He was a private detective! I stopped in the street and struck my forehead with the palm of my hand. Idiot, Fran! Susie was a private detective. She hadn’t recognised him when I’d described him but she hadn’t then been aware he was in the same line of business as she was. She might not know him by sight but she might know of his one-man agency. I turned my steps in the direction of the Turkish fast food outlet and the Duke Detective Agency’s office above it. It was lunchtime, anyway, and I was hungry. After I’d talked to Susie, I’d go down and buy a kebab.
It was all go in the food outlet: smoke and steam and yelling Turkish voices. Knives flashed as an unidentifiable joint on a pole was shredded, customers pushed in and out, a powerful aroma of cooked meat and spices rolled out into the street. I went up to the agency’s office.
The building was old and the staircase probably original. The treads were narrow and creaked underfoot. I passed a door which I knew led into a washroom area with a loo, hand basin and broken hand-dryer. ‘Staff Only’ announced a label importantly in order to deny admission to any passer-by caught short. The first-floor door with ‘Duke Investigations’ emblazoned on it stood ajar. That was unusual because Susie liked to hear the jangle of the bell as it opened so that she knew someone was there. I stood there for a moment listening for voices from within but there was no sound, although I could hear a creak of floorboards above and a distant murmur of conversation. It was punctuated by the muffled squawk as someone exclaimed, ‘
Ow!
’ Michael was plying his trade.
I pushed the agency door open a fraction more and called out, ‘Susie? It’s Fran.’
There was no reply. She might be in the loo, or have nipped out for something, but she wouldn’t leave the door open. I felt uneasy and gave it a hefty shove that sent it flying wide with a protesting crack of the hinges.
The outer office, as I have explained, was just a tiny area separated from the main office by a partition and right now it was empty. Two wooden chairs of the old-fashioned kitchen type stood there for clients to wait on, should there be a rush of business. I don’t suppose anyone had sat on them for quite a while. The only light in there came through the glazed panel in the partition, via the window in the main office. I couldn’t see any movement through the frosted pane. I tapped at the door into the inner sanctum and called out again. No reply.
I really didn’t like this. But I was probably just being jumpy for no good reason. Any second now a tap of heels would herald Susie running up the staircase from the loo and she’d appear behind me. I opened the connecting door and walked in.
Susie wasn’t there. But Duane Gardner was. At first I thought my eyes or my imagination must be playing tricks. But unfortunately he was real and shake my head or rub my eyes or just try denying the evidence before me though I might, he wouldn’t go away. He was sitting on the floor with his back propped against the far wall and his legs splayed in front of him, for all the world like a wooden puppet with broken strings. He wore his trademark baggy long shorts with the pockets and his white cotton T-shirt. The white baseball hat had fallen off and now I could see his hair was very fair and fine and clipped close to his skull. His eyes were open and stared at me. His small mouth formed a circle of surprise. I’d wanted to find him and now I had, but far, far too late for us to talk. I knew, with sinking heart, that he was dead; that this was only the outer husk of poor Duane. In that sense he wasn’t really there. The person had gone, departed on that final journey.
My legs trembled and I sank down on to the chair placed for a visiting client before that scarred old ministry desk of Susie’s. Even now I can see the entire little office in my mind’s eye, every piece of rickety furniture, the steel-grey filing cabinet, the cobweb draped across the corner of the unwashed window-pane. Outside, on the window ledge, was a scruffy dark grey London pigeon with scaly feet and a wary yellow eye. It seemed to be looking in; perhaps it was. It could probably see me and hoped I’d open the window and scatter some breadcrumbs on the ledge. But to have an audience of any kind at that moment was an unacceptable intrusion into a scene that should have been private. For death ought to be a private matter, in my view. We all fancy ourselves surrounded by our nearest and dearest as we shuffle off the mortal coil but I know, from my dad’s death and later my grandma’s, that even if your loved ones are there, you are already cut off from them by a gradually thickening pane of glass, like that pane in the window. You can no longer reach across to them nor they to you. It is the most private moment of your entire existence, that time when you come to quit it.
I could no longer reach out to Duane in any real sense. Physically I could have touched him, had I wished, but it would have been meaningless. He could neither have known nor responded. Yet had I arrived here, what? Half an hour ago? Perhaps even less? If I had, even now, at this very moment he and I would have been chatting or having some sort of conversation even if only an argument. He would probably have been accusing me of not telling him I was a professional and I would have been denying that I was any such thing. Duane, in that imaginary never-to-be held conversation, was jeering at me, demanding ‘Oh, yeah? Right, then, what are you doing here?’
What the hell
was
I doing here? Why did it have to be me? And what was
he
doing here? That’s what I would probably have retaliated, had I arrived earlier and we faced one another now exchanging insults. The question now rephrased itself as ‘what was he doing here -
like that
?’
All this passed through my head in a mere couple of seconds. I heard my own voice uttering a low moan of distress. Initially it wasn’t a cry of fear, in shock though I was. I felt confusion and above all pity. I hadn’t liked him but he was a relatively young man and apart from outwitting me, he’d not done me any harm.
Not until now. Now, whatever he’d been involved with, I was involved with it too. He had been a good detective. He’d tracked me down in some way and learned I worked occasionally for Susie. He’d come here in order to find me, confront me or leave a message for me. It could only mean trouble for me of some sort. Now at last I began to be afraid.
I begged quietly and uselessly, ‘Please, Duane, don’t do this to me.’
He was beyond obliging me. The small round open mouth seemed almost to be about to tell me what had led to this, but the communication had been terminally interrupted. He would have looked surprised had the film of death not already been dulling his gaze. His expression seemed to say, ‘This can’t be happening to me. It’s a big mistake. You want someone else.’
Then, as I watched, the muscles of his jaw twitched as if he would speak, after all, and his mouth stretched in a ghastly yawn. I nearly jumped out of my skin and thought for a second or two that I was wrong, he wasn’t dead. I called to him, ‘Duane?’
But his mouth, at the widest extent of the yawn, froze and remained open in a horrid rictus. It was the involuntary contraction of the muscles in the first signs of approaching rigor.
There was a sudden clatter of footsteps behind me. I whirled round and dashed out into the reception area just in time to intercept Susie. She had on that black business suit and carried a battered document case.
‘Hullo, Fran!’ she greeted me. ‘How long have you been here? I’ve just been stood up by a potential client and I’m bloody fed up. I reckon I’ve been given the right old run-around. Let’s stick the kettle on.’
Chapter Six
She made to enter the office but I barred her path. ‘Wait, Susie, don’t go in there. There’s something I’ve got to tell you first.’
Her gaze sharpened. ‘What’s up?’
I indicated the connecting door. ‘There’s a visitor in there, a dead one.’
Susie stared at me. ‘What do you mean, a dead one?’
‘I’m not likely,’ I said, my voice breaking and sounding, to my own ears, as sharp as chalk scraping on a blackboard, ‘to make a mistake over something like that.’
‘Let me see!’ She pushed me aside and opening the door, strode through it. ‘Crikey . . .’ I heard her gasp. Then, ‘Bloody hell!’
I didn’t want to return to the inner office but I edged inside it to stand behind Susie and look over her shoulder.
She had more presence of mind than I did. She turned her head towards me. ‘Have you rung an ambulance?’
‘No. Well, look, it’s too late for that.’
‘I’m not a bloody doctor and neither are you!’ She was refusing to accept the evidence of her eyes. She walked over to the slumped form, crouched down and stretched out her hand to his shoulder. ‘Oy, mate? Can you hear me?’
‘No, he can’t,’ I said. ‘He’s a goner, Susie. Face it.’
She gave a little squeak, snatched her hand away from him and jumped to her feet, scuttling back to stand beside me.
‘Who is he?’ she whispered.
I told her. ‘It’s the guy I told you about, all in white, who was tailing Edna. It turned out he was a private detective by the name of Duane Gardner. You ever heard of him, Susie?’
‘Gardner? No, but the detection business is getting crowded these days. He didn’t work from an office round here, that’s all I can say.’
‘He has - had - his office in Teddington.’
The fringes of the metropolitan area counted as the darkest unknown territory in Susie’s book.
‘Teddington? Right out there? Upmarket area that, isn’t it? Blimey, I wouldn’t know him, would I? What was he doing here and how did he get in?’ Her forehead crinkled in a frown. ‘What did he want?’
I shook my head. ‘He must have been looking for me.’
Susie moved towards the desk and the phone.
‘Perhaps you ought not to touch that,’ I said as she stretched out her hand.
She froze, let her hand drop and turned to me. ‘This isn’t a crime scene, Fran. Look, there’s no blood. He’s just dropped in his tracks. Best way to go, really. You don’t have time to know what’s happening.’
‘I don’t care,’ I snapped, ‘use your mobile!’
‘All right, then.’ She retrieved the document case that she’d left by the door, dug out a mobile phone and rang the police on that.
‘We wait,’ she said, as she put the phone away. ‘But I’m not waiting in here - with him. We can sit out there in the reception.’
I looked round the office. ‘Before we do, and before the cops get here, does everything look all right to you?’
She glanced round. ‘Yeah, sure, all of it. Fran, what’s up with you?’
‘Shock, I guess,’ I said. ‘Like you say, he probably had a heart attack or something sudden like that.’
We went back to the reception and sat down side by side on the kitchen chairs. Susie, moments before such a trim sprightly figure, looked pale and cold. She shivered. Her shoulders slumped. Even her blond curls seemed to have lost their springiness.
‘I could do with a cup of tea,’ she muttered. ‘But the kettle is in there.’ She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. ‘Anyway, I suppose you don’t want me to touch that, either.’ She rallied a little and sat up straighter to look me full in the face. ‘It’s not foul play, Fran. It’s life playing one of its sick jokes.’
Usually I’d agree with her about life’s often misplaced sense of humour, but general unease prompted me to ask, ‘What time did you go out, Susie?’
‘Out of the office or out to work? I haven’t been in the office this morning till now. I had a call to make first, business, or I thought it was.’ Susie’s voice took on a grim tone. ‘I’ve been all the way out to Richmond and for nothing. Some woman made the appointment over the phone and sounded kosher. She’d met a new bloke and he was really keen but she thought some of the stories he was spinning sounded a bit unconvincing, so wanted me to check him out. Straightforward stuff but plenty of legwork and surveillance and day-to-day expenses so out I went to meet her in some upmarket pub calling itself a wine bar, only she never showed.’
‘Did you try and get in contact with her?’
‘Of course I did! I rang the number she gave me and some other woman, not the same one for sure, it was a different voice - she said she didn’t know anyone of that name. I know when I’ve been given the run-around and believe me I am not pleased!’
‘I do believe it,’ I told her morosely, ‘and I also believe it sounds as though we’ve been set up, both of us.’
She looked startled and then thoughtful. ‘Someone got me out of the office so that they could fix to meet whatsit, Gardner, here? And then croak him? Leave him here for one of us to fall over when we got back? Why? I mean, why
here
?’
‘Because it drops me right in it, doesn’t it?’ I muttered. ‘You’ll have to get your story about your trip to Richmond absolutely straight, remember all you can about this woman who contacted you. The police will ask.’