Keeping Bad Company

by Ann Granger

  They see life as being one of those questionnaires with little boxes that you tick or cross according to your circumstances. Tick enough of them and you are Doing All Right. Too many crosses and you’re seriously disadvantaged. They assume we all want the things our consumer society reckons essential to health and happiness. But what about the ability to find hope and happiness in little things? Some people would look at me and say my life wasn’t worth much. They say it about the severely disabled, the mentally ill and drink-sodden old dossers like Albie. I’m not saying Albie’s life-style couldn’t have been improved. But the last I’d seen of him, he’d been making for the porch with a half-bottle of Bell’s and the prospect of finding his mate Jonty. He’d been quite happy. True, he’d just had a nasty experience from which Gan and I had saved him, but he’d forgotten it already. It was a pity he’d done that. He might be alive now if he’d scared more easily or if the prospect of a drink hadn’t numbed his brain to more important things.

  Unwarily, I said, ‘He must’ve stayed around the church.’

  ‘Whazzat?’ I swear Parry’s nose and ears quivered.

  So I had to tell him all about the previous evening’s adventures. ‘I wanted to persuade him to come with me to see you,’ I concluded. ‘I wasn’t interfering. I was trying to help.’

  I suppose I sounded defiant. He grunted and said, ‘We were looking for the stupid old git as well. I sent a man I could ill-afford to spare to check out Marylebone and Paddington railway stations and every tube station between there and Oxford Circus. I even went myself to that old church, the one he reckoned saw the snatch from. He wasn’t there. There was another bloke hanging around, stank to high heaven. It wasn’t Albie and he scurried off when he saw me. They’re never so far gone they don’t recognise the police!’

  ‘Probably,’ I muttered, ‘because you’re so obvious! You were there too early. He came later and so did the two men looking for him. Albie saw the snatch from the porch of St Agatha’s, just the way he said. But the kidnappers realised he’d seen them, so they came back last night to silence him. I’m pretty sure I recognised one of them. He’s called Merv, a big bloke with an Arsenal supporters’ tattoo and nearly white hair. He drinks at the Rose and drives a scratched blue Cortina. The Cortina Albie saw the girl bundled into – and I saw last night when they tried to grab Albie!’

  ‘A burned-out Cortina was reported last night,’ Parry said, a tad thoughtfully. ‘Alongside the park. Fire engines called out to it at four in the morning. No sign of anyone in it. Firecrew reckoned it might’ve been joyriders who torched the motor when they’d finished with it.’

  ‘Merv and his chum knew Ganesh and I saw the car,’ I explained as patiently as I could. ‘So they got rid of it.’

  Parry was still in an argumentative mood. ‘If you’re right, and they came back to take out a witness, why didn’t they leave his body in the car before they torched it? That way they’d have got rid of him altogether, give or take a few charred bones.’

  No wonder our crime rate is what it is.

  ‘If the firecrew discovered a charred body in the car, the police would set about identifying it,’ I pointed out. ‘If, in some way, it was found to be Albie’s – and Merv couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t be – then you’d want to know what the hell Albie was doing in a car. They wanted Albie dead, but it had to be in some way that’d look like an accident. Unfortunately for them, Gan and I saw them earlier, trying to grab Albie off the street!’

  Parry fixed me with his bloodshot gaze. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘They know you saw them – and they saw you.’

  That shut me up. They had seen me. They might even come looking for both Ganesh and me. I remembered the incident two nights before. That had been bad enough. Just a solitary stroller had got my imagination working overtime with creating scary scenarios. Now there was a real possibility of flesh and blood thugs on my trail. I wondered briefly if it were worth telling Parry about the man out there on the pavement, above my head as I lay in my dungeon bedroom. But there was nothing to tell. No facts. The police like facts although when presented with them they seemed, in Albie’s case, to have made precious little effort to follow them up.

  I glowered at Parry and saw that he’d lit another cigarette. I was badly upset by what I’d learned and the sight of him sitting there quite at home was the last straw.

  I lost my temper with the frustration of it all and yelled, ‘If you’d tried harder, you’d have found Albie and he’d be alive now! I spent all morning sitting on Marylebone Station hoping he’d turn up! And all on your behalf! So that he could tell his story to you! What’s up? Don’t you want to find the snatched person, whoever it is?’

  ‘Come on, Fran, be reasonable!’ he wheedled. ‘We don’t pass up any lead. You were quite right to report what he’d told you. But even if we’d found him, we’d always have had to take any testimony he gave with a big pinch of salt. Even you can’t say he’d strike a jury as reliable. We always knew we couldn’t ever have put him on the witness stand and no identification he made would’ve stood up for two minutes if challenged! The most we could’ve hoped for was that he’d have given us a further lead and that was doubtful, too. Look, his brains were as scrambled as those eggs I made you.’

  It was not a nice simile and made me distinctly queasy. ‘He was still your witness! You didn’t worry about him, but they did, Merv and his mate! They kept looking until they found him and they killed him!’

  He leaned forward, foxy features sharp. ‘So you keep telling me, Fran. But just hold on a minute. You’re talking murder, here, and the fact remains that you don’t know what happened after you left Albie. He had a bottle, for crying out loud! He was all set to drink himself senseless. You’ve got at least to consider that he reeled off and fell in the canal, full of whisky. He drowned, Fran, and despite what you tell me you saw earlier, he didn’t need any help in doing it. He fell in, poor old sod. Couldn’t get out – finish. There’s no evidence, Fran, to show otherwise. Evidence points to accidental death.’

  ‘What was he doing down there by the canal?’ I snapped. ‘I left him heading for the porch.’ With a stab of guilt, I remembered I’d urged him to move elsewhere. Perhaps he had, perhaps the canal path had seemed safer. ‘Did anyone see him go in?’ I asked.

  ‘No one’s come forward to report hearing a splash or a cry,’ Parry said unwillingly. ‘But that’s not surprising, is it, at that hour of the morning? Give it time. We’re asking around.’

  ‘Did you see his body? Did you see Albie in the water?’ I couldn’t believe he was taking it so calmly. They’d lost their only witness, and now had a murder on their hands. All Parry could say was that Albie was better off where he was now.

  ‘No. I got down there after they’d dragged him out. I understand he was found floating face down with an empty whisky bottle in his pocket.’ He made sure I took that point in.

  I sat back and asked, ‘So where’s Jonty?’

  ‘Jonty?’ His nose quivered again.

  ‘The old man he was going to share the booze with. The old man you saw scurrying away! Look, there were two of them going to drink a half-bottle of Scotch. That makes a quarter-bottle each and that wouldn’t be enough to send Albie tumbling into the canal!’

  Parry was shaking his head. ‘Naw, he had a whole bottle. He was wearing that big old coat he always had on. When he fell in, that coat would’ve made it impossible for him to clamber out. The bottle was still in his pocket, Fran, just like I said. It was empty and I saw it with my own eyes.’

  ‘No, I saw it,’ I told him triumphantly. ‘I saw it last night. He offered me a nip from it. A half-bottle of Bell’s whisky. A half-bottle, sergeant! You can check that out with Ganesh Patel. If there was a full-size bottle in his pocket this morning, someone put it there. And hey, why on earth should he return an empty bottle to his pocket, anyway? Once it was empty he’d have chucked it away. It was a plant!’ Sarcastically, I added, ‘I’d have thought you’d know enou
gh to recognise a plant when you saw it!’

  Parry didn’t like that. His mouth pursed up tight and his little eyes glared at me, but he didn’t say anything. I’d got him. He couldn’t ignore a significant discrepancy.

  ‘No signs of violence on the body,’ he said at last, sulkily, I fancied.

  ‘What do you expect?’ I asked. ‘Albie said they weren’t amateurs. I saw them hustling him into their motor. They nearly got him inside for all his kicking and yelling. They’re a couple of professional heavies. They waited around until the coast was clear and went looking for him again. They found him.’

  My voice quavered unexpectedly on the last word and I was horrified to realise I was near to breaking down. Only determination not to give way in front of Parry stopped me.

  ‘They found him in the porch,’ I went on, ‘and gave him another bottle of whisky. Maybe they took him elsewhere first. They made him drink it, which wouldn’t’ve been difficult. Stopping him might have been. When he’d passed out drunk, they put him in the car, drove over to the canal and heaved him in. The car had become a liability, too recognisable, so they drove it to the park and torched it.’

  Parry’s cigarette had smouldered to a spray of ash, which suddenly collapsed and dropped on to the sofa. He started, swore and brushed the ash quickly to the floor. ‘You say Albie was on his way to meet up with the old geezer I spotted, the one who smelled like he’d been dead himself a month?’

  ‘His name’s Jonty and I’m not surprised he ran away from you. He’s terrified of everyone. He could never have fended off an attack. I hope they didn’t get him too!’

  Parry chewed his thumbnail for a moment before taking his hand from his mouth and heaving a sigh. ‘So what you’re telling me is, I’ve got to go out looking for yet another deadbeat? All right, you got a closer look at him than I did. Can you give me a more detailed description? To me he just looked a moving pile of rags. Got any idea of his surname or where he hangs out during the day?’

  ‘No idea,’ I confessed. ‘I reckon he must be as thin as a skeleton to go by his hand which was the only bit of him I really saw.’ Something occurred to me. ‘He mumbled about making a good living once,’ I said. ‘I thought he was rambling but – ’

  ‘Probably made a good living begging,’ Parry interrupted, ‘until the smell put people off!’

  ‘I was going to say, perhaps he was on the halls, like Albie. Perhaps that’s why they were friendly.’

  He thought that over and shrugged. ‘We’ll never find him,’ he said, and something about the way he said it made me shiver.

  Jonty had either run away in terror and wouldn’t come back to this part of London, or Merv and his pals had got rid of Jonty too, somewhere else. Just one more old man dead in a doorway. What’s new?

  Parry got to his feet. ‘Merv, you say, and drinks at The Rose?’

  ‘That’s right. People there knew him. They called out his name when I asked about the car.’

  Parry was staring down at me thoughtfully. ‘You and your pal, what’s his name, Patel? You both stay away from that pub, you hear me? In fact, from now on, you stay right out of this altogether, Fran. Remember, the two blokes saw you and there’s something about you, Miss Varady, that people remember!’

  I watched his legs and feet disappear up the basement steps and after a moment or two, I went upstairs too, to call on Daphne.

  ‘I just wanted to talk to someone,’ I explained.

  She peered into my face. ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘You’ve clearly had a terrible shock. You need a drop of brandy.’

  I hadn’t realised my face betrayed so much or just how shocked I was. The brandy was welcome, though it’s not something I drink much of. I spluttered over it a bit and said I was sorry to have disturbed her. The large, old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg manual typewriter still stood on the table with what appeared to be a fresh pile of paper beside it.

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, not at all! What’s happened?’

  I couldn’t tell her everything, so I just said, ‘An old man I knew died. His name was Albie Smith. He was just an old tramp, but he used to have a variety act, years ago. He had a troupe of performing poodles. He – ’ I hesitated. ‘A jogger spotted him in the canal and called the police.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Daphne leaned forward, her hands clasped and resting on her bony knees, which were outlined through her jogging pants. She had a different pair of hand-knitted sock-slippers on today. ‘Years ago,’ she said, ‘I remember seeing some performing dogs at, let me see, oh, at the Theatre Royal in Portsmouth. They were very clever. One of them pushed another one along in a little pram.’

  ‘That might have been Albie’s act,’ I said. But she couldn’t remember the name of the turn and anyway, he’d probably had a stage name.

  ‘Why did he fall in the canal?’ she asked.

  ‘The police think he was drunk. That’s to say, he probably was drunk.’

  How he got drunk was another matter, but it didn’t concern Daphne.

  It concerned me. I should have made sure Albie spent the previous night in a place of safety. At the very least I could have gone with him to collect Jonty and chivvied them both elsewhere, somewhere they could have drunk themselves into a stupor hidden from Merv.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Daphne asked.

  ‘I saw him last night. I wanted to take him to a hostel, but he didn’t want to go.’

  ‘There might not have been a place free for him,’ she said. ‘And if he didn’t want to go, you couldn’t make him.’

  I was grateful to her for that. ‘Do you think,’ I asked, ‘that poodles have souls?’

  I’d have felt foolish asking anyone else but Daphne. She didn’t bat an eyelid. She thought about it and then said, ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows, do they?’

  ‘Sergeant Parry, who came to tell me about Albie, said that wherever Albie is now, he’s probably better off.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Daphne, ‘we don’t know that, either. Because he was a tramp, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t rather be here than there, wherever there is. On the other hand, there’s no reason to suppose he isn’t perfectly all right there now. Why shouldn’t he be? Personally I believe in reincarnation. If I’m right, then Albie’s got the chance to start all over again. On the other hand, if the heaven theory is right, then it seems logical to me that if there’s a heaven, it’s a sight better organised than we’ve made our world down here. There might not have been a place for him here, but there should be there, wherever heaven is. I imagine heaven is what we want it to be. In your friend’s case, a sort of ever-open hostel, perhaps, with unlimited beds.’

  ‘Hope they don’t make him take a bath,’ I said wryly.

  ‘Because our bodies may be dirty doesn’t mean our souls aren’t clean.’ Daphne gave a deprecating cough. ‘I don’t lay any claim to that burst of wisdom. It was something I was taught in Sunday school, aeons ago. The children used to sing, “And your souls shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall!” I’ve no idea if those are the correct words. It’s what we sang, anyway.’

  ‘I like to think,’ I said, ‘that we’ve all got souls, the animals, too. Wherever Albie is now, I hope that Chou-Chou, Mimi and Fifi are all there with him, that they’re together again.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Daphne. ‘Because we can’t be sure of anything, doesn’t mean it isn’t so. We just haven’t got any proof.’

  Bingo! I thought. I couldn’t be sure what happened to Albie, but that didn’t mean my suspicions weren’t correct. I just needed proof. Parry was wrong, quite wrong, if he thought I was going to give up as easily as that. Just because he’d warned me off? Never. And because of Merv and his mate? Even less. Now I really had matters to settle with Merv.

  I thanked Daphne for the talk and the brandy and told her I felt better now.

  ‘Any time,’ she said. Then as I was leaving she added, ‘You won’t do anything hasty, will you, Fran?’

  She understood me a lot better tha
n I’d imagined. It gave me something to think about.

  I went down to the canal. It was a visit I had to make.

  Albie’s body had long been removed, of course. All that remained to mark his demise at that spot was a fluttering blue and white tape that had cordoned off the area. And even that was broken down.

  The strip of mud and straggly grass beside the concrete towpath was strewn with cigarette stubs and sweet wrappers and trampled by police-issue boots. But the visitors, both official and simply ghoulish, had all gone for the moment and I was alone. I was glad of it, because I had a little ceremony to perform and I didn’t want an audience. I placed the spray of carnations I’d brought with me neatly in the middle of the wet, flattened grass. The next person to come that way would probably pinch my floral tribute, but I wanted to do the right thing and mark the spot of Albie’s passing in a decent manner, if only for minutes. I stood back, like they do at the Cenotaph, and remained with bowed head as I said a brief prayer for Albie.