Rattling the Bones (10 page)

‘Right, Gardner,’ Ganesh muttered, handing the card back. ‘Although I could print off a dozen cards like that saying I represented Patel’s detective agency.’

‘That’s more or less what I told him. He told me to check out the number.’

Ganesh leaned back in his chair with a faraway look on his face. ‘You reckon it would be a good business, Fran? Investigations undertaken, strict confidence assured?’

‘Not if your Uncle Hari had anything to do with it.’

‘True,’ said Ganesh, shaking his head sadly. ‘He’d want to vet all the clients and none of them would come up to his standards. But it’s an idea. I know you’re not keen on us going into a dry-cleaning business . . .’

‘Gan! This is not the time to discuss your daft idea about us opening a dry-cleaner’s. And a detective agency, no, it’s too complicated. I like doing things my own way, on my own, picking the cases I want to look into. I don’t want to be like Susie taking all kinds of seedy jobs.’

‘I suppose so,’ mumbled Ganesh.

‘Edna!’ I said firmly. ‘We are talking about her and what I’m going to do.’

‘Do nothing,’ he told me, ‘because you don’t know what the set-up is. Whoever is looking for her must have a strong motive. If you interfere you might not be doing her a favour, as you seem to think.’

‘A strong motive doesn’t mean it’s in Edna’s interest. We don’t know it.’There was a pause while we both mulled it over. ‘Perhaps I was right when I asked Gardner if it was about a will,’ I said wistfully. ‘Hey, Gan, perhaps someone has died and left her millions.’

‘Not likely, is it?’ Ganesh said in that dampening way. ‘She’s so old, anyone older than her with millions to leave would have to be ancient and have younger heirs.’

‘In fact she’s not that old, not nearly as old as I imagined. She’s in her sixties.’

He thought about it for a few moments and I waited because Ganesh can come up with some interesting ideas.

‘All right, she could be someone’s wife. Perhaps they split years ago and now the old chap wants to put his affairs in order, because he’s ancient even if she isn’t . . .’ Ganesh was growing enthusiastic with his scenario. ‘And make his will and so he wants to know if she’s alive so he can fix a divorce. You know, make sure she doesn’t turn up and contest it.’

‘Funny you should say that,’ I mused, ‘because she told me she thought she had been engaged to be married once. But she couldn’t remember to whom.’

Ganesh put down his fork. ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen, Fran? This Duane Gardner finds Edna again and talks to her. He won’t get any sense out of her, any more than you did.’

‘She needs protecting.’

‘She’s got protection of a sort. She lives in that hostel.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And the people there ought to know about this.’

‘What,’ asked Ganesh, ‘makes you think they don’t already?’

‘That’s another thing I’m going to find out,’ I told him.

Chapter Five

I returned to the hostel the following day. Mindful of what had happened on my previous visit, I waited until I saw Edna leave and hung around long enough to make sure Duane Gardner wasn’t following her. But Duane wasn’t around in the street nor, as far as I’d been able to establish, was he anywhere else, hidden away. What’s more, this time I had taken the precaution of first checking out the house being renovated.

I had found Tom and Jerry still at work there in their paint-splashed overalls. They bid me a cheery ‘Hullo, darling!’ as I negotiated ladders and pots in the hall and made sure not to lean against any painted surfaces. Everywhere smelled of damp plaster. Before I could return their greeting my ears echoed to a cavernous clang which made me jump and my head ring. This racket originated with a shaven-headed youth busy in what looked as if it might be intended to become a kitchen or bathroom. He was banging pipes with a hammer and pretending to be a plumber.

‘Duane Gardner,’ I said to them all briskly, as soon as the noise level let me. I meant to let them all know I was standing no nonsense. ‘He’s tall and spindly, wears white clothes and a tennis cap. You two let him hide in your van the other day.’ I pointed at Tom and Jerry who looked bashful and sniggered like a pair of school kids.

‘Well,’ I went on, ‘is he here?’

‘No, love, honest,’ they said earnestly in unison.

‘You can look round the house if you want,’ said Jerry.

The plumber made a last deafening assault on the pipes and wandered out to join us in the hall. ‘Whaddya want ’im fer?’ he enquired. He wore a skull earring and jeans cut off at the knees. Instead of revealing pale bare legs like those Duane displayed, the shins and calves of the plumber were tattooed on every available inch of skin. It looked as if he wore particularly exotic stockings. I thought I recognised the hand of Michael in the fantastic nature of the artwork.

‘Do you know Duane?’ I countered. ‘Or have you seen him?’

‘Nah. Just want ter know why you want ’im.’

‘None of your business!’ I told him.

‘Please yerself,’ he said, unoffended, and returned to his pipes.

‘I’d like to look in your van,’ I said to Jerry.

He looked as if he’d like to argue but there was a glint in my eye which changed his mind.

We went outside and he opened the back door of the white van and stood by silently while I inspected a heap of tins and rope and bits of wood.

‘Satisfied?’ he asked when I stood back.

‘Yes, thank you.’ I was still being brisk but polite with it.

‘He in trouble or something?’ asked Jerry.

‘What do you think?’ I asked him.

‘I think he’s in trouble with
you
,’ he replied.

‘Got it in one,’ I said. ‘And if you hide him again, so will you be.’

‘Blimey,’ said Jerry in respectful tones, ‘I wouldn’t want that. I gotta feel sorry for the poor bloke, though.’

Let them all stick together. If they helped out Duane again they still wouldn’t tell me if I asked, but they’d act so guilty I’d know it. I’d have given a lot to know where Duane was, though. He’d probably gone to make a report to whoever was hiring him. I wondered, as I crossed the road to the hostel, whether in that report Duane would mention me.

Again there was no weeping Sandra on the hostel’s steps today, thank goodness. I rang the bell and Simon appeared.

‘Oh, hi,’ he said recognising me.

He didn’t look guilty but he did look uncomfortable. My arrival does sometimes affect people like that. He knew I was going to ask questions. In my experience this provokes two sorts of reaction. There are people who won’t talk and those who won’t stop. I suspected Simon was one of the former but there was no harm in trying.

‘We need to have a word,’ I said, ‘about Edna.’

‘Well, we don’t discuss—’ he began.

‘You are responsible for her,’ I interrupted him. ‘She lives here in your care. There is something you should know. Can I come in?’

He pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose with an index finger and nodded.

Nikki was still sitting in front of the computer in the untidy little office cum sitting room. She, too, greeted me with a laconic, ‘Hi!’

Simon began to make the coffee without asking me this time. I sat down in the chair uninvited. It didn’t seem presumptuous. They seemed to have accepted I was part of the scenery now, even if only on a temporary basis.

‘Where’s your dog?’ asked Nikki, swivelling round on her chair and accepting her mug of coffee from Simon. ‘Ta, Sim.’

‘I left her with a friend.’

This morning I’d left her with Erwin the drummer who has the other ground-floor flat in the converted house where I live. Erwin works nights and sleeps days. But between professional gigs he sits around a lot. He’s happy to walk Bonnie and Bonnie likes him. It may have something to do with the fact that, quite often, she comes back with the smell of marijuana in her fur, a spaced-out dog.

‘What’s all this about Edna?’ Simon asked, settling himself in a facing chair.

‘Someone is following her,’ I said. ‘Not me, I mean, but a private detective called Duane Gardner. He’s about thirty-eight at my guess but from a distance looks younger. He wears a lot of white and a baseball or tennis-type cap. Has he been here?’

They shook their heads. I believed them. I wouldn’t believe Tom or Jerry or the hammer-wielding plumber but this pair, I was ready to bet, were painfully honest. That was why my arrival had made Simon look so flustered. He didn’t want to talk but he couldn’t bring himself to lie.

‘Are you sure about this?’ asked Simon, now even more worried.

‘I’ve spoken to him. He won’t tell me the name of his client or why he wants to find Edna but, as far as I can make out, that’s what Duane has been hired to do, find her and more.’

‘More?’ Nikki asked sharply.

I nodded. ‘He has found her, right? But he’s still following her. He admitted to me he tried to talk to her but she scuttled away. Edna is scared of him. I think she probably knows what all this is about but she wouldn’t say. I think she may be in need of some protection. You, at least, should know about it, in case he does turn up here.’

‘We don’t discuss . . .’ Simon began but tailed off miserably. They were, after all, discussing her with me.

Nikki, her mind ahead of her co-worker’s, asked, ‘You talked of protection. What kind of harm do you think would come to her if this bloke Gardner got her cornered?’

‘I don’t know. He might try and persuade her to go with him, whether she wanted to or not. He acts on the orders of his client. Because I don’t know who that is, or what he or she wants, I can’t guess what Duane might do. But Edna doesn’t want him around. I’m one hundred per cent sure of that.’

‘We can inform her social worker,’ said Nikki. She glanced at Simon. ‘Perhaps we should, Sim.’

Much good that would do, I thought but didn’t say. But then, I didn’t know what anyone could do. Edna couldn’t be locked up just to protect her from Gardner. She wasn’t a danger to anyone or even to herself, left alone. She wasn’t likely to get herself lost, wandering about, because she knew the streets better than the average London taxi driver.

Besides, to keep Edna in any kind of controlled environment would be to kill her. She was like those cats she had befriended in Rotherhithe: a feral creature. I thought of her sitting in the cemetery with her face upturned to the sun’s rays and the look of joy and peace on it. Contentment is rare and a fragile thing. Someone was trying to destroy Edna’s small world of happiness.

I stood up. ‘I just wanted to warn you,’ I said, ‘so that you can look out for him. Thanks for taking me seriously. It is serious, but Edna being Edna, people don’t care.’

Simon said stiffly, ‘We care!’

‘I know you do. That’s why I’m here. Thanks for the coffee. If she doesn’t come back at night here, even once, you should do more than tell the social worker. You should tell the police.’

Nikki said sharply, ‘We try to keep the police away from our residents. They are sensitive people and very easily upset.’

I took it she meant the residents of the hostel were nervous souls and not the boys in blue, although I had to admit that in my experience the police did get upset at the drop of a hat over nothing. However, not in the way Nikki meant.

‘Report her missing, right?’ I insisted. ‘And if the cops won’t take you seriously, ask to speak to Inspector Janice Morgan and when you do speak to her, tell her Fran Varady gave you her name. Inspector Morgan, got it?’

I left them muttering together and looking very concerned; but I felt better because someone other than me was taking an interest in all this. If Duane turned up now at the hostel, he’d get very short shrift. But Duane was cunning. He wouldn’t break cover by going to the hostel. They’d ask too many questions and, even as charity workers, they represented inquisitive officialdom.

But what could I do now? Where could I go? Really I needed to find Duane Gardner, because only he could lead me to his employer. I could phone his office or go there. But that would be to walk into a situation without having taken any precautions. I needed to know more about him first. He probably wouldn’t be at his office, anyway. I’d find Lottie, the girlfriend who acted as general dogsbody, and she’d warn Duane I was sniffing around. I could phone him and ask to meet but I wouldn’t learn any more from a second talk with him than I had at the first.