Les had seen the stares, too. ‘They think it looks funny, you and me,’ he muttered.
‘Perhaps they’ll think I’m your daughter, Les,’ I told him kindly.
‘If I ’ad a daughter,’ retorted Les, ‘I hope she wouldn’t dress like you. I never did fancy women in boots. I like high heels on a woman, suits her. Shows her legs off.’
Why is it, I felt like asking him, that middle-aged scruffs with a beer gut like Les, liked their women to dress to the nines but made not the slightest effort themselves? Why, in addition, did they think that glamorous fashion-conscious women would be interested in them? I didn’t ask partly because I didn’t want to alienate Les any further. I wanted information from him. Not that an ego like his was easily dented. But mostly I didn’t ask him because he wouldn’t have understood the question. Les probably sincerely considered himself a gift to the female of the species.
The pub was filling up and the noise level rising. I didn’t want to shout so was forced to snuggle closer to speak in his ear. It probably looked very cosy to the regulars up at the bar.
‘Now, Les,’ I began. ‘I’m not a copper. You can talk to me.’
‘You’re a copper’s mate,’ he said, edging away. ‘Everyone knows you’re pally with that woman inspector, even if you ain’t her eyes and ears.’ He lifted the glass so that he held it between us like a demarcation line. ‘I ain’t got anything to talk to you about, girl.’
‘I’m not even a copper’s mate. You want reminding who I am? I’m the patsy who was left to find the body, remember now?’
‘Nothing to do with me!’ he said promptly and buried his face in the glass.
I waited until even he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t now drained. ‘I don’t like being used like that, Les.’
‘No, well, you wouldn’t . . .’ he agreed unhappily and signalled to the bar.
I knew what the signal meant. Help!
The barman was there in a flash. ‘Need another, Les?’ He scooped up the glass and gave me a warning look.
‘Er, yus, same again,’ Les muttered.
‘What about your lady friend?’ asked the barman, ‘or is she just leaving?’
I leaned forward and met the barman’s gaze. ‘No, she isn’t,’ I said. ‘And Les is big enough to look after himself, right? I’m fine with the drink I’ve got.’
‘Yeah, yeah, she’s all right,’ muttered the hapless Les, now as red as a beetroot.
‘Suit yourself,’ said the barman and departed.
‘What do you want to do that for?’ growled Les. ‘Embarrassing me like that?’
‘Come off it, Les!’ I told him. ‘Just answer my questions and I’ll be out of here. You can sit here for the rest of the night and with luck you might even meet a woman wearing stiletto heels. But talking of embarrassing situations, let’s get back to the one I found myself in when I stumbled over Duane Gardner, as dead as a dodo with a bruise on the back of his head and a socking great needle puncture in his arm.’
A fresh pint appeared before Les and the barman whisked away back to his bar before he had to make eye contact with either of us.
‘As Gawd is my witness,’ said Les pitifully, ‘I never knew anything like that was going down, honest.’
Bingo! So he did know something and I was ready to bet a pound to a penny it had to do with the set of office keys he held - or had held. Susie had surely taken them back into safe keeping or got the locks changed by now and declined to supply him with a new set.
I patted his arm in commiseration and he was so sunk in self-pity he didn’t even recoil. ‘No, Les, of course you didn’t.’
‘Old Duane was a mate,’ snuffled Les, getting lachrymose. He hadn’t had time to drink much with me but I doubted the pint I’d bought him had been the first of the day. ‘And we worked together, didn’t we? He trusted me.’
More fool Duane, but there, that wasn’t his problem now. ‘And anyway,’ Les was saying, ‘I can’t be getting into anything like that, can I? I can’t have the cops coming round my place and acting like they think I’m up to my neck in something.’ Now he leaned towards me and I got a blast of beery breath. ‘See, between you and me, darling, I got form.’
‘Have you, Les?’ I asked, all innocent surprise, as if I’d never suspected.
‘Only old stuff !’ he hastened to insist. ‘I got into a bit of trouble when I was younger. Like kids do, you know. But the cops they never forget, like bleeding elephants they are. They got everything on their records. Use computers these days. It’s no use telling them that any trouble you got in when you were a kid was just larking about, being silly. They act like a bloke’s a criminal.’
‘What sort of trouble?’ I had an idea that Les’s description of youngsters ‘larking about’ was a pretty liberal interpretation of events.
‘Oh, nuffin’ heavy,’ Les urged. ‘I used to hang round with my mates on match days, we’d go out looking for the other teams’ supporters and jump on ’em. A bit of a punch-up, you know. They gave as good as they got. A few times there was a bit of crowd trouble inside the grounds, up in the stands, and I happened to be in the middle of it, just by bad luck. But like I said, it was years ago.’
So here I sat with an ageing ex-football hooligan with a record of convictions for affray and assault. Well, I wasn’t interested in ancient history, just the very recent sort.
‘So what happened about the keys, Les?’ I asked in a kindly tone as used by Sister Mary Joseph when a six-year-old limped in from the playground with bloodied knees. (Whatever the explanation it was inevitably followed by: ‘Ah, well, it’s your own fault then, so it is. Let it be a lesson to you. Now sit down and stop squalling.’)
‘Did you lend them to someone?’ I coaxed.
‘No!’ His voice rose in a horrified squawk attracting more curious looks from the regulars. ‘No,’ he repeated in lower tones but just as vehemently. ‘I never lent ’em to no one. But I did, well, mislay ’em for twenty-four hours. I found them again, mind you.’
I invited him to tell me about it. He extracted a promise from me not to tell Susie. I think he was more frightened of Susie than of the police. He wouldn’t be getting too much work from Lottie now and he couldn’t afford to lose another employer.
‘Where was this and when?’ I asked.
‘It was just a bit of bad luck, not my fault nor nothing. These things happen and I put it right. I got ’em back.’ He frowned. ‘I hadn’t used them for a couple of days but they were in my coat pocket, or I thought they were. You know I recognised old Duane from your description of him. You also know that with Susie not having any work for me, I had to go out looking to see if anyone else had a job for me. Eventually I got out to Teddington. I didn’t go to the house. It was getting late. I knew where Duane did his drinking so I went there - and found him. I told him about you asking around about him. He was grateful, like I said. He bought me a whisky.’
Here Les gazed a little resentfully at the beer glass.
‘And the keys?’
‘Oh, yes. It was hot in there, that place where he was drinking. So I took off my coat and just hung it over the back of my chair. I reckon what happened was, the keys fell out of my pocket then and they musta landed on the floor. Only I didn’t know, did I? I didn’t see them lying there because it wasn’t very well lit. I wouldn’t have heard ’em fall because of all the chatter going on round us. It’s a poncey sort of place, all dim lights and fancy food if you want a bite. No sausage and beans, just cass-oo-let.’
‘Cassoulet, Les. It’s very nice.’
‘It’s French,’ said Les grimly. ‘What’s wrong with sausage and beans?’
It wasn’t the time to discuss international cuisine. ‘When did you miss the keys, Les?’
‘I didn’t,’ he said honestly. ‘Not right off. I missed them the next day, after old Duane met his end, poor bugger. Susie asked me about them. I put my hand in my pocket and they wasn’t there! I didn’t let on to Susie. I swore to her they had never been out of my keeping. She was in a fair old state herself and she didn’t ask actually to see them, right? It was a near thing, that. I thought that at any minute she would. Usually she’s as sharp as a needle but what had happened threw her a bit. The police had been making a nuisance of themselves.’
‘Well, when there’s a murder . . .’ I couldn’t help murmuring.
Sarcasm was wasted on him. ‘Yeah, you’re right. The minute you got a stiff on your hands you can’t move for uniforms and plain-clothes. Them SOCO fellers, too, they get in all over the place, looking for fingerprints, scraping up bloodstains. They hoover the dust outa your carpet, you know. They really turned Suze’s office over, sealed it off and went through it like a dose of salts. That Michael upstairs, him with the nasty needle, he was doing his nut ’cos he couldn’t get up the staircase to his own place.’
‘Susie told me,’ I said, stopping this flow of information. Les might not like the police but the way they went about their work clearly fascinated him. Probably he had been on hand a few times to observe it.
I was intrigued by his reference to Michael’s tattooing activities and wondered if this was based on a less than successful visit to the parlour by Les. But if Les had tattoos, I didn’t want to see them.
Les was shaking his head, still wondering at the thoroughness of the Met. Then he got back to the matter in hand. ‘Anyhow, I knew I had to find those keys quick before either Susie or the plods asked me to produce ’em. I thought I must have left them at home, so I went straight to my place and hunted everywhere without luck. I was getting panicky, I don’t mind telling you. I tried to think where I could have lost them. Then I remembered putting my coat down in the bar where I was drinking with Duane and his mate.’
I sat up so suddenly I nearly tipped the table over. Les made a grab for his glass.
‘You didn’t say anything about Duane drinking with a mate when you found him!’ I said. ‘You just said you found him in a place where he drank regularly.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ He looked at me in a puzzled way. ‘He wasn’t drinking alone. Nothing odd in that.’
‘So tell me about the person he was with, man or woman?’
‘Man,’ said Les promptly. ‘Snappy, stroppy city type. Didn’t take a shine to him at all. He looked at me like I was going to ask him for a hand-out.’
Adam Ferrier. So Adam had known almost from the first that I was interested in Edna and that I had spotted Duane outside the Tube station.
I had been silent for longer than usual so Les was getting curious. ‘Do you want to know how I got the keys back or not?’
‘Of course I do.’ I rallied to the present and pushed aside the interesting line of thought that was developing fast in my brain.
‘After I’d looked everywhere else, like I was saying, I began to think I might have lost them out at Teddington in that pub. So I went out there and asked the barman if any keys had been handed in. Funny thing, he told me, not twenty minutes earlier someone had come in and handed over some keys. He didn’t know who it was. It was a girl, that’s all he could say.’
‘A girl!’
Les blinked. ‘Yes, that’s all I know. The girl said she’d found the keys on the floor there. She’d picked them up thinking they were her boyfriend’s but it had turned out they weren’t so she’d brought them back.’
But not before they had been used, I thought grimly. Fran, I told myself, you’ve been made a fool of.
I got to my feet and Les looked relieved.
‘You going? Right, then. Here, you promised not to tell Susie!’
‘I won’t.’
‘Nor the cops?’ he added belatedly with an anxious grimace.
‘Listen to me, Les,’ I told him. ‘The very best thing you can do is go to Inspector Morgan and tell her all about the keys being out of your possession for the vital twenty-four hours. You can tell her you were unwilling to upset Susie Duke and that’s why you didn’t own up straightaway. But the longer you keep quiet about it, the worse it will be when the cops do find out. If they pick up someone for Duane’s murder the first thing they’ll ask the killer is, how did he get in? You might keep quiet. You can’t be sure the murderer or his accomplice will.’
‘Accomplice?’ asked Les, startled.
‘The girl who handed the keys in.’
‘Oh, yes, her,’ said Les, ‘I’d forgotten her.’
So had I.
I sometimes feel it takes the quiet of the night and the darkness to get my brain working. I lie there with Bonnie snoring at my feet and the ideas begin to flicker through my imagination with the rapidity of a magic lantern show. Bonnie does have a basket, by the way, but she sneaks out of it and hops up on the bed as soon as she judges I’m asleep and won’t know.