by Ann Granger
Parry looked up at the fly-speckled neon strip in the ceiling and chewed the ends of his moustache. The policewoman found her voice and asked if I wanted to add to or change anything in my statement. I said no, I didn’t, that was it.
‘Play the tape back,’ Parry ordered.
She played it back. I thought I sounded coherent enough. In fact, all things considered, I thought I sounded pretty good.
‘You’re sure about all that, then?’ Parry asked.
‘Sergeant,’ I said, ‘I am absolutely sure. I will, if necessary, go into a witness box and swear to it.’
They still looked down in the mouth – more so, if anything. They offered me another cup of tea and said, perhaps we could go through it again later?
I was awash with tea by now, tired and just wanted to go home. In considerable bad temper, I told them all this and added that if they would just get the statement typed up, I’d sign it.
The pair of them exchanged glances. The policewoman switched off the tape recorder. Parry leaned forward earnestly.
‘Look, Fran,’ he said. ‘You’re making a serious accusation here. For God’s sake, unless you’re absolutely one hundred per cent sure, tone it down now, before anything’s signed. You don’t want to go on record with some wild tale you can’t back up.’
‘The point is,’ the policewoman chimed in, ‘that you can hardly expect Miss Szabo to support what you’ve told us about her part in things. You’ve accused her of plotting to extort money from her own father.’
‘I’m not accusing her,’ I pointed out. ‘She told me.’
The policewoman gave me a gargoyle grimace. ‘Was there any witness to this confession of hers?’
‘It wasn’t a confession. She told me because she was trying to get me on her side. He’s her stepfather, incidentally, not her father, and I told you what she told me, about how he used to knock her mother around and she and her mother ran away to the refuge. Actually, you can check all that. The refuge must have records.’ I knew I was beginning to sound exasperated but that always happens when I deal with the police.
‘We’ll check,’ Parry said grimly. ‘But Szabo’s not going to take kindly to this.’
It seemed to me it didn’t matter whether Szabo took kindly to it or went into a red rage. If that’s the way it had been, then his misdeeds had caught up with him, and he oughtn’t to grumble about it. Chickens come home to roost and all the rest of it.
‘You’re making a lot of trouble for the girl, you know,’ said the policewoman accusingly.
‘And for us,’ said Parry, who had his priorities in strict order with himself first.
I felt the tiniest twinge of compunction. Why drop Lauren in it? Hadn’t she and her late mother suffered enough? It wouldn’t take much. Hints were being dropped here with resounding thuds. I couldn’t ignore them so why not listen?
All I had to do was murmur apologetically that perhaps I’d misunderstood and they’d all be happy. It was what Parry and his steely-eyed female partner here wanted. The dyspeptic DI would be mightily relieved. In Lauren’s place, wouldn’t I have done as she did? Hadn’t she some right to try to make Szabo suffer a little in his turn? I owed him nothing.
But neither, I told my overcharitable conscience, did I owe Lauren anything. If she could have got the better of me in our scrap for the mobile phone, it was unlikely we’d be here now. Come to that, she had known Merv and Baz had locked me in a room on the floor below and hadn’t even had the decency to come down and check whether I was still breathing. Self-centred little madam. She had wanted to play dirty and she had to take the consequences.
Nor was I going to oblige the police, who were playing their own dirty game, pressuring me to change my story while I was tired and shocked. Justice was in danger in slipping out of the window here, just to save everyone inconvenience.
But I had justice firmly by the coat-tails and wasn’t letting go. There was another issue, one that mattered an awful lot more to me than anything we’d discussed here so far. I hadn’t forgotten how casually Lauren had dismissed Albie’s death. I wasn’t dismissing it and neither was I going to allow the police to sweep it aside.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m fed up with the entire Szabo family. I’ve told you all I know and you can sort it out. You’ve got her back all in one piece. No ransom paid. You can take the credit for all of that. I suppose you’ll do that anyway and not think to share any of it with me! But I don’t care about that. What concerns me is that we’re in danger of forgetting Albie.’
Parry glowered and the policewoman looked vague. She shuffled some papers in the hope of her memory being jogged. That annoyed me more than anything. As I feared, they’d just forgotten the poor old blighter.
‘Albert Antony Smith, deceased!’ I said loudly. ‘The murder victim you fished out of the canal.’
‘Alkie Albie?’ Parry’s sparse ginger eyelashes fluttered in alarm. ‘You’re not going to accuse Lauren Szabo of sending a couple of killers after a witness?’
‘No, not her,’ I said wearily. ‘Stratton did that. Lauren Szabo didn’t know about Alkie Albie and had no reason to tell the men to get rid of him. Stratton is the efficient type. She’d eliminate any loose ends. You want to know what I think happened?’
Neither of them looked as though they did, but they were going to hear it anyhow. ‘I think you told Szabo there was a witness to the kidnap, a homeless man. The witness had spoken to me. Szabo hurried off to find out what I knew. But he also told Copperfield the police were looking for the vagrant, as I expect you called him. Copperfield, in turn, confided in his receptionist. She had probably been holding his hand and making soothing noises during this stressful time, and he’d obligingly kept her up to date on the progress the police were making, or lack of it.’
Parry glowered, but he was on weak ground where setting Szabo on to me was concerned, so he didn’t interrupt.
‘Mind you,’ I added, ‘Merv and Baz might have decided off their own bat to eliminate Albie. But for my money, Stratton told them to do it.’
Parry thought it over. ‘Leave it with us, Fran,’ he said. ‘We’re not overlooking the old man’s death, whatever you think. But we need more to go on than your theories. Right now we can’t prove either of the two men was ever in that church porch.’
‘They’re going to get away with it, aren’t they?’ I asked, exasperated. ‘They killed poor Albie and are going to get clean away with it.’
‘Have a bit of faith in us,’ coaxed the woman officer.
But I’d lost faith in them. I said, ‘I want to go home.’
They drove me home in a police car. Although by now it was very late, both Daphne and Ganesh were waiting for me. They’d been sitting in Daphne’s warm, comfortable kitchen, which smelled strongly of coffee.
They greeted me with relief tinged, on Ganesh’s part, with disapprobation.
‘If you had told me,’ he said, ‘that you were going to accept to be a model for that crazy artist, I should have advised you very strongly against it.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why I didn’t tell you.’
I collapsed on to a chair. Daphne took charge.
‘Don’t scold her now,’ she ordered Ganesh. ‘She needs some hot food and lots of rest.’
She proceeded to feed me homemade soup and crusty bread, and brewed up a hot toddy to finish it-and me-off.
In between mouthfuls of soup, I told them all about everything, what had happened to me at the community hall, at the office block, on the fire escape, and at the police station.
Daphne clicked her tongue disapprovingly. ‘That girl’s certainly caused a lot of people a lot of trouble, much of it unnecessary by the sound of it. To think she could simply have walked out of there! If you ask me . . .’
Daphne was fair-minded. She searched for some form of condemnation which would make allowance for Lauren’s unhappy childhood and well-intentioned if warped scheme for raising money for the refuge, all of which I’d e
xplained.
‘If you ask me,’ she concluded, ‘that young woman needs straightening out.’
I thought, good luck to anyone rash enough to try.
Ganesh said unexpectedly, ‘You can’t expect her, Lauren, to be a nice person.’
We stared at him.
‘Where would she learn about niceness?’ he asked. ‘She was a young child when her mother married Szabo. From then on, all she saw was violence and betrayal, not only in her own home, but at the refuge, listening to the stories of the other women there.’
‘And yet,’ I said unwillingly, because it was hard to speak up on behalf of anyone in this whole business, ‘and yet Szabo did seem so fond of her when he talked to me. When he spoke of her being in the hands of criminals, he was nearly in tears.’
‘People cry for all sorts of reasons,’ was Ganesh’s response to this. ‘Half the time, they’re crying for themselves. How do you know Szabo wasn’t just feeling sorry for himself?’
Daphne cleared her throat delicately. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Elizabeth Barrett,’ she said. ‘You know, the Barretts of Wimpole Street? She was a poetess and ran away with Robert Browning?’
‘I know it,’ I said. ‘But sorry, Daphne, I don’t see the connection. I don’t see Lauren lying on a sofa writing verse.’
Daphne leaned forward. ‘But there was no need for Elizabeth to lie on her sofa, day in and day out, in Wimpole Street, was there? She wasn’t an invalid. Her father had persuaded her that she was, to keep her there. By all accounts he treated his children abominably, yet had he been asked to defend his actions, he would have insisted he’d acted out of love.’
‘I don’t know these Barretts,’ said Ganesh. ‘But I do know that when something’s really badly wrong in a family, you often find that every member of it swears blind everything is just fine. You read it in the papers every day. Women married to murderers swear the bloke was a perfect husband and father. Families,’ added Ganesh with some emotion, ‘no one understands them, only the family members.’
This was all getting beyond me. I wasn’t in the mood for subtle argument. I’d had a very packed day, and the toddy and the soup combined were making me drowsy. The kitchen was very warm. Exhaustion took over.
‘You know,’ I mumbled. ‘I told Parry no one trusted anyone else in this business. I was right. Even Stratton didn’t know her two goons were cutting a separate deal with the kidnap victim.’
‘You need to go to bed,’ Daphne said firmly. ‘A good night’s sleep will set you right.’
‘Is that the time?’ Ganesh looked at his watch and leaped up with a hunted expression. ‘I’ve got to go! Hari will have locked up the place and I’ll have to get him out of bed to let me in. I’ll never hear the last of it.’
‘You can doss down in my place till morning,’ I mumbled, ‘and go back when he opens the shop.’
‘Or I’ve got a spare bed,’ offered Daphne.
‘Thanks but no,’ he said. ‘Hari will’ve been on the phone to High Wycombe by then. Dad’ll be on the first train up to town.’
Let him sort it out. Not for the first time, I appreciated the fact that I had no one. I propped my head in my hands. I knew I ought to go but was too tired to move.
‘Don’t be depressed, dear,’ Daphne said, returning from showing Ganesh out. ‘I think you’ve been a heroine.’
I thanked her, but said I felt a failure. ‘All I wanted to do was get justice for Albie. I also wanted to find the missing girl and I did find her. But justice for Albie seems as far away as ever. On top of all that, they’ve lost Merv.’
Daphne sighed and joined me at the table. ‘Things will work out, Fran. Give the police a chance. They’ve only just got the girl back. They’ll go into it all very thoroughly, I’m sure.’ With slightly less assurance she added, ‘They’ll find out the truth about your friend, Albie.’
‘Truth is no good without evidence,’ I told her. I hauled myself to my feet, because I was going to fall asleep where I sat if I didn’t make a move right there and then. I apologised for keeping her and thanked her for the soup.
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘I’m just so glad you’re safe. You’re sure you wouldn’t like to sleep here tonight? I can make up a bed in a jiff.’
‘Thanks, but I’ve only got to go down to the basement, after all,’ I told her.
She led me down the hall and opened the front door. A blast of cool air swept in, shaking me out of the mist of tiredness. The street was bathed in murky lamplight and empty – no!
It wasn’t empty. Coming towards us along the pavement was an extraordinary sight.
Two figures lurched along in a disorganised fashion as if arguing with one another. The taller one, who urged the other on, I recognised at once as Ganesh. The smaller one, who was protesting and grumbling as he scurried spider-fashion alongside, was invisible beneath a motley assortment of old clothes bound round with string. One of those old-fashioned Balaclava knitted hoods covered his head and in his arms he was clasping some sort of bundle. The pair of them reached the bottom of the steps to Daphne’s door.
‘Fran!’ Ganesh called up excitedly. ‘I’ve found him! I mean, he found me! He was waiting for me at the shop!’
The mobile pile of rags emerged from behind Ganesh into the light flooding down the steps from Daphne’s hall.
‘Good gracious!’ muttered Daphne as a powerful odour enveloped us.
Only one person smelled that bad.
‘Jonty!’ I cried. ‘I – we – thought you were dead!’
‘Dead?’ He snorted, coughed and wheezed, then spat to one side.
Ganesh leaped back. ‘Hey!’
‘If I ain’t dead,’ Jonty croaked, ‘it’s because I was bloody lucky. I got out, I did. I run like I never run before or since! They was busy nabbing poor old Albie and they hadn’t time to grab me. I got away and I’ve kept away till now.’
He moved up a step, closer to us, still clasping the sack with his assorted possessions. Daphne retreated hastily.
Jonty peered up at me. I hadn’t seen his face before. Framed in the filthy knitted hood, it resembled some sort of monkey’s, creased in deep lines and sprinkled with grey whiskers. His eyes were small and bloodshot and fixed me with a ferocious expression. Spittle dribbled from his mouth as he spoke and he appeared to have very few teeth.
‘Go on, tell her!’ urged Ganesh from behind him. ‘Tell her why you came back.’
Jonty cast him a look of mixed surprise and disapproval. ‘Course I come back, soon as it was safe. He was my mate, was Albie. I couldn’t have helped him. I couldn’t have done nothing to save him, but I want ter see right done by Albie. By his memory, like.’ He took one hand from the bundle and poked a yellowed forefinger at me. ‘You’re a do-gooder, you are. Well, do a bit of good, then. Go and tell the coppers what I told him!’ Jonty jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Ganesh.
‘Yes, I know you’ve told me!’ Ganesh said testily. ‘But I want you to tell Fran!’
‘All right, then.’ Jonty cleared his throat again and I waited apprehensively for him to spit. But after taking a brief look round, he seemed to decide this wasn’t the place, and just began, ‘When you come and found me that night in the porch, I told you, didn’t I, I was waiting for old Albie to turn up? Expected him, I did. Sure enough, a bit later he come along. He brought a bottle of whisky. Half-bottle of Bell’s it was. He said, he’d seen you two and you wanted to take him along to talk to the police the next day. You wanted him to tell ’em what he saw, about that girl being snatched. He said, he’d fixed to meet the young lady there at Marylebone Station. He said that he –’ Jonty’s blackened thumbnail hooked towards Ganesh again – ‘that feller there worked in that newsagent’s, up near the traffic lights, a bit down from that spud caff. So when I reckoned things might’ve quietened down a bit and those two fellers weren’t looking for me no more, that’s where I went.’
‘He was waiting for me,’ said Ganesh. ‘In a doorway
near the shop. He jumped out as I went past. I couldn’t believe my eyes.’
‘Jonty,’ I whispered, all trace of tiredness gone, ‘are you saying you saw the two men take Albie away? That you can remember what they looked like and can identify them?’
‘That’s what I’m telling you, isn’t it?’ Jonty was getting irritated at my obtuseness. ‘I saw them two blokes. I was there when they grabbed old Albie. One was a big slab of a feller, all pale, pale hair, eyes, like a walkin’ stick of lard. The other was a little dark feller wearing one of them leather motorcyclist’s jackets. They drove up in an old Cortina. They hadn’t reckoned on finding me there too, and they’d have taken me along with Albie, I reckon, only Albie was putting up a good scrap and it took the two of ’em to drag him away. So that’s when I scarpered. Remember ’em? I’ll never forget ’em.’