Keeping Bad Company (27 page)

In appearance he was disappointing, short, squat, olive-complexioned and losing his hair. His build was that of the glimpsed silhouette against my curtains. I realised, too, that this was the man Ganesh and I had seen with Merv the fateful evening they’d tried to bundle Albie into Merv’s car.

Hats or helmets, the man liked to cover his head. It could either be from vanity or because baldness is quickly identifiable, something even a confused witness would remember.

We’d foiled their attempt at a snatch that night, but later they’d found their quarry. This man, I knew, had killed Albie.

I expected to feel a surge of hate yet somehow it eluded me. The baldness remained disconcerting, a mark of human frailty. I don’t quite know what I’d expected of Merv’s partner. Whatever it had been, it hadn’t been ordinariness, even dullness. Yet everyone, they say, has one striking feature. With this man, it was the eyes. Enormous eyes, it seemed to me, like the eyes in an oil painting, and very slightly protuberant. In colour they were very dark brown, almost black, so that they seemed not to consist of iris and pupil, but just a large dark luminous disc in the surrounding whiteness of the eyeball.

I knew him and he knew I knew him. As I met his gaze of those unnaturally large dark eyes, they laughed at me, matching a mocking curve of his fleshy lips. My mind picked up his message clear as a bell.
I had you running scared, gal . . . Now you see me face to face. Still scared?

You bet I was scared. Ordinary thugs are simple souls. This one was a nutter. Merv’s interest in me, I supposed, was professional. I’d got in the way of a job and he would remove me as any other obstacle in his path, animate or inanimate. It made no difference.

This other one’s interest was different, personal. To begin with, I’d cost him a valuable motorbike and with it, I supposed, his employment as a courier. Even if I hadn’t, his attitude would still be different to Merv’s. He’d enjoyed prowling outside my flat, or chasing me on that bike, as he enjoyed staring at me here. He was doing it for kicks.

Well, I didn’t for a moment suppose that either of them was an art lover. Nor did I think they’d give up an afternoon normally spent on the football terraces unless they had urgent business. The business, I was miserably certain, was finding me. Now they’d found me.

I didn’t how they’d tracked me down. Possibly Jimmie, meaning to advertise Angus’s work, had put the word around and by bad luck, it had reached Merv’s ear. Merv caught my eye and his chewing mouth stilled and then twitched nastily. My balding adversary continued to stare, eyes bulging with lewd interest, laughing himself sick inside as he watched me squirm there on my stand, dressed in my ridiculous costume, unable to escape. I must have looked like a butterfly impaled on a pin. It was an uncomfortable image. I could imagine this man as a child, pulling the wings off living insects, tying cans to dogs’ tails, interfering with the neighbourhood’s little girls. A really nice sort.

‘Angus . . .’ I hissed, as loudly as I dared.

But Angus was busy explaining what I represented to an interested audience of two middle-aged women and a girl with a baby in a buggy. The balding man shook his head at me chidingly. Merv was chewing again and studying me with puzzled care, as if he couldn’t work out what the hell I was supposed to be or why I was dressed like it. I was wondering myself.

When his questioners had moved on to the scrap-metal man, I tried again to attract Angus.

This time he heard my hoarse whisper and came over. ‘What’s the matter, Fran? You don’t need to go to the loo again? Can’t you hang on till the end? It’s only another three-quarters of an hour.’

‘Ring the police . . .’ I breathed huskily. My voice seemed clogged in my throat.

‘What?’ He put his ear closer. Merv and his chum began to move away.

‘Ring the police. Ask for Sergeant Parry. Tell him Merv and – and another man are here and have seen me.’

‘Can’t it wait till four o’clock? It’s going well and I don’t want to leave the stand.’

‘No!’ I found my voice and it emerged in a strange squawk. The scrap-metal sculptor looked across at us in surprise and some concern. Perhaps he thought some part of my anatomy had been pierced by a pin securing a liana.

‘Go and ring them now!’ I urged. ‘There must be a phone in this hall somewhere.’

Some more people had arrived and stopped to study me. ‘Excuse me . . .’ one of them said diffidently to Angus.

‘I’ll ring in a minute, when I get a chance!’ Angus promised me hurriedly.

There wasn’t much I could do. I couldn’t see either Merv or his pal. My field of vision was restricted so I had no way of knowing whether they had left the hall altogether. Perhaps they’d heard my request for the police and decided to make themselves scarce. I hoped so.

There was a flurry of new visitors in the last ten minutes. Angus was fully employed and didn’t leave me, or not for long enough to have phoned. Then, miraculously, the public had gone and clearly weren’t coming back. Merv and the other had also vanished to my great relief. At four thirty, or just after, Reg closed the doors.

The woman in the purple skirt clapped her hands and shrilled, ‘Oh, well done, everybody!’

There was a huge combined sigh of relief from the various exhibitors. They turned to one another, offering congratulations or, in a few cases, recriminations. The two girls with the painting had fallen out over something. The thin man produced a hip flask and saluted his scrap-metal creation before taking a swig. I climbed down from the stand unaided.

‘Gimme my clothes!’ I gasped as I began to divest myself of paper birds and strings of greenery.

‘Hey!’ Angus yelped. ‘You’ll damage everything! Wait, let me do it!’

‘You can untangle the bits later. I just want to get out of this suit. Look, fetch my gear, will you?’

‘It’s all right,’ he said, realisation dawning on his face. ‘Those two blokes have gone. They went ages ago. I don’t know what they were doing in here. Just a couple of creeps, I suppose, hoping for a free boob show. I didn’t ring the police, I’m afraid. I didn’t get time. Reg was supposed to keep the weirdos out. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t cause any trouble. You didn’t know them, did you?’

‘Believe me,’ I wailed, ‘they were very bad news. I’ve got to get out of here, Angus!’

It finally dawned on him that this was a genuine emergency. His forehead crinkled in decent dismay. ‘Sorry, Fran, didn’t realise you were really worried about them. I thought you just thought they were kinky. I’ll get your gear from the van,’ he promised. ‘Hang on.’

Back in the loo, I transferred myself into my own things in record time and emerged holding the body stocking, which was still festooned with birds and greenery. The corridor was empty. From the hall came noisy scraping and bumpings as the exhibits were dismantled. I started forward with the intention of returning the body stocking to Angus, who would be worried about it, and then making for the nearest phone.

I was vaguely aware that the door of the men’s washroom opposite was opening, but paid no attention. That was a big mistake but I was barely given time to realise it. There was a scuffling behind me and the next thing I knew, someone had enveloped my head and shoulders in a musty-smelling piece of cloth.

I dropped the body stocking and tried to shout for help and disentangle myself at the same time. My voice was muffled by the cloth and my arms were neatly pinned to my sides. I was trussed up as neatly as an oven-ready chicken with some kind of belt or rope, then hoisted by feet and shoulders. I was carried away full length and at a cracking pace, with no more control over what was happening than one of the exhibits in the hall might have had. (Amongst which, as I had time to reflect, I’d recently featured with such distinction.)

I was aware that we’d left the hall. We bumped down some steps and I could hear traffic. Without warning I was dropped, landing with a painful wallop that knocked the breath out of me. Doors slammed. An engine revved. My world, wherever it was, began to move around me, lurching and rattling. I’d been slung into the back of a van and was being driven away.

Chapter Fourteen

It wasn’t easy to keep my wits about me in the circumstances, but I did my best.

I reasoned with glum realism that no one would have paid any attention to my plight, even if they’d seen me thrown in the van. Everyone was busy with their own valued works of art, intent on dismantling and moving them out of the hall without damage. Oddly shaped articles of every kind were being lugged into the car park and a body form wrapped in a cloth wouldn’t attract even a cursory glance.

Angus would worry, though, if I didn’t come back. He’d go looking for me and the body stocking. I’d dropped that on the floor when my captors grabbed me and unless they’d had the presence of mind to scoop it up, it still lay where it fell and Angus would find it.

He would be bright enough to connect this with my earlier plea to call the police and with luck, he’d belatedly do just that. Whether this would help me or not was debatable. Lauren Szabo had been missing two weeks with the police hunting high and low and no one had found her.

I considered trying to bump my way along to the rear doors of the van and kick them open. On telly, captives do that kind of thing all the time. Believe me, it’s not so easy. I was being thrown around all over the place as it was, and organising myself to move in a controlled fashion quickly proved hopeless.

I was sweating profusely and my mouth was parched with thirst and fear. It was increasingly difficult to breathe. The cloth wrapped itself tightly over my face and loose fibres forced their way into my nose and mouth. It stank. Since there was no point in struggling and getting exhausted, I concentrated on not suffocating and conserving my strength for when we should arrive. Always assuming, of course, they didn’t intend simply to wait till nightfall and drop me off the nearest bridge. They’d already shown a tendency to dispose of inconvenient individuals in water. I tried not to think about that option.

I couldn’t judge time well. In my situation minutes had to feel like hours. I certainly seemed to be thrown around in my prison for some time, but in London traffic, that didn’t necessarily mean we’d travelled a vast distance. As far as I could tell, we’d not spent more than a third of the journey time stuck in one spot. I was sure we were still in London and probably not more than a couple of miles or so from where we’d started. Merv and his mate had tribal instincts. They wouldn’t move far off their own patch where they knew every alley and bolt hole. (And where a phone call to an obliging pal would fix up an alibi if need be, as they’d demonstrated on the night Albie died.)

At last we stopped altogether. Doors slammed again. Footsteps approached. Though I still couldn’t see anything, the darkness had lifted. The van doors had been opened. Hands grabbed me and I was unceremoniously but highly efficiently carried, as before, into a building.

They were careless now, manhandling me with less regard than would’ve been shown by a couple of piano-shifters for a pub’s beat-up set of ivories. They were talking to each other and in normal voices, arguing about where to put me. A voice I identified as Merv’s suggested taking me upstairs. The other man was against this as getting me around the corners would be difficult. It wasn’t as if the lifts were working, he grumbled. What’s more, for such a skinny little cow I was beginning to weigh effing heavy. He refused point-blank to carry me any further. They put me down, upright this time, while they argued it out. The second man, I’d been able to gather, went by the name of Baz.

To me all this meant they felt themselves secure wherever they were. There was no one to see or hear them and they had complete freedom of the place, choosing where to put me and able to bawl at one another to their hearts’ delight. In the end, they decided I could walk up a flight of stairs if guided.

I was shoved along and then ordered to start climbing. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried going upstairs with your arms pinned to your sides and a cloth over your head. Try it as a party game, if you want to get rid of your friends. I stumbled repeatedly and fell headlong twice, bruising my shins badly and cracking my forehead on the stairs above. Even Merv and Baz seemed relieved when we reached the next landing and there was no talk, even from Merv, of moving up another flight.

All this told me we were in some large, or at least tall, building. Their voices had an echoing quality suggesting emptiness, and together with their attitude indicated a deserted block of condemned flats, or possibly of office units that had failed to attract tenants. There were such places, and small industrial units sporting sun-faded ‘To rent’ signs, all over London.

We moved forward again on the level. A door was opened.

‘In here,’ said Merv, as if I could see.