Keeping Bad Company

by Ann Granger

  ‘You seen ’em?’ he croaked.

  ‘No, mate, we’ve been busy,’ said Ganesh. ‘You want a hot dog? Buy two, get one free. That makes three,’ he added.

  He got a glassy stare.

  ‘You see nothin’, no kids?’

  Merv wasn’t as thick as he looked. He was suspicious.

  Help came unexpectedly. The tart with the silver jacket said, ‘I seen a bunch of kids. They was round our way earlier. Joyriders, that’s what they are. They’re always hotrodding round there. Residents got a petition up to put them bumps in the road.’ She eyed Merv. ‘You on your own? Or you with a mate? ’Cos me and my friend, we know a nice little club.’

  Merv gave his by now familiar growl and went back into the pub.

  ‘Well, I didn’t fancy him, anyway,’ said Silver Jacket.

  Red Leggings saved dripping mustard from her hot dog by curling her tongue lizard-fashion to catch it. ‘He looked like a bloomin’ nutter to me,’ she said.

  Ganesh was climbing down from the rear of the van.

  ‘Are you satisfied?’ he asked. ‘Now can we go?’

  Chapter Four

  Somehow I couldn’t get to sleep that night. 1 kept thinking about Merv, his bashed-up motor and Albie and all the rest of it. I had a bruise just below my left shoulder blade from my encounter with the bar and a personal debt to settle with Merv over that. It spurred my resolve but didn’t help me get my ideas in order.

  There was another problem. I’d been right to worry about that windowless little bedroom beneath the pavement. Try as I might, I couldn’t relax in it. It was unnatural and there was no way I could come to terms with it. The air was stifling even though I’d left the door open. I also kept the door open because otherwise I was sealed in.

  I tossed and turned as I stared into the darkness and juggled the oddly assorted scraps of information at my disposal. Like the kaleidoscope I’d had as a kid, each time I tapped my assembled facts, they reformed to make a different picture. The only thing the pictures had in common was that they were all lurid, all tangled and all vulnerable. There was no scenario that was simple, logical and unshakable. Nothing signposted the way to go with my investigations.

  From time to time footsteps passed overhead and echoed eerily around my little room. The sense of being buried alive increased. Tomorrow, I decided, I’d make up a bed on the sofa in the living room. This was definitely the last time I’d sleep in a catacomb. Like a mantra, I began to mutter, over and over:

  ‘Now I lay me down to sleep,

  I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep.

  If I should die before I wake,

  I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take.’

  That was keeping it simple and dealing with the basics. The words ran round and round inside my throbbing head. The feeling of being trapped and of being in danger increased. My brain was as scrambled as any kaleidoscope. I was afraid to go to sleep in case I dreamed. But despite that, eventually I must have dozed off.

  I awoke with a start and a dreadful sense of claustrophobia, even worse than earlier. I didn’t know what time it was but I knew it must be after midnight. Despite it being so late, someone was walking up there, above my head.

  I’d heard feet earlier but this was different. These feet didn’t march assertively or patter briskly past. This was a slow, even footfall and every so often, it paused. I wondered for a moment whether it could possibly be a copper on the beat. But coppers don’t pound the beat the way they used to. They drive round, in pairs.

  The man above was moving again. I knew it was a man. The footfall was too heavy for a woman and men place their feet differently to the ground. He walked another few steps and stopped again, this time directly overhead, over the thick opaque glass of the skylight.

  I knew he couldn’t see me, any more than I could see him. But I knew he was up there and he – I had no doubt of it – knew I was down here, in my cell beneath the ground.

  I sat up in bed, swung my feet to the ground and waited. There was a grille set in the door of the room so that I couldn’t suffocate in here but there was no draught, just a still, warm smothering air. And quiet. So quiet I might, if I hadn’t known better, have thought he’d gone away. But I did know better. I knew, because I could hear him thinking.

  I saw a telepathy act once at an amateur variety night. I was also part of the night’s programme. I was the drummer in the all-girl band. All right, I don’t play the drums very well, but the others didn’t play guitar very well. We were terrible. Anyhow, this act was good. We knew it was rigged, it had to be, but we none of us could see how the man rigged it and he wasn’t telling. Otherwise, I didn’t believe in telepathy. Or I hadn’t done until that moment, when sitting on my bed and listening, I seemed to hear a kind of echo inside my brain. The sense of the unknown prowler’s presence was overwhelming. I almost thought I could hear him breathing, though that would be impossible. But for a moment there, it was as if his mind and mine had touched.

  Cold sweat trickled down my spine. I didn’t dare switch on the light because that would’ve glowed up through the glass disc. I didn’t move again. I forced myself to suggest explanations and knew that I was grasping at straws. He’d stopped to light a cigarette, I told myself. Less innocently, he could be a burglar, sizing up the house and contemplating entry. I ought to make a noise, let him know someone was awake and aware of him.

  My brain rejected this feeble suggestion at once. ‘No, he’s not,’ a pert little voice argued. ‘He’s looking for you, Fran. He wants to know where you live. He wants to know about you. He’s looking around, compiling a dossier in his mind.’

  Above my head, feet scraped and the footsteps began again, moving away, moving more quickly, as if he were satisfied and had found out what he wanted to know. He was gone. I knew he had left completely, and wouldn’t be coming back, not that night at least. I was alone again.

  I let out my breath with a long sigh, not having been aware I’d been holding it. I got up and padded to my kitchenette to make a cup of tea, switching on every light in the flat as I went.

  I turned on my telly as well for a bit of company, longing to hear human voices. It was two in the morning and the reception was perfect, wouldn’t you know it? No double-vision. No snow-storm. They were showing an ancient black-and-white film. I settled down to watch, nursing my mug of tea, returning to normal.

  The film was about medieval villagers hunting out a witch who was saved in the last reel by the return of her crusader lover. They’d obviously been on a tight budget because they’d employed so few extras. There must have been lots of out-of-work actors like me who’d have given their eye-teeth just to be a bystander in the crowd with a chance to shake their fists at the camera. Yet whether dressed as peasants, or in saggy chainmail and partly disguised by helmets which looked as if they’d been fashioned from tin bowls and probably had, the same familiar few faces kept running past the cameras.

  It distracted me for a while. But eventually the film finished and my worries came back. If you’re a young woman and live alone, as I did, the risk of a stalker hanging around the place is always there. They see you around the area, follow you home. Sometimes it gets no further than that. They get bored and seek out other prey. Or they get frightened off.

  If that was all he’d been, I could deal with it. But another possibility had occurred to me, that the visit had to do with Albie. If so, then logically the visitor had been Merv, yet I didn’t believe it. I’d seen Merv walk. I recalled how he’d padded with dull muffled tread in his trainers towards Dilip’s hot-dog stall. My man had worn stouter, heavy-heeled footwear. However, it was unlikely that Merv had been drinking alone and Albie himself had seen two men. So, had my visitor been the other man?

  Ganesh had warned me about blundering into the pub but the opportunity had been too tempting to pass up. Had my rashness aroused suspicion and had Merv’s companion decided to check me out?

  It was a thought which sent my already jittery mind spinning
off in several directions, conjuring up a variety of alarming possibilities. What if the two men seen by Albie to snatch the girl had realised they’d been observed? Once they’d got the girl away to a hiding place, they might have gone back with the intention of silencing the witness. Not finding him, had they, like Gan and me, gone looking for him? Suppose the other man had been following Albie on that fateful morning of our encounter at Marylebone? The stranger’s intention had been to waylay the old fellow, but he’d been thwarted when Albie settled down to talk to me. Subsequently Ganesh had joined us. The follower might have decided at this point that three was a crowd and left, intending to await another occasion when Albie might be found alone. But before he’d left he’d had time to get a good look at me and had recognised me when I’d walked into The Rose the previous evening. If this was what had happened, then I’d really walked into trouble.

  I cursed my rashness. It was all very well saying that I couldn’t have known, but I ought to have thought more about it. Instead I had sought out Merv, an action too suspicious to overlook. I had truly become a player in the game. Until now, I could have reasoned that by reporting Albie’s story to the police, I’d done all I could as a good citizen. But not now. Out there on the streets was an elderly, frail man who carried a dangerous memory in his fuddled brain. It was a memory I shared and someone suspected it.

  I was yawning by now and nodding my head. It was beginning to get light outside and with the grey dawn, all my fears began to fade into foolish nightmares, probably induced by the extra cheese on my potato. Perhaps I was wrong about everything.

  ‘Your trouble, Fran,’ I told myself, ‘is that you’ve got too much imagination!’

  I went back to bed. It really wasn’t so bad in the underground room with daylight seeping through the opaque glass overhead. With the new day, last night’s walker became a man who’d stopped to light a cigarette. A Cortina parked outside The Rose had been coincidence. Albie’s original tale could be dismissed as the rambling of an alcohol-ravaged brain. I could even choose to blame the railway, with everything stemming from a cold wait on Marylebone Station, which had led me to pay altogether too much attention to the incoherent mumblings of an old wino, building a regular house of cards on those poor foundations.

  I couldn’t allow myself to sleep late because I had to go over to Jimmie’s and meet Angus the Artist. I crawled out, heavy-eyed, at around eight and got myself together, washed my hair, which doesn’t take long because I keep it very short, and got into my comfy old jeans. If I was going to be an artist’s model, I supposed I ought to make a bit of an effort so I dug out my turquoise silk shirt and quilted dark blue Indian waistcoat, both of which I’d found on a nearly new stall at Camden Market just after I’d moved in to the flat. I yawned and hoped Jimmie’s coffee would wake me up.

  So, there I was, more or less ready for the day, and just about to leave the flat when someone rang the doorbell. One thing I wasn’t ready for was visitors. To begin with, normally I didn’t get any, other than Ganesh and occasionally Daphne from upstairs. It was too early for Ganesh and a bit on the early side for Daphne. She knew I tended to sleep late. And no one sends me parcels.

  I went to the window that gave on to the basement well and peered out. A man was standing before my front door, his back to me. His jacket, which was a sort of sage green overlaid with a grille of white squares, was unknown to me. But the solid build of the wearer and his cropped ginger hair rang a bell-a warning bell. While I was trying to place him, he turned round. Either he had eyes in the back of his head or he’d sensed I was scrutinising him through the window. He came to rest his palms on the outer sill and stared at me through the glass.

  Eyeball to eyeball, there was no mistaking him. It was my old adversary, Sergeant Parry.

  ‘Can I come in?’ he mouthed, words muffled by the glass and the echo off the basement walls.

  My heart sank. I had no idea what he wanted, or why he was even lurking in this neck of the woods. I would find out, no doubt, very soon.

  ‘Surprise!’ he said when I opened the door. He grinned at me evilly.

  ‘Hullo,’ I said in what I hoped was a deflating tone. ‘I’m just going out.’

  ‘Won’t take a moment, Fran,’ he lied.

  ‘Miss Varady to you,’ I told him. ‘Come in, then.’

  He came marching in and made himself at home, settling down on the sofa. ‘Got a cup of tea to spare, then, Miss Varady?’

  ‘No. What do you want?’ I asked him. ‘And what are you doing around here, anyway?’

  ‘I work out of the local nick now,’ he informed me. ‘And you’ve been down there, Fran, I hear. Now that interests me. Fran Varady going to the police? Gotta be a story worth hearing.’

  He’d read the daybook, that’s what he’d done, and seen the entry. It was just my luck that he was now gracing the local CID with his unlovely presence. He was still trying to grow a moustache and still having little luck with it.

  ‘Ask the desk sergeant,’ I said. ‘He can tell you all about it.’

  Parry shook his head. ‘You tell me all about it, eh?’

  He didn’t sound so much encouraging as minatory. He’d never been my friend and I doubt he was anyone’s friend. He had what Grandma Varady would have described as a nasty, suspicious mind, and no social skills. Neither, looking at that jacket, did he have any dress sense. He did have a shaving rash, though, on his throat. Red hair and sensitive skins go together. But if his skin was sensitive to soap, it was as thick as an elephant’s in other respects. DS Parry wasn’t New Man. He was an old-style bullyboy armed with a police ID, and he was sitting on my sofa, resentful at being refused the tea. But at least he’d arrived in broad daylight and rung the bell. Parry’s style was to barge in, not prowl around outside. Nothing subtle about him.

  I repeated my tale about Albie and hoped that he’d get up and go away satisfied. I should have known better. Nothing satisfies Parry except getting the better of you, preferably in sadistic fashion.

  I told you I don’t feel this way about all policemen. Mostly I don’t have any opinion about them. It’s just that I didn’t like Parry and accepted he didn’t like me. But at least we understood one another.

  He listened in silence, mouth turned down disapprovingly beneath the mangy ginger moustache.

  ‘And you took this load of cobblers seriously?’ he asked at last, when I’d finished.

  ‘Yes, that’s why I went and reported it. Not that it did any good. I’m not surprised we’ve got the crime rate we have. People take the trouble to go and tell you someone’s been snatched off the street and no one takes it seriously.’

  Even as I spoke the words, I realised I was wrong. Lack of sleep and surprise at seeing Parry had momentarily clouded my thought processes. Now the truth hit me, as they say, in a blinding flash. Parry wouldn’t waste time on me if someone wasn’t taking something seriously.

  It wasn’t that they were inclined to pay an awful lot of attention to me. They wouldn’t be interested in anything I had to say in the normal run of affairs. The only reason they were conceivably interested enough in what I’d reported to bring Parry over here was because what I’d told them tied in with something they already knew.

  I settled back in my chair and smiled at Parry, which gave me the added satisfaction of seeing him look startled. ‘There’s been a snatch,’ I said. ‘Albie’s right. I’m right. And you lot are keeping it quiet for some reason.’

  So under wraps were they keeping it that not even the desk plod knew. This was a CID special.

  It was taking him a moment to adjust to the fact that he’d lost the initiative. He played for time. ‘Go on, make us that cuppa, love.’

  The words were wheedling but the tone wasn’t. It was a mix of peremptory and patronising. I stifled my instinctive reaction and got up to make him his tea. I’d won one round and letting him have this little victory was bearable. Besides, it was a sacrifice in a greater cause. I wanted to keep him happy, because I
wanted him to relax, and tell me a bit more than he probably intended.

  ‘To begin with,’ he said, when we restarted and he’d slurped at his hot tea, ‘you’ve got it wrong. There’s been no snatch.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I agreed.

  ‘Don’t be clever, Fran.’ Parry put down his mug. ‘Not with me. You’ve got a smart mouth and you don’t mind using it. It even impresses some people, but it doesn’t impress me, right? I’m not going to sit here and tell you there’s been a kidnapping on the manor. So I’m telling you there hasn’t been one, right?’

  ‘Right, sergeant,’ I said meekly.

  He gave me a suspicious look. ‘But if there had been one, right? Only if. . .’ he paused but I said nothing, ‘then it’d have to be handled very carefully and professionally by the police. There’s procedures for handling kidnappings. A technique, if you like. We wouldn’t want publicity, Fran. We wouldn’t want you wandering around shooting off that mouth of yours about things.’