Mixing With Murder (25 page)

‘Who is Ned?’ asked Ganesh.

‘Lisa’s friend, the one I mentioned to you. He’s all brawn and not much brain, but devoted with it.’

‘Devoted enough to push Ivo in the river?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘I’ve considered it. But let Pereira find that out. It’s nothing to do with me. Provided Vera does as I told her and tells Pereira Ivo came to Oxford to see her, Pereira will lose interest in me. Ivo’s death will go down as a mugging or an accident. Perhaps it really was one of those. I don’t care any more.’

‘Who is Pereira?’

I stared at him. ‘Didn’t I tell you? She’s a copper. I’m sure I told you about her.’

‘Fran,’ Ganesh said firmly, ‘you tell me next to nothing. The first I know about anything is when the police turn up here telling Hari I’ve drowned in Oxford and the Oxford plods have retrieved my mobile from the bottom of the river.’

‘I’ve told Hari I’m sorry about that. I am sorry I lost your mobile.’

Ganesh indicated a leather holder clipped to his belt. ‘I’ve borrowed Usha’s. I’ve given the number to everyone I’ve told Bonnie is missing so that, if they see her, they can ring me wherever I am.’

‘I can’t go back to Oxford tonight,’ I objected. ‘I must stay at my place here in case Bonnie comes home.’

Ganesh went into the kitchen and began making the tea. ‘Listen,’ he called to me from there. ‘Why don’t you go over to your place now and check it out? If she’s not there, you can go on to Lisa’s flat and get the passport - where is this flat, anyway?’

‘St John’s Wood.’

Ganesh came back, a mug of tea in either hand. ‘Blimey, that’s a bit upmarket for a pole dancer, isn’t it? I’d have thought the rent was out of her league.’

‘What do I care where she lives?’ I demanded. Then I broke off and stared at him. ‘All this has scrambled my brain,’ I said. ‘I’ve just remembered Ned told me that when he went to London to see Lisa, before she started working at the club, she lived in Rotherhithe in a rented room in a council flat. She must have been earning an awful lot of money at the Silver Circle to be able to move from there to St John’s Wood.’

‘Dodgy,’ opined Ganesh. ‘The whole thing has been dodgy from the beginning. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I suggest you go and get the passport and take it back to your flat. Stay there tonight. Then take the train to Oxford first thing tomorrow morning. Drop off the passport at Lisa’s house and afterwards come back here. After all, once you’ve given her the passport, you don’t need to stay in Oxford any longer, do you?’

I shook my head.

‘So, do it. Then you’re in the clear.’

That’s why I like talking things over with Ganesh. He makes everything sound so simple.

After I’d drunk my tea I went to my place but there was no sign of my dog. The flat is on the ground floor of a double-fronted house. Each floor has two flats on it except for the attic which is a single conversion. There are also two basement flats with separate entrances. Although Ganesh had already done the rounds there, I knocked on all doors and asked about Bonnie, or pushed notes underneath giving Beryl’s phone number in Oxford. Erwin the drummer, who has the other ground-floor flat, promised to ask all his mates to keep a lookout. I didn’t hold out much hope from this. I’d met some of Erwin’s mates, most of them musicians, affable souls puffing joints at all hours of the day and night and given to memory lapses. Erwin insisted he would keep them looking and I appreciated his wanting to help. There wasn’t anything else I could do, so I set out for Lisa’s flat.

It was getting late in the evening when I got there, about eight. It was pretty quiet everywhere. Lisa had given me a set of three keys. One was the key to the main entrance to the flats and another opened the flat itself. The remaining key was a small one which locked the drawer in which she kept the passport. It was in a bedside cabinet, she’d told me. I couldn’t miss it. It all seemed straightforward.

The flat was in a low-rise block built, by the look of it, some time in the thirties. I let myself into the downstairs hall and shut the door quietly behind me. But not, as it appeared, quietly enough - or else she’d seen me approach.

She popped out of her door, the ground-floor flat to the left, and stood smiling at me. She was eighty years old at least, nearing ninety at a guess, and five feet in height. Her hair was dyed an alarming black and she had piled it on her head and attempted to fix it there with pins. Wisps of hair escaped all over and dangled wildly around her face which was puckered and plastered with lavishly applied pancake make-up. Her mouth was a wobbly scarlet line of lipstick. As for her clothes, she gave the impression she had been hunting in a box of jumble and pulled out things at random. A drooping skirt in Indian cotton hung to her ankles and her feet were thrust into gold Turkish slippers.

‘You are visiting somebody here?’ she asked. She had a strong accent which I thought I recognised. She sounded a lot like my grandmother Varady and didn’t look unlike her.

I pointed upward towards the first-floor flats and attempted to edge round her. She shuffled sideways and continued to block my access to the stairs.

‘Mrs Betterton?’ she asked. ‘I think she has gone to visit her son. He lives in Hendon.’ She peered up into my face. Her eyes were sharp little black roundels on a yellowish background.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not Mrs Betterton.’

‘Ah,’ she said cunningly, ‘the young lady. But she is not there. She has also gone away visiting.’

If she was anything like my grandma, she’d go on asking until I explained myself. I decided to save time and tell her more or less what I was doing there.

I held up the keys. ‘I’ve come to check the flat for her. All right? Make sure there are no leaky taps or anything.’

She looked alarmed. ‘There is a problem with the plumbing? The water will come through my ceiling?’

‘No,’ I said patiently. ‘I just used that as an example. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll pop up and see.’

This time I moved too quickly for her, got past her and was halfway up the stairs before she could react. She didn’t give up, though.

‘I can come with you?’ she called, putting her hand on the banister and preparing to haul herself up after me. ‘In case it is the plumbing?’

‘No need!’ I called back firmly. ‘I’ll let you know if it’s the plumbing.’

I’d reached the upper landing. Lisa’s flat was indeed to the left directly above the remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I got the door open as fast as I could, scurried in and shut it behind me, just in case she had decided to follow me upstairs.

The atmosphere suggested the place had been closed up a while. Scents which had been trapped there when the door was shut lingered in furniture and curtains: a stale smell of cigarettes, fried food and lavender bubble bath. I went to the window and opened it to clear them all out. Then I took a look around me.

Ganesh was right: this did look an expensive hang-out for a pole dancer, even one earning good money. I was in the living room, which had a parquet floor and was furnished with two huge white leather sofas. They faced one another across a glass coffee table of aggressively modern style. There was a large painting of a nude on the wall. The girl in the picture was turned away from the observer but looked back over her shoulder. She wasn’t Lisa but probably a professional artist’s model because the painting was a genuine original and looked as if it had cost a bit. Even I could see it was an extraordinarily erotic picture and it made me feel uneasy. This wasn’t because I’m a prude but because I doubted it would have been a woman’s choice of décor. Those two monster leather sofas also had a masculine look. I wondered if I was in the right flat.

I took a look in the small kitchen which had been left clean and tidy and smelled faintly of good quality coffee and pepperoni pizza.

I turned my attention to the bathroom. There were a lot of used towels stuffed in a wicker basket awaiting laundry day. A large bath towel was draped carelessly over the edge of the bath. I touched it. It was damp. There was still water in the dip surrounding the plughole. Ought it not to have dried up by now? Lisa had been days in Oxford.

I opened the door of a mirror-fronted cabinet and was confronted with an array of cosmetics and toiletries all crammed together, and a man’s electric razor. I closed it and turned my attention to a small pedal bin. It contained a lipstick-stained tissue and a torn piece of thin white printed card. I picked it out of the bin and scrutinised it. It was all that remained of a small box of the kind that one associates with chemist’s shops. Little of the print remained intact but there was enough for me to make out what it had once contained. My unease increased.

But I was here to get a passport and I’d better hurry up and do it. The need to get out of here was becoming overwhelming. I found the bedroom, but only after opening the door to a small boxroom which Lisa had apparently been using as a dressing room. Her clothes hung on the sort of rail on wheels you see in shops. Every kind of outfit was here, not just her professional ones with their spangles and lurex. She had the sort of brimming wardrobe most young women probably only dream of and nothing was cheap. Shoes were lined up by the wall. I counted twenty pairs. Trainers and high boots jostled Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks. Some looked as if they’d never been worn but were the result of a no-holds-barred spending spree.

The bedroom was dominated by a king-size bed decked with a satin quilted throw and numerous fancy cushions, just like you see in the display in a furniture-shop window. There were matching bedside cabinets both with lockable little drawers. I tried the nearer one with my little key but the drawer was empty. I went round to the other side and tried again. The same key worked and the drawer slid open. A jumble of envelopes lay within. I riffled through them until I found one containing a small red booklet. The passport! I pulled it out and opened it. Lisa’s face stared blankly at me in the sort of mugshot you get from one of those photo cabins. I slammed the drawer shut, hastily relocked it and turned towards the door.

As I did the bell rang. Damn, I thought. Old Mother Hubbard downstairs had finally creaked her way up determined to find out what I was doing and why I was so long about it. I wasn’t going to let her inside. Anyway, I’d got what I’d come for. I thrust the passport into my pocket and set out for the bedroom door. I’d stretched out my hand to pull it open when I noticed for the first time the dressing gown hanging behind it. There was something about it didn’t look right and not just the colour, which was dark brown. It was made of silk or a silky type material and patterned with an oriental design.

I hesitated and unhooked it. The doorbell rang again. I ignored it and shook out the dressing gown, revealing the dragon crawling up the back. Not only was it far too big for Lisa, it was the wrong style, or put another way it was designed for a different sex. This was a man’s dressing gown. I put my nose closer to the thing and sniffed. I didn’t think Lisa smoked cigars but the wearer of this did.

For the first time I turned my attention to the built-in wardrobe. If Lisa kept her extensive wardrobe in a separate dressing room, what was in here? I slid back a door. A row of suits and jackets confronted me. On a shelf were neatly folded sweaters. The cigar smell, which had been trapped in there, oozed out and assaulted my nostrils. No wonder Lisa had chosen to house her own clothes elsewhere.

The doorbell squealed a lengthy frustrated peal. The old lady must be leaning on it. I hurried across the living room, pausing to slam shut the window I’d opened, and pulled open the flat door.

Two people stood there, both totally unknown to me, a woman and a man. She was tall and thin and had turned forty although she dressed like a twenty-year-old in tight white trousers and a cropped top which revealed her bare midriff. The skin of her face and arms and the midriff were all evenly tanned and suggested regular use of a sun bed. Her hair was bleached and cut short in a feathery style and her eyes sparkled either side of her pointed nose in a challenging expression.

He was shorter but, to make up for it, broader, giving the impression he was square. He had dark coarse hair, a pock-marked skin and pouched dark eyes. He wore a navy blazer and cream-coloured chinos and a lot of heavy gold jewellery. His dark eyes watched me expressionlessly. I had the feeling he was some sort of minder. Behind them both I could glimpse the old lady from downstairs. She was halfway up the staircase clinging to the banister, a look of triumph on her wizened face. Whatever this visitation was, I reckoned the aged one was responsible for it.

The woman in the doorway took the initiative. ‘About bleedin’ time,’ she said. ‘What you been doing in my flat?’

It was a difficult moment but my life has been spent dealing with difficult moments and the first rule is not to let anyone see they’ve caught you on the hop.