Keeping Bad Company Read online

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Let’s say the old man did see a snatch. Then someone’s missing, right? The snatch victim? It’s just possible the police might not know about it but someone must know. She’s got to have been missed.’

  ‘Go on . . .’ I encouraged.

  We had time to talk it over. Jimmie had disappeared into the corridor and blue smoke curled through the open door into the area behind the counter. I was pleased Ganesh had changed his tune and was taking Albie seriously at last. It was always worth having Ganesh put his mind to a problem, because what he said generally made sense.

  He made sense now. He was right. Someone who normally lived safely in the bosom of her respectable family couldn’t disappear without it being noticed. No one would notice if I disappeared except Ganesh, and possibly Daphne, after a while. Though Daphne might think I’d just wandered off, and if Gan did go and live in High Wycombe, it’d be a long time before he found out. It was an unsettling thought. Fran Varady, the woman no one would miss.

  ‘The kidnappers may have said to the family, don’t call the cops or something nasty will happen. The family may be trying to handle this on their own.’

  He had a point. It could explain the desk sergeant’s indifference. If he knew of a kidnap in the district, Albie’s story – no matter who was telling it – would have caused more of a stir.

  The microwave pinged. Jimmie reappeared wreathed in swirling smoke like an alien in a low-budget film, extricated the spuds, and approached bearing two plates. He set them down before us with a flourish.

  The potatoes were monsters of their species, overcooked to a pale brown all through, their skins dry, wrinkled and dull charcoal coloured, like a rhino’s. My cheese had melted to a bright yellow waxy puddle, enveloping the side salad. I should have ordered the beans, like Ganesh.

  ‘There you go, and I’ve put extra salad.’ Jimmie pointed at it.

  Yes, he had. There were two slices of unripe tomato and three of dehydrated cucumber nestling in the yellow sea with the crumpled, transparent lettuce leaf.

  ‘And more filling!’ he added with the kind of munificence the President of France probably shows when he’s handing out the Legion of Honour.

  We thanked him nervously. There had to be something behind this and there was.

  Jimmie rested his fists and astonishingly hairy arms on the table and addressed me. ‘I’ve been hoping you’d come in, hen. You’re an actress, is that right?’

  ‘Ye-es . . .’ I said. ‘But I haven’t got my card yet.’

  ‘You don’t need a card for this. I’ve got a wee job for you.’

  Ganesh asked jocularly, ‘Has she got to dress up as a potato and run up and down outside advertising this place?’

  I wished he hadn’t said that because Jimmie obviously hadn’t thought of it and began to think of it now. He frowned. ‘You know, that’s no’ a bad idea there. Mebbe another time, eh?’

  ‘Maybe another time, no!’ I snapped. Not even for extra salad and cheese.

  ‘But your friend here’s not that far off the mark. How do you fancy being a model?’

  ‘Does this involve taking off my clothes?’ I asked, because this is what ‘being a model’ always seems to involve. Not that I’d be prudish in the case of true art. But getting my kit off on a small stage in front of a lunch-time crowd of boozy businessmen was not, to my mind, art. I told Jimmie if this was what he’d got lined up, forget it.

  He looked offended. ‘No, no, it’s a young lad, Angus, an artist. He’s a Scot like myself and seeing as he was a bit short of cash, I gave him a job here. He comes in mornings, early, and mops out the place, cleans the tables, that sort of thing. He doesna’ make any money out of the art. But he’s real serious about it and verra talented.’ Jimmie nodded and paused to let all this sink in.

  Ganesh twitched an eyebrow in disbelief and turned his attention to his food.

  But Jimmie was concentrating on me. ‘Now, you see, the thing is this. The lad needs a model. He had one but she let him down. She broke her leg, poor lassie, and is all laid up with a steel pin in her shin. He’s got an exhibition all fixed up and he’s really in a spot.’

  I did see but, still suspicious, pointed out that there were plenty of professional artists’ models. Jimmie said there was a little bit more to it than that. It wasn’t a question of just sitting there and being painted. Wouldn’t I like to come round to the café in the morning, around ten? Angus would be there, having finished his stint mopping out, to explain it all to me himself. Jimmie himself could promise me, hand on heart, that it was absolutely legit and a paying proposition.

  I needed a job and money so I agreed to come back around ten in the morning, and meet the talented artist. I insisted I was promising nothing. I’d been offered paying propositions before. Besides, if Angus was reduced to cleaning out Jimmie’s café, it was unlikely he had much dosh to spare and, it followed, not much to pay a model.

  ‘Don’t do it!’ advised Ganesh when Jimmie had gone back to his counter.

  It was good advice but as usual when Ganesh said don’t, I did.

  We set off slowly homewards – towards my place, that was. It was half-past ten and the pubs were busy with drinkers getting in a last pint before eleven when most of the pubs locally turned out. The Rose at the end of the street had opened all its windows, despite the cool night, to let out the fug and steaming heat of bodies pressed together in its cramped bar.

  The Rose is an unreconstructed bit of Old London Town. It has glazed brown tiles cladding the exterior and inside, although it’s lost the spit and sawdust of its early days, it’s kept the same atmosphere, resolutely downmarket. That’s what its patrons like about it. Everywhere else around has been gentrified, yuppified or poncified. The term depends on whether you’re an estate agent or one of The Rose’s regulars.

  There’s plenty of life about the old pub. They had live music in there that night and either something was wrong with the sound equipment or the band was worse than usual. Discordant wails and amateurish guitar-playing escaped in bursts between shouts of laughter, roars of disapproval and the occasional crash of broken glass. All the usual sounds associated with The Rose, in fact. Despite what you might expect, serious trouble there is rare. The landlord pays a couple of bruisers disguised as bar staff to see things stay that way. They don’t have women behind the bar at The Rose.

  Another thing they don’t do at The Rose is sell food, unless you want peanuts or potato crisps. They’re a boozer, for Gawd’s sake, and not a naffin’ restaurant, as the landlord likes to explain if some stranger asks to see the bar menu. Anticipating the nightly exit of unfed but well-watered patrons, a van selling hot dogs had taken up position nearby. Puffs of acrid-smelling smoke wafted towards us. The proprietor was setting up a placard by his mobile eatery. It read: ‘Three Hot Dogs for the Price of Two. Unbeatable value.’

  I privately thought the mental gymnastics required to work that out were probably beyond the patrons of The Rose by the time they reeled out into what passes for fresh air around there.

  ‘Hi there, Dilip,’ Ganesh hailed the cook. ‘How’s it going?’

  He straightened up. He was remarkable for being about as broad as he was tall, solid as a brick wall, with a walrus moustache. ‘See that?’ He pointed to the placard.

  We duly admired it, Ganesh asking tentatively, ‘What’s with the special offer?’

  ‘You gotta let ’em think they’re getting something for nothing,’ said Dilip. ‘That’s the only way you do any business these days.’

  They fell to discussing the general slowness of business, whatever its nature. To illustrate the point, a couple of amateur-looking streetwalkers had appeared, both seeming depressed as if business had vanished altogether. One wore tight red leggings, not a good choice on spindly pins that lacked any discernible thighs or calves and were as sexy as two matchsticks. The other wore a short skirt revealing lace tights on legs that contrasted startlingly with her mate’s, bei
ng bulbous about the calf and tapering to disproportionally narrow ankles. They looked like a couple of upturned beer bottles. She wore a silver blouson jacket. At a guess I put Red Leggings’ age at thirteen and her chum in the silver jacket’s at fourteen.

  They stationed themselves by the wall and Red Leggings took out a pocket mirror and began to examine a zit on her chin.

  ‘Lookit that !’ she moaned. ‘They bloody know when I’m goin’ to work!’

  ‘You want to try that green make-up,’ advised Silver Jacket.

  ‘Who wants a green face?’ retorted Red Leggings, offended.

  ‘Honest, it’s foundation, but it’s green. You put your other make-up on top and it don’t look green, not when you’ve finished.’

  ‘You’re havin’ me on,’ said the spotty one, still disbelieving.

  I could’ve told them both a thing or two about stage make-up, but Silver Jacket was giving me a funny look. She thought I was on the game, too, and had strayed on to their pitch.

  I wandered off a little way out of their range and out of earshot of the strangled sounds made by the musical group in the bar. There were cars parked here. Perhaps they belonged to people living in the flats above nearby shops, or perhaps to patrons of The Rose. Among them was a blue Cortina with a long white-ish scratch along one side. I wandered over to it

  There were probably dozens of them. But not all in this one corner of London. I stooped to peer through the window and met Garfield’s eyes peering back at me. Avoiding his outstretched paws, I made out what appeared to be a hole where there ought to have been a car radio. That wasn’t unusual for city life anywhere. Windscreen wipers, aerials, chrome manufacturers’ logos, radios . . . the absence, not the presence of these things, counts as standard if you leave your car unattended.

  Despite the fact that the vehicle was in the old banger category and appeared to have been done over already, a little sticker in the window announced that it was protected by an alarm system. They didn’t depend on Garfield alone.

  Not all such stickers were genuine, I knew that. I wondered, if I rattled the door handle . . . I reached out my hand tentatively.

  ‘Fran!’ Ganesh called. ‘What do you think you’re doing hanging round that heap of scrap?’

  I beckoned him over. Without speaking I indicated the car. When he’d had time to absorb the make and the scratch, I said, ‘And it’s the right colour.’

  Gan was looking sceptical. ‘It could belong to someone who lives up there.’ He pointed at the upper windows of nearby buildings. ‘And has it occurred to you that if it’s parked here regularly, Albie could have seen it? When he needed to describe a car for the story he spun you, this is the one he chose. It doesn’t mean it was used in a snatch.’

  But I had that certain feeling. Certain, that is, this was the car. ‘This is it, Gan. The one we’re looking for.’

  ‘No,’ Ganesh said firmly. ‘We are not looking for it. You, possibly. Myself, absolutely not.’

  ‘Your mate Dilip,’ I said, ‘does he work this pitch regularly? If so, and the car’s a regular, he’ll have seen it, too. Go and ask him.’

  Ganesh walked back to the van, hands in pockets. Dilip had clambered back inside and was getting his stock ready for the rush. There was an exchange of words and Ganesh came back.

  ‘Dilip doesn’t remember it.’

  ‘Then he’s in the pub, the driver. That means we can find out who he is.’

  The wind was getting stronger. It tugged at Ganesh’s long black hair and knocked over Dilip’s placard, which landed face down on the pavement.

  Gan went back to reposition it, wedging it between van wheel and kerb. He came back. ‘So, what’s your plan? We hang about here until chucking-out hour? We could be wasting our time and it’s getting colder.’

  I indicated the warning notice. ‘If that’s genuine, there’s a quicker way of bringing him out here.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ He was horrified. ‘What do we say when he charges out with a couple of his mates and accuses us of trying to break into his motor?’

  ‘We say we saw kids running off down the street. We were just standing by the hot dog van, chatting to Dilip. We didn’t notice until we heard the noise, then we saw the kids.’

  ‘No!’ said Ganesh adamantly.

  Do you know, that little warning notice wasn’t fake? The old heap actually had an alarm and it went off. What I hadn’t reckoned on was that with the noise going on in the pub, no one could hear it in there. Result, no one came out to switch the thing off.

  What did happen was that lights began to appear in the windows of the flats above the shops. Soon irate tenants were hanging out in varying stages of dress or undress and yelling for someone to do something about that effing noise.

  ‘You started it,’ said Gan. ‘Now what do we do?’

  Dilip, behind his counter, opined, ‘Run like hell, I should. I’ll tell ’em it was kids.’

  But we weren’t likely to get another chance. I told Ganesh to wait and pushed open the door into The Rose.

  The place was a pall of smoke, totally airless. You couldn’t see across the bar. The stench of beer, cigs, cheap aftershave and sweat was awful. I stood there, gasping for breath and eyes smarting as blue clouds enveloped me.

  Dimly, through the mist, I made out a raised stage at the far end of the room. The band was up there and had, thank goodness, finished their act. They were starting to dismantle their gear. The walls were yellowed with nicotine deposit and the net curtains (yes, net, no one could say The Rose didn’t know what was nice) were greyish-brown. The carpet was so discoloured it was impossible to tell what its original design or shade might have been. Crushed cigarette stubs littered it but with so many holes burned in it already, that hardly mattered.

  I edged over to the bar and tried to catch the eye of either of the beefy barmen. Both ignored me. They had a rush of last-minute orders and I was at the end of the queue. Besides, they don’t like women going up to the bar at The Rose. They’re traditional. There weren’t so many women in the place. Those who were there were defiantly raucous, shouting to make themselves heard.

  The first thing they teach you at any kind of voice production class is that if you yell, you distort. Voice projection, that’s the thing. Breathing. The diaphragm. On the drama course they taught us all about that. Every word to be audible at the back of the gods.

  ‘Who owns a blue Cortina with a scratch along one side?’

  I’d given it the finest Shakespearean. Henry Irving would’ve been proud of me.

  It worked. There was a fractional pause. Eyes turned my way. Faces were blank with shock. One of the barmen asked, ‘What was that, darlin’?’ Not because he hadn’t heard, but because he couldn’t believe he’d heard it – not from someone my size whose head was not much above the level of his bar.

  I repeated my question in my normal voice, adding, ‘Some kids are hanging around it.’

  To back up my story, in the lull, the repetitive squeal of the car alarm could now be heard.

  ‘Merv!’ yelled someone. ‘Ain’t that your motor?’

  The crowd heaved and parted like the Red Sea. Between the ranks, a figure appeared and came towards me. I felt like a very small Christian faced with a very large and hungry lion.

  Merv was tall, pale, and rectangular like a slab of lard. He was one of those who think it obligatory to go around in sleeveless T-shirts in all weathers and his muscular arms were tattooed from shoulder to wrist. One displayed a morbid interest in coffins, skulls and daggers. The other showed an old-fashioned cannon and the word ‘Gunners’ in capital letters, indicating that if he knew what loyalty meant, which I doubted, he’d given his to the Arsenal Football Club. He had pale yellow hair trimmed to a stubble and his round slate-coloured eyes lacked lashes or brows. It wasn’t the expression in them that worried me so much as the lack of it. Nothing. A pair of glass peepers would’ve had more life in them. No doubt about it: I was faced with one of the living dead.
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  It spoke. ‘What about my motor?’ it growled.

  ‘Kids . . .’ I faltered. ‘Joyriders looking for a – ’

  He shoved me aside as he strode out. I staggered back against the bar and bounced off again painfully. The crowd reformed. The barmen went back to pulling pints and the band to unplugging the sound equipment. I trotted outside to see what was happening.

  Ganesh had joined Dilip inside the van and was dispensing hot dogs to the tarts. The alarm was silent now but Merv, standing by the car, was exchanging insults with one of the flat dwellers.

  ‘And you!’ yelled the householder, slamming his window shut.

  Merv, still ignoring me, padded along the pavement to the van, arms dangling, held away from his body and slightly bent, fists clenched.