Rattling the Bones Read online

  ‘Cassoulet, Les. It’s very nice.’

  ‘It’s French,’ said Les grimly. ‘What’s wrong with sausage and beans?’

  It wasn’t the time to discuss international cuisine. ‘When did you miss the keys, Les?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said honestly. ‘Not right off. I missed them the next day, after old Duane met his end, poor bugger. Susie asked me about them. I put my hand in my pocket and they wasn’t there! I didn’t let on to Susie. I swore to her they had never been out of my keeping. She was in a fair old state herself and she didn’t ask actually to see them, right? It was a near thing, that. I thought that at any minute she would. Usually she’s as sharp as a needle but what had happened threw her a bit. The police had been making a nuisance of themselves.’

  ‘Well, when there’s a murder . . .’ I couldn’t help murmuring.

  Sarcasm was wasted on him. ‘Yeah, you’re right. The minute you got a stiff on your hands you can’t move for uniforms and plain-clothes. Them SOCO fellers, too, they get in all over the place, looking for fingerprints, scraping up bloodstains. They hoover the dust outa your carpet, you know. They really turned Suze’s office over, sealed it off and went through it like a dose of salts. That Michael upstairs, him with the nasty needle, he was doing his nut ’cos he couldn’t get up the staircase to his own place.’

  ‘Susie told me,’ I said, stopping this flow of information. Les might not like the police but the way they went about their work clearly fascinated him. Probably he had been on hand a few times to observe it.

  I was intrigued by his reference to Michael’s tattooing activities and wondered if this was based on a less than successful visit to the parlour by Les. But if Les had tattoos, I didn’t want to see them.

  Les was shaking his head, still wondering at the thoroughness of the Met. Then he got back to the matter in hand. ‘Anyhow, I knew I had to find those keys quick before either Susie or the plods asked me to produce ’em. I thought I must have left them at home, so I went straight to my place and hunted everywhere without luck. I was getting panicky, I don’t mind telling you. I tried to think where I could have lost them. Then I remembered putting my coat down in the bar where I was drinking with Duane and his mate.’

  I sat up so suddenly I nearly tipped the table over. Les made a grab for his glass.

  ‘You didn’t say anything about Duane drinking with a mate when you found him!’ I said. ‘You just said you found him in a place where he drank regularly.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ He looked at me in a puzzled way. ‘He wasn’t drinking alone. Nothing odd in that.’

  ‘So tell me about the person he was with, man or woman?’

  ‘Man,’ said Les promptly. ‘Snappy, stroppy city type. Didn’t take a shine to him at all. He looked at me like I was going to ask him for a hand-out.’

  Adam Ferrier. So Adam had known almost from the first that I was interested in Edna and that I had spotted Duane outside the Tube station.

  I had been silent for longer than usual so Les was getting curious. ‘Do you want to know how I got the keys back or not?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ I rallied to the present and pushed aside the interesting line of thought that was developing fast in my brain.

  ‘After I’d looked everywhere else, like I was saying, I began to think I might have lost them out at Teddington in that pub. So I went out there and asked the barman if any keys had been handed in. Funny thing, he told me, not twenty minutes earlier someone had come in and handed over some keys. He didn’t know who it was. It was a girl, that’s all he could say.’

  ‘A girl!’

  Les blinked. ‘Yes, that’s all I know. The girl said she’d found the keys on the floor there. She’d picked them up thinking they were her boyfriend’s but it had turned out they weren’t so she’d brought them back.’

  But not before they had been used, I thought grimly. Fran, I told myself, you’ve been made a fool of.

  I got to my feet and Les looked relieved.

  ‘You going? Right, then. Here, you promised not to tell Susie!’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Nor the cops?’ he added belatedly with an anxious grimace.

  ‘Listen to me, Les,’ I told him. ‘The very best thing you can do is go to Inspector Morgan and tell her all about the keys being out of your possession for the vital twenty-four hours. You can tell her you were unwilling to upset Susie Duke and that’s why you didn’t own up straightaway. But the longer you keep quiet about it, the worse it will be when the cops do find out. If they pick up someone for Duane’s murder the first thing they’ll ask the killer is, how did he get in? You might keep quiet. You can’t be sure the murderer or his accomplice will.’

  ‘Accomplice?’ asked Les, startled.

  ‘The girl who handed the keys in.’

  ‘Oh, yes, her,’ said Les, ‘I’d forgotten her.’

  So had I.

  I sometimes feel it takes the quiet of the night and the darkness to get my brain working. I lie there with Bonnie snoring at my feet and the ideas begin to flicker through my imagination with the rapidity of a magic lantern show. Bonnie does have a basket, by the way, but she sneaks out of it and hops up on the bed as soon as she judges I’m asleep and won’t know.

  That night, after the visit to Edna and the events of the day leading up to it, together with the revealing conversation with Les, my poor brain went into overdrive and fairly buzzed. I wasn’t sorry for it because it distracted me from the ache in my shoulder. I must have landed on it when I threw myself to the ground to escape the motorcyclist.

  The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to slot together but there were still gaps and also some of my conjectures were leading me down some murky and doubtful paths.

  One thing was becoming very clear to me: from the moment poor Duane Gardner and I met at Golders Green and sat talking in that café, he was a doomed man. In fact we both became marked out as threats to someone’s plans. It had started even earlier than that, I mused, when I went to Susie’s agency and expressed curiosity about the man in the white baseball cap I’d seen watching an elderly ex-bag lady. Duane wasn’t supposed to have attracted anyone’s attention and no one was expected to ask any questions. That the contrary had happened had alarmed someone deeply.

  Even so, why should anyone worry about me, who had just appeared on the very outer edge of Duane’s enquiries? Because, I told the darkness, I revealed to Duane not only that I’d known Edna for some time, but that I still had a personal interest in her. That made me an unknown quantity and caught everyone on the hop.

  Duane had either reported the unwelcome development to Adam Ferrier or to someone else. Or Ferrier had found out about it the evening Les had come to the bar, where Adam and Duane were drinking, to tout for business and incidentally to warn Duane about me. Les wasn’t to know Duane and I had already met again in Golders Green. But Duane, after Les left them, expressed his belief to Adam that I was also professionally employed to check on Edna. With Les telling them that I was a familiar face at the Duke Detective Agency it must have looked like confirmation.

  But was Adam the only person Duane had told? Had Adam picked up the keys which fell from Les’s pocket after Les had gone, and realised what they were? Had he slipped them into his own pocket without Duane’s knowledge and then suggested to Duane that they might go to the Duke Detective Agency early the next morning and confront me?

  But here my reasoning met a fork in the road. Clearly, someone, at that point, decided to kill two birds with one stone: in Duane’s case literally to remove him and in my case, to carry out the foul deed on the premises of the Duke Agency. I would become enmeshed in police enquiries and my watch over Edna disrupted.

  But why should it worry Adam - or indeed anyone else - that someone was apparently interested in Edna? Ferrier might be surprised, even puzzled, but alarmed ? Frightened, even, so much so that he determined there and then to do something drastic about it? More particularly, why on earth woul
d he consider removing from the scene the private detective he had himself hired? Merely because of a perceived incompetence? The answer to that would be to sack him; although it wasn’t Duane’s fault I’d met Edna outside the Tube station. No, if Duane had been murdered because of his involvement, or so I reasoned, it wasn’t just because he had met me. There had to be some other motive inspiring the killer’s decision and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what reason Ferrier could have.

  So back I came to my second question: who had killed Duane? If Adam had no motive, who did?

  Duane was a good detective . . . Lottie’s tribute to her late boyfriend echoed in my head. Why did it seem to me that the clue to it all lay in that?

  Bonnie was rumbling softly in her sleep. Her imagination works actively at night, too. She dreams a lot. Her paws and nose twitch. She mumbles and mutters in a series of doggy squeaks and mini-growls.

  ‘See ’em off, girl!’ I told her. For good measure, I added, ‘You’d better see them off, too, Fran, whoever they are.’

  I fell asleep. But my brain must still have been working on autopilot because in the early hours I awoke and sat up with a start, dislodging Bonnie who gave a startled yelp.

  ‘Bonnie,’ I said to her. ‘It’s not always what you see. Sometimes it’s what you don’t see.’

  Bonnie gave a sulky little growl and began to turn round and round, flattening herself a new spot. If I was going to start rambling in the middle of the night, she didn’t want to hear it.

  But I got very little sleep after that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was time to rattle some old bones. There is no better place to do it than the Family Records Office in Islington.

  Mind you, it would be no use my going to any such place to track down my remote ancestors. They were born and buried in Hungary and all I knew of them was from a garbled tale or two recounted by Grandma when she’d been at the apricot liqueur. She had a strong romantic vein in her and might have invented half the tales she told me. According to her our family had once been wealthy landowners. She painted a picture of rolling puszta and whitewashed villages, dusty roads and ox-carts and handsome horsemen. She had a few sepia portraits of uniformed figures to prove it - but you can buy old photographs from stalls in antiques markets and I caught her out a couple of times giving different names to the individuals shown. Perhaps she was just getting muddled. Perhaps the bloke with the tight collar and carnation wasn’t my grandfather. Perhaps I’ve always been suspicious by nature. Anyway, true or not, they were good stories. Probably we had all really lived in a boring suburb of Pest, rattling to work nine to five on the trams. There’s a sort of heroism in that. About the only thing I do know is that my grandfather was a doctor. Was he the first in the family? Were his parents proud of his achievement? Don’t ask me; I’ll never find out.

  But at the Records office, if you’ve been born, married or died in England or Wales, you’re there. People can find you if they look hard enough and the day I went there the place was stuffed with people looking. There they were, rattling bones like mad. They were seeking out the marriages of people who had been newly-weds when Victoria and Albert were chasing each other around Windsor Great Park. They were requesting certificates so that they could decipher the spiky signatures and gaze on the pathetic laborious ‘marks’ of the illiterate, which briefly clothed the bones but tantalisingly revealed nothing of the people themselves. Were those marriages happy? Was the arrival of all those babies whose births are recorded here greeted with joy? Were the families recorded as all living at one address on a Victorian census form dwelling in harmony or did the atmosphere seethe with resentment and despair? What old sins and scandals were hinted at? Who had fathered the illegitimate child born to the sixteen-year-old girl whose mother had made a second marriage to a younger man? What on earth did all those obscure causes of death on ancient certificates mean? What misery and pain were indicated by a lingering illness without modern medicines to help? In short, what did the diligent researchers here think they would discover? Why were they all so keen to track down their ancestors?

  Probably, like my grandma, they had peopled their imaginations with romantic figures dashing around doing gallant deeds and making fortunes. The reality was more likely to be that if they tracked down anyone, it would be some mild little clerk like Bob Cratchit. But it would be nice to think that even if you are nobody particular, still at some future date someone will spend all day trying to find out when you were born or got married or pegged out.

  I told the girl at the counter what I wanted to look up and was directed to shelves and shelves of index volumes. I was there all day, partly because I was sidetracked for a while into looking up my own parents’ marriage and my own birth. That sort of research-fever is catching. I had to be stern with myself and stick to looking for what I’d come here to find. I was worn out when I went to meet Ganesh that evening but elated, too, because I was sure I had struck gold.

  ‘I haven’t got any birth or marriage certificates or anything,’ I said to him as we wandered up the green swell of Primrose Hill to escape the bricks and tarmac. We didn’t escape people, the grassy area was filled with them and their dogs, but everyone was relaxing: walking, talking, unwinding. We reached the top and stood there looking across at Regent’s Park and at the city skyscape beyond it. ‘You have to send away for certificates and it costs money.’

  ‘No proof, then,’ said Ganesh dampeningly.

  ‘I had to search the indexes and cross-reference everything, deleting the ones that didn’t match up.’

  ‘Indices,’ said Ganesh pedantically. ‘The plural of index is indices.’

  ‘They’ve got miles of them there and they call them indexes. They should know.’

  ‘It’s sloppy usage.’

  ‘It took me ages,’ I went on, ignoring him, ‘but in the end I established that in 1957 a Lilian Walters married a Roger Forester at Kingston-on-Thames. I don’t suppose she was the only Lilian Walters in the world or old Roger the only Forester male getting hitched at the same time. But that they got hitched to one another makes me sure.’

  Ganesh turned slowly to face me, hands in pockets. He wasn’t going to let me see it but I knew he was almost as wired by the information as I was.

  ‘You are trying to tell me that Lilian, Lottie Forester’s grandmother, and Edna were sisters?’

  ‘You bet they were. You remember Edna talking about her sister to us in hospital? Her sister was a few years older than Edna and very fashion-conscious. She was probably dating Roger at the time. Edna watched Big Sis Lilian making sure her stocking seams were straight before she went off to meet her beau.’

  Ganesh frowned. ‘Does Lottie know this? Did Duane know it? Is that how Duane got to find Edna?’

  ‘Isn’t that the million-pound question?’ I retorted. ‘I can’t believe Lottie knows absolutely nothing. But I do know she’s said not a word to me about it, neither has Adam. Why did Adam take his grandfather’s search request to Duane and Lottie’s agency? Just because Lottie was an old flame or because he also knew that Edna was Lottie’s great-aunt? They’ve been holding out on me, Gan.’

  Ganesh was nodding slowly. ‘You need to get out of this affair, Fran. Right now.’

  I stared at him in astonishment because it was the last thing I’d expected to hear from him. ‘Now?’ I squeaked. ‘Now when I’m getting somewhere at last?’

  ‘You don’t know where you’re getting,’ he pointed out. ‘But you do know now this is family business. I don’t understand it any more than you do. But families I do understand. They won’t tell you anything, Fran, because you’re an outsider, not one of them. They don’t want you knowing their business and they will do anything to make sure you keep your nose out of it.’

  ‘Like one of them running me down on a motorbike? ’ I countered. ‘Or trying to run down Edna?’

  There was a silence. I knew as the words left my mouth that they were disastrous. But too late.
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br />   Ganesh stepped back to survey me better and a faint air of smug triumph crossed his face. ‘I knew it!’ he said. ‘I knew something had happened you hadn’t told me about. All that business back at the hospital asking the old lady if she’d seen anyone else around when she had the near miss with the motorcyclist. Come on, out with it!’

  I had no choice. I told him about my own near miss.

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you, Ganesh,’ I said humbly. ‘So I didn’t tell you and I asked Morgan not to mention it.’

  ‘Rubbish. You didn’t want me to know you’d got in way over your head. Not that I didn’t suspect it already. How many more good reasons do you want to drop your enquiries? Leave the whole thing to the police, can’t you? I don’t want to wind up visiting you and Edna in hospital!’

  He was angry but he was really worried to think I’d been in danger. An apology was in order for keeping him in the dark. I delivered one handsomely.