Risking It All Page 8

  ‘What about your parents?’ I asked. ‘Are they happy you want to go in for gardening?’

  ‘They don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Once they got used to the idea. They’re both high-flyers in the business world. At first they thought I might just be reacting to their lifestyle, like kids do. You know the kind of stuff. They think nothing of jetting halfway round the world to meet another bunch of business suits, then whizzing back to stagger off the plane and have a working breakfast with a home-grown lot. Who needs that? I don’t. I’ve worked out what I want. I drew them up a business plan, something they could understand. I showed them where I wanted to go with the gardening. After that they were OK.’

  Something told me this was the end of our conversation. Now he put his foot down and overtook the car still dawdling along ahead of us.

  I don’t know what made me look at the driver’s window as we passed by him. Being, as I was, in the four-by-four, rather higher up, I got a good view of the interior and the driver.

  ‘Shit!’ I muttered. I hadn’t meant to say it aloud. But I’d been caught unawares. The colour of the other car should have rung a bell with me, but with my mind on other things, it hadn’t. No doubt about it. The car was being driven by Rennie Duke.

  He was wearing a sheepskin cap, his idea of a disguise probably. But it was Rennie, I was sure of it. Perhaps if I’d seen the car myself before, and not just had Ganesh’s description to go by, I might have spotted him earlier.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Ben quickly.

  ‘Nothing, I just remembered something. It’s okay, really.’

  He wasn’t convinced. I saw him look up at the mirror and take in the car now on our tail.

  I was furious with Duke and sorry I couldn’t ask Ben to pull up so I could jump out, storm back to the following Mazda, bash on the bonnet and give the PI a piece of my mind. The last thing I needed was his weaselly presence dogging my footsteps as I tracked down my sister. Wasn’t it all difficult enough? When things are bad, we’re always encouraged to believe they can only get better. Not in my experience, they don’t. They can and generally do get worse. If I wanted an example of that, here it was.

  Or rather, now it wasn’t. Duke’s car had dropped back; perhaps he feared he’d been spotted. By the time we reached the Tube station, it had long disappeared from view. Had it all just been a weird coincidence? I thanked Ben and jumped out before he could repeat his offer to drive me home or ask me any more questions.

  He drove off. I stood just inside the entrance to the Tube station, concealed by a pair of chatting London Transport workers, and waited. After a few moments, a jade-green car appeared and stopped at the traffic lights. The driver, the fur hat jammed ludicrously down to his ears, was hunched forward anxiously over the wheel. He scanned the entry to the Tube station and the open area in front of it. I’d no doubt now it was Rennie Duke. I pressed back against the ticket machine. I didn’t think I could be seen, or at least not well enough to be identified. The lights changed. He was in a flow of traffic now and couldn’t hang about. He drove on and I heaved a sigh of relief. With luck, Rennie had lost Ben at the traffic lights. But even if he caught up with him again, he would follow Ben all the way home to wherever he lived before he rumbled I wasn’t in the four-by-four.

  I now knew it wasn’t coincidence that had put him outside the Mackenzie house. He was following the same trail I was and I could make an educated guess as to what had put him on to it. I knew he’d visited my mother in hospital. Sister Helen knew him. Suppose, on one visit, my mother had fallen asleep, or been drowsy from drugs? And there, sticking out from under her pillow, was the comer of an envelope, the letter she’d written out for me. Someone as nosy as Rennie Duke couldn’t have resisted that. A bit of water from her bedside jug dabbed along the glue line, peel it open, read the interesting contents, composed so carefully for my eyes only, but containing an address and a request. I could imagine Rennie’s features twitching like a rat on the scent of food. Press it back down while it was still damp and let it dry. It’d stick again, well enough for her not to notice. Rennie was a good PI. Not a nice one, but a good one. He’d probably been waiting in the road, wondering what to do, when I waltzed up and rang her doorbell. So he’d shelved his immediate plans and decided to follow me instead. For the foreseeable future I’d be looking over my shoulder. I groaned aloud.

  ‘Who’re you dodging, love?’ asked one of the LT men, amused.

  I emerged from behind him. ‘Just an old boyfriend,’ I said. ‘If he’s anything like my ex-wife,’ said the man, ‘he’ll find you in the end.’

  All I needed. A Job’s comforter. ‘Great,’ I said.

  I spent the rest of the day at the housing department. There were advantages in going there late: fewer other applicants. On the other hand, first come, first served. They probably didn’t have a herring box left to offer me, even if they’d wanted to.

  I sat on a hard chair, staring at the scuffed and scratched paintwork around me and the door of the toilet with its notice advising anyone thinking of using it to contact security at once if they found any syringes in there. Security was a small depressed man in navy trousers and blue shirt. He kept looking at his watch. It was getting near the end of the day.

  A fat woman with greasy hair was berating the official at the counter. She was accompanied by a younger version of herself, bottle-blonde and spotty, with a bulging waistline. A grimy toddler in a buggy completed the unattractive trio. He was sucking a lollipop.

  ‘There’s eight of us in the house. It’s too bloody many. My daughter needs a place of her own. She’s got a kid and another on the way.’

  The woman at the counter took details in a weary way. It had been a long day. Mother, daughter and grandchild departed. The kid dropped his lollipop on the floor as he passed me. The security man said, ‘Oi!’ in an aggrieved way, but only got a dirty look from the two women. They disappeared from view. The security man and I stared at the lollipop and then at each other, as if each willing the other to pick it up. Heck, it wasn’t my job. It wasn’t his either. The cleaner would be coming in shortly. The lollipop stayed where it was.

  The woman at the counter listened to my tale of woe. She said she’d put me down for a place in a hostel though there was no guarantee. I said I didn’t want a place in a hostel. She told me, nicely, not to be choosy.

  ‘Have you got somewhere for tonight?’ she asked. She was trying to be helpful. But there wasn’t anything she could do.

  I told her I had somewhere for that night and she gave me a look which asked what I was doing bothering her, then. I’d forgotten the lollipop, and as I tramped out I stood on it and it stuck to my boot. I had to pull it off and drop it in the waste bin. The security man was grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘It’s nice to know I’ve made someone happy,’ I said to him sourly.

  ‘That’s all right, love,’ he said kindly.

  I walked home, the sticky patch on the sole of my boot attracting loose paper, cigarette ends and dead leaves. I had to keep scraping the lot off on the edge of the kerb. It had been an eventful day. I’d got a lead on the Wildes but Rennie Duke had got a lead on me. All in all, life was getting extremely complicated.

  Chapter Five

  I trailed along the streets, taking my time about getting home. ‘Only worry about one thing at a time!’ Grandma used to say. Fine, but how do you decide which pressing worry is at the front of the queue? Should I be beating my brains out over going to see the Wildes? Or working out what Rennie Duke was up to and where he was going to appear next? Or how I was going to explain to Hari that I wouldn’t be getting a council flat? In fact all these concerns were pushed into the background by thoughts of my mother, lying in the hospice, trusting me to be successful, to find Nicola and do it somehow without upsetting the Wildes or letting Nicola find out the truth. I decided to think of my sister as ‘Nicola’, the only name the poor kid knew she’d ever had. And then to come back and tell her all about it. To come back
in time to tell her all about it. I couldn’t muck about. I had to get on with it.

  I was so lost in these thoughts that I almost walked into someone. I was vaguely aware of a figure, stooped like Mrs Mackenzie had been, but over a waste bin, and poking about in its contents. I managed to avoid him and was going to step round him when I recognised Newspaper Norman.

  ‘Hi, Norman!’ I said.

  If you saw Norman you’d think he was just another old wino dossing on the streets, occasionally rescued by the Salvation Army, cleaned up, fed, kitted out and five minutes later back to his scruffy unwashed self. Norman is certainly grubby enough. He has long hair and a beard, unwashed and uncombed. He wears a dirty raincoat of the sort that used to be known as a flasher’s coat, over striped pants from a morning suit and a pullover full of holes. But you’d be wrong. Norman isn’t just another old down-and-out looking for a pile of paper to make his bed that night or seeking to earn a few pence from returned copies or waste paper. Norman is a great British eccentric.

  Hearing me say his name, he looked round crossly, still hunched over the waste bin, but seeing who it was he straightened up and replied graciously, ‘Good morning, my dear.’ He then glanced up at the sky and asked, ‘Or is it already afternoon?’

  I told him we were well into afternoon and heading towards evening. This early in the year the light was fading by five.

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Norman. ‘How time flies.’

  He sounded and looked, with the striped pants, like a butler who’d lost his post without references after being found in flagrante delicto with a parlourmaid and was now in sadly reduced circumstances. ‘I haven’t finished yet,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got the Guardian.’ A peevish note entered his voice.

  Every day Norman set out with a plastic bin bag to collect up discarded newspapers; hence his nickname. He didn’t want just newsprint in bulk. He wanted one fairly clean and absolutely complete copy of each title. He included everything: the broadsheets, the tabloids, the local press. He set out early each morning, roamed the railway termini (good places, he’d told me, for discarded papers), bus shelters and parks. Top of his list was a copy of The Times in which no one had done the crossword. When he’d got them all, he took them home and filed them. Well, filing is too grand a word. He packed them tidily in boxes. The ground floor of his house was stacked with boxes of newspapers, all date-marked with felt-tip pen. The first floor was let out to tenants. The tenants probably worried about sleeping above all that combustible material, but Norman was their landlord, and the tenants were generally the sort of people who didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. The house, from the outside, looked about to fall down. Norman had inherited it from his parents. He’d lived there all his life. If what might once have been a hobby had grown into an obsession, so what? Norman was a man satisfied with his lot.

  Only not so satisfied at the moment, owing to the absence of a copy of that day’s Guardian.

  ‘Hari may still have one at the shop,’ I said.

  But at this Norman looked sly and pointed out that he’d have to pay for it, wouldn’t he, then?

  We made our way down the street into the lengthening shadows, side by side.

  ‘You still living in that garage?’ he asked me suddenly.

  That’s another thing about Norman. You’d think he has no interest in anything but the national press. But he generally has a pretty good idea of what’s about.

  I told him I was.

  ‘I’ve a back room available,’ he said. ‘Very nice. Looks out on to the garden. A room with a view, as you might say.’

  I’d seen Norman’s garden, full of long grass, tangled bushes, an old privy festooned with ivy and inhabited, he claimed, by an owl, broken domestic appliances and rats. I’d also glimpsed from time to time some of Norman’s other tenants as they crept furtively back and forth. The company of the rats would have been preferable. I thanked him and declined the offer. He wasn’t offended. We parted company at the corner of the street. Norman went in further search of the Guardian. I went back to the shop.

  Hari was in the storeroom and Ganesh was alone, resting his forearms on the counter and reading Personal Computer World. His long hair was secured with an elastic band but a bit of it had escaped and hung down by his cheek. He was studying all the technology on offer intently and would have made a good model for someone like Rodin if he’d wanted to knock out another Thinker. Ganesh hasn’t actually got a computer, in case this obsession of his with computer magazines should make you think otherwise. The only technology around the place is the lottery ticket terminal and the till. But Jay, his brother-in-law, is seriously into the Internet and Ganesh is feeling a bit left out. He looked up.

  ‘Where’ve you been all day?’ he asked

  ‘I had a bit of business to attend to,’ I told him with dignity.

  Ganesh looked disapproving and heaved a sigh. ‘If you think I don’t know what you’re up to, Fran, you’re wrong.’

  I must have looked startled, because I didn’t see how he could know if I hadn’t told him.

  ‘You needn’t look so scared,’ he went on. ‘I don’t know exactly what it is, of course I don’t. Because you’re keeping all your cards close to your chest, aren’t you? But it’s something that will get you into trouble, and when it does, you’ll come running to me to help you out of it.’

  ‘I hate it when you’re smug,’ I told him.

  ‘So I’m right!’ he crowed.

  ‘I didn’t say that. I just said – forget it. If you want to know, I went down to the housing department.’ He had raised his eyebrows, so I shook my head and added, ‘No luck.’ He grunted. ‘Gan,’ I ventured, ‘has Rennie Duke been around here again, like this evening?’

  He shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen him.’

  ‘Have you seen a car like his?’

  ‘No. How could I, stuck in here?’ This was accompanied by a glower towards the back room, from which came scraping and rustling noises, indicating that Hari was busy about some kind of stock-taking exercise. Ganesh had probably been manning the fort most of the day.

  I told him I’d see him later. I went through to the back room. Bonnie jumped up from her cardboard bed and went bonkers welcoming me. Hari greeted me more sedately from the top of his stepladder. I scooped up the wriggling Bonnie and made for the yard door and my garage home before Hari could ask me any questions, like, how much longer was I going to be there. How was I to know? It was beginning to look like indefinitely.

  In the circumstances I had decided it might not be the best thing to eat with Hari and Ganesh in the flat that evening. However, Ganesh, who pretty well always guesses how my mind is working, came down to the garage when they’d shut up shop at eight, and suggested we went out for a bite to eat. We ended up in Reekie Jimmie’s baked spud café because it was near at hand, certainly not because Jimmie’s baked potatoes were anything your average gastronome would want to write about. The best you could say about it was that it was warm in there. In fact there was a real old fug, what with the odours of cooking and hot greasy dishwater, to say nothing of the smell of the fags Jimmie nipped out to smoke in the corridor behind the counter area, the smoke from which seeped in through the half-open door. That evening he had on offer the usual four fillings: vegetarian (baked beans); chilli (baked beans with a token amount of meat); cheese (rubbery); tuna with sweetcorn (a lot of sweetcorn and very little fish). Gan asked for vegetarian and I had the tuna, even though all that sweetcorn tended to give me wind.

  ‘Haven’t seen you in a while, hen,’ said Jimmie reproachfully, ladling beans over a blackened spud.

  We muttered excuses and carried our potatoes to the far corner, which took us out of Jimmie’s orbit but put us directly under the piped music.

  ‘When are you thinking of going to see your mother again?’ Gan asked. ‘Only I’ve got to let Dilip know if I want to borrow his car.’

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ I said. I could at least let her know that I’d an ad
dress for the Wildes. Pity it was so far away. This was an exercise requiring time and money, and I was short of both.

  We made conversation on a variety of subjects, skirting round the one uppermost in my mind and Gan’s suspicions that I was getting into something over my head, as usual.

  Business had slowed. Jimmie left his counter and drifted towards us. He wore checked chef’s pants and a whitish jacket. His hair must once have been red but had paled to a speckled grey and hamster ginger. Rumours about Jimmie were numerous, but you couldn’t check any of them. He was said to be an ex-bank robber, to have two wives and several children in Scotland, to have played professional football, and, the most unlikely, to be a criminal mastermind who used the spud café as a front. This I found hard to believe, because he spent most of his time in the café, and if you had any money, would you do that? I suspected the rumours were started by Jimmie himself just to keep the punters coming in.