Rattling the Bones Page 5

  ‘I don’t need a book to tell me Hari’s problem. I live with him!’ snarled Ganesh now.

  ‘I’ve got problems, too,’ I told him. ‘Stop worrying about Hari and put your mind to something constructive. That’s probably in your business studies book. Don’t waste time on negative energy.’

  Ganesh put down the clipboard but kept the pencil so that he could jab it dramatically at my chest.

  ‘You’ve been getting into trouble. I knew it. What have you done?’

  ‘I went looking for Edna. I told you I would.’

  ‘Did you find her?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not exactly. I found the hostel where she’s living. The people there are pretty good.’

  ‘So, nothing to worry about.’ He looked relieved. He had been concened I was going to get into some scrape. It was quite a shame to destroy his rising optimism.

  ‘Well, Gan, there is.’ I explained to him about the second appearance of the man in the baseball cap and how he’d disappeared so mysteriously.

  ‘He’s pretty good at giving people the slip. He thinks quickly on his feet and uses whatever is to hand, like plunging into the street market. I reckon I’ve worked out what he did this time. He knew I was after him and if he was still in the street, I’d see him. Those two decorators were carrying stuff out of the house and they’d left the front door open. I reckon he nipped in there behind their backs, waited until I’d left and then slipped out again. They didn’t see him go in and if they saw him coming out, it wouldn’t matter. He’d spin them a yarn about me being an ex-girlfriend he was trying to dodge. Or he might have told them that first and asked if he could dash inside out of sight. They wouldn’t question it and they lied to me when I turned up immediately afterwards. Blokes stick together over things like that.’

  ‘And,’ asked Ganesh in that quiet dangerous way, ‘did you ask the decorators, both in white clothing, if either of them had walked down to the corner of the street a few minutes earlier for any reason and stood about where you might have seen him? Looking for a mate who was supposed to meet them there, for example?’

  ‘Ganesh! I did not see a man in a white overall! I saw that guy in the white baseball cap and white T-shirt and pants! He likes to dress in white.’

  ‘You’re getting obsessed, Fran,’ said Ganesh seriously. ‘You’re getting like Hari. You’ve got this fellow on the brain. You didn’t see him. You saw a house-painter.’

  ‘Yes, I did see him! I know what I saw. I’m not blind and I’m not daft.’

  ‘Why should he be there?’

  I expelled my breath in a long hiss, seeking self-control. ‘Because he’s doing what I was doing, trying to find Edna.’

  ‘What for?’

  Almost dancing with frustration, I clenched my fist and shook it at him. ‘I don’t know why!’

  ‘Negative energy!’ said Ganesh smugly.

  I stormed out, Bonnie at my heels, and left him to count his confectionery stock.

  I realised when I got out onto the pavement that I was very hungry and it wasn’t just being in the storeroom surrounded by snacks. It was almost four o’clock. All I’d had to eat since cornflakes for breakfast was a Mars bar munched as I trudged round the hostels. I slowed my step by the busy little supermarket which was the cause of Hari’s troubles. But on the point of going in and buying one of those chilled meals in little trays I changed my mind. It would feel like disloyalty to Hari and Ganesh, even though I wasn’t going in there to use the newspaper kiosk. I walked on and got home to discover my fridge was empty. My store cupboard (a bit of a misnomer that) only held a packet of dried chicken soup and half a packet of cream crackers which had gone soft, plus a tin of dog food claiming to be made of beef and nourishing marrowbone jelly. I made the soup and drank it while nibbling the crackers and very unpleasant it all was. Bonnie tucked into the beef, doing rather better than me. I would have to go out and buy something to eat later.

  I looked at my wristwatch. It was gone five now, nearly half past. Bonnie had settled down and gone to sleep, tired by her long walk. If I went now and walked quickly I might just reach Susie Duke’s office before she closed up for the day. I would explain the mystery of Edna to Susie, get her opinion and, on the way out, pick up a kebab.

  ‘I’m going out,’ I explained to Bonnie. ‘But I won’t be long. Be a good dog.’

  She opened one brown eye to make sure I wasn’t going to drag her along with me just when she’d got settled. She made no effort to follow me.

  The Duke Detective Agency (confidential enquiry agents) run by my good friend Susie Duke was located at that moment above a Turkish takeaway outlet in a busy parade of little shops. Odours of grilled meat permeated upwards through the floor, but it had its advantages as a location, so Susie assured me when she moved the business in there. It was easily reached, it wasn’t her home address (always dodgy to give that to punters) and at lunchtime she could nip downstairs and buy a kebab as I was planning to do for my supper.

  It was a tall old building. In addition to the Duke Detective Agency directly above the kebab shop there was another business, a tattoo parlour, above Susie. The Agency and the tattoo parlour were reached from the same staircase which was accessed from the street through a door next to the kebab place. The street door was unlocked during working hours to allow visitors to climb the stairs and seek a solution to their problems either by consulting a private investigator or, if they preferred, getting themselves a whole new set of tattoos.

  You met some really odd-looking people coming down the stairs from the parlour. I mean, they often looked fairly odd when they passed you going up: they looked amazingly weird when they passed you going down after Michael the tattooist had done his work. Michael wasn’t a man who contented himself with ‘I Love Sheryl’ or ‘Hammers For Ever’ with a representation of West Ham’s coat of arms. Michael talked people into apocalyptic visions worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. Flames crawled up their arms and legs. Fantastic creatures played among them and rode serpents with bulging eyes, straight from a Snakes and Ladders board game. Occult symbols spattered the lot like strange confetti thrown down at a wedding.

  The parlour’s clients, on the other hand, probably considered those who visited the detective agency equally peculiar.

  If the two sets of customers shared anything, it was the apprehension on their faces as they arrived and the expression of mixed relief and doubt when they left. They were relieved they’d got it over with and beginning to wonder if they’d done the right thing. Either way realisation was dawning on them that it was irreversible.

  The door on the first floor giving access to the Agency bore a neat little notice with the name of the business and the hours the office was open. If you passed through this door, you found yourself in the reception area. Because the whole office area was really just one big room, this reception area had been created by subdivision. A half-glazed partition screened new arrivals from the inner sanctum which was Susie’s consulting room, to borrow a phrase from the medical world.

  The furnishings in Susie’s room were pretty basic: a desk, a chair and a filing cabinet. I don’t know where Susie got that desk from. You can buy computer stations, nice modern ones, quite cheap from those discount warehouses. Susie’s desk looked like something from a government department clear-out in the swinging sixties, cheap lacquered pine with burn and ink marks, scratches and doodles all over it. Possibly it had come with the office, understandably abandoned by the previous tenant. Her little laptop computer usually stood open on the top but I don’t think Susie trusted much information to the computer. Most of it was in the filing cabinet which was battleship grey of old-fashioned design and looked as if it might have come along with the desk from the same ministry somewhere in the depths of Whitehall.

  I occasionally work for Susie on odd jobs but generally the sort of thing she does isn’t my cup of tea. Checking people’s credit and delivering summonses or lurking about trying to catch husbands/wives/partners and other
s who are two-timing their better halves isn’t for me. Besides, Susie had found an ‘operative’, as she liked to call him, who was more suited to that kind of thing: Les Hooper.

  I was hoping Les would be out on the trail when I got there and I’d find Susie alone. She is usually in the office at the end of the day to check the answerphone, put away sensitive material in the lockable file cabinet and catch up on any paperwork. I wasn’t keen on Les, for no really good reason other than instinct and a desire to protect Susie from landing herself with a problem. Susie is a nice woman who has a tendency to take up with unattractive men. Her late husband, Rennie Duke, had been one such and Les Hooper was another. Not that, as far as I knew, her relationship with Les was anything other than professional, but ‘mighty oaks from little acorns grow’, as Sister Mary Joseph used to tell us. This was to explain how our childish fibs would lead us down the slippery path to becoming wastrels and criminals in adult life. Being a child of imagination and always ready to be sidetracked from the subject by some observation of my own, I always associated the acorns of the saying with the bunions which distorted Sister Mary Joseph’s lace-up brogues. Perhaps I was just easily confused at the age of six.

  My instinct about Les was equally tenuously connected with a distant memory of Eddie Kelly. Eddie lived at the end of our street when I was about ten years old. He was a big fellow, running to seed and untidy, and without any known means of earning a living. He and his wife (whose name no one knew) ‘kept themselves to themselves’ as people then said. If you met Eddie in the street he’d give you a broad nicotine-yellow smile and greet you but then quickly pass on. Few people returned his smile. He wasn’t liked.

  Mrs Kelly, of the unknown first name, was a thin nervous woman with unkempt blond hair dragged back into a ponytail secured with an elastic band. She never spoke to anyone. We’d see her scurrying from her house to the shops and back again. Sometimes no one saw her for a week or more but we knew she was there because washing appeared on the line in the overgrown back garden. Eddie wasn’t the sort of man who washed out his own smalls. Mrs Eddie must have put the wash out after dark because we never saw her do it. She often wore large sunglasses, even in winter, and inappropriately large amounts of colourful make-up at other times. It never did quite disguise the purplish areas beneath.

  Susie is an attractive woman. Perhaps Mrs Kelly had looked like Susie when she was younger and hadn’t yet taken up with Eddie. Susie runs her own little business. She would be a bit of a catch for someone like Les whom I had marked down as a perennial loser, quite apart from his reminding me of Kelly. So I hoped that Susie would eventually wake up to his deficiencies and give him the boot. I wouldn’t like to think of Susie hiding away and putting on sunglasses on rainy days to go to the shops.

  I was out of luck. Business must be slow. Susie and Les were sitting in the two rickety chairs drinking tea and chatting like a couple of old biddies on a park bench. This intimacy boded ill.

  ‘Hullo, Fran, love!’ cried Susie, jumping up to give me a welcoming hug.

  Les raised his tea mug in salute and growled, ‘Hello, darling.’

  He called everyone ‘darling’ so it didn’t signify affection, as Susie’s greeting had. I didn’t want affection from Les and I never like being called ‘darling’.

  ‘Hullo, Les,’ I said. ‘Nothing happening?’ Meaning, isn’t there something you could be doing somewhere else?

  ‘Very quiet,’ said Susie, answering for him. ‘Real dead. Where are all the clients?’

  ‘The Patels have the same problem at the newsagent’s,’ I told her.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Susie philosophically. ‘Want a cuppa?’

  Les rose ponderously to his feet and offered me his chair while Susie re-boiled the electric kettle. This unexpected gallantry made me suspicious. He knew I had little time for him. He’d have to do more than offer me a seat to change my mind.

  In lieu of his chair, he propped himself against the desk. He was a big man, like Eddie, and in the small room he loomed even larger. He wore a scuffed leather jacket and he needed a shave. His shoes were dirty. My grandma told me to avoid young men who didn’t clean their shoes. This omission denoted sloppy thinking and a grubby lifestyle generally. It was certain they would never ‘get on’.

  Les was middle-aged, still didn’t know what shoe polish was, and had obviously never ‘got on’, so my grandma was right. To me he looked like an ex-con and I had a horrible suspicion that’s what he was. I asked Susie once but she avoided the question though she did say something about poachers turning gamekeepers.

  ‘He knows people,’ she had added mysteriously. ‘He’s got contacts. He’s useful.’

  ‘Just make sure he or one of his crooked mates doesn’t try and use you!’ I’d warned her.

  ‘I wasn’t born yesterday!’ Susie had replied chippily.

  She had on her business suit today, snug-fitting, black, very short skirt. With it she wore black tights and high heels. This generally meant she had been calling on some client or someone else she wanted to impress. Her blond hair frothed in a cloud round her head and her white blouse revealed plenty of cleavage. If the client was a man, he’d be impressed, all right.

  ‘Had you come to see if I had any work for you, Fran?’ she asked. ‘Or is this social? I hope it’s social, ’cos I’ve got no work for you. I had to go to the bank this morning and explain about my cash-flow problem. Clients are as rare as hen’s teeth, aren’t they, Les? I mean, I haven’t even got any work for Les here. That’s why we’re sitting here chewing the fat.’

  Les uttered a gargling sound through the bottom of his tea mug.

  So the business suit had been to impress the bank. I hoped it had done the trick. I debated whether to tell Susie about Edna. I’d rather Les hadn’t been there because he wouldn’t understand my interest in an old bag lady. But, as I’d come, I thought I might as well tell them of my adventures.

  They listened politely. I couldn’t tell what Les was thinking but he appeared to pay close attention. Susie hung on every word.

  ‘Weird,’ she said, when I stopped speaking. ‘You are absolutely sure the man you saw opposite the hostel was the same as the one you saw on the corner of Parkway and Camden High Street?’

  ‘I am absolutely certain. Ganesh reckons I saw a house-painter in white overalls but white overalls look nothing like a T-shirt, baseball cap and long shorts. This man, whoever he is, isn’t the sort you forget. He looks as though he’s been in the dark for ages and just come out into the light. It’s made him long and pale like a stick of celery.’

  Les put his mug to his lips although he must have long finished his tea. He seemed to realise it was empty and put it down on the desk.

  ‘What about the old lady?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘Any use asking her?’

  ‘None at all,’ I said firmly. ‘You can’t have a normal conversation with Edna.’

  ‘Give it a miss!’ advised Les. ‘Waste of time. Well, I gotta be going. Gimme a bell when you need me, Suze.’

  He slouched out and the atmosphere changed.

  ‘Right!’ said Susie brightly. ‘You free? Let me get cleared up here and we’ll go out and eat. Give us a chance to have a natter and catch up.’

  After some debate we settled for a steak house and when we had ourselves nicely parked in a corner and had ordered, I opened the conversation with the question I always asked her these days.

  ‘When are you going to get rid of him?’

  ‘You mean Les, don’t you?’ mumbled Susie, playing for time.

  ‘Of course I mean Les! I mean, just look at him. I’m not surprised you haven’t got any clients. One look at him would put off anyone.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t deal with the clients,’ she assured me earnestly. ‘I do all of that. I want to know exactly what they want and ask them for information I need to have and settle the fee, all that kind of thing. I couldn’t leave it to Les. He’s not got an office sort of brain.’

  ‘Agreed. I
imagine he has the brain of a not particularly gifted orang-utan.’

  ‘Just ’cos you don’t like the poor bloke,’ said Susie reproachfully.

  The waiter brought our wine and hung about eyeing Susie’s cleavage, tilting the bottle and leaning over the table for a better look. We thanked him, removed the bottle from his grasp and sent him on his way.