Keeping Bad Company

by Ann Granger

  ‘He dumped her for me because he thought he could get his hands on Szabo money!’ Lauren panted as she pounded up the staircase beside me. ‘So I suppose she thought she’d get her own back on him and get her own hands on Szabo money – ’

  ‘Will you shut up for a minute!’ I gasped as we stumbled out on to the next landing. ‘Just concentrate on finding somewhere to hide!’

  Fat chance, was what was I was thinking. This floor mirrored the ones below, a corridor of stripped rabbit hutches. It offered no hiding place safe from the vengeful Merv and Baz who, from the sound of it, had reached the floor we’d just quit and any minute now, would find that Lauren was also missing.

  A painted sign on the wall read ‘FIRE EXIT’ and an arrow pointed upwards. This staircase was unlike the others, narrow and dimly lit. It was Hobson’s choice. I raced up it, Lauren on my heels.

  At the top our way was barred by a steel emergency door. ‘Give me a hand!’ I gasped.

  We wrestled with the bar and managed to release it. The door scraped open outwards and a blast of fresh air hit us as we stumbled through to find ourselves on the roof.

  I hadn’t realised, until we came out into the open, how late it had got. The daylight was fading fast and a grey pall hung over the skyline. The roof itself was flat, with a surrounding waist-high parapet. We’d exited through a square concrete hut-like affair. It was the only thing up here apart from a similar locked hut which was probably the housing for the immobilised lift machinery. Dotted around were some metal hoods crowning ventilation shafts. In the gloom, they looked eerily like giant mushrooms. The wind gusted around freely up here and it was very cold. There had to be a way down. It wasn’t a fire exit otherwise.

  I raced round the parapet and finally spotted a short flight of metal rungs running up the inside of the low wall to a pair of hooped handgrips bolted to the rim. I looked over.

  The malicious wind grabbed my hair and blew it across my face. The world swam unpleasantly from side to side. I shut my eyes and opened them again. Over the parapet was a straightforward metal rung ladder leading down to the floor below. An encircling metal cage offered the escapee some protection from falling as he/she climbed out on to the ladder and negotiated the top rungs. The cage looked anything but reliable. Its effect would be purely psychological. The lower rungs lacked even this nominal safety device. The ladder terminated at a metal platform opposite a window on the floor below. From there on downwards there was an iron staircase, running in sections from floor to floor, window landing to window landing, to touch down in a deserted shadowy alley at the side of the building.

  I felt sick at the thought of clambering down there, but sicker still at the idea of falling into Baz’s hands. The bolts fastening the top of the ladder to the parapet had leached orange stain into the concrete, but when I shook the handgrips they seemed firm enough. We had to chance it. I showed it to Lauren.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘I’m not going down there.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ I told her. I was more than fed up with her by now. ‘Stay here and let Merv throw you over the edge, why don’t you?’

  ‘I might just as well,’ she retorted. ‘Look,’ she pointed at the cage, ‘if a cat climbed out on to that rickety old thing the whole lot would fall off the wall.’

  ‘That’s dodgy, but the ladder’s OK. All you’ve got to do is climb down to that platform, see? From there on down it’s a proper iron staircase.’

  ‘I don’t much like the look of that either,’ she grumbled.

  Nor did I, to be honest, and the longer I stood here arguing with her, the less I liked it. It was either climb down there now, straight away, or lose my nerve.

  I grabbed the handles, fixed my eyes resolutely on the concrete wall and climbed over. My toes felt for the rungs. They were thin and insubstantial and my feet teetered on them, seesawing as I attempted to find balance. The wind whipped past me fiercer and even colder than up on the roof. It took my breath away, snatching it from my nostrils and mouth. I had a terrible sensation of being suspended in space and for a split second I froze, unable to move at all. I didn’t want to look down, but I couldn’t avoid looking sideways.

  I wished I hadn’t. What I saw made things worse. There in the gap, where the alley met the road, was Jane Stratton, pacing up and down in the twilight beneath a flickering streetlamp. She kept looking at her wristwatch, perhaps wondering why her two goons were taking so long. If she looked down the alley and up, it was likely that even in the poor light, she’d see me clinging to the side of the building.

  ‘Sst!’ That was Lauren. I looked up and she was leaning over, glaring at me. ‘Well, go on, then,’ she said. ‘I can’t climb down till you get going.’

  I managed to avoid pointing out she’d only just said she wasn’t going to try. Instead I told her I could see Jane Stratton.

  ‘So we’ll have to keep it as quiet as possible!’ I warned, hoping I could count on her to control her desire to shout insults. I wouldn’t put it past her.

  I left her to make up her mind and got my feet moving, creeping downwards. My heart was pounding, I felt sick, and my hands sweated, but somehow my foot touched the landing at last.

  The ladder quivered and creaked ominously. Lauren was scrambling down. She managed pretty well. That girl just liked making the maximum fuss.

  ‘Now what?’ she said, as she joined me.

  ‘We carry on down,’ I said. ‘And do shut up and try not to make the metal treads rattle. The Stratton woman will hear us.’

  Jane had her back to the alley at the moment, which was all to the good. This slight plus was immediately wiped out by the sound of voices from above. Merv and Baz had found their way out on to the roof.

  They would certainly see the top of the fire escape ladder and take a look over the parapet. I made a quick inspection of the window alongside the landing, but it only opened from the inside.

  ‘For God’s sake, get going!’ Lauren poked me painfully in the back. ‘Why’re you hesitating?’

  With Lauren so close behind me that she threatened to dislodge me and send me plummeting down, I began to descent of the metal stair to the landing below.

  We reached that all right but then such luck as we’d had ran out. What hadn’t been discernible in the dull light was that a complete section of the next staircase down was missing, about four treads in all, leaving a space too big to bridge with an outstretched leg.

  ‘We’ll have to let ourselves drop down,’ I said. ‘From here, down through the gap to the landing below.’

  ‘You first,’ she said, running true to form. Somehow, even if we succeeded in getting out of this, I was never going to be able to take a shine to this girl.

  I lowered myself to the landing and sat there with my legs dangling through the hole left by the missing treads as I tried to judge it. The absence of good light made it tricky. The gap seemed to fluctuate in width and the metal platform below alternatively rose towards me and fell away. I couldn’t see what kind of condition it was in, and what worried me most – always supposing I didn’t fall off the side of the platform when I hit it – was that the sudden impact of my weight on a long-unmaintained structure might be enough to shake the whole thing loose.

  The exercise would, moreover, make a heck of a noise and was likely to attract attention.

  I glanced over my shoulder towards the spot where the alley below debouched into the road, looking for Jane Stratton. She was still there, wandering up and down in a fidgety manner. Her blonde hair gleaming in the lamplight, she suggested a sort of latter-day Lili Marlene. But then I saw something very odd.

  Without warning she turned and ran past the alley entrance in an attitude of complete panic, blonde mane flying.

  Seconds later an engine roared and headlights swept the street. Her car lurched past but the moment it went out of sight, there was a screech of brakes, then more engine noise and more protesting metal. Something had caused her get out of her car again, because she reappea
red, racing back towards the building. Hard on her stiletto heels came several uniformed figures, pounding along on their size twelves.

  ‘We haven’t got to jump it,’ I told Lauren in relief. ‘The police are here. Thank God for that!’

  And it’s not often you hear me say that when the boys in blue pop into view.

  ‘About time too,’ she grumbled, always the happy little soul.

  From our windswept perch where we crouched like a pair of dispossessed eagles, we watched figures scurry back and forth. Two brawny uniformed figures emerged, holding Baz between them. He glanced back and up as they shoved him into the police van, and even at that distance and in twilight, I felt the stare of those bulbous dark eyes.

  ‘They’ve got Baz,’ I said to Lauren, unable to disguise the relief in my voice. ‘I hope they put him away for a long time.’

  I didn’t add that if they failed to do that, and the law does funny things sometimes, I would have to quit the flat. Probably quit the country. I fully expected to see two more coppers frogmarching Merv away in similar fashion, but although there seemed to be a good deal of activity within the building, no one came out for several minutes. Then a movement caught my eye in the dusk away to my right. Here the wall around the building’s rear yard bordered the alley. To my surprise, a man had appeared, perched astride the top with one leg dangling down on the alley side, the other still on the yard side. Even as I watched in dismay, he completed the movement he’d begun, slipping over the wall and dropping down into the alley.

  ‘Hey,’ I yelled desperately. ‘Hey! Stop him!’ I rattled the nearest iron stanchion in an attempt to attract attention. ‘Hey, you lot in there, he’s getting away!’

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Lauren’s fingers gripped my arm like a vice. ‘Leave it alone, look, the bolts are coming out of the brickwork! Are you crazy or something?’

  ‘Merv!’ I gasped, pointing.

  She released me and peered in the direction I indicated. He hadn’t run down the alley, but crossed it to the buildings on the other side and we were just in time to see him squeeze his bulk into a narrow gap between them. Rats know their bolt-holes and Merv had found his.

  I cursed fruitlessly while Lauren wittered about the danger I had put us in by shaking the rickety stair.

  ‘It’s all right, we don’t have to stay here now!’ I snapped back in exasperation. ‘We can go on back up.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she objected. ‘It was bad enough coming down that wretched rung affair. Now you’ve loosened it even more. It’s got too dark now and I can’t see.’

  ‘We haven’t got any choice!’ I yelled at her. ‘Start climbing!’

  ‘Don’t shout at me!’ she snapped, hoity-toity.

  ‘Shout at you? If you don’t watch it, I’ll push you off!’ I bellowed.

  ‘Oy! You down there!’ a male voice shouted from above.

  Torchlight bathed us. We looked up. A familiar head had appeared over the parapet, festooned with hair that looked colourless in the torchbeam and a mangy moustache.

  ‘For Gawd’s sake, Fran,’ Parry called. ‘How did you get down there?’

  If it’d been only me stuck down there they’d have told me to start climbing. But then they realised the kidnapped Szabo heiress, as they probably thought of her, was with me. They started talking about sending for the fire brigade and a turntable ladder.

  I’d no intention of sitting there for another fifteen minutes waiting for Captain Flack. I told Lauren she could wait on her own. I was climbing back up the ladder.

  ‘I’m not staying here on my own,’ she snivelled. With that, she shoved me out of the way and shinned up the ladder like the boy in the Indian rope trick. Metropolitan Police arms lifted her the last part of the way and over the parapet to safety.

  Then they all disappeared, taking their torches with them, leaving me to struggle up the vertical rungs in semi-darkness, under my own steam.

  ‘Oy!’ I called up. ‘What about me?’

  Parry reappeared. He handed the torch to a uniformed man who directed it at me in a haphazard way as I crawled upwards. Parry seized my arms and dragged me unceremoniously the last few inches over the concrete wall.

  ‘You’ve let Merv get away!’ I gasped as my feet touched the flat roof. ‘He ran over there, between those buildings!’ I pointed out the crack into which Merv had scurried, hardly visible now in the dusk.

  Parry swore, abandoned me and went to yell instructions to others. Reaction had set in. My legs began to quiver and nausea swept over me. I sat down on the roof with my back against the parapet and rested my head on my bent knees.

  A few minutes later heavy footsteps crunched towards me. ‘All right, there, Fran? Not going to throw up, are you?’

  I looked up into Parry’s face, looming over me. ‘No, I’ll be fine,’ I managed to say weakly. ‘How did you manage to lose him?’

  ‘He must have got down into the basement here and hid up among the pipes. Slipped out behind our backs, but we’ll pick him, don’t worry.’ He dropped on to his heels before me and went on. ‘By the way, your Jock boyfriend rang us up, the artist. He said he thought you’d been kidnapped.’

  ‘I was kidnapped,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been tied up, hooded, driven around, dumped in a locked room . . .’

  ‘Well, you’re all right now,’ he interrupted. ‘No harm done, eh? You’ve even got your clothes on.’

  Not for the first time, Parry’s reasoning eluded me. As it stood, his remark sounded highly insulting but at least it cured my temporary weakness. ‘Clothes?’ I snarled. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Rabbie Burns said he found your costume on the floor. He thought you might be in your frillies.’ He grinned. ‘Oh well, next time, eh?’

  ‘Just turn it in, will you?’ I groaned. ‘I’ve suffered enough.’

  He frowned at me. ‘Yeah. Someone smash your face again?’

  I’d forgotten the blood smears. ‘I hit a door,’ I said, ‘climbing through a transom window.’

  ‘Sounds like you,’ he said. ‘You don’t ever learn, do you?’

  I looked over his shoulder to where a sympathetic group was still gathered around Lauren. They were dispensing TLC by the bucketful and I wondered why no one, not even Parry, ever gave me so much as a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

  ‘About her,’ I said. ‘About Lauren Szabo. There are one or two things you ought to know . . .’

  Lauren looked up at that point and saw me and Parry huddled together by the parapet. She met my eye, swayed, and crumpled realistically to the ground in a dead faint.

  Immediate pandemonium, of course, and summoning of an ambulance with paramedics and all the rest of it.

  ‘Poor kid,’ said Parry, jumping to his feet. ‘Gawd knows what’s been happening to her.’

  I let it go for the time being. I’ve seen some stage faints and Lauren’s was a good one. But she was going to have to put on a better act than that to get out of this.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lauren was borne away in the ambulance for a hospital checkup. I was taken to the nick and asked to make a statement.

  An inspector appeared, a thin, pale man. He looked resentful, as though he’d been called in on his day off, probably in the middle of a dinner party, if the smudge of tomato on his tie was anything to go by. If so, he clearly blamed me for his bad luck and incipient indigestion. I had foolishly imagined he – all of them – would be crowding around, vying for the chance to congratulate me and thank me grovellingly for doing their job for them.

  Instead I was seated on a hard chair, presented with a mug of tarry tea, and invited to relate my adventures into a tape recorder.

  In the less than comfortable surrounds of the interview room, I told them everything. I didn’t leave anything out. A policewoman had joined us.The inspector took a packet of indigestion tablets from his pocket and chewed on them. Apart from that, he sighed a few times in an irritable way but he didn’t say anything. Even Parry didn’t interrup
t more than twice. The policewoman began to show signs of restiveness as my account progressed but Parry silenced her with a look. By the time I’d finished, they all looked thoroughly glum and it was dawning on me that far from being the heroine of the hour, I’d upset the police applecart well and truly.

  I’d done what they hate most. I’d introduced a whole new aspect to things and it would result in paperwork.

  The inspector rose to his feet, put his tube of pastilles in his pocket, dusted himself down and announced that he would leave everything in the hands of the sergeant. He nodded to me as he left but avoided my eyes in a decidedly shifty manner.

  With his departure, the atmosphere changed but not for the better. I wondered whether the senior man had left because if anything irregular was going to take place here, he didn’t want to know about it. Perhaps he was just hurrying off in hopes of getting back in time for the pudding.