by Joyce Porter
‘I could ring round the local nursing homes, if you like, dear, and ask if Mrs Hellon is there.’
‘Oh, don’t put yourself out on my account,’ said the Hon. Con, looking noble.
‘I could start with St Edith’s. That’s always spoken of as being the best.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said the Hon. Con, knowing that she could continue being surly now that she’d got Miss Jones on the run.
‘I’ll start the minute I’ve done the washing up,’ promised Miss Jones, hoping against hope that the Hon. Con might, for once, volunteer to do this little chore for her.
The Hon. Con was immune to mental telepathy. She got up from the table and took herself off without another word into the sitting-room. Here she remained in strict purdah up to and beyond the time the telephone started ringing.
Miss Jones was up to the elbows in detergent but eventually she had to acknowledge defeat and go and answer the phone herself.
The Hon. Con looked up from the Financial Times as Miss Jones opened the sitting-room door with some vigour.
‘You’re wanted on the phone, dear.’
The Hon. Con tossed aside her paper and began to get to her feet. Her attitude would have been one of a-woman’s-work-isnever-done if such a conception had not been well beneath her contempt. ‘ Who is it?’
‘Somebody called Charlie,’ said Miss Jones, managing to lower the temperature of the room several degrees.
The Hon. Con tried to look as though she had never heard the name before. ‘Charlie?’
‘She says she’s your taxi-driver!’ snarled Miss Jones and turning on her heel, marched furiously back into the kitchen.
The Hon. Con picked up the telephone with some trepidation. The interior walls of Shangrilah were notoriously thin and every word uttered in the hall could be clearly heard in the kitchen even when the auditor had not, as Miss Jones undoubtedly had, an ear glued to the door panel. The Hon. Con was going to have to choose her remarks with care.
‘Hello. This is the Honourable Constance Morrison-Burke speaking.’
‘Cor strike a light, hark at you!’ sniggered Charlie. ‘ It’s me, ducks!’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Bloody hell, you’re a bit toffee-nosed this morning aren’t you? What’s up? The girl friend listening?’
‘Hm,’ said the Hon. Con. ‘Well, it’s a possibility.’
‘Oh, I read you! Well, I’ll make it short and sweet and maybe we can have a proper confab later. Without any shell-like lugs napping in the breeze.’
‘That would be very useful,’ said the Hon. Con carefully!
‘Right! Well, do you know where I am at the moment?’
‘No.’
‘Outside the cop shop! And do you know who I’ve just delivered there?’
‘No?’ said the Hon. Con, wishing Charlie would get on with it and stop asking so many blooming questions.
‘Bridget Mary Perpetua O’Coyne!’
‘No!’
‘Elder sister of the late Teresa Eucharia Marie O’Coyne.’ The Hon. Con grasped the implications in an instant. ‘ Golly!’
‘Come to identify the body,’ Charlie went on cheerfully, ‘and all that jazz. Nearest next of kin over here, you see. The rest of the O’Coyne mob are still rotting away somewhere in the backbogs of Ireland. I was just wondering if you’d like to meet her.’
‘Not half!’ said the Hon. Con excitedly. ‘Can you arrange it?’
‘Sure can, honey child! As a matter of fact, I’ve arranged for her to stay with me at my flat for a couple of days until after the inquest. Well, the poor kid’s not what you might call rolling in it and she’ll be more comfortable with me than sitting all on her own in some lousy hotel room.’
‘You’re a jolly generous girl!’ said the Hon. Con warmly. ‘Heart of gold!’ She might have said more but the sound of a sharp intake of breath from behind the kitchen door brought her back to sordid reality with a bump. ‘When would be – er – convenient?’
‘Well, I shouldn’t think the police’ll keep her too long. She doesn’t seem to know much about what her sister’s been doing lately so my guess is that they’ll be through with her by midday. How about you joining us for a spot of dinner at my place? Pot luck and bring your own eating irons! Say one o’clock. I’ll ring you back if we can’t make it, otherwise I’ll not bother.’
‘OK.’ The Hon. Con shot an anxious glance at the kitchen door. ‘What’s your … the … ?’
‘The address?’ Charlie’s mocking laugh came tinkling over the wires. ‘Bloody hell, it must be like living in a convent! She’s certainly got you well and truly under her thumb, hasn’t she?’
The Hon. Con clenched her teeth. ‘It’s not like that at all!’ she snapped. ‘Just give me the information will you?’
‘92, Slagside Terrace and keep your wig on, ducks! It’s at the back of the railway station. Know it? Look, I could maybe call round and pick you up, if you like.’
The Hon. Con clutched the telephone receiver. Dear God, that would put the cat amongst the pigeons. ‘No, I’ll manage all right. Thanks for phoning. Bye!’ She leaned weakly against the hall-stand and mopped her brow.
Chapter Eleven
Much as the Hon. Con would have liked to sneak out of the house without a word, she knew that she would have to face Miss Jones, if only to inform her that she wasn’t going to be in for lunch. It was an encounter that Miss Jones could be relied on to make as unpleasant and sticky as possible.
The Hon. Con decided to play it with a bright and breezy air. After all her conscience was perfectly clear. Having taken a deep breath to steady her nerves, she flung open the kitchen door just in time to catch Miss Jones making a desperate lunge back to the sink.
‘Well, that’s a bit of luck!’ bellowed the Hon. Con, rubbing her hands. ‘Teresa O’Coyne’s sister is in Totterbridge and I’m going to interview her. Chance of a lifetime, eh? By the way, old thing, I shan’t be in for lunch.’
‘You didn’t tell me Charlie was a woman.’
The Hon. Con grimaced hideously at the back of Miss Jones’s head. ‘Oh, didn’t I?’
‘No.’
The Hon. Con stuck her thumb to her nose and wiggled her fingers defiantly at the still-turned back. ‘Didn’t think you’d be interested.’
‘Didn’t you?’ Miss Jones wrung out the dishcloth with a viciousness that made the Hon. Con feel quite uncomfortable. ‘ I wonder why?’
The Hon. Con, driven to extreme measures, crossed her eyes, dragged the sides of her mouth down with her fingers and blew her cheeks out. It was a display which had driven a whole procession of nannies screaming from the Morrison-Burke nursery, but Miss Jones’s reaction, when she turned round unexpectedly and caught the Hon. Con in full contortion, was merely one of refined and pained surprise.
The Hon. Con relaxed her face into a silly grin. ‘Think I’ll pop out and do the rounds of my cat traps. Been neglecting them a bit lately, what with one thing and another.’
It was pretty nippy out in the garden – and damp, too – but the Hon. Con reckoned that, as atmospheres go, it was preferable to the one currently reigning in the interior of Shangrilah. She pottered around, shivering and resetting her traps and chucking the odd stone at one foolhardy moggie that kept sneering at her over the hedge. What with Miss Jones working doggedly to rule and refusing to do overtime, there was no morning coffee and the Hon. Con was heartily thankful when it was time for her to leave for her luncheon engagement.
Slagside Terrace lay in the midst of territory which was not entirely new to the Hon. Con. During the haphazard periods when she had been militantly engaged in Good Works, she had visited most of the seamier parts of Totterbridge and as she drove along she kept her head well down in case the memory had not yet faded. Some of those women who had opened their doors in the belief that it was the man with the new colour telly had not been pleased to find it was the Hon. Con. They had appeared to think, moreover, that the offers of second-hand clothing and reno
vated furniture were nothing short of insulting and frequently harsh words had been exchanged. After the last dust-up, the Hon. Con had abandoned the undeserving poor and turned to forcing library books on hospital patients who were too ill to answer back.
She stopped the car and sat for a moment while she examined her surroundings. They were not inspiring. Two rows of ugly little houses, their roofs buckling under a forest of television aerials, glowered at each other, across a narrow street. Sheets of old newspapers flapped obscenely over the pavements or lay huddled and sodden in the gutters, blocking the drains. Human interest was provided by a woman with remarkably muscular arms who stood in her doorway a few yards off. She stared disapprovingly at the Hon. Con’s Mini. She was dressed in bedroom slippers, a paper thin nylon overall and massive rollers which made her head look as though it had escaped from the pages of the cheaper science fiction. Only the noisy arrival of three kids at the top of the street fleetingly diverted her attention. The Hon. Con turned to watch them, too. A couple of little boys, busily engaged in thumping an even smaller girl whose only protection was a rusty bicycle chain.
The Hon. Con sighed, got out and locked the Mini with exaggerated care.
The front door of No. 92 was decorated with – apart from a few anatomically inexact childish scrawls – some elaborate and much revised instructions concerning the number of times the bell was to be rung. Once for Klimaszewski, twice for Hasdrubal Harbinger Smith, three times for Miss ‘Mirabelle’ and four for Featherstone. The Hon. Con didn’t know Charlie’s surname and as she stood trying to work out the probabilities a window was flung open high over her head.
‘Come right up, ducks! The door’s not locked. Third floor!’ Charlie’s head disappeared, only to reappear a second later. ‘Elvis! Elvis Blodger!’
One of the little boys at the far end of the street paused in his efforts to screw off the ear of the little girl. ‘ What?’
‘This car belongs to a pal of mine!’ screamed Charlie. ‘You lay one finger on it and I’ll string your guts up for bloody front room curtains!’
The child raised the face of a Botticelli angel. ‘Eff off, you mucky old slag!’ he yelled and leapt to avoid a shrewd slash from the bicycle chain.
Charlie grinned down at the Hon. Con. ‘It’ll be safe as houses now,’ she assured her, rather improbably. ‘see you in a sec!’
The Hon. Con had a tricky journey up the unfit, rickety staircase. Every deep breath brought in the most appalling stink of boiled cabbage – a stink which the Hon. Con noted with dismay grew in pungency as she approached the third floor.
‘Come on in!’ said Charlie, waiting hospitably in the open doorway of her fiat, ‘Fiona’s just popped into the lavvy but she’ll be out in a tick.’
‘Fiona?’ asked the Hon. Con, getting out her handkerchief and seeing if a whiff of Old Spice would clear her head.
‘That’s what she calls herself professionally,’ explained Charlie and ushered the Hon. Con into a tiny sitting-room the size of a rabbit hutch. ‘Here, go and dump your coat in the bedroom while I dish the dinners up.’
While the merry flushing of a toilet filled the entire flat, the Hon. Con deposited her duffle coat on a double bed adorned with two poodle nightdress cases. The Hon. Con thought they were jolly nice and returned to the sitting-room in a happier state of mind to find herself face to face with Miss O’Coyne, senior.
Charlie poked her head out of the kitchenette to make the introductions. ‘Connie – Fiona! Fiona – Connie!’
The Hon. Con scowled. She despised all stuffy conventional behaviour, of course, but she despised it rather more in herself than in other people. Connie, indeed!
‘Lo!’ drawled Fiona, nee Bridget Mary Perpetua, slowly chewing away like a ruminating cow.
‘How do you do!’ said the Hon. Con. She had not expected such a big girl. You couldn’t exactly call Fiona fat but she was certainly well developed and that skimpy jumper and skirt left little even to the most apathetic imagination. She seemed to fill the sitting-room and the scent in which she had drenched herself killed the pong of stale cabbage stone dead.
The Hon. Con and Fiona stared perplexedly at each other.
‘Grub’s up!’ Charlie swept in bearing three greasy, newspaper wrapped bundles which she proceeded to deposit on the chipped dinner plates waiting on the table. ‘Salt and vinegar’s on already and them as wants forks can fetch ’em!’
The Hon. Con’s scowl deepened. It was one thing to be sportingly prepared to muck in and quite another to be faced with a soggy pile of rapidly congealing fish and chips.
Charlie unscrewed a quart bottle of beer with a satisfying fizz. ‘Fiona says the cops were pretty decent this morning.’
‘Oh yes?’ The Hon. Con raised a pale and limp chip to her lips. ‘Did they happen to mention how they’re getting on with their investigations?’
‘That lot?’ Fiona was a girl of considerable dexterity, managing to articulate quite distinctly through a mouthful of best quality cod and mint-flavoured chewing gum. ‘They’d never find our Terry’s killer if they was to trip over him. I’ve never seen such a dopey looking bunch of jacks since the day I was born.’
The Hon. Con’s double standard raised its head again. While it was all right for persons of breeding, intelligence and education to criticize the police, she objected to hearing unwashed immigrants – who were no better than they should be – doing the same thing. However, the annoyance had to be borne if any information at all was to be extracted from the awful Fiona. Not that, judging by the way her red-rimmed mouth was flapping, getting her to talk was going to present any problem.
The Hon. Con interrupted a spate of abuse about the police and their antecedents. ‘Teresa was younger than you, I believe?’
‘Four years,’ agreed Fiona, excelling herself by accepting a cigarette from Charlie while still consuming her fish and chips. ‘There’s five boys between her and me.’ She seemed to think that this statement required elaboration. ‘That’s including the bloody triplets, of course.’
‘Of course.’ The Hon. Con thankfully abandoned her essay into the realms of mental arithmetic.
‘Not that me and Terry was all that close,’ Fiona continued, cigarette in one hand and a wad of chips in the other. ‘I mean, when I scarpered, she couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen and as far as I was concerned she was just one of the kids. To tell you the truth, when she wrote and told me she was coming over to England, I could hardly remember which one of the little bleeders she was. Not that it mattered a tinker’s cuss because, like I told her straight, she needn’t think she was coming and parking herself on me. In my business you need kid sisters hanging round your neck like you need the bloody clap.’ She popped the chips into her mouth.
‘What is your job, exactly?’
Through several pairs of false eyelashes, Fiona looked at the Hon. Con rather pityingly. ‘ I’m a model, darling.’
Now, many people thought that the Hon. Con led a pretty sheltered life and wasn’t really what used to be called ‘with it’. They couldn’t have been more mistaken. The Hon. Con was not a fool. She knew all about la vie Bohème. And Chelsea. And the Left Bank.
She stared disapprovingly at Fiona. A pound to a penny that the girl was one of those shameless trollops who stripped to the buff and posed in the all-together before the lascivious gaze of artists in paint-stained smocks and floppy bow ties! The Hon. Con repressed a shudder.
Meanwhile, Fiona, her right hand with its blood-red nails hovering over the bag of chips, was chattering on as though being a model was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Seems I might as well have saved my breath, though, because our Terry had quite a few ideas of her own. Told me straight out that she wasn’t going on the game, the cheeky little bitch!’ The blood-red nails descended on a chip and it joined the chewing gum in Fiona’s capacious mouth. ‘Beats me where these kids get their high and mighty ideas from, but our Terry had got it all worked out. Mind you,’ she added sar
donically, ‘she hadn’t planned on getting herself murdered in the process but you can’t foresee everything in this life, can you?’
‘Jolly tough luck,’ muttered the Hon. Con.
‘Occupational hazard, love,’ was Fiona’s rather callous rejoinder. ‘Just shows our Terry wasn’t as bloody clever as she thought she was. Men are men, aren’t they? Where our Terry made her big mistake was thinking that just because they drive big, expensive cars and have a bath every day they’re any different from the dirty pigs the rest of us have to mix with.’
‘I don’t understand these girls who can’t think of anything else but getting themselves a man,’ said Charlie, giving the Hon. Con a conspiratorial glance. ‘ There’s more to life than that.’
‘Oh, it was security our Terry was after,’ explained Fiona as she ground out her cigarette end in a piece of batter. ‘Having seen enough of the want of it back home in Ireland. If she could have made sure of having a good steady income for life she’d have married a door post and you could have stuffed the other. She’s got it all planned. A good, respectable chap with plenty of money. Somebody between forty and forty-five with plenty of life insurance so she could look forward to being a rich young widow. Poor little devil!’
Charlie shared out the rest of the beer while Fiona recovered what little composure she’d lost. ‘If it was money she was after, what did she go as an au pair for? They only get a couple of quid a week, don’t they?’
Fiona sighed, ‘Oh, that was our Terry all over. She was always prepared to go without jam today if she thought it meant caviar tomorrow. God knows where she got it from because, sure to hell, there’s nobody else like it in our family. She’d got no qualifications, you see, and she wasn’t keener on hard work than anybody else. But, if she’d got a job in a factory or a shop, where would she have met her dashing hero? Working as an au pair girl meant that she was right in amongst the nobs, didn’t it? And she didn’t give a damn about the mistress of the house, believe me! Our Terry could run rings round them where work was concerned. This Hellon woman was a right mug. Why, if our Terry felt like a day in bed, she just used to tell her that she’d got the curse and the silly cow spent the rest of the day running upstairs with cups of tea for her. Cushy, you’d not credit it!’
