by Ann Granger
‘Gawd,’ he called out, ‘he’s right. It’s Rennie Duke.’ He turned back to his colleague. ‘You know, that bent shamus. What’s the poor little sod doing here?’
They stared majestically at poor Ganesh. ‘May we ask if you were having dealings with this private detective, sir?’
‘I haven’t had dealings with him,’ said Gan crossly. ‘He called in the shop asking about someone and left me his card.’
But they knew they were on to something. ‘You wouldn’t happen to remember the name of the person he was asking about, I suppose?’
I knew Gan was going to blurt out that it was me, and I was thinking desperately of some way of stopping him when an interruption came. The scene-of-crime operatives had arrived, spilling out of a van laden with all kinds of paraphernalia. A car brought a cross-looking individual with a medical bag. It’s been my bad luck before this to be on the spot when murder investigations have got underway. You might even say I’m an old hand. I knew the doctor was there to pronounce Rennie dead. They don’t leave these things to chance. Even if they’ve only got half a body, a doctor has to declare it lifeless. This one, having officially signed Rennie off, left. The pathologist would be along later.
The SOCOs were busy now. Blue-and-white tape was tied across the entry to the garages to bar access. A screen was put up round Rennie’s car. Flashlights popped. Another medical figure appeared on the scene, a plump gent with baggy eyes, the patho. He clambered into a one-piece protective suit and wombled his way out of sight behind the screen.
Ganesh and I asked if we might go. The cops were unhappy about this. ‘CID will be here in a minute,’ they told us.
That was what I was worried about.
During all this activity, other people who garaged their vehicles in this row had begun to appear and were not happy at being denied access. Our two uniformed men went over to explain and placate them. They didn’t do very well. People had to get to work. They wanted their cars. One or two might even have had items in their garages they didn’t want the cops to see, and feared a search. Explanations about messing up the scene of crime rolled off them like the proverbial water of a duck’s back. Word had got out on the street. A crowd of curious onlookers had started to gather. More uniformed coppers arrived. One of the original ones returned to me and Gan, looking harassed.
As he did so, a car drew up and a couple of plain-clothes types, one a woman, got out and began to force a way through the noisy crowd. The copper muttered, ‘CID’s here.’
The male detective was ordering the crowd to disperse, which it began to do unwillingly. The woman joined our group in the garage, hands thrust into her pockets and shoulders hunched against the cold. She fixed me with a disapproving look.
‘Well, Fran, I can’t say I wasn’t hoping not to see you again!’
It was Inspector Janice Morgan, whom I’d met before. Though not without the usual faults instilled in them at police college, she had on that occasion turned out to be the most sensible copper I’d ever come across.
My first feeling was of immense relief. The person I’d been dreading seeing arrive was my old foe, Sergeant Parry. But Morgan had a different sergeant with her, one I didn’t know. He had left the dispersing crowd and was standing a little way back and taking in every detail of my domestic arrangements with mean little eyes.
‘It wasn’t my idea,’ I said. ‘The feeling’s mutual, if you see what I mean. No offence. I didn’t arrange this.’
Morgan gave me a funny look and went outside. One of the uniforms followed her. We watched her walk over to the screen around Duke’s car. When she came back, she called over one of the original uniforms, who began to fill her in on the details to date. ‘Local shopkeeper’ and ‘homeless person’ were the phrases I caught. I wanted to correct him. I wasn’t homeless. I was just living in temporary accommodation. Other people might think that’s homeless, but to me, being homeless is having no roof at all. There’s a big difference, believe me.
Morgan returned to Gan and me. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we’d all be more comfortable down at the station.’
‘We don’t have to go to the station,’ I said mutinously. I’d been through it enough times to know the rules.
Ganesh spoiled it again by insisting, ‘We can’t go back to the shop. I told you, Hari will have kittens. He’ll have them anyway when he hears I’m not available for work for an hour or two.’
I thought ‘hour or two’ was being optimistic but I didn’t say so.
Morgan eyed him. ‘You told the officer that Duke had called at your shop. Would this other person, Hari, also have met him?’
This time Gan was really tempted to lie. I could see it in his face. But he admitted that yes, his uncle had seen Clarence Duke.
Morgan said that in that case, she would need to talk to Uncle Hari at some point. Ganesh entered into an involved explanation of Hari’s nerves, but it didn’t get him anywhere. They let him lock up the garage and go back to explain to Hari that he wouldn’t be there for a bit. I called after him to put Bonnie in the storeroom. I heard him mumble crossly but I was confident he’d let her in, even if she did bark at him and try and grab his trouser leg.
He came back a few minutes later and said, ‘I’ve told Hari there’s been an accident.’
They put us in the back of their car and drove us to the station.
Once we got there, they split us up, true to form. The atmosphere was no longer sympathetic. I was shown into an interview room by a desk officer oozing synthetic civility, which was worse than outright sarcasm, and offered a cup of tea. I accepted. It was going to be a long morning, even if Gan didn’t think it was. The tea arrived in a plastic cup. It looked like creosote and smelled pretty much like it too. I was assured Inspector Morgan wouldn’t be long and left to brood.
But brooding wasn’t a good idea. I ought to have taken the chance to have a good clear think. However, after a disturbed night and an early start to my day, my brain felt as though I’d been hit with a sandbag. I also felt depressed, and not just because finding a corpse before breakfast does lower the spirits, but because besides all my other problems, I now had this giant one to contend with. What I really needed was some shut-eye. I arranged the chairs so that I could put my feet up on one and prop myself against the wall, folded my arms and closed my eyes. I might as well get five minutes’ kip as sit here sunk in gloom.
I did doze off, and was awoken suddenly by Morgan’s arrival. I nearly fell off my chairs.
‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she said drily.
I put my feet to the ground. She took away the chair I’d rested them on and wiped the seat off with her handkerchief before returning it to the far side of the table and sitting down.
She looked much as she had on the first occasion we’d met. Her dress sense hadn’t improved. I’ve never known a young woman dress in such a middle-aged way. She was wearing a dreary grey suit over a pale-blue jumper I suspected she’d knitted herself. Her hair was what I suppose you’d call bobbed. She had little make-up. She looked like a character in an Agatha Christie adaptation. All she lacked was a string of pearls. I decided to break the ice. She and I went back some way, after all, and I remembered her domestic problems, as they’d then been.
‘How’s whatshisname, Tom?’ I asked. ‘Did you get back together again?’
She shook her head. ‘We’re divorced. He calls from time to time but I put the phone down. Mostly.’
So nothing had changed there.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m supposed to ask the questions, Fran.’ She paused, looked me critically up and down and sighed. ‘So you’re living with Mr Patel and his uncle now?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ I told her cautiously. ‘I’m sort of dossing in their garage.’
‘Does he charge you rent?’ she asked indignantly.
‘No, he thinks it’s temporary. He’s helping me out.’
She cast her gaze to the ceiling. ‘Honestly, Fran, I really thought yo
u’d have made it to something better by now. I thought you had it in you. You’re not a no-hoper like some. But things seem to be as bad if not worse. I thought that old chap, Monkton, was keen to help you?’
‘He was. He did. He found me a flat. I was flooded out.’ She was still giving me that reproachful look, so I went on the attack. ‘Look, don’t blame me, right? Blame the ruddy water board. The council won’t house me. I’m out of a job at the moment. Unless I win the lottery, I don’t have a lot of choice.’ Getting stroppy with the cops doesn’t usually help, but I was cheesed off. Anyone would think I went round hunting out awkward situations and then putting myself squarely in the frame as a sort of masochistic exercise.
I added defensively, ‘I don’t like being in police stations.’
She didn’t reply that I had the knack of finding my way back to them like a homing pigeon. Instead she snapped, ‘I’m not always keen on being in them either. I particularly don’t like long, dreary mornings spent listening to improbable yarns spun by jokers who think they’re smart and can run rings round the poor old plods. I don’t like clever clogs who conceal evidence. I don’t like the same person always being around dead bodies.’
‘Oi!’ I interrupted. ‘I didn’t kill him.’
‘Did I suggest you did? Well, you don’t want to be here, and believe me, I’d rather not be here. But we’re both stuck with it, so we’re going to have to make the best of it, aren’t we?’
The door opened and the sergeant I didn’t know came in. He was a pale little chap with thin fairish hair and acne. His eyes were still mean.
‘We’re going to record this, OK?’ she said. Spotty switched on the machine on the table. ‘This is Sergeant Cole,’ she went on, introducing him to the machine rather than to me. ‘And for the record, I’m Inspector Morgan.’
‘I don’t like it being recorded,’ I sulked. ‘Why can’t he take notes like in the good old days?’
‘Know a lot about police procedure, do you?’ asked Cole in a weedy voice.
I gave him a glare which turned his acne scarlet, safe in the knowledge that tape-recorders can’t register dirty looks.
Janice Morgan began again, briskly. ‘Tell us all of it, Miss Varady. Had you also met Clarence Duke before this morning?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted.
‘Fine. So tell us how, why and where. Because I need to know how you – and not anyone else – came to find him dead in his car right by where you’re presently living. Don’t tell me it’s a coincidence. I don’t believe in them, not this sort. Don’t leave any of it out and don’t be creative. We’ve been through this routine before, you and I, on other occasions. You know you’ll have to tell us in the end. Save both of us time, why don’t you?’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I met the guy once and I spoke on the phone to him once.’
‘It looks as if he might have been keen to speak to you again,’ she retorted. ‘He was waiting outside your garage at five in the morning.’
‘That’s an assumption,’ I pointed out.
‘I think it’s a fair one. We’ll go on it, anyway, for the moment. What did he want to see you about?’
‘It’s private business and has nothing to do with his death.’ I wasn’t giving up without a struggle.
‘If we decide the information has nothing to do with his death, we’ll discard it. But right now, we need to know.’
Obviously I had to tell her about my mother. But what I hadn’t got to tell her, couldn’t tell her in any circumstances, was about my search for the Wildes and Nicola.
‘I think I told you my mother walked out on us when I was seven,’ I began. She nodded, frowning slightly. She suspected I was about to send her after a real red herring. ‘Well, in a way, she’s walked back in again,’ I went on. ‘I mean, not literally. She’s dying. She’s in a hospice at Egham. She asked Duke to find me and he did. She wanted to see me before she died.’
Whatever she’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this, and I’d taken the wind out of her sails. She was looking at me incredulously. Even the puny Cole looked a bit startled.
‘You can check,’ I told them. ‘I’ll give you the name of the hospice and its phone number and everything. You ask for Sister Helen. After Duke told me about my mother, I went out there with Ganesh Patel to see her. Sister Helen will confirm it.’
Morgan said soberly, ‘I’m sorry your mother is terminally ill.’
‘Dying,’ I corrected her.
‘It’s a word . . .’ she began.
‘It’s the right word. You can be terminally ill for months. My mother doesn’t have months. She doesn’t have weeks. She doesn’t need you lot crowding round her. Above all, she doesn’t have to know Clarence Duke is dead. She used to know him. She hired him to find me. She doesn’t need bad news. Check with Sister Helen but stay away from my mother.’
There was a silence. Cole fingered a pustule on his chin. Then Morgan began to speak again very slowly and carefully, as if picking her way through a verbal minefield.
‘I don’t like having to do this to you, Fran, at a time like this. I don’t want to make you go over and over it. That’s why I’m asking you, for your own sake, to tell me everything you know, now. Then we can let you go and you can go and visit your mother, which I’m sure you want to do.’
There was a hint of arm-twisting there. But Morgan hadn’t quite got it right. Perhaps an excuse not to go and see my mother was what I secretly wanted. I felt a stab of guilt. Of course I had to go. She’d be waiting to hear how I was getting on with my search. But it was the search which made me so unwilling to go out to see her. If only she had asked Duke to find me just for my own sake. Because she wanted to see me and not because she wanted me to do something for her. I suppose, looking back, I was feeling resentful and perhaps a bit jealous of the unknown sister I’d been set to track down. I knew in my heart that it was love that was behind my mother’s willingness to take the gamble of contacting the Wildes to find out about the baby she’d given up. I wasn’t sure she had ever loved me as much. Perhaps I was being unfair. But that was how it looked to me.
‘Fran?’ Morgan was prompting.
‘I’ve told you everything,’ I said.
She drummed her fingers on the table and stared at me. ‘You met Duke. What did you think of him?’
‘Not much, a bit weird.’
‘Weird?’
‘Sort of creepy.’
‘But good at his job, presumably, because he found you.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said uneasily, not sure where this was leading.
‘Did you ask him how he found you?’
Now it was my turn to be startled. No, I hadn’t, oddly enough, either through fear of what he might say, or for the shock of hearing my mother was alive and wanted to see me. It should have been an obvious question but I hadn’t put it. But how had the wretched Duke found me?
I shook my head. ‘I didn’t think to ask at the time. I’ve no idea.’
‘Suppose I could suggest to you the way he tracked you down?’ She was eyeing me again, sizing me up.
I was even more uneasy, but I really did want to know, and said so.
‘In his wallet we found a newspaper cutting from the Camden Journal. It was about your street being flooded just before Christmas. It gave the names of some of those who’d had basement flats and come off worst. Just a guess, but possibly your mother saw that in the local rag, figured there could only be one Fran Varady, and cut it out. She gave it to Duke and asked him to seek you out.’
‘Makes sense,’ I agreed, but my mind was running on. Belatedly my brain had woken up and was now throwing out ideas like sparks from a Catherine wheel. Amongst other things, I was miffed that Morgan had known all along about my being flooded out, but had still made me explain it to her.
‘So he spoke to you and told you about your mother?’
I nodded.
‘And he phoned you?’
‘No, I phoned him. I had told him I’d let him
know if I’d go and see her. That’s what I did. He gave me the address. That was the last time I had anything to do with him.’
After all, you couldn’t count seeing him in his car lurking near Mrs Mackenzie’s house.
‘You had no idea he was waiting outside the garage in his car?’
‘No.’
‘Did you hear anything?’
‘I did hear a bit of a rumpus out there during the night,’ I confessed.
She hissed. ‘You see? I have to drag every bit of information out of you, Fran. It’s like drawing teeth! When? What time? What did you hear?’
I told her I didn’t know what time. During the night. ‘I didn’t get up and put the light on and the garage has no windows.’ I’d heard a funny noise which I thought might have been an animal, and a clunking sound which, yes, might have been a car door, and panting. Yes, panting! Of course I didn’t blooming well go and look! What am I? Crazy? It wasn’t the first time I’d heard noises during the night outside. I’d heard some a couple of nights before, someone running. It happened all the time.
