Keeping Bad Company

by Ann Granger

  ‘Just don’t come back again,’ he bade me kindly as we parted.

  I set off with my plastic carrier containing the Bell’s bottle. Much as I disliked the idea of dealing with Parry again, he’d have to know about it. It supported what I’d told him, that Albie had had a half-bottle of whisky last night in the porch and not a large bottle.

  Of course it wasn’t proof unless they could get Albie’s fingerprints off it. I wondered, uncomfortably, where Albie’s body was. Lying in a morgue? Would they carry out a post-mortem? I thought they probably would. Stray deaths have to be accounted for. They’d confirm he’d died by drowning and we’d be no further forward. I glanced down at the plastic bag with the bottle. Jonty would’ve handled it and after that Ben handled it and lastly I picked it up, though I’d been careful. Other rubbish had rubbed against it in the bin, unfortunately, and Ben’s hands had been like shovels. If there had been prints, they would’ve been smudged or obliterated by now.

  I realised at this point that I wasn’t walking towards my flat. I was walking the other way, towards St Agatha’s refuge. It seemed I was meant to go there.

  The refuge looked like a quiet, respectable house not unlike Daphne’s and in a similar street. The only real sign that anything unusual ever happened there was a wooden board temporarily nailed over the lower half of the window to the left of the door, signifying a breakage. That, and the tiniest, most discreet of notices beside the bell push, reading ‘Women’s Refuge’. I stood on the step and wondered what I could say that would sound convincing. No story came to mind so I rang the bell anyway and trusted to luck and inspiration.

  The door was opened by a thin-faced woman with a wary expression. Her hair, cut in an old-fashioned, dead straight page-boy bob and dyed an unlikely reddish colour without variation in texture or shade, had to be a budget wig.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, without preamble, and I found myself standing in a narrow hallway that smelled of cooked vegetables. From the rear of the hall, through a half-open door, came the rattle of crockery as if someone were laying the table for the evening meal. Upstairs a baby wailed, and a sudden burst of shrill voices was cut short by the slam of a door. The air of tension about the place was palpable. I’d been surprised by the way the woman had hurried me inside without question and then I realised that possibly they didn’t like leaving the front door open. I remembered the boarded window panes. They had a bit of trouble here sometimes, so Jonty had said.

  ‘You want a bed, I suppose?’ The woman sounded partly resentful and partly resigned. Her gaze took in the plastic carrier. ‘Is that all the stuff you’ve brought with you? Just as well, we’ve got very little room to store personal effects.’

  Embarrassed I explained that actually I didn’t want a bed, I’d only come to ask a couple of questions.

  Her thin features reddened. ‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’ she snapped. ‘If you want to do a story, you might at least phone first! And in any case, we don’t want too much publicity. We get more people coming here than we can cope with as it is.’

  It was the second time that day I’d been mistaken for a journalist. I explained to her that I wasn’t from the media.

  ‘So what do you want?’ Her temper was getting shorter by the second.

  I told her my story. ‘The old man said he saw a girl running away from somewhere around here. So I wondered whether you’d missed any of your – ’ I wasn’t sure what to call the women who came here, so ended up, ‘clients.’

  She pressed her lips together. ‘We don’t discuss anything which happens here with anyone outside. We don’t discuss the circumstances of any of the women here nor do we give out any names or details which might allow them to be identified. They come here knowing that all their problems will be heard with sympathy and the information received in complete confidence. I don’t know who you are, but it’s clear you have no valid reason for being here at all. Please leave.’

  She moved past me and opened the front door.

  ‘Look,’ I pleaded, ‘perhaps this girl meant to come here but never reached you? She may have been snatched on the way. You might not know about her but she knew about you! Wherever she is, she still needs your help!’

  ‘If you refuse to leave,’ she said, ‘I shall fetch help to put you out.’

  She meant it. I left.

  I walked home thinking that I’d handled that particularly badly. It would be difficult for me now to go back there again. But the woman I’d seen couldn’t be on duty all the time. If I returned tomorrow at a different time, say in the morning, there was a chance someone else might answer the door. Provided the first woman hadn’t passed on a warning message about me, another refuge worker might be more helpful.

  I turned into my street. I didn’t know what time it was but the meal-time activity at the refuge had reminded my stomach I hadn’t eaten since Parry cooked scrambled eggs for me at lunchtime.

  I hurried towards my flat. Daylight was failing and it was that peculiar hour of the day when objects begin to blend into their surrounds. What with the poor light and my mind being occupied with food, I failed at first to realise that a large car was parked opposite the house, shielded by a gnarled, unhealthy city tree and the gathering dusk.

  My attention was called to it by a slam of the driver’s door. He’d got out, a big solid bloke in a pale grey uniform-type suit and a dark tie, and was walking towards me.

  I cast a despairing glance at my basement steps. No way could I get down them and indoors before the hulk reached me.

  ‘Miss Varady?’ he asked in a flat, unemotional voice.

  I had a choice of answers. ‘No’ would be pointless because he’d already identified me. I said, ‘Yes?’ and looked up at Daphne’s windows, hoping against hope she was looking out. But there was no sign of her.

  ‘Mr Szabo would like to talk to you,’ the hulk said. He nodded towards the parked car.

  I took a look at it. It had tinted windows.

  ‘I don’t know him,’ I quavered.

  ‘He’s waiting in the car.’ The hulk’s voice grew slightly reproachful. ‘He’s had a long wait. You’re late coming home tonight, Miss Varady.’

  ‘Look, this has to be a mistake . . .’ I began. But I got no further. He took hold of my arm, not roughly, just firmly, and guided me across the road with gentle persuasion.

  The rear passenger door swung open and with it the interior light came on. But I still couldn’t quite make out who sat in the back seat because he was leaning away from me into his corner. But I heard his voice.

  ‘Miss Varady? Please don’t be alarmed. My name is Vincent Szabo. I believe I knew your father.’

  The tone was precise, a touch old-maidish. As a chat-up line, it was different.

  Chapter Eight

  When I was a kid I was told, as kids are, never to get into a car with a strange man. I’ve hitchhiked a few times and broken the rule, but the choice had always been mine. Get into the car or not. This time, given any kind of choice, I’d have decided not. This wasn’t the sort of lift I’d have accepted. Nevertheless, before I knew it, there I was sitting in the back of Szabo’s plush motor. I was torn between wondering whether I was ever going to be allowed to get out of it again and a curiosity to see the owner of the voice.

  The chauffeur hadn’t joined us. He was hanging about outside somewhere, making sure we weren’t disturbed. Szabo had asked the man to set the interior light to ‘on’, so that we shouldn’t be left in the gloom when the door was shut again. Now we eyed each other in the resultant cosy intimacy.

  I’d had no time to imagine what he’d be like but even if I had done, wouldn’t have been anywhere near the mark. He was a small man with a round head and a halo of grey curls. His face was pale, lined with worry, and his eyes – blue or grey, I couldn’t be sure which – anxious. He was about as frightening as your average lollipop lady. I began to understand the chauffeur. If you haven’t got muscles of your own, you have to hire ’em.

  Szabo�
��s appearance was further undermined by his clothes, which were expensive and stylish but looked too big for him. He seemed to be sitting inside his overcoat as in a tent, and his shirt collar stood away from his neck. Something about it all niggled briefly at my memory, but I couldn’t put a finger on what he reminded me of, other than a white mouse. The coat rustled as he leaned forward and his hand, small as a woman’s, emerged from a sleeve to reach over and pat mine.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed, my dear,’ he said again, reassuringly. They really were more suited to be a woman’s hands, tiny, and the fingertips very soft with nails professionally manicured. He took his hand away, not letting his fingers linger, but I still didn’t like the gesture or the velvety feel of his skin. The guy was a toucher. There’s the paternal kind and the groping kind, but it adds up to the same thing in my book. They want to get their grubby mitts on you.

  Perhaps he sensed he’d made a wrong move. He made a vague, deprecating movement of the hand in question and withdrew it into the baggy sleeve of the overcoat. Then he folded both hands tightly, after the fashion of an imperial Chinese mandarin, to show he had them under control. I wondered what else he had up his sleeve, in both senses.

  Urgently he repeated, ‘I really do mean I knew your dad.’

  ‘My dad’s dead.’ I managed to make icicles form on the words, and squeezed up in the corner as far away from him as I could, just to let him know the touching hadn’t gone unremarked and sitting there with his hands clasped like a mother superior didn’t fool me.

  I supposed him to be about fifty, which is what my dad would have been if he were still alive, or forty-seven, to be exact. Though Szabo in no way resembled my father, who’d been stockily built, there was something in his cast of features that was identifiably Central European. Szabo was a Hungarian name as common as Smith, and I supposed it was just possible he was telling the truth.

  ‘I was very sorry when I heard Bondi had died,’ he went on.

  My father’s first name had been Stephen but Grandma Varady had always called him Bondi. No one else to my knowledge had even done so until this man. I knew then that somehow, though I’d no idea how, he might well have known Dad. Nevertheless, I said, ‘He never mentioned you.’

  ‘Why should he?’ Szabo unfolded his fingers and pressed the well-manicured tips together. The sleeves of his coat still came halfway up his palms. ‘We were boys at the time. Let’s see, we’d have been ten, eleven years old? We played in the local Catholic boys’ football team. How time flies. My parents moved to Manchester and took me with them. I lost touch with Bondi. I’ve always regretted it. We were good friends for several years. Happy days . . .’ He sighed.

  I wondered what line of business he was in. Whatever else had happened after their lives diverged, Szabo would appear to have made money. Dad hadn’t. Or rather, Dad had made fair amounts from time to time, but always had trouble keeping it.

  Hungarians have a name for being good at business, highly entrepreneurial, hard workers, quick to learn, and are usually welcome as immigrants anywhere. ‘A Hungarian,’ so the saying goes, ‘is a man who goes into a revolving door behind you, and comes out of it ahead of you.’ Szabo was probably a perfect living example of this.

  My dad had been the exception that proves the rule. The one who’d somehow got stuck in the door’s workings and gone round and round, always heading somewhere and never arriving anywhere.

  ‘You’re wondering about me,’ Szabo was saying, ‘wondering how I got to you, what I’m doing here. What I want, I dare say.’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ The only thing I was fairly sure of was that Vinnie here wasn’t just kerb-crawling. I might still be wrong about that, of course. On the other hand he was being so damn polite, looking so worried, was so anxious not to offend. What did he need from me?

  ‘Of course you are!’ Szabo nodded. ‘I’m sorry there wasn’t a – a less alarming way of introducing myself. But now I have, I’d better explain myself.’

  I settled back. I could have scrambled out of the car, I suppose, and set up a yell if the chauffeur had tried to grab me. But I wanted to hear what Vincent Szabo, self-styled friend of my father’s youth, had to say. After all, the man would have appeared to have gone to a lot of trouble to meet me.

  ‘You don’t mind if we talk in the car?’ he asked. I didn’t point out I’d not been given any choice in the matter. He was watching me anxiously, as if my agreement mattered.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said.

  After all, I might learn something. There had to be a reason for all this. Besides which, what can’t be cured must be endured, as Mrs Worran, who’d lived next door to us when Dad had been alive, had been fond of saying. I’d heard her say it to Grandma after my mother walked out. Later, when Dad died, she’d said it to me. There was something in her grim acceptance of Fate that had struck me then as worse than despair. I still found it irksome as a philosophy, but sometimes, like now, it described the situation perfectly.

  ‘You see,’ Szabo was saying, ‘I like my privacy. I’m essentially a private man, a family man, you’d say. I don’t care to discuss my affairs in a public place or to think that others might be discussing me in that way, for all and sundry to hear. I find it distressing. That’s why I find this meeting distressing and I’ve chosen to conduct it in this way. I hope you’ll understand.’

  I waited. He had paused as if he expected me to speak and when I didn’t, he rubbed his small neat hands together and began again, his voice staccato, the words chopped into broken phrases.

  ‘What I have to say is particularly sensitive. Oh dear, this is quite – You see, I hardly know how to begin. To have to talk of it at all. And of course, I shouldn’t, shouldn’t be talking to you or to anyone. But then, when I realised you were Bondi’s girl . . . I thought, that would be different. Almost as if I were talking to him. He was a dear friend.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, irked by this continual dropping of Dad’s name, ‘but I honestly don’t remember my father mentioning your name.’

  ‘Why should he?’ For a moment Szabo seemed even more downcast, if that were possible. ‘Life took us in different directions.’ Suddenly his manner changed, becoming all at once confident and almost cheerful. ‘Oh, those were the days! He was a real scrapper of a kid, your dad. Always getting into fights with bigger kids and coming off worst. Never learned.’ He gave a rusty chuckle as if he’d got out of the habit of laughing of late. Then amusement faded. ‘He should have learned, but he never did. It doesn’t always pay to go straight in there with fists flailing.’ He tapped his forehead with a manicured nail. ‘Use this.’

  Well, I already knew that. If I hadn’t got in the way of using my brains before this, I wouldn’t have survived as long as I had. Before now I’d have been one of those bodies they find in the canal, like Albie’s, all shot up with booze and drugs. I knew enough to keep clear of trouble. I can’t help it if sometimes trouble seeks me out.

  I glanced at the little man in the opposite corner and wondered if Vinnie had early learned to use his brains because he wasn’t built for the rough stuff. Undersized children sometimes tag along with a tough kid for protection, like a moon orbiting a powerful planet. Had that been the nature of the link between Dad and this man? Had Dad protected him from the playground bullies? The football team story could still be right. A small kid like Szabo could still have been nippy about the football field and a nifty player, despite his present unathletic appearance.

  ‘I’m here because of something so – appalling, something which has quite, I don’t exaggerate, turned my world upside down,’ Szabo said earnestly. ‘My dear, you’re confused. I’m confusing you. It’d be best, perhaps, if I explained events in the order in which they happened. You’ll soon see why I want – why I need – to talk to you.’

  His manner had changed. Now he’d made up his mind to tell me his story, he began speaking briskly and in a coherent way. I was relieved because his manner had been making me jumpy. I’d even begun to wonder if
he wasn’t on something.

  ‘As I was saying, my parents took me away from London to Manchester.’ He sounded brighter, as if the change had been a turn of luck for the better. ‘I went into the soft furnishing business, wholesale, not retail, supplying upholstery fabrics to the trade. It’s a good business – or it was before the recession set in. The housing boom did me a power of good. Everyone buying a new home and each new home filled with nice new furniture and curtains.’

  He sounded cheerful again, remembering his successes. ‘Oh, I didn’t forget your dad.’ he said. ‘Even if, as you suggest, he might’ve forgotten me! No, I remembered him and when I started to do well, I wrote suggesting he come up North and join me in business. He wrote back refusing. Felt it wasn’t his style. That was the last time we communicated. I’d no idea what he did after that.’ He raised his eyebrows questioningly and paused for me to fill in the detail.

  ‘Not very well,’ I admitted. ‘Although sometimes better than others.’