by Ann Granger
‘I’m not,’ I lied.
She smiled at me. ‘I used to work in the probation service,’ she told me, ‘before I decided to join the police. I worry about young people with problems.’
‘I do not have a problem,’ I repeated slowly and forcefully. ‘I am not on probation and I’m twenty-two years old, not a kid.’
‘You look younger,’ she said.
‘Yeah, it’s because I’m pint-sized and don’t do the make-up and fashion thing.’
She flushed. Perhaps she thought I was getting at her. But too bad, I was the one getting the unwelcome attention.
We were driving down a long street and to either side, from time to time, appeared the imposing frontages of what I supposed to be the colleges. I couldn’t help rubber-necking. Pereira obliged by telling me that this was the High Street and naming the buildings we passed.
Our route opened out. ‘We’re coming up to Magdalen College and Magdalen Bridge. That’s the Botanic Gardens on the right. If you’re interested in boating you can hire a punt just under the bridge.’
‘I’ve been warned to stay out of punts,’ I said.
We rolled over the bridge and came to an area where several roads met, with a patch of dusty vegetation in the middle.
‘This is called the Plain,’ Pereira continued her tour guide commentary. ‘It used to be a cemetery.’
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘And this is the beginning of the Iffley Road.’
That meant we were nearly at our destination. Thank goodness, I’d be rid of my guardian angel soon. She turned the car into a side street and pulled up before a red-brick villa with bow windows and an illuminated sign in the ground floor window reading ‘Bed and Breakfast. No Vacancies.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Pereira. ‘You’re out of luck, Fran.’
‘No, I’m booked in. They’re expecting me.’ I opened the door and scrambled out. As I retrieved my bag from the rear seat she made one last try.
‘I have to go to London for an early-morning meeting,’ she said.
I just smiled at her. ‘Thanks for the lift.’
I ran up the steps to the front door and rang the bell. My police escort hadn’t moved off but sat waiting in her car to see what happened.
There was a pause, longer than I would have wished. I refused to turn my head and meet Pereira’s eye. At last I heard sounds of movement and then the yap of a small dog. I was already unsettled and that sound nearly finished me off. For one wild stupid moment I wondered if Bonnie had been spirited to Oxford to meet me, but it couldn’t be so and it wasn’t.
The door opened. A woman with hair an unlikely shade of red, wearing black trousers and a striped blue and grey shirt, stood before me. Tucked under her arm was a wriggling miniature poodle. It fixed me expectantly with its shiny little eyes, its pink tongue waggled and it gave another friendly yap of greeting.
‘Hi . . .’ I said, my voice choking.
‘Sorry, dear,’ said the redhead. ‘I’ve got no rooms free.’
‘I’m Fran Varady . . .’ I began.
Her face brightened and she interrupted me. ‘Oh, you’re Mickey’s girl. Come on in, then. I was wondering when you’d get here.’
I wasn’t Mickey’s girl and I would have to disabuse her of that quickly. But right now I had other things on my mind. I snatched up my bag and stepped into her hallway.
She looked past me. ‘Who’s that, then?’
‘Plainclothes,’ I said.
‘Blimey, dear,’ she returned. ‘You didn’t take long to get yourself noticed, did you? What did you do?’
Chapter Three
‘I haven’t done anything!’ I told her. ‘Look, can I come inside? She’ll drive off as soon as the door’s shut. She’s just checking I’m staying here.’
The landlady didn’t argue with that. Let’s face it: she didn’t want a copper parked outside her front door keeping observation. No one would. It’s the sort of thing the neighbours notice and it makes them nervous. She moved aside in a way which struck me as clumsy, and let me walk past her and drop my bag on the floor. Then she pushed the door closed and set the poodle down. He ran to sniff my jeans and then stood on his hind legs to put his narrow paws against my knee and panted at me happily. I scratched his woolly ears. He wore a pale blue leather collar with rhinestones on it.
‘This is Spencer. He likes people,’ said the landlady. ‘I have to pick him up when I open the door in case he runs out. Do you want to take a look out of the window in there and see if your friend has gone?’
She indicated the room which originally would have been the house’s front parlour. I went inside and looked through the bay window, knowing that most of me was hidden by the B and B sign which hung there. Pereira’s car was nowhere to be seen. I’d finally shaken her off. I turned away in relief. With the police you can never be absolutely certain. Although I’d assured the landlady my unwanted guardian angel would leave once she saw I was accepted in the house, there had been the possibility she’d sit out there for a while to make sure I hadn’t just talked my way in on a temporary basis. It was sod’s law that I’d run into a nosy copper at Paddington and I hoped she wasn’t going to complicate matters. They were complicated enough already. Not, of course, that I’d come to Oxford to involve myself in anything criminal. I told myself this forcefully, subduing the awkward persistent twinge of doubt. But I guessed Pereira’s interest in me was less because I might be in trouble than that I might turn out to be trouble, for her.
I was now free to study the contents of the room in which I found myself. It was decorated with flowered wallpaper of the sort I hadn’t seen in years and still had an old-fashioned fireplace although these days a gas fire was installed in it. Otherwise, it was furnished with small tables each neatly laid with two place settings and salt and pepper pots. There was a lingering background odour of bacon.
‘It’s the breakfast room,’ said the landlady from the door. ‘Breakfast is from eight to nine thirty, or you can have it earlier if you let me know the night before. I don’t do evening meals. There are lots of little places in the area where you can eat.’
She was either a very patient person or she wasn’t overburdened with other tasks at the moment. She didn’t appear to mind how long I lingered.
‘That’s OK,’ I told her. ‘I don’t think I’ll be staying long.’ I realised I owed her an explanation as to why I’d arrived in the company of plainclothes. ‘I just had the bad luck to meet up with that sergeant on the train. I didn’t give her any encouragement but she kept asking me questions. I don’t know why. She insisted on driving me here. She said she wanted to be sure I had somewhere to stay.’
‘Ever been homeless?’ the landlady asked unexpectedly but in a pleasant way.
‘Yes, for a little while. It was quite a time ago. Does it show?’ I was surprised.
‘No, dear, of course it doesn’t. My name’s Beryl. Do you want me to show you your room?’
She turned and lurched towards the staircase. The poodle pattered after her. I picked up my bag and followed.
We climbed slowly to the first floor. It was clear now that Beryl had some kind of walking difficulty. She held on to the banister and hauled herself up. When we arrived, she opened the door to a room at the back and stood aside for me to enter.
‘I hope you’ll be comfortable. I don’t offer a proper en suite although you’ve got your own washbasin, see? But there’s a bathroom right across the hall and toilets on each floor. There shouldn’t be a problem because there are only three other people staying, two tourists and a travelling rep, I know the sign in the window says I’m full, but I just switched that on to stop people coming and asking for rooms. It’s been a really busy summer and I wanted a bit of a rest.’
‘I’m sorry Mickey asked you to take me,’ I apologised. ‘It’s extra work for you.’
She waved that away with a hand tipped with scarlet nails. ‘No, dear, not a bit! I’m always happy to do Mickey Allerton a favo
ur. I used to work for him, years ago.’
I put her age at around fifty now, but she still had style, despite the lame leg. The bright red hair was tucked into a neat French plait and she was carefully made up and wore large pearl cluster carrings.
‘I was a dancer,’ she said with a note of sadness in her voice. ‘Good days, they were. I had a lot of fun.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t work for Mickey, not in his clubs. I don’t sing or dance or strip. I’m an actor although I haven’t got an acting job right now. Mickey just asked me to come to Oxford to do an errand for him.’
I glanced at the poodle. I could tell her about Bonnie being held as surety for my good behaviour but I decided against it. She obviously had a high opinion of Allerton and I didn’t want to damage it. Theirs was an old acquaintance. I was a ship passing in the night - I hoped.
‘All right, dear. It’s your business. When you’ve unpacked, come down and have a cup of tea with me,’ she invited.
I thanked her and she left me to it. I heard her awkward progress down the hall and then down the stairs. I wondered what had happened to her leg and remembered Ganesh’s sarcastic remark about falling off the stage.
The room was furnished very comfortably in a similar old-fashioned way to the breakfast room, but benefited from the early evening sun which cast a warm apricot glow over everything. Through frilly net curtains I gazed from the window on to the long narrow garden at the rear of the property. For ease of maintenance most of it had been paved. There were a couple of wooden seats but some colourful plants in pots were the only growing things apart from a knobbly wisteria trained against the far brick wall and scrambling across the lintel of a wooden door in the middle of the wall.
People say evenings like this are peaceful but I find them unsettling. I understand why ancient peoples like the Aztecs worried so much about the sun setting. There is a kind of finality about it, an awareness of the long night ahead. There’s a saying, however, about not letting the sun go down on your anger. Today it was going down on mine. I was still angry with Mickey Allerton and I would stay angry, even after all this was over, no matter how things turned out.
I turned back from the window and sat down on the one upholstered chair and took a further look at my temporary home. It was odd to think that this was exactly what it would be for the next two or three days, my home, my space. Yet it had nothing of me in it. Everything was contrary to what I felt myself to be. I am not a frilly-curtain person, nor a lilac-bedlinen one. I averted my eyes from the awful picture on the wall depicting a child with unfeasibly large eyes and a tear rolling down his face. Why would anyone want such a picture? I wondered. How could anyone think it cute? I wasn’t just in a strange city where I knew no one. I was in an altogether alien world. I had a mad impulse to search the room for listening devices, like James Bond in a new hotel room. Perhaps the bug was located behind that picture or the mirror on the dressing table . . .
I caught sight of myself in the mirror and stood still before it, trying to see myself as DS Pereira had. I still didn’t think I looked like someone who might be on the wrong side of the law nor even someone who might once have been homeless. But Beryl’s question had shaken me. There was something about me. I couldn’t see it but others could. It wasn’t anything to do with appearance, looks or dress. It had to be something else: body language, and a kind of wariness.
One of the people who had a flat in the converted house in which I lived kept a cat. My dog Bonnie and this cat lived on terms of mutual respect. They ignored one another. But whereas Bonnie was friendly with the other tenants, the cat avoided us all, everyone except its owner. Whenever I’d tried to make friends with it, it sat down at a distance and stared at me with unrelenting yellow eyes. If I moved towards it, it moved away. When I stopped, it sat down again. There was a distance between us and it was to be kept. The cat had been a stray and the tenant had taken it in. It had been a scraggy, half-wild moggy. Now it was plump and sleek but it hadn’t lost its mistrust, its belief that you only survive if you keep your own space and others keep theirs. Was I like that? Did they read it in my eyes? I didn’t like the idea.
It’s not difficult to become homeless. There is a belief among people who don’t know any better that those who lack a roof over their heads do so by choice. After all, they reason, there’s always help somewhere. But there isn’t. Or if there is, it comes with strings attached. Many people on the street are there because they want to lose themselves, blend in with the anonymity of pavements and shop doorways. There are those whose marriages, careers and lives have fallen apart. There are those who are mentally ill. There are those for whom drink or drugs have become the beginning and end of existence, a never-ceasing cycle. Their days pass in a blur of feverish desire, painful withdrawal symptoms, all-too-short rushes of relief and passages of oblivion. There are ex-cons who will end up back in gaol. There are youngsters running away from abusive homes, others from ‘good’ families against which they have rebelled and become lost, unable to go back to what they have left. Others have fallen out of the system, some have been in council care when children, but when no longer ‘children’ are in no one’s care. Where should they go? Where turn?
I became homeless at sixteen because Grandma Varady died. My father had already died three years earlier. Grandma had been the tenant of the flat and the landlord wanted me out. He didn’t care where I went. He advised me to ‘go down the council’. I didn’t want to share hostel space with drug addicts and the mentally ill. I slept in a local park. Later I shared the first of many squats. After a while I got a place to live with the help of someone I’d helped. That didn’t last but I was offered my present place by a charity which, among other projects, had run the hospice in which my mother had died. I had a kind of security at last. But obviously my days of being ‘of no fixed address’ had stamped its mark on me.
‘Snap out of it, Fran!’ I told myself. ‘Don’t start brooding. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be able to get back to London.’ That was where I belonged. There no one cared what I looked like or what my past had been. That is the blessed anonymity of big cities, their magnet-like appeal.
It didn’t take me long to unpack my bag. I pushed Hari’s map in my pocket and made my way back downstairs.
Beryl hadn’t told me exactly where to find her but logic took me to the rear of the building and the rattle of teacups guided me there into a large, bright kitchen. The landlady was putting the pot and milk jug on a round pine table which was already set with the cups and a plate of chocolate biscuits.
I sat down, accepted a cup of tea and tackled the situation head on. There really was no other way. ‘I don’t know how much Mickey told you . . .’ I began.
She waved her scarlet-tipped nails at me. ‘I don’t worry about Mickey’s business. You don’t have to tell me anything. I said to Mickey I’d be happy to have you here and if you want to know anything about Oxford, just ask. I can’t do any more than that because of my leg.’ She reached down with a teaspoon and tapped her lower left leg. It made a dull hard sound. ‘Lost it,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Below the knee.’
‘Was that in an accident at the club?’ I asked in horror. Perhaps Ganesh had been on the right track, after all.
She shook her head vigorously. ‘Bless you, no. I fell off a bus at Marble Arch. It was Christmastime and you know how busy that area is at that time of year. The pavements were crowded. They had police out with loud hailers doing crowd control. I was on the bus and I thought I’d be clever and just jump off when it slowed down. But that’s not as easy as you think. I stumbled and then a taxi hit me. It was my own fault. The leg wouldn’t mend. In the end they chopped it off, just below the knee and gave me a false one. Of course, my dancing career was over. Things would have been bleak but, as it happened, an auntie died and left me this house here in Oxford. So I had the idea to set up a Band B. I was already over thirty and well, if you work the clubs, you need your looks and your figure. Mic
key came up trumps. He gave me a bit of money to see me over while I got the business going. He’s a good sort, Mickey, if you play fair by him.’
I didn’t ask her what happened to people who didn’t ‘play fair’. It was even clearer that Beryl thought Allerton was the bee’s knees. I’d have to be careful what I said. She was a nice woman, but she was a direct line back to the Silver Circle. I imagined that either Mickey would be on the phone daily to her to check on my progress or she’d received orders to bring him up to speed. I’d have to make it obvious that I was trying my best to carry out Mickey’s errand. However, as someone who had not only known Mickey Allerton but had also worked for him, perhaps Beryl was uniquely able to give me some indication as to why Lisa Stallard might have bolted back to Oxford; if indeed that was what she had done. It would make my job so much easier if I knew why she’d left in the first place without warning her boss.