She waved that away with a hand tipped with scarlet nails. ‘No, dear, not a bit! I’m always happy to do Mickey Allerton a favour. I used to work for him, years ago.’
I put her age at around fifty now, but she still had style, despite the lame leg. The bright red hair was tucked into a neat French plait and she was carefully made up and wore large pearl cluster carrings.
‘I was a dancer,’ she said with a note of sadness in her voice. ‘Good days, they were. I had a lot of fun.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t work for Mickey, not in his clubs. I don’t sing or dance or strip. I’m an actor although I haven’t got an acting job right now. Mickey just asked me to come to Oxford to do an errand for him.’
I glanced at the poodle. I could tell her about Bonnie being held as surety for my good behaviour but I decided against it. She obviously had a high opinion of Allerton and I didn’t want to damage it. Theirs was an old acquaintance. I was a ship passing in the night - I hoped.
‘All right, dear. It’s your business. When you’ve unpacked, come down and have a cup of tea with me,’ she invited.
I thanked her and she left me to it. I heard her awkward progress down the hall and then down the stairs. I wondered what had happened to her leg and remembered Ganesh’s sarcastic remark about falling off the stage.
The room was furnished very comfortably in a similar old-fashioned way to the breakfast room, but benefited from the early evening sun which cast a warm apricot glow over everything. Through frilly net curtains I gazed from the window on to the long narrow garden at the rear of the property. For ease of maintenance most of it had been paved. There were a couple of wooden seats but some colourful plants in pots were the only growing things apart from a knobbly wisteria trained against the far brick wall and scrambling across the lintel of a wooden door in the middle of the wall.
People say evenings like this are peaceful but I find them unsettling. I understand why ancient peoples like the Aztecs worried so much about the sun setting. There is a kind of finality about it, an awareness of the long night ahead. There’s a saying, however, about not letting the sun go down on your anger. Today it was going down on mine. I was still angry with Mickey Allerton and I would stay angry, even after all this was over, no matter how things turned out.
I turned back from the window and sat down on the one upholstered chair and took a further look at my temporary home. It was odd to think that this was exactly what it would be for the next two or three days, my home, my space. Yet it had nothing of me in it. Everything was contrary to what I felt myself to be. I am not a frilly-curtain person, nor a lilac-bedlinen one. I averted my eyes from the awful picture on the wall depicting a child with unfeasibly large eyes and a tear rolling down his face. Why would anyone want such a picture? I wondered. How could anyone think it cute? I wasn’t just in a strange city where I knew no one. I was in an altogether alien world. I had a mad impulse to search the room for listening devices, like James Bond in a new hotel room. Perhaps the bug was located behind that picture or the mirror on the dressing table . . .
I caught sight of myself in the mirror and stood still before it, trying to see myself as DS Pereira had. I still didn’t think I looked like someone who might be on the wrong side of the law nor even someone who might once have been homeless. But Beryl’s question had shaken me. There was something about me. I couldn’t see it but others could. It wasn’t anything to do with appearance, looks or dress. It had to be something else: body language, and a kind of wariness.
One of the people who had a flat in the converted house in which I lived kept a cat. My dog Bonnie and this cat lived on terms of mutual respect. They ignored one another. But whereas Bonnie was friendly with the other tenants, the cat avoided us all, everyone except its owner. Whenever I’d tried to make friends with it, it sat down at a distance and stared at me with unrelenting yellow eyes. If I moved towards it, it moved away. When I stopped, it sat down again. There was a distance between us and it was to be kept. The cat had been a stray and the tenant had taken it in. It had been a scraggy, half-wild moggy. Now it was plump and sleek but it hadn’t lost its mistrust, its belief that you only survive if you keep your own space and others keep theirs. Was I like that? Did they read it in my eyes? I didn’t like the idea.
It’s not difficult to become homeless. There is a belief among people who don’t know any better that those who lack a roof over their heads do so by choice. After all, they reason, there’s always help somewhere. But there isn’t. Or if there is, it comes with strings attached. Many people on the street are there because they want to lose themselves, blend in with the anonymity of pavements and shop doorways. There are those whose marriages, careers and lives have fallen apart. There are those who are mentally ill. There are those for whom drink or drugs have become the beginning and end of existence, a never-ceasing cycle. Their days pass in a blur of feverish desire, painful withdrawal symptoms, all-too-short rushes of relief and passages of oblivion. There are ex-cons who will end up back in gaol. There are youngsters running away from abusive homes, others from ‘good’ families against which they have rebelled and become lost, unable to go back to what they have left. Others have fallen out of the system, some have been in council care when children, but when no longer ‘children’ are in no one’s care. Where should they go? Where turn?
I became homeless at sixteen because Grandma Varady died. My father had already died three years earlier. Grandma had been the tenant of the flat and the landlord wanted me out. He didn’t care where I went. He advised me to ‘go down the council’. I didn’t want to share hostel space with drug addicts and the mentally ill. I slept in a local park. Later I shared the first of many squats. After a while I got a place to live with the help of someone I’d helped. That didn’t last but I was offered my present place by a charity which, among other projects, had run the hospice in which my mother had died. I had a kind of security at last. But obviously my days of being ‘of no fixed address’ had stamped its mark on me.
‘Snap out of it, Fran!’ I told myself. ‘Don’t start brooding. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be able to get back to London.’ That was where I belonged. There no one cared what I looked like or what my past had been. That is the blessed anonymity of big cities, their magnet-like appeal.
It didn’t take me long to unpack my bag. I pushed Hari’s map in my pocket and made my way back downstairs.
Beryl hadn’t told me exactly where to find her but logic took me to the rear of the building and the rattle of teacups guided me there into a large, bright kitchen. The landlady was putting the pot and milk jug on a round pine table which was already set with the cups and a plate of chocolate biscuits.
I sat down, accepted a cup of tea and tackled the situation head on. There really was no other way. ‘I don’t know how much Mickey told you . . .’ I began.
She waved her scarlet-tipped nails at me. ‘I don’t worry about Mickey’s business. You don’t have to tell me anything. I said to Mickey I’d be happy to have you here and if you want to know anything about Oxford, just ask. I can’t do any more than that because of my leg.’ She reached down with a teaspoon and tapped her lower left leg. It made a dull hard sound. ‘Lost it,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Below the knee.’
‘Was that in an accident at the club?’ I asked in horror. Perhaps Ganesh had been on the right track, after all.
She shook her head vigorously. ‘Bless you, no. I fell off a bus at Marble Arch. It was Christmastime and you know how busy that area is at that time of year. The pavements were crowded. They had police out with loud hailers doing crowd control. I was on the bus and I thought I’d be clever and just jump off when it slowed down. But that’s not as easy as you think. I stumbled and then a taxi hit me. It was my own fault. The leg wouldn’t mend. In the end they chopped it off, just below the knee and gave me a false one. Of course, my dancing career was over. Things would have been bleak but, as it happened, an auntie died and left me this house here in Oxford. So I had the idea to set up a Band B. I was already over thirty and well, if you work the clubs, you need your looks and your figure. Mickey came up trumps. He gave me a bit of money to see me over while I got the business going. He’s a good sort, Mickey, if you play fair by him.’
I didn’t ask her what happened to people who didn’t ‘play fair’. It was even clearer that Beryl thought Allerton was the bee’s knees. I’d have to be careful what I said. She was a nice woman, but she was a direct line back to the Silver Circle. I imagined that either Mickey would be on the phone daily to her to check on my progress or she’d received orders to bring him up to speed. I’d have to make it obvious that I was trying my best to carry out Mickey’s errand. However, as someone who had not only known Mickey Allerton but had also worked for him, perhaps Beryl was uniquely able to give me some indication as to why Lisa Stallard might have bolted back to Oxford; if indeed that was what she had done. It would make my job so much easier if I knew why she’d left in the first place without warning her boss.
‘You really enjoyed working in the club, then?’ I asked nonchalantly. ‘You didn’t mind the smoky atmosphere or some of the dodgier punters?’
She frowned as she poured the tea. ‘Mickey was always very careful to keep undesirables out of the club. He runs a very good class of place, Mickey. He picks all the acts with care, nothing tacky, if you know what I mean. Like, just yesterday, when he phoned me about you coming here, he told me a girl had turned up to audition a week or two ago and it turned out she did an exotic dance with a blooming big snake. He reckoned it was vulgar and he told her, no way could she work for him. All the other girls were pretty relieved, too. You don’t fancy a snake loose in the dressing room, do you? Not one the size that thing was, apparently. A python, Mickey said. Even the doorman freaked out when she came in with it. Mickey didn’t fancy the look of the thing himself!’ Beryl chuckled. ‘No, I reckoned the old Silver Circle was a nice place to work.’
‘So nothing there a girl could object to, if she was in that line of work?’
‘No, dear!’ Beryl appeared shocked. ‘I wouldn’t say that about all the clubs. Some of them are real sleazy dives. But Mickey always wanted to go upmarket.’
I wondered just how upmarket Mickey thought he could take the business. But with an ambition like that, if Beryl was on the level about it and not just blinded by gratitude towards her old employer, there seemed little obvious reason why Lisa Stallard had suddenly decided to run for it. Unless, of course, she was involved in something else. The unwelcome feeling of unease returned, nestling in the pit of my stomach.
To drive it away, I took out Hari’s map and unfolded it on the table.
‘Where did you get that?’ Beryl asked in wonder. ‘That ought to be in a museum. I can let you have a better one than that. There’s some tourist stuff up in your room, leaflets and the like. One or two of them have probably got a map of the city centre in them.’
‘I’m interested in this area.’ I pointed at the area where I believed the Stallards lived. ‘What can you tell me about this part of town?’
‘Very nice,’ said Beryl. ‘Expensive. It costs a lot of money to buy a house there. Otherwise I’d move my business up that way.’
‘I want to find someone who lives there. I’ve got an address from Mickey. I thought I’d go up there this evening and look round, just to get my bearings. Is there a bus?’
She told me that would be no problem and explained where to catch a bus which would take me right across the city to my destination. She also asked if I thought I’d be back later than ten, because if so, she’d give me a front-door key.
‘I go to bed early,’ she explained. ‘I have to get up early for the breakfasts.’
I said I hoped to be back long before ten but perhaps I ought to take a key, just in case. It would be a long bus ride from the Iffley Road across the city to the area marked Summertown, where the Stallards lived.
Beryl told me about the name. ‘It was developed in the days when Oxford always had the fevers in the hot weather. Something to do with not having proper drains, probably. Everyone who could moved out to a healthier area until the cooler weather came back. It was the “summer town”, see? It was a risky life in the old days, wasn’t it?’ she observed.
I could have pointed out to her that it was a pretty risky life now, even if we were spared the threat of being brought down with a low fever every time the bugs woke up from winter hibernation.
With both Pereira’s and Beryl’s efforts to interest me in the city’s history and famous sights, I ought to have spent the bus ride taking more interest in passing scenery but my mind was on the job in hand. The bus set me down in a parade of shops, mostly closed now. It was the sort of area you could buy anything but not cheap as in Camden High Street. This was a classy area; even BBC Oxford had a place there.
The area also offered one immediate consolation. I had worried that wandering about a largely residential area, map in hand, obviously a stranger - and one who had already attracted the unwanted attention of authority - I’d attract more interest. But from the moment I jumped from the bus - taking care after hearing Beryl’s tale - I saw that I could wander around here happily and no one would give me a second glance. There were quite a number of young people around and a broad assortment of others. All had in common that they were utterly absorbed in themselves. Some of the houses bore signs of multiple occupation. This area, this entire city I guessed, contained a shifting population of young people, drawn here either for the university or for other reasons. One thing I had noticed from the bus was the number of language schools here in North Oxford. I had passed several gaggles of foreign-looking youngsters. They, along with tourists, presumably moved in when the students went home for the long summer break. They made the population even motlier in content than it would have been anyway. It was all working to my advantage.