Asking For Trouble (10 page)

I took to switching on the light if I awoke and reading till morning. I was getting through Nev’s books at the rate of about one a night and getting bags under my eyes as well. I told myself I was at least making up for my missed education. Nev’s book choice was on the heavy side.

One afternoon Inspector Janice turned up on my doorstep. With luck I’d at least seen the last of Parry. It was the first time Janice had tackled me in the surroundings of my own home.

I made her coffee and let her have the armchair Euan had got from the Sally Army for me. When she sat in it, the springs collapsed under her. Her knees shot up to chin level and she grabbed the balding plush arms and glared at me.

‘I was being polite!’ I told her. ‘Not playing a practical joke on you. You can sit on this one, if you prefer.’ I indicated the tubular aluminium and plastic effort I was sitting on.

She struggled to the edge of the armchair and perched there. Her mug of coffee was on the floor by her feet. ‘This is a dreadful place for you to be living in!’ she blurted. ‘How did you get into all this mess, Fran? You’re young, fit and you’ve got all your marbles!’

For the first time she wasn’t wearing her police hat to ask questions. She really wanted to know, for herself. Perhaps for that reason I didn’t resent her words.

‘It’s a place,’ I told her. ‘You don’t want to know the story of my life. I became homeless. It’s easier than you think.’

‘Tell me!’ she persisted.

‘The person I was living with became ill. She had to go into hospital long-term. She was the tenant, not me, and the landlord wanted me out.’

I was telling her the truth but still not telling her how it really was. After Dad died, Grandma Varady and I had stayed on together. But after a while she became confused. I think it was Dad dying. She couldn’t really cope with it. She began to talk as if he was still alive and even worse, she began to call me Eva, which was my mother’s name. It was as if she couldn’t remember that my mother had left.

‘Bondi’s late this evening, Eva,’ she’d say. Bondi was the name she’d had for my father whose name had been Stephen.

She also started getting up in the middle of the night believing it was morning and wandering out of the house and down the street in her nightgown. Her doctor found her a place in a home. I’d always sworn I’d never let Grandma Varady go into such a place but things never turn out the way you expect. I couldn’t look after her. She no longer knew who I was. She lived about six months in the home and died there in her sleep. By then I was already living at the first of many ‘irregular’ addresses.

I said to Janice, ‘Look, I’ve had jobs, dozens of them. But when employers find out you don’t have a regular address, they can’t get rid of you fast enough. Or else they take advantage of the situation to offer you slave wages. You drop out of the system. You have to fight to get your foot back in the door.’

‘So tell me about systems!’ she invited. ‘All systems exclude you if you don’t kick your way in. Try making it as a woman officer in the CID.’

She had a point but I didn’t want her to think I was whingeing and I told her so. ‘I’ll get out of here one day, one way or another, on my own two little flat feet! Getting this murder business behind me would be a start.’

She nodded, picked up her mug and sipped. ‘I’m going through divorce,’ she said suddenly. ‘So I know how you feel, believe me. When I get the divorce behind me, I’ll be all right. Right now . . .’ She bent her head over the mug.

I’d never seen any rings on her hand so I hadn’t reckoned on her being married. But there was no reason why she shouldn’t be.

‘Is he another plod, I mean, police officer?’

She gave a rueful grin. ‘No, he works for a bank. I’m rather sensitive about living space myself at the moment.’ She jerked her head to indicate the room. ‘Tom, my soon-to-be-ex, wants to sell up our house and split the proceeds. I’m damned if I’m going to lose my home! I decorated every room in that house! Up a ladder with a tin of emulsion every evening after I got in from work! While he sat in front of the telly or pushed off to play squash with his mates.’

She sounded really fierce. Tom obviously had a fight on his hands. I sympathised with her and made a few encouraging remarks.

We were getting on pretty well together by now. Then Janice seemed to remember she was there on official business. She put the mug on the floor and sat up as straight as she could in the chair.

‘Finding someone who could remember you and Porter in Camden has helped, Fran, but the superintendent still isn’t happy. He can’t believe that you knew so little about Theresa Monkton. Where she went during the day and other people she met. She lived with you. Even if she wasn’t talkative, she must have let the odd comment slip. When you live with people you find out about them by a kind of osmosis. I found out plenty about Tom by living with him. Not because he told me, but because you can’t hide from people you’re with every day and night. You’re either not trying to remember or you’re holding out on us. Give yourself a break. Give me a break. Come up with something, can’t you?’

I told her I would if I could, but as I’d told her before, even though I’d seen Theresa every day, I just hadn’t known her. ‘What about her family? They have to have known more about her than I did.’

‘She hadn’t been in touch with them in months. They had been trying to find her. You can imagine how distressed they are.’

I cast about desperately. ‘How about Lucy? She brought Theresa along in the first place. Did you find her?’

‘Lucy Ho? Yes. She met Theresa by chance in a pub and felt sorry for her.’ Janice looked both irritated and depressed. ‘There’s a sort of vacuum around that girl and I’m beginning to think it was deliberately created.’

She saw I was about to deny responsibility and added quickly, ‘I don’t mean it was created by you or the others. I mean, she created it herself.’

Janice hesitated as if unsure whether to confide in me. Then she hunched forward on the chair edge and went on in a rush, ‘Fran, think about this. No friends, no visitors, no background details about herself, no attempt to mix with the others and be friendly. To me that’s someone trying to hide, terrified of giving clues.’

I did think about it and conceded she might be right.

‘She was careful not to leave any trail for someone else to follow,’ Janice insisted. I could see it was her pet theory.

I played devil’s advocate. ‘
Someone
followed it. Because
someone
found her.’

I sounded hard-boiled but I wasn’t feeling that way. I was feeling guilty. It had never occurred to me that Terry had been scared, living in fear all the time she was with us, and in need of help. None of us had offered it. I reasoned that she hadn’t seemed afraid. But then, I hadn’t tried looking beneath the surface of the front she’d put up. All right, she couldn’t have expected much help from Nev or Squib, and Declan had his own problems and had left. But I could have listened. I could have tried to give her some support.

‘I didn’t want to know what made her tick,’ I said. ‘She lived with us, but she was a stranger.’

And that
was
the truth, although I was just beginning to see it myself for the first time.

Janice struggled out of the chair. ‘Thanks for the coffee. I’ll be in touch.’

I felt even more depressed when she’d left. I realised that I was feeling grief for Terry, something I hadn’t felt before. I wasn’t proud of myself. I should have felt it before.

Now I knew that I owed her. I hadn’t helped her then, but I could still help now if I knew where to start. I gave it a lot of thought without coming up with an answer.

Ganesh came over in the van and took me to our old place, down by the river, where we sat on a chunk of concrete and looked across to the Crystal City and watched gulls picking over debris on the mudflats.

Gan said, ‘I wrote a poem, about her, about Terry.’

Gan is a good poet. Generally he only shows his poetry to me, although he has been known to read out some of it to Mad Edna. The last time he did that, she said it was very good and had he thought of taking up the piano?

‘I’m not bloody Nöel Coward!’ Ganesh had told her.

So he read his poem to me now, the one about Terry. It was strange hearing him read it because he hadn’t known her as well as I had, and had no reason to feel guilty as I did. But it was as if he felt what I felt and was able to express it better than I could in words.

When he’d finished, I said, ‘Thanks, Gan.’

‘Perhaps we aren’t meant to know,’ he said, tucking the paper away in his leather jacket. ‘What happened to her really, I mean.’

‘I want to know!’ I retorted. ‘But short of Edna recovering her sanity and backing up your story, I can’t see where to begin!’

That must have beeng iving Fate a gentle hint. The next day, out of the blue, I had another visitor at the flat.

The doorbell rang as I was trying to block up some of the gaps round the bedroom window with ready-mixed filler. I’m not much of a handyman but I was making a fair job of it and I was annoyed to be called away.

I peered through the little spyhole and saw a very smart, elderly gent outside. More out of curiosity than anything, I opened the door.

‘Miss Varady?’ he asked very politely, and raised his hat. ‘I’m Alastair Monkton, Theresa’s grandfather.’ He held out his hand.

I apologised for having Tetrion smeared over me and suggested it would be better if we didn’t shake hands.

He followed me into the sitting room, trying not to look too appalled. I invited him to take the notorious armchair, while I washed my hands and brushed my hair.

When I came back I asked him if he’d like a cup of coffee.

He probably didn’t fancy coffee made in a place like that. He said, ‘I don’t want to impose, Miss Varady. You realise I want to talk about my granddaughter. Perhaps you’d allow me to take you to lunch?’

I wanted to talk about his granddaughter, too. He was hoping I could tell him something but I was hoping he’d tell me.

Moreover, any lunch he’d buy me had to be better than anything I had in my kitchen. I said ‘yes’ straight away.

Chapter Six

Monkton had a taxi waiting downstairs. It must have been building up a terrific fare on the clock but he didn’t seem to mind. The taxi-driver certainly didn’t, although you could see he didn’t much like waiting around in that district.

We went to an Indian restaurant which Alastair Monkton said was very good. It certainly wasn’t like the Indian take-aways I knew. It had a carpet on the floor and starched white damask tablecloths and the waiters wore white jackets.

The food on the other tables looked and smelled pretty good too, nearly as good as Ganesh’s mother’s. The menu was the size of
The Times
and it took nearly as long to read it. I settled for the special fish curry and he chose the lamb curry with ginger.

When we’d had time to settle down and size one another up across the Naan bread, he asked, ‘I hope you won’t take this amiss, Francesca. But may I ask how old you are?’

I told him, twenty-one. Also that I preferred to be called Fran.

‘Twenty-one?’ He looked for a moment as if his thoughts had drifted away somewhere. He said, more to himself than to me, ‘No age, really. No age at all. Life before you. Everything to do. Everything to live for.’

He must have forgotten the flat we’d just left.

He turned his gaze back to me and rejoined the present. ‘Then you’re much of an age as Theresa, my granddaughter. She was just twenty. We had thought, hoped, she would have phoned home on her birthday, but she didn’t. We didn’t know where she was. We couldn’t even send her a card. We couldn’t help her at all and she obviously needed help so desperately.’

‘We called her Terry. That was her idea.’ I hesitated. ‘She was doing what she wanted to do. I know that’s hard to explain to you. She didn’t want help. She wanted to be independent.’

I realised as I spoke how futile that sounded. Independence takes money. Not for nothing is it called ‘independent means’. Money with no strings attached. Without it, you can forget independence. I realised I’d been deluding myself with notions of my own independence, when all I was, truly, was at a loose end. Nevertheless it was a freedom of sorts.

Alastair wouldn’t have understood. He would have sent Terry money if she’d phoned home on her birthday or any other day. But it would have come with chains, not just strings, attached. For that reason alone, she would never have reached for that phone.

I knew he was going to ask me next if I had any idea how her death could have happened, and I didn’t. He was so nice and obviously Terry’s death had been such a dreadful blow to him, that I really wished I could help.

‘She was very quiet,’ I said. ‘She didn’t talk much about herself. I never saw her with a boyfriend.’

I knew she’d been keen on Declan but that didn’t count because it didn’t come to anything.

‘I’ve been to Cheshire to talk to young Nevil Porter.’

That surprised me and I must have looked it. He smiled and said, ‘I thought he seemed a pleasant young man. Sadly, it was obvious he’d been ill. You too, if I may say so, seem a pleasant, sensible young woman. I’m glad that Theresa wasn’t in with a bad crowd, even if you were all living illegally in that condemned house. You and young Porter, you seem to be so, well, normal. A matter of – er – style, aside. Porter’s people seemed very decent. I dare say yours, too. I admit I’ve been forced to reassess my earlier impressions.’

Obviously he hadn’t met Squib. I rather hoped he didn’t. He seemed to be thinking over something again. He was staring down at his plate and he looked very sad. I felt very sorry for him but a little embarrassed too. I looked away and saw that people at the next table were looking at us and whispering. We must have appeared a strange couple, Alastair and I. The woman at the table looked shocked. She probably thought Alastair had picked me up off the street for lunch followed by a session involving leather and bondage. I treated her to a stony glare and she flushed and looked away.