Running Scared (2 page)

I could have argued, and perhaps I should have done, but in the end, it wasn’t any of my business. I didn’t doubt Hitch had given Ganesh the phone number of a ‘supplier’. But I’d be willing to bet that, if Gan rang up, on the other end of the line would be some mate of Hitch’s, sitting in a lock-up garage filled with dodgy goods. Ganesh is stubborn and always wants to know best. He wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say. So why not let him get on with it? A new washroom would be nice. But that Ganesh, of all people, should behave like this took me aback. He was usually so sensible, never did anything without examining it from all sides first, never acted rashly, never gambled and never did anything which would upset his family (other than befriend me, an act which had them dead worried).

I let it go and concentrated on my coffee. Ganesh obviously thought he’d won the argument so that put him in a good mood. An air of truce hung over the shop.

That’s when the door opened. At first the only thing I was aware of was a cold draught which ruffled all the magazines on their shelves and sent the crepe chains threshing. A red one and a turquoise, twisted together, fell down. A squall of rain spattered the tiled floor. More tinsel fell off the shelves. We both looked up. Silhouetted in the open door was the figure of a man. He stood there briefly, steadying himself with one hand on the doorjamb, then staggered towards the counter and grabbed at it for support. Ganesh stretched out a hand towards the jemmy he keeps under the counter for opening boxes and fending off drunks. I stood there rooted to the spot, horrified and fascinated.

I faced a Halloween mask – gaping mouth, bulging eyes, streaked scarlet with gore which poured from a cut above one eyebrow, filling the eye-socket beneath. More blood dribbled from both nostrils. I knew I should do something, but I couldn’t move. The clutching fingers scrabbled at the wooden surface, inarticulate sounds issued from the mouth and, with a last throaty gurgle, the intruder slid beneath the counter and disappeared from sight. A strand of silvery fronds floated after him, undulating gracefully in the disturbed air currents.

His disappearance jolted both of us into action and we raced round the other side. He was sitting on the floor, back to the counter, legs splayed, bloodied head grotesquely crowned with the tinsel strand.

‘Cripes,’ said Ganesh. ‘Get a cloth, Fran.’ He ran to the door, looked up and down the street, twisted the notice on the glass to ‘Closed’ and locked us in. Whoever had done that to the man on the floor, we didn’t want them joining us.

We divested our visitor of his tinsel crown, got him to his feet and propelled him into the storeroom. He stumbled along between us, gasping, but, apart from the obvious, apparently not otherwise injured. We propped him on a chair and I ripped open a box of Kleenex to mop up the blood.

‘Haven’t you got something else?’ hissed Ganesh, who even in a time of stress realised he had to write off that box of tissues as no-sale. ‘Couldn’t you have used loo paper?’

‘Make him some tea!’ I snapped.

Our patient gurgled and seemed to be regaining his wits. His nose wouldn’t stop trickling blood so I wedged wads of tissue in both nostrils and told him he had to breathe through his mouth.

Ganesh came back with a mug of tea.

‘Thag you,’ mumbled whoever-he-was.

‘What happened, mate?’ asked Ganesh. ‘Was it a mugging? You want me to call the cops?’

‘Doh!’ cried the other in great alarm, sloshing tea around.

‘Keep still!’ I ordered. ‘You’ll start bleeding again. Perhaps he ought to go to casualty, Gan. He could have broken his nose.’

‘Doh, doh! I dode want dat!’ The stranger decided he couldn’t communicate with both nostrils bunged up, so removed the blood-sodden wads and threw them in the waste-paper basket. I waited for a fresh scarlet waterfall, but it didn’t come. My first aid had worked.

‘No police,’ he said firmly. ‘No hospital. I’m all right now.’

‘Please yourself,’ said Gan in some relief. He didn’t want the law in his shop. That sort of thing puts customers off. Nor did he want to take time to drive the guy to the nearest casualty unit. ‘So long as you’re OK, right? You were unlucky. It’s safe enough round here in daylight, usually.’

The victim mumbled agreement. ‘Yeah, I had a bit of bad luck.’

I wondered if he was going to give us any details, but apparently not. He was patting the inside pocket of his coat and progressed from there to the side pockets. Eventually he pulled out a handkerchief and passed it gingerly over his bashed features. When he took it away, it was freely smeared red. He studied it with interest.

Ganesh was getting restive. ‘Look, mate, I’ve got to reopen the shop. I can’t stay closed much longer. I’m losing trade. You can sit here as long as you need. Take your time, right?’

‘I’m really sorry about this.’ Our visitor looked stricken. He thrust away the handkerchief and began to fumble again at the inner pocket of his overcoat. ‘I realise this is costing you money. Let me make it up.’

Now up to that moment, neither Gan nor I had doubted our friend had been mugged. So we were a tad surprised when out of the pocket came a wallet and out of that came a tenner. It wasn’t alone in the wallet. It had some company, as I could see – a couple of fivers and a twenty at least.

I met Ganesh’s eye. He was thinking what I was thinking. This wasn’t a mugging. If muggers had had time to dish out that amount of facial decoration, they’d have got the guy’s wallet for sure. Come to that, he still had his wristwatch and a gold signet ring. I couldn’t make out the initials on the ring, which was a pity. They were sort of swirly and tangled up but one might have been C.

Our visitor was looking anxiously from one to the other of us. He’d misunderstood our exchange of glances. ‘Not enough?’ he asked and made to add another note.

‘No, I mean yes, that’s fine!’ Ganesh took the tenner. We had shut up shop, after all.

I took a more critical look at our guest, who’d suddenly become very interesting. He was in his thirties, a biggish chap, wearing a dark suit under that charcoal-coloured overcoat. His white shirt was blood-spattered and his tie askew. The damaged eye was swelling shut. He wasn’t looking his best, but even so, he wasn’t bad-looking. Still, there was something about him I couldn’t quite fit together. He was dressed like a business type but didn’t look like a man who spent his life in an office. There was a faint odour of nicotine about him which suggested he was a heavy smoker and offices tend to be smoke-free zones these days. You see the exiles, lurking unhappily in the doorways at street level, puffing furtively as they try to keep out of the rain.

On the other hand, he wasn’t particularly an outdoor type, though he sported a recently acquired tan. Perhaps he’d been on holiday. It wasn’t fair to judge in the circumstances, but to my eye his suit and coat weren’t quite right. They were too well worn and unfashionable, the sort of clothes someone might keep in the wardrobe for the odd occasion when he needed to impress, but didn’t wear day to day. His trousers weren’t kept up with the snazzy braces they hand out to high-fliers with their business diplomas, but by a tooled leather belt with a fancy brass buckle which was definitely leisure-wear.

You see why I consider myself to be quite a good detective. I notice these things.
You know my methods, Watson.
Here, I deduced, was a youngish, fit man who normally dressed casually but left home today tricked out to look prosperous and businesslike. Why? To impress someone. Not a woman. Not in that coat. No, a bloke, the sort who’d be wearing a snappy suit and wouldn’t be impressed by chinos and a leather jacket. He’d set off to do a bit of serious business, but whoever he’d met had duffed him up. It suggested more than one person, because our new friend here looked well able to handle one assailant. For my money, he had set up a meeting with someone dodgy, perhaps even someone who’d had a minder with him, and it hadn’t turned out as he’d wished. He shouldn’t have gone alone. Unless, of course, he had good reason for keeping his business private.

Eat your heart out, my old violin-scraper.

‘I don’t want trouble,’ Ganesh was saying. ‘So, whoever’s after you, do you think they’re still out there, looking around? Will they come in here?’ Before the other could speak, he added, ‘Look, I’m not prying, but it wasn’t a mugging, was it?’

I chimed in with, ‘One mugger would’ve thumped you while the other grabbed your jewellery and dosh. Ganesh and I mean, if you’ve got a private fight that’s your affair. But we don’t want the shop damaged.’

‘Don’t suppose the insurance would cover it,’ Ganesh added, ‘seeing as we didn’t call the police.’

The stranger took his time thinking about his answer to all that and I didn’t blame him. ‘Take your point,’ he said at last. ‘Truth is, I don’t know who’s out there, if anyone. I’m pretty sure they don’t know I came in here. They might be still scouting around for me, I suppose.’

He began to struggle up out of his chair. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’ll take my chances.’

He sounded brave and doomed, like that chap who went with Scott to the Antarctic and walked out into the snow when the rations ran low. It seemed to call for some responding gesture on our part. Not for the first time I spoke up when I should’ve kept quiet.

‘I tell you what,’ I said, ‘I’ll slip out the back way, stroll round to the front as if I was coming here to buy something, and see if anyone’s hanging around.’

‘Take care,’ Ganesh said, worried.

I had a question for the man. ‘Who should I be looking for?’ (Yes, I know it should be ‘whom’ – I went to a good school where they fussed about that kind of thing – but I was under pressure.)

‘They’re in a car,’ he said. ‘A silver-grey Mercedes. They stopped at the traffic lights down the block. I got the door open and rolled out into the road.’

‘They’, were careless, I thought, and they’d lost their man. Whoever was paying them wouldn’t be pleased. They’d be moving heaven and earth to get him back.

‘Nearly got run over by a bloody bus,’ said our visitor, aggrieved.

‘Is that when you smashed your nose?’ Ganesh asked sharply.

‘Do me a favour. Look, if you can see the car, two guys in it, one small, one big with a ponytail, that’ll be them. But I reckon they don’t know I came in here. My bet is, once they saw I’d got away, they burned rubber getting out of here.’ He was quite perking up. I had a suspicion this wasn’t the first tight corner he’d been in and squeezed out of. Curiouser and curiouser.

I had to ask. ‘Why’d they do it?’

‘Misunderstanding,’ he said, and that was as much as I was going to get. I hadn’t really expected more.

‘You watch yourself,’ muttered Ganesh to me.

‘It’ll be all right,’ said our guest, not altogether gallantly. ‘They won’t be expecting a girl.’

I hoped they weren’t as I let myself out of the back door. I pulled up the collar of my fleece-lined denim jacket to keep out the rain and hide my face, made my way along the alley at the back of the shop, into the side street and back to the main road again.

There was a bus stop there, so I lingered by it, scrutinising the traffic as if waiting for my bus. The street was fairly busy – taxis, vans, cars, one or two motorcyclists. No Mercedes. Double yellow lines precluded legal parking for most of its length and the only stationary vehicle was a red Post Office van.

I turned round and leaned nonchalantly on the metal post. The people passing along the pavement were the usual mob, mostly women at this time of day, some with kids. One or two of the men who passed looked scruffy but none of them like a minder. No ponytails. This was an open bus stop without a shelter and I was getting wet. I put up a hand to wipe water from my hair. A split second later, there was a growl of tyres behind me. Intent on the pavement, I’d failed to observe the arrival of a double-decker. A woman got off. The bus throbbed expectantly and I realised I was meant to board it.

‘You getting on or what?’ the driver shouted at me. I waved a negative at him. ‘You hailed me!’ he bellowed.

‘No, I didn’t!’ I shouted back.

‘You bloody did. You put your hand out.’

‘No, I didn’t. I was rubbing my head.’

‘I gotta schedule to keep, you know!’ he informed me.

‘Well, go on and keep it, then!’ I’d had enough of this.

He gave me a dirty look as he accelerated away. There was a man who lacked the Christmas spirit.

If anyone had been watching, that would have blown my cover, so I might as well go back and report all clear as far as I could see.

I strolled up to the shop. Ganesh, framed in gold, was standing on the other side of the glass door, peering between a sticker advertising Mars bars and one advertising Rizla cigarette papers. At my nod, he flipped the closed sign to open, and unlocked the door.