Running Scared Read online

  ‘Here,’ said Hitch suddenly, ‘we found something when we pulled the old basin out, didn’t we, Marco? You got it?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Marco fished in his pocket and handed me one of those small padded envelopes. ‘Jammed down behind the pipes underneath.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, taking it. I turned it over. It was stuck down with Sellotape. I pressed it cautiously and felt something small, cylindrical, and solid inside. I didn’t recognise the shape but the envelope looked clean and fresh. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been there long.

  ‘Dunno what it is,’ prompted Hitch, adding virtuously, ‘We didn’t open it, Marco and me. It’s stuck down.’

  I forbore remarking that it was a pity the contents of the storeroom weren’t stuck down. I retreated into the shop, followed by our workers, and handed the package to Ganesh.

  ‘They found it hidden behind the pipes.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Gan suspiciously.

  ‘How do I know? Open it, you’re the manager.’

  ‘I’m not going to open it,’ he said. ‘It might explode. You read about these things in the papers. Nutters go round shops hiding incendiary devices.’ Hitch and Marco backed off a little.

  ‘What would be the point of it going off in the washroom?’ I asked. ‘It wouldn’t set fire to anything in there. Besides, how would he get into the washroom to hide it? The public never goes in there and no one could get past whoever is working in the shop without being seen.’

  ‘You open it, then,’ he said.

  ‘All right, I will!’

  Hitch and Marco watched with interest and from a safe distance, as I tore open the envelope and shook out what appeared to be a small roll of film on to the counter top. We looked at it. Ganesh put out his hand.

  ‘Wouldn’t touch it if I was you,’ said Hitch. ‘Might be dodgy. You don’t want your dabs on it, do you?’

  That will tell you quite a bit about Hitch.

  ‘What’s it doing in the washroom?’ asked Ganesh, bewildered. ‘Why should anyone put it there?’

  ‘It might be mucky,’ suggested Hitch brightly. ‘You know, some feller and girl getting up to things. I mean, things like in that Indian book what tells you how to do it all kinds of funny ways.’ Both he and Marco gazed at Gan and myself with a new interest and some respect. ‘Never read it myself,’ added Hitch with regret.

  This irritated Ganesh who snapped, ‘Don’t talk such nonsense! The Kama Sutra is a serious work of great beauty.’

  Hitch opened his mouth to ask for further enlightenment but the look on Ganesh’s face made him change his mind.

  I knew why Ganesh was ratty. It wasn’t just that he doesn’t like to hear his culture misunderstood (although he grumbles enough about it himself), it was because that’s not how things are between him and me. Some people get the wrong idea about that. Hitch wasn’t the first. But Ganesh is my friend, not my lover. Not that I couldn’t fancy Ganesh, or that he couldn’t fancy me. There have been times when we’ve come awfully close to moving beyond the friendship scenario. But we both know it wouldn’t work out if we did. Sex complicates things, in my experience, and for us it’d make life more than difficult. His parents have other plans for him, and I’m not part of them. They like me, or I think they do, even though they obviously fear I’m a bad influence on him and give him dangerous ideas of independence. Ganesh says they like me and they’ve always acted as if they do. But they simply don’t understand me or my life-style, my lack of family or the way I exist from day to day. It’s one of those situations. Nothing can be done about it and you just have to lump it. Still, I’m glad to have Gan as a friend because that means an awful lot.

  Ganesh went on now in tones clearly meant to dash any remaining fantasies Hitch might have, ‘In any case, this doesn’t belong to me. Is it yours, Fran?’

  ‘Course not!’ I protested. ‘I’d have said so. Why on earth should I hide it in the washroom, even if it was mine? Besides, I haven’t even got a camera.’

  ‘Well, Hari wouldn’t hide it there, would he?’ argued Ganesh. ‘If he wanted to tuck it away somewhere, he’d put it upstairs. So it isn’t his.’

  ‘That makes it no one’s,’ I pointed out. ‘And that’s daft. It has to belong to someone.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Hitch, losing interest. ‘Makes no difference to me and Marco. It’s all yours whatever it is.’

  The two of them drifted back to the storeroom. I took Ganesh’s arm and propelled him nearer the entrance to the shop, out of earshot.

  ‘It belongs to that bloke!’ I whispered excitedly. ‘It must do, Gan. You know, the one who stumbled in here the other morning? It must be his and he hid it there. You let him use the washroom to clean up. Someone was after him – after this – and he stashed it there to pick up later.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Fran,’ said Ganesh, but he looked uncomfortable. ‘Anyone could’ve put it there. Even Hari, though I don’t know why.’

  ‘Of course Hari didn’t put it there! Why on earth should he? Look, Gan, I didn’t tell you this, but someone came in yesterday morning, asking about the guy – and wanting to know if we’d found anything dropped on the floor. He told a stupid tale about a friend of his losing something – and he offered me twenty quid.’

  ‘Fran!’ cried Ganesh, agonised. ‘You didn’t take it?’

  ‘Course I didn’t! I didn’t say anything, either. Think I’m daft?’

  Ganesh glanced at the counter and the roll of film lying on it. ‘What do we do with it? Give it to the police? It really doesn’t look like it’s anything, but if you think someone’s after it—’

  ‘We could get it developed first.’ I tried to make the idea sound as tempting as possible. ‘You know, just to make sure. I mean, we can’t go to the police with a blank film or someone’s holiday snaps, can we? I’ll take it along to Joleen at the chemist’s down the road. They’ve got a one-hour service.’

  Hitch and Marco had recommenced the labours in the washroom. Hitch was whistling piercingly as they hammered the old tiles off the walls. As each tile came loose, it fell to the ground with a shattering of ceramic.

  ‘I can’t stand much more of this,’ I said. ‘I’ll nip along to the chemist’s, anyway. I need some headache pills.’

  ‘We sell ’em here,’ said Gan, not losing his business instincts, even in the circumstances.

  I nipped back to the chemist for the developed reel at lunchtime. It was Saturday and the place was packed. Joleen, to whom I’d given the film, was dealing with a customer. Another woman in the shop fetched them for me.

  ‘It says here,’ she read from a note stapled to the yellow envelope, ‘that most of the film was unused and there were only four snaps on it.’ She stared at me curiously.

  ‘Right,’ I said jauntily, as if I knew. I paid her and scuttled outside with them.

  I couldn’t resist taking a peek on my way back to Ganesh, but they weren’t very interesting. They showed three men sitting at a table in some kind of garden or possibly a planted area surrounding a swimming pool at a posh hotel. Exotic-looking flowers bloomed on a creeper growing over a whitewashed wall. To the extreme right of the picture, beyond the wall, could be glimpsed a small area of coastline, a beach of sorts, some hinterland and a smidgen of sea. One of the men was mustachioed and swarthy in appearance, one had his back to camera and I could see only dark hair and a sweat-stained grey-blue shirt. The third man, in early middle age, was either fair or grey-haired, it was hard to tell. He looked plump and prosperous, but tough, and wore a multi-coloured leisure shirt. Dark glasses hung on a safety chain round his neck. Holiday snaps, after all, I thought, and felt really disappointed. I don’t know what I’d expected.

  ‘Here,’ I said, pushing them under Ganesh’s nose in a gap between customers. ‘What do you make of them?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Ganesh, glancing at them.

  ‘They’ve got to mean something,’ I persisted.

  ‘No, they haven’t. Don’t tell me that
bloke who was in here the other day went to the trouble of hiding those! Four pictures of him and his mates on the Costa Brava?’

  ‘He’s not in them,’ I objected. ‘Not even this guy with his back to camera is him, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘So, he was the photographer. Only he wasn’t, because I don’t believe they belong to him, Fran. It doesn’t make any sense.’

  I was peering at the snaps more closely. There was a bottle of beer on the table, label towards the camera.

  ‘If we got this blown up,’ I said, ‘we could read that label and it’d give us a clue.’

  ‘They are someone’s holiday snaps,’ said Ganesh patiently. ‘And even you can’t make out differently. Look at that chap’s shirt.’

  ‘It’s somewhere warm and holiday-ish,’ I mused.

  ‘It might be the Canary Islands,’ said Ganesh thoughtfully. Despite his dismissive attitude, I could see he was gradually getting as hooked on this as I was. ‘Usha and Jay went there on holiday and this could easily be one of their snaps.’

  Usha is his sister and Jay her accountant husband. Jay is doing spectacularly well and now Usha’s studying accountancy at evening classes so she can work in his office. The better they do, the more depressed Ganesh gets. I tell him that’s nobody’s fault but his own. He’s got to get out of the retail business.

  This wasn’t the moment to bring up that delicate subject. Right now the photos had priority. I didn’t go along with the Canary Islands theory and said so.

  ‘Well, it’s not Bournemouth, is it?’ argued Ganesh.

  ‘That doesn’t mean it has to be some other obvious holiday spot. Look, see that bit of beach? It hasn’t got any parasols or sunbathers on it. And look at the landscape behind the beach. You can only see a bit of it, but it looks as if it’s in the middle of nowhere, scrubby-looking trees and dried-up grass. There aren’t any skyscraper hotels. The beaches in most tourist resorts are lined with hotels and bars.’

  ‘Ever been to the Canaries?’ retorted Ganesh.

  I had to admit I hadn’t. ‘But I’ve seen pictures. Come to that, I’ve seen Usha’s holiday snaps and they don’t look a bit like this.’

  Ganesh straightened up. ‘So, what do we do with them?’

  ‘If that bloke hid the film,’ I reasoned, ‘he wanted to keep it safe and my guess is, he’ll come back for it. But not until he knows the coast is clear. If he thinks the men who were after him are watching this shop, he won’t come here yet. He’ll wait. The least we can do is keep the pics and negatives safe until he comes. So I think you should put them somewhere safe while we wait.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ganesh resignedly. ‘I’ll keep them for a week and if he hasn’t come back for them in that time, I’m going to bin them, right?’ He shoved the yellow packet under the till. ‘Look, are you going out anywhere tonight? I’ve been thinking, every other business round here is having a staff Christmas dinner. So I don’t see why you and I can’t go out and have a decent meal at the expense of the shop.’

  ‘Hari—’ I began. I thought it only fair to remind him.

  He interrupted. ‘I’m the manager while Hari’s away and it’s my decision that the staff can have a Christmas outing. We’re entitled. We’ve worked hard.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I agreed. ‘I’m not doing anything else.’

  Ganesh nodded. ‘Come back here around eight-fifteen – gives me time to lock up.’ He hesitated. ‘See if you can fix up your hair before then, can’t you? It does look awful, Fran.’

  I overlooked renewed criticism as I was being offered dinner.

  Chapter Five

  On my way home, however, I caught sight of myself reflected in a window and Ganesh was right. My hair looked awful. A little further along, on the corner, was a small hairdressing salon. I peered in. It didn’t look particularly busy. I pushed open the door.

  A ferocious-looking woman, who was assaulting a customer with an outsize can of spray, looked up through a cloud of chemicals and exclaimed, ‘Gawd, what scissor-happy maniac done that?’

  Everyone in the shop, staff and customers, stopped their conversations, magazine-reading, cutting, washing, etc. and stared at me.

  Before I could answer, she went on just as fiercely, ‘You didn’t get that cut here. She didn’t get it done here!’ she repeated more loudly for the benefit of anyone who hadn’t heard.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said meekly. ‘Can you fix it?’

  ‘I dunno . . .’ She looked at the clock on the wall.

  ‘I’m going out tonight,’ I said pathetically.

  ‘Make the date over the phone, did he?’ asked the charmer with the hairspray. ‘He’ll have a fit when he sees that. Oh well, sit down a tick and I’ll have a go when I’m finished here. That hedge on the top will have to come off.’

  When I emerged, some time later, I looked like Joan of Arc about to go to the stake. My hair resembled a reddish-brown bathing cap. She’d trimmed the spikes on top back to little longer than the bits at the sides and brushed it all forward to a little wispy fringe on the forehead. I have to admit, though, it looked quite good, certainly better than before.

  Because of this I didn’t get home until three-thirty and the light had a dirty greyness to it presaging the early dark. But I could see the puddle in front of the house still hadn’t dried up. It hadn’t rained again and I wondered vaguely about it before my attention was distracted.

  The lights were on in Daphne’s front window, a room she seldom used, and the curtains hadn’t been drawn. Through it I could see, brightly lit, Bertie and Charlie standing close together in deep discussion. Charlie was leaning on the marble mantelshelf and Bertie was puffing on a pipe. They looked the perfect pair of crooks. I couldn’t see Daphne. She was probably making the unspeakable duo tea.

  I resisted the urge to knock on the door and ask to see her. If she wanted to tell me what they were up to now, she’d tell me in her own good time. But the sight of them there, looking so at home as if they already owned the place, made my new haircut bristle.

  I went down to the basement and my own flat, put on the kettle and sorted through my meagre wardrobe. Since I hadn’t acquired any new clothes in the past three months – apart from a pair of sock-slippers kindly knitted for me by Daphne and hardly suitable for the ‘staff dinner’ – it looked like the ankle-length purple skirt I’d got from Oxfam and the ethnic Indian waistcoat again (Camden Lock Market), teamed with a black polo-neck sweater (BHS sale) and my Doc Marten boots, because they were the only footwear I had at that time, apart from a pair of ancient trainers with holes in both soles.

  Later, when I’d showered and put it all on, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror to study the effect. I looked a real ragbag. When I was studying drama, we did a production of Blithe Spirit and I got to read for the part of the batty medium, Madame Arcati. Now I looked as if I was dressed for the role. I was distracted by a loud ring on my doorbell.

  It wasn’t even a quarter to eight yet and I didn’t think it could be Ganesh. Besides, the arrangement was I meet him at the shop. As I went towards the door, I noticed an envelope lying on the mat just inside. Either someone had delivered it since I’d come home – and I hadn’t heard the letter box – or I’d stepped over it in the gloom when I’d walked in. I stooped and picked it up, tucking it in my pocket, before opening the door on the chain and peering through.

  It was one of the Knowleses – going by the brown jacket, Charlie. ‘Good evening!’ he crowed, and simpered at me in a sickly fashion. ‘Can I come in for a little chat, my dear?’

  ‘I don’t know what about and I’m not your dear,’ I said to the crack in the door. It was worse than being called ‘darling’ by Hitch. At least Hitch did it unconsciously.

  ‘Won’t take a mo,’ he fluted in a coaxing voice.

  I opened my mouth to tell him to get lost, but I remembered this was Daphne’s nephew. So I slipped the chain and let him in. He nipped over the threshold and toddled past me, uninvited, into the living room
. There he stood, dead centre, with his eyes darting all over the place. He might be related to my landlady, but he was making pretty free here, just as he and his brother had been doing upstairs when glimpsed by me through the window. Only he wasn’t anything to me and I objected. Before I could let him know this, however, he added insult to injury.

  ‘You’re keeping it very tidy, I see,’ he said. ‘Quite a little homemaker, eh?’

  The sheer rudeness of all this rather took my breath away. But I rallied. ‘That what you came to check on?’ I still couldn’t get over the patronising old git’s attitude but I kept telling myself this was Daphne’s nephew. Be nice to him, Fran, even if it kills you.

  He had slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and took out a small notebook. ‘As a matter of fact, I have come to check –not on your housekeeping, dear, oh my, no. Purely a technical point, you might say. I understand from Aunt Daphne that when you moved in no inventory was made.’