by Ann Granger
‘Of course you’re free to go, Fran. You came here entirely voluntarily.’
Ho, ho, ho. I trudged out and went to find a chemist who’d sell me some arnica.
Chapter Nine
In the meantime, no matter what else pressed on my attention, there was another ongoing problem, that of my lack of accommodation. It was hardly fair on Hari, with the police hanging round, for me to stay on in the garage. It was taking advantage of his generosity and cruelly ignoring the damage to his tattered nerves. I don’t sponge off people in any way. I never have. I stand foursquare on my own bootsoles. I’d told Morgan I was flat-hunting and I ought to do something to back that up. I turned aforesaid boots reluctantly in the direction of Newspaper Norman’s home sweet home.
It would, if Norman had bothered to get the place done up, have been a highly desirable residence. I felt sorry for his neighbours, all of whom had kept their places in shape. It was a mid-Victorian terraced house with a flight of steps up to the front door and another down to the basement. Once it had been painted white, but over the years most of the paint had peeled like a bad case of sunburn. What hadn’t peeled had turned grey. The door had been painted black, but that too had cracked and flaked. Someone had removed the brass letterbox so that only a waist-high rectangular slit remained through which the wind must whistle and through which, if you felt like it, you could look into the hall. Or anyone inside could look out.
It was dark already despite the early hour, and I was pretty sure Norman would be home, sorting the day’s gleanings. Someone was home, at least. There was a light on the first floor and one on the ground floor to the left of the front door, filtering through faded curtains. The basement, which had a separate entrance, was also occupied.
I rang the bell. After a minute or two I heard sounds of movement. Shuffling footsteps reached the door and stopped. I stooped to the letter-hole and said, ‘It’s me, Norman, Fran.’
A voice at the level of the hole said, ‘Just a tick, dear.’
The door creaked open and a blast of fetid air hit me. Norman stood in front of me, now wearing an At Home outfit of red jogging pants teamed with an ancient velvet smoking jacket with moth-eaten quilted silk lapels.
‘Come about the room?’ he asked, before I could say anything. He stood back and waved me past him. ‘Very sensible. It hasn’t been snapped up yet but it will be.’
The hallway was cold and damp. The walls were covered with faded flowered wallpaper on which hung several pictures in Edwardian taste, including a reproduction of The Monarch of the Glen in an ornate gilded frame, caked in dust. The odour of boiling vegetables oozed from a room at the far end, presumably the kitchen. Through an open door into the lighted room on the left, I could see stacks of newsprint. It was everywhere, spilling from cardboard boxes and stacked in heaps, covering every surface and half the floor.
‘Follow me,’ invited Norman.
Ganesh was right. I had to be mad.
‘I don’t offer my rooms to just anyone,’ said Norman, preceding me up the creaking stairway. ‘I have to take a fancy to them.’
Help! Perhaps I should just turn and run right now. The stairway smelled of mice. I’ve lived in old buildings and I recognised it at once. Mice, I’ve been told, lack a muscle to control the flow of urine. They wee all the time.
We’d reached the landing. Four doors gave on to it, one to the left, one to the right and two straight ahead. Norman produced from his pocket a ring of keys of the sort gaolers carry, selected one, and stretched out his hand to a door in front of us. Before he could open it, the door to the right flew open and the hairiest man I’d ever seen stepped out.
Despite the chill in the place, he wore only a singlet and jeans. He was unshaven and his thick black eyebrows grew right across his brow in an unbroken line. More black hair sprouted across his shoulders, down his arms, and burst in a forest from his chest. It grew right up his throat. His bare feet were thrust into flip-flops and even his toes were hairy. Even from where I stood, I caught a whiff of acrid sweat. He pointed a finger at me and demanded in hoarse, heavily accented tones:
‘Who she?’
‘It’s all right, Zog,’ said Norman. ‘It’s only a nice young lady come about the room.’
Why not just describe me as a nice toothsome morsel? Zog was staring wildly at me from beneath his beetling brow.
‘You’re not to worry about Zog. It’s just that strangers upset him. He’s frightened of the immigration,’ whispered Norman. ‘He keeps thinking they’ll track him down. He’s a timid soul. The other night he came in late in a terrible state. Someone had pulled up in a car next to him as he was walking home. I dare say the driver was lost and only wanted to ask for directions, but poor Zog took to his heels. He was in such a panic he ran into the blind entrance to those garages you live in. That made things worse, of course. He got out of there and raced home here, shaking like a leaf.’
Well, that explained one thing. Now I knew who’d been outside the garage a couple of nights before Rennie Duke. If you’ve come into the country in the back of a lorry, you’ve got a lot to be scared of, and you must have been pretty desperate to start with.
‘He was coming home from work,’ Norman continued. ‘He works nights, cleaning. He feels safer then. He doesn’t go out much during the day.’
‘Don’t worry!’ I told Zog, but he twitched violently at the sound of my voice and looked as if he was going to pelt down the stairs and away. Hurriedly I asked Norman to tell him I was myself the child of an immigrant family and definitely sympathetic.
‘There, you see,’ said Norman. ‘That’s why you’ll get on all right here. You hear that?’ he added in a raised tone to Zog. ‘You and the young lady have a lot in common.’
Well, I hadn’t actually said that.
Zog grunted, scratched his chest hair and shambled back into his room.
Norman unlocked the door ahead of us and switched on the light, which glowed with all its forty-watt strength from a worn flex in the middle of the ceiling. No lampshade. Naturally.
‘Fully furnished,’ said Norman, gesturing widely to encompass the room’s fixtures and fittings.
Yes, it was. It had been furnished in his parents’, if not grandparents’, day. I guessed much of it stemmed from the late 1940s. The carpet was worn to the backing threads. There was a double bed with head – and footboards constructed of flat slats, so that the sleeper lay as if between a couple of picket fences. The mattress sagged in the middle and was stained ominously. I couldn’t help wondering about bugs. The bed stood high enough off the ground for you to keep a cabin trunk underneath if you wanted to. Rashly I peered underneath and saw a sea of fluffy dust and a receptacle with a handle, painted with roses.
‘Norm, you have got a loo?’ I asked in horror.
‘Bless you, dear, of course. It’s just next door in the bathroom. But you’ve got your own washing facilities.’ He pointed at a cracked washbasin hanging from the wall.
‘Fire escape?’ I ventured. I couldn’t ignore all that newspaper downstairs.
‘No problem,’ said Norman confidently. ‘You can always climb out the bathroom window and drop down on to the roof of the lean-to. From there to the ground it’s no more than eight feet.’
And two broken ankles.
I looked round despairingly. The rest of the furniture comprised a small wardrobe, a dressing table with an oval mirror and two hardbacked dining-room chairs. There were pictures on the walls up here, too. One showed children in black stockings and Holland pinafores, picking wild flowers. The other showed a sinking ship in mountainous seas with people clinging to spars. A girl with flying golden tresses was nobly rowing to their rescue in a tiny boat. A small brass plaque told me it was entitled The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter.
‘Could probably find you an armchair downstairs. Put it over there by the window. Pity it’s dark and you can’t see the view.’ Norman padded to the window and peered into the night. ‘The sash is broken but I’l
l fix it.’
I didn’t need to see the view. I’d seen enough.
‘Terms by arrangement,’ said Norman discreetly, coughing into his hand.
I couldn’t refuse outright. Norman, in his own way, was trying to be helpful – and get himself a reliable tenant. Besides, I mightn’t find anywhere else. Yet I balked at acceptance. Surely there must be something, somewhere? I went through the actions of a seriously interested applicant. I turned the tap in the sagging washbasin. The pipes coughed hollowly at me and a trickle of rust-tinged water ran out. The plughole was clogged with hairs and gunge. It whiffed a bit. I tugged open one of the dressing-table drawers. A knob came off in my hand. Having wrestled the drawer open, I then couldn’t shut it.
The close inspection was making Norman nervous. He removed the drawer knob from my hand with a tetchy ‘Gently!’ and thrust it back into place.
‘There we are, then!’ he said brightly. I was still looking round, so he decided on a diversion. ‘Nasty business over your way.’
It took a moment for me to realise he meant the murder. My surroundings exerted a horrid fascination which blotted out all else. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It was.’
‘Know him, did you? The dead feller?’
I concentrated on Norman with an effort. ‘Why do you ask?’
His gaze eluded mine. ‘Thought you might have known him. After all, what was he doing down there, parked by those garages? Dead end, that, ain’t it?’
‘He took a wrong turning,’ I said. ‘Like Zog.’
I didn’t want to discuss it and Norman knew I didn’t. In his crafty way he’d speeded up my departure before I wrecked the remaining fixtures and fittings. Nevertheless, on the way out, he insisted on showing me the bathroom. The promised fire-escape route through the window here was facilitated by the fact that the catch was broken, and despite the icy temperatures outside and the lack of heating inside, the window with its cracked frosted glass in a mouldering wooden frame was wedged permanently ajar. The huge old enamel bath stood on four lion’s paws and was rusted round the plughole and so eaten away elsewhere it brought to mind bodies being dissolved in acid. The cold had perhaps led to the cracking of a pipe running along the wall from the loo which was leaking into a pile of surplus newspapers stacked underneath in a festering yellow heap. Even Norman seemed to feel he should offer reassurance.
‘I’m going to get that fixed, too. Sidney up in the attic is very handy with tools.’
I didn’t ask where Sidney had learned to be handy with tools. Probably cracking safes.
I didn’t want to hurt Norman’s feelings, but no way could I live here. I’d rather doss in a doorway. I said I’d let him know. He seemed surprised.
‘Don’t take too long about it,’ he advised.
I’ve never been so glad to be out of a place in my life. Standing on the wet pavement, breathing in the evening air and listening to distant traffic noises, I felt like one of those prisoners who climbs on stage at the end of Fidelio.
The shop, when I reached it, was a haven of normality. Hari was selling the Evening Standard, Ganesh was restocking the cold drinks cabinet, Bonnie snoozed on her cardboard bed in the stockroom. I could’ve kissed them all.
The next morning, I took the train out to Egham and toiled up the hill to the hospice. The bump on my forehead had subsided and I’d taken the precaution of buying some concealant and covering up the purple bruise which had come out overnight. I would have to keep it covered. I didn’t want Ganesh asking me about it, quite apart from my mother. If she noticed.
‘How is she?’ I asked Sister Helen.
‘Quiet,’ she said. ‘Sleeping a lot. Last night she talked about you.’
I must have looked startled, because she smiled.
‘She’s very happy to have got in touch with you again.’
‘Sure,’ I mumbled, then asked, ‘what did she say, about me?’
‘That it was nice to see you managing so well and that you’d got a new job lined up. She hoped you’d come again today and keep her up to date with events, whatever they are.’ She twitched an eyebrow.
I didn’t respond to the unspoken invitation. I knew the events my mother waited to hear about. She hoped I’d come with news that I’d seen Nicola. I felt ridiculously disappointed. Aloud, I thanked Sister Helen for keeping the police at bay.
‘We’re here to make things as easy for your mother as we can,’ Sister Helen said calmly. ‘Naturally, she mustn’t be harassed.’
She gave me a steely look and I understood she meant I wasn’t to upset my mother either. The fact that she thought I might do that was in itself suspicious. I wished I knew how much Sister Helen herself knew. I got the funny feeling she was holding out on me in some way. But it was no good hoping she’d let on. Even if my mother had told her anything, she’d consider it akin to being under the seal of the confessional, and she wouldn’t go blabbing it out, not to the police, not to me, not to anyone.
I told her I understood the rules.
They’d moved Mum’s bed. It was over by the window so that she could see out into the garden at the rear of the building. It was milder out today, and the sun shone weakly. I didn’t know why they hadn’t put it there before.
‘Look Fran,’ she said when she saw me. ‘I can see the birdbath from here. The starlings all push and shove one another trying to get in. It’s quite funny.’
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked across her, out of the window, at the birdbath. There was a blackbird in it at the moment, ducking his head under the water, thrashing his wings, having a wonderful time. Water droplets flew everywhere.
‘I’ve been out to Kew,’ I said. ‘It’s where the Wildes live now. I saw Flora Wilde.’
My mother caught her breath, and colour flooded into her pale cheeks. She put out her hand and grabbed mine. ‘I knew you’d do it, Fran.’
‘Hang on,’ I said awkwardly. ‘She wasn’t very pleased to see me. I tried to explain. I told her about you – being here. But she was scared. I mean, you can see her point of view.’
But that was just what my mother couldn’t or wouldn’t see.
‘Oh, but she doesn’t have anything to fear,’ she said in that infuriatingly confident way. ‘I just want to know what Nicola, as I must call her, looks like. In my mind, you know, I still call her Miranda.’
Inwardly I groaned. She just didn’t want to know about any obstacle to the beautiful idea she’d had to send me hunting for my half-sister. I felt a twinge of resentment again. She wasn’t giving any thought to Flora or to me or to how much trouble could be caused. She’d just got this thing in her head about my seeing Nicola. The words ‘in my mind’ stirred unease in me. Was this really all just in her mind, as Flora had said? Had she transferred Miranda’s name and identity to another baby, not hers at all? Was the thirteen-year-old out there in leafy Kew my sister or not?
I took a deep breath and described the house in Kew to my mother. She was pleased it was so nice. Then I told her I’d spotted a school photo and described that. That really cheered her up. But it didn’t satisfy her.
‘You’re so near, Fran. You’ve almost seen her. You can’t give up now,’ she beseeched me when I ventured to suggest that perhaps my mission had been accomplished.
‘This is dangerous, Mum,’ I insisted. ‘The more I ask around, the riskier it all gets.’
‘How?’ she asked sulkily, turning her head from me to stare defiantly at the garden and the now deserted birdbath.
‘You don’t want Nicola to know the truth, do you?’
She was silent. My heart sank. ‘Mum?’ I asked. ‘What is the truth?’
She turned, looking surprised. ‘About what?’
I was miserably aware I wasn’t to upset her, but if I was to go on with my task, I had to be sure.
‘About Nicola. Is she really my half-sister?’ My mother was still silent. I felt as if I was walking in treacle. I struggled on. ‘She isn’t Flora’s child? You are – you are quite sure about
that?’
‘Is that what Flora’s said?’ she returned. ‘I know my own baby, Fran.’ She put out a frail hand and stroked my cheek. ‘Find her for me, Fran. Speak to her.’
‘About what?’ I was horrified. This wasn’t what she’d originally asked of me. ‘You said you just wanted to know what she looked like.’
She gave me a strange look, like a child who’s trying to manipulate an adult into some course of action which it knows a straight request won’t bring about. Or was it a child who’d committed some transgression and was trying to shift the blame? I wished I knew.
‘It would be nice to know what her voice was like.’ She gave me a wheedling smile. ‘To know some words she’d actually spoken. I can’t see her, Fran. I can’t talk to her. You can.’ She sighed and closed her eyes. ‘I’m tired now. I think I’ll have a little nap. Come again.’