his boss’s house she’d be able to telephone the office and explain.

  The lane was very muddy and went steeply uphill. Fifi sat forward in her seat, expecting to see a house at the end of it. But as they reached the top, all at once they were in a wide open space which went on for miles. All she could see was a big barn and a few sheds.

  ‘Where’s the house?’ she asked. The rain was heavy now, drumming on the ca
r roof, so perhaps this was why the barn looked so sinister and remote.

  ‘Oh, the house!’ Martin exclaimed. ‘It’s behind the barn, you can’t see it from here.’

  Fifi noticed he had a hard edge to his voice and she didn’t like his furtive glance at Del.

  Her heart plummeted as she realized she had been conned. The whole thing about Dan being sick was just a ruse to get her out here. Why, she didn’t know, but she felt it was most definitely the kind of danger Yvette had warned her of.

  Common sense told her she mustn’t show she suspected anything. She must play along with them, and as soon as they let her out of the car she’d make a run for it.

  But as Martin opened the car door, she looked down at her shoes. They were her favourite ones, with very pointed toes but comfortable, the heels only a couple of inches. She wouldn’t be able to run in them, though, not on rough ground. Her skirt was tight too; they’d catch her in no time.

  ‘Out you come then,’ Martin said as he pulled forward his seat to let her out and held out his hand to her.

  Del got out on his side, and skirting round the back of the car, he grabbed Fifi’s free arm, making flight impossible anyway.

  Just the way they held her proved her fears were completely justified. ‘Dan’s not here, is he?’ she said bleakly. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘Don’t you ever stop asking questions?’ Martin said impatiently, not even looking at her. ‘Come on or we’ll get soaked.’

  She tried to pull herself free, but they were holding her too tightly, and they frogmarched her towards the barn.

  Fifi struggled, and looked around her desperately. It was just on nine in the morning, but there was no one in sight. Not a man with a dog, a farmer driving a tractor, no one. She couldn’t see any house. There was a wood to her right, which possibly had a house beyond it, but nothing else, just acres and acres of stubble from wheat or barley that had recently been harvested.

  The sheds and barn were robust-looking constructions. The barn was built of some kind of metal and on the door were two hefty chains and huge padlocks. She was really scared now; she could hear her own heart pounding and her stomach was churning. Martin held her tightly while Del unlocked the barn door.

  ‘Please tell me what this is all about,’ she pleaded with them. ‘I haven’t done anything to you. Why should you want to hurt me? Where is Dan? Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Shut up, can’t you?’ Del said as he opened the big door, then grabbed her right arm again. The barn was empty but for a couple of bales of straw, and she dug her heels in, refusing to walk until they told her what was going on.

  They looked rattled, but they just caught her arms and dragged her across the straw-strewn floor towards what looked like a kind of big cage. ‘This is where you’ll stay until the boss decides what’s got to be done with you,’ Del informed her, and opening the door to it, pushed her through and locked it. ‘Shout all you like, there’s no one around to hear you. We’ll be back later.’

  ‘Don’t go yet,’ she pleaded with them, going up to the bars and holding on to them because her legs felt as if they would give way. ‘Just tell me why. What have I done?’ she asked, and tears ran down her cheeks.

  She saw no sympathy in Del’s face, just the desire to get back in the car and go. But Martin looked uncomfortable.

  ‘There’s some water and a blanket.’ He pointed to the corner of the cage.

  ‘Don’t do this,’ she cried out. ‘My parents will lean on the police once they know I’m missing. I work for a solicitor, I’m not someone that can just vanish without anyone worrying!’

  ‘You talk too much,’ Del replied, looking at her dispassionately. ‘Come on, Mart. Let’s go.’

  She screamed then, so loud she felt she could be heard for miles around. But it made no difference to them. They walked off, slamming the barn door behind them, and she heard the clank of the chain as they locked the padlock.

  A few seconds later she heard the car drive off.

  She didn’t scream any more, she knew only too well there was no one to hear, and if she kept quiet, if someone did come by she’d hear them. But she couldn’t stop herself crying, or cursing herself for the stupidity of getting into a car with people she didn’t know.

  By ten o’clock Fifi had gone right round the cage inspecting it, but found no weak spot in the bars or any implement which might help to free her. She thought the cage had been made for securing valuable merchandise, perhaps spirits, in a warehouse. It was constructed of steel, with a slightly raised wooden floor, and far too tough to break or bend. It was some ten feet square, and there were track marks to it from the barn door, which suggested a forklift had been used to place it here. It couldn’t have been here long either, for there were no spider’s webs or dust on it.

  She had nothing remotely useful in her handbag; she’d already tried to pick the padlock with her nail file and the end had broken off. She didn’t even have a book or a newspaper to pass the time with.

  The barn was very big, taller than a double-decker bus, and gloomy because the only light came from horizontal narrow windows right up by the roof. There was enough space for dozens of tractors or other farm machinery, but the absence of anything, even rubbish, suggested it had been cleared out fairly recently and hadn’t been used for anything since.

  The mattress and the blanket on it were in good condition, dry to the touch and clean-smelling, as if they had only recently been brought here from someone’s home. That at least suggested that whoever was behind her abduction wasn’t entirely inhuman, but it might also mean he was intending to keep her here for some time.

  Fifi sat down on the mattress and tried to think how long it would be before someone got anxious about her. At the office they wouldn’t do anything. They couldn’t phone her home, and as they didn’t know Dan had left her, there was no reason why they’d find her absence anything more than irritating. Frank would wonder where she was when she didn’t come home tonight, but it would be a couple of days before he found it worrying. Miss Diamond would be the same.

  All Fifi could hope for was that Dan would get the letter she sent and go round to the flat. But he’d most likely think that she’d gone out straight from work with one of the girls from the office. Would he wait for her to come home? And if he did, might he think she was spending the night with another man?

  Frank might tell him about the men calling this morning! He’d smell a rat at that, surely?

  She sighed deeply as she realized they had almost certainly lied about that. If they meant her harm they wouldn’t have presented themselves to a neighbour who could later identify them. They’d probably just waited in their car at the end of the road until they saw her.

  However she looked at it, no one was going to be worried about her for at least two days, possibly longer. And even then, how would anyone find her? How would they know where to even start looking?

  Yvette’s warning kept reverberating in her head, and she had no doubt that this had something to do with her going to the police on Saturday. But how did they find out? And how did they know Dan hadn’t been with her all weekend?

  She mentally collated all the scraps of information she’d collected over the past weeks, and she realized that someone at Dan’s work must be connected to Alfie and his card games. It was probably he who set up the attack in the alley, tipping off Alfie about what time Dan would be leaving the site. And when Dan said he’d walked out on her, this same man saw a golden opportunity to grab her.

  But there were dozens of men working on the building site – any one of them could be one of Alfie Muckle’s relatives or cronies. She wondered if Dan had ever talked about how she was always going on about the murder, or how she watched out of the window? She couldn’t imagine him doing so, but maybe if he was growing irritated with her he had to let off steam?

  But why snatch her? What possible use could she be to them? She’d already told everything she knew to the police!

&nbs
p; As the morning slowly ticked by, Fifi became more and more frantic. People didn’t get snatched or abducted for no reason, it was either to shut them up or to hold them to ransom. The latter seemed unlikely in her case; people in the street knew she was more or less estranged from her family, and they weren’t rich anyway. Therefore the reason for her being here must be to shut her up.

  She had to suppose John Bolton was killed because he knew too much. But what did they think she knew? Did they think she’d seen something more from her window?

  Dan had often talked about the police tipping the wink to villains who had paid them. Could it be that the man in the Jaguar had been told she’d recognized him as one of the men who played cards at Alfie’s?

  That had to be it. Perhaps he was afraid she’d be called upon to pick him out in an identity parade.

  Whatever their reasons for wanting her, there was a cold certainty about the way it would end. They’d have to kill her, for she could identify the men who had brought her here.

  Just the thought of that brought her out in a cold sweat, and her heart beat faster. She wished to God she’d never gone to that council depot.

  Chapter fifteen

  Frank was washing up his supper things when he saw Dan come in through the front door. ‘Hello, Dan,’ he called out. ‘First sighting of you in days. Been doing overtime?’

  As Frank spoke, he left the kitchen and went down the hall towards Dan. He saw that the lad didn’t look his usual glowing self. He was positively gaunt, with dark circles beneath his eyes.

  ‘Yeah, overtime,’ Dan replied, but he didn’t look directly at Frank. ‘Must go, things to do.’

  Disappointed that Dan didn’t want to chat, and a little concerned at his appearance, Frank watched him walk up the stairs, noting that he wasn’t in his work clothes. Could he have lost his job and didn’t want to admit it?