Read Online Keeping Bad Company by Ann Granger - Free Book Online Page B

got the girl away to a hiding place, they might have gone back with the intention of silencing the witness. Not finding him, had they, like Gan and me, gone looking for him? Suppose the other man had been following Albie on that fateful morning of our encounter at Marylebone? The stranger’s intention had been to waylay the old fellow, but he’d been thwarted when Albie settled down to talk to me. Subsequently Ganesh had joined us. The follower might have decided at this point that three was a crowd and left, intending to await another occasion when Albie might be found alone. But before he’d left he’d had time to get a good look at me and had recognised me when I’d walked into The Rose the previous evening. If this was what had happened, then I’d really walked into trouble.
     
    I cursed my rashness. It was all very well saying that I couldn’t have known, but I ought to have thought more about it. Instead I had sought out Merv, an action too suspicious to overlook. I had truly become a player in the game. Until now, I could have reasoned that by reporting Albie’s story to the police, I’d done all I could as a good citizen. But not now. Out there on the streets was an elderly, frail man who carried a dangerous memory in his fuddled brain. It was a memory I shared and someone suspected it.
     
    I was yawning by now and nodding my head. It was beginning to get light outside and with the grey dawn, all my fears began to fade into foolish nightmares, probably induced by the extra cheese on my potato. Perhaps I was wrong about everything.
     
    ‘Your trouble, Fran,’ I told myself, ‘is that you’ve got too much imagination!’
     
    I went back to bed. It really wasn’t so bad in the underground room with daylight seeping through the opaque glass overhead. With the new day, last night’s walker became a man who’d stopped to light a cigarette. A Cortina parked outside The Rose had been coincidence. Albie’s original tale could be dismissed as the rambling of an alcohol-ravaged brain. I could even choose to blame the railway, with everything stemming from a cold wait on Marylebone Station, which had led me to pay altogether too much attention to the incoherent mumblings of an old wino, building a regular house of cards on those poor foundations.
     
    I couldn’t allow myself to sleep late because I had to go over to Jimmie’s and meet Angus the Artist. I crawled out, heavy-eyed, at around eight and got myself together, washed my hair, which doesn’t take long because I keep it very short, and got into my comfy old jeans. If I was going to be an artist’s model, I supposed I ought to make a bit of an effort so I dug out my turquoise silk shirt and quilted dark blue Indian waistcoat, both of which I’d found on a nearly new stall at Camden Market just after I’d moved in to the flat. I yawned and hoped Jimmie’s coffee would wake me up.
     
    So, there I was, more or less ready for the day, and just about to leave the flat when someone rang the doorbell. One thing I wasn’t ready for was visitors. To begin with, normally I didn’t get any, other than Ganesh and occasionally Daphne from upstairs. It was too early for Ganesh and a bit on the early side for Daphne. She knew I tended to sleep late. And no one sends me parcels.
     
    I went to the window that gave on to the basement well and peered out. A man was standing before my front door, his back to me. His jacket, which was a sort of sage green overlaid with a grille of white squares, was unknown to me. But the solid build of the wearer and his cropped ginger hair rang a bell-a warning bell. While I was trying to place him, he turned round. Either he had eyes in the back of his head or he’d sensed I was scrutinising him through the window. He came to rest his palms on the outer sill and stared at me through the glass.
     
    Eyeball to eyeball, there was no mistaking him. It was my old adversary, Sergeant Parry.
     
    ‘Can I come in?’ he mouthed,