Keeping Bad Company Read online

  I thought he’d got a pretty good one now, considering how easily he’d conned me out of a cup of coffee. But his next words cut me down to size.

  ‘I was on the halls,’ he said. ‘Don’t have variety no more. All that tellyvision, that’s what killed it. We had some marvellous acts on the halls.’

  ‘Go on, Albie.’ I was surprised and really interested. Poor old fellow, He’d been someone once. Just shows you shouldn’t judge. And, oh God, look at him now. Was I going to end up like that? As a bag lady, mad as a hatter, and with all my belongings in a couple of sacks?

  ‘I had some poodles,’ he said. ‘They’re very intelligent, are poodles. They learn very quick. Three of ’em I had. Mimi, Chou-Chou and Fifi. They done tricks, you know. You wouldn’t think how clever they were. They played football, walked on their hind legs, played dead. Mimi pushed Fifi along in a little cart, done up like a nursemaid in a frilly cap and Fifi with a kid’s bonnet on. But Chou-Chou, he was the smartest. He could count numbers and read ’em. I’d hold up a card and he’d bark the right number of times. I had to give him a bit of signal, of course, but the audience never saw it. He was the best dog I ever had, Chou-Chou, and dead easy to train. He was very partial to a glass of stout. He’d have done anything for a nip of stout, would old Chou-Chou.’

  ‘I’d have liked to have seen the act,’ I said honestly. I didn’t ask what happened to kill it off because I didn’t want to know. Perhaps it had just been the down-turn in the variety scene, but I guess the bottle had done it. Albie’d shown up once too often, too drunk to do the act, or made a fool of himself on stage and that had been it. I wondered what happened to Mimi, Chou-Chou and Fifi.

  As if he could read my mind, he added. ‘I couldn’t feed’em, after that. I couldn’t feed meself. They was clever little dawgs. Woman took them as said she could find ’em homes. I hope she found ’em good homes. I asked her to try and keep ’em together. They were used to being together. But I reckon she split ’em up. No one would want all three of them. Reckon they pined.’

  Not only the poodles had pined, I thought.

  He seemed to pull himself together with an effort. ‘What else you do, then?’ he asked. ‘When you’re resting, as we sez in the business?’ Clearly he now saw us as fellow professionals.

  ‘I look into things for people. I’m a sort of enquiry agent – unofficial.’ I tried not to sound self-conscious.

  He put down his beaker and stared at me. ‘What, a private eye, like?’

  ‘Not a proper one. No office or anything. I’d have to keep books and pay tax and stuff if I set up properly. I’m unofficial. Anything legal.’

  ‘Are you now . . .’ he said very slowly and, when I thought about it later, very seriously.

  I should have got up and run then, but I didn’t.

  ‘You any good at it?’

  ‘Not bad,’ I said with just a twinge of conscience because I’d only had one case. But I’d managed it pretty well, so my failure rate was nil and there’s not many detectives can say that, can they?

  He was quiet for quite a while and I was just grateful for it. A few people had come through the gates from the platforms and it looked as if a train was in. They must have fixed the broken-down train or shunted it away.

  ‘You see funny things when you sleep rough, like I do.’

  What?’ I was watching for Ganesh and only half heard Albie.

  He obliged by repeating it. ‘Only I keep my head down. I don’t want no trouble. It’s like anyone what’s out and about at night, on the streets. You see a lot of things and you say nothing. Fellows what work on the dustcarts, going round the restaurants and so on, clearing away, early hours of the morning – they see all sorts, but they never say anything. That way, no one bothers the dustmen and it’s the only way they can work safe, see?’

  He peered into the bottom of his empty cup but I wasn’t obliging with another fifty-pence piece. I’d just got my giro but it didn’t stretch to supporting Albie as well as me in the style to which we had the misfortune to be accustomed.

  But he had other things on his mind. ‘I saw something the other night, though, and it’s been really buggin’ me ever since. I saw a girl. Nice young girl, she was, not a tart. She wore jeans and a little denim jacket over a big knitted sweater. She had long fair hair with one of them things what keeps it tidy.’

  He put his hand to his head and drew a line from ear to ear over the top of his skull, meaning, I supposed, an Alice band. I knew about them. The daughters of the mothers with the baggy skirts had been keen on them.

  ‘About your age, mebbe a year or two younger. Not very old. Pretty. Running like the clappers. She had a good turn of speed, too.’

  ‘Running for the last train,’ I said idly. I don’t know why, perhaps because we were in a station.

  ‘Naw . . . I told you. I was in the porch, over at St Agatha’s church. You know St Agatha’s?’

  I did know it. It was a quarter of a mile or so from where I lived, a red-brick Gothic lookalike with wire over all the windows to protect them from missiles, like stones or Molotov cocktails. Churches attract that kind of attention these days.

  ‘She wasn’t running for no train. She was running from two fellers. Only they was in a car, so it didn’t do her no good. They come screeching round the corner, pulls up by my porch. Out jumps these two blokes and grabs the girl. She starts kicking and yelling, but one of ’em put a hand over her mouth. They shove her in the car and whoosh, off they go.’

  This story was beginning to worry me, always supposing that he hadn’t simply made it up. But it had a ring of truth about it. I thought of a possible explanation, not nice, but possible.

  ‘St Agatha’s runs a refuge,’ I said. ‘For battered wives and so on. She might’ve come from there, or been on her way there, and her husband, or boyfriend, and one of his friends grabbed her.’

  ‘She didn’t look like no battered wife,’ Albie said. ‘She looked like one of the Sloanes, what they call ’em. I seen it clear. Right by me. Only they didn’t see me. I squeezed in the back of the porch, outa the streetlight.’ He paused. ‘They weren’t no amateurs,’ he said. ‘They were heavies. They weren’t no husband or boyfriend. They knew what they were about. He’d got a bit of a cloth in his hand.’

  ‘Who had?’ I was getting more and more worried. At this rate I’d be needing some of Hari’s pills.

  ‘One of the fellers. He put it over her face. It smelled, like a horspital. I could smell it, even from where I was. She stopped kicking, sagged a bit, and he shoved her in the back of the car. She went in limp and just lay there on the back seat in a heap. I could just see her shoulder in that woolly sweater. Knockout drops.’

  ‘Did you report this, Albie?’

  ‘Course I didn’t!’ He sounded reproachful as if I’d suggested something mildly indecent. ‘Think I want my head bashed in? They’d come looking for me, they would, them fellers. I’d be a witness. I see their faces and their motor. It was blue, or I think it was. The lamplight plays tricks with colours. It was an old model, Cortina. It’d got a bit of damage along one side, a white scrape, like he’d had a run-in with a white car and it’d left its mark, know what I mean?’

  I knew what he meant. I also reflected that the fact he’d noticed so much was remarkable. However, on the whole, I thought so many details made it unlikely he was making it all up.

  ‘Albie, you’re saying you witnessed a serious crime! That girl could be in real danger. You ought – ’

  ‘Fran?’

  I’d been so engrossed with Albie’s story that I’d failed to see that Ganesh had arrived. He was standing in front of me, hands shoved in the pockets of his black leather jacket, and frowning. The wind whipped up his long black hair. He took a hand from his pocket to point at Albie and asked, ‘What does he want?’

  ‘Who’s this, then?’ asked Albie, and it was clear he was offended. ‘Friend of yours?’

  ‘Yes, I was waiting – ’ But I didn’t get any
further.

  Albie got up. ‘Ta for the coffee, ducks.’ He began to pad away in that surprisingly nimble way he had.

  ‘Wait, Albie!’ I called.

  But he’d gone, through the main arch and out into the road.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Fran!’ (I could see Ganesh hadn’t come back from High Wycombe in the merriest of moods.) ‘What do you want to sit talking to him for?’

  ‘He’s a witness!’ I exclaimed, jumping up.

  ‘To what? How to live on an exclusive diet of whisky?’ Ganesh asked, making an impatient move towards the exit.

  ‘To a kidnapping!’ I shouted and it was then, as the words left my mouth, that I fully realised what I’d said.

  Ganesh was staring at me. With more than a touch of despair I repeated, ‘He witnessed a kidnapping, Gan, and I’m the only person he’s told or is ever likely to tell about it.’

  Ganesh dropped his holdall to the ground and made a violent gesture of dismissal. ‘Why must you always do this, Fran?’

  ‘Do what?’ I babbled, taken aback by the vehemence in his voice. Ganesh gets sarcastic and he gets censorious but he doesn’t generally lose his cool.

  ‘Mix in such bad company!’ he retorted. ‘You know it always brings you trouble!’

  Chapter Two

  Before I go any further, I ought to explain that, despite what you may be thinking, life wasn’t going too badly for me at that time. At least I had a decent place to live and that was definitely an improvement on my previous situation.

  Immediately before moving into my present flat I’d been living in short-term council accommodation in a tower block. The lets were short term because the whole building was scheduled to come down. Half of it already stood empty, boarded up and vandalised. Drug addicts broke in and indulged their various habits and insalubrious ways. Kids sniffed glue and various down-and-outs dossed. The council cleared them out at intervals and boarded the flats up again. Back came the junkies the next night and so it went on, with the occasional suicide plunging past the window on his way from the roof, muggers lurking in the entry hall, and Leslie, the neighbourhood pyromaniac, sneaking round trying to start his fires.

  People like me were moved in there because the council had nowhere else to put us, or that it wanted to put us. We had low or nonexistent priority on the housing list and we were desperate enough to be prepared to put up with the squalor and the danger. It wasn’t the first such place I’d lived in. I’d been vandalised out of an earlier one. That second one was even grottier than the first one, something I wouldn’t have considered possible. But it’s a fact that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. Beggars can’t be choosers, they say, and I bet ‘they’ are comfortably housed.

  There’s only so long anyone can stand living like that and I’d got to the point where I was considering asking Leslie if I could borrow his matches. Things Had To Change. But if I walked out, the council would have said I’d made myself homeless intentionally, and they were under no further obligation towards me.

  I’d have been prepared to settle for almost anything else. I had been enquiring without much hope about a place in another squat when Alastair Monkton got in touch.

  The last time I’d seen Alastair he’d promised to see what he could do to help. I’d taken it as his polite way of saying farewell, like people you hear bawling ‘we must have lunch’ at someone they clearly mean to avoid like the plague.

  But Alastair had come up trumps, being a gent of the old school, man of his word, etc., etc. Besides which, since I’d almost got killed trying to help him out, he owed me a favour. He told me about his friend in Camden. She was a retired lady librarian by the name of Daphne Knowles, whose house had a basement flat that she was willing to let to the right person.

  I foresaw a problem in that. As you’ll have gathered, few people would consider me ‘the right person’ for anything, much less to have lodging under the same roof. Any lady librarian of advanced years, and certainly any known to Alastair, would, I imagined, be rather fussy about the company she kept and fussier still who lived in her basement flat. I knew Alastair had put in a good word for me, but I wasn’t counting on it being enough.

  Still, worrying what she might think of me was jumping the gun. Without money one can do nothing and I had to establish my financial position before I approached the librarian. Without much optimism. I set out for the council’s benefits office. If I could at least persuade the woman I’d be able to pay the rent, it’d be something. Though what poor old Alastair and the lady librarian might consider a reasonable rent, would probably fall way outside my budget. I was undergoing one of my frequent jobless spells.

  It was a quiet morning when I got to the benefits office, just a student with his head in a book, an out-of-work dancer, and a man with a cardboard box on his knees. The box was bound with string and had airholes punched in it. From time to time, a scrabbling sound came from inside it.

  The student’s number was called first, so off he went and I sat talking to the dancer who’d been out of work because of medical problems. She had consequently got behind with the rent and received notice to quit. She told me all about her stress fractures and asked me whether I thought she ought to accept a job she’d been offered abroad.

  ‘Some of these overseas dancing jobs are a bit dodgy,’ she explained. ‘When you get there, the sort of dancing they want isn’t the sort of thing I trained for.’

  I commiserated, knowing how hard it is to get a living from the performing arts, but suggested she check out the job offer carefully.

  The student had gone off in a huff. It was the dancer’s turn at the counter and that left me with the man with the cardboard box. By now, he was talking to it in a furtive whisper. I had to ask what was in it. I’m human.

  He was happy enough to untie the string and open it up. It turned out to contain a large white Angora rabbit with pink eyes. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the box had been completely empty or held an old boot, because you meet a lot of people like that out on the streets.

  ‘I’ve got to leave the place we’ve living at,’ he explained. ‘It’s got a rule, no animals. Plain stupid, I call it. I mean, it’s not like a rabbit is a dog, is it? Winston’s got his own little hutch and everything. I keep him clean. He don’t smell. Cats is worse than rabbits. Cats go roaming around. Winston don’t do that. But the landlord’s downright unreasonable. He reckons if he lets me keep Winston there, next thing he’ll have to allow pet snakes and things what more rightly oughta be in the zoo. So we’ve got to go. I mean, I couldn’t part with Winston. He’s all I’ve got.’

  Winston twitched his nose and crouched quivering in his box. He looked like a nice enough rabbit, as they go, but it was a depressing thought that anyone could be left with no living friend but a rabbit. Whenever I get too smug about my own lack of strings attached, I try to remember people I’ve met like this.

  The man leaned towards me, his face creased in worry. ‘I never leave him behind when I go out. I always bring him with me in his box like this. He don’t mind. He’s used to it. There’s people living where I am now that I wouldn’t trust if I left Winston all alone. When I came back, I’d find the kids had got him out of his hutch, taken him round the back somewhere, and chucked him to a couple of dogs for a bit of fun. I’ve seen a couple of dogs with a good grip, one either end, tug a small creature like Winston here, clear in two. ’Course, that’d be if someone else hadn’t turned him into rissoles first.’

  I said sincerely that I hoped he found them both somewhere else safer to live.

  After this, it was my turn at the counter.

  I explained I’d been told of a vacant flat. Before committing myself. I needed to know what kind of help I might hope for with the rent, being out of work.

  After I’d answered all the questions – and there were a lot of them – about my personal circumstances and where the flat was and what it was like (which I didn’t yet know), there was good news and bad news
.

  The good news was that I would probably qualify for maximum benefit. The bad news, before I got too euphoric, was that in my case this would be based on what the council considered a reasonable rent for the sort of accommodation suitable for me in the area where I intended to live. Here we hit a snag. The accommodation the Rent Officer seemed likely to consider suitable for me was probably something a little bigger than Winston’s hutch. Since Daphne’s flat was likely to be quite a bit roomier, and was located in an area where vacant bedsits were as rare as hen’s teeth, and landlords could name their price, whatever I got by way of benefit wouldn’t nearly pay the rent. I’d have to find the difference myself.

  ‘Or find a cheaper place,’ suggested the woman behind the counter, smiling kindly at me.

  It was much as I’d expected and I couldn’t grumble. But it did seem that even going to view the flat would be a wasted journey. I went all the same, because I felt I owed it to Alastair.