Rattling the Bones Page 10

  Susie and I went back to the office and she sighed. ‘How am I going to be able to work in here from now on, Fran? I’ll be imagining him, there on the floor. Every time I look up from the desk, I’ll see him staring back at me. I had a job finding this place. Rents round here for office space, well, you wouldn’t credit what they are. I don’t want to work from home. It’s risky. But I’ll have to look for somewhere else. I’ve got all my cards printed up and everything. It’s going to cost me. And then there’s that bloody lock. I’ll have to get it changed today and tell the landlord.’

  ‘Who is the landlord? Wouldn’t he have a key?’

  ‘Some property company is landlord. Yeah, they probably have got one. But they wouldn’t hand over a key to anyone other than me. If they have, they’re in deep trouble. Still, they must hold spare keys to all the properties. A tenant might do a moonlight flit, go off without paying the rent or a forwarding address. They’d need to get in. But there’s no way your mate Gardner would have been able to get it from them, is there?’

  ‘He wasn’t a mate,’ I said dully.

  She stopped worrying about relocating and turned to stare at me. ‘I didn’t mean a proper mate like your pal Ganesh. I just meant someone you know.’

  ‘I didn’t even know him. I just met him; our paths crossed. Come on, Susie, let’s go over to the pub. I’ll buy you a brandy. You look like you need a drop. I know I do.’

  She came to pat my arm sympathetically. ‘I’m really sorry this happened to you, Fran.’

  ‘Call it my luck.’

  But my luck hadn’t been out; Duane’s had.

  We turned back towards the exit but I lingered, sure there must be something here to tell us exactly what had happened.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Susie impatiently. ‘Are you expecting to find an explanation all nicely written out and put on the desk for us to find? Look, he didn’t have time to write us a note, poor bloke. He didn’t have time to call an ambulance or get downstairs to the kebab place to ask them for help or anything.’

  ‘All right, all right, I’m coming!’ I said. ‘But this is only the beginning of it, Susie. The cops won’t believe neither of us know why he was here. Why did they think we’d removed something from the scene? What?’

  She shook her head. ‘Cops are like that . . .’

  ‘You are sure nothing was moved or missing from the room?’

  ‘I told you! Everything was fine - except for him on the floor. Give over, Fran.’

  ‘How can it be fine? If neither of us let him in, nor even Les, then he broke in. That’s going to take some explanation. What was he after? He probably came to find me, saw the office was empty, and decided to snoop about to see if there was anything concerning Edna here. He’d found out who I was - and I really would like to know how he did that! Once he knew I worked for you occasionally, he must have felt sure I was following Edna for the same reason he was: someone was paying me. When we talked I didn’t admit it. He thought I’d pulled a fast one on him. He reckoned he was entitled to know what I was up to. The cops will be back asking more questions and I don’t want to tell them about Edna. They’ll pester her and she’d be terrified.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ she said, suddenly brisk. ‘Let his girlfriend, that Lottie you mentioned, do that. She runs the business with him. It’s a professional matter. Anyway, you don’t know he was here about Edna. It’s a fair guess but only a guess. My wild-goose chase out to Richmond still could have nothing to do with it. Maybe Gardner just fancied you and wanted to chat you up.’

  ‘Do me a favour. He was here about Edna,’ I said. ‘And I reckon so was someone else.’

  Chapter Seven

  Ganesh hit the roof.

  ‘What did I tell you? Didn’t I say you ought to leave it alone?’

  ‘I didn’t invite him round to Susie’s office,’ I argued. ‘I don’t even know how he knew he might find me there. I didn’t tell him I worked for her occasionally.’

  We were sitting in my flat that evening, nursing glasses of some cheap wine I’d picked up on the way home. I got it at the supermarket causing all Hari’s woes. Any guilt I might have felt at taking them my business was overcome by the facts that a) I had other things on my mind and b) Hari didn’t sell alcohol, anyway.

  ‘This is horrible,’ said Ganesh now, thoughtfully.

  ‘Yeah, you should’ve seen him. He looked sort of surprised. It was creepy.’

  ‘I meant the wine. The Gardner business too, of course.’

  ‘Thanks for the sympathy. The wine was the cheapest they had, special consignment.’ I tasted it.

  ‘Yuk, my grandma always told me you get what you pay for.’

  Ganesh leaned back on the sofa and Bonnie rolled an eye at him, just checking.

  ‘Gardner asked someone about you,’ Ganesh went on slowly. ‘He must have done. Otherwise, how would he have known he might find you at Susie’s? I understand he was curious about you. He might have suspected you were working for a rival firm, targeting Edna and trying to get to her first, before he did. That’s the most likely thing. So he asked around and whom did he ask?’

  Ganesh never mixes up ‘who’ and ‘whom’. He’s got a pedantic side to him but also, when he gets the time, he writes poetry and takes a lot of trouble over it.

  ‘He probably talked it over with his girlfriend, Lottie. She runs the business with him.’

  ‘Then you need to talk to her, Fran. Find out how he tracked you down. She probably knows. Although perhaps you ought to wait a bit; see if the cops make a move.’

  Right on cue the doorbell rang. We looked at one another. Ganesh went to peer from my window. I live in a flat to the left of the front door in the converted house and because the window is a bay, it’s possible to look through the side pane and see who is standing in the small porch outside. This is often useful.

  ‘It looks like that woman inspector you get on so well with,’ he hissed. ‘Morgan, isn’t it?’

  ‘Tell me that’s a bad joke,’ I begged.

  ‘No way, she’s outside your door . . .’ Ganesh broke off to smile politely and wave at the unseen person outside. ‘And she’s spotted me now so you can’t pretend you’re out. If I’m here, you’re here, right?’

  At least it was Morgan and not Sergeant Parry. I wouldn’t agree with Ganesh that I get along well with her, but I’d rather have to talk to her than Wayne Parry. He has a ginger moustache, suspicious eyes, rotten sense of humour and, worst of all, he fancies me.

  ‘Hullo, Fran,’ Janice Morgan said cheerfully when I opened the door to her. ‘Can I come in for a chat?’

  Grandma Varady used to say some people had no dress sense. She used to do home sewing for people, like wedding dresses and outfits for women who couldn’t buy anything to fit them, so she had an interest in such things. In a way, she bequeathed it to me. I don’t mean I’m turned out like a West End shop window dummy. I mean, I notice clothes.

  Grandma used to get hold of glossy magazines and cut out some of the fashion shots to give her inspiration. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she was pinching some designer’s work. I think she had pinched the magazines, too, from visits to the doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room. They were too expensive to buy and the ones that came in the house were always out of date and well thumbed, smelling faintly of antiseptic. But again, I don’t think she thought of that as in any way wrong because in her view the original owners of the magazines had put them in the public domain by leaving them in waiting rooms, up for grabs.

  If Grandma could see me now I suppose she would have been pretty critical of my wardrobe and got out her old treadle machine straight away, running me up something snazzier. However, even if I don’t go along with high fashion, I do make an effort at least to have some style of my own and Grandma would have approved of that. But Morgan would have had Grandma incoherent with frustration.

  Morgan’s approach to clothes appeared to be to go out of her way to pick al
l the dullest fabrics, colours and styles on offer. If she had been making a statement by this I would have understood and even cheered her on. But I reckoned it was based on a wish not to stand out. All right, a plain-clothes officer has to be discreet. I’ll buy that. But she was heading for anonymity and in my book that was plain unhealthy. This was a nice-looking woman with a respectable income and no one but herself to spend it on. Yet today she was wearing a baggy charcoal-grey pinstripe suit and a white shirt and flat black loafers. Perhaps the outfit was meant to look professional but to me it just looked uninspired. It wasn’t brightened by any jewellery, not even a pair of simple clip earrings, or a coloured scarf. She didn’t wear her wedding ring any longer as the divorce from Tom was well behind her. Her mousy hair was chopped off in an unflattering long bob just skimming her shoulders in a straggly way and it needed a colour rinse or highlights. She hadn’t bothered with make-up although with a bit of lipstick and eyebrow pencil she’d look really pretty good. Perhaps I ought to volunteer her name to one of those make-over shows on telly. Or hey, who’s talking? Perhaps someone should volunteer my name.

  Bonnie gave a little bark as she entered the flat and pattered towards her. But after a sniff at her lightweight support stockings, my dog turned away and settled down again. She kept her eyes on the new arrival, though. Bonnie has a strong instinct for the police in any guise.

  ‘She remembers you,’ I said. ‘Want a glass of wine?’

  ‘That would be very pleasant,’ said Morgan, smiling brightly at Ganesh. ‘Nice to see you again, Mr Patel.’

  ‘Likewise,’ said Ganesh. ‘I thought—’

  I glared at him and he shut up. I knew he had been going to say that he thought the police didn’t drink on duty.

  Morgan had guessed it. ‘This is an informal call,’ she said. ‘I’m in my own time.’ She lifted the glass. ‘Cheers!’ She sipped and winced. ‘I saw a report about a fatality discovered in Mrs Duke’s office earlier today,’ she went on.

  She replaced the wine glass on my newly acquired occasional table. The table is square and weighty and supported by a carved elephant. One of Ganesh’s aunts had been about to throw it out and he rescued it for me.

  ‘The report said the body was discovered by you, Fran, so I thought I’d pop round and have a word about it. I’m sorry you had a nasty shock.’ She sounded sympathetic and it was probably genuine. The police are trained in dispensing sympathy in cases of sudden death, but Morgan knew me well enough to realise how shaken I was and to have some personal concern.

  ‘Yes, it was nasty,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know that I want to talk about it.’

  ‘It helps to talk,’ she assured me. ‘Don’t you think so, Mr Patel?’

  ‘Depends to whom she’s talking,’ retorted Ganesh, getting his ‘whom’ right again, even in the stress of the moment. ‘If she’s talking to a friend, like me, that’s fine. If she’s talking to the police, even if the officer in question is off duty, it’s not so good. Put it this way, you lot are never off duty. Would you have called to see Fran this evening if she hadn’t stumbled on a dead body earlier?’

  ‘No,’ Morgan admitted. ‘But I thought she’d rather chat to me here in the comfort of her own home than down at the station.’

  ‘If you’ve seen the report of the incident,’ I said, ‘then you’ll have read what I told the two officers who attended the scene. I’ve nothing to add.’

  I’ve dealt with the police a few times now and I’ve got to know the rules.

  ‘Oh, Fran,’ she said sorrowfully. ‘This is me. How long have we known one another? You always know more than you tell us.’

  ‘She’s got nothing to add!’ Ganesh said crossly. ‘You have no grounds for what you say.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Morgan amiably to him. ‘Now, Fran, why don’t you tell me how you come to be acquainted with Duane Gardner?’

  I saw Ganesh give an imperceptible shake of the head but chose to ignore it. Morgan was right, of course; I had to tell her all about my meetings with Duane. I had to tell her about Edna. It might be the best thing to do for Edna’s sake. If the police took an interest in what was happening around her, whoever had hired Duane might be scared off. Besides, they couldn’t deny that something was going on around Edna, not now with Duane down at the morgue.

  But I had a question of my own first. ‘Can you tell me what he died of ? He wasn’t old. He didn’t look too healthy, I suppose, and might have been sick. Has a postmortem been done?’

  ‘It will probably be done in the morning,’ Morgan told us. She eyed her wine glass and wisely decided against taking another sip. ‘The attending doctor who was called at the time noticed fresh puncture marks on his arm. Did you know Gardner was an addict?’

  So that was what all those questions from the two coppers at the scene had been about. They’d been pretty casual about it before the doctor turned up, but once he had pointed out the marks to them, they wanted to know if Duane had been shooting up in the office either on his own or in company and if so, where the syringe was. They thought either Susie or I had removed it. I’d been too horrified by the general scene to take a close look at the body or I might have noticed the tell-tale puncture marks myself.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I told Morgan. ‘If he was a user then his girlfriend would know. She runs the business with him and her name is Lottie. I don’t know anything else about her and I’ve never met her. But I suggest you ask her.’

  ‘Her name is Lottie Forester,’ Morgan told me. ‘She tells us Gardner had a habit some years ago, but he went through rehab and he’d been clean for some time. She denies he’d slipped back into old ways. But he might have hidden it from her.’

  ‘If she was living with him, she’d have known,’ I argued.

  I spoke absently. My mind was running on well ahead of the point the conversation had reached. Morgan was waiting patiently. She could see I was reasoning it out. But I remained puzzled. I’d sat near to Duane in that Golders Green coffee shop eating fish and chips for about three-quarters of an hour. He’d worn a sleeveless top and I’d had ample opportunity to spot the signs if there had been any to see. Regular needle users make such a mess of their arms I could hardly have missed.

  ‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ I said. ‘I know the postmortem hasn’t been carried out yet, but there has to be something else about the body that brought you round here to see me so fast. What about signs of violence? I didn’t see any, but then, I wasn’t looking.’

  Yet I had been suspicious and asked Susie if she noticed anything odd or different in the office - a corpse on the floor aside. There was no way I could accept Duane had just dropped down dead there for me to find. I know coincidences do happen, but this hadn’t been one.

  Morgan said slowly, ‘Although there has been no proper autopsy yet, a preliminary examination of the body has found a bruise on the back of his head.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘he might have acquired that when he fell. He was found sitting with his back against the wall, I understand. You didn’t move him, either you or Mrs Duke, before the police arrived?’

  ‘Neither of us even touched him. Susie was going to shake his shoulder because she thought he might just be unconscious but she changed her mind.’

  ‘So he might have fallen backwards.’ Ganesh had been following all this with furrowed brow and now broke in. ‘And as he fell he struck his head against the wall behind him, then just slithered down to a seated position.’

  ‘Yes, indeed he might have done that,’ agreed Morgan in a way which told us she didn’t believe it happened that way for a minute.

  ‘Are you saying, or hang on . . .’ I paused to rephrase it. ‘I know you are not saying this, but is there a possibility he was coshed and then someone jabbed a needle full of heroin or some other substance in his arm?’

  The postmortem would tell if a fatal overdose or a contaminated substance had killed Duane. If it had, and he was
n’t on drugs himself, then someone else administered it to him. Normally he’d have resisted unless, of course, he couldn’t for whatever reason. The most obvious would be that someone had knocked him out first.

  Ganesh muttered something and was so distressed he took another deep swig of his wine and didn’t even blink.

  ‘We’ll know in the morning,’ said Morgan soothingly. ‘Now, are you going to talk to me, Fran?’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ I said.

  Morgan fished a small tape recorder from her pocket and put it on the elephant table amid the glasses.

  ‘Oy!’ snapped Ganesh. ‘What about this being an informal call?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said wearily. ‘Switch it on. If they’ve got it all on tape then perhaps they won’t keep coming back and asking me the same daft questions all over and over again, Gan.’