Keeping Bad Company

by Ann Granger

He shrugged. ‘I was afraid of that. If he’d joined forces with me, I’d have guided him. Oh his own, Bondi was always – erratic. However, I did well for a long time and then we had a few setbacks. The bottom fell out of the housing market and it hit me as it hit a lot of suppliers to the trade. Carpets, housepaints, bathroom fittings, you name it. The whole shebang took a hell of a knock. Saddled with negative equity, who buys a new three-piece suite? But I’d made my money by then and besides, I’d got a good export business going. Speciality fabrics to the Middle East.’

  He gave a coy, old lady’s giggle, indicating he was about to make a joke. ‘Many a harem’s fitted out using my fabrics. They’re mad about velvets.’

  ‘Great,’ I said vaguely.

  ‘I’ve also diversified into other interests,’ he went on. ‘It doesn’t do to keep all the eggs in one basket, as they say.’

  He didn’t explain what these other interests were and I didn’t ask.

  His manner, which had continued to veer between the depressed and the almost hilarious, changed again. His state of mind was beginning to worry me. He was either under intolerable stress and barely coping, or seriously nuts. I wasn’t sure which.

  ‘I was married for twelve years and I count myself blessed to have had an extraordinarily happy marriage. My wife was a widow at the time we met. She had a little girl, Lauren, aged just six. It’s difficult for a woman on her own, bringing up a child, especially with the world being like it is today,’ he concluded earnestly, leaning forward slightly to impart this wisdom.

  Within a stone’s throw of where we sat we could’ve found half a dozen single mums who could tell him a thing or two about how tough it was. But this prissy little fellow, with his success hanging smugly about him, seemed to think he’d made the discovery.

  ‘I adopted Lauren and brought her up as my own,’ he said, emphasising the last word just a little. ‘I’m as proud of her as any father. I’ve done my best for her. Good school, dancing lessons, elocution classes, cordon bleu cookery course . . .’ He rattled off the list with simple pride.

  I nearly told him I’d been to a good school and had acting lessons, and look at me! But I didn’t.

  ‘My responsibilities towards Lauren increased after my wife died.’ His blue eyes rested on my face, watching for my reaction. ‘She had cancer.’ His gaze moistened and I felt an awful lurch in the diaphragm and hoped he wasn’t going to snivel. Poor little guy. Perhaps he’d lost weight when his wife fell ill and died. That could be why the wretched overcoat was too large.

  ‘After that I had a double duty towards Lauren. I had to play the role of both father and mother. I owed it to my late wife to take every possible care of her and see she wanted for nothing. I did make sure she lacked nothing. Like I said, she’s had everything, the best money could buy. I made sure of it. Anything she wanted, she only had to ask.’ He leaned towards me again and I guessed it was a substitute for touching. He’d realised I didn’t like the hand-patting, but he couldn’t help himself. He had at least to imitate a physical contact.

  Well, all right, all right, I believed him. But I’d got control of my emotions, and was thinking straighter. If he’d done his homework on my background, as he surely had, he’d know that my father had been left with the care of me after my mum cleared out. Szabo was making a bid for sympathy, assuming I’d appreciate his problems and the effort he’d made to tackle them.

  He’d probably done his best, just like he’d said. But I don’t know whether spoiling a kid rotten is the kindest thing to do in the long run. I also wondered if he’d been there to listen when Lauren burbled about her dreams, as my dad had been for me. But perhaps I was misjudging him. Maybe he idolised Lauren.

  As if he sensed my thoughts, he burst out emotionally, ‘She’s a lovely girl, a beautiful girl, with a sweet nature!’

  Well, there have to be a few examples of pure young womanhood around like that, even in this wicked world. Perhaps he’d kept Lauren locked up in a tower, like Rapunzel. Lauren, he said, had been aged six at the time of her mother’s marriage to Szabo and the marriage had lasted twelve years. I didn’t know how long his wife had been dead. ‘How old is Lauren now?’

  ‘Nineteen,’ he said. ‘So a little younger than you.’

  He obviously knew I was twenty-one. The man probably had the equivalent of a Who’s Who? entry on me.

  He drew a deep breath, as if he’d surprised himself by the outburst, and resettled himself in his corner of the back seat. ‘I’m successful. It’s attracted jealousy and resentment in some quarters,’ he went on. ‘It’s inevitable. I can live with that. Unfortunately money also attracts another kind of attention.’ Emotion entered his voice again. ‘What I’m about to tell you isn’t to be repeated to anyone, you understand? No gossiping among your friends.’

  ‘You’re sure you want to tell me?’ I asked, since he was getting het up again and the muscles around his mouth were wobbling.

  ‘Not particularly, to be truthful. But I’m in an unusual and unexpected difficulty. My daughter has been kidnapped.’

  He broke off and seemed to be waiting for my reaction.

  It was blunt enough as a statement and was meant to shock. But I couldn’t sound surprised. I knew that a snatch had taken place. That an identity had at last been given to the snatch victim came almost as a relief. I said I was sorry.

  ‘Sorry?’ He picked up my word and shook his head. ‘You can have no idea what it means. Oh, kidnap – everyone thinks he knows! But when it happens to you, when someone you love, someone you’ve cared for, watched grow from a young child to a lovely woman, is taken from you . . .’ He twitched. ‘Not to know where she is, if she’s well or hurt, who has her prisoner, in what circumstances they’re keeping her, what kind of people – ’ He broke off and twitched again. I hoped he wasn’t going to break down. Instead, he rushed on, ‘I say, what kind of people? But I know what kind. Only depravity of the worst sort could do this, only a mind dulled to any human emotion could even contemplate it!’

  I felt I ought to say something so I said, ‘They have no reason to harm her.’

  ‘They don’t reason like you or me. What’s happened is worse than death,’ he said quietly. ‘You can mourn a death and bury a body. I don’t know whether I’ll ever see Lauren alive again, or whether it’s a body they’ll bring back to me. Or neither. It could be that I’ll never know. At least they are still sending their messages and while there’s contact, I have hope.’

  ‘They’ve named a ransom?’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve received a ransom note for a quite exorbitant sum. I’m a wealthy man but I’m not a millionaire. Perhaps, given time, I might raise the money but even if I did, there is no guarantee Lauren would be returned. I am not a fool. Until I pay, they need Lauren. She is their security as well as their hostage. We’re hampered in everything we do, knowing she’s in their hands. But once they have the money, they don’t need her any longer. She’s an embarrassment and worse, a weak link in their armour. They will be taking precautions so that she can’t identify them. They probably have her blindfolded, or keep her in a dark room. She’ll be distraught, terrified. But she may still have heard a voice, smelled some distinctive odour, caught the sound of something unusual out in the street, recognised some peculiar feature of the house . . . any of these things could lead to their capture and conviction. So why shouldn’t they kill her, once they have the money? After that, all that will matter to them will be their safety.’

  I was following this as best I could and trying to deduce what I could from it. Some of what he was saying sounded semi-official. Before, he’d said ‘I’, but now he was saying ‘we’.

  ‘You’ve been to the police,’ I said, not a question.

  ‘I knew I had no choice but to go to the police!’ he retorted vehemently. ‘They have their procedures. The first thing they organised was a blanket ban on news reporting. Despite the fact that I’m not accustomed to following orders, I’ve been following their instructions i
n negotiations with the kidnappers to the letter. Meantime, the police have been trying to locate my girl. They’ve not done so and I’m beginning to become impatient, not to say out of my mind with worry. One can’t know what those creatures who hold my daughter will do. My confidence in the police is dwindling. In fact, it seems to me they’re floundering, with no more idea what to do than you would have, if I gave the job of finding Lauren to you.’

  I thought that he underestimated my ingenuity, but it wasn’t the time to argue. I nodded.

  It seemed to encourage him. He began to sound more determined. ‘I think it’s time I took a more active hand. Now, I understand from Sergeant Parry that you had some conversation with an elderly vagrant who claimed to have seen a girl, answering Lauren’s description, snatched from the street?’

  So that was it. That’s how Szabo knew about me and I came to be sitting here, listening to all this. Parry had grassed.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I did. And if you’ve seen Parry today, you’ll know the old man’s body was found floating in the canal this morning. Parry declares there is no evidence to suggest it was anything other than an accident but I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’ve spoken with Sergeant Parry and with his superiors. Like you, I feel it’s unlikely the death was accidental. And if those men killed the old man, why shouldn’t they kill my girl? I can no longer afford to sit back and leave it to the authorities! Tell me what the vagrant told you, all of it, exactly as he said it.’

  I told him, but only that, not what I had seen. Szabo listened intently, looked dissatisfied and tapped his pale fingers on the knees of his quality worsted pants.

  ‘And the two men?’ he asked. ‘Did the tramp describe them?’

  I was being manoeuvred rapidly into a no-win corner here. If I answered all these questions, I was likely to end up on the receiving end of aggro from Parry. If I didn’t, Szabo could turn awkward. He might look harmless but I’d an idea he was used to getting his own way and I hadn’t forgotten the beefy chauffeur. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘do the police know you’re talking to me?’

  ‘Naturally,’ he said, sounding rather starchy. ‘Recognising a Hungarian name, I asked the police what they knew about you and Sergeant Parry appeared to know your background quite well. I informed him that you were almost certainly the daughter of my boyhood friend Stephen Varady and that I’d seek you out as a matter of courtesy, if nothing else.’ He sniffed vengefully. ‘The police didn’t like it, perhaps. But since they’ve come up with absolutely nothing so far, they were hardly in a position to argue with me. I’ve put through some tough business deals in my time. I know when to call someone’s bluff!’

  So take that, he might have added.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘He didn’t describe the men. He described their car.’ I gave him the description and told him a car like that had been torched during the previous night.

  ‘And the men?’ Szabo practically bounced in his seat with excitement. ‘Perhaps the old man didn’t describe them, but I understand you can give a description of at least one of them?’

  I cursed Parry and wondered what on earth he was playing at, putting Szabo on to me. I wasn’t sure how much I was supposed to tell him. But if the police had wanted to keep Vinnie from questioning me, Parry should have kept his mouth shut. I wondered why Parry had given out the information. It could be that Szabo was a difficult man to refuse, or that the sergeant thought I was holding out and might tell Vinnie here more than I’d told the plods.

  ‘I saw one of them, I think,’ I said. ‘Very tall, possibly a body builder. all muscles and tattoos. Ugly mug. Not nice.’

  He leaned forward intently. ‘Tattoos? What kind of tattoos? Any special marks?’

  ‘Gunners’ supporter,’ I said. ‘Arsenal Football Team, that is. Got it tattooed on one arm.’

  ‘You’ve told the police?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ I said sharply. ‘I don’t keep things like that from the coppers!’

  I might do if I thought it advisable, but I wanted Szabo to think I was a law-abiding type. I didn’t want him to get the idea he could use me in some way with Parry none the wiser.

  My companion was searching in his inner breast pocket and took out a little silver case and a silver pen. From the case he took a business card and with the pen wrote a phone number on the back. He handed it to me.

  ‘I can always be reached on this number,’ he said. ‘If you see this man again, I want you to get in touch with me immediately, do you understand? Whether or not you tell the police, I want you to tell me directly. Or if you come across anything else, or remember anything, however insignificant it might be, which the old man said, you understand? Get in touch with me!’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, pocketing the card. I hadn’t said I’d do it, but he took that as read. His mistake.

  He’d put away the card case and pen and brought out his wallet. ‘Look, my dear, I hope you won’t take this wrongly. Obviously things have been difficult for you since your father died. I know if the situations had been reversed, Bondi would have tried to look after any daughter of mine who was in need. I’d like to help. If I’d known about you, I’d have offered my help before this.’

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ I said sharply. ‘I can manage.’

  ‘Please!’ he urged. ‘I’m not offering charity! I understand you’re proud, like your dad, but look at it this way. Let me pay you for your time this evening. You’ve been more than patient and I do appreciate it. I apologise again for any alarm you may have felt. Matson, my driver, lacks, er, tact. Call it compensation?’

  He took out several twenty-pound notes and fanned them out like a magician, inviting me to pick a card, any one. The notes were all crisp and new. I nearly asked him, jokingly, if he’d printed them himself, but he was probably deficient in a sense of humour right now, and if they were duds, he wouldn’t be passing them himself.

  There were five of them. ‘One hundred pounds,’ he emphasised, peering at me in the poor light. ‘Do you feel that’s adequate?’

  There are moralists among you reading this who would feel I should have refused the money. But I took it because, fair’s fair, he had taken up my time and originally given me a heck of a fright. Nor would he have liked being refused. Besides, I was broke, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t known Dad.

  ‘And you won’t forget what we agreed?’ he asked.

  As I recalled it, we hadn’t actually agreed anything, but there was only one answer. ‘No, Mr Szabo,’ I said meekly, pocketing the readies.

  He smiled and nodded and almost patted my hand again, but remembered just in time. ‘You know, I feel as though I’ve managed to do something to help Lauren at last. It’s been so frustrating with the police, they always reckon to know best – though I’ve begun to doubt it. Just talking to you, telling you, it’s been such a help. I want to thank you. You’re a good girl. You’re like your father. I knew I couldn’t go wrong seeking out Bondi’s daughter.’

  I’d been going to give him a nice bright smile back, but it faded. The last person to call me a good girl had been poor old Albie.

  ‘Can I go now?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course!’ He looked stricken and tapped on the smoky window. ‘I’ve held you up, such a long time, I’m so sorry . . .’

  The door beside me opened and the chauffeur waited outside on the pavement, hand outstretched to help the little lady out.

  Halfway out, I made a mistake. Curiosity got the better of me. I turned back and asked, ‘Why was Lauren walking around at night on her own, near St Agatha’s church?’

  I don’t know if Szabo heard the question or not. The chauffeur’s deferential touch turned to an ungentle grip. I was hoicked smartly out of the motor and deposited on the pavement. The car sped away, leaving me rubbing my upper arm.

  Bruise on my shoulder from Merv and bruises on my arm from Szabo’s minder. I was keeping the wrong sort of company.

  Chapter Nine

  Gane
sh came over in the evening with a bag of takeaway food and a bottle of wine. I was glad we hadn’t to go out to eat, not least because I wanted to avoid Jimmie’s until the art show was over. It was already Thursday, which meant I’d only one clear day left before my debut as a living work of art. I still hadn’t told Gan about it and wasn’t keen to.

  So when he asked, ‘What’s been happening?’ I concentrated on telling him about Albie, St Agatha’s and an edited account of my meeting with Szabo.

  ‘I’m sorry about the old fellow,’ Ganesh said, ‘even if he was a disgusting old drunk. I’d like for the two thugs to get caught. But it’s a job for the police, Fran. You should hand that whisky bottle over to Parry at once. I remember it. I mean, I remember that Albie definitely had a half-bottle of Bell’s.’

  ‘That’s handy,’ I said. ‘You can tell Parry, back my story.’

  But Ganesh was frowning, his mind running on something else. ‘This Szabo, you reckon he really knew your family?’