‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘Move on, please, love,’ he said.
‘It’s just that I live in the street.’
‘It’s all over.’
‘What’s all -?’
‘Just move on.’
I felt reluctant. Something had happened almost exactly where I lived and I wanted to know about it, but the officer stared at me and I couldn’t think of an excuse so I just pushed my bike along the pavement to our house.
Dario was up a ladder in the hallway painting the rose round the light. I leaned Campbell ’s bike against the wall. ‘Someone’s going to fall over that,’ he said.
‘It’s just for today,’ I said. ‘What’s going on outside?’
‘There were more police a couple of hours ago,’ he said. ‘There were cars and an ambulance.’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been out. I heard that someone had been robbed.’
‘Murdered,’ said a voice behind me.
I turned round. It was Mick. ‘Murdered?’ I said. ‘No! What happened?’
‘Someone was being robbed in the street and they got killed. They must have tried to resist. Fucking idiot.’
Dario grinned down at me. ‘Yesterday Astrid crashes into a car, today someone gets murdered. This area’s getting dangerous.’
‘Lucky we’re getting evicted then, isn’t it?’ I said, and then I looked up at Dario suspiciously. ‘How long have you been doing the house up?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Were you in on Miles’s plan?’
‘Me?’ he said. ‘What would I have to gain from that?’
‘I wouldn’t like to think how your twisted mind works,’ I said.
Chapter Four
I had a cool, very quick shower and pulled on loose-fitting clothes over my bruises and grazes, wincing. A light skirt, because outside the May evening was balmy and soft; a shirt that would cover my arms; sandals. I had a date with three old friends in Clerkenwell, and I wasn’t going to get on my bike again but travel on the top of the seventy-three bus. Dario came with me, because he, too, was going out. The police were still there. There seemed to be even more of them than before, and now there was also a yellow metal sign on the pavement, just a few metres from the taped-off area, asking anyone who had witnessed anything unusual on the evening of Thursday, 10 May, to contact the police.
‘Do you really think someone’s been murdered?’ I asked Dario.
‘Definitely,’ he said, with enthusiasm.
‘It just says “serious incident”. That could mean all sorts of things. Maybe a car crash. Or a mugging.’
‘There’s an awful lot of police for that,’ said Dario.
We were quite used to muggings in Maitland Road, and to yellow signs asking the public for help, which rarely came. Maitland Road backed on to a rough estate. Gangs of youths roamed the street and hung out in the park, bored and belligerent, trousers dropping off their arses and cigarettes dribbling from their lower lips. They broke windows, threw bins across the road, did their drug deals in the bus shelter where we were standing now, had scuffles that could turn nasty. Where we lived was one of the roads that formed a kind of border between the well-off and the desperately poor.
When Miles, Pippa and I first moved in, many of the houses were crumbling and boarded-up. Gardens were rank with weeds, the only shops were twenty-four-hour news-agents and strange outposts of a previous civilization that sold Crimplene slacks and long johns. The sandpit in the park was full of needles and litter. It was an area that felt abandoned and unloved. Now it was being gentrified. There were still run-down terraced houses and dilapidated squats, but others had been renovated and decorated, inappropriately smart now between their dowdy neighbours. There were Volvos and BMWs as well as beaten-up old Rovers and Fords. Estate-agents’ signs peppered the front gardens, builders’ vans and skips squatted outside gutted houses. The brutal grey and pink blocks, with names like Morris and Ruskin House, were now grim, stubborn, neglected islands.
The bus came and I climbed up to the top deck to stare out as Hackney ended and I was into more genteel Stoke Newington, then more-genteel-still Islington, where lights glittered in terraced houses and all the expensive restaurants were full. I didn’t think about the Maitland Road incident for the rest of the evening. I met my friends and we had a drink, standing outside the pub in the ebbing warmth, then going on for a cheap meal, and back to Saul’s house for coffee. Everyone was tired, but because it was Friday night we lolled about, chatting idly, not willing to leave.
It was late by the time I took the night bus home. The air was cool on my skin now. I thought about sleeping late the following morning, then maybe going with Pippa to the flower market and out for lunch. And I thought, too, about the need to find a new place to live. Three months wasn’t long, just until the end of the summer.
Two police cars remained in Maitland Road. Several teenage boys were standing around the first; as I passed, one kicked the front kerbside tyre, trying to be cool. When I grinned at him, he blushed, suddenly appearing much younger than he wanted to.
‘Hi,’ I shouted, as I pushed open the front door.
Everyone except Dario and Owen was downstairs, sitting round the kitchen table with a couple of empty wine bottles between them. Miles’s girlfriend, Leah, was there as welclass="underline" the cause of our eviction from the house. I would have expected there to be a certain chilliness in the air, but instead I sensed excitement
‘You missed all the drama,’ said Miles.
‘What drama?’
‘The police were round here, asking us whether we’d heard anything unusual last night.’
‘Really? Did they say what had happened?’
‘Mick was right,’ said Miles. ‘Someone was murdered.’
‘In Maitland Road,’ added Davy, as if that was good news.
‘No!’
‘Yeah.’
‘God, how awful. Who was it? We don’t know them, do we?’
‘No,’ said Pippa. She sounded almost disappointed.
‘Someone called Margaret Farrell, apparently,’ said Davy. ‘We don’t know a Margaret Farrell, do we?’
‘I don’t, anyway,’ I said. ‘Did she live near here?’
‘That’s the thing,’ said Pippa. ‘She lived just a few houses up. Number fifty-four. She was a neighbour, kind of.’
‘Number fifty-four?’ I said. I tried to remember which house that was and who lived there.
‘The house with the dark green door and the tidy front garden,’ said Miles.
‘We went out to have a look at it,’ added Davy.
‘What time was it?’ I asked. I couldn’t get my head round the fact that while we had been safe and warm inside someone was being killed just a few feet from our front door.
‘The police weren’t sure about that. They just wanted to ask us if we’d heard anything unusual during the night.’
‘Only the usual unusual,’ I said. ‘Shouts, people running, things being thrown.’
‘That’s what we said.’ Davy tipped the last of the wine into his glass and held it up to the light. ‘And we gave everyone’s names in the house.’
‘What for?’
‘Routine,’ said Miles, vaguely. ‘I said we were all here last night. They just said we should get in touch if we remembered anything that might be helpful.’
‘Margaret Farrell,’ I pondered. ‘Do they know why? Was she robbed – or what happened? Was it in her house?’
‘No,’ Davy explained. ‘Apparently someone found her body where the bins go, outside the basement front. They said the binmen found her.’
‘No! Just dumped with all the rubbish? That’s horrible.’
‘That’s what I heard. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?’
‘But why?’
‘I think she was mugged and they killed her by mistake,’ said Miles.
‘They?’
‘It’s probably the husband,’ said Pippa. ‘It always is, you know.’