Risking It All Read Free

adopt or not.
     
    As it turned out, I was both right and wrong. They had been talking about me, but not about the suitability or otherwise of my accommodation.
     
    Ganesh mumbled, ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
     
    ‘No, I’ll make the coffee,’ I said. ‘And then we can all three of us sit down and sort it out in a civilised way.’
     
    ‘Sort out what?’ He scowled at me.
     
    ‘My being in the garage, isn’t this all about that? You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll find somewhere else.’
     
    A customer came in and Hari turned to him with the deeply suspicious look on his face he reserves for customers he hasn’t seen before. He’s only marginally less mistrustful of the ones he knows. Gan followed me into the washroom, where I was filling the kettle from the tap. Okay, I know it doesn’t sound very hygienic, but since Gan had the whole washroom completely renovated, while Hari was away in India just before Christmas, it’s all very clean and nice in there. There’s even a plastic air-freshener dispenser so you get overpowered by Woodland Fern as you step in.
     
    ‘We weren’t talking about that, as it happens,’ said Gan in that way he has when he’s still cross with me; sort of critical and reproachful together. It means he’s about to tell me something, for my own good, I don’t want to hear.
     
    I plugged the kettle into the wall socket and said, ‘Oh, right?’
     
    ‘Yes, right!’ He paused, then asked in a different voice, sounding a bit embarrassed, ‘Look, Fran, you’re not in any kind of trouble, are you?’
     
    ‘What, me?’ The kettle hissed gently as it came to the boil. I put the mugs ready on the little shelf there for that purpose and spooned Nescafé into them.
     
    ‘Be serious, Fran. There’s been a bloke here asking about you.’
     
    That shook me up. I stood with the teaspoon in one hand and the coffee jar in the other and stared at him. ‘Who?’
     
    ‘No one I’ve ever seen before.’
     
    ‘DSS checking on me?’ That seemed the obvious answer. ‘Perhaps they think I’m drawing the dole and still working here.’
     
    ‘You can have your job back when business picks up,’ said Ganesh, diverted. Then he said, ‘No, it wasn’t them. Anyone can recognise them straight away.’
     
    ‘Not the cops?’ I was beginning to get just a tad nervous.
     
    ‘Not the regular sort. Here, he left his card.’ Ganesh fished a battered piece of white card from his jeans back pocket and held it out to me though I hadn’t a free hand to take it. The kettle boiled.
     
    ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. I made the coffee, put down the spoon and took the card.
     
    ‘This is a wind-up,’ I said when I’d scanned it.
     
    ‘He’s got business cards printed, how can it be? He must be who he says he is.’
     
    ‘Gan,’ I said patiently, ‘no one, but no one, has the name Clarence Duke.’
     
    ‘Why not?’ Ganesh was genuinely puzzled.
     
    ‘Because he was the bloke who drowned in a cask of malmsey. The Duke of Clarence, I mean. I know my Shakespeare. Richard the Third.’
     
    My ambition, yet to be fulfilled, is to be an actor. I know I didn’t actually complete the dramatic arts course I went on after being expelled from school, but that, as they say, was for reasons beyond my control.
     
    ‘What’s malmsey?’ asked Ganesh.
     
    I said I thought it was a sort of sweet wine. Gan said he’d never seen that one in Oddbins. I asked if he’d ever looked. Anyway, it was something they drank in the Middle Ages. Gan said he thought that was mead.
     
    ‘And he must have been pretty well tanked up if he fell in and drowned.’
     
    ‘The story has it, he was pushed.’
     
    ‘Not another one of your murders,’ groaned Ganesh.
     
    We were getting off the point here but I didn’t want us falling out again. I didn’t even argue that the murder investigations I’d got caught up in were not, in any sense, ‘my’ murders. What am I? Lizzie