Running Scared Read online

  Running Scared

  ANN GRANGER

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 1998 Ann Granger

  The right of Ann Granger to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7725 1

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ann Granger has lived in cities in various parts of the world, since for many years she worked for the Foreign Office and received postings to British embassies as far apart as Munich and Lusaka. She is married, with two sons, and she and her husband, who also worked for the Foreign Office, are now permanently based near Oxford.

  To my son, Tim, who gave up his free time to help me in my research, with thanks

  Chapter One

  I’m not the sort of person who goes out of her way to find trouble. It’s just that trouble always seems to find me. Generally, I just try to make it from one day to the next and avoid hassle. I don’t know why it never works out like that. It’s so unfair, and especially as Christmas approaches and everyone’s looking forward to the holiday. But my luck being what it is, that’s when I ran into my latest set of problems. Because if you can be certain of anything in this world, it’s that you never know what life’s going to hit you with next.

  It was a cold, rainy morning and I was helping out my friend Ganesh in his uncle’s newsagent’s shop when disaster struck. Ganesh not only works for his Uncle Hari, he also lodges with him over the shop. I don’t know whether Hari really is an uncle or some other kind of relative, but uncle’s what everyone calls him, even me. Hari is a nice man but nervous and fidgety and that gets Ganesh down. So when Hari announced he was going on an extended family visit to India, and in his absence Ganesh was to be left in sole charge of the shop in Camden, Gan just about danced round the place for joy.

  I was pleased for Ganesh too, because it was high time he had a chance to run something without interference from his family. All his life he’s helped out in shops run by relatives. He’d helped his parents in their Rotherhithe greengrocery until they’d been dispossessed by the council, who were redeveloping. Now they run a fruit and veg place out of town at High Wycombe. It’s very small and they don’t need Ganesh, nor is there any accommodation for him, so that’s why he’s currently with Hari. I sometimes ask Ganesh why he puts up with being passed round the family like this, filling in where needed, but he always says I don’t understand. Too right, I tell him, I don’t. Explain it to me. Then he says, what’s the point?

  He’s really capable and if he could just get his own place, he’d be fine. I wish he’d give up the dream of being in charge of a dry-cleaner’s, though. He has a crazy idea he and I could run something like that together. Not a chance, I tell him. I don’t want to spend my life handling other people’s dirty clothes and I hate the chemical smell of those places, and the steam.

  However, I didn’t mind giving Ganesh a hand in the newsagent’s while Hari was away, especially in the mornings, which is always the busiest time, though with Christmas coming up things would start getting really hectic pretty soon. Hari had given Ganesh authority to hire me as a part-timer and I needed the money. But I want to make it clear that one day I’m going to be an actress – I nearly finished a course on the Dramatic Arts and everything once – but in the meantime I take any legitimate work going, including being an informal enquiry agent.

  So, off went Hari, leaving Ganesh three pages of minutely detailed instructions in a curly alphabet and I turned up on my first day bright and early at eight o‘clock. Ganesh had been there since six, but I have my limits. Everything went swimmingly for a bit and I was enjoying being a genuinely employed person. It was quite interesting in the shop and at the end of the first week I got my pay packet and felt I was a regular member of the public at last. Only ‘last’ was what it wasn’t going to do. I should’ve known.

  It was on the following Tuesday that things started to go wrong. The week had begun all right. Gan and I had spent Sunday putting up Christmas decorations in the shop. Ganesh’s idea of a decorative colour scheme is red, lots of it, and gold, even more of that, enlivened by an occasional flash of hot pink or vibrant turquoise. When we’d finished with the shop it looked fantastic – perhaps rather more Diwali than Christmas, but Gan and I were really chuffed with it.

  All Monday we gloried in the compliments from customers. Then, on Tuesday, a postcard of the Taj Mahal arrived from Uncle Hari and the atmosphere changed. Ganesh stopped buzzing cheerfully and skulked around beneath the crepe paper chains. He’d propped the card on the gold tinsel-trimmed shelves behind the counter along with the cigarettes, and kept giving it hunted glances.

  I’d already guessed that Ganesh was up to something because he’d been making furtive phone calls over the previous week and looking pleased with himself. I knew it wasn’t just the approach of festivities and seasonal sales. I could see he was dying to tell me, especially during Sunday when we’d been pinning up the decorations, but I wasn’t going to encourage him although I was longing to know. With the arrival of the postcard, he stopped looking smug and became clearly worried. Eventually, he came clean.

  We were having our coffee-break. The early morning rush had thinned, there was no one in the shop for the moment, and the emptiness of the rainswept pavement outside suggested things might stay quiet all day until the usual early evening flurry of trade. We didn’t have to go upstairs to the flat to make the coffee because we had an electric kettle downstairs which I filled with water in the washroom.

  The building’s old and long ago converted from what must once have been quite a nice house. There are two ways up to the flat, one from the shop, using the former back stairs, and a separate one from the street. The downstairs washroom was at that time a museum of antiquated plumbing and fixtures, tacked on to the back of the building in what must have seemed at the time the height of modernity. It was all as clean as it could be kept given its general state, but that was terminal. The washbasin was hanging off the wall. The tap dripped. Any wall tiles were loose and cracked and the floor tiles had gaps between them. The vent for the extractor fan was clogged with dust and dead flies. The lavatory cistern was operated by a chain which had lost its handle. It clanked furiously whenever it was flushed and the ci
stern lid was loose so if you didn’t watch out, there was always a chance it would fall down and brain you. The loo itself was the piece de resistance. An original, no kidding, patterned all over with blue forget-menots. It had a wooden seat with a crack in it which pinched your bum. I tell you, anyone ventured into that washroom at his peril. I called it the Chamber of Horrors.

  Ganesh, to be fair, had been grumbling to Hari about the state of the washroom ever since he’d moved there. But whenever Hari was tackled, he always replied that he wasn’t a rich man who could afford to replace everything just like that. ‘Besides,’ he’d declare, ‘look at such a beautiful lavatory pan. Where would I again get such a wonderful object?’ He usually ended up by promising to get a new tapwasher, but even that got put off indefinitely.

  On this particular morning, I steered my way to the counter carrying a mug of coffee in either hand and said crossly, ‘The least you can do, Gan, while Hari’s away, is fix that dripping tap.’

  At that, Ganesh, who since the postcard’s arrival had been brooding darkly in a corner like Mr Rochester on a bad day, brightened up. He chortled, rapped out a rhythm on the counter with his palms and, just as I was deciding he’d gone bonkers, let me into his secret.

  ‘I can do better than that, Fran. I’m going to get the whole thing done out, ripped out, fixed up, everything brand-new, while the old bloke’s away.’

  He beamed at me. I stood there, slopping coffee and gawping. I’d only set my sights on the new washer. Ganesh must have got Homes and Gardens down from the shelf and let it go to his head.

  ‘Hari won’t agree,’ I said.

  ‘Hari won’t know, not until he gets back and by then it’ll be a whatsit, fait accompli, that’s what they call it.’

  ‘They call it a screaming hysterics,’ I said. ‘That’s what Hari will have when he sees the bill.’

  Ganesh took his coffee from me, stopped looking smug, and started to look obstinate. ‘He left me in charge, right? I’m empowered to sign cheques on the business and everything, right? So I’m going to get it done and he can make as much fuss as he likes. What’s he going to do, sack me? I’m family. He can’t. Anyway, I know the stingy old blighter. He always carps at spending money, but once it’s gone, he shrugs it off. When he sees how good it looks and how reasonable the cost was, he’ll get over it. It’s improving the property. That has to be good. And if he still argues, I’ll tell him Health and Safety at Work rules didn’t allow the old one. They probably don’t.’

  ‘It’ll cost a bomb,’ I said, playing devil’s advocate. Someone had to. He was too full of it.

  ‘No, it won’t. I’ve got a really reasonable quote. Dead cheap. Bloke can start work on Friday and he’ll be done, finished, gone in days, by the end of next week, certain.’

  I perched on the stool behind the counter and sipped my coffee. It all sounded a bit too easy to me. ‘How come it’s going to be so cheap?’ I asked. ‘All the existing fittings will have to go, new ones put in. The extractor fan has never worked to my knowledge so that’s got to be replaced. The plumbing’s knackered. The walls will have to be painted, the floor retiled . . .’

  ‘It’s all taken care of,’ said Ganesh airily. ‘And he’ll take away the old fittings and rubbish for me and everything.’

  ‘Who will?’ I asked suspiciously.

  Ganesh’s air of confidence slipped just a tad. ‘Hitch,’ he said.

  I spilled my coffee. ‘Hitch? Are you mad?’

  ‘Hitch does a good job,’ Ganesh said obstinately. ‘And he’s cheap.’

  ‘He’s cheap,’ I said, ‘because all the stuff he uses has been knocked off from a builder’s yard somewhere.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t – or this won’t be. I checked that with him first. Think I’m daft? It’s all on the level. He’s given me the name of his supplier and everything. I can ring them up – and I will, before he starts. I’m not daft, Fran.’

  I could have argued, and perhaps I should have done, but in the end, it wasn’t any of my business. I didn’t doubt Hitch had given Ganesh the phone number of a ‘supplier’. But I’d be willing to bet that, if Gan rang up, on the other end of the line would be some mate of Hitch’s, sitting in a lock-up garage filled with dodgy goods. Ganesh is stubborn and always wants to know best. He wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say. So why not let him get on with it? A new washroom would be nice. But that Ganesh, of all people, should behave like this took me aback. He was usually so sensible, never did anything without examining it from all sides first, never acted rashly, never gambled and never did anything which would upset his family (other than befriend me, an act which had them dead worried).

  I let it go and concentrated on my coffee. Ganesh obviously thought he’d won the argument so that put him in a good mood. An air of truce hung over the shop.

  That’s when the door opened. At first the only thing I was aware of was a cold draught which ruffled all the magazines on their shelves and sent the crepe chains threshing. A red one and a turquoise, twisted together, fell down. A squall of rain spattered the tiled floor. More tinsel fell off the shelves. We both looked up. Silhouetted in the open door was the figure of a man. He stood there briefly, steadying himself with one hand on the doorjamb, then staggered towards the counter and grabbed at it for support. Ganesh stretched out a hand towards the jemmy he keeps under the counter for opening boxes and fending off drunks. I stood there rooted to the spot, horrified and fascinated.

  I faced a Halloween mask – gaping mouth, bulging eyes, streaked scarlet with gore which poured from a cut above one eyebrow, filling the eye-socket beneath. More blood dribbled from both nostrils. I knew I should do something, but I couldn’t move. The clutching fingers scrabbled at the wooden surface, inarticulate sounds issued from the mouth and, with a last throaty gurgle, the intruder slid beneath the counter and disappeared from sight. A strand of silvery fronds floated after him, undulating gracefully in the disturbed air currents.

  His disappearance jolted both of us into action and we raced round the other side. He was sitting on the floor, back to the counter, legs splayed, bloodied head grotesquely crowned with the tinsel strand.

  ‘Cripes,’ said Ganesh. ‘Get a cloth, Fran.’ He ran to the door, looked up and down the street, twisted the notice on the glass to ‘Closed’ and locked us in. Whoever had done that to the man on the floor, we didn’t want them joining us.

  We divested our visitor of his tinsel crown, got him to his feet and propelled him into the storeroom. He stumbled along between us, gasping, but, apart from the obvious, apparently not otherwise injured. We propped him on a chair and I ripped open a box of Kleenex to mop up the blood.

  ‘Haven’t you got something else?’ hissed Ganesh, who even in a time of stress realised he had to write off that box of tissues as no-sale. ‘Couldn’t you have used loo paper?’

  ‘Make him some tea!’ I snapped.

  Our patient gurgled and seemed to be regaining his wits. His nose wouldn’t stop trickling blood so I wedged wads of tissue in both nostrils and told him he had to breathe through his mouth.

  Ganesh came back with a mug of tea.

  ‘Thag you,’ mumbled whoever-he-was.

  ‘What happened, mate?’ asked Ganesh. ‘Was it a mugging? You want me to call the cops?’

  ‘Doh!’ cried the other in great alarm, sloshing tea around.

  ‘Keep still!’ I ordered. ‘You’ll start bleeding again. Perhaps he ought to go to casualty, Gan. He could have broken his nose.’

  ‘Doh, doh! I dode want dat!’ The stranger decided he couldn’t communicate with both nostrils bunged up, so removed the blood-sodden wads and threw them in the waste-paper basket. I waited for a fresh scarlet waterfall, but it didn’t come. My first aid had worked.

  ‘No police,’ he said firmly. ‘No hospital. I’m all right now.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ said Gan in some relief. He didn’t want the law in his shop. That sort of thing puts customers off. Nor did he want to take time to dri
ve the guy to the nearest casualty unit. ‘So long as you’re OK, right? You were unlucky. It’s safe enough round here in daylight, usually.’

  The victim mumbled agreement. ‘Yeah, I had a bit of bad luck.’

  I wondered if he was going to give us any details, but apparently not. He was patting the inside pocket of his coat and progressed from there to the side pockets. Eventually he pulled out a handkerchief and passed it gingerly over his bashed features. When he took it away, it was freely smeared red. He studied it with interest.

  Ganesh was getting restive. ‘Look, mate, I’ve got to reopen the shop. I can’t stay closed much longer. I’m losing trade. You can sit here as long as you need. Take your time, right?’

  ‘I’m really sorry about this.’ Our visitor looked stricken. He thrust away the handkerchief and began to fumble again at the inner pocket of his overcoat. ‘I realise this is costing you money. Let me make it up.’