Hard Going

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  The door opened again. A pallid, spotty youth said, ‘Please, miss, is Mr Sullivan here?’

  The bellow returned. ‘Does it look as if he’s here, you half-witted object? Get out!’ The door closed. ‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus in here this morning,’ she said in a normal voice. She got up and fetched the coffee.

  When she was settled again, Connolly picked up the thread. ‘But his kitchen and bathroom are fierce modern, full o’ gadgets.’

  ‘Yes, funny that, isn’t it? But I suppose he liked his comfort, and he did love to cook. Very good at it, too,’ she added, almost wistfully.

  No more din-dins at Lionel’s, Connolly thought. ‘Did you ever meet his wife?’ she tried.

  ‘No. I heard from someone that he had been married once, or they thought he had been married, but he never mentioned a wife. In fact, he never said anything about his past, or his family, his career before he retired, anything like that.’

  ‘Did you ever meet any of his friends from before he came to Hammersmith?’

  ‘Never a one. Strange, don’t you think? That’s what I meant, about wondering whether you ever really knew him.’

  ‘Did he have any lady friends while you knew him? Romantic friends, I mean.’

  ‘Not that I know of. Actually, I’ve always sort of subconsciously wondered if he was gay.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Oh, nothing tangible. Just the lack of lady friends, as you put it, and something about him as a person – you know, the bachelor life, the quaintness, the antiques, the nice clothes, fond of cooking, knew all about wines. Epicene – is that the word?’

  It could be the word for all Connolly knew. She thought about Atherton – there was something of that about him, especially the cooking and the clothes. But he wasn’t gay – far from it. If mattress surfing was an Olympic event, he could have represented Britain. No reason old Lionel should have been gay either. Love a God, could a man not own a spatula without his credentials being questioned?

  ‘Anything else?’ she asked.

  Mrs Shepherd thought about it. ‘He was terribly fond of the theatre. And very knowledgeable. He must have seen every play ever written. Loved his Shakespeare, even the ones nobody reads any more – you know, Coriolanus and so on. Loved Tom Stoppard, too, for the wordplay. He used to go a lot, I do know that. And he organized trips to the theatre for groups of his friends. I’ve been several times. He usually ended up paying for that, too.’

  ‘Why would that make him gay?’ Connolly asked, still processing curry o’ l’anus. What the feck was that?

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t, I didn’t mean that. But from the way he talked, he seemed to know quite a lot of actors personally, as well as the plays, so I put him down as a bit of a luvvie. It was just another piece of the jigsaw, you know.’

  Somewhere a bell rang. Mrs Shepherd made getting-up movements and said, ‘The hordes are about to descend on us. And I’ve got playground duty, God help me.’

  ‘Just one more question,’ Connolly said, wondering what it should be. She didn’t feel she’d got much further, but there seemed no way in to this man’s life. ‘Do you know one of Lionel’s friends called Nina?’

  ‘Nina? No, no I don’t think so.’ She paused in thought. ‘No, I don’t think I’ve ever met a Nina. Who is she?’

  ‘Apparently she telephoned him now and then, left a message with his housekeeper.’

  ‘Oh! The sinister Mrs Danvers,’ said Mrs Shepherd, with half a smile.

  ‘I think the name is Kroll, Mrs Kroll,’ Connolly corrected her.

  ‘I know, dear, it’s a reference,’ said Mrs Shepherd. ‘I shouldn’t take too much notice of what Mrs Kroll says, if I were you. I don’t think she’s very reliable. Several times when I’ve rung up and Lionel’s been out, I’ve left messages which she hasn’t passed on. And sometimes she’s simply refused to take a message. Lionel lets her have all too much rope, in my opinion. She’s the sort who takes advantage.’

  The door opened, and a knot of adults shot in as if expelled from the corridor like peas from a pea-shooter. ‘Tea!’ cried the front runner desperately. ‘Haven’t you put the kettle on, Molly? What have you been doing?’

  Connolly made her escape so that the Shepherd could explain herself any way she liked. Calling a detective constable ‘dear’, the cheeky skanger! she thought as she made her way down the corridors against the flow and bedlam of youthful humanity. It was like one of those nightmares where you can’t make any progress towards your goal. She suppressed a panicky feeling that she’d never get out.

  Slider sent Atherton for brains and McLaren for muscle on the Krolls Quest – it did sound a bit Dragons and Dungeons, that. Atherton was slightly offended at the idea that he might need McLaren, but Slider said he didn’t know what he might get into, and he didn’t want him suddenly having to send for back-up. McLaren did not look hefty, like Fathom, or powerful, like Gascoyne, but he had a whippy strength, was fast and hard and, since he possessed no imagination, fearless.

  Getting into the car beside him, Atherton winced and said, ‘For God’s sake!’

  ‘What?’ McLaren protested, wounded.

  ‘You had curry again last night.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘It can’t be good for you to have curry every single night. There’s madras sauce coming out of your pores.’

  McLaren started the engine. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘I swear, next time I get in a car with you I’m bringing a canary in a cage.’

  ‘I liked it when you and Norma were always fighting,’ he said. ‘At least I got a bit of peace.’

  ‘I liked it when you were going out with whatsername. Pam, was it?’

  ‘Jackie,’ he corrected sulkily. She had dumped him, but he liked to believe he had dumped her because her programme of improving him – clothes, haircut, diet – had got on his wick in the end. She’d even made him have a manicure, for Chrissakes!

  ‘Ah yes, the ineffable Jackie,’ Atherton said.

  ‘What’re you talking about, effable?’ McLaren asked suspiciously. It sounded rude to him.

  ‘But at least for a while she had a good effect on your personal grooming regime,’ Atherton said. ‘Your nose hairs are back with a vengeance. You look as if you’ve been sniffing Growmore!’

  ‘And you’re about as much fun as Joan Crawford with PMT,’ he countered.

  ‘That’s pretty good,’ Atherton said generously. ‘I never knew you could do quick repartee.’

  ‘I can think on my feet,’ McLaren protested.

  ‘Well, I’ve seen you count on them,’ he agreed.

  The Krolls’ house was at the end of a short turning off the main road. It was detached, but that didn’t make it grand: it was small, Victorian yellow brick and slate roof, and about the size of a gatekeeper’s cottage.

  Behind it was a small yard and a separate brick building that looked as though it had been a stable with hayloft above. You still found places like these in the untouched parts of some outer London villages, probably purpose-built in the late nineteenth century for a local tradesman, a greengrocer, say, with a pony-and-cart round.

  There was a sign on the windowless side of the house, a large wooden board with battered edges, which had been painted with the words kroll & sons builders. The paint had cracked like the mud of a dried-up pool and was coming off in large flakes, revealing some other wording underneath. The Krolls had painted over an existing sign without doing the base work properly, which was not, Atherton noted, a very good advertisement for the business. The front garden of the house had been roughly tarmacked over and sported a motley collection of pallets, scaffold boards, broken boxes, a cement mixer that had been left caked in cement, and some other junk including a supermarket trolley with its wheels missing. And in the back yard, the original stable building had been joined by several rough sheds, cobbled together out of old doors and corrugated iron.

  ‘Well, here’s a man who cares about appearances,’ Ath
erton commented.

  Behind the yard, the backs of the warehouses on the industrial estate reared up, and the road was a dead end, with a high metal fence and more warehouses beyond. McLaren, out of native caution, turned the car and parked facing back down the road.

  Kroll’s high-side van – they had got the description and reg number from the Crimint database, along with his photo – was not in sight, though there was a dark-blue-and-rust coloured combo van, with no wheels, up on blocks directly in front of the house, and a beat-up Ford Focus parked in such a way as to prevent the van’s doors being opened. The street was quiet when they got out – only the whine of a forklift truck from over the end fence arguing with the trill of an equally unseen robin. The house had the air of being empty. Atherton went ahead and both knocked and rang, while McLaren stood at the gate, keeping an eye on the road.

  ‘No-one in,’ Atherton said at last, at exactly the moment when a shadow appeared behind the frosted glass pane, and the door was slowly opened.

  ‘No need to keep ringing bell like that! You think we’re deaf?’

  It was a small, old woman in a black dress with iron-grey hair pulled back into a bun, like any peasant grandmother from any country in Europe. She had left her teeth out so the lower half of her face had collapsed together, but her dark eyes sparked with vigorous anger. She looked like a bulldog that’d swallowed a wasp.

  ‘What do you want?’ she went on without waiting for Atherton to speak. She reached into the pocket of her dress and brought out a set of dentures which she inserted, smacking her lips, the better to articulate her hostility. ‘My grandson Marek is asleep upstairs. If you wake him he will be angry. You want my son, you have to come back later.’

  There had been no mention in the intelligence that Kroll had his mother living with him. ‘We’re CID officers,’ Atherton said. ‘Detectives,’ he added for clarity’s sake, showing his warrant card.

  The little lady bristled. ‘Why you don’t leave us alone? Jacek has done nothing! Nothing! We come here from Poland to get away from persecution, Nazis knocking on the door in middle of the night.’

  Atherton recognized a line when he met one. To remember the Nazis she would have had to be well in her eighties and she looked a good ten or fifteen years short of that.

  ‘Nobody’s accusing anyone of anything,’ he said soothingly. ‘We just want some information. Can we come in, Mrs Kroll?’

  ‘Not Kroll – Adamski,’ she said.

  Atherton recalibrated quickly. Records had their Mrs Kroll’s maiden name as Adams. Anglicizing was common among long-term settlers. This must be Angela’s mother, not Jack’s.

  The old lady examined both the warrant cards carefully, and then scrutinized their faces before stepping back to let them in. And she still added, in warning, to prove herself not alone and helpless, ‘Marek is asleep upstairs. He will hear if you start anything.’

  She led them down a dark passage of closed doors towards the back of the house. It felt cold, despite the warm day outside, and there was a smell of stale cigarettes and male sweat and, under that, the sharp, sour smell of mould. She led them into the kitchen, which Atherton noted had not been refitted since the eighties. The lino tiles on the floor were worn and chipped, the unit doors were all on the slant as their cheap hinges sagged; there were dirty dishes in the sink and the gas stove was crusted in spillings. Either the business was not doing well, or the Krolls had found something else entirely to spend their money on.

  Mrs Adamski sat herself at the Formica-topped table, fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket and lit one. She waved it at the other chairs around the table. Atherton sat; McLaren remained standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘So, what you want to ask?’

  ‘Your daughter worked as housekeeper to a man called Lionel Bygod,’ Atherton said.

  Mrs Adamski wagged the cigarette in assent.

  ‘I expect you will have heard that he was killed on Tuesday.’

  ‘Nothing to do with us,’ she said quickly. ‘Why you come here asking questions? We don’t know nothing.’

  ‘It’s purely a matter of routine,’ Atherton said soothingly. ‘We have to establish where everybody was at the time.’

  ‘Everybody working all day,’ Mrs Adamski snapped. ‘What you think?’

  ‘Your daughter doesn’t work all day, only mornings. What time did she come home on Tuesday?’

  A shrug. ‘Three o’clock, maybe. Like always. Then she change and go over The King’s Arms.’

  Atherton knew it: a pub just across the main road from here, which had been prettified recently to make it look like an old coaching inn – though as it featured live entertainment and big screen TV sports, the effect was only skin deep.

  ‘She went for a drink?’

  ‘She work there!’ Mrs Adamski said indignantly. ‘Evenings, five to eleven.’

  ‘I see,’ Atherton said, making a note. Even given that her job for Lionel Bygod was not tiring, for her to want to hold down a second job suggested a need for money that did not sit with Kroll making big money at his nefarious activities, or indeed at the building trade. ‘And after eleven?’

  ‘She come home. Go to bed.’ A shrug. What do you expect a working woman to do?

  ‘Fine,’ said Atherton. ‘And your son and grandson? Where were they?’

  ‘Out all day on a job. Not come home till half past four. Then I cook supper, then they go to pub seven, half past.’

  ‘The King’s Arms?’

  A nod.

  ‘And what time did they come back?’

  A shrug. ‘Half past eleven maybe. And go to bed. That is all.’

  Not by a long chalk, Atherton thought. ‘The job they were out on all day – where is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. They don’t tell me.’ Now the anger was back. ‘I don’t know what they do. Angelika work, work, and for what? For nothing! Pennies! Jacek should take care of her. That’s what Polish men do, they take care of their women and children. She should not have to do these jobs. Working in a pub! That where she is now – so soon Mr Bygod dies, she gets more hours at King’s Arms. And what does he do all day? Swinia leniwy! There is never any money, only what Angelika brings. She should not have married him!’

  Atherton could make a guess at swinia, anyway. ‘It must be very hard for you,’ he said, ‘seeing her neglected like that.’

  Mrs Adamski bloomed under the sympathy. ‘Very hard for mother,’ she confirmed. ‘Her father was not that sort of man. I never go to work – he would have thought it shame on him. He had pride. Jacek has no pride. And always the rows between them, the shouting, on and on. I say to him, you have no right to say anything to Angelika, until you bring home money. He say to me, you don’t understand, but I understand very well when a man does not do his duty.’

  ‘What does he think you don’t understand?’

  ‘Oh, he say he work very hard, but the money does not come. The bad men take it from him. He say he has bills to pay, debts. Ha!’ A mirthless laugh.

  ‘What bad men are these?’ Atherton asked. He slipped it in as casually as possible, but still Mrs Adamski took alarm.

  ‘I don’t know. I talk too much. I am foolish old woman. There are no bad men.’

  McLaren made a sound of warning, and Atherton glanced past him to see a scrawny, bed-draggled figure come slopping along the passage from the foot of the stairs. It was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a sleeveless vest, none too clean. Its feet were bare, it was unshaven, and its too-long hair was a mess, not improved by the slow scratching that accompanied the dragging walk. It appeared not so much to have descended from the apes as to have been overtaken by them.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said in a plain Acton accent. ‘Gran? You all right? Who’re you?’ He addressed the last to Atherton, but reaching the door he finally spotted McLaren, who had been hidden from him, and alarm belatedly tensed all his muscles. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asked in definite fright.

  ‘Ten o’clock in the morning, alr
eady he is awake!’ Mrs Adamski said witheringly. ‘My grandson, Marek. Another lazy pig who lies in bed all day while his mother works.’ She managed to inject a superb amount of scorn into ‘mother’.

  ‘I told you, Gran, it’s not Marek, it’s Mark,’ the lad said sulkily. ‘Who are you people?’

  ‘The police, Marek,’ Mrs Adamski said with heavy irony. ‘They have come to wake you up gently so you should not lie in bed all day and maybe hurt your back.’

  ‘Fuck, Gran, you don’t talk to the police!’

  This elicited a stream of furious Polish aimed at the lad, who showed no sign of understanding any of it. He rubbed one bare, dirty foot over the other, looking from Atherton to McLaren nervously. When the old woman stopped, he said, ‘Me dad’s out, and me mum. Me gran don’t know nothing. Me mum won’t half be mad if you upset her.’

  McLaren caught his attention. ‘Where’s your dad?’ he asked in the tone that brooked no prevarication.

  ‘He’s out – at a job,’ he added just in time.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Out Hanwell.’

  ‘This is the job you’ve been helping him on?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Reluctantly dragged out.

  ‘We’d like to have a word with him. What’s the address?’

  Alarm. ‘He might not be there. I mean, he might have to go and get stuff. Materials. Or something.’

  ‘I think you need to talk to us,’ Atherton intervened firmly.

  McLaren caught the ball and said, ‘Come and sit in the car – no need to upset your gran. We’ve got a few questions to ask.’

  ‘No! I don’t have to. I’m not going!’

  Atherton got up and stepped close, masking him from his grandmother with his body. He said quietly, ‘I can smell the weed on you. What have you got in your pocket?’ Mark’s hand made the automatic, guilty movement. Dope, Atherton thought – in both senses. ‘I can bust you for possession, we can toss your room and see what else you’ve got up there. Cuff you and take you away. How will your gran like that? Or you can sit in the car nicely and answer some questions. We’re investigating a murder. This is serious stuff, Mark. You don’t want to mess us about.’