Asking For Trouble (9 page)

‘Well, it helps, Francesca,’ Janice said encouragingly.

‘Not much,’ I told her.

‘No, not much,’ she agreed. She was honest, at least. But I still didn’t trust her.

Since she was feeling generous towards me, I asked her about the post mortem. ‘Is this or isn’t this a murder inquiry? If not, why do I need an alibi? If it is murder, I should be told so, outright. I don’t have to cooperate if I don’t know what’s going on.’

She didn’t answer at once. She pulled over behind a stall selling curtain material, and twisted in her seat to face me.

‘It’s not that easy to answer your question, Fran. It wouldn’t be the first case where foul play has been suspected and then, after exhaustive and costly inquiries, it’s been decided the injuries were accidental or self-inflicted. People do harm themselves in a multitude of ways. I wouldn’t like to guess how often an investigation’s taken time, money and manpower, everyone’s got frustrated and tired, and still we’ve ended up closing the file. No one likes that. On the other hand, murder has been made to look like suicide before. The killer’s found it easier to try and fake a suicide than to fake an accident. In this case, we’ve an apparent suicide, but with so many inconsistencies about it that we have to be suspicious. Sergeant Parry, who was one of the first officers to see the body—’

I interrupted bitterly, ‘I know what Parry thinks! He thinks we had something to do with it!’

‘No,’ she contradicted me. ‘You don’t know what Sergeant Parry thinks. Despite anything he may have said to you, he’s not leaping to any conclusions about this, nor am I. Parry is a very experienced officer. I, for one, respect his opinion. So, if we haven’t a suicide, what do we have?’

Janice glowered through the windscreen at the billowing net curtaining strung along the trader’s stall ahead. ‘The worst is trying to explain all this to the family. Suicide appals most relatives. They want to believe it’s an accident. Even murder is more acceptable to them. They can’t be responsible for the accident or the murder – but the suicide leaves them with a personal burden of guilt. If I went to Theresa’s family today and said, sorry, folks, the murder theory was a mare’s nest. It was suicide, after all. You know, they’d be more upset than if I went to them and named a killer?’

‘But yourself,’ I persisted. ‘You think that, out there somewhere, is a killer?’

‘Personally and off the record, yes, I think so. But hunches, mine or Parry’s, aren’t enough, even when there’s circumstantial evidence to back them up. Eventually it has to be proved to the satisfaction of a jury. That’s not easy. Juries nowadays mistrust forensic evidence. They shouldn’t but they do. A couple of cases of verdicts declared unsafe which get wide media coverage, and there you are! Unsupported confessions are no longer accept-able. The boundaries of reasonable doubt get hazier every day. I think someone attacked her, that she was either naked or was stripped partially naked in the process, there was some struggle which took place on the floor and the splinters of wood entered her skin. She then received a blow to the head which rendered her either unconscious or semi-conscious. The attacker finished the job, making it look like a suicide. There’s evidence to support all that. But as yet,
I
don’t know why and
I
don’t know who.’

‘I don’t know who, either!’ I hadn’t missed the stressed pronoun.

‘You see why I keep asking about a fight,’ Janice said. ‘If the bruises were come by in an earlier incident, some significant physical evidence drops out of things.’

‘No fight,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘I’m glad you didn’t invent one. It wouldn’t have helped – either of us. I think someone killed her, Francesca. But I need to be sure. I can’t afford a mistake.’

I must have looked surprised because she flushed. ‘You have to understand, there are – certain tensions among police officers as amongst people working together in any job. I have – there are certain people who resented my promotion. They’d like to see me fall flat on my face. Clash of personalities, call it. An office of any kind is a claustrophobic place. You get that.’

She’d said more than she’d intended and looked away, embarrassed.

I was thinking of the blow to Terry’s head. She would have to have been disabled in some way or she’d have put up a fight. Perhaps she did put up a fight and that’s when he hit her. I must have sat there thinking for long enough to make Janice curious.

‘Remembering something, Francesca?’

‘Nothing that matters.’

‘Why don’t you let me decide that?’

I was in no mood to be patronised and said so.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean it to come out like that. But if there’s anything, tell me. You want the killer found, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘He chose to string her up from the light fitting and leave her there to strangle to death.’

‘People get sexual kicks all ways. Maybe he sat there and watched because that’s the sort of thing he likes. There are a lot of very sick people around, Francesca, and a lot of them act and look normal – most of the time.’

‘You don’t have to tell me! Do you think I haven’t come across enough weirdos?’ I couldn’t help sounding exasperated. ‘This wasn’t a sex game gone wrong. This was someone who wanted her dead. Someone who hated her enough to do what he did, quite deliberately and for no other reason than to kill.’

‘So,’ she was watching me carefully with her pale grey gaze. ‘Any ideas who? If you’re so sure, you must have some theory.’

‘I don’t have a theory,’ I told her. ‘But I do know there was someone else in the house that afternoon while we were away. The place reeked of one of those male colognes when Nev and I got home. Ganesh saw a stranger earlier, acting odd. He told one of your boys in blue about it.’

‘He told Sergeant Parry. We haven’t been able to find anyone else who saw the man he described. He’s a friend of yours, Mr Patel, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Sometimes I lend a hand in the shop on a Saturday. But he didn’t make up seeing someone just to help me out.’

‘I didn’t say that. Why should he have felt it necessary to do that?’

They like doing that, the police. They like asking you the sort of questions which, however you answer them, you sound guilty. They have suspicious minds. Even when they try to be fair, as I suppose Janice was, it comes out sounding like a caution. They can’t help it. It’s the mentality they have or the way they train them at police college. I could have told her that Edna had also seen a stranger, well dressed, and too intent on sneaking through the churchyard to notice her or that he’d dropped his cigarettes. But what use was Edna as a witness? Even if I could get her to talk to Janice? From what I’d seen earlier, Janice herself hadn’t been having much luck with Edna. I wondered suddenly why she’d been trying.

‘For about the hundredth time,’ I said, ‘I didn’t have anything to do with her death and I don’t know who killed her or why.’

‘Neither do I, Francesca,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But by the time I’ve finished, I shall!’

‘Bully for you!’ I muttered.

The stallholder, squat, grubby little fellow, had had enough of us sitting there chatting. He came storming up and mouthed through Janice’s window.

‘Listen, darling, this undercover obbo or what? I’m selling a few yards of nylon net, not bleedin’ heroin!’

‘Got a stallholder’s licence?’ Janice asked.

‘Do me a favour, doll!’ he pleaded. ‘Haven’t you coppers got anything else to do but harass honest businessmen?’

‘Get a licence!’ Janice told him.

I could see something was bothering her as we drove off. After a moment she asked, sounding bemused, ‘Francesca, tell me honestly, do I look like a policewoman?’

‘To some people, perhaps,’ I told her diplomatically.

She seemed puzzled.

When I got back to the flat, Ganesh was waiting for me, sitting on the landing. A net of oranges lay on the top stair by him.

He greeted me with, ‘I came to see how you were getting along in this place.’

His voice and manner were more sympathetic than when we’d last spoken at his shop, and put me vaguely in mind of someone visiting a friend in hospital. Dealing with a person who is ill and one who’s having trouble must be similar. The oranges, presumably, equated with taking flowers to the patient. I’ve always thought that it was nicer to take fruit to the sick than flowers. Fruit doesn’t make you think of funerals.

‘Don’t ask!’ I said as I opened the flat door to let us in. ‘I’ve been trawling Camden with Inspector Janice, trying to find an alibi.’

‘And did you?’ Ganesh dropped the string of fruit on the table and gave me a sharp look.

I told him what had happened. ‘It’s something,’ I finished.

He shrugged and looked disapprovingly round the flat. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea,’ he said and went out into the kitchen whence I could hear him rattling crockery.

Whilst it’s always nice to have a lover, sex can get in the way and sometimes what’s needed is just a friend. That’s what Ganesh is, a friend.

A friend is someone you can tell your troubles to, argue with, not see for weeks and then meet again and take up where you left off, all without getting tied up and wrung out emotionally. Problems, I think, are what constitute the basis of the friendship between Gan and me. He has his problems and I have mine. I don’t entirely understand his, nor he mine, but it doesn’t matter. I listen to him and he listens to me. It doesn’t solve anything but it certainly helps.

Of course, I’d be fooling myself if I told you the familiar man/woman chemistry played no part at all. Sometimes I see Ganesh looking at me with half a question in his eyes, and I dare say he catches me looking at him in the same way from time to time. But that’s as far as it’s ever got. Things between us work well as they are and you know what they say, if a thing’s not broke, don’t fix it. Sometimes I think it’s a pity, though.

Right now I felt absolutely whacked. I really didn’t want to talk to anyone, even Ganesh, but I needed all the support I could get.

As we sat in the kitchen drinking the tea he said, ‘I’ve tried asking around too, Fran, customers, mostly. But it’s hard to get anyone to talk about it now. It was a nine-day wonder. Now all they do is moan about our prices. If they ever knew anything they’ve forgotten it.’

‘My impression exactly,’ I said gloomily. ‘But thanks for trying, anyway.’

‘Dad says, he still needs someone in the shop on a Friday and Saturday, if you want to earn some extra money.’

I told him I didn’t think his father really wanted me around the place. I was a bird of ill-omen, filling Gan’s head with ideas of independence and a free lifestyle, consorting with suspicious types, at odds with the police.

‘They like you,’ Ganesh said obstinately. ‘You personally. The other – it’s a clash of cultures. They don’t understand but they still like you.’

‘They think I’ll lead you astray,’ I said unwisely.

He got angry then. ‘For God’s sake, Fran! Do you think I want to spend my entire life flogging spuds and bananas to old women with string bags? Listen!’

He leaned across the table. ‘I’ve been thinking. We both need to get out of where we are. There is a way. If I’ve learnt something from the shop it’s the basics of running a business. You and I together, we could run any kind of business we liked! We can go to the bank, get them to put together a small business package for us! Get one of those Start-Up grants! I’ve been keeping my eye open, looking for a suitable place. And if we needed help with the accounts, to start off, Jay would do that for us, no charge, family.’

It was the most hare-brained idea I’d heard in a long time and coming from Ganesh, whom I saw as sensible, it was unbelievable. He didn’t honestly think it would work, did he? Even if I had the aptitude for business, which I don’t. I supposed his family had been giving him hassle and that’s what had brought all this about, but he’d betrayed himself with the idea of Jay helping with the accounts. With one breath he was tálking of branching out on his own. With the next, he was still relying on the family network.

Rather unkindly I retorted, ‘Forget it. It’s a barmy idea. It’d drive me round the bend. I certainly couldn’t stick your brother-in-law coming round once a week to audit the books!’

‘You might,’ he said touchily, ‘think about it.’

‘I’ve got the police on my back right now. How’m I supposed to think about anything else? I can’t even think straight about what happened at the house any longer!’

He mumbled a bit and I could see he was annoyed with me. But I couldn’t imagine myself, even when the present crisis was over, sitting over the books every evening with or without Jay at my shoulder, trying to make them balance. Worrying about staff and business rates, profit and loss? I think I’d pitch myself out of the window. But it illustrated, if nothing else did, the reason why Ganesh and I couldn’t ever progress beyond friendship. When it came down to lifestyles, he was a traditionalist at heart. Me, I was just me, a gypsy if anything, an urban nomad. No fixed abode, no fixed employment, no fixed anything. Another word for that is freedom.

But none of that helped right now. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings and tried politely to explain to him how I saw it. He said it didn’t matter and took himself off, still looking huffy. Alone, I sat eating the oranges, one after the other. It’s called comfort-bingeing.

I did need the extra money so, in the end, I went over to the shop and helped out. I thought the customers would recognise me and ask me questions, but Ganesh had been right. All they were worried about was making sure I didn’t sell them any bruised fruit and making me pick all the yellow leaves off the greens.

Going back to the flat in the evenings was something I began to dread.

For the first time in my life I was actually afraid, although I didn’t tell Ganesh. I hadn’t been frightened in the squat or in any other place I’d lived in and I’d lived in some crummy ones. But that tower block was unbelievable. The winds whistled round it and right through it and when I woke up in the middle of the night I had a dreadful feeling of being lost in some kind of nightmarish desert. I felt that when dawn came I’d find everyone had gone and left me entirely alone in that place. I can’t describe it. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.