False Alarm Read online

  Maggie brought in a tray of mugs of coffee and a plate of delicious looking biscuits. She handed them round, collapsed on to a settee, flicking off her flip-flops, and ran her fingers up through her spiky red-at-the-moment hair. ‘Cynthia terrifies me. And she always comes out on top at the bridge parties. What’s that about Donald messing up?’

  Bea told her. ‘He tried it on with Evonne and Carmela, and when they didn’t want to know, he had some call-girl cards printed up with their details on. Cynthia’s just thrown him out.’

  ‘Wow! Really?’

  ‘Really. Did you say she comes to your mother’s bridge parties?’

  ‘Mm. I think Lucas asked her to. He put up some money to help her get started, you know.’

  Bea stared at Maggie. ‘What else do you know about the people who live here?’

  Maggie counted them off on her fingers. ‘Nothing much to say about the McIntyres. She’s a wimp and he’s overprotective.’

  ‘Start from the top. The Professor.’

  ‘He’s OK. I suspect he’s looking for someone to take care of him in his old age. Dunno if my mother is quite the right person, but as a stopgap he’s useful to her. He’s got a daughter who’d dearly love to shove him into an old people’s home, but he’s not ready for that yet.’

  Oliver, tapping keys, said, ‘He’s OK. The genuine article. I doubt if he’s good husband material, though. Married and widowed twice. Been single for some time.’

  Bea handed the biscuits around. ‘He’s hungry for company, so he might be all right. What about the people opposite him, the ones who are in France at the moment?’

  Maggie took a biscuit. ‘Um. Yum. Strong chocolate flavour. And something else? Orange peel? The people opposite the Professor are a retired businessman and his wife. She’s got heart trouble. They like it in France because their daughter lives there with her husband and their three grandchildren. I did wonder if they were doing the flat up to sell.’

  ‘That makes sense. Maggie; for someone who doesn’t live here now, you know a lot about the natives. I assume from Carrie and Lucy?’

  ‘Aren’t they sweet? They take an interest in everyone and everything, not like some old people who grumble about everything and never move from their armchairs. The next down is Tariq; well, he’s gone and I gather he’s left something of a mess behind him. He was warned about the music, you know. But you can’t tell some people anything. Then there’s Harvey . . .’ Maggie’s face cracked into a grin. ‘Oh, poor Harvey. Getting locked in, and then getting stuck half way in and half way out of his window. Wish I’d seen it. But he’s all right, really.’

  Bea took a second biscuit. ‘Is Carmela “all right, really”?’

  A quick frown. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never understood exactly what she does for a living. Carrie says Carmela lets men talk to her and that that’s all they do, but Lucy says that if I believe that, I need my head examining. I really don’t know.’

  Bea nodded. ‘Agreed. So if we skip Cynthia and the McIntyres, that leaves us with the dark-haired Daddy’s girl, Evonne, and her partner, Connor.’

  ‘I hardly know them,’ said Maggie. ‘They have their own friends, not exactly my style. Carrie says they’ve been rather naughty and that they’ve let the side down. I used to think Connor was quite dishy, but he’s shaved off all his hair and I don’t think it suits him.’

  ‘Which leaves Lavinia.’

  ‘The old lady on the ground floor. She was here for ever, since before my mother came, and that must be seven or eight years ago now. Not that Mother was in the penthouse then. She only moved up here when she married Lucas.’

  ‘Where was she before?’

  ‘Where the Muslim family is now. Have you seen them yet? Poor things; the women jump if a car backfires, and the men look at me as if I were toast.’

  ‘Nice toast, or something to gobble up?’

  ‘Like, “I would if I could, but someone’s watching.”’

  ‘Not nice. Do they speak English?’

  ‘Well enough. The women let me into their flat once when they needed to know how to work the oven and they didn’t trust the caretaker, which you can understand in a way. They wear those black cloak things whenever they go out, and when they have visitors apart from the family.’

  Oliver took another biscuit, spraying crumbs as he accessed another website. Laughing. ‘Harvey’s blog! I must say, he writes amusingly. I can see why he’s got a following.’

  ‘Getting back to Lavinia,’ said Bea.

  ‘She used to frighten the life out of me,’ said Maggie. ‘She was ancient. Enormous. A big woman with a hairy chin, none too clean. She couldn’t walk without a stick, and she breathed heavily all the time. She used to stand in the doorway of her flat and call out to everyone who came in or went out, wanting them to pick things up off the floor for her, or to go and buy her something from the shops. If I was in a hurry I used to rush through the foyer with my head down and pretend I hadn’t heard her.’

  ‘I thought she had a carer.’

  ‘A succession of carers. I don’t know how many she got through, but Carrie said she never liked any of them. She and Lucy used to pop in to see her at least once a day to make sure she was all right. The caretaker used to have terrible rows with her, but she used to shout back at him and . . . I don’t know. I suppose she was lonely. My mother said she ought to have gone to an old people’s day centre, but when she mentioned it, meaning nothing but kindness, Lavinia refused, saying she was all right as she was, and how dare my mother interfere. She wasn’t a very nice person, but perhaps I wouldn’t be very nice if I got to be old and my legs all swelled up and my family never came near me.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘Heart attack. She was coming up to her ninetieth birthday. I don’t even know exactly when it happened. One day when I came to visit my mother her door was closed and I thought “good”, because she wouldn’t be jumping out at me, and then my mother told me she’d died in the week. And I thought – which was awful of me, but there it is – that they’d probably had a lot of difficulty taking her body away because she was so big, you know. I wondered if they’d put her in a chair, or on a trolley, or what. It’s odd how quickly you forget. I used to worry about meeting her in the foyer every time I came, and now I don’t even think about her.’

  Oliver was still at the computer. ‘At least she wasn’t on Facebook.’

  Bea said, ‘So, who else is?’

  ‘The Lord High Executioner, Sir Lucas Ossett, pops up everywhere. At the Mansion House for a dinner, at a reception at one of the Middle Eastern embassies, at the opera with a cute little dolly bird on his arm—’

  ‘Let me see!’ cried Maggie and bent over him. ‘Oh, wow! He’s got a different woman with him every time.’ She straightened up, losing her smile. ‘But not my mother.’

  Silence. No, not her mother.

  Bea sighed. ‘Best be prepared, Maggie. I really do think he’s moved on.’

  Maggie was near tears. ‘Isn’t marriage supposed to be for life?’

  Silence. Yes, it was. But some people didn’t see it that way, did they?

  Bea still missed her own dear husband, every day of her life. Every now and then she’d turn round to ask him something only to find he wasn’t there any more. She shook herself back to the present. ‘I think I’ll pop down to have a word with Harvey. There’s time before supper, isn’t there? I’d like a look at his portfolio of pictures.’

  Oliver grinned, still tapping away at the computer. ‘He’ll keep you for hours if you’re not careful. He likes an audience.’

  Bea looked at her watch. ‘Maggie, suppose you come and fetch me in, say, half an hour or so? I’d really like a word with the Muslim family, if possible, and you could introduce me.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bea. ‘There’s something I’ve been told, somewhere along the line. I keep feeling that something else is about to happen, and that if I don’t stop it, there�
�s going to be . . . No, I’m being silly.’

  ‘Another death?’ Oliver stared at her.

  ‘Two deaths so far; Lavinia and the caretaker. Two disappearances; Tariq and Donald. I keep telling myself they’re not linked in any way. And gut reaction is telling me that they are. Anyone want to argue with me about this? I’m ready to be convinced I’m wrong.’

  ‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘I, too, think there’s something seriously off beam here. Shall I accompany you to Harvey’s?’

  ‘No, thanks. He won’t want to pinch my bottom, and if he does, he’ll get my handbag across his face.’

  She took the stairs down. It was only two flights.

  Harvey let her into his flat with a: ‘Hallo there! Come to visit the invalid?’ His bonhomie was catching. ‘I’m well on the way to recovery, thank you.’ He held up his hand, to show he still had a plaster on it.

  ‘I wanted to be sure you’d suffered no ill effects. I also wondered if you’d let me have a look at your photographs of the neighbours. Oliver tells me you have a real talent in that direction.’ She looked around, but there were no pictures of young men to be seen.

  ‘By all means, dear lady. Come in, come in. Isn’t this weather glorious? I shall be out with my camera early tomorrow. It doesn’t happen very often that we get snow here, does it? And, alas, it goes so soon.’

  ‘Do you go out into the parks to take your shots?’

  ‘That’s not my scene. Let me show you the ones I took last time we had snow.’ He led the way to the second bedroom which, as Oliver had reported, was set up as a workroom with shelves reaching up to the ceiling and wide work surfaces at different heights below. There was the usual array of modern computers and printers which a serious photographer would need but also a collection of old cameras and even – she had to gasp at this – two ancient old typewriters on a high shelf.

  No pictures of young men. Harvey approached a row of blue photograph albums, each one labelled with a date. ‘I keep them in chronological order.’ He ran his finger along the ranks, selected an album, turned pages and laid the volume flat on a work surface for Bea to inspect.

  He had shot the fire escape, each stair rimmed with snow, from the ground level upwards. The balconies and railings danced up and up in a dizzying, hypnotic manner. She could hardly believe her eyes. The pulp fiction which he wrote, and his airy-fairy manner, had been misleading. ‘Harvey, you are a true artist!’

  SIXTEEN

  Harvey beamed. ‘That picture won a prize . . . I’ll show you the newspaper cutting in a minute.’

  Bea turned pages. More stunning photographs, all black and white; the backs of buildings, a stack of wheelie bins, the first track of a vehicle in the snow . . .

  Harvey was pulling out more albums and pushing them back again. ‘Now where is it? I had it out to show Oliver only yesterday.’

  She continued to turn pages. Ah. A full length portrait of a large, angry woman leaning on a stick. Was this Lavinia? Yes, it must be. She was wearing a shapeless cardigan over a T-shirt and ancient trousers. Ankles overlapped soft shoes with Velcro fastenings. There were rings embedded in fat fingers, and she was leaning on a stout, man’s stick decorated with metal badges. Bea’s father had had a stick like that. Holidaying in the Alps, he’d bought a badge from each of the towns he’d visited and put it on his walking stick. In the Middle Ages pilgrims stuck metal badges on their hats or cloaks. Nowadays young people stuck similar fabric badges on their rucksacks.

  Harvey was riffling through his albums, getting annoyed with himself. ‘Where is it? Has someone been moving my albums around?’

  Bea held up the album she was holding. ‘Is this Lavinia?’

  ‘Mm? Oh. Yes. Horrible woman, but one of my best likenesses. I entered that in a competition at the National Portrait Gallery. It got a Commended.’

  Bea turned pages and smiled, recognizing Carmela, looking stylish but thunderous. Next came a shot of two women in head to foot burkas, even their eyes concealed by masks. Harvey had caught them in the act of getting out of the lift, and they were frozen for all time in surprise. Bea laughed again.

  He giggled. ‘Silly creatures. I assume they’re both hideous underneath all that mummery!’

  Bea shook her head at him and turned more pages. Dark-haired Evonne led her partner Connor across the hall. He was almost unrecognizable with a full head of hair. ‘Any comment on these two?’

  ‘Pretty boy turns into street rat. The girl should wave her magic wand and turn him back.’

  An elderly lady laden with a heavy tray. ‘Oh, here’s Lucy Emerson. What on earth is she carrying?’

  He peeked over her shoulder. ‘A tray of cakes. Taking food to those who can perfectly well manage by themselves. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”’

  Bea’s hands stilled on the book. Her Latin was rusty, almost non-existent. Did he really mean that you should beware of people bringing you gifts? ‘Dear me,’ she said, as lightly as she could. Speculation ran wildly through her head.

  He closed the book she’d been holding and put it back on the shelf. ‘Lucy and Carrie were most solicitous when I had flu last winter. Brought me hot chicken soup every day. I never had the courage to tell them it disagreed with me. Care for a cuppa?’

  Bea said, ‘Thank you. Have you got a good photo of Maggie?’

  He selected a different album for her. ‘Have a look while I put the kettle on.’

  He went off to the kitchen and Bea turned pages. Pictures of autumn in London. Piles of leaves blowing in the air. Atmospheric clouds. Pigeons in flight. Carrie Kempton struggling with her umbrella in the wind. Lady Ossett – oh, what a laugh! – failing to hold on to a couple of large bags from a designer dress shop while reaching for the bell for the lift. Lucy Emerson in a jerkin and squashy hat, attending to her flower pots on the balcony, her backside prominent, a stout stick leaning against the wall.

  The caretaker – not the current one but the one who’d fallen from the balcony – hunched over a cigarette, sitting in the yard, his broom beside him. Maggie . . . ah, Maggie touching up her lipstick as she waited for the lift in the foyer. Not one of Harvey’s best.

  Bea put the album down and went to the window to look out. Snowflakes drifted past, but they didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. There wasn’t going to be a white-out.

  Harvey came back with a mug of tea for her. ‘I seem to remember that it’s not a particularly good shot of Maggie.’

  ‘Would you take one for me some time? I’d really like that. I’ll pay for it, naturally.’

  ‘Can do. No need to pay, after all you’ve done for us.’

  He had a pair of very bright eyes. Were they guileless, or filled with guile? You could read him either way. Bea decided his eyes were filled with knowledge. Wise old eyes. The eyes of an outsider who saw most of the game, but refused to make judgements . . . although he might drop hints.

  ‘I do my best,’ said Bea, meaning it. ‘Your tea is excellent. Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll find you that cutting about my prize-winning picture in a minute.’

  ‘Not to worry. I’m sure you’ve won many prizes in your time.’

  ‘That’s the only one of the fire escape under snow. A neglected beauty, don’t you think?’

  Now what did he mean by that? She thought she’d picked up most of his hints . . . ‘timeo Danaos’, etcetera. What was so important about the fire escape?

  The doorbell rang. Maggie; arriving on time to rescue her. Bea thanked her host for a most interesting time and for the tea. And made her escape.

  As they were going up the stairs Maggie said, ‘Mother always calls him “that appalling creature” but I rather like him even if he does go on a bit. Have you seen his portraits? He took one of Lucas which ended up in the Vicori company brochure.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bea. ‘I mean, no. I’ve asked him to take one of you, Maggie. I’d really like it. You remember we wanted to put the photos of the founding members of the agency up on the wall? I want
yours and Oliver’s there as well.’

  Maggie laughed. ‘Did you see him take your photo, too? He’s got this titchy little camera that he carries round with him so that he can get what he calls “true” snaps. He’s probably got a couple of Oliver, already.’ She came to a halt outside the Muslim family’s door. ‘Now you will be gentle with them, won’t you? No sudden movements or shouting, or they’ll jump out of their skins.’

  ‘Would I know, if they’re wearing burkas?’

  Maggie rang the doorbell and waited; frowning, fidgeting, uncomfortable about this visit.

  A thickset, olive-skinned man of a certain age opened the door. His eyes darted from Maggie to Bea and back again, and he made no move to welcome them into the flat. ‘Yes?’ He wore European dress, and there was a solid gold watch and bracelet on his left wrist.

  Maggie said, ‘This is Mrs Abbot, who has been so kind to me and to my mother. As I told you earlier, she’s been talking to all the people who live here, trying to find out who has been playing such cruel tricks on them. You said she might call and talk to you, too?’ There was definitely a question mark at the end of that sentence. Maggie wasn’t at all sure the man was going to let them in.

  Bea spoke in her softest voice. ‘I appreciate this is an intrusion, but if you could let us in for a few minutes . . .?’

  Maggie was eager to help. ‘She’s sorted out the nasty phone calls people have been having and—’

  Bea said, ‘You didn’t have any of those, did you, Mr . . . er?’

  Dark eyes travelled from one to the other. He shook his head.

  Maggie pressed on. ‘She also found out who damaged Sir Lucas’s car.’

  Something moved behind the dark eyes. He knew about that.

  Bea said, ‘You knew who that was, didn’t you? It must have been horrible for you, living directly under all that loud music.’

  ‘Tariq was not a good Muslim.’

  Well, no. Not if he preferred men to women. His brand of rap music was hardly likely to appeal to this man, either. The man swung his door open and beckoned them inside. Once they were in the hall he closed his front door, locked it, and put the chain on. He led them into a big, airy room which overlooked the street. A conventionally furnished room with a huge television set and a marked absence of women. A slender, dark-haired young man rose to his feet as they entered.