Asking For Trouble (6 page)

They weren’t happy about it but they let us all go. We trailed back to Jubilee Street to find a gallant specimen of the Old Bill was guarding the entrance to our house. He wouldn’t let us in. We told him all our gear was in there and, as far as we were concerned, it was still our home. He told us we’d have to wait till someone told him officially he could let us inside. After some argument, he let us know that the forensic team was busy in there, and nothing had to be disturbed.

‘What are they looking for?’ Squib asked, as we walked away. ‘They got the body. They took photos of the place.’

I didn’t want to worry Nev, so I just said that the police were like that, pernickety.

Squib made what, to his mind, was a joke. ‘They think we strung her up, do they?’

He cackled away happily and I didn’t tell him that he’d hit the nail right on the head. That’s exactly what their nasty little minds were thinking.

Shut out of the house, we were at a loose end, if that’s not an inappropriate expression in the circumstances. Nev and Squib went down the pub and I went to the corner shop to talk to Ganesh.

I’d walked along the stretch of pavement going to and from the house or the shop at the corner I don’t know how many times. I knew every crack. I knew all the places rain collected and where edges stuck up and could trip you. I could walk down the street in the pitch dark and not put a foot in a puddle or fall flat on my face. Quite often, I had walked down it in pitch dark because the street lighting was inreliable. The council never came around and fixed our pavement or resurfaced our road.

The reason they gave was that the area was due for redevelopment. It was as part of the redevelopment that our row of houses was scheduled to come down. I don’t know what they intended putting up in their place. Smart flats, probably, for young executives.

If you kept going when you got to the end of the street, you got to the river. Looking across, you could see on the far side the luxury flats built in the docklands for Yuppies, before Yuppies became an endangered species, like snow leopards. Looking down the narrow defile between crumbling brick terraces towards those shining towers always made me feel like Judy Garland gazing at the Emerald City. Because of that, and the way the sun sparkled on all the glass of the high-rise office blocks, I called it ‘the Crystal City’.

‘Sounds like a football team,’ Ganesh said.

‘That’s Crystal Palace. I’ll call it what I like.’

Sometimes of a summer evening, Gan and I walked down there and sat on a crumbling wall above the mudflats, looking across and making up stories about the people who lived there. Once, we actually went across there and walked round, but we felt like little green men just dropped in from Mars. It was so clean, so prosperous. The people looked so fit and healthy, well dressed and trim. They had a purposeful air as if they were all going somewhere and knew where it was. We couldn’t wait to get back again.

Now the developers were starting, at a much slower rate, on our side of the river. Our houses sprawled around the edge of the cleared building sites like a shanty town or squatter camp in the Third World, clinging to the skirts of a big city. Most of the people round here had no more chance of making it across the great divide to the affluent part of the area than they could sprout wings and fly.

It was the older ones who were bewildered. Old men who’d worked all their lives down at the docks before the work disappeared and the wharves became tourist sights. Old women who’d lived here all through the Blitz and who still scrubbed their front doorsteps. People like Ganesh’s parents, who’d come here thinking that it would be upward and onward in a new country and who had worked hard to achieve success, but who had found themselves trapped now in this urban wilderness, a far cry from anything they’d ever imagined.

I think Mr Patel was hoping the development would bring quality housing nearer, as it had done across the river, because no one round here had very much money at the moment. If people started moving in who had more dosh, they might spend some of it in his shop. He had all kinds of plans, speciality Indian foods and so on. I didn’t like to suggest the council might decide to bulldoze his shop as well. Everyone needs a dream.

Right opposite the shop, on the other corner of the street, was a disused chapel and burial ground. We called it ‘the graveyard’. The building was locked up, the glass in its mock-Gothic windows broken, weeds growing from cracks in the masonry. It had originally been a congregational chapel. It had changed hands and religious viewpoint several times since then. The last people to use it as a place of worship had been the Church of the Beauteous Day.

The Church of the Beauteous Day had been really something. When they turned up of a Sunday morning, whole families dressed in their best, it was like Mardi Gras. And they knew how to worship with songs and cymbals, all right. To say nothing of trombones, choirs and hand-clapping. When they weren’t making music they were listening to the preacher, the Reverend Eli, and shouting joyously ‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Yes, Lord!’ For one day a week, they brought light and life and faith to our street. But the premises weren’t suitable for all their social events and they moved out, led away by the Reverend Eli, a tiny man with crinkled grey hair. Away he took all those smiling ladies in the floral hats, smart young men, little boys with bowties and little girls with snowy socks, like Moses leading the children of Abraham into the desert. I don’t know whither he led them. Some said to Hackney. I was sorry. I missed them, especially the Reverend Eli, who, when he saw me, would sing out, ‘You ready to repent, child?’ and beam a gold-toothed smile.

Though the chapel was abandoned, the burial ground was still in use, by the living. A crazy old baglady named Mad Edna had her home there among the headstones with a tribe of feral cats for company. People taking a short cut through the graveyard were alarmed when Mad Edna sprang out from behind a tomb, like Magwitch the convict in
Great Expectations
, and began a conversation with them. She always treated them graciously, as if they’d come to call on her. She told me she’d been a débutante once, long ago, and I believed her. The council was having trouble over demolishing the chapel because of the graves alongside it, so Edna was safe for the time being.

A load of fruit and veg had been delivered to the shop during the afternoon. It was stacked on the pavement and Ganesh was moving it, putting some on display outside the shop, and carrying the rest down the side alley to the yard at the back.

He was wearing grubby jeans and an old Fair Isle sweater, because it was a mucky job, and his long black hair was tied back with a piece of ribbon. He ties his hair back when he’s working because it’s more convenient and because his father insists on it. If Mr Patel had his way, Ganesh would be working round the shop wearing a suit and with his hair trimmed short back and sides, or so Ganesh reckons.

Parents have ambitions for their children, I suppose. My dad had ambitions for me. Sometimes I hope that I’ll still manage to fulfil some of them, someday, and he’ll know, in heaven. I’d like to please him, even at this late date. Make up for all the disappointment.

Ganesh looked up as I came along the pavement. His expression had been worried but it cleared. ‘Fran! Thank God you’re all right! What’s going on? I’ve been worried sick about you! Someone said a person had died in your house!’

‘Someone did,’ I told him. ‘Terry.’

We both looked down the street towards the house. Besides the police, quite a few sightseers had gathered. There was a van parked, just down from the police vehicles, which hadn’t been there earlier. My heart sank, if possible, further. If it had been any one of the other of us, there wouldn’t have been half the fuss. Nev, with his history of breakdown, would have been written off as suicide. Squib hanging from the light fitting would have been written off as one fewer problem for society. They might have said the same about me. But Terry – there was something about Terry. She was going to be trouble. The police sensed it, just as I’d always sensed it. They knew they were not going to be able to write her off, just like that. They were doing it all by the book to head off any criticism at a later date.

Ganesh didn’t like the sight of all the activity down the street either. He dusted his hands and wiped them on his sweater, and by mutual accord, we set off down the alley.

The yard was full of stuff. Empty crates, full crates, packing cases, dismembered cardboard boxes baled up for the refuse people to take, and everywhere scraps of squashed fruit and withered leaves.

Ganesh picked out a couple of apples and handed me one. I was surprised to find I was hungry. We sat down side by side and between bites at the apple, I told him as much as I could. It wasn’t much. Inspector Janice had given strict instructions that I wasn’t to talk to anyone about anything. But Ganesh wasn’t just anyone. Anyway, if he’d already heard someone had been found dead in the house, he knew nearly as much as I did.

However, I’d had some theatrical training, so I made a good story of it and finished up on a highpoint by suggesting the police thought it was murder.

Cheap theatricals didn’t impress Ganesh who looked sceptical. ‘Gossip around the place says she hanged herself.’

Word travelled fast. ‘They think someone helped her.’

‘Who?’ That was Ganesh for you, always the awkward question.

‘Us, probably. We didn’t.’ Something had occurred to me and it made things worse. ‘Gan, if it’s true, if someone killed her, she let him into the house.’

We had fixed up a proper lock on the front door. Or rather, Declan had. We locked it when we went out to stop anyone else taking over our squat, quite apart from the council getting in and repossessing us. When we were at home, we locked ourselves in as a matter of principle. Apart from the council, there were plenty of people out there who might like to make trouble for us, the developers for a start. We even blocked up the letterbox after dark to prevent anyone pushing lighted rags through it. That had happened elsewhere.

If one of us was alone in the house, we took extra care. Entrance was strictly by the front door. Terry would have locked it and not opened it for anyone she didn’t know and trust. The downstairs windows didn’t open easily. The wooden frames had swollen with damp and warped with age. The old sash cords didn’t work. Just to push the window open an inch took two people and more effort than it was worth.

‘When the police realise that, it’s going to make it look worse for us,’ I concluded. ‘Like an inside job.’

‘She knew people outside,’ he said, ‘people she’d have let in. Let the police go and hassle them.’

‘That’s the point, Gan. I can’t name a single one. We knew nothing at all about her, where she went, what she did when she left the house. She was always suspicious, secretive.’

Ganesh said unkindly that Terry had always struck him as a headcase.

At this point, his father came out to see why Ganesh had stopped working. Mr Patel has a sort of sixth sense which tells him where and when anyone he’s employing isn’t working one hundred per cent. I’ve worked in the shop on a Saturday and I know.

When he saw me, he looked relieved. ‘Ah! There you are, Francesca! We have all been extremely worried about you, my dear. What on earth is going on?’

‘She’s just telling me about it, Dad!’ Ganesh said patiently.

‘Terry’s dead, Mr Patel,’ I told him.

‘That other girl? This is very bad. How has she died?’

His brow furrowed into deep worry lines as I told him. Unwarily I let slip that the police thought the death might be suspicious. As that, he erupted, jabbing a forefinger at me in accusation and looking as if he was going to have a fit.

‘Murder! Murder, are you saying, Francesca? In this street? So near to my shop? In this place where you are living?’ He rounded on Ganesh. ‘Have I not told you so?’

Ganesh snapped back at him in Gujarati and, the next thing, they were at it hammer and tongs with me unable to understand a word.

But I didn’t need a translator. I could guess what it was all about. After a while Mr Patel turned and stamped off back into the shop.

Ganesh, breathing heavily, said, ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Never mind. I understand.’

‘Look, they do like you!’ He thrust out his jaw pugnaciously. ‘Don’t get Dad wrong. I know he flew off the handle then, but that’s because murder on the doorstep isn’t what he expected to hear about. It wasn’t anything to do with you!’

‘Leave it, Gan!’ I said sharply.

The muscles around his mouth and jawline tightened and he got up and began to stack some empty crates, throwing them around with unnecessary force. After a few minutes, when he’d got the anger out of his system, he sat down again and asked in a reasonably normal voice, ‘Yesterday afternoon, that’s when the police think she died?’

‘They haven’t said, but we were all out of the house between one-thirty and around seven when Nev and I got home. Squib came in later. The body was stiff. I’d guess some time during the afternoon.’

He was looking thoughtful. ‘Look, it’s probably nothing, but yesterday afternoon, I noticed this guy . . .’

Irritatingly, he fell silent.

‘Go on, then! Where?’ I prompted in frustration.

‘Hanging around in the street. By the post box on the other side about half way down. I’d never seen him before. I took a good look at him because, well, if a stranger starts hanging around casing places, you do, don’t you?’

‘If he was thinking of breaking in anywhere round here, he was being a bit optimistic!’ I said. ‘No one round here’s got anything worth pinching.’

‘He didn’t look that type. He was a big chap, six-footer, well built, pretty fit. He’d have been aged about, oh, early thirties, and he was well dressed. Casual clothes, I mean, but nothing he’d got down the market. Quality gear. Sort of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ things. Tweed jacket.’

I thought about this. ‘What time was this?’

‘I couldn’t swear to it. Early on, around three or just before. At least, that’s when I saw him. I don’t know exactly what time he arrived. I was in the shop. I came out and there he was. I fooled around outside to watch him, then went inside and tried to keep an eye on him through the window. Then I was distracted and when I looked again, he’d gone.’