Keeping Bad Company (14 page)

‘I just wanted to talk to someone,’ I explained.

She peered into my face. ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘You’ve clearly had a terrible shock. You need a drop of brandy.’

I hadn’t realised my face betrayed so much or just how shocked I was. The brandy was welcome, though it’s not something I drink much of. I spluttered over it a bit and said I was sorry to have disturbed her. The large, old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg manual typewriter still stood on the table with what appeared to be a fresh pile of paper beside it.

She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, not at all! What’s happened?’

I couldn’t tell her everything, so I just said, ‘An old man I knew died. His name was Albie Smith. He was just an old tramp, but he used to have a variety act, years ago. He had a troupe of performing poodles. He – ’ I hesitated. ‘A jogger spotted him in the canal and called the police.’

‘Oh dear.’ Daphne leaned forward, her hands clasped and resting on her bony knees, which were outlined through her jogging pants. She had a different pair of hand-knitted sock-slippers on today. ‘Years ago,’ she said, ‘I remember seeing some performing dogs at, let me see, oh, at the Theatre Royal in Portsmouth. They were very clever. One of them pushed another one along in a little pram.’

‘That might have been Albie’s act,’ I said. But she couldn’t remember the name of the turn and anyway, he’d probably had a stage name.

‘Why did he fall in the canal?’ she asked.

‘The police think he was drunk. That’s to say, he probably was drunk.’

How he got drunk was another matter, but it didn’t concern Daphne.

It concerned me. I should have made sure Albie spent the previous night in a place of safety. At the very least I could have gone with him to collect Jonty and chivvied them both elsewhere, somewhere they could have drunk themselves into a stupor hidden from Merv.

‘What are you thinking?’ Daphne asked.

‘I saw him last night. I wanted to take him to a hostel, but he didn’t want to go.’

‘There might not have been a place free for him,’ she said. ‘And if he didn’t want to go, you couldn’t make him.’

I was grateful to her for that. ‘Do you think,’ I asked, ‘that poodles have souls?’

I’d have felt foolish asking anyone else but Daphne. She didn’t bat an eyelid. She thought about it and then said, ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows, do they?’

‘Sergeant Parry, who came to tell me about Albie, said that wherever Albie is now, he’s probably better off.’

‘Ah,’ said Daphne, ‘we don’t know that, either. Because he was a tramp, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t rather be here than there, wherever there is. On the other hand, there’s no reason to suppose he isn’t perfectly all right there now. Why shouldn’t he be? Personally I believe in reincarnation. If I’m right, then Albie’s got the chance to start all over again. On the other hand, if the heaven theory is right, then it seems logical to me that if there’s a heaven, it’s a sight better organised than we’ve made our world down here. There might not have been a place for him here, but there should be there, wherever heaven is. I imagine heaven is what we want it to be. In your friend’s case, a sort of ever-open hostel, perhaps, with unlimited beds.’

‘Hope they don’t make him take a bath,’ I said wryly.

‘Because our bodies may be dirty doesn’t mean our souls aren’t clean.’ Daphne gave a deprecating cough. ‘I don’t lay any claim to that burst of wisdom. It was something I was taught in Sunday school, aeons ago. The children used to sing, “And your souls shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall!” I’ve no idea if those are the correct words. It’s what we sang, anyway.’

‘I like to think,’ I said, ‘that we’ve all got souls, the animals, too. Wherever Albie is now, I hope that Chou-Chou, Mimi and Fifi are all there with him, that they’re together again.’

‘Why not?’ asked Daphne. ‘Because we can’t be sure of anything, doesn’t mean it isn’t so. We just haven’t got any proof.’

Bingo! I thought. I couldn’t be sure what happened to Albie, but that didn’t mean my suspicions weren’t correct. I just needed proof. Parry was wrong, quite wrong, if he thought I was going to give up as easily as that. Just because he’d warned me off? Never. And because of Merv and his mate? Even less. Now I really had matters to settle with Merv.

I thanked Daphne for the talk and the brandy and told her I felt better now.

‘Any time,’ she said. Then as I was leaving she added, ‘You won’t do anything hasty, will you, Fran?’

She understood me a lot better than I’d imagined. It gave me something to think about.

I went down to the canal. It was a visit I had to make.

Albie’s body had long been removed, of course. All that remained to mark his demise at that spot was a fluttering blue and white tape that had cordoned off the area. And even that was broken down.

The strip of mud and straggly grass beside the concrete towpath was strewn with cigarette stubs and sweet wrappers and trampled by police-issue boots. But the visitors, both official and simply ghoulish, had all gone for the moment and I was alone. I was glad of it, because I had a little ceremony to perform and I didn’t want an audience. I placed the spray of carnations I’d brought with me neatly in the middle of the wet, flattened grass. The next person to come that way would probably pinch my floral tribute, but I wanted to do the right thing and mark the spot of Albie’s passing in a decent manner, if only for minutes. I stood back, like they do at the Cenotaph, and remained with bowed head as I said a brief prayer for Albie.

As I came to the end of my short act of memorial, it seemed to me I wasn’t alone after all. I looked up quickly, thinking someone might be watching me from the railings atop the steep bank, or had come along the towpath unheard, or was even in one of the quiet houseboats.

But there was no one. The canal itself was covered with a scum of debris, everything from waste paper to discarded condoms. Water slapped against the houseboats as they groaned and creaked. Yet I still felt that tingling between the shoulder blades that you get when someone is watching. I wondered for a moment whether it was Albie’s ghost. Except that Albie’s spirit would have been well disposed towards me and what I felt was alarm, some age-old instinct, as if an unfriendly presence had manifested itself and prowled about me.

The mood was broken as, with a whirr of wheels, a cyclist appeared at the far end of the towpath and pedalled determinedly towards me. He was all kitted out in a special helmet, goggles, thigh-hugging black cycling shorts and a tight jersey. I had to clamber up on the bank, almost trampling my flowers, to let him past. The ignorant oaf just cycled on without so much as a nod of thanks, not even slowing down. Yet I was pleased to see him because just then any sign of another human life was welcome.

I didn’t agree with Parry that there would have been absolutely no one around down here in the early hours of the morning. There’s a whole world out there that seeks the darkness and the lonely places. But if there’d been anyone and if they had seen anything, they would be keeping quiet. It was as Albie’d said. Those who move about the city streets by night see and hear a lot, but they say very little about any of it. It’s one of the laws of survival out there.

But Albie had seen something and, against all the rules, had told me. He’d put confidence in me because we both hankered after the theatre: he, because he’d lost the life, and I, because it shimmered before me like a mirage, vanishing whenever I tried to grab at it.

He’d trusted me and I wasn’t about to let him down.

Chapter Seven

It was after four when I left the canal and started to walk home. My mind was busy planning how to go about my enquiries. There were two lines of approach, as I saw it. One was Jonty, assuming I could find him again, and the other was the women’s refuge run by St Agatha’s.

The refuge had cropped up a couple of times and the more I thought about it, the more I felt it tied in somehow. In fact, St Agatha’s church seemed to feature large in all of this, one way and another. It would only be a slight detour to call in there on my way home. I turned my steps in that direction.

In daylight St Agatha’s mock-Gothic looked less like a backdrop for a
Hammer House of Horror
special. The gate in the fencing around the place was unlocked and pushed open wide. The porch was empty and clean and reeked of extra-strength commercial disinfectant. The church door also stood open and from within came the whine of a vacuum cleaner. I put my head through the gap.

I’d never been inside but I could have made an educated guess and been more or less right. It was a fairly typical late-Victorian church, with oak pews and pillars bearing wooden boards for hymn numbers, and brass memorials to local worthies. There were a lot of flowers around, either in free-standing arrangements or attached as posies to bits of the architecture or fittings. It suggested that recently the church had seen either a wedding or a funeral. A woman was standing on one of the pews, tin of metal polish in hand, rubbing energetically at one of the brass plaques with a rag. Further away, up in the chancel, another woman pushed an ancient upright Hoover back and forth. Both were intent on their tasks. I walked in, up to the brass polisher and cleared my throat loudly.

She turned and looked down at me from her vantage point on the pew. ‘Oh, hullo,’ she said. ‘Can I help?’

I apologized for disturbing her and indicated I just had a couple of questions, which wouldn’t take a moment.

She seemed glad of the chance to stop work and chat, and clambered down from her pew, puffing. She was a little on the heavy side to be climbing up and down furniture. Her companion in the chancel had switched off the machine and was struggling to extricate the full inner paper sack from the outer bag.

‘It’s our turn on the cleaning rota, Muriel’s and mine,’ my new friend explained. ‘I’m Valia Prescott. My husband is captain of the bell-ringers. If you want the vicar, I’m afraid it’s his afternoon off. There’s an emergency number on the notice board. If it’s a baptism or a wedding, that’s not emergency, I’m afraid, and you’ll have to get in touch with him tomorrow.’ She paused for breath.

It can’t be helped, but some given names don’t age with their owners. I suppose it will be odd being called Francesca when I’m eighty. Perhaps one ought to be able to change one’s name as one goes along, to suit one’s years – turn into a Maud, Doris, or a Muriel like the wielder of the vacuum cleaner. The name Valia, to me, suggested some sort of wood nymph cavorting about veiled in nothing but her long hair. But this Valia was sixty something, grey hair set rigidly in a tight perm, and she wore a hand-knitted tangerine-coloured pullover, which clashed nicely with her flushed rosy complexion. None of the information she’d so kindly reeled off for me was of any use. I nodded brightly to show I’d taken it all in and then explained my business.

‘My name’s Fran Varady. I’m trying to find an elderly homeless man who might have been sleeping in the porch out there last night. His name is Jonty.’

She first looked a little startled, this being an out-of-the-ordinary request, then her good-natured expression became grimmer. ‘Someone was there last night, all right! The smell out there was still dreadful when I got here with Muriel around two. It’s difficult to get cleaners for a place this size and paying someone’s out of the question, so the Mothers’ Union got up a rota. I don’t mind doing it – I quite like cleaning brass.’

She paused to glance up complacently at her work. The memorial was to a ‘physician in this parish’, paying tribute to his observance of his ‘duty as a Christian and as a man of healing’. His patients had lost his services in 1894. His testimonial gleamed like gold, testifying to Valia’s efforts. I complimented her and she beamed at me as brightly as the brass plaque.

‘I don’t mind doing anything, really, but anyone would draw the line at having to clean out the porch. Not that I had to clear away the worst of the mess. Ben, our caretaker, had done that this morning. But the smell was such that we just had to throw a bucket of Jeyes down there and brush it well out. It’s the vicar, you see.’

Fortunately I was able to decipher her meaning. ‘You mean the vicar lets the homeless sleep out there?’

‘Not exactly
allows
it, but doesn’t stop them. We used to have a wire mesh outer door but vandals broke it down. Then this vicar got the idea that we ought not to refuse shelter to a homeless person, even if it meant letting him sleep in our porch. Of course, one wants to be charitable . . .’ she drew a deep breath, her ample bosom filling like a pair of water wings, ‘but there are limits! As I say, the vicar doesn’t have to clear up after those people. Sometimes – well, I won’t tell you what kind of disgusting mess they make out there.’

‘This Ben, the caretaker,’ I asked. ‘Would he still be around the place?’