Rattling the Bones Page 8

  I had found Tom and Jerry still at work there in their paint-splashed overalls. They bid me a cheery ‘Hullo, darling!’ as I negotiated ladders and pots in the hall and made sure not to lean against any painted surfaces. Everywhere smelled of damp plaster. Before I could return their greeting my ears echoed to a cavernous clang which made me jump and my head ring. This racket originated with a shaven-headed youth busy in what looked as if it might be intended to become a kitchen or bathroom. He was banging pipes with a hammer and pretending to be a plumber.

  ‘Duane Gardner,’ I said to them all briskly, as soon as the noise level let me. I meant to let them all know I was standing no nonsense. ‘He’s tall and spindly, wears white clothes and a tennis cap. You two let him hide in your van the other day.’ I pointed at Tom and Jerry who looked bashful and sniggered like a pair of school kids.

  ‘Well,’ I went on, ‘is he here?’

  ‘No, love, honest,’ they said earnestly in unison.

  ‘You can look round the house if you want,’ said Jerry.

  The plumber made a last deafening assault on the pipes and wandered out to join us in the hall. ‘Whaddya want ’im fer?’ he enquired. He wore a skull earring and jeans cut off at the knees. Instead of revealing pale bare legs like those Duane displayed, the shins and calves of the plumber were tattooed on every available inch of skin. It looked as if he wore particularly exotic stockings. I thought I recognised the hand of Michael in the fantastic nature of the artwork.

  ‘Do you know Duane?’ I countered. ‘Or have you seen him?’

  ‘Nah. Just want ter know why you want ’im.’

  ‘None of your business!’ I told him.

  ‘Please yerself,’ he said, unoffended, and returned to his pipes.

  ‘I’d like to look in your van,’ I said to Jerry.

  He looked as if he’d like to argue but there was a glint in my eye which changed his mind.

  We went outside and he opened the back door of the white van and stood by silently while I inspected a heap of tins and rope and bits of wood.

  ‘Satisfied?’ he asked when I stood back.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ I was still being brisk but polite with it.

  ‘He in trouble or something?’ asked Jerry.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked him.

  ‘I think he’s in trouble with you,’ he replied.

  ‘Got it in one,’ I said. ‘And if you hide him again, so will you be.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Jerry in respectful tones, ‘I wouldn’t want that. I gotta feel sorry for the poor bloke, though.’

  Let them all stick together. If they helped out Duane again they still wouldn’t tell me if I asked, but they’d act so guilty I’d know it. I’d have given a lot to know where Duane was, though. He’d probably gone to make a report to whoever was hiring him. I wondered, as I crossed the road to the hostel, whether in that report Duane would mention me.

  Again there was no weeping Sandra on the hostel’s steps today, thank goodness. I rang the bell and Simon appeared.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ he said recognising me.

  He didn’t look guilty but he did look uncomfortable. My arrival does sometimes affect people like that. He knew I was going to ask questions. In my experience this provokes two sorts of reaction. There are people who won’t talk and those who won’t stop. I suspected Simon was one of the former but there was no harm in trying.

  ‘We need to have a word,’ I said, ‘about Edna.’

  ‘Well, we don’t discuss—’ he began.

  ‘You are responsible for her,’ I interrupted him. ‘She lives here in your care. There is something you should know. Can I come in?’

  He pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose with an index finger and nodded.

  Nikki was still sitting in front of the computer in the untidy little office cum sitting room. She, too, greeted me with a laconic, ‘Hi!’

  Simon began to make the coffee without asking me this time. I sat down in the chair uninvited. It didn’t seem presumptuous. They seemed to have accepted I was part of the scenery now, even if only on a temporary basis.

  ‘Where’s your dog?’ asked Nikki, swivelling round on her chair and accepting her mug of coffee from Simon. ‘Ta, Sim.’

  ‘I left her with a friend.’

  This morning I’d left her with Erwin the drummer who has the other ground-floor flat in the converted house where I live. Erwin works nights and sleeps days. But between professional gigs he sits around a lot. He’s happy to walk Bonnie and Bonnie likes him. It may have something to do with the fact that, quite often, she comes back with the smell of marijuana in her fur, a spaced-out dog.

  ‘What’s all this about Edna?’ Simon asked, settling himself in a facing chair.

  ‘Someone is following her,’ I said. ‘Not me, I mean, but a private detective called Duane Gardner. He’s about thirty-eight at my guess but from a distance looks younger. He wears a lot of white and a baseball or tennis-type cap. Has he been here?’

  They shook their heads. I believed them. I wouldn’t believe Tom or Jerry or the hammer-wielding plumber but this pair, I was ready to bet, were painfully honest. That was why my arrival had made Simon look so flustered. He didn’t want to talk but he couldn’t bring himself to lie.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ asked Simon, now even more worried.

  ‘I’ve spoken to him. He won’t tell me the name of his client or why he wants to find Edna but, as far as I can make out, that’s what Duane has been hired to do, find her and more.’

  ‘More?’ Nikki asked sharply.

  I nodded. ‘He has found her, right? But he’s still following her. He admitted to me he tried to talk to her but she scuttled away. Edna is scared of him. I think she probably knows what all this is about but she wouldn’t say. I think she may be in need of some protection. You, at least, should know about it, in case he does turn up here.’

  ‘We don’t discuss . . .’ Simon began but tailed off miserably. They were, after all, discussing her with me.

  Nikki, her mind ahead of her co-worker’s, asked, ‘You talked of protection. What kind of harm do you think would come to her if this bloke Gardner got her cornered?’

  ‘I don’t know. He might try and persuade her to go with him, whether she wanted to or not. He acts on the orders of his client. Because I don’t know who that is, or what he or she wants, I can’t guess what Duane might do. But Edna doesn’t want him around. I’m one hundred per cent sure of that.’

  ‘We can inform her social worker,’ said Nikki. She glanced at Simon. ‘Perhaps we should, Sim.’

  Much good that would do, I thought but didn’t say. But then, I didn’t know what anyone could do. Edna couldn’t be locked up just to protect her from Gardner. She wasn’t a danger to anyone or even to herself, left alone. She wasn’t likely to get herself lost, wandering about, because she knew the streets better than the average London taxi driver.

  Besides, to keep Edna in any kind of controlled environment would be to kill her. She was like those cats she had befriended in Rotherhithe: a feral creature. I thought of her sitting in the cemetery with her face upturned to the sun’s rays and the look of joy and peace on it. Contentment is rare and a fragile thing. Someone was trying to destroy Edna’s small world of happiness.

  I stood up. ‘I just wanted to warn you,’ I said, ‘so that you can look out for him. Thanks for taking me seriously. It is serious, but Edna being Edna, people don’t care.’

  Simon said stiffly, ‘We care!’

  ‘I know you do. That’s why I’m here. Thanks for the coffee. If she doesn’t come back at night here, even once, you should do more than tell the social worker. You should tell the police.’

  Nikki said sharply, ‘We try to keep the police away from our residents. They are sensitive people and very easily upset.’

  I took it she meant the residents of the hostel were nervous souls and not the boys in blue, although I had to admit that in my experience the police did get upset
at the drop of a hat over nothing. However, not in the way Nikki meant.

  ‘Report her missing, right?’ I insisted. ‘And if the cops won’t take you seriously, ask to speak to Inspector Janice Morgan and when you do speak to her, tell her Fran Varady gave you her name. Inspector Morgan, got it?’

  I left them muttering together and looking very concerned; but I felt better because someone other than me was taking an interest in all this. If Duane turned up now at the hostel, he’d get very short shrift. But Duane was cunning. He wouldn’t break cover by going to the hostel. They’d ask too many questions and, even as charity workers, they represented inquisitive officialdom.

  But what could I do now? Where could I go? Really I needed to find Duane Gardner, because only he could lead me to his employer. I could phone his office or go there. But that would be to walk into a situation without having taken any precautions. I needed to know more about him first. He probably wouldn’t be at his office, anyway. I’d find Lottie, the girlfriend who acted as general dogsbody, and she’d warn Duane I was sniffing around. I could phone him and ask to meet but I wouldn’t learn any more from a second talk with him than I had at the first.

  He was a private detective! I stopped in the street and struck my forehead with the palm of my hand. Idiot, Fran! Susie was a private detective. She hadn’t recognised him when I’d described him but she hadn’t then been aware he was in the same line of business as she was. She might not know him by sight but she might know of his one-man agency. I turned my steps in the direction of the Turkish fast food outlet and the Duke Detective Agency’s office above it. It was lunchtime, anyway, and I was hungry. After I’d talked to Susie, I’d go down and buy a kebab.

  It was all go in the food outlet: smoke and steam and yelling Turkish voices. Knives flashed as an unidentifiable joint on a pole was shredded, customers pushed in and out, a powerful aroma of cooked meat and spices rolled out into the street. I went up to the agency’s office.

  The building was old and the staircase probably original. The treads were narrow and creaked underfoot. I passed a door which I knew led into a washroom area with a loo, hand basin and broken hand-dryer. ‘Staff Only’ announced a label importantly in order to deny admission to any passer-by caught short. The first-floor door with ‘Duke Investigations’ emblazoned on it stood ajar. That was unusual because Susie liked to hear the jangle of the bell as it opened so that she knew someone was there. I stood there for a moment listening for voices from within but there was no sound, although I could hear a creak of floorboards above and a distant murmur of conversation. It was punctuated by the muffled squawk as someone exclaimed, ‘Ow!’ Michael was plying his trade.

  I pushed the agency door open a fraction more and called out, ‘Susie? It’s Fran.’

  There was no reply. She might be in the loo, or have nipped out for something, but she wouldn’t leave the door open. I felt uneasy and gave it a hefty shove that sent it flying wide with a protesting crack of the hinges.

  The outer office, as I have explained, was just a tiny area separated from the main office by a partition and right now it was empty. Two wooden chairs of the old-fashioned kitchen type stood there for clients to wait on, should there be a rush of business. I don’t suppose anyone had sat on them for quite a while. The only light in there came through the glazed panel in the partition, via the window in the main office. I couldn’t see any movement through the frosted pane. I tapped at the door into the inner sanctum and called out again. No reply.

  I really didn’t like this. But I was probably just being jumpy for no good reason. Any second now a tap of heels would herald Susie running up the staircase from the loo and she’d appear behind me. I opened the connecting door and walked in.

  Susie wasn’t there. But Duane Gardner was. At first I thought my eyes or my imagination must be playing tricks. But unfortunately he was real and shake my head or rub my eyes or just try denying the evidence before me though I might, he wouldn’t go away. He was sitting on the floor with his back propped against the far wall and his legs splayed in front of him, for all the world like a wooden puppet with broken strings. He wore his trademark baggy long shorts with the pockets and his white cotton T-shirt. The white baseball hat had fallen off and now I could see his hair was very fair and fine and clipped close to his skull. His eyes were open and stared at me. His small mouth formed a circle of surprise. I’d wanted to find him and now I had, but far, far too late for us to talk. I knew, with sinking heart, that he was dead; that this was only the outer husk of poor Duane. In that sense he wasn’t really there. The person had gone, departed on that final journey.

  My legs trembled and I sank down on to the chair placed for a visiting client before that scarred old ministry desk of Susie’s. Even now I can see the entire little office in my mind’s eye, every piece of rickety furniture, the steel-grey filing cabinet, the cobweb draped across the corner of the unwashed window-pane. Outside, on the window ledge, was a scruffy dark grey London pigeon with scaly feet and a wary yellow eye. It seemed to be looking in; perhaps it was. It could probably see me and hoped I’d open the window and scatter some breadcrumbs on the ledge. But to have an audience of any kind at that moment was an unacceptable intrusion into a scene that should have been private. For death ought to be a private matter, in my view. We all fancy ourselves surrounded by our nearest and dearest as we shuffle off the mortal coil but I know, from my dad’s death and later my grandma’s, that even if your loved ones are there, you are already cut off from them by a gradually thickening pane of glass, like that pane in the window. You can no longer reach across to them nor they to you. It is the most private moment of your entire existence, that time when you come to quit it.

  I could no longer reach out to Duane in any real sense. Physically I could have touched him, had I wished, but it would have been meaningless. He could neither have known nor responded. Yet had I arrived here, what? Half an hour ago? Perhaps even less? If I had, even now, at this very moment he and I would have been chatting or having some sort of conversation even if only an argument. He would probably have been accusing me of not telling him I was a professional and I would have been denying that I was any such thing. Duane, in that imaginary never-to-be held conversation, was jeering at me, demanding ‘Oh, yeah? Right, then, what are you doing here?’

  What the hell was I doing here? Why did it have to be me? And what was he doing here? That’s what I would probably have retaliated, had I arrived earlier and we faced one another now exchanging insults. The question now rephrased itself as ‘what was he doing here - like that?’

  All this passed through my head in a mere couple of seconds. I heard my own voice uttering a low moan of distress. Initially it wasn’t a cry of fear, in shock though I was. I felt confusion and above all pity. I hadn’t liked him but he was a relatively young man and apart from outwitting me, he’d not done me any harm.

  Not until now. Now, whatever he’d been involved with, I was involved with it too. He had been a good detective. He’d tracked me down in some way and learned I worked occasionally for Susie. He’d come here in order to find me, confront me or leave a message for me. It could only mean trouble for me of some sort. Now at last I began to be afraid.

  I begged quietly and uselessly, ‘Please, Duane, don’t do this to me.’

  He was beyond obliging me. The small round open mouth seemed almost to be about to tell me what had led to this, but the communication had been terminally interrupted. He would have looked surprised had the film of death not already been dulling his gaze. His expression seemed to say, ‘This can’t be happening to me. It’s a big mistake. You want someone else.’

  Then, as I watched, the muscles of his jaw twitched as if he would speak, after all, and his mouth stretched in a ghastly yawn. I nearly jumped out of my skin and thought for a second or two that I was wrong, he wasn’t dead. I called to him, ‘Duane?’

  But his mouth, at the widest extent of the yawn, froze and remained open in a horrid rictus. It
was the involuntary contraction of the muscles in the first signs of approaching rigor.

  There was a sudden clatter of footsteps behind me. I whirled round and dashed out into the reception area just in time to intercept Susie. She had on that black business suit and carried a battered document case.

  ‘Hullo, Fran!’ she greeted me. ‘How long have you been here? I’ve just been stood up by a potential client and I’m bloody fed up. I reckon I’ve been given the right old run-around. Let’s stick the kettle on.’

  Chapter Six

  She made to enter the office but I barred her path. ‘Wait, Susie, don’t go in there. There’s something I’ve got to tell you first.’

  Her gaze sharpened. ‘What’s up?’

  I indicated the connecting door. ‘There’s a visitor in there, a dead one.’

  Susie stared at me. ‘What do you mean, a dead one?’