He moved in front of me so I couldn’t walk on. I cursed myself for the momentary weakness which had let him latch on to me. I knew from experience that people like him were often difficult to shake loose again.
‘Go on, love,’ he persisted, pushing his face into mine. Close to, he wasn’t nearly so old nor so decrepit. His eyes met mine and sparkled with something which might have been intelligence or just malice. He pushed a couple of leaflets into my hand. ‘Buy yourself something nice. Dead cheap!’
I said, ‘Yeah, why not?’ and thrust the leaflets into my pocket.
I didn’t take them out again until I was safe indoors. I wasn’t surprised to find I had not two leaflets, but one leaflet and a brown paper envelope.
I opened the envelope and shook out on to Daphne’s kitchen table a strip of negs and four prints I recognised as old friends.
The police had kept their side of the deal. Now I had to keep mine.
Chapter Seventeen
Ganesh and I went out together to eat that evening. Given my guilty conscience, I wouldn’t have chosen to go out with Gan that night of all nights. But he called round to the house just after eight to ask if I’d eaten and if not, whether I wanted to go out.
‘We might have better luck this time,’ he said. ‘And not find a body lying around in your basement.’
I nearly told him he shouldn’t count on that and the body might be mine – but he wouldn’t have thought it funny and neither, come to that, did I.
‘Is this another staff Christmas dinner?’ I asked. No harm.
‘No, it isn’t,’ he retorted. ‘We can’t take two staff outings! You’ll have to pay your own way. Or I’ll pay, if you like,’ he added generously.
As it happened, Daphne had gone to see a friend and I was on my own and hadn’t got round to making a sandwich – my idea of cooking dinner. So we went, having established that I’d pay my own whack. It was one thing to let the business pay, quite another to let Ganesh shell out. I don’t mean because he’s broke, but that’s not the way our friendship works. He has lent me money in the past when I’ve been completely cleaned out or needed it urgently, but I’ve always paid him back. ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ as Mrs Worran used to say.
She was our neighbour when Dad and Grandma were alive. She belonged to some exclusive sect, so exclusive that if they were the only ones saved, Heaven must be a pretty empty place, just a few Mrs Worrans rattling around up there. She had a stock of such slogans, one for every occasion. They were uniformly negative. She also had a stock of badly printed tracts which she would post secretively through our door late at night, as if we didn’t know they came from her. Once, at the age of ten, when I unfortunately fell off my bike into her privet hedge making a large hole, she shot out and told me that the way I was going, when the sheep were divided from the goats, I’d be in the wrong half of the draw for sure. When I was expelled from school, she was in her element. Even after Grandma died shortly after Dad, and I was left quite alone, Mrs Worran informed me by way of encouragement that she was sure I’d manage all right. ‘The devil knows his own,’ she said, which at the time I found rather obscure and never have quite worked out.
We left Bonnie shut in the kitchen. She took a dim view of this. We could hear her howling as we closed the front door. She probably added tonight’s desertion to the list of things she had against Ganesh.
We ended up in a local burger bar where we both ordered the vegeburger. Ganesh is the vegetarian, not me, but somehow I’d gone off the idea of meat. It made me think of dead things. The vegeburger seemed to consist mainly of beans. On top of everything else, when I went to meet Grice the next day, I’d have wind. Not but what the very thought of going to meet Grice was enough to give anyone wind.
It gave me a chance to explain to Ganesh, however, that I couldn’t come to work the following morning. ‘I’m sorry to let you down,’ I said. ‘But something’s come up. It’s just one of those things. Perhaps you can get Dilip to come in for a couple of hours.’
‘You know,’ said Ganesh, ‘I don’t interfere and I’m not about to start. But I want you to know that
I
know you’re up to something and I just want you to be careful.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ I promised. You bet I would.
‘And you tell Harford,’ he went on grimly, ‘that if anything goes wrong with whatever it is, I’ll be round to see him.’
‘You’ve got a thing about Harford,’ I said.
‘I haven’t. You have.’
‘Rubbish!’ I snapped through a mouthful of beans. ‘You said the same thing about Parry. Really, Gan, you’re turning into a real old matchmaker.’ (I knew that would annoy him. That’s why I said it.)
‘I didn’t say you were keen on Parry,’ argued Ganesh. ‘I said he was keen on you. And he is. So I was right. But you’re not likely to fall for him, are you? Let’s face it; he’s gross. Harford’s got education and prospects and is a good-looking bloke. Of course you’re interested. But if it’s led you into making silly decisions, it’s not a good thing. That’s all.’
I told him it was a good thing he’d finished his burger or I’d have shoved it down his throat.
The next morning turned out clear and bright, one of those winter days when the weather seems to have got it wrong, and spring is trying to get in early. The pale sunshine, the pleasant breeze, and the cheerful look on the faces of passers-by, all combined to mock me and the way I felt, which was like a woman on her way to the block.
’Tis a far, far better thing
—No, it wasn’t. It was about the stupidest thing.
I began my long walk across the Hungerford Bridge shortly before twelve. Down below me on the Embankment I could see Cleopatra’s Needle looking lonely and out of place, just like me up here really. The narrow walkway on the bridge was busy with people going in both directions. They slowed as they passed an old boy who was flying a kite from this vantage point. He was good at it. The kite, which was made of some silvery material, was way up high out over the water and he controlled it very niftily with what looked to me like a converted fishing reel. It shimmered around up there, dipping and diving, catching the eye of nearly everyone. Many stopped to take a second look, unsure whether it was a bird, a helicopter or – there’s always one hopeful – a UFO. Then they saw the old man and knew it was a kite. I envied the kiteman his peace of mind as I walked on.
The river sparkled to my left and the view, if I’d been in the mood to admire it, was suffused with that pearly light which hangs over the Thames on days like this. The great dome of St Paul’s, where the river sweeps round to the right, hung suspended above the buildings around it. Sometimes when I’ve seen it, I’ve really wished I could paint. I don’t mean I aspire to being a Canaletto, just I’d like to be one of those hobby painters who can knock out a reasonable watercolour to hang on the wall and show off to their mates. But whenever I’ve tried, the result has looked like one of those expressive but out-of-sync efforts you see pinned up in infant schools. Even when I was in infant school, I couldn’t get it right. I always got more paint on myself than the paper and in the end, they took the poster paints away and gave me crayons. I didn’t like the crayons. They were too much like hard work.
To my right, the trains rumbled and clanked in and out of Charing Cross Station, along the parallel rail bridge. I wished I was on one of the outward bound ones, going anywhere.
Ahead of me lay the South Bank complex, with its galleries, theatres and concert halls, its presence heralded by the line of fluttering blue and white flags along the riverside. I wondered briefly if I was ever going to make a career in the performing arts, or whether I’d no more hope of that than I had of painting in oils or flying a kite. I really did think I had more talent at acting than the other two. Everyone has a talent to do something, Grandma Varady used to say. It’s finding it. (You see, Mrs Worran wasn’t the only one with slogans. The difference was, Grandma’s were intended to encourage you.) Finding this talent and making it work for you are two different things, however, as I’ve since discovered. Grandma’s talent, she reckoned, was in making a very good strudel. She tried to teach me how to do it and, guess what, I couldn’t do that, either. Flour and butter everywhere, stewed apple stuck to the pan, the air pungent with burned sugar. Result: a stick of pastry you could’ve knocked a hockey ball around with.
I wondered at greater length if I was even going to make the return journey back across the bridge this afternoon. In my pocket, the envelope with the negs was burning a hole. The Hungerford Bridge that morning seemed more like that bridge in Berlin where they used to exchange spies. I imagined finding a couple of heavies with long overcoats and trilby hats waiting for me on the other end. Come to think of it, that wasn’t such a wild piece of imagination. God alone knew what I was going to find. Hopefully a well-organised snatch brigade from the Met. The problem was that in my experience, the police never seemed that well organised, more a case of trusting in the endearing British habit of muddling through. Grice, on the other hand, I was sure was organised to the nth degree. I began nervously to study the expanse of concrete promenades on the further side and the festival pier extending a long finger over the choppy khaki water. Was one of the strolling figures Grice?
In the angle where the walkway comes to an end and the flight of steps down to the bank starts, a young bloke was sitting on a grubby blanket, asking passers-by for change. No one gave him any. Even the tourists could tell he was fake. Probably they thought he was a professional beggar. I knew he was a cop who’d ousted the regular pitch-holder for the day. Cripes, I thought, is this amateur the best Foxley could come up with? I just hoped Grice wouldn’t walk across this way and see him. Talk about dead giveaways. I don’t know what betrays undercover coppers – the way they stand on their big flat feet or their haircuts perhaps? This one just didn’t look hungry enough. But mostly, I think, I rumbled him because he hadn’t got the voice right. Beggars repeat the same question of passers-by like a mantra, with dulled hope, resignation and not quite buried resentment. This guy sounded altogether too chirpy, as if he was selling flags for charity.
‘You’re rotten,’ I muttered to him, as I passed.
‘Sod off,’ he managed to mutter back before I was out of earshot.
It was oddly comforting to know that, despite my present co-operation, nothing had really changed in my relationship with the rozzers.
I clattered down the steps. No going back now. There were always people around this large pedestrianised area, even in winter, especially on a fine day like today. I walked down the side of the Festival Hall to the cafeteria. Through its glass walls, I could see a few people having coffee. A young couple right by the door leaned across the table, gazing into one another’s eyes. There was a whole world around me, living normal, peaceful lives. What had I done to be excluded from it?
Curiosity killed the cat, Fran, I told myself. You had to go and get that film printed up. You couldn’t just have chucked it in the bin, could you?
The concreted area between the cafeteria and the rail bridge saw only a few visitors. I made my way to the larger-than-lifesize bronze head of Mandela on its plinth. No one stood by it and I felt a spurt of ridiculous optimism. Perhaps Grice wasn’t going to show. Then I looked beyond it, up the short flight of steps to the higher level of walkway.
A burly figure stood up there, a man, with his back to me. He was leaning over the parapet and holding up a camera as if he were taking photographs of Waterloo Station’s wonderful Victory Arch. The trouble was that from there he couldn’t see it, only the topmost line of stonework, a couple of flags, and the legend ‘Waterloo Station’. The rest was obscured by the grimy yellow brickwork of the rail bridge reaching down into Concert Hall Approach. Thoughts floated through my head in a discouragingly logical progression.
a) He was no photographer.
b) He was no tourist.
c) He might be an anorak obsessed with Victorian railway arches.
d) He was far more likely to be Grice.
As I neared, he turned and, pointing the camera down towards me, began taking snaps in my direction. He was prosperous in appearance, wearing a belted pale grey waterproof jacket and one of those little green felt Tyrolean hats. The angle he’d chosen allowed him to frame me in the viewfinder as I walked towards him. I heard the faint click as he pressed the button. He’d got a record of me, should he need it again. Nice thought.
He moved again, slipping rather incongruous shades on his nose, walking towards me, descending the flight of steps and pausing at the Mandela bronze. Slowly and deliberately he turned his body sideways on to me, apparently intent on getting a shot of Mandela from the best angle.
I had no doubt now this was Grice, who’d sussed out the area and taken up his position before I arrived. My heart sank to my boots. What did I do now? Walk up to him? It wouldn’t do to look too familiar. I couldn’t hail him by his name because I wasn’t supposed to know it. In the end, I stopped by the plinth and stuck my hands in my pockets, as if I was waiting for someone.