Asking For Trouble (4 page)

‘Hear that?’ Squib pointed at the dog. ‘She didn’t like him, Terry didn’t. She was always saying he’d got fleas. He hasn’t. But he’s crying for her, see? Animals are better than humans, that’s what I think. Animals have got decency.’

‘Decency’, I told him sharply, ‘means we fetch the police.’

We might have argued about it for ages, but it got settled for us. There was a shout from downstairs.

We stared at one another, all panicking. I ran downstairs and would you believe it? There was the man from the council again. This time he had a colleague with him, a sweaty, tubby charmer with a malevolent scowl.

‘We came to check you’re preparing to move out,’ the first one said, ‘and to make sure you mean to attend today’s hearing.’

I’d forgotten the hearing. It hardly seemed to matter now. They were the last people we needed there and I wondered frantically how to get rid of them. ‘We can’t!’ I blurted. ‘I mean, we’ll see you there. We’re getting ready to leave, so you can’t come in, not just now.’

He came nearer to where I stood, halfway down the uncarpeted stair, and frowned up at me. ‘It’s Fran, isn’t it? You’re in charge here, aren’t you? You always seem to speak for the others.’

That, I recalled ruefully, was what Terry had accused me of.

The reason I always spoke for the others was because, left to themselves, they always said the wrong thing. I was thinking wildly now, trying to think of the right thing to say, to find some way of explaining.

‘Something’s happened. One of our friends has – has had an accident. I’ve got to fetch help.’

‘What kind of accident?’ It was the fat one speaking now. He moved forward, looking nasty.

‘Fran?’ The younger one looked at me, worried. ‘Do you need an ambulance?’

It crossed my mind that he wasn’t such a bad sort. But I hadn’t time for character analysis.

The other one snapped, ‘Drugs, you bet! One of ’em’s oh-dee’d! They would choose this bloody morning to do it! How long’s he – she – been unconscious?’

‘We’re not druggies!’ I shouted. ‘None of us is!’

That was absolutely true. It was another house rule. No drugs. Terry sometimes had cannabis. But that was it.

Fatso was sniffing the air now. ‘I’m not so sure!’

‘The smell’s the dry rot!’ I snapped at him.

There was a creak on the stair behind me and I heard the dog growl. Squib’s voice soothed it. Then he spoke.

‘You can’t go upstairs,’ he said. ‘One of our mates is dead.’

That put the cat amongst the pigeons. The first council official was up the stairs like a greyhound, racing past me and Squib and pushing Nev aside on the landing. The dog began to bark and wanted to jump up at him but Squib held it by its collar.

‘Where?’ the official was yelling. ‘Are you sure?’

‘She topped herself!’ Squib yelled back at him. ‘It was you coming yesterday to tell us we’d gotta quit that did it! She got depressed!’

The fat man was plodding heavily up the stairs. He squeezed past me giving me a dirty look. He had BO, the sort his best friend hadn’t told him about. The stair creaked. I hoped the dry rot would give way under his weight but it didn’t. Probably just as well. We’d have had two corpses.

Nev mumbled, ‘She’s in there! We didn’t touch her!’

The two men had opened the door to Terry’s room. There was silence and then the fat man began swearing.

We heard him say, ‘The press will get hold of this!’

The thinner one told him to shut up. Then they began whispering together. Eventually the first one came out of the room and spoke to us all.

‘We’ll fetch the police. You lot stay here. Don’t let anyone in. Don’t talk to anyone!’ He paused. ‘My colleague, Mr Wilson, will stay with you.’

Fatty plodded across the landing, glowering. He looked an awful lot less confident than when he’d arrived. Squib’s dog, not liking the look of him, growled again.

He moved back. ‘What sort of dog is that? Is it a pit bull?’

‘Does it look like a pit bull?’ I asked. ‘It’s about half the size, to start with.’

‘He’s got a bit of Staffordshire in him, I reckon,’ said Squib with pride. ‘Once he gets his teeth into something, he don’t let go.’

‘For Gawd’s sake,’ said Wilson to his council colleague, ‘Hurry up and get back here with the cops!’

We waited for the police, all of us sitting in the living room, Wilson included. He sat by the door like a heavy, with his arms folded over his beer belly, in case any of us tried to rush him. When he wasn’t watching us, he was watching the dog.

Squib huddled in the far corner with his arms round it, whispering into its pointy ear. It kept turning its head and looking up at him. Once or twice it licked his face. No way was anyone going to be able to claim it was dangerous. I hoped.

Nev was managing well. He sat by the hearth, only a nervous twisting of his hands betraying stress. From time to time he glanced at me for reassurance and I smiled back. It took some doing on my part. I didn’t feel like smiling. My head was in a whirl and I knew I had to sort it out before the police got there.

To begin with, they’d ask us about Terry and there wasn’t very much we could tell them. We could suggest they ask Lucy. That was about it. I tried hard to remember all the things she’d said, every word since she’d arrived. But I hadn’t liked her and I hadn’t talked to her unless I’d had to, so there you were. All opportunities missed.

She’d been very well spoken, an upper-class sort of voice. She reminded me of the girls at the private day school I attended until they politely requested my dad to take me away. Of course, she used to use all kinds of words she’d picked up out there in the streets, trying to sound like just anyone else around the area. But it hadn’t worked. She still sounded different. There was that woolly jacket with the expensive label. She’d had that with her when she came. She was wearing it the night she arrived with Lucy. I know she didn’t get that jacket from Oxfam. She’d brought that with her from home, wherever home was.

As for her friends, I didn’t even know if she had any, or where she went during the day. The police would ask if either Nev or Squib had been her boyfriend. Neither had. Nev was generally considered to be with me, but the arrangement was a platonic one. I acted, if anything, as Nev’s minder. He didn’t cope well on his own. Squib had his dog for company. He didn’t really need people.

Declan was the one Terry had been keen on. But we didn’t know where Declan had gone and anyway, he’d had troubles of his own. I didn’t want to put the police on to Declan. I’d liked him.

So, to come back to the most important question, why? Why should she kill herself? I couldn’t accept it, even though I’d seen the evidence. She hadn’t appeared depressed or worried, more than any of us were worried about the eviction. Despite Squib’s theory, I didn’t believe she’d worried enough about that to take such extreme action. Generally, she’d just been her normal, grousing self. Alarm bells were starting to ring at the back of my brain and I didn’t like the sound of what they were trying to tell me.

I remembered how she’d been dressed when we found her, just in the unzipped jeans and crumpled shirt. I couldn’t understand why the jeans weren’t zipped up. If she’d been walking around like that before she died, the jeans would’ve ended up round her ankles. So, had she pulled them on in a hurry and, with suicide in mind, not bothered with the zip? Or, an idea, as grotesque as it was unwelcome popped into my head, had someone else dressed her unconscious body, panicking, fumbling with the zip and giving up? I remembered the aroma of cologne in the house when Nev and I returned from Camden and my feeling that some outsider had been there in our absence.

I put that unpleasant thought on hold and concentrated on another. The rigor. Accepting that she had died yesterday afternoon, the police would want to know where we’d all been, when was the last time we’d seen her and if she’d appeared distressed in any way. They were unlikely, in the circumstances, to accept anyone’s plea of total ignorance and absence from the scene, without some confirmation. We were not the sort of people whose word they took. So what we were looking for here were alibis, not to put too fine a point on it.

Nev and I, with luck, could prove that for part of the time we were eating Mexican bean stew with his friends. As for Squib, a pavement artist must have hundreds of witnesses to his activities. But all of them would have been hurrying by, glancing at a hunched figure rubbing industriously at a square of paving with chalks. Some would have taken a closer look at the picture, but few would have troubled to look closely at the artist.

I must have shifted in my chair because I met Wilson’s beady gaze fixed on me. He had tensed as I moved and probably thought I was planning to leap through a pane of glass and run off down the street like they do in movies. If so, he watched too much television.

Nev said, ‘I need a glass of water,’ and stood up.

Wilson ordered, ‘You just stay where you are, sunshine!’

‘He’s been sick!’ I snapped. ‘You stay there, Nev. I’ll go and get you the water.’ I marched over to Wilson and stood over him. ‘You don’t have any right to prevent me!’ I told him. ‘And don’t forget, your mate was here yesterday and our friend died right afterwards!’

‘You’ve got a big mouth!’ he said.

‘And you’ve got a fat gut!’ I told him.

‘All right,’ he snarled. ‘You won’t be so lippy when the police get here. Go and get him his glass of water. Where’s the kitchen?’

‘It’s the next room. If I leave the door open, you’ll be able to see me in there from just outside this room, OK?’

He grunted and moved out into the hall where he could see both the living-room door and the kitchen door. I went into the kitchen and turned on the tap. I had a drink of water myself while I was there, even though I could feel Wilson’s eyes boring into my back. Then I took Nev’s glass back with me.

He said, ‘Thanks, Fran!’ and sipped at it. After a moment, he whispered, ‘Stick with me, won’t you, Fran? I don’t think I can manage to face the police alone!’

I smiled again. But he was going to have to manage somehow because they’d interview us separately for sure.

Honestly, I’d never seen so many coppers in my life, not all in one house. They brought all sorts of equipment, lights and cameras and I don’t know what else. It would have been interesting to watch if we hadn’t been at the centre of it all.

A Detective Sergeant Parry arrived. He had crewcut ginger hair and bright blue eyes too close together. His eyebrows were almost non-existent and possibly by way of compensation he was trying, not very successfully, to grow a moustache. It sprouted unevenly along his upper lip with varying thickness and hue as if it were infected with mange. His manner was sarcastic. Whatever he told him, he obviously didn’t believe any of it.

‘All right, what happened?’ He’d produced a notebook and was thumbing wearily through it.

We told him we didn’t know.

‘Don’t give me that. And don’t waste everyone’s time, mine, yours, the inspector’s. Do you know how much an investigation like this costs the taxpayer? No, don’t suppose you do. You lot don’t pay any taxes. Just scroungers, live off the social. Come on, let’s have the whole story.’

What can you say to someone like that? We said nothing.

‘What is this?’ He scowled at us. ‘Someone told you you’ve got a right to silence? Got something to hide?’

‘No,’ I said patiently. ‘We already told you that we just don’t know what happened.’

He sighed. ‘Look, it was a game, right? It went wrong. It was a stupid bet or something. You were pissed out of your skulls at the time. Or high as kites. Which? Both? There will be a post mortem. We’ll find out what you were using. It’ll be much easier if you tell me now. Stand you in good stead before the court.’

‘What court?’

‘Coroner’s court. What other? Sounds to me as if bad conscience is troubling you.’

I’d meant to keep cool but at that, I couldn’t. ‘I thought you were supposed to make tactful and sympathetic inquiries when this sort of thing happens – not try and invent something you can stick on us?’

‘Sassy little madam, aren’t you?’ He pointed his Biro at me. ‘But you’re talking yourself into a lot of trouble, lady. Don’t cheek me! I’m writing it all down here.’ He tapped the pad. ‘Every word.’

I told him, ‘That moustache looks like something the cat brought up. Go on, write that down. You’re supposed to write it all down, not just pick out the bits which suit you.’

He put his notepad and Biro away. ‘All right, have it your own way. We’ll go down to the station and interview you all there. It’ll be recorded on tape. You can make all the smart remarks you want, darling. But when the tape’s played back they won’t sound so clever.’

I asked, ‘Are we being arrested? What’s the crime?’

He looked mock-shocked. ‘Of course not, dear! The very idea!’

I knew we could refuse but, on the other hand, we were hardly flavour of the month and it might be best not to make things worse. So we went.

They took our fingerprints. I’d never been involved in a suicide enquiry, but this didn’t seem justified to me. I asked why. ‘For elimination. Once we don’t need them any longer, they’ll be destroyed,’ I was told.

I asked, ‘Elimination from what?’ But I didn’t get any answer.

They split us all up so that we couldn’t confer. I don’t know where Nev and Squib went. Nev looked awful as he went out, grey-faced, sweating and looking as guilty as hell. I hoped the police realised he wasn’t well.

I sat for ages in a bare little room, watched by a bored copper who kept scraping his finger round inside his ear and inspecting the tip of it to see what he’d found there. I wished they’d offer me a cup of tea, but they didn’t. Eventually, Parry came again and said Inspector Morgan would like to talk to me.

Before we left the house, the younger, nicer, council official had come back and I’d found out his name was Euan. So now I began to wonder if they were all Welsh and if they were, what they were all doing in this part of London. Were they all plotting some sort of revenge for the death of Llewellyn?

Inspector Morgan turned out to be a woman. I suppose they thought that was clever of them, all girls together stuff, and I’d confide in her. But I did get that cup of tea at long last.