Asking For Trouble (5 page)

She was quite young which surprised me. I’d always imagined inspectors would be old fellows with grey hair and bad teeth. Or, if they were women, built like brick barns. Morgan was smartly dressed though her hair was a bit dowdy. If she looked like anything, she looked like a schoolteacher. She had something of the same manner, bossy but wary at the same time.

‘Miss Varady?’ she asked, although she knew I was. ‘I don’t think I’ve come across that surname before.’

‘It’s Hungarian,’ I told her. ‘But before you start checking on me, I’m British by birth.’

My father came from Hungary with his parents in the fifties when they had the revolution. He was five years old at the time.

‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well now, Francesca—’

I interrupted her to ask, ‘What’s your first name?’

She looked surprised so I went on, ‘Because if you’re going to call me by my first name, I ought to be able to call you by yours. Otherwise, I call you Inspector, and you call me Miss Varady.’

The copper by the door hid a grin.

She took that quite well. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Just when we’re on our own, then, my name’s Janice. So, Francesca—’ She underlined it faintly. ‘Just carry on telling me about yourself, and the squat, and your friends – and Theresa Monkton.’

‘We called her Terry.’ There really wasn’t more I could say than that. We hadn’t known her very long. I had nothing but my own guesswork for the things I’d deduced about her, so I couldn’t mention any of them. She hadn’t talked about herself. Lucy might know something. I told Inspector Janice all this.

‘What about her other friends?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. She didn’t say. No one ever came to the house.’

‘Had there been any disputes between you, any of you, at the house?’

There’d been plenty, Terry being so lazy and grumbling all the time. But I thought quickly before I answered. I didn’t like the drift of the question. What did they think had happened?

I said, ‘Nothing much, just the usual squabbles about whose turn it was for the washing-up. She kept herself to herself. We always tried to respect one another’s privacy. Even people like us have the right to a private life, you know! It’s not easy, when you’re all living together. You have to be careful not to ask questions and we didn’t.’

‘Which of the men was her boyfriend?’

‘Neither! People come and go in squats! It just happened that we were two women and two men!’ For good measure, I added, ‘I don’t have to stay here and be grilled by you, you know.’

‘You volunteered to come to the station, Francesca.’

Not that I remembered. I said so.

‘We know it’s been a shock,’ she said soothingly. ‘But we need to know the circumstances. We’re grateful for your cooperation. Now, let’s get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible, shall we? Tell me the last time you saw her.’

‘Alive? Yesterday around lunchtime. Next time I saw her, she was dead.’

‘Hanging from the ceiling?’

‘Of course, hanging from the ceiling! Where else?’ Morgan was waiting. ‘Nev wanted to take her down because she looked so hideous, hanging there. But I told him, we mustn’t touch her. We had to tell your lot. But the council men turned up first.’

‘But you were going to notify the police?’

‘Yes!’ I said fiercely. ‘Believe it or not, we were!’

‘Oh, I believe you, Francesca. Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Because we’re squatters. Don’t tell me the law’s impartial. Tell your sergeant. He doesn’t know it.’

Janice’s eyes were pale grey and now they looked like bits of steel. For a few minutes she forgot she was being nice to me and this was a cosy girls’ chat. ‘You’ve a complaint against Sergeant Parry?’

Not if I knew what was good for me, I didn’t.

‘Lovely feller,’ I said. ‘Every woman’s dream.’

She was studying me. ‘We’ll be getting a complete post mortem report. But there are already one or two things which puzzle us. You’re absolutely certain that when you left the house yesterday, you all left together?’

‘I told you, yes! Nev and I went over to see if we could get a place to live up Camden way. Squib went somewhere else. Up West, probably. He was looking for a clear piece of pavement to make a picture. He’s a pavement artist.’

‘Yes, we’re checking on that. Why do you call him Squib? I understand his name is Henry.’

‘He doesn’t look like a Henry. I didn’t give him the name Squib. He’s always had it as far as I know. No one calls him anything else.’

If she’d known Squib she could have worked out for herself that he had a low-wattage brain and someone somewhere made a joke about his being damp.

I added, ‘But he’s all right. He likes animals and they like him.’ I leaned forward. ‘I know what he looks like and I know what you’re thinking, but Squib is all right! You can trust him!’

‘And Nevil Porter? What about him?’

I fixed her with a look and said very quietly because I wanted her to listen and take it in: ‘Don’t bully Nev. It would be easy for you to do that. He couldn’t resist. He’d tell you anything you wanted him to say whether it was the truth or not. He’s been ill, had a breakdown. He’s very intelligent but he can’t cope. That’s why he packed in his studies. Get a doctor to talk to him. And you can check all this. He hasn’t done anything and if you got him to confess to anything, his medical history would mean you couldn’t take it into court. So leave him alone.’

She gave a thin smile. ‘We already know some of this. We’ve had a call from his family’s solicitor.’

That was quick. They hadn’t wasted much time. But I guessed what had happened. Once they’d got Nev on his own, he’d panicked and asked for that solicitor. ‘Did Nev ask for a lawyer?’

‘Yes.’ Then she asked silkily, ‘We appreciate that he’s very nervous and it appears he has a medical history of breakdown. But all the same, why should he need a solicitor? Wouldn’t a family friend do? Or one of the doctors who treated him? If he hasn’t done anything, he only needs to answer a few routine questions.’

I was angry because I’d just tried to explain all that and it was as if I hadn’t spoken. But I knew I mustn’t lose my temper. I met her eye and said firmly, and nice and clearly, just the way they’d taught us to speak up at that school, ‘Surely he’s entitled to have his solicitor?’

She blinked. ‘Yes.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

I’d hit the ball back into her court. She didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much she could do but give me a frozen smile. The corners of her mouth turned up, but her lips stayed clamped together. It was more like rictus than a smile and reminded me of Terry.

I thought about Nev again. He must have been really afraid he’d go to pieces when he asked for the family lawyer. He would have known that the first thing that legal eagle would do, would be pick up the telephone and inform Nev’s parents he was in trouble. Next thing, they’d be down here from the wilds of darkest Cheshire before you could say knife.

Still, I was relieved to know Nev had someone looking after his interests. But it had made the police even more suspicious. Neither Squib nor I had anyone to look after our interests. But we were probably luckier than Nev. I’d met Nev’s father once and he would be the last person I’d want around if I had problems. He’s one of those who are always ready to tell you what you ought to do, even if any idiot can see you’re in no state to do it. When Nev had his breakdown, his father just stood over him telling him to pull himself together! What use is that?

‘Why, when you came home and, according to what you told Sergeant Parry and me, you cooked sausages, didn’t someone go upstairs and ask Theresa if she wanted to join you? Didn’t you usually eat together?’

I don’t know why she had to repeat the same set of questions so many times in as many ways. Either she was slow to get the picture, or she thought that, eventually, I’d start contradicting myself.

I repeated for the
n
th time, ‘I told you, Nev and I had already eaten and Nev’s vegetarian. You can check everything I’ve said. I don’t know what Terry did after we left her Monday midday. We didn’t go up to her room when we got in because we thought she was out of the house and would be back later. I also told you she didn’t confide in us. She just went off and did her own thing.’

‘So why did you go up to her room this morning? Had something happened to make you suspicious?’

‘No! We just thought she’d gone for good – and we were checking.’

But she had gone for good, poor Terry. I wished I’d phrased it differently. All the same, trust her to make trouble for everyone else, even in dying.

The image kept coming back to me, although I tried to keep it away. It was as if that hanging body was there in the room with us, the purplish-black face which hadn’t looked like Terry at all, her delicate features bloated and discoloured and her swollen tongue protruding at us in a grotesque, childish gesture of defiance.

It seemed Morgan could read my mind. ‘When you found her, Francesca, did you notice the bruises?’

The alarm bells were jangling ever louder. Every visible bit of Terry’s skin had been mottled mauve and grey when I saw her, but since then, a doctor must have had a closer look. They couldn’t have done a post mortem yet, only a preliminary check, establishing death. But someone, unless Janice was even more devious than I had already credited, had noticed bruises.

‘You mean, as if she’d fallen?’ I, too, could be devious.

‘Uh-huh. More as if someone had hit her.’

‘Someone had roughed her up recently?’ This was very bad news.

‘Well, we don’t know, do we, Francesca.’ She gave me that rictus smile. ‘Or at least, I don’t. There appear, on cursory examination, to be bruises on her thighs and upper arms and a serious contusion on the side of her head resulting from a blow hard enough to knock her cold. Also a graze on the right hip.’

Getting worse.

‘So I’ll ask again, were there ever any fights in that house?’

‘I’ll tell you again, no! We may have had a few spats. No punches were thrown – ever!’

‘These spats? Were they ever – emotional in origin?’

I sighed. ‘Whom would we have been fighting over? Nev? Squib? You’ve got to be joking. We had house rules and it kept the peace, more or less.’

But I was thinking of something else. Janice was, too.

‘How about the way she was dressed, when you found her. Did it strike you as unusual?’

I admitted it bothered me a little.

‘It bothers me, too,’ she said. ‘Jeans and a shirt. No underwear of any kind. Did she usually go around without any knickers on?’

‘How should I know?’ I snapped. ‘She never wore a bra. She didn’t have much to put in one. The graze on the hip. Was the skin broken?’

‘Definitely and a couple of wood splinters lodged in it. Forensics will find the origin of those. Did she ever bring men back to the house?’ The last question was slipped in like a knife beneath my guard. I knew what she was getting at, but I thought she was wrong.

‘She didn’t bring back anyone, male or female. If she was on the game, she was operating well away in another part of town. I never saw any sign of it.’

Janice abandoned that line of questioning and the tone of it, becoming conciliatory again. ‘I’d like, if I may, to ask you about the dogleash. The dog belongs to the one you call Squib, is that right?’

‘Yes. The leash just lies round the house. The dog’s very well trained and it isn’t often he put it on a leash.’

‘So anyone could have got hold of the leash? Is that what you’re saying? We can expect to find all your fingerprints on it?’

The question hit me with an unpleasant jolt to the solar plexus. So this was why they’d been in such a hurry to take our fingerprints, before we could object. The sick feeling below my chest intensified.

I didn’t want to say anything else to make her more suspicious of me. But I’d been told by someone who reckoned he knew that there still wasn’t any really reliable way of taking clear fingerprints off rough surfaces. Not clear enough to stand up in court, anyway. To be used as evidence, so the person who told me said, there had to be sixteen points of similarity between a print taken at a scene of crime and one taken off a suspect. And that’s an awful lot. That dogleash was a scuffed-up bit of old leather. They’d be lucky to get sixteen points of similarity off that.

She was still giving me that steely look. I countered it with one of my own.

‘I don’t think I should answer any more of these questions without a lawyer.’

‘My goodness,’ she said. ‘First Porter, now you. What’s your reason for wanting a legal adviser, Francesca?’

‘Simple. You indicated you only wanted to ask about the circumstances leading to our finding Terry’s body. You did say there were a few things puzzling you. But this line of questioning seems to me far more than is necessary for a suicide. I’m not daft. You think you’ve got yourselves a case of murder.’

Chapter Three

When they realised I really wasn’t going to answer any more questions, the interview came to an abrupt end – for the time being. They weren’t keen to see any more of us legally represented, even by the most incompetent of lawyers, at that stage. They didn’t know for sure they had a murder case. For that they’d await the final report of the post mortem. Janice thanked me icily for all my help and murmured that they might need to talk to me again. What was my address?

I pointed out they knew. She said, still smiling, she understood we were about to be evicted within the next few days. I told her it was still the only address I had, and suggested she ask the council what it meant to do about us. I was asked to wait outside.

Eventually someone came to tell me they’d been in touch with the council and understood it meant to rehouse me – though not Squib or Nev. All this was news to me. The police must have put pressure on and succeeded where all else had failed. But it made me uneasy, as it turned out, rightly so.

They also brought me a transcript of everything I’d told them. I signed after I’d read it a dozen times because I wanted to be sure what I was putting my name to. Then I asked, ‘Can I go now?’