Mixing With Murder (11 page)

She bit her lower lip and stared at me. ‘I don’t think you and I need to have any future dealings. I don’t want to talk to you again. You denied knowing Mickey when Ned mentioned him to you, but Ned wasn’t fooled and neither was I. You had to be lying. You had to have come from him. You couldn’t have come from anyone else. Ned advised me to leave at once. But I couldn’t do that. I knew you’d try again. I shouldn’t have hung up on you when you phoned. I should have made an arrangement to meet you somewhere private. But I panicked when I heard your voice. I thought, stupidly, that if I refused to talk to you, you might go away. Of course you didn’t. I realised that when I calmed down. You would be on your way here. If I wasn’t here, you’d talk to my parents. I had to be here and head you off. Just go back and tell Mickey I’m through with the club and I don’t want to hear from him again, right?’

She had run out of words at last and now stood, arms akimbo, flushed but with some of the panic she’d mentioned now visible along with the anger in her eyes.

I tried again to sound non-threatening yet businesslike, despite my earlier lack of success. After all, this was just a scared kid. I knew she was my age but there’s a scared child hidden in all of us and it takes over when we least need it to. Lisa wanted to sound and be tough. Somehow it wasn’t quite working.

‘Believe me,’ I said, ‘I’d like nothing better but it’s not so simple.’

‘Ned said I should go to the police if you turned up again.’ She took one hand from her hip and began to twist her fingers in a lock of long fair hair.

‘And tell them what?’ I asked.

Again she hesitated. ‘You were harassing me.’

‘I didn’t know you were with Ned when he saw me from the window next door. So I hadn’t even set eyes on you when I talked to him. I didn’t send you any message via him. I hadn’t then phoned. Where’s the harassment? Unless you count Ned tagging along with me all the way across town to the Iffley Road and insisting on finding out where I was staying!’

‘He was trying to help. Mickey’s harassing me.’ Obstinacy was now displacing any fear.

‘I’m not Mickey.’

‘You’re Mickey’s stooge!’ The anger was back, redoubled.

The accusation hurt. ‘I am not Allerton’s stooge!’ I snapped back. ‘I don’t work for him, right? But he asked me to get you to agree to contact him and until I do, he’s keeping something of mine and I don’t get it back. I want it back. Understand?’

‘Sounds like Mickey,’ she said gloomily. Some of the aggression had faded. ‘He’d twist your arm and make out he was doing you a favour.’

For a split second I thought I might be about to make a breakthrough and get her to talk to me, but as bad luck would have it a door at the far end of the hall opened and a woman appeared.

‘Lisa? Who is it?’

‘I’m a friend of Lisa’s from London, Mrs Stallard!’ I called out before Lisa could speak.

Jennifer came towards us, smiling in welcome. ‘Then why hasn’t Lisa asked you in?’

‘It’s early . . .’ Lisa said lamely, glowering at me. ‘Anyway, Fran has to—’

‘No, I don’t,’ I interrupted brightly. ‘Not for ages.’

‘Oh, well, if you’ve got time, do come in. We were just about to have coffee.’ Jennifer smiled at me before she turned and trotted back down the hall.

Lisa drew in a deep breath and stood aside for me to enter. The aggression was back, emanating from her in waves. As I walked past her into the house she muttered, ‘If you say one word to them about Mickey Allerton or the Silver Circle,
one word
, right? You’re dead! I mean D-E-A-D! Got that?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I get it.’

The small back room into which I was shown was on the dark side and stuffy. Sunlight bathed a garden and the conservatory which had been built on to the rear of the house. But neither the light nor fresh air permeated in here. In the conservatory a man in a wheelchair, Paul Stallard, was doing something with potted plants at a shelf constructed to be just the right height to enable him to carry out his indoor gardening. Jennifer was out there and telling him something, about my arrival I guessed. He stopped doing whatever it was, wiped his hands on a cloth, and turned his head to peer into the room. But because it was darker indoors than out there, he couldn’t make out much and he turned the wheelchair towards the open double door into the room. There was no threshold and he was able to propel himself inside unaided. Everything here had been arranged for his convenience.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You’re Lisa’s friend. How nice to meet you.’

He held out his hand. I went to shake it. The skin felt papery and I could feel all the bones. I didn’t know how old he was; I guessed not very, not more than in his late forties, but his features bore the stamp of premature ageing, wrinkled skin and dark-circled eyes. His neck emerged scraggily from his pullover. He must once have been a tall man but now he’d shrunk into himself, a propped-up puppet, his useless legs skewed to an unnatural angle.

‘I’m Fran,’ I said.

‘I’ll go and get the coffee,’ Jennifer said brightly. ‘Make yourself at home, Fran.’

I sat down in a sagging armchair. Lisa took a chair right opposite where she could see every move I made. She pressed her knees together and chewed at her right thumb, her eyes fixed on me.

‘Why don’t you go and help your mum, love?’ her father asked mildly. ‘Fran and I will be all right here for five minutes.’

Reluctantly she got up and went out. As she passed me she met my gaze and in hers I saw not aggression now, but pleading. I smiled at her encouragingly.

One of the reasons the room was so dark, apart from lacking direct outside light, was that it was lined with bookshelves packed tightly with every kind of book from paperback thrillers to solid-looking hardback books of natural history and theatrical biography. This is what Paul Stallard did when he wasn’t messing with the potted plants. He read, immersing himself in worlds he couldn’t visit.

‘It’s very nice for us to meet one of Lisa’s London friends,’ he said.

‘It’s nice to meet you both, too,’ I returned. I felt a heel. In this closed, claustrophobic world, the arrival of someone bringing news of an existence outside the house made this a red-letter day. The stuffy air held a papery smell like you get in libraries and in addition there was the odd background odour that you always get around illness.

‘Did you come to Oxford especially to see Lisa?’ he was asking. ‘She didn’t mention it.’

‘She didn’t know I was coming. I’ve got an aunt here.’ I plunged into the story I’d made up during my cross-city bus journey, in case I was asked for an explanation of my presence in Oxford. ‘She runs a bed and breakfast place on the other side of Magdalen Bridge. I’m staying with her. I had an idea Lisa was home and I thought I’d just call on the off chance she’d be here.’

‘Are you a dancer, too?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m an actor. But right now I’m between parts. Resting, as the acting profession calls it.’

He smiled. ‘Lisa’s resting, too. Not because she didn’t have work but because she was working so hard she got really tired and a doctor recommended her to take some time off. She’s always wanted to be a dancer, right from a tiny tot. Sadly she wasn’t good enough to make the Royal Ballet or any of the other ballet companies but she’s found good regular work in the chorus line, as you’ll know.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s good work.’ Chorus line? At the Silver Circle?

‘She’s been in the chorus of several of the big West End shows.’ Paul went on to name a couple of the biggest musicals currently running in London. ‘We’ve never been able to go to London and see a show, of course. But she’s told us all about it.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Yes, I dare say she has.’

‘She has a good singing voice,’ said Lisa’s father proudly. ‘Her mother and I are always telling her she ought to audition for one of the main roles.’

‘There’s a lot of competition,’ I said. ‘Acting is the same.’

‘What was your last role?’ he asked, genuinely interested.

‘It was in an adaptation of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
,’ I said. ‘I played Miss Stapleton, the villain’s sister.’

He nodded, pleased at recognising the reference. ‘I’m a great admirer of the Sherlock Holmes stories. In that one Stapleton uses his wife to gain Sir Henry Baskerville’s confidence, giving her a false identity as his sister.’

He didn’t know how closely this paralleled what I was doing here. ‘That’s right,’ I said uneasily.

‘How did you manage for the hound?’

‘Oh, we had a real one.’

‘I’d like to have seen the production,’ Paul said.

I was rather glad he hadn’t. It had ended dramatically, but not quite in the way Conan Doyle envisaged. Our play had ended in a dogfight. ‘You know what they say in the theatre about never working with children or animals?’ I asked. ‘Well, it’s true.’

Thankfully the two women returned then trundling a wooden trolley with the coffee and some sponge cake. They’d brought napkins and bone china. I was the guest of honour.

‘Fran’s been telling me about her stage career,’ Paul Stallard said.

I opened my mouth to say that, actually, the play had been staged in a pub, but closed it again. Why dispel the glamorous image this wheelchair-bound man had created of a world away from this stuffy book-lined prison? Lisa wasn’t the only one prepared to let a false impression of her career take hold here. She had encouraged the Stallards in their vision of their daughter on the vast stage of one of London’s bigger theatres. I’d seen the cramped stage of the Silver Circle where she’d gyrated round her pole. There was no way these two existences could be reconciled. But it wasn’t for me to destroy their serene confidence in what Lisa had been doing in London.

Coffee was poured, real coffee. I appreciated that. Grandma Varady wouldn’t have allowed a jar of instant coffee in the house but, since I’d been alone, my coffee making had been of the powder and hot water variety.

‘Have you seen Lisa on stage?’ asked Jennifer Stallard.

The cup shook in her daughter’s hand and the coffee slopped. Lisa mumbled and patted the front of her white sweater with her napkin.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t,’ I said. ‘I mean to, one day.’

‘Perhaps Lisa could arrange for you to sit in on a rehearsal?’ Jennifer went on brightly.

‘It’s not usually allowed to bring friends to rehearsals,’ Lisa said sharply.

‘So,’ said Paul to me. ‘What do you do, Fran, when you’re not acting?’

I could have replied, I was sitting there and acting out a role right then. I said, ‘I take odd jobs. I was a waitress in a pizza parlour. I work mornings sometimes for a newsagent near my home. I go to auditions. It’s tough. Everyone wants to be a star or, if they can’t be that, to walk on and speak three words.’

Paul chuckled. ‘I used to dream, when I was young, I might be an actor. But I realised I didn’t have sufficient talent. But I’ve encouraged Lisa in her stage career. She does have the talent. I don’t just say that because I’m her father.’

‘It’s all right, Dad,’ Lisa said unhappily.

He chuckled again. ‘I’m embarrassing her,’ he said to me. He didn’t know the half of it. Now he set down his cup. ‘Come out into the garden, Fran, and meet a friend of mine.’

He turned his chair awkwardly. Lisa put down her cup and went to help. She pushed him out of the room, through the conservatory and into the back garden. I followed.

I’m not a gardener, but I thought I might have been able to keep a plot tidier than that one. Long grass grew everywhere; in it were embedded lumps of rock and what looked to me like discarded junk. Buddleia, familiar to me from the sides of London’s railway tracks, had set itself wherever it fancied and trailed purple, heavy-scented cones of tiny flowers from its twisting arms.