Keeping Bad Company

by Ann Granger

  I wouldn’t have fancied it around the home, but then it was unlikely I could ever have afforded it so the problem didn’t arise. It didn’t carry anything so vulgar as a price tag.

  I caught the Ice Queen’s eye, nodded towards the cherub and asked, ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred,’ she said, and allowed herself a smirk of satisfaction when she saw my mouth fall open.

  She returned to her work, rattling a keyboard with scarlet talons. At her elbow, a red light suddenly glowed on the telephone. She ignored it. After a few moments, the light went out. I wondered if it signified an outside line was in use.

  Without warning, one of the twin inner doors opened and a bulky figure filled the aperture.

  ‘Miss Varady?’ He moved solidly towards me, spectacle lenses glinting, hand outstretched. ‘Jeremy Copperfield. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. Do come through. Would you like some tea or coffee?’

  The receptionist paused in her work and raised a forbidding eye.

  ‘No thank you,’ I said. ‘I won’t take up much of your time.’

  I followed Copperfield to his office, which closely resembled the outer room in colour scheme and general furnishings. He invited me to sit on one of the ubiquitous white leather chairs, and eased himself into a beige leather executive chair with stainless-steel arms. He placed his fingertips together and swivelled gently to and fro before me, all the while watching my face over the top of his specs.

  Fighting the impression that I’d strayed into some private sanatorium and was facing an expensive medical consultant, I forced myself to relax on my chair, and studied him back. There was silence while we eyed one another in polite antagonism.

  Lauren’s boyfriend was about twenty-eight and had a weight problem which, if he hadn’t got to grips with it by now, he never would. His belly bulged over his waistband. His jawline was lost in the cushion of double chins, which in turn made his mouth, with its pink pouty lips like those of the cherub, look too small. It struck me that he showed little sign of the distress he ought to be suffering. But perhaps he was good at hiding his feelings.

  ‘I don’t recall,’ he broke our silence to say, ‘that Lauren ever mentioned your name to me.’ He stopped swivelling the chair and rested his hand on the steel arms, raising his head so that his eyes were still fixed on me but this time through, not over, his glasses. The lenses were thick and made his eyes appear piggy. He wasn’t my cup of tea, but then I wasn’t Lauren, and the choice was hers.

  I’d already decided to use the story that had worked well at the refuge until I’d mentioned Lauren’s name.

  ‘We hadn’t seen each other for a while when we bumped into one another. We fixed up a reunion lunch but she didn’t show. I did think she seemed worried about something, so that made me concerned. I’ve been trying to get in touch with her.’

  Behind the jam-jar-bottom lenses, his eyes blinked at me. As if I hadn’t spoken, his voice flowed on, ‘So I took the precaution of phoning her father. He says it’s in order to talk to you. You know there is a possibility she’s being held somewhere against her will and the police are involved. You understand all this is highly sensitive and mustn’t become public knowledge.’

  So it had been an outside line. So much for the approach I thought I’d agreed with Szabo. Now I was left looking foolish. But I had to admit that without Szabo’s go-ahead, Copperfield wouldn’t be talking to me.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, abandoning that line. ‘I understand the circumstances and believe me, I’m very sorry. You’re all under a terrible strain.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we are.’

  But he still didn’t look it, not to me. Curiously, I asked, ‘Have you been dating Lauren very long?’

  Blink. ‘We’ve known each other several years,’ he said, pursing his fat little lips and suddenly looking so like the marble head out there in reception that I had a job not to grin.

  ‘Is Mr Szabo also involved in the art market?’ I asked, ‘I thought he was in loose covers.’

  Copperfield ignored the question and his stare informed me that he considered it improper. Worse, he suspected me of mockery. His opinion of me wasn’t high. But there again, neither was my opinion of him. It was clear to me already that far from being the love of Lauren’s life, this man was her Malcolm Tring.

  I should explain. Obviously, Jeremy here was Szabo’s choice for Lauren, a man who saw things his way and could be relied upon to report back to her stepfather at the first sign of trouble. Szabo himself would deny this was the reason for his selecting Copperfield. He’d roll out a whole list of Jeremy’s virtues. Personal charisma wouldn’t figure among them, but neither would Szabo see it as a disadvantage. If anything, he’d see it as an irrelevance.

  That’s the way it goes. Families judge by a whole different set of criteria to that favoured by their offspring. Which is where Malcolm Tring comes in.

  Malcolm figured briefly in my life when I’d just turned fourteen, and all because Grandma Varady liked a game of cards. She belonged to a whist club and there she met a fellow fanatic called Mrs Emma Tring, a well-to-do widow. Mrs Tring, it soon turned out, had a grandson, one Malcolm.

  ‘A really nice boy,’ enthused Grandma V. to me, as she ladled out the goulash soup one evening. ‘Just a year older than you, fifteen, and doing very well at school. He escorts his grandmother to the whist club regularly, such a kind boy. Not many his age would give up the time! He’s always polite and so well spoken, and the family has a pine furniture business in the High Street. I understand from Emma it’s doing very well, and my goodness, she has some beautiful pearls.’

  Grandma paused for dramatic effect and chinked the ladle on the soup tureen. ‘And he’s an only child!’ she whispered.

  ‘I want to be an actress,’ I said, correctly divining the drift of all this. ‘I don’t want to spend my life selling pine furniture.’

  ‘Actors starve,’ she said, correctly as it happens. ‘A business is handy to fall back on.’

  ‘Especially if it’s furniture!’ I quipped, and was rapped on the knuckles with the ladle for not taking the matter seriously. But how could I take seriously anyone connected with a business that advertised itself as selling ‘FURNITURE TO MAKE YOUR HEART TRING’?

  Grandma did take it seriously and needless to say, I was eventually dragooned into accompanying her to the whist club, there to meet Malcolm Tring. Also needless to say, he was awful, and I’d have had to be out of my skull to want to fall back on him. Nor did I think his grandmother’s pearls all that great. They looked fake to me. I was already something of an expert on stage props by then.

  Malcolm reciprocated my feelings. It was mutual dislike on sight. Grandmothers Tring and Varady engineered one more meeting and then, a stroke of luck, Malcolm had to go into hospital for his adenoids, and that was that.

  I don’t think Grandma V. ever quite forgave me. Not even when the furniture business burned down eighteen months later. It was in the Standard, and arson was suspected. So perhaps it hadn’t been doing all that well. I always knew those pearls were false.

  Jeremy offered the kind of reassurance to concerned families that Malcolm had appeared to offer. No doubt the marble cherub business was doing well. Every home should have one. Szabo probably saw in this young entrepreneur something of himself when younger. Jeremy would guarantee Lauren a nice big house and a generous personal spending allowance. Jeremy wouldn’t stray and he wouldn’t ask where Lauren spent her money or her afternoons. Business would always come first with him, women a long way back second. I was even prepared to bet Jeremy Copperfield was an only child.

  The scepticism in my face succeeded in rattling Copperfield. He flushed and said loudly, ‘We were about to announce our engagement!’

  By ‘we’ he meant himself and his prospective father-in-law. I doubt Lauren was in full agreement.

  ‘Then you’ll want to find her,’ I said.

  The flush turned to beetroot. ‘I would feel any other s
uggestion to be insulting, Miss Varady!’

  ‘I want to find her too.’ I ignored the huffing and puffing. I wasn’t here to listen to Copperfield’s bluster. I was here on business.

  My voice must have told him so and it was an attitude he respected. His own manner changed. The flush faded, he sat up straighter in the executive chair, folded his plump hands and asked crisply, ‘And what would be your interest? You don’t know Lauren personally. Is Szabo paying you?’

  It was possible Szabo thought he was. I didn’t. ‘My interest,’ I said, ‘is in what happened to an elderly man whose body was taken from the canal yesterday morning early.’

  Copperfield’s small sharp eyes gleamed behind the lenses. ‘Has this any bearing on what’s happened to Lauren?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I’d appreciate your reasons,’ Copperfield said.

  ‘Fair enough. I believe he saw Lauren snatched off the street. The men involved knew he’d been a witness. They arranged his death.’

  There was a silence. Then Copperfield said carefully, as if picking his way through a verbal minefield, ‘You are suggesting murder. That’s a very serious matter. Where do the police stand in all this?’

  ‘You’d better ask them,’ I retorted.

  ‘I shall, believe me.’ He unfolded his podgy paws and tapped the armrests of his chair. ‘And what do you think I can tell you, Miss Varady, that the police or, indeed, Vincent Szabo can’t?’

  ‘I had wondered,’ I confessed, ‘whether Lauren had told you of anything unusual that had happened to her lately, during the time leading up to her disappearance. Had either of you made any new acquaintances? Started going to new places? Had anyone been asking about her, making some excuse or other?’

  ‘Much as you are doing?’ His cheeks shuddered as a sarcastic smile rippled away from the edges of his mouth.

  ‘OK then, much as I’m doing. Was there anyone?’

  ‘If she’d told me any such thing,’ he said, ‘I’d have insisted she report it to the police.’

  Time to shake him up a little. ‘Did you know,’ I asked innocently, ‘that she was a regular volunteer helper at a refuge for battered women in the area where she was snatched?’

  I was wrong in fancying that would bother him. He looked annoyed, but not surprised. ‘The police have already investigated that angle, as I understand it. I’ll be frank with you, Miss Varady. I didn’t approve of such good works, laudable though they might have been. The simple fact is that when a young woman stands to be heiress one day to, well, not exactly a fortune perhaps, but certainly a comfortable amount, she has to accept the risks that go with having money. She becomes a prey for spongers, spinners of hard-luck tales, penniless young men and unsavoury elements in society of all kinds. Her family and friends will try to protect her but she must also protect herself.

  ‘I knew she gave her time to the refuge, amongst other similar hostels. I tried to dissuade her. The very nature of such a place is that she must meet all kinds of riffraff there and that sooner or later, one of them may try to gain advantage from the situation.’

  I couldn’t let that pass. I nearly jumped out of my chair to remind this well-heeled slob that the women at the refuge had received horrendous treatment. They weren’t there by choice. They were there often because their very lives were in danger. To describe them as ‘riffraff’ was unacceptable and I’d be glad to hear him withdraw it.

  ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘What you’ve just said confirms my view. The women in those places are there because of violence. They are associated with violent men. So it follows that anyone associated with those women is also likely to become the target of violent men.’

  I remembered the broken window and damaged door at the refuge and reluctantly conceded he had a point. ‘So you’re saying,’ I said, ‘that it’s through her voluntary work that Lauren became known to her eventual snatchers?’

  ‘I think it’s highly likely, don’t you? I fancy the police think so too. Look, Miss Varady . . .’ he consulted an expensive-looking wristwatch, ‘I’ve given you quite a lot of my time this afternoon and frankly, I can’t see to what purpose. There is nothing I can tell you that isn’t more properly learned from the police. In fact, I suspect the police would be strongly opposed to my talking to you at all.’

  He wasn’t going to talk to me any further, he was saying. So I could just get out. I got up and prepared to go, but I had one last query.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘that cherub thing out there,’ I pointed at the door and the reception area beyond. ‘Is it really worth fifteen hundred smackers?’

  ‘Cherub?’ He looked puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean the zephyr! Yes, a lovely piece. Exquisite. Italian Renaissance and established provenance. It was salvaged from the ruins of a pleasure villa on Lake Garda at the close of the Second World War.’

  ‘Salvaged’, I suspected, might be a euphemism. ‘Trophy of war?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly not!’ His full lips pressed together and disappeared into a thin line. The flesh around them had turned white with anger. ‘Good day, Miss Varady,’ he said, opening the door.

  There was a motorcycle courier in the outer office. It was a tribute to the soundproof quality of the office doors here that I hadn’t heard him arrive. Leather-jacketed, metal-helmeted and high-booted, he was a space-age vision, even more out of place in these surroundings than I was, even though he was here on proper business, not part-time detecting.

  The Ice Queen handed him a package. He growled, ‘Right!’ and clumped away, casting me no more than a dismissive glance. If he wondered about my presence, he didn’t show it. Perhaps I hadn’t even registered with him. A man who spent his days weaving in and out of London’s packed traffic probably didn’t worry much about anything except staying upright.

  The receptionist gave me a glance that was only marginally more aware than the courier’s.

  ‘Mr Szabo is waiting for you downstairs,’ she said, and returned to her work, wiping my presence from her mental screen.

  Vinnie Szabo was standing in the doorway, sheltering from the draught that cut through the alley. Perhaps he also wanted to avoid the scrutiny of any passer-by who might glance down the narrow way and wonder what he was doing lurking there.

  ‘Hi,’ I said dourly, because I was cross with him.

  We left the alley awkwardly, obliged to walk in single file. I went first. The courier had made it out into the main road, mounted his machine and was already zigzagging away. There was no sign of Szabo’s car or the muscular driver. He wouldn’t have found it easy to park around here. Perhaps Szabo had wisely taken a cab. He edged out of the narrow entry behind me, and stood unhappily on the pavement. He was wearing his overcoat and it looked even more oversize than it had in the car. His small hands barely poked out of the sleeves and the skirts nearly reached to the pavement.

  He peered up at me, Mole from The Wind in the Willows. ‘You’ve seen Jeremy? Did he – Was there anything?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But then he knew exactly who I was and why I was there. I thought we’d agreed I’d say I was a friend of Lauren’s?’

  ‘But he phoned me,’ he protested in dismay. ‘I had to tell him.’

  ‘I might have got more out of him if you hadn’t,’ I said, still feeling sour about it.

  ‘He wouldn’t have spoken to you at all,’ Szabo defended himself. ’When he phoned me, he was worried you might be an emissary of the kidnappers.’

  That certainly hadn’t occurred to me!

  ‘Never mind,’ I said, conceding the point. ‘He wouldn’t have believed the other story anyway. He doesn’t know anything. I don’t think Lauren would’ve told him if she’d had anything on her mind.’

  ‘She certainly wouldn’t have wished to worry poor Jeremy. He is devoted to her.’ We’d fallen into step and he spoke these words confidently as he scurried beside me.

  I wasn’t getting into an argument over that one. I’d have been surprised if Lauren spoke much to
Jeremy about anything.

  We’d reached the corner of the street and parted with a minimum exchanged of farewell words. I promised to ring Vinnie if I learned anything but it was clear from his expression he no longer held out any hopes of my turning up any information of value. He’d been desperate when he’d contacted me. That I’d failed him hardly made any difference. He hadn’t really expected much.