Running Scared Page 12

  I still kept looking back on principle. So busy was I doing it, that when someone stepped out of a doorway in front of me, I almost collided with them and just about jumped out of my skin when a voice said, ‘Fran?’

  ‘Oh God, Tig,’ I gurgled. ‘I nearly had a perishing heart attack.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you, then?’ asked Tig.

  I hadn’t wanted to hang about in the street and neither had she, so we took refuge in a nearby café, a narrow-fronted establishment that ran back a long way like a tunnel. It was crammed with marble-topped tables. In the summer, they moved some of the tables out on to the pavement, but this time of year, only a lunatic or a polar bear would sit outside.

  Tig and I had retreated to the furthermost end of the room from the door with our espressos.

  ‘I’m scared Jo Jo will look in and see me,’ Tig had explained, leading the way. She now gave me curious scrutiny. ‘Who’re you trying to avoid?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ I said. ‘I’m not allowed to say.’

  She shrugged. She didn’t care anyway. She didn’t look any better or healthier since I’d last seen her. The dark shadows under her eyes were worse, the pinched look more pronounced and there was more than fear of Jo Jo in her eyes. There was a deeper fear and it had driven her to seek me out. I waited for her to tell me what it was.

  She went at it a roundabout way. ‘I came to the shop yesterday, where you work, Sunday morning. There was an Indian guy there, big bloke. He said you weren’t working, not Sunday. They’d got the builders in. They were working Sunday. They moonlighting?’

  ‘No, self-employed. Dilip told me you’d been. I hoped you’d get in touch again. Sorry I missed you.’ I sipped the coffee. I was glad of it. My nerves needed settling.

  Tig shifted on her wooden chair and it scraped on the tiled floor. ‘Yeah, well, I’m sorry I gave you an earful last time.’ She rubbed her thin hands together. The fingertips were blue and the nails dirty. She needed a bath.

  I asked, ‘You sleeping rough, Tig?’

  She twitched. ‘Look, did you mean what you said? About doing anything legal?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ I said, not at all happy.

  ‘OK, then, I’m hiring you.’ I must have looked as if I’d been hit with a sock full of wet sand because she added irritably, ‘Well, you said you were a private detective and you worked for people who couldn’t get help anywhere else. That’s me. I can’t go anywhere else, so I’ve come to you. I want you to get in touch with my family for me. Like, act as go-between.’

  I knew I could only blame myself for this. I’d urged her to go home. I’d offered to help if I could. It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. If I’d given it any thought afterwards, which I hadn’t, I would’ve decided, with relief, that she wouldn’t take me up on it. And I’d also told her I took on jobs for people. I’d boasted about it, to be frank. Which just goes to show you’ve got to be ready for the unexpected, and if you don’t want to be reminded of something you’ve said, keep your mouth shut.

  ‘Well?’ She was leaning across the table, her pinched face flushed in anger and her whole attitude a bad case of aggro. People at a nearby table gave us alarmed looks. They probably thought we were about to start a fight on the floor. ‘Or was it just a load of crap?’ she went on. ‘All that what you told me? You made it all up? You’ve never done any jobs for no one.’

  ‘Yes, I have!’ I was moved to defend myself. ‘I was surprised when you asked, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you going to do it?’ She leaned back now, fixing me with a very direct stare.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What do you want me to do? Phone them?’

  ‘No, go and see them.’ She was fumbling inside her jacket and pulled out a roll of dirty notes secured with an elastic band. ‘See this? It’s my emergency cash. All I’ve got. Jo Jo knows nothing about it. There’s enough there to buy you a day return ticket, rail, from Marylebone to Dorridge. That’s where they live. There’s a train every hour – I checked it out for you. Leaves Marylebone quarter to the hour. Coming back, leaves Dorridge at forty-eight minutes past the hour. Any money left over you can keep for your fee. I don’t know what you usually charge, but this is all I’ve got, so take it or leave it.’

  She was going too fast for me and my fee was the least of my worries. ‘Who lives there, your parents? Where’s Dorridge, for crying out loud? It sounds like porridge.’

  ‘It’s on the way to Birmingham, before you get to Birmingham, just before Solihull. It’ll take just over two hours to get there and the same back, so you’ll have to go early in the morning.’

  ‘Hey, hold on.’ She’d got it all planned, it seemed, but I had questions to ask.

  A streetwalker came in out of the cold. She was just starting the evening stint and was all dressed up nice in a fake fur coat and patent leather stilettos. She wasn’t young, in her forties, a bit blowsy with bottle-blonde hair and too much make-up. The Italian waiter evidently recognised her because he gave her a secretive sort of smile and, without her having to ask, yelled down the café to the guy on the espresso machine, ‘Hey, give the lady a coffee!’

  She didn’t pay for it. I guess she’d already paid.

  Tig, watching the same scene, said scornfully, ‘Why’d guys pay her? They can pay someone like me half the money and I’m half her age.’

  ‘Then watch out for the pimps,’ I said. ‘They don’t like competition on the same patch.’ I didn’t mention that the professional tart had certainly taken the trouble to shower before she went to work. Some punters, though admittedly not all, might be put off by Tig’s appearance and the whiff of street doorway.

  My companion shrugged again. ‘Well, I’m not on the game now, anyhow. I told you, I don’t do it any more, not unless I’m really skint, you know, and some old feller comes up and asks. They bloody well nearly always are old, the ones who like really young girls.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, memory of Charlie still fresh.

  ‘Still – that sort don’t give no trouble.’ Her gaze darkened. She was thinking of her treatment at the hands of the City types who’d gang-raped her.

  My mind was working overtime. If I went on this errand for Tig, it’d take me out of London for a whole day. That would mean, in present circumstances, a whole day without having to look over my shoulder and jump at shadows. I liked the idea of that. On the other hand, with Ganesh in his fragile state of health, I couldn’t leave him to manage on his own in the shop. I’d have to go on a Sunday when Dilip could help out doing the morning papers.

  ‘We need to talk serious business,’ I said. ‘If, and it is only if, I do this for you, there are things I need to know. For starters, why you left home in the first place and why, all of a sudden, you want to go back. And it’s no use clamming up on me. I’m not going into a situation like that blind, OK? Another thing, I can’t just get on a train and go to this Dorridge place. Suppose I turned up and your parents had gone out for the day? Or like you said before, they might’ve moved. I’d have to phone first and make an appointment. They’re going to ask questions. Also, does Jo Jo know what you’re planning and what’s he likely to do when you take off? Follow?’

  ‘He can’t,’ she said quickly. ‘He doesn’t know what I’m going to do or where my family lives. I’ve never told him where I come from and he hasn’t asked. You don’t, do you?’

  She was right. The homeless respect one another’s privacy and the right to keep stum about an individual’s past. If you want to tell everyone, fine. If you don’t, they don’t press you. It’s a rule.

  She hunched over her empty coffee cup. ‘If I tell you, you’ll do it?’

  ‘I’m not bargaining,’ I told her. ‘I’m telling you my terms. Take it or leave it.’

  The waiter was giving us funny looks. I told Tig to wait and went up to the counter to get us another couple of coffees. Thanks to the lay-out of the place, it would be difficult for her to slip past me and out while I was away from the table. But I kept an
eye on her, in case.

  She’d taken the time given by my absence to think it over and had reached a decision. ‘All right, I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I’ll give you the phone number and you can ring them. But if you do, you’re not to say where they can find me, right? The last bloody thing I want is them driving down here.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘I’ll write their names and address and phone number down for you.’

  Neither of us had a bit of paper though I had a stub of pencil. There was a card on the table telling customers of some Christmas offer the café was running – coffee, choice of sandwich and a cake for £2.50, something like that. Tig turned it over and wrote on the back.

  ‘Their name is Quayle, Colin and Sheila. My name’s Jane, really. That’s what you’ll have to call me when you talk to them.’ She pushed the card towards me. She’d written it all down, with address and phone number.

  A thought had struck me. ‘You need to send a personal message, or tell me something that I couldn’t know about you or them unless I knew you well. I mean, I’ve got to convince them I really am speaking on your behalf.’

  She gave an odd little smile. ‘All right. Wish my mum a happy birthday. It’s her birthday tomorrow.’

  It was personal, all right, but I wished she’d thought of something else.

  Tig found giving out the practical details easier than the next thing she had to tell me. I could see her bracing herself. ‘Jo Jo and I,’ she said, ‘we had a place to doss but we lost it. The last few nights, we’ve been sleeping over Waterloo way, in an underpass. You know the place? It’s under the road system, a big empty space. There used to be lots of people sleeping there. Most of them have gone now, moved out. They’re building there now. But there’s still space to doss if you haven’t got anywhere else. They try and move you on, of course.’

  I nodded. I knew the place she meant. It had been the site of Cardboard City, that squatters’ camp in the maze of subterranean walkways between Waterloo and the South Bank complex. I’d never slept there but I’d been there in its heyday, looking for someone or just passing through. Each inhabitant had had his space, with his sleeping bag and plastic carriers of personal belongings, his dog, his transistor radio – some even had a scrap of dirty carpet down and a broken old armchair or two. Some were young, some old, some in sound mind and some way out of theirs. Some had been there years. When I was at school, our art teacher had been keen on the painting of a guy called Bosch who’d turned out stuff which looked as if it had all been painted when he was as high as a kite – but which she reckoned was symbolic. The old Cardboard City had put me in mind of one of those paintings by Bosch – a world of weird things which were normal to those caught up in the nightmare.

  But even down there the homeless hadn’t been secure. The area was being developed, as Tig said – luxury flats and a monster cinema going up. The debris of the streets was being swept up and moved elsewhere as the men in the hard hats and their equipment moved in.

  Tig was avoiding my eye, her face turned down, her stringy fair hair falling forward. Her voice was muffled. ‘Coupla nights ago,’ she said, ‘someone died there.’

  People do die on the streets. I waited. There had to be more.

  ‘It was a girl, about the same age as me. She was sleeping right near us. She’d got a little dog. Nice dog, friendly. Some people have those big dogs that go for you. Jo Jo had one once and I was glad when he sold it on to someone. You had to watch it all the time or it’d have you. Anyhow, this girl, I didn’t know her name or anything, but I’d talked a bit to her that evening. I’d made friends with the dog and that’s mostly what we talked about, the dog. Later she went off somewhere and she didn’t come back until after midnight. She’d had a couple of drinks, I could smell the booze – and I guess she might’ve got hold of some stuff and been shooting up somewhere. Sunday morning, she never got up. Never stirred. No one bothered much at first. But then the dog started whining and sniffing at her. I got a really bad feeling. I went over and shook her shoulder. She was cold already. Her eyes were open and bulging and her jaw had fallen open and stiffened like that. She looked horrible. It was the scariest thing I ever saw in my life. Like a horror film only worse, because it was real.’

  Tig shook back her hair and looked up, meeting my gaze firmly. ‘And I thought, that’s me. That’s how I’m going to end up and pretty soon. It’s true, isn’t it?’ She stared at me defiantly.

  ‘Unless you do something about it,’ I said.

  ‘Right. That’s what I thought. I won’t like it, I won’t like going home and facing them. Perhaps they won’t even have me. But I’ve got to try because it’s the only way out I’ve got. Some people get out of it other ways. They get a permanent place to live and they get a job. Like you, you’ve got out of it. You always were smart. But that’s not going to work for me. I haven’t time enough for that. I get out now or by spring, I’m dead.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  She relaxed and I felt a stab of unease. She’d be relying on me. Supposing I messed the whole thing up? Said the wrong thing on the phone? It’d be Tig’s lifeline snapping. I forced the worry away but I did venture, ‘You could ring them yourself and then I could go up—’

  ‘No!’ Her voice was fierce. ‘I won’t talk to them until—They’d ask too many questions.’

  They were going to ask me questions, but I took her point. ‘So, why’d you leave in the first place?’ I asked. ‘Just general.’

  She shook her head. ‘I told you what my mum’s like, everything so perfect. Dad’s worse. It didn’t matter how hard I tried at school, he’d find some subject I’d done poorly at, and ask, what about that? I went to a good school, they paid –private.’

  ‘So did I,’ I said glumly. ‘Until it threw me out.’

  ‘Well, then, you know how it is. Parents have spent money and they want results, don’t they?’

  She was turning the knife in my conscience, though she didn’t know it. Her parents had probably found the money without too much difficulty, but Dad and Grandma Varady had really scrimped to send me. When I’d been expelled, they hadn’t moaned, just sympathised and rallied round. But I knew I’d let them down and would have it on my conscience to my dying day. For Tig, it was different, however. She’d worked hard, apparently, but it hadn’t been enough.

  ‘He – my father – kept talking about university,’ Tig was saying. ‘But I didn’t want to go to university. He said I’d never get a really good job without a degree. He kept on and on. Then there was Mum with her “you-can’t-go-out-looking-like-that” and “be-careful-to-make-nice-friends”! And, of course, “you-don’t-want-to-be-thinking-about-boys-you’ve-got-your-studies”.’

  Tig shook her head and leaned forward, her pale face flushed. ‘Look, I know it doesn’t sound so bad, talking to you now. They weren’t beating me up. Dad hadn’t got his hand in my knickers, there was nothing like that. It was just day in, day out, pressure. I couldn’t get away from it, not there. So – I left.’

  Everyone’s got their reasons. It doesn’t matter whether they sound good or bad reasons to anyone else. They’re good enough for the person concerned.

  ‘You see,’ Tig said sadly, ‘how hard it is to talk about going back. How disappointed they’ll be, how shocked, horrified. I don’t know if they can cope with it. That’s why you’ve got to find out first.’ ‘I’ll really do my best, Tig,’ I promised. ‘Honestly, I will.’ I hoped I hadn’t bitten off more than I could chew.

  Chapter Nine

  With all the trouble I was causing Daphne at the moment, I didn’t feel I could ask to phone long-distance to Dorridge from her place. I don’t mean I wouldn’t pay her. I always paid for my calls from Daphne’s. But I might find myself explaining about Tig. Daphne would be interested and I was pretty sure, sympathetic, but she’d worry about it. Besides, I needed time to think out what I’d say. The more I thought, the less I liked the whole idea.<
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  The next morning, I explained it all to Ganesh. He was feeling better and had got rid of the bandages, but still had a large plaster on his head. I told him to sit on a stool behind the counter and stay there. I’d do any running around and would stay all day till closing time. At least I was spared Hitch and Marco creating havoc in the washroom. It seemed they couldn’t come in and finish today.

  ‘He’s got a problem with his supplier over the floortiles,’ said Ganesh.

  I made no comment on this, but privately decided they were both keeping clear of the place while there was any chance of running into the police on the premises. Neither of them, I fancied, liked answering questions. Instead, over our coffee-break, I explained about Tig.

  ‘You ought to have steered clear of that,’ said Ganesh. ‘No way are you going to come out a winner. Tell her you’ve changed your mind.’