A Lesser Evil (27 page)

What she had meant was that she wasn’t sure it was appropriate to go out and drink so soon after Angela’s death. She supposed she wanted his reassurance it was okay, and she certainly didn’t want to sit there watching him playing with a clock or being reminded of the child whenever she looked out of the window.

It was hot and airless in the flat and Fifi wanted to suggest going to Hyde Park for a walk. She thought she’d feel better getting some fresh air, seeing grass and trees, but Dan seemed to be engrossed in his clock and quite happy to stay in.

Around eight, Fifi glanced out of the window and saw a couple standing outside number 11, looking up at it.

‘Do you think they are journalists?’ she asked.

Dan came over to the window and looked. ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said. ‘More like pathetic horror seekers.’ He grimaced in disgust and went back to his clock. ‘I suppose we’re going to have lots more of them,’ he added a few seconds later. ‘I really wonder at the mentality of some people. What do they hope to see? A corpse hanging out the window?’

Fifi went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, convinced then that Dan had already put the matter behind him, and he thought she should too. But she didn’t see how she could ever put it behind her.

She didn’t hear Dan get up the following morning. She woke at eight to find he had already gone to work, and she felt hurt he hadn’t woken her to say goodbye.

By eleven the heat in the flat was oppressive, the police were over the road again and she was feeling very weepy, so she decided to go down and talk to Frank.

From the hall she could see through to his kitchen, and as the back door to the garden was open, she knew he was out there.

‘Frank,’ she called out. ‘Could you stand a visitor?’

‘Come on out, Fifi,’ he replied.

He found him perched on a stool mending a pair of old boots, and right away she knew he was upset too because he didn’t get up to greet her or ask how she was feeling.

‘Are you feeling miserable too?’ she asked, putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? I still can’t really believe it’s for real. But you must have got such a shock when you came home on Saturday and were told about it.’

‘You can say that again,’ he said dolefully.

‘Thank you for the brandy you sent up. It helped,’ she said. ‘But I can’t keep on drinking to numb it. I don’t know what to do with myself today. At least yesterday I had my statement to make.’

She spoke about how hot it was in the police station, about it being in the paper and how she supposed her mother would read it, then suddenly became aware Frank was barely listening. He seemed to be in a world of his own.

‘What’s up?’ she asked, kneeling down beside his stool.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘There is,’ she insisted. Normally he would have made a fuss of her, made her tea, even given her a fatherly cuddle. But he had gone right into himself, the same way she’d been all weekend. ‘Tell me, Frank, we’re friends, aren’t we?’

‘You’ve got enough on your plate without my worries too,’ he said.

‘Is it something to do with your daughter?’ Fifi asked. ‘Did you get a letter from her today?’

He sighed. ‘No, it’s nothing to do with her,’ he said. ‘It’s just the bloody police.’

‘What have they done?’

‘They came at midday yesterday. While you were still down the nick.’

‘Well, they would come, they talk to everyone when something like this happens.’

He just looked at her, and it seemed to Fifi that any moment he was going to cry. It was clear something had been said that was worrying the life out of him.

‘Just tell me, you’ll feel better if you share it.’

‘It’s that evil bitch Molly,’ he hissed. ‘I reckon she’s told them it was me who killed Angela.’

‘Oh, Frank.’ She half smiled. ‘I don’t doubt Molly has tried to blame half the people in the street, but the police aren’t going to believe her, not about you. You wouldn’t hurt a fly, and anyone around here would vouch for that.’

‘I’ve been tempted to kill Molly several times in the past,’ he said brokenly. ‘She knows that, and now she’s up to her neck in this, she’s trying to wriggle out of it by pinning it on me.’

Fifi might have laughed if Frank hadn’t sounded so completely serious.

‘I think you’ve misunderstood what the police said –’

‘That slag told them stuff about her and me,’ Frank interrupted her before she could finish. ‘She told them we’d been having an affair and that I wanted her to leave Alfie. She reckons I killed Angela because she turned me down.’

Fifi did laugh then, she couldn’t help it. ‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ she said, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘I didn’t think anything could make me laugh today, but that is so absurd!’

‘It might make me laugh too if it wasn’t for the fact someone else told them that I was overheard saying I was going to kill one of her children so it looked like Alfie’s work.’

Fifi sat down heavily on a garden chair. ‘No, Frank, no one would say something like that about you!’

‘It wasn’t a lie, it was true, at least partly.’ Frank hung his head. ‘It was a sort of joke with Stan. We were in the pub the night after Dan was attacked, everyone was saying Alfie must have been in on it and that. I said I’d cheerfully kill any of the Muckles, even their kids. Stan said something about we could kill one of them and let Alfie get blamed for it.’

‘Who told the police this?’ Fifi asked.

Frank shrugged his shoulders. ‘God knows, someone who was in the pub that night, I suppose. It were just a joke. I can’t stand any of that family, not even the kids, but I wouldn’t kill them.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Fifi said soothingly. ‘Everyone around here makes remarks like that. I’ve even heard Mrs Jarvis saying she wished someone would set fire to their house with them all in it. If the police took all the death threats made about the Muckles seriously they’d need the entire London police force here in Kennington to deal with them. But you mustn’t worry about this, Frank. The police like to shake people up. It’s the way they get information.’

‘Well, they shook me right enough,’ he retorted. ‘I mean, if they can find out about a joke you made a few weeks ago, what else can they dig up? I’m really worried about it.’

‘You mustn’t be. For a start, if they thought you’d had any kind of hand in this, they’d have taken you down to the station for questioning.’

‘But they asked me stuff about being in the Army during the war. I got the idea they wanted to know if I’d ever killed anyone.’

‘Had you?’

‘I don’t know for sure. You fire your gun and you see men fall, but there’s lots of others shooting too. You don’t know if it was one of your bullets necessarily.’

‘Well, Angela wasn’t killed with a gun,’ Fifi said. ‘Did they tell you how she was killed?’

Frank shook his head.

‘Well, they think she was smothered with a pillow. That’s hardly the work of an old soldier, is it? Now, let me make you a cup of tea.’

Fifi made the tea, and sat down again in the garden to drinks hers. She wanted to go now, Frank’s gloom was making her feel even worse than she had before. But her customary curiosity wouldn’t quite let her excuse herself and leave. She could see there was something more on his mind, and she felt compelled to winkle it out of him.

‘Tell me what’s bothering you,’ she said after a little while. ‘You know what they say, “A trouble shared” and all that.’

‘If I tell you, will you promise to keep it to yourself?’ he asked.

Fifi promised.

Frank stumbled, faltered and at times stopped altogether as he told her the story of how he’d met Molly on the night of VE Day in Soho. Fifi forgot her own troubles as she listened, hardly believing that staid, rather prim Frank could have sex in a back alley with anyone. But as his story unfolded and he told her of the coincidence that he’d come to live right across the road to the woman, who then blackmailed him, all at once she knew it was entirely true.

‘She snatched everything from me,’ he said bitterly. ‘My savings, the chance of happiness with my daughter and grandchildren in Australia. I could just about forgive all that if she’d left me with peace of mind while June was dying. But she never let up taunting me. Every day I expected that she’d tell June and break her heart.’

‘Are you saying she told the police about this?’ Fifi asked incredulously.

‘Not the truth, so I had to tell them. Like I said before, she said we’d had an affair and I asked her to leave Alfie and run away with me. She claims that I never stopped pestering her, and then when she wouldn’t do as I asked, I got bitter and kept making trouble for her. She reckons I saw them go out for the day and I slipped round the back and killed Angela to spite her.’

‘That is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard,’ Fifi exclaimed. ‘But you really mustn’t worry about this. The police know what Molly’s like, and they’ll see this story of hers for what it is, a desperate attempt to blame someone else. If they really thought you’d done it they would’ve arrested you.’ She felt very sorry for Frank and gave him a hug, saying that the police would have to find his fingerprints or some other evidence to prove he’d been in that house.

‘How were you supposed to know they were going out for the day and leaving Angela behind anyway?’ she said firmly. ‘Even if you had known, and wanted to kill her, you weren’t likely to risk going in there first thing in the morning when so many people might spot you.’

He didn’t respond to that, just sat there with his head hanging down, a picture of misery.

‘You’ve been very kind, Fifi,’ he said eventually. ‘But leave me alone now, there’s a good girl. I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

That felt like a real rebuff, and it hurt because she was only trying to help him. She wanted to ask Frank how the police had left it, whether he was a real suspect or not. But she realized that she wasn’t going to get any real sense out of him, and feeling even sorrier for herself than she had earlier, she went over to see Yvette.

When she didn’t answer the door, Fifi tapped on the window. She could hear the radio so she knew she was in.

Yvette came to the front door eventually, but she only opened it a crack, and her eyes were red with crying. ‘Oh, Fifi!’ she said. ‘I cannot talk to you now, I am too upset, ze police have been ’ere, and all the time they are banging and moving things next door. I must go out to get away.’

‘Come over to my flat then,’ Fifi suggested. ‘I’ll make you some tea and we can talk.’

‘
Non
, I cannot,’ she said, her hands fluttering in agitation. ‘I ’ave the need to be alone.’

It seemed to Fifi that everyone needed to be alone but her. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But if you change your mind, you know where I am.’

A little later Fifi went along to the corner shop to get some bread, and walked into a coven of half a dozen middle-aged woman all gossiping about Angela’s death. None of them actually lived in Dale Street, but all their faces were ones she’d seen around the area.

A woman with a headscarf tied round her curlers and a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth was holding forth about Alfie. ‘He’s been doing it to his girls for years,’ she said with authority. ‘He got the two older ones up the spout and then threw them out. A man that does that ought to be hung up by his feet and a bit chopped off him every day.’

When she saw Fifi, her eyes lit up. ‘You found the kid, didn’t you? What did she look like? How did he kill her?’

Fifi could understand curiosity, but the phrasing of this woman’s questions was utterly repellent and ghoulish. ‘If you’ve got any questions, go and ask the police,’ she said snootily.

The woman was so surprised that the cigarette fell out of her mouth on to the floor. ‘Hoity-toity,’ she said as she picked it up. ‘I suppose your shit don’t stink either.’

Fifi turned on her heel and left the shop without any bread, her face burning. Until yesterday she had felt at home here, now it was as though she was an alien. If it was true that Alfie had got his two older daughters pregnant, why hadn’t someone reported it? What was the matter with everyone round here? Why were they all so spineless?

As she marched indignantly up the street she could see a man at the door of number 3 talking to Mrs Blackstock who lived on the ground floor. She and her husband were frail and elderly, and Fifi had only spoken to them once or twice as they rarely came out of their house.

She guessed the man was a journalist. He was short and thin, with glasses and a very cheap baggy suit.

‘I don’t know anything,’ Mrs Blackstock was saying. ‘My husband and I keep ourselves to ourselves.’

Fifi could see Mrs Blackstock felt intimidated. She was holding on to her walking stick so hard that her knuckles were white.

Fifi tapped the reporter on the shoulder. ‘Leave her alone,’ she said. ‘And I don’t think you should be pestering people for information when a little girl has just died,’ she added as he turned to face her.

‘Would you be Felicity Reynolds?’ he asked, his eyes lighting up behind his glasses. ‘You found her, didn’t you? Would you like to tell me about it?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Fifi said. ‘Now clear off back to whatever cesspit you crawled out of and leave this lady in peace.’

He looked surprised and backed away. Mrs Blackstock quickly shut her front door and Fifi went home.

As she closed the front door behind her and walked up the stairs she began to cry.

She couldn’t cope with all this, the horror in her own head, police questions, journalists and now other people trying to put their anxieties on to her. She’d lost her baby, got a broken arm, her parents had disowned her, and even Dan wouldn’t stay home to look after her.

What had happened to her life? Before she met Dan it was all so easy and nice. She liked her job, she had good friends, she came home every evening to a hot dinner and even her clothes were washed and ironed for her. Now she was living in a slum, and everything was falling around her ears.

And it wasn’t going to get any better either. She’d have to go to court when the trial began, forced to give evidence with that monster Alfie sitting there in the dock looking at her.