by Ann Granger
He seated himself uninvited. ‘All right?’ he enquired.
We took this as wanting to know if the food had been satisfactory and assured him it had. Well, it had been as good as we’d expected it would be, which was not very, but then you couldn’t say it had failed expectations either.
Jimmie leaned forward to impart a confidence. ‘Spuds have gone out of fashion, you know, hen. Right, aye?’ He nodded towards Ganesh.
Ganesh, appealed to as an authority on the capital’s eating habits, said cautiously, ‘Depends.’
‘No, no, you take it from me. I’ve been thinking of turning this place into a pizza joint, you know?’
At the thought of the same spud fillings spread on pizza bases, I probably blanched. ‘There are a lot of pizza places about, Jimmie,’ I said. ‘At least this place is – is different.’
‘Aye, but that’s because they’re popular!’ he returned wistfully. ‘That’s what the public wants. I thought, mebbe paint the place up, make it look a wee bit Eye-talian. Hang some of those fancy bottles on the walls. Table service. You wanting a job?’ This was aimed at me.
I said I was always wanting a job. I didn’t think he was serious, so there was no harm in going along with his plans. We all have dreams.
‘Right then,’ he said, getting up. ‘I’ll remember.’
I didn’t sleep very well that night. The sweetcorn was intent on reminding me why I usually avoided it. I don’t know why I chose it. No one but myself to blame, as usual. But then, cheese or baked beans can play havoc with the digestion as well. If you want a good night’s sleep, don’t eat at Reekie Jimmie’s.
I dozed off eventually, even so. Bonnie woke me in the early hours, as she’d done before, growling softly. She was standing near my head. I put out a hand and it touched her. The hair on her spine was rigid. She gave my fingers a quick lick, just to let me know I wasn’t the object of her growling, then rumbled threateningly again.
A car had turned into the blind driveway where the garages stood. Perhaps one of the other garage owners? The engine was switched off. But I heard no squeak of neighbouring garage doors opening. I listened hard. Someone was walking up and down outside. Not running as on the previous occasion I’d heard someone there. Just walking, pausing, walking on. At last, before my locked doors, the footsteps stopped.
I sat up, swung my legs to the floor, scooped up Bonnie and clamped a hand on her muzzle.
I was just in time. A faint tapping was heard at the door. Bonnie wriggled and uttered a muffled squeak. I whispered, ‘Shh . . .’ She froze.
The tapping sounded again, louder. I heard a voice, a man’s voice. It was muffled, but I could have sworn it called my name.
This was all wrong. Anyone who knew I lived in the garage probably knew I came and went through the back door into the yard. I never used the main garage doors. Besides, who’d want to talk to me now, at this time of the night, or early morning? Not having any windows, I couldn’t tell what time it was. I put hearing my name down to nerves. In the circumstances, I was ready to imagine anything. It was probably no more than one of those lost souls who’d taken the turning into the blind roadway and was wandering about, looking for a way out. I was getting fed up with this. Perhaps Gan and I could nail up a board reading Garages Only.
Then the door shivered as an unknown hand rattled at the catch. In my arms, Bonnie felt as though she was about to burst out of her skin with frustration. Neither of us had imagined that.
The footsteps moved away. I heard a car door slam. I waited for the engine to start up but it didn’t. I couldn’t work this out and I didn’t like it. For a long time I sat there, with Bonnie on my knees, listening and waiting. She, too, waited and listened. Then she stiffened. I couldn’t hear anything new, but she had. I strained my ears. Was that a footstep? Or just a piece of debris blown in by the wind and rattling its way past all the garages? There was another sound, sudden and unexpected, a kind of yelp. I wasn’t sure it was even human. It could have been a human voice, cut short. Or it might have come from some kind of animal, hunting out there in the gloom. There were several feral cats around the area. It could even have been Norman’s owl. Without warning, making me almost jump out of my skin, a car horn blared a brief, shocking fanfare, splitting the night air. It was followed by a scraping noise and a clunk. Someone, something, was panting. And then, whatever it was, or had been, was gone.
How I knew it had gone I couldn’t tell you, but I knew it had, and Bonnie knew it, too. I released her. She dropped to the ground and ran towards the closed double doors. But there she stopped, and barked a couple of times in an experimental way, before beginning to whine and scratch at them. I switched on the garage light. The fluorescent tube buzzed and flickered into white light. Bonnie, by the doors, turned to look at me enquiringly. Then she scrabbled some more at the doors, whined and looked back at me again.
I told her to wait and struggled into my clothes. Then I opened the small door into the shop’s back yard and peered out. It was still dark but there was a distinct lightening on the horizon despite the raindrops starting to fall. I looked at my watch. It was almost five and the temperature was pretty low. Bonnie abandoned her attempt to dig through the main doors and pattered past me through the back door out into the yard. A sudden patch of yellow showed as someone put on a light in the flat over the shop. A distant dustbin lid clattered to the ground, almost certainly dislodged by one of the cats. Bonnie barked and I told her to shut up.
The curtain at the lit window twitched and I saw the outline of Ganesh’s head and long hair. He could see me, too, in the lit doorway of the garage. He disappeared, and a few minutes later the back door of the shop was opened.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, coming out into the yard. He was unshaven and had pulled on jeans, a sweater and old trainers. He blinked blearily at me through a thick fringe of black hair.
‘I woke up early,’ I said.
‘Making a habit of that, aren’t you?’ he asked. He ran his fingers through his hair in an attempt to tidy it. ‘It’s cold and wet out here,’ he grumbled.
I followed him into the shop and put the kettle on. He leaned against the doorjamb of the washroom, watching me, his arms folded.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘You don’t fool anyone. Not me, anyhow. What’s going on?’
‘Someone was out front by the garages,’ I told him.
‘So? People go to work.’
‘No, I mean, wandering about, tapping at the doors of Hari’s garage, trying the handles. I think he called my name. Bonnie heard him and woke me.’
Ganesh glanced at the nearest window. It was still darkish out there despite the street lighting.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get my jacket and we’ll go and take a look.’
‘He’s gone now,’ I protested.
‘He might have left some trace or other behind. Come on, the papers will be here soon.’ He was struggling into a leather jacket.
We went out of the front of the shop after collecting a torch from the storeroom. Gan locked the shop’s street door behind him. It was tipping it down now. Rain beat disagreeably into our faces. The pavement glittered beneath the street lights, and as the drops hit it, the force sent them bouncing up like tiny fountain jets so that we walked through a mass of dancing spray. We scurried, hunched in our jackets, to the access road to the garages. A car was parked just inside it, a Mazda.
I muttered, ‘Oh, no, Duke!’ That sad apology for Philip Marlowe was definitely dogging my footsteps after his chance success in Wimbledon. I felt like steaming over to the car and, even if Rennie wasn’t in it, leaving a nasty message taped to the windscreen.
Gan, sensing my mood, put a restraining hand on my arm. ‘Hold on, it mightn’t be his. There are hundreds of them around.’
The lighting by the garages was certainly so poor that the colour of the car was unidentifiable, just dark greyish. A good detective, back in Wimbledon, would’ve made a note of Duke’s registration number,
but I’m still learning. Gan’s words made me hesitate, but not for long. My eyes had adjusted to the gloom and I was sure that someone was sitting in the driver’s seat, and sure in my own mind who that person was. Giving Rennie the slip in Wimbledon had been pretty useless, seeing as he knew where to find me.
Gan was stamping his cold feet and muttering. Huddled together against the icy wind, trickling wet fingers of rain finding their way under our collars, we consulted badtemperedly.
‘It’s Rennie Duke,’ I said, shivering. ‘It’s got to be. Let me go over there and give him an earful.’ I wasn’t just angry, I was worried. The last thing I needed was that perishing little creep hanging about.
‘There are other Mazdas,’ persisted Gan doubtfully from somewhere inside the upturned collar he held together in front of his mouth.
‘I tell you, it’s him. I feel it in my bones. And if I stay here much longer, it’ll be pneumonia I feel.’
‘What on earth would he want? And why choose to call on you in the middle of the night?’ Gan abandoned his grip on his collar to fold his arms and tuck his hands into his armpits.
I said I didn’t know. Privately I could guess. Duke’s appearance in Wimbledon the previous day meant he’d sniffed out some clue to my mother’s secret, from sneaking a look at the letter or otherwise. True to form, he was acting on it. But why had he been parked so obviously in the garage area? He couldn’t have intended to tail me surreptitiously as I left. If it had been him rattling at the door during the night, it looked as if the little squirt really wanted to talk to me. To what purpose? Did he believe I’d team up with him? That I’d even tell him anything at all? That I was that daft?
‘You’re right, we’ll go and ask him what he’s playing at,’ said Gan. ‘I’m not hanging about out here any longer!’
I couldn’t have stopped him and I didn’t want to. I was curious too. Ganesh marched up to the car and, stooping, tapped on the window. I joined him and, crouched shoulder to shoulder, we peered inside.
Through the rivulets streaming down the glass, we could see the driver as a dark outline. He appeared to be asleep. His head was propped on the back of the seat. A sheepskin cap was tilted over his nose, obscuring his face.
‘That’s Rennie’s hat,’ I whispered through chattering teeth. ‘I told you it was him.’
Ganesh rapped loudly on the car window again, but the slumped figure didn’t stir. Ghostly fingers seemed to run lightly up my spine. In the pit of my stomach I was getting a sick, tight feeling.
‘We need that flashlight,’ I said. My voice sounded dull and flat.
Ganesh said, ‘Stay back, Fran. Let me take a look.’
He took out the torch and made his way to the driver’s side of the car. The beam of the torch lit up the interior so that even from where I stood, I could see everything clearly in a frozen diorama, even the mascot dangling in the middle of the windscreen. The scene was dominated by Rennie Duke’s partly collapsed form, propped up in the driving seat. Even in the thick jacket, it looked frail. His sheepskin hat at its rakish angle suddenly seemed a pitiful gesture of bravado. His hands were both raised against his chest, the fingers spread out in a clawing gesture, and round his throat, just visible above the collar of his jacket, was a dark line. The ends of the knotted cord which had choked the life out of him were lying on his shoulder.
Ganesh switched off the torch. His voice shaking, he said, ‘I’ll phone the police.’ He moved towards the entrance to the driveway, then turned. ‘You coming or staying here?’
I husked, ‘I’ll stay here, in case anyone else comes. You won’t be long, will you?’
‘No, only as long as it takes to ring the cops and get Hari down to take care of the papers. And then,’ added Ganesh, ‘neither of us will have very long before the cops come, so you d better get your story straight, Fran, whatever it is.’ He paused. ‘Is there anything you want to tell me now, quickly, before the law gets here?’
‘No,’ I said.
I fancied he looked relieved. I couldn’t blame him. I’m not sure ignorance really is bliss, but it makes life much easier when you’ve got the police grilling you. Hiding what you know is a whole lot harder, as I’d soon be finding out first hand.
Chapter Six
At first, when the police arrived, they were all efficiency and reasonableness. They checked the car and its silent occupant, radioed for back-up and suggested we might like to tell one of them all about it back at the flat over the shop while the other stood guard at the scene of crime.
Ganesh said his uncle wouldn’t like it. The police looked glum. One of them blew on his hands and rubbed them forlornly. He had as much chance of generating heat as a Boy Scout with a couple of sticks and a pile of wet twigs. The rain had eased but it hadn’t got any warmer. We all stood in the grey dawn light in the lee of the garages and the poor shelter it offered. Gan and I were shaking like leaves. Being forced to stay out in the rain could easily turn the law against us – rather sooner than they’d turn against us anyway. I imagined the cosy flat. Then I imagined the hysterical Hari. Gan was right; the flat was out. I suggested tentatively we might at least go to the shop.
‘Don’t be daft, he’s down there himself by now,’ said Gan.
Fortunately, he then remembered he had the key to the main garage doors on him. So he opened them up to a series of protesting groans which fitted the scene like a Greek chorus.
‘Don’t use the garage much?’ asked one of the coppers. Alert type. Should go far.
Ganesh mumbled something about not running a van at the moment. We all squeezed through the gap into my temporary home.
Until then, the coppers had seemed to assume that we’d found the body when coming to the shop’s garage at the start of the working day, and they were happy enough with that. They were even sympathetic.
‘Nasty shock,’ one had said.
But when they twigged that going to the garage wasn’t part of Ganesh’s morning routine, and even more when they saw my camping equipment, things changed. They not only became suspicious; they got that look of furtive triumph on their faces that coppers have when they think they have stumbled on an illegal activity.
One asked, ‘What’s all this?’ in policemanly tones. He might just as well have said, ‘’Ello, ’ello, ’ello . . .’ He pointed his biro at my bed, the heater and Bonnie’s bowl. ‘What’s going on here?’
I explained I was living there. It didn’t go down well.
‘What, here, in a garage?’ He stared at me in disbelief.
‘It’s a long story,’ I told him, ‘but I’m between accommodation.’
Bonnie, in the yard, heard my voice and began to whine and yelp at the back door. ‘And that’s my dog,’ I said. Bonnie scratched frantically at the door in support. I knew better than to let her in. She doesn’t like uniforms. Her previous owner had slept rough. To Bonnie, uniforms mean being moved on.
‘Where do you live?’ they asked Ganesh.
‘I told you, over the shop with my uncle.’ Ganesh had a mulish look about him. He was embarrassed. It was a toss-up whether he was blaming Hari, blaming me, blaming Duke, or blaming the police. I had a feeling it would end up being me.
They stared from one to the other of us and decided to start with the tax-paying citizen.
‘As you’re a resident, sir, it’s possible you might recognise the dead man. Do you feel you can take a look? He might be a user of one of the other garages here.’
‘I’ve looked already,’ said Gan. ‘I’m not looking again.’
‘And?’ The cops were waiting.
It was a pity he’d asked Ganesh. If he’d asked me I’d have said I didn’t know him from Adam and put an end to it. But Ganesh is honest and said yes, he had met the deceased briefly. He understood the dead man’s name to be Clarence Duke. He wasn’t an owner or renter of one of the garages. He believed him to be a private detective.
All this time I was signalling to Ganesh to shut up. The more you tell the cops, t
he more you give them to go on, the deeper in schtuck you are. Don’t go thinking that the more helpful you are, the more the fuzz will trust you. Oh no, their minds don’t work that way at all. They just assume that if you know anything at all, you know all there is.
I was also uneasily aware of a ripple of excitement emanating from one of the constabulary as Ganesh spoke. PC Plod now scuttled back to the car and peered in again.