Angel Hunt (14 page)

Unfortunately, Mrs Tuckett spotted me, and I saw recognition click into place in her mind before I had to stand up and do my bit.

That went quickly enough, with no tricky questions. I presumed that Prentice had had a word in somebody's shell-like, or maybe nobody was very interested. Certainly the various court officials who came and went didn't seem interested. And once Hatchard, the CID man who'd come round to Dwyer Street on the night in question, had done his bit and told the Coroner twice that he didn't suspect foul play, then most people seemed satisfied, and I could get back to enjoying my hangover.

I didn't exactly try to sneak out of the Court; funnily enough, most Courts aren't designed with that in mind. Let's just say I tried to leave with the minimum of fuss.

My big mistake was pausing for that half-minute too long to hold the door open for the redheaded girl. I had only just noticed her – so I must have been taking things seriously – but she was worth waiting to be polite to. Her black, suede-look high-heels put her a good three inches taller than me, and a grey checked suit and crisp white shirt offset with a thin red bow tie, and the fake leather document wallet she clutched, gave her a professional air.

She also wore large, red-frame glasses, although she wore them on top of her head, as if to keep in place the shock of ginger-red red hair that she'd rubber-banded into a pony tail down most of the length of her back. As she passed me, I caught a whiff of a clean, peachy perfume – the sort of scent women buy for themselves. She didn't even notice me. You can't win ‘em all; but one or two now and then would be nice. It might almost be worth coming to Court again.

Then it was too late to escape, and Mrs Tuckett was between me and the daylight at the end of the corridor. But that did mean she was also between me and Prentice, who was hovering trying to cut off my retreat as well, so maybe it's true what they say about every silver lining having a cloud.

‘It's Roy, isn't it, luv? That's what they said, wasn't it?' she gushed as she closed on me. I took a lungful of her perfume: the sort men buy for women because they like the ads or they can pronounce the name. ‘I'd like to thank you for coming.'

I hadn't realised it was a party, but I didn't say it. After all, I can be sensitive to other people's feelings. And anyway, I was giving away at least 50 pounds. (Rule of Life No 131: if you ever really have to fight, pick on someone two weight divisions lower. At least two.)

‘It was the least I could do,' I said weakly as she brushed her lips against my cheek.

‘You do remember me, don't you, luv?' she pleaded, searching for eye contact I was trying to avoid.

Behind her, Mr Tuckett sighed loudly. He'd realised a long time ago that he'd married a woman who cuddled complete strangers in the street and probably had a season ticket for West Ham in her handbag.

Behind him, Prentice looked at the ceiling and squirmed with pleasure as Mrs T put an armlock on me and began to walk us both down the corridor.

‘It's Bernice, Billy's mum,' she sniffed. ‘You looked after Billy at university for me – and now this happens.'

She shook her head sadly. I shook mine in wonderment. Where did she get all this from?

‘I ... er ... didn't exactly keep in touch, you know, Mrs Tuckett,' I said lamely.

Her grip tightened. ‘I know how it is, luv. You have your own life to lead. Are you married? Children?'

I shook my head.

‘Neither was Billy,' she ploughed on. ‘He was an only child, you know.'

She said
that
over her shoulder. Mr Tuckett exhaled noisily and said: ‘I'll go get the car,' and left us in the entrance hall. Over Mrs T's head, Prentice hopped from one foot to the other, making ‘get rid of her' movements with his eyebrows.

‘He never had many friends, you know. I hoped that university would bring him out of his shell, but he kept himself to himself.'

I remembered something Bunny had said.

‘Did Billy have a car, Bernice?'

‘No, that was his father's one big disappointment in him.' Just the one big disappointment? I'd have thought that was a good track record.

‘We bought him one, of course, for his twenty-first birthday, but he would never learn to drive. He used to say it polluted the environment. Even with this unleaded petrol we have nowadays, he said it was too late for the ozone layer, or whatever it is.' She paused. ‘Though he had been a bit more interested in driving recently. Kept bringing the subject up, when he was home.'

She dabbed at a watery eye.

‘Why do you ask, Roy?'

I could feel Prentice hovering. He wanted to know why as well. ‘It's just something one of the lads said the other night. Somebody who was with us at university. We were –' I thought up a good lie quickly; they're the best ones ‘– remembering all the times we had when we were students. Somebody mentioned that Billy used to ride a bike.'

Bernice forced a smile. ‘A ten-speed mountain bike,' she said proudly. ‘He asked for one last Christmas and I insisted, even though Barry – Mr Tuckett – thought it a bit childish.'

My God: Barry, Bernice and Billy. Happy Families.

‘You don't think so, do you?'

‘Heck, no,' I said generously. ‘They're very fashionable in the City now. People go utter mega on them.'

Well, they did during the Underground strikes, and I honestly did know a young brat-race type who went to work in the West End on a unicycle. But then, he was in advertising, so you had to make allowances.

‘Billy went everywhere on it, even had a name for it.'

‘Really?' How ridiculous.

‘Larry, he called it. I don't know why.'

‘Did he live at home, Bernice?'

‘Well, we always kept his room for him, and he could come and go as he pleased. He went away a lot, with his work, but he's been back with us for the last year or so, off and on.'

Prentice was frowning at me, wondering where this was all going. I did too. Pretty soon I'd be putting in a claim for ten percent of his salary.

‘What sort of work did Billy do, Bernice? I don't remember him saying anything about a job.'

‘Oh, it was always charity work or his campaigning. He was involved in all the things like Greenpeace, cruel sports, protection of birds, that sort of thing. Animal mad he was. Mr Tuckett thought it was all to get at him, but Billy was very sincere about it. Barry knew there was never much chance of Billy going into the family business, and he was disappointed, but he's not a vindictive man. He let Billy get on with his life.'

At that point, a new, bright red Mercedes estate car eased up to the Court steps. Mr Tuckett was at the wheel, and obviously the family business was doing okay.

‘Will you be coming to the funeral? It'll be a quiet do,' Bernice said softly. ‘We've had to wait for today before we could fix anything.'

‘If you've something to write on, I'll give you a phone number and you can let me know the arrangements.' I could always get Fenella or somebody to answer the phone, and I wasn't in the phone book, so I figured that if I chickened out, I could block her.

She rummaged around in a handbag as big as my trumpet case and eventually found a length of till receipt from a grocery store. From the length of it, she must have had a truck waiting outside the check-out.

As I scribbled the Stuart Street number, Mr Tuckett honked the horn of the Mercedes. Bernice flapped a hand at him in dismissal, so casually that her jewellery hardly rattled.

‘I've just had a thought, Roy, though I know it's an imposition,' she said, cheering visibly. Under other circumstances, I'd have had a snappy answer for her.

I just said ‘Yes?' and as I dropped the pen she'd handed me back into her bag, I noticed that she carried at least two fat rolls of ten-pound notes secured with circular gold clips shaped like salamanders, or maybe alligators. I didn't get that good a look.

‘If you're not doing anything, would you come back to the house with us now? You can stay for lunch.' I must have looked worried. Behind her, Prentice certainly did.

‘It's just … Look, I know it's asking a lot, but I can't bring myself to go through Billy's things. In his room. Barry wants it done, but I won't let him. He won't know what to keep and would probably just throw out everything. And I want to keep a few things to remind me of Billy. Would you do it? Now? Strike while the iron's hot, sort of thing, now we've had the idea? You know what I mean.'

She managed to open her eyes even wider; wide enough to give a suicidal Spaniel decent competition. How could I resist?

Prentice was nodding encouragement.

‘Well … if you think I can be any use …'

‘Oh, thank you, Roy, you're an angel.'

She hugged me, not realising what she'd said.

‘As long as you can give me a lift back here this afternoon,' I said, establishing some ground rules. I wasn't in the adopt-an-orphan business.

‘Of course, of course.'

Mr Tuckett hooted again.

‘Come on, before the old man loses his rag.'

She frog-marched me down to the street, leaving Prentice holding the door open.

He made as if to say something, but I just beamed at him and he had to let it go.

As we approached the Mercedes, Bernice said:

‘Was that a friend of yours? Do you want to ask him along?'

‘Never seen him before,' I said.

 

Some of the people I know regard Hackney as the sticks and half expect to see herds of grazing wildebeest when they come to visit me. In their book, Leytonstone would therefore be real bandit country, and Romford, once you'd convinced them that it wasn't actually off the edge of the map, was probably the Twilight Zone.

Barry Tuckett drove smoothly and quietly, not contributing to the conversation in the back seat, which wasn't really a conversation but Bernice's potted biography of Billy. By the time we got to Romford, she'd said an awful lot but I wasn't any wiser.

The Mercedes slid to a halt outside a fair-sized, 1930s detached house set back from the road by a small garden that had thoughtfully been concreted over. There was a sundial on a plinth in the middle of it, which was quite tasteful, and three faded concrete gnomes, which were anything but. From their expressions, they were wondering where all the grass had gone as well.

Mr Tuckett muttered something about having to get back to work, and Bernice said that would be fine, as she could drop me back in her car. She patted him on the shoulder, and he drove off as she plumbed her bag for a ring of keys that wouldn't have looked out of place at Balmoral.

The house had been furnished with a lot of money badly spent in a mixture of styles. There were also no books anywhere and no immediate evidence of a sound system. I'd noticed two separate burglar alarm circuits on the way in, but I didn't spot anything that wasn't instantly replaceable and therefore over-insurable.

I told myself not to be such a snob.

Bernice said she would show me Billy's room and leave me to it while she made lunch, and did I fancy a drink? I said a large mug of strong, sweet tea would do the job and she agreed, adding that it was the best thing ‘after a shock.' I hadn't been thinking of stress or shock, I'd been nursing a hangover. The adrenalin of going to a Court had kept it at bay so far, but now I could feel the walls closing in again.

Billy's bedroom looked more like a student's room than his pad at university ever had. The posters on the walls were all reproductions of newspaper adverts showing battery farm conditions or dogs and rabbits with various electrodes attached to them. Under one of these someone had added, in pencil, ‘An Animal Auschwitz?'

There was a desk overloaded with papers and two freestanding bookcases, though they held few books. Most of the space was taken up with piles of pamphlets and hand-outs.

I pulled out the stool that Billy must have sat at the desk on, and began to rifle through things in no particular order.

It all made depressing reading. One four-pager told me that around 500 million animals were killed for food in the UK each year. It made no mention of fish, so I supposed that while ‘meat is murder,' fish eating is justifiable homicide. Nearly four million animals were used each year for experiments, 80 percent of which were rodents, which gave the activists a problem, as rats don't have good PR potential. (It's their naked tails. Can you think of a sympathetic animal with a hairless tail? Especially one that moves quickly?) There were hand-outs on ‘cruelty free' cosmetics, positively promoting cosmetic companies who did not drip shampoo into rabbits' eyes in what I knew was called the Draize Test for irritancy. And there must have been a hundred copies of a pamphlet on the campaign against street trading in animals. I remembered reading about the protests over Club Row just north of Spitalfields' market, where a street market in animals had been held since Victorian times. Those particular Victorian values had been shot down about 1983. One up to the libbers.