Keeping Bad Company (35 page)

He held up both hands palms outward to stem my protest. ‘My dear, my dear! I’m not accusing you of anything! I’m not blaming you, please believe me! In no way at all am I criticising, not in the slightest! Without you, I wouldn’t have my girl back again. Forgive me if I’ve phrased this badly. I’ll start again. Let me put it another way. Perhaps you didn’t lack presence of mind. But Lauren had been imprisoned in that place at the mercy of those thugs and as a result, she was confused and frightened. She may have said things to you which – well, which were not quite correct.’

‘About her time at the refuge with her mother, you mean?’ I asked.

The muscles round his mouth twitched and the skin turned white. ‘She was rambling, almost delirious. She’d been held prisoner, mistreated, starved. You should pay no attention either to that story or anything else she may have said regarding her relationship with the two scoundrels who held her captive.’

‘Look,’ I told him, ‘you’ve got to sort this out with her, not with me.’

‘But you are the only reason the police have heard these – these ramblings. They’ve been asking questions. It’s highly embarrassing for a man in my position. You really shouldn’t have repeated what my poor girl said. Not without checking it with me first. Most importantly, you obviously made a mistake in one significant detail, a very significant detail. There is one clear mistake in the story you told the police and it must be put right without delay.’

‘What’s that, then?’ I asked.

‘The key. You said the key to the room in which my daughter was held prisoner was in the lock on the inside. But obviously it was on the outside and you turned it to open the door – and found her.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘She opened the door, from the inside, and found me, if you like.’

Szabo stopped fidgeting and in a cold little voice said, ‘That is impossible.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, because after all, it was hard for him to accept the humiliation he must be suffering, now that the whole story had come out. Not that I had any real reason to be sorry for him, but we all do things we’re ashamed of from time to time. Supposing Vinnie to be ashamed, which I’d no reason to believe he was. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

‘You were mistaken,’ he repeated in the same cold little voice. ‘You had hit your head. Lauren said you were covered in blood when she first set eyes on you.’

‘I hit my nose and chin,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t concussed, if that’s what you’re suggesting. I know what I saw, what I did, and what Lauren told me.’

He sat back in his chair and fixing his grey pebble eyes on me, said flatly, ‘I want you to change your story.’

I pointed out I couldn’t if I wanted to. I’d already made a statement to the police.

‘The police were remiss,’ he said. ‘They should have asked a doctor to examine you. Despite what you say, I believe you were concussed and confused. Indeed, you still are. So much is obvious. No blame will attach to you if you go back to the police and say you’ve thought it all through, and you want to amend your statement. If necessary, I can get a doctor to certify that you are suffering from a head injury received last night and no statement made by you can be taken as it stands. It was wrong of the police even to question you at that time, before – ’

‘Before you’d had this chat with me?’ I suggested.

‘Before,’ he said coldly, ‘before you’d had a good night’s rest and time to think things over.’

His voice grew louder. ‘It is unthinkable,’ he said, ‘that a foolish rumour should be allowed to take root and grow. It is, at the very least, highly speculative, fanciful. At the worst, it is slanderous. I cannot allow it. I’m a well-known businessman. I have friends, not only in Manchester but throughout the soft-furnishing trade. They respect me. I’ve got influence, connections in local government who are important men. This story you’ve told, if it became public knowledge, would be damaging, very damaging. It could ruin my standing, lose me their respect, I’d be finished!’ He was breathing heavily, his voice shaking. Tears filled his eyes and he blinked them away and he leaned towards me, ‘It must be stopped. I’ve come here to stop it and I shall stop it.’ Behind the tears his eyes gleamed with frightening intensity.

I forced back the instinct to flinch and managed to hold that almost maniacal gaze. I wondered why, a few minutes before, I’d been feeling sorry for him. Here he was asking me to swear to lies. Not to protect Lauren from any charge of conspiracy to impede police enquiries or to extort money, or whatever she might be guilty of. No, he feared for himself, for his reputation socially, his business contacts, the cosy little deals with his influential friends and his personal self-esteem.

‘Forget it,’ I told him. ‘Ganesh was right. You don’t care about Lauren, you only care about yourself. You want to keep her under your thumb, at home where you can keep an eye on her or married to Copperfield which would be the next best thing, because you don’t trust her not to blab out the truth. You’re just a control freak, that’s what you are, and a nasty little sadistic one!’

His mouth twitched. The tears had dried. For a moment I almost thought he might hit me. Instead, he turned to another method of settling opposition, one which he’d probably found effective in the past.

He put a hand to his inside coat pocket and said silkily, ‘If it’s a question of money . . .’

‘It’s not a question of money!’ I snapped.

He hastened to rephrase the offer he’d been about to make. ‘I mean, I had been intending to offer a reward to anyone leading us to Lauren. I would have done so if the police hadn’t insisted on a media ban. It’s quite allowable in the circumstances and you are more than entitled to that reward. It’s a considerable amount.’

He might be able to buy a doctor’s certificate, but he wasn’t going to buy me.

‘There are other things beside money,’ I told him.

His hand dropped from his lapel. ‘Such as?’ He stared at me with his mouth twisted scornfully. ‘I’d have thought that in your situation money was of prime importance. What else could there be?’

‘Honour,’ I said. ‘Honour, Mr Szabo. My father understood honour. He was an honourable man. Which is why, although you may have known him as a boy, I don’t believe you and he were ever friends.’

His mouth opened and closed soundlessly. For a moment there was such fury in his eyes that this time I really thought he was going to attack me and I cast my eye round for some sort of weapon with which I could fend him off. But instead he got to his feet.

‘I see you are indeed your father’s daughter,’ he said nastily. ‘Bondi could also be very stupid.’

I watched him leave. I’d made an enemy, but it couldn’t be helped. You can’t go through life without treading on a few toes. I hoped I’d trodden hard on Vinnie Szabo’s polished handmades.

The next few days passed off uneventfully, for which I was grateful. They were busy, however. Some kind of family crisis blew up in High Wycombe which meant Ganesh had to go there and stay over to help settle it. So I went to help out Hari in the shop. I was still basking in glory in Hari’s eyes so he was over the moon to have me there and kept pointing me out to customers, which was embarrassing. It was also good business, of course. They hung around to gawp at me and generally bought some extra item to excuse their curiosity.

Hari appeared quite sorry when the last day of my temporary employment came. When he shut up shop at eight, he invited me into his back parlour for a cup of tea and told me his medical history in amazing detail. Hari cheers up when he talks about illness. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a sort of hobby with him. He probably got little encouragement from Ganesh, but in me he had a fresh audience, so I got the complete works including the time he fell off a ladder while stacking the top shelf and chipped two vertebrae. Poor Hari does seem accident-prone.

It was nearly nine when I left. It was that moment before dusk settles properly when your eyes play tricks because it seems as if it ought to be light enough to distinguish objects, but it isn’t. As I turned into the street where I lived, I thought I glimpsed something whisk into a doorway a little down from my place. People came and went all the time and it was an hour at which quite a lot of people are about so I didn’t pay too much attention. Nevertheless, some little warning signal must have rung in my brain because I paused at the top of the basement steps to look up and down the street.

Had I done what I usually did, which was just swing round the railing post and clatter down into the basement well, I’d have had a bad accident. Perhaps, too, I had Hari’s story of his fall from the ladder still ringing in my head. So as it turned out, when I moved forward again, I did so more cautiously than usual.

Even so I almost fell. My ankle snagged some resistance and I stumbled and for a dreadful moment I thought I would plunge headfirst down the stone steps to the concreted floor below. I just managed to clasp the railings and hang on desperately until I found my footing. It was very gloomy now, even though the street lighting had come on. I reached down and felt around and my fingers found the wire. It was stretched across the second step down. That was clever. It was also the trick I’d played on Baz on the tow-path so I didn’t need to guess who’d played it on me now. Merv was still around all right. Ganesh was again proved right. Even hunted, Merv still felt safer on his own territory. I glanced down the street. Was he still in the doorway, waiting to see if I fell? Or had he slipped out while I was disengaging the wire?

I went back up again and rang Daphne’s doorbell.

I told her not to worry but I needed to ring the police. They came quickly this time. Parry wasn’t with them, off-shift it seemed, but the two who came knew about me and about Merv. They searched up and down the street but he’d made off. One of them went back to their car and radioed in while the other checked my flat before I was allowed to return to it.

As it proved, letting us know he was around and active was Merv’s big mistake. It established that he was holed up locally somewhere. The radio message the copper had sent resulted in an immediate raid on Merv’s mother’s house.

It was hard to think of Merv with a devoted mum but apparently he’d been known to hide up at her place before. They had checked it out right after he’d given them the slip at the office building, but now they went back there in force and sure enough, he’d scuttled there with the intention of packing up a few things and clearing out. But the police arrived before he could leave and he was trapped.

Dear old Mum barricaded the front door against the forces of law and order and hurled abuse and kitchenware at them from an upper window, while her darling boy tried to escape out the back. But the police were waiting for him so Mum had sacrificed her nonstick saucepans in vain.

Jonty later picked out Merv and Baz at an identity parade. Faced with a witness, they started gabbing. They blamed each other and both of them blamed Stratton.

Parry came round and told me the police had searched Stratton’s flat, which he described admiringly as ‘a real tart’s boo-dwar, all satin sheets and white fur rugs’.

The police also checked out Baz’s home. I wasn’t surprised to learn he’d been living in a single filthy room stacked high with mouldy junk food cartons and women’s underwear.

‘Knickers,’ said Parry with relish. ‘Hundreds of pairs. He must’ve pinched them off washing-lines. We had to bring ’em away in umpteen boxes, filled a squad car. We can’t charge him because we can’t prove he stole them. No one’s been down to complain they lost any and I don’t suppose anyone will come in to identify ’em. You’ve not lost anything off your washing-line, have you?’ He raised his foxy eyebrows hopefully.

I told him I hadn’t got a washing line, not outdoors. ‘What does he do with them all?’ I asked naively.

‘He collects them,’ said Parry. ‘You know, like people collect dolls in national costumes or old football programmes. He collects ladies’ panties.’

He seemed to think this was a logical explanation, which not only told me something about Baz, but quite a lot about Parry.

In the end, and not surprising anyone, no charges were brought against Lauren Szabo. Vinnie got a top medical man to give his highly paid opinion that she’d been brainwashed during her time in that deserted block. As the official version went, the two men had put ideas in her head and she’d gone along with what they’d suggested. She’d been living a kind of fantasy whilst in captivity. Szabo sent her off to an expensive Swiss nursing home to recuperate and get her side of the story right before she met the general public again. I hoped she remembered to take her skis along.

As far as I know, she and her stepfather are still together as a family unit. I imagine them, Szabo trying to buy her goodwill and silence with endless presents, terrified of what she might do if she leaves and frightened of her when she’s there: she circling round him like a shark waiting for a chance to dive in and destroy him, and all the time letting bitterness eat away at her. There’s a name for that sort of relationship. Mutually destructive.