Risking It All (3 page)

The afternoon was quiet and they didn’t really need me. Ganesh and I chatted about this and that, carefully not mentioning the morning’s visitor. We sold the odd Mars bar and packet of ciggies. Just after four, when Hari returned, I collected Bonnie from the storeroom where she’d been snoozing while I worked, and left the shop by the front entrance. Bonnie needed a walk.

I set off briskly, but I hadn’t gone far, only to the next corner, when a small, moustached figure stepped out of a doorway and confronted me.

‘Francesca Varady?’

‘Shove off,’ I advised, my heart sinking. This had to be the guy who’d been round earlier.

He ignored the brush-off. He was used to it in his line of work. ‘Clarence Duke,’ he introduced himself. ‘Private detective. My card!’ He produced another home-made effort with a flourish.

I again advised him to take himself off asap, this time rather less politely.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he urged.

‘I’m not alarmed,’ I told him. ‘I just don’t want to talk to you. My mother warned me about strange men.’

A funny look came over his face. ‘Your mother?’

I was immediately sorry I’d said it. Since she’d walked out when I was seven, I’d never seen or heard from my mother again. A day doesn’t pass that I don’t miss Dad and Grandma Varady, who brought me up. But my mother I’ve never missed. Kids are resilient. Once I’d realised she wasn’t coming back, I’d cut her out of the scheme of things. I didn’t need her, and obviously she’d had no need of me.

‘I’d like to talk to you on a matter of business,’ said Clarence Duke, attempting an honest expression and failing dismally. ‘Can we go and have a cup of tea somewhere?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I have to walk my dog.’

He eyed Bonnie. ‘Then perhaps I could walk with you and we could have a little chat?’

He was a creep. On the other hand, I’m incurably curious. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But you do the talking. All I’ll do is listen until I get bored. I don’t guarantee any replies.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Clarence. ‘I don’t think you’ll be bored.’

He smiled. He did have bad teeth.

Chapter Two

We strolled along the path by the canal. After we passed under the bridge, I let Bonnie off the lead. She pottered happily ahead of us investigating interesting whiffs, of which there are plenty just below Camden Lock. The canal was on our left. The road on the other side of us was invisible high up behind a bank of dusty shrubs and a brick wall. There weren’t too many other people around. I like it down there by the canal, even though not all the memories it has for me are nice. Someone I knew died down there in that debris-strewn grey-green water lapping at the concrete rim. In my imagination, which is always active, I could picture his body, kept afloat by his old ex-army greatcoat, face down, arms outspread. But like I say, that’s my imagination. I never saw him dead. I just heard about it later.

Thinking about that, I almost forgot Clarence Duke and had to pull myself together, realising he was talking to me. I wondered where he’d left his car. Parking places in Camden are like palm trees in the desert. They’re rare and they draw travellers to them from all directions. Being a motorist hadn’t stopped him donning running shoes. At any other time I’d have laughed. They were so clearly insurance. Few people are happy when they find they’re being trailed by a private investigator. I wondered how many quick getaways Duke had managed – and how many times he’d got caught and duffed up. He was of puny build. He ought to put in some time at the gym.

‘You don’t mind,’ he was saying, ‘if I just check with you I’ve got the right Fran Varady?’

‘I’ve never come across another one,’ I said sourly. ‘And I’m not answering questions, remember?’

‘If you’re not the right girl,’ he pointed out, ‘then I’m wasting my time and yours and I’ll be off. So we might as well be sure.’

‘You are wasting your time, anyway. As far as I can see, you’re definitely wasting mine.’

He gave me a thin smile. He’d had difficult interviewees before. He cut out the chit-chat and got to his questions. ‘Could you tell me your father’s name?’

A prickle of alarm ran up my spine. Sure, I could tell him my dad’s name. But how would Clarence know I’d given him the correct one? Only if he knew something about Dad. As much to find out what, as to oblige him, I told him my father had been called Stephen.

‘Only,’ I said, ‘he was christened Istvan. They were Hungarians.’

‘Yes,’ he said in a way which told me he already knew this. Who the heck was this guy? ‘How about your mother’s name?’

My mother again. I’d spent fourteen years doing my best to forget her, and here was Clarence making me think of her. He had no right to do that. No one had that right.

‘She was called Eva,’ I said. ‘But she skipped out, so don’t ask me anything about her, all right?’ I drew a deep breath. ‘Look, I don’t know who you are. A scrap of card means nothing. Anyone can print them off and stick any daft name on them.’

I’d offended him, not by doubting whether he was legit, but by attaching the adjective ‘daft’ to his name.

‘I can’t help my name!’ he said sharply. ‘I was called after my grandfather. Clarence is no ruddy name to have, I can tell you. I had a hell of a time at school.’

Fair enough, I couldn’t help my name either. But I felt I’d evened things up between us a little. He was wanting to know about my family. He’d been obliged to tell me something about his. Being such a little fellow, if he’d been bullied at school as he said, he’d have been unable to do much about it.

For a moment, I even stopped disliking him. Not that I’d got good reason for taking against him, other than the fact that he was bothering me. But dislike’s an instinct and connected to distrust. I didn’t trust Clarence Duke. But I did sympathise with his having been the target of bullies when he’d been a kid. Children are ingenious and implacable tormentors of other children. They form gangs like stray dogs and hunt like them, seeking the weak, the isolated.

My first year at the private girls’ school Dad sent me to was wretched. I was the outsider and every other girl in my year knew it. They circled me from the first, predatory, waiting. I couldn’t tell anyone. The picked-on child never can. When you’re young, failure to be accepted is a thing of shame to be borne in silence. I couldn’t tell a teacher; that would be telling tales and dishonourable. I couldn’t tell Dad and Grandma. They were congratulating themselves that the sacrifices they were making were worthwhile. They were giving me a good start in life. To have confessed that I was miserable would have distressed and disappointed them. Worse, it would have shocked them and destroyed the image they’d created of the school being full of nice young ladies who didn’t behave like street urchins. They wanted so much to believe I was happy there. I couldn’t take that delusion away from them, especially as I knew that Dad was desperately trying to make it up to me that my mother wasn’t there. Poor Dad. He thought he’d solved my problem for me. Instead of that, he’d made it worse. Dad always had good ideas. I don’t remember any of them working out.

‘Tough,’ I said to Duke. ‘I mean it. Like, bad luck.’

He chuckled to himself, the last reaction I’d expected. ‘That’s until I found out how to deal with it.’

This I wanted to hear. Sooner or later the victim generally susses out a form of defence, though sometimes there are real tragedies when a kid doesn’t. In my case, a talent for acting got me off the hook, to an extent. I could imitate any teacher with a marked manner or voice. I disarmed my persecutors by making them laugh.

The staff members concerned soon guessed what was going on. It must have been then they put me on that staff-room unofficial blacklist. Perhaps they’d been waiting for a chance to put me on it from the first. They, too, knew I was different. My family had neither money nor class. I had a foreign name, no mother, a father who was a loser and a grandmother who was loudly and flamboyantly barmy.

I avenged myself on the entire staff by behaving badly. I saw them as fair game. I thought of myself as some kind of resistance heroine fighting an occupying power. They saw me as a subversive revolutionary who didn’t know and would never learn what was acceptable behaviour, but had a sure-fire instinct for what wasn’t. A rotten apple in their snooty little barrel. From then on, until my eventual inevitable expulsion, life was one long running battle. They brought up the big battalions. I sniped from behind cover and sabotaged their lines of communication.

I got a reputation and in turn that got my original persecutors off my back. Lest you think they admired my fine disregard for authority, my dash and derring-do, let me correct that. My school-fellows scented danger to themselves, that they’d be damned by any kind of association. So they left me alone to rampage among the school rules at will. They were sharper than I was. I was too dumb to realise I was doing harm to no one but myself. The school won the last battle, as it was inevitable they would. I was not, wrote the headmistress to Dad, taking advantage of what the school had to offer. They all felt that was such a pity. I was bright but unruly. I seldom if ever handed in homework on time. When it did arrive, it gave the impression of having been scribbled out on the bus that morning on the way to school. (She was right.) It hardly seemed fair to let me continue to be a subversive element when I wasn’t even benefiting from the education on offer. I was out. Poor Dad. Poor Grandma. I’d like to add, poor me. But seeing as I’d brought it all on myself, I’ve never been able to indulge in self-pity. Just as well.

So it was with real curiosity that I asked Duke, ‘How?’

He wiped the smug look from his weasel features and gave me a funny sideways glance, as if judging how I’d take what he was going to say. ‘Everyone’s got secrets. Even school bullies. In fact, especially school bullies. So you find out what the secret is and you let them know you know it. Then they leave you alone.’

I could see how he’d ended up a private detective. His investigations had started early, sneaking around finding out the sordid little sins and embarrassments that schoolkids hide behind bluster and aggression. He could finger this one for shoplifting. That one’s mother was on the game and had been up before the magistrates again. Another one lived in unbelievable squalor with drunken parents. The RSPCA had been round to rescue the dog, but the child had been left to social services and they’d done sod all. Clarence had put himself in the position of being able to start a whispering campaign, and even the most violent playground thug is powerless against that. I understood it. But I didn’t like it.

‘Something tells me you fancy you know a secret about me,’ I told him. ‘And I’d like to hear what it is. For a start, I’d like to know who hired you. I’m entitled to be told, I think.’

‘Eva did,’ he said simply. ‘Eva Varady, your mother.’

I stopped dead and whirled to face him. He looked alarmed, as well he might. I guess my expression told him this wasn’t welcome news. We were about the same height and I think I’m pretty fit. It’s not only men who can dish out the aggro. He backed off a little and then hopped back some more when I yelled in his face:

‘That’s a lie! She didn’t. She couldn’t have. It’s not true. She’s gone. She’s dead!’

He put his head on one side in that bird-like way of his and dealt me another of his strange looks. ‘Who told you she was dead?’

I was silenced. No one had told me. I suppose, as a child, I’d decided in my own mind that she must be. She had never come back for me. Death was the only acceptable explanation. Later, I’d assumed that I must be as dead for her as she was for me, even if we were both living. The idea of my mother as a flesh-and-blood creature intervening in my life had become too incredible even to be imagined. I still couldn’t imagine it. This had to be some kind of trick. Who was pulling it and why or what he or she hoped to gain, I couldn’t even guess. But that was it, it must be. I seized the explanation, demanding, ‘Who put you up to this? What’s your game? If you think I can’t deal with a slimy little runt like you, you’re badly mistaken. I don’t like people trying to put one over on me and I always do something about it.’

But even as the words left my mouth, I knew in a small cold corner of my heart that it was going to turn out to be just as he’d said.
She’d
sent him. Any other explanation was grasping at straws. She’d walked out and now, on this cold, overcast February morning by the canal, she’d walked back in again in the person of this sad little bloke. How could she do this to me? And why?

Clarence Duke was looking hard done by. ‘You asked me,’ he snivelled. ‘So I told you. That’s what you wanted to know. It’s always the bloody same. People say they want the truth and when they hear it they go off the deep end and start yelling. No one put me up to it, except Eva herself. It’s my job. I do things for people. Things they can’t do themselves. She wanted to find you so I found you for her. It’s a job to me, right? You needn’t make it sound so personal. What’s it to me whether you’re happy about it or not?’