A Few Little Lies

by Sue Welfare

  Vic looked up again, trying to recall the details. ‘Oh yes, I remember. Young Fanners’ thing, years ago –’

  Lawrence patted his old friend on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. I know the whole family and they’re all morons, no need to come up with any examples. I’ll take your word for it.’

  Bob took the soda off the tray. ‘This family values thing, I’m surprised he’s got the bloody nerve. Someone’s bound to shoot him down sooner or later, all guts and feathers. Always makes a nasty mess, that sort of thing.’

  Vic and Lawrence turned to look at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  Bob grinned. ‘Well, you were at Ben Frierman’s stag do last Christmas, weren’t you?’

  Lawrence pulled a face. ‘Frierman’s?’

  Vic smiled. ‘I remember, just, but I can’t remember Phelps being there. Jack was there, and the Lib Dem chap, and that son-in-law of yours.’

  Lawrence held his face in a carefully controlled expression. He wasn’t certain exactly how Calvin had found his way onto Ben Frierman’s prestigious guest list.

  Across the room. Bob was nodding. ‘The Lib Dem chap, Fielding, Tom Fielding, that’s his name. Bloody good chap, got totally rat-arsed.’ He grinned. ‘Shame he’s not standing as a Conservative, much more the calibre of man we’re looking for.’

  Vic chuckled. ‘At least that brass-knickered Labour bitch didn’t show up. Mind you, I’d like to have seen the look on her face when that stripper popped out of Santa’s sack.’

  Lawrence glanced out of the window. He tried to remember Guy Phelps’ face from the Christmas party, but failed. There were other faces he recalled very clearly. In his desk, hidden in the drawer, was one of them – Catiana Moran, Lillian Bliss. That’s where he had met her for the first time. Her face was indelibly etched on his mind. He took a deep breath. Below the study window, he could see Calvin Roberts deep in conversation with Guy Phelps.

  Lawrence looked at his watch. Ten minutes and his housekeeper would ring the gong for lunch. He sighed. It might be a good idea to have a quiet word with Bob Preston about exactly what Guy Phelps had been doing at Frierman’s Christmas party.

  11

  When Dora got back from Keelside, Gunners Terrace was quiet, awash with Sunday-afternoon stillness. The sun shone. Dora parked right outside her door, let herself into the hallway and stood Gibson and the photo albums down on the first step. She slipped off her jacket. Upstairs she could hear Oscar bleating and complaining. It felt an age since she had had the flat to herself.

  Dora stretched – a few quiet, restful hours, a hot, deep bath, a long, long soak, then she would ring Jon. She didn’t look into the street to see if the watcher was still there. She felt numb, frozen over, as if she hadn’t got any more fear or emotion left to burn up.

  Yawning, carrying cat basket, jacket and books, Dora climbed the stairs. She decided to take the car to the lock-up later. Maybe she would have a siesta. She wriggled and jiggled, shifting weight and load so that she could unlock the top door. She had no sooner stepped into the hall than Oscar, who had been waiting by the kitchen door, let out a furious squeal of indignation, echoed a split second later by Gibson from his wicker prison.

  Oscar hissed furiously, every hair on his sinuous gingery body standing up on end.

  ‘What in God’s name have you got in that basket?’ he snarled, arching up onto tiptoe.

  Dora stood the cat basket, which was now rocking and rolling and creaking dramatically, down on the hall floor.

  Jon Melrose picked up the file he’d just received from Yarmouth: Lillian Bliss. Soliciting, shoplifting, a string of minor convictions, cautions, fines, two months inside … He glanced at her arrest photo. Lillian Bliss was strikingly handsome, with a mane of wild hair caught back in a pony tail – no false contrition here, no modestly averted eyes. Her face betrayed a Mona Lisa smile, glittering eyes bright and flirtatious. The face was very different from the one he had seen as she had cowered in the alley beside Dora’s flat.

  Jon sniffed and laid the folder alongside the other reports of the breakins in Fairbeach and that morning’s incident in Keelside. His superintendent was rarely in at weekends unless there was a major reason – one more smalltime burglary didn’t count. But Jon knew that, added together, there was something here, something that linked the incidents together, and Lillian’s latest robbery added weight to his argument.

  The sooner Lillian Bliss was out of Dora’s life the better. He stretched and looked out of the office window, willing the phone to ring and wanting it to be Dora. The thought took him by surprise. He glanced back down at the files on his desk. He had had the same momentary, gut-wrenching fear when he’d got the call about Dora as he had when Nita had rung him about Joe; that came as a surprise too.

  Seeing her well, unhurt, grinning at him, had given him such a sense of pleasure and relief that he found it hard to find the words to describe it. He could still feel her body curled up against him, see her painting a smile on over her fear with a broad brush. The sensations of tenderness and concern were things he had almost forgotten existed since his marriage had ended. Until he’d met Dora, he had resigned himself to never feeling them again.

  Lillian Bliss’ bright eyes stared back at him from the arrest photo, moving his thoughts on. It was simpler to weigh names and reasons than the nebulous things Dora had left inside his head.

  Surely the bright lights of London – almost any city – would have been a better option for a girl like her than a small sleepy Fenland town? Before Jon could tug at the tenuous thread of ideas that had started to form, Rhodes, his detective sergeant, came in.

  ‘Just got a shout for the uniformed lads, gov. That guy you wanted to see down at the docks has turned up in a brand new Merc. Not bad for a guy with no visible means of support, eh?’

  Jon picked up his jacket, his mind reluctantly letting go of Dora Hall and Lillian Bliss; time to get back to the thoughts he was being paid to have.

  There was an awful moment when Dora first got out of the bath, in which she thought someone had burgled the flat again. As she stepped into the hall there was a stunning crash from somewhere close by. By some dark nightmarish twist of fate, while she had been soaking, they had been there again –

  Dora froze, standing with a towel up against her face. For a moment she felt completely and utterly empty, no fear, no surprise, and then a surging tidal wave of panic rushed through her, filling her right to the brim.

  It solidified in her stomach. She felt her colour draining and was about to step into the office to grab the phone when she heard a furious yowling and a mewling.

  ‘Shit,’ she snorted, the panic popping and fragmenting into ripped pieces like a burst balloon. With an overwhelming sense of relief, Dora threw the towel down and hurried into the kitchen.

  She had forgotten to shut the cats in. Oscar was sitting on the table, snaking his tail angrily from side to side. The room had been thoroughly cat-attacked. A spiralling maze of feline tracks wheeled and turned, recording a running battle across the top of the kitchen units. Two mugs lay smashed on the floor, lapped by fruit juice running in a river into the overturned laundry basket – an orange tidal surge.

  Oscar eyed her with total white-hot fury and hissed, ‘It’s got nothing to do with me, it was him,’ in a most aggressive and articulate defence.

  In the sitting room, the cats had upturned a plant and two lamps; both were surrounded by a gavotte of peaty pawprints. A newspaper had exploded all over the settee. Despite the mess, Dora puffed out a short sigh of relief. From under the sofa, Gibson regarded her with narrow angry eyes.

  ‘Sorry, Gibson,’ she whispered in an undertone, ‘I thought I was doing you a favour bringing you here. Just hang on in there, Oscar will get used to the idea, you won’t be staying very long. Why don’t you try and humour him?’

  She made herself a sandwich and then went into the office. The answer machine blinked its Cyclops eye, but she ignored it and tapped in Jon’s home number. The
phone clicked and hissed noisily as the bell rang at the other end of the line. It would be the machine but it was still good just to hear his voice.

  She waited for the omnipresent bleep: ‘Hi, this is Dora, I know you’re out, hope you’re okay and that Joe is doing well. I thought I’d ring you while everything is quiet. It was wonderful to see you today. Good to know that the cavalry still shows up –’ She paused. ‘Don’t bring your pager tomorrow night. If you change your mind about coming, can you give me a ring? …’ She hesitated, wondering how to finish the call. It sounded like a verbal postcard. Did she now say, ‘Wish you were here, weather lovely. Lots of love?’ and add three kisses? The thought made her grin, which she knew Jon would hear in her voice as she wished him goodbye.

  After she had put the phone back in its cradle Dora slipped off her mules. Siesta, a few hours of undisturbed, dreamless sleep, was what she needed.

  Later that evening, as the street lights began to glow jaundiced yellow, a man, keeping to the shadows, made his way to the car parked alongside the boarded-up chemist’s at the end of Gunners Terrace. Diagonally opposite the flat, it gave an uninterrupted view of the comings and goings. He pulled the ignition key from his pocket and slipped inside.

  He lit a cigarette, dropped the flap of the glove compartment and pulled out a tape recorder. The little light on the control panel was fading. He grimaced. It was plugged into the cigarette lighter. If this surveillance job went on for much longer he’d need to have the bleeding car towed away or get a jump start.

  He pulled the earpiece out of its case, screwed it into his ear, rewound the tape, and started to listen to the recording from the little bug he’d slipped into the phone in the flat above the shoe shop. No-one seemed to have noticed it was there after the breakin, which was a stroke of luck. Probably far too busy scrubbing walls to go looking for surveillance devices.

  He pressed ‘play’ and was greeted by a deafening burst of mind-numbing static. He winced in pain – bloody cheap eastern European imports. He turned the volume down and tried again.

  He’d done the PI course. Most people came into surveillance through the services, that’s what he’d read in the brochure he’d sent away for. But he had come to it by a more practical, hands-on, direct route: several counts of burglary, breaking and entering, aggravated assault, a few months as a guest of Her Majesty as a juvenile on a short sharp shock course. And then he’d seen this ad in Exchange and Mart for a private detective course. Correspondence, of course, twenty-four easy parts and a collection of attractive text books which had been his to keep. He’d got his girlfriend to fill in the form and do most of the course work, but even so, he’d got his certificate. He had had it framed and hung in the back bedroom he used as an office.

  Bit of luck getting a cash-in-hand decorating job for that old girl, Alicia Markham. She was something high up in Fairbeach politics and that.

  He smiled and screwed the earpiece in a little harder, trying to pick out the words amongst the white noise.

  He’d handled it very well. ‘Actually, I’m a private detective,’ he’d said one day when she’d come into the kitchen to see how they were getting on. He’d seen her little eyes light up. She hadn’t even haggled about his rates.

  Finally, the tape was beginning to clear – well, almost. He sniffed and strained to decipher the words behind the hisses and snorts. He was concentrating so hard he didn’t hear the car door open until it was too late.

  A funny little grunt of indignation formed in his mind and he was about to swing round, when he felt something long, cold and metallic press against the curve of his throat and he swiftly decided, on balance, not to look round at all.

  ‘I think we need to talk, chummy,’ said a low male voice. ‘Why don’t you just slide across into the passenger seat, make yourself comfortable and then we can have a nice friendly little chat.’

  Dora stretched and yawned, and liked the way it felt so much that she did it again. The light through the bedroom window had faded from springtime blue to street-light amber. There were no thumps, no bangs, no raucous mewlings. She eased herself off the bed like a conscientious nurse handling a frail patient. No crashes, no burglars, no Lillian. No Lillian?

  Dora peered through the gloom at the bedroom clock. It was nearly ten o’clock. How long did it take to open a bloody dirty book shop for God’s sake? The relief she had felt on waking hardened back up into a knot of tension. Surely Lillian ought to be home by now? Dora screwed up her face in frustration – and surely she wasn’t supposed to worry about her? Hadn’t Calvin’s idea been that Lillian would be a quiet invisible force for the common good, promoting, smiling, signing, posing, making Dora and Calvin’s life infinitely more profitable and far easier?

  Dora took a deep breath and switched on the bedside lamp. Did she now ring Calvin and witter on like a worried mother hen? Stay by the phone? Call Jon? The last possibility sounded tempting, but Dora had no desire to introduce Lillian as the reason for the call. She sighed, got dressed and decided to go to see what the cats had made of each other in her absence.

  They were asleep, one on either end of the sofa, which was no help whatsoever. She made up her mind to ring Calvin if Lillian wasn’t back by eleven, revised that to twelve, and sat by the TV watching the programmes come and go like moving wallpaper, with no awareness whatsoever of what it was she was watching.

  Just as Dora had made up her mind to ring Calvin, she heard the intercom bell ring and hurried into her office.

  ‘Hello?’ said a breathy blonde voice.

  ‘Lillian?’ Dora snapped. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Hello?’ said Lillian again, but more brightly this time.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick. What time do you call this?’ Dora demanded, and then groaned. She sounded like somebody’s mother.

  Pushing the open button, she tried hard to get a grip. She wasn’t responsible for Lillian Bliss. And she would be gone tomorrow. Why was it that the thought held no comfort? She opened the hall door.

  Lillian smiled up at her from the stairwell. She was wearing a black rubber microdress and thigh-high shiny boots. Her blonde hair had been teased up into a waterfall of glistening curls.

  ‘Hello, Dora,’ she said, sounding genuinely pleased to see her. ‘I’ve had a lovely day. Look what the man in the shop gave me.’ She executed a perfect pirouette between one step and the next. ‘And there was people there who wanted my autograph.’

  Dora groaned softly. ‘Why don’t you come in?’ she suggested, in as even a tone as she could muster.

  Lillian’s voice must have disturbed the cats because, a millisecond after she crested the stairs, Oscar and Gibson hurtled towards her, mewling, purring and fighting each other for her undivided adoration. With some difficulty, Lillian squatted down to pick them both up.

  ‘Oh, you lovely, lovely boys,’ she whispered and then looked up at Dora. ‘You went and got Gibson?’ Her voice was tight with emotion. ‘Thank you. I missed him so much. Isn’t he a lovely, lovely boy?’

  Dora stared at the adoring simpering cats – perhaps Lillian rubbed herself down in cat nip or sardines.

  They headed for the kitchen, because Dora didn’t think that Lillian in her rubber dress would be able to sit down on one of the armchairs in the sitting room.

  She made tea and a sandwich for her resident bondage Cinderella, while Lillian, eyes bright with excitement, talked and talked and talked.

  ‘You should have come with me, Dora, you’d have loved it, it was wonderful. They had photographers and pink champagne and lots of little things to eat on sticks and on trays, pink things mostly. And there were loads of reporters there. And then this man, Geoff – he owns the shop – said it would be nice if I wore one of the dresses that they sell, so I got changed in his flat and there was this huge pink ribbon right across the door to the shop. And then they gave me this enormous pair of scissors and I cut the ribbon and then Geoff – he was quite big – picked me up, and c
arried me across the threshold and …’

  Dora listened in awed silence. Lillian seemed to have perfected a technique of speaking without needing to draw breath.

  Lillian pressed on oblivious. ‘… I signed loads of autographs and hundreds of my books. Geoff wanted to take me out, but his wife said no. Then this reporter asked if I’d like to go out to dinner. Well, I could hardly say no, could I? He said he wanted to know the real me, and that he’d seen me on the telly and he’d got this lovely room at a really nice hotel and –’ She paused, reddening slightly.

  Dora stared at her. ‘He wanted an interview?’

  Lillian nodded. ‘That’s right. He said –’

  ‘And he had a really nice room? Are you telling me you –’ She stopped. ‘You slept with him, didn’t you?’

  Lillian blushed. ‘Not slept exactly.’

  Dora took a deep breath, gathering her thoughts back into a tidy heap. ‘And what exactly did you tell him during this interview? You haye to be careful what you say, let alone what you do.’

  Lillian squared her shoulders. ‘I am, I’m always careful. I just try to tell the truth,’ she said, with a slight edge of indignation in her tone.

  Dora forced a smile, afraid to ask what the truth might consist of. ‘Never mind the truth – what we really need, Lillian, are a few little lies.’

  Lillian wrinkled up her nose.

  Dora handed her a sandwich. ‘I think maybe I ought to write a fictional past for you, you know, a story that you can tell people when they ask you about Catiana Moran’s life.’

  Lillian nodded. ‘Right,’ she said, and took a huge bite out of the sandwich. With her mouth full, she glanced around the kitchen. ‘Did you bring the rest of my things back from the flat?’

  Dora stopped. Lillian had no idea about the man in her flat, the man rifling through her things, the man who had pushed Dora over.