Rattling the Bones (14 page)

I spoke absently. My mind was running on well ahead of the point the conversation had reached. Morgan was waiting patiently. She could see I was reasoning it out. But I remained puzzled. I’d sat near to Duane in that Golders Green coffee shop eating fish and chips for about three-quarters of an hour. He’d worn a sleeveless top and I’d had ample opportunity to spot the signs if there had been any to see. Regular needle users make such a mess of their arms I could hardly have missed.

‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ I said. ‘I know the postmortem hasn’t been carried out yet, but there has to be something else about the body that brought you round here to see me so fast. What about signs of violence? I didn’t see any, but then, I wasn’t looking.’

Yet I had been suspicious and asked Susie if she noticed anything odd or different in the office - a corpse on the floor aside. There was no way I could accept Duane had just dropped down dead there for me to find. I know coincidences do happen, but this hadn’t been one.

Morgan said slowly, ‘Although there has been no proper autopsy yet, a preliminary examination of the body has found a bruise on the back of his head.’

‘Shit,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘he might have acquired that when he fell. He was found sitting with his back against the wall, I understand. You didn’t move him, either you or Mrs Duke, before the police arrived?’

‘Neither of us even touched him. Susie was going to shake his shoulder because she thought he might just be unconscious but she changed her mind.’

‘So he might have fallen backwards.’ Ganesh had been following all this with furrowed brow and now broke in. ‘And as he fell he struck his head against the wall behind him, then just slithered down to a seated position.’

‘Yes, indeed he might have done that,’ agreed Morgan in a way which told us she didn’t believe it happened that way for a minute.

‘Are you saying, or hang on . . .’ I paused to rephrase it. ‘I know you are not saying this, but is there a possibility he was coshed and then someone jabbed a needle full of heroin or some other substance in his arm?’

The postmortem would tell if a fatal overdose or a contaminated substance had killed Duane. If it had, and he wasn’t on drugs himself, then someone else administered it to him. Normally he’d have resisted unless, of course, he couldn’t for whatever reason. The most obvious would be that someone had knocked him out first.

Ganesh muttered something and was so distressed he took another deep swig of his wine and didn’t even blink.

‘We’ll know in the morning,’ said Morgan soothingly. ‘Now, are you going to talk to me, Fran?’

‘Oh, all right,’ I said.

Morgan fished a small tape recorder from her pocket and put it on the elephant table amid the glasses.

‘Oy!’ snapped Ganesh. ‘What about this being an informal call?’

‘It’s all right,’ I said wearily. ‘Switch it on. If they’ve got it all on tape then perhaps they won’t keep coming back and asking me the same daft questions all over and over again, Gan.’

‘Just watch what you say!’ he ordered.

‘I know!’ I said irritably.

‘Yes, and I know you. It’s all that business about being an actor. Stick you in front of a mike or in front of that tape recorder there and you react like you’re on stage. Cut out the dramatic flourishes, right? You’re not auditioning for a part.’

Morgan switched on her little gadget and it began to whirr softly. ‘Interview with Francesca Varady,’ she informed the room. She glanced at her wristwatch and added the time and for good measure, the location.

I explained about seeing Edna and remembering her from the Rotherhithe days, about her running away from Duane and my attempt to follow him. I told her about the hostel and Simon and Nikki, about following Edna to Golders Green and meeting up with Duane Gardner again in the cemetery there.

‘I didn’t make any arrangements to meet him again.’ I finished. ‘I didn’t tell him of my connection with Susie’s agency. He shouldn’t have known anything about it. I had the shock of my life when I walked into Susie Duke’s office and found him.’ I hesitated and then repeated, ‘I only
found
him. I hadn’t arranged to meet him there. I told you, he shouldn’t even have known I could be reached through the agency.’

‘Yet you are assuming,’ Morgan pointed out, ‘that he
had
gone there to find you.’

Ganesh joined in at that point to say, ‘Fran might be assuming that, but I’m not. Gardner was in the detection business and might have had half a dozen reasons to visit a colleague in the same line of work. He may have gone there to find Susie Duke because he wanted her help in some professional matter. That Fran turned up was just bad luck.’

‘You seem to have a lot of bad luck of that sort, Fran,’ observed Morgan, giving me a funny look.

‘I don’t ask for it!’ I snapped.

‘Perhaps you do, Fran,’ she argued reasonably and to my annoyance I could see, from the corner of my eye, Ganesh nodding agreement. ‘You take too much interest in what’s going on around, could that be it?’

‘I’m a concerned citizen,’ I told her. ‘We’re always being told to keep our eyes open for anything dodgy, aren’t we?’

She nodded, ‘Of course, and if you should see anything, you
report it straight away to the police
, right?’ She had that minatory gleam in her eye that I knew so well of old.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, ‘as if you’d have been interested in Edna.’

‘It’s always worth trying me,’ she replied. ‘I have a lot of respect for your intelligence, Fran.’

Before I could recover from the shock of this unexpected endorsement, she added:

‘But I often don’t think much of your judgement. Before you do anything else, Fran, think!’

She got up to leave at that point, abandoning her wine. ‘Here,’ she said, holding out a scrap of card. ‘You can reach me on this number, should you think of anything.’

‘See?’ said Ganesh smugly when Morgan had left. ‘I’m not the only one warning you. Do like she says, will you, in future? Think before you get into things!’

‘I’m thinking,’ I promised him. ‘I’m thinking.’

I was too; I was thinking what I could do next about this business. I wasn’t going to let it drop and to do her justice, Morgan hadn’t asked me to do so outright. She’d known I wouldn’t and although she’d never admit it, I had come up with some pretty useful information in the past. If I read the signs right, then she was prepared to turn a blind eye to my activities over the next week or so, provided I didn’t tread too heavily on police toes.

Or, at least, that’s how I chose to read it.

I couldn’t do anything until Ganesh had also left and by that time it was too late to phone anyone. I had to wait until morning. I chose breakfast-time because I guessed that Duane and Lottie probably ran the business from their home address. I wanted to catch her before she went out for the day. There was a chance I’d only get a recorded reply but I was in luck.

‘Yes?’ That was all she said. She didn’t give the name of the business. In the circumstances she didn’t need professional enquiries just now. ‘Is that Lottie Forester?’ I asked.

A pause. ‘Yes,’ the girl repeated. Her voice sounded young and guarded. She’d been dealing with the police. Perhaps now she thought I might be a reporter from a local rag. If a private investigator is murdered, the greenest cub reporter sniffs a good story. It wouldn’t surprise me if she hadn’t had a reporter or two knocking at the door already and, if not, she certainly would do soon.

‘My name is Fran Varady,’ I said. ‘Did Duane mention me to you at all?’

‘Yes.’ The reply hadn’t changed but her tone had, gaining a note of hostility. Was she going to blame me for what had happened to her boyfriend?

‘I’d like to come and see you,’ I said. ‘I think we need to talk, Lottie. I realise it’s a bad time and I’m really sorry about what’s happened, but it’s not going to get better for a while. This can’t wait that long. We both want to know the same thing, you and I, don’t we? We want to know who killed Duane.’

I thought I might get the standard affirmative reply but instead she said crisply, ‘Come this morning. Can you get here by half past ten?’

‘Make it eleven to be sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to find you.’

‘We’re in the
A-Z
,’ was the terse reply. ‘You can get a suburban train out of Waterloo. Get off at Fulwell station. We’re near the golf course.’ She hung up.

It occurred to me, as I did so, that I was intending to call on someone in mourning and almost certainly in deep shock. To describe my proposed action as tactless was an understatement. But I didn’t have time on my side. The police might already have told Lottie not to talk to anyone. I wasn’t just anyone: I was the person who had found the body. But if she had time to think about it, and time to recover some composure, she might clam up on me and I’d get nothing.

I thought wryly that perhaps I’d missed out on a career with the brasher end of the tabloid press world. Their reporters work on the same principle. Get in quick or you’ll get no story. I felt ashamed but still determined. ‘Bonnie,’ I addressed her aloud and she cocked an attentive ear, ‘Susie thinks I’m a natural for the detection business but really, I’m not. I’m too sensitive.’

‘Like how . . .’ Ganesh’s voice seemed to echo in my ear in an unpleasantly sarcastic tone.

‘I’m misunderstood,’ I told Bonnie.

This time even Bonnie’s expression seemed to say, ‘Oh, yeah?’

She wasn’t at all as I’d expected although, to be honest, I wasn’t sure what I’d thought she’d be like, other than understandably distressed. From her voice she’d sounded young and educated. On the other hand, from my brief acquaintance with Duane I’d imagined his partner would be someone a bit freaky like him. You have to be fairly tough to deal with the day-to-day seediness of life seen from the private detective’s viewpoint. Susie used blond curls and a bouncy personality as a weapon. But Susie wasn’t Duane’s type. I imagined someone in unisex clothing, with cropped hair and smoker’s complexion.Yes, that would be more in Duane’s line.

When she opened the door to my ring I found myself looking at a young woman not a great deal older than I was, certainly no more than twenty-six or -seven. She was very pretty, contrary to all my expectations. Poor Duane had been no hunk. But this girl was almost beautiful and if her eyes hadn’t been reddened from weeping and shadowed underneath from lack of sleep, she would have been stunning.

She put me in mind of a Botticelli painting, with long abundant reddish hair which kinked naturally and if cut short would have curled. Her face was oval and her greyish-green eyes thickly lashed. She was slim and wore a full cotton skirt in three contrastingly patterned tiers, gipsy-style. With it was teamed a figure-hugging black top with three-quarter length sleeves and a deep V-neck. Her tiny feet were shod in tightly-fitting pointed black fashion boots with very high heels. It was almost as if she stood on tip-toe and the resulting effect reminded me of pictures I’d seen of women with bound feet in old China.

I wore clean jeans and a top and because I had my
A-Z
booklet together with a notepad with me, I also had a little black leather backpack, contrary to my usual habit. So far so good, plain but professional (I hoped), but I did wish I’d had time to do something about the colour of my hair, its crude red dye contrasting unfavourably with Lottie’s natural auburn curls.

I’d found the house easily enough. It was a thirties-built detached suburban villa with a double-bay frontage and garage to the side reached by a weed-pocked gravel drive. It was only a short walk away from a golf course which turned out to be a private one. In this part of the world a house like this would cost a fair bit of money. People with that kind of income don’t swing a golf club with any old Tom, Dick or Harry.

I had stared up at the frontage. Although it could do with some paint and TLC, it didn’t appear to be divided into flats or to have suffered the even worse fate of being turned into student bedsits. You can tell such places by the mismatched curtains and rooms obviously in some use other than that originally intended; bottles of washing-up liquid propped on bedroom windowsills. There were no battered bikes in the neglected forecourt and no name cards by an array of bell-pushes. The absence of all that surprised me. I wouldn’t have thought Duane and Lottie could have afforded to rent the whole place, unless the detection business was doing exceptionally well in this nook of suburbia. As to having a mortgage on it, that didn’t bear thinking of. A pair of city high-flyers with no dependants might manage it but not a youngish couple of hand-to-mouth amateur ’tecs.