A Copper’s Lot Is Not a Happy Lot
i
Detective Inspector Cummings snapped his fingers in PC Prendergast’s face. ‘Have you been listening to a word I’ve been saying, constable?’
Prendergast blinked and rubbed her eyes. ‘Sorry, guv. I was miles away.’ Hurriedly slipping her daydreams on ice, she cast an eye about the street. Although only a humble probationary officer - an opinionated minion, if you will - had she been asked to rankrate The Holloway Road on an insalubriousness scale of one to ten, she would at a pinch have given it a nine. Every other shopfront was boarded up, the pavements were binbagged with rubbish and a good many of the streetlights didn’t. To compound the air of festering neglect, a queue of traffic stretched as far as the eye could see, pumping plumes of noxious fumes over a bedraggled straggle of commuters slouching home from work.
Some way off, she spotted a ramshackle building in a rundown arcade. She tugged D.I. Cummings’s arm and pointed. ‘I say, guv, do you think that’s the place?’
‘And what makes you think that, constable?’ Cummings said as he swatted her hand off his sleeve.
‘Let’s just call it gut instinct, shall we?’
‘Nothing to do with the name Fantoni’s Electrical Repairshop above the door?’ Cummings shook his head and, to pass the time of day, asked, ‘correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s Heather, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, guv,’ Prendergast said as she skipped along beside him hurrying to keep up with his limp. ‘As in a sprig of.’
‘Pretty name. Suits you. So, Heather, how long have you been with the Met?’
‘A little under a year, guv. Joined just after my twentieth birthday. It’s been my ambition to be a detective for as long as I can remember.’
Cummings drew to an abrupt halt and looked her up and down. ‘Well, well, I assumed you were a lot younger. Still, I’m sure you’ll find life on the force a thrill a minute. But breaking bad news to relatives is a delicate matter, so leave the talking to me. Just look, listen and learn. Come on, let’s get it over with,’ he said and instructed her to lead the way.
Prendergast smeared a peekhole in the repairshop window, pressed her nose to the glass and peered in. ‘Looks like the birds have flown, guv,’ she said. ‘If you want my two-penny’s worth, it’s a wild goose chase.’
‘When I want your opinion, constable,’ Cummings said, ‘I’ll ask for it.’
‘Just say the word, guv.’ Prendergast stood smartly to attention and tipped her cap.
Muttering, ‘don’t hold your breath,’ Cummings stepped back and ran his good eye over the upper floors. ‘So, tell me, Heather,’ he said with a pensive twiddle of the moustache. ‘What makes you so sure the place is empty?’
She pointed to the closed sign on the door. ‘How about that, guv?’
‘What of it? It’s seven at night.’
Prendergast frowned and tapped her watch. Not to be deterred - determent was not much in her nature - she shone a torch through the repairshop window. ‘Well, just look at the state of the place, guv. Honestly, it’s an absolute tip. Must be forever since the cleaner’s been in. And see that?’ She directed the torchbeam at a tinselled shelf above a scrappage of refurbed washerdryers and reconditioned refrigerations. ‘If there was anyone home, they would have taken down those Christmas decorations ages ago. Everyone knows it’s frightfully bad luck to leave them up after . . .’
Cummings cut her short with, ‘come on, Heather, pull yourself together. I’ve got better things to do than tramp the streets all night. Plays merry-hell with my arthritis.’ He felt his back and winced. ‘I got lumbered with this job because the major investigation team is scouring Westminster for The Prime Minister’s missing cat. If it wasn’t for my hernia, I’d be out there with the lads. Mind, there’s plenty of life in the old dog yet, whatever the missus might say . . . she should be so lucky.’ He clacked his knuckles in a manly manner and cocked Prendergast a suggestive wink.
‘Thanks awfully for asking me to assist, guv. Can’t tell you how honoured I am,’ Prendergast gushed with a bounce in her voice, thrilled by the prospect of putting her college training to use in the pursuit of justice rather than runaway wheelchairs, stray dogs and errant pavement cyclists.
‘Don’t go getting any ideas, constable. You weren’t exactly top of the list. The family liaison team is busy comforting the PM’s wife, so they scraped you up from parking control to lend me a hand. Oh, well,’ Cummings sighed, ‘losers can’t be choosers.’ He looked at Prendergast from the corner of an eye and shook his head. ‘Anything else?’
Eager and ever-willing, Prendergast shone her torch at a cluttered counter in the bowels of the shop, half-hidden by a display of repurposed electricals and reconditioned mechanicals. ‘Well, how about all that unopened mail?’ She flashed her flashlight at a pile of threatening envelopes beside a cranky cashtill. ‘I’d say that’s the clincher, wouldn’t you guv?’
‘And how do suppose it got there, eh? Magic?’
‘Unlikely, guv. My bet is the postman has a key. My Aunt in Tunbridge Wells keeps a spare in the gazebo so tradesmen can deliver when the maid is out.’
‘This isn’t Royal Tunbridge Wells, Heather, it’s North London and no one trusts anyone in this godforsaken neck of the woods. If you want to become a detective, you had better learn to use your eyes.’ Cummings cocked a thumb at a dimlit window on the first floor. ‘Ever thought they might be avoiding us?’
‘Doubt it, guv. My guess is they can’t hear the doorbell - the traffic’s frightfully loud. Want me to rattle the window with a pebble? Always worked like a charm when I got locked out of dorm at school.’
Cummings gave Prendergast a despairing look, groaned, ‘why me,’ rapped his knuckles on the door and bellowed, ‘open up . . . police,’ loud enough to waken the deaf.
‘Sorry, guv - afraid I’m a bit of a rookie at this.’ Prendergast shuffled on the spot fingering her cuffs until a sullen cumbersome in overalls appeared and announced that it was gone six so please shove-off.
Prendergast tucked her cap beneath an arm, arched her back, and - with all the officiousness at her command - said, ‘very well, miss. If it’s alright with you, we’ll pop back in the morning.’
Cummings barged her aside and wedged his good foot in the door. ‘Ruby Fantoni? I believe we spoke on the phone. I’m Detective Inspector Cummings and this is my assistant, PC Prendergast. May we come in?’
Grumbling that the officers must be wanting her mum, the girl grudged them through a clutter of dismembered washing machines and the skeletal remains of electrical appliances to a workshop at the rear. In contrast to the mangled mangles, bosched washers and a miscellany of repairables in the shop, the small workspace was well organised - spare parts catalogued by appliance type and make, tools arranged in descending order of handiness and manuals shelved beneath the stairwell. The floor was carpeted in antistatic rubber and a grill by the back door housed an old-fangled fan to extract unventilated air.
Minding them to watch their step, the girl led the way up a twisty poke of stairs to an upstairs flat, showed them into the living room, pointed to a frail woman huddled in a rocking chair by a wheezy gas fire and sat down on a pouffe in the corner.
Ruby Fantoni acknowledged her visitors with a grunt. ‘Coppers. Might have guessed.’
‘Please don’t get up, Missus Fantoni,’ Cummings said as he ran an eye about the room.
‘As if I would. You’ll not be staying.’
Cummings rocked back on his heels with his hands behind his back and asked, ‘would you have a photograph of your missing husband?’
The blood drained from Ruby’s cheeks and she nodded at a silver-framed snapshot on the mantlepiece. ‘That’s the only one I got,’ she said. ‘It were took on our wedding day in Huddersford, twenty some-odd year ago. Couldn’t abide having his picture took, couldn’t Toni.’
Cummings picked up the snapshot, gave it a cursory look, handed it to Prendergast and shook his head. ‘Missus Fantoni . . .’ He cleared a loud frog from his throat. ‘I am afraid I must be the bearer of bad news. There is no question that our deceased is your husband.’
A moribund hush descended, broken only by the ticktock of the sideboard clock and the rumble of traffic in the street outside. Prendergast hardly dared breathe a word as she plasticbagged Ruby’s wedding photograph for evidence safekeeping. Although she didn’t say as much, she was somewhat perplexed that DI Cummings hadn’t asked her to break the grim news. As a fellow member of the opposite sex, she was more attuned to female sensibilities than he was. Deceased being such a terminal word, she had been planning to soften the blow with something along the lines of, ‘nothing to worry about, Missus Fantoni. Your husband is just helping the pathologist with his enquiries.’ After all, as Aunt Elizabeth might say, a little white lie is often kinder than a truth that dare not speak its name. Still, what’s done is done - cats out of bags, water under bridges, spilt milk, laddered tights and all that - so, mindful that her knees were not her best feature - she gave her skirt a firm tug and sat down on the horsehair sofa ready to look, listen and learn.
Although she tried to appear composed, Prendergast was hiving with excitement - and with good cause. After months of sitting and resitting her exams and the worst part of a year pounding the beat, she could scarcely believe that she was at last assisting with a real-life murder enquiry. She had every hope that if she played her cards right, she would be but a hop, a skip and a jump from becoming Prendergast of The Yard, the most righteous enforcer of The King’s Lawful Order since the late, great Sherlock Holmes.
Drawing upon her years of college training, she made a mental note of the surroundings. Although perfectly happy to slum it when duty called, she was appalled by the lack of home comforts. Not to mention the frightful décor. Or the ghastly smell. Mothballs, she suspected. Or sweaty socks . . . she shuddered at the thought. Apart from the obligatory widescreen television, she could see none of the basic amenities of life above and beyond a few commonfolk trappings; the settee, Ruby’s rickety rocking chair, the wind-up clock, an ageing standup lamp, a sepia print of a breasty Hawaiian maiden on the chimney breast, a flight of plaster ducks above the mantleplace, a cluttered gatelegged table and a lopsided sideboard. So, this is how the other half live, is it, she wondered rhetorically. To be charitable - as she went to great pains to be - she thought the decor shabby. Grim might be another word. Squalid a third. All of the above, quite possibly. But she did not give a fig. After all - as she reminded herself - Prendergast of The Yard is a woman of all the people, no matter how pathetic their station in life.
Ruby dabbed her eyes with the back of a hand. ‘If you got any questions, meck it quick. Me and Ellie could do with being alone.’
‘It is three weeks since we found your husband’s body,’ Cummings said as he stood at the window gazing at the pub opposite with a mean and thirsty look. ‘Might I ask why you didn’t report him missing sooner?’
Ruby rocked back in her chair and stared at the missing ceiling tiles. ‘Goes off all the time, but always comes back with his tail between his legs. Least he did,’ she said, as if her late husband’s late behaviour was only to be expected. ‘We’d had a tiff about the usual, so I assumed he were just having one of his turns till I saw that picture in the Gazette.’
With one eye on his watch and the other on the pub, Cummings said, ‘thank you, Missus Fantoni. That will be all for the time being.’ He pocketed his pocketbook, glanced at Prendergast and flicked his head at the door.
Misinterpreting her guv’nor’s gesture as carte-blanche to pursue her own lines of enquiry, Prendergast turned over a new leaf in her pocketbook and licked the tip of her pencil. ‘I am so sorry for your loss, Missus Fantoni - really - but would you mind if I ask you a few questions?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘I’m afraid I must. Did your husband have anything on his mind? Financial problems, perhaps.’
‘Dun’t be such a daft-ha’peth. Never worried about money, didn’t my Toni. Left all that to me.’
‘So, what exactly did your husband do for a living?’
‘Nowt, if he could help it.’
‘Hmmm . . . I see.’ There was something about Ruby’s evasive manner that gave Prendergast pause for thought. Indeed, she had paused to think of little else since being assigned to the Fantoni case earlier that day when DI Cummings’s regular PC came down with an acute attack of petulance. She put herself in Prendergast of The Yard’s designer shoes, donned a blasé smile and probed a little deeper. ‘I understand you recycle scrap metal.’
‘Do we heckers-like,’ Ruby said. ‘Fantoni’s fix domestic appliances - crocked washers and the like. Have done since we moved down south. My Ellie does it now. Took over from her dad a bit back.’
Prendergast made a note in her laborious shorthand, tried to read it back and gave up. So, thinking quickly on her feet, she asked, ‘if you don’t mind me asking, did your husband have much cash about his person when you last saw him?’
‘Never met my Toni, did you?’ Ruby stared at Prendergast as if she had been born the day after yesterday. ‘But now you come to mention, that’s where he said he were off to - to see a man who owed him, so he reckoned. Said he’d be able to pay off all his borrowings and still have enough left over to set him up for life, so must have been a pretty penny.’ She gazed into the fire as if it was a gaseous portal to the past, shook her head, sighed and sighed again. ‘Always a dreamer, my Toni . . . that Italian blood from Papa Fantoni’s side, like as not.’
Prendergast had to strain her voice to catch Ruby’s ears above the rumble of traffic on the road outside. And so, as taught in college Interrogation class, she laboured each word, taking particular care with vowels and consonants and making sure to pause at the end of every sentence. ‘Missus Fantoni,’ she said, emphasising the words Missus and Fantoni. ‘Can you think of anyone who might have wished your husband harm?’
‘No need to shout, lass.’ Ruby scowled and pointed to a telephone directory. ‘Teck your pick,’ she said. ‘Loan sharks dun’t teck kindly to being bumped, not to mention all the homes he wrecked. Couldn’t keep his grasping hands to hisself.’
‘You have my profound sympathies.’ Prendergast lent forward and gave Ruby a comforting pat on the knee. ‘I’m sure that your late husband had many other splendid attributes.’
‘Not unless you know summat I dun’t, he didn’t,’ Ruby snarled and gave Prendergast’s hand a wriststinging slap.
Keen to catch the pub before happy-hour ended and misery-hour began, DI Cummings nodded a terse instruction to Prendergast to button it, zip it, stuff it and shut it. ‘Forgive me for being blunt, Missus Fantoni,’ he said bluntly. ‘But your husband was a ladies’ man, was he? That must have rankled. If you don’t mind me asking, where were you on the night of the sixth?’
‘What . . . you reckon . . . me? Chance’d be a fine thing,’ Ruby scoffed. ‘No. I were here watching tele, weren’t I, love?’ She gave her daughter an affirmatory nod. ‘Me health’s not good, so I dun’t get out much. Angina.’ She hacked an asthmatic cough, patted her heart and wheezed. ‘If I’d wanted Toni gone, I’d have put sleeping tablets in his coco,’ she said. ‘Thought about it often enough.’
DI Cummings raised a balding eyebrow and turned to Ellie. ‘And might I ask where you were on the night in question, miss?’
‘You’ll not get much sense out of the lass.’ Ruby spoke for her daughter. ‘Dun’t have much to say for hessen that one, unless you need summat fixing. Her dad taught her all he knows - all he knew, I mean. Mending household appliances is all my Ellie thinks about. That and Tom.’
‘Tom?’ Cummings gave Ruby a pertinent look and tapped his chin with a relevant finger. ‘Might I have a word with this Tom person?’ He glanced out of the window, whetted his lips and suggested, ‘why don’t we say tomorrow morning?’
‘Why dun’t we say nowt of the kind?’ Ruby said with a snarly smile. ‘I’ll vouch for Tom. He were tucked up in bed the night Toni went off. It’s all he can do to manage the stairs since his accident. Hit him hard, that did. Had to give up a promising career in pest control, and he were doing reet well.’ She swallowed a choke in her voice and looked at each of the officers in turn. ‘Mind me asking how Toni come by his end?’
Before Cummings could prise a word in edgewise, Prendergast leapt in where angels dread to tread. ‘I shouldn’t really say, Missus Fantoni,’ she said. ‘But I suppose you’ll find out soon enough. Your husband’s throat was cut - but please don’t be alarmed,’ she hastened to add as Ruby’s face turned a whiter shade of pale. ‘According to the post-mortem, the knife was sharp as a blade, so I’m sure it would have been over in the blink of an eye. Rest assured,’ she said restassuringly. ‘Antonio is now as happy as a sand-boy playing harp or mandolin with baby Jesus and a choir of gorgeous heavenly angels.’ Then her smile faded to a look of steely-eyed determination. ‘But all joking aside, you have my word that I will hunt down the person or persons responsible for your late husband’s gruesome murder, even if it takes a hundred years.’
D I Cummings hitched up his surgical support, buttoned up his trenchcoat, put on his hat, said ‘thank you ladies. Please accept my deepest condolences. PC Prendergast’s replacement will keep you informed of developments,’ and crook-fingered Prendergast . . . outside you.
No sooner had they exited the shop than Cummings rounded on Prendergast with, ‘what the blazes do you think you’re playing at, constable? You were supposed to be a token woman and wring your hands, not get under my feet like a piece of sodding chewing gum.’
‘But I . . .’
‘Button it. You said more than enough back there. So, you’re going to bang the perp to rights, are you? You and who else - NYPD?’
‘Please don’t shout at me, guv. It’s frightfully rude. I did my best. Honestly.’ Verging on tears, Prendergast said, ‘at college, they taught us to . . .’
‘Oh, of course - college. Might have guessed. Told you to scare the living daylights out of grieving relatives, did they? Pardon me for spending thirty years on the job. And what was all that guff about cracking the case, even if it takes a hundred years . . . where did that come from? Enid Blyton - Five Go a-Murdering? You couldn’t crack a walnut.’
‘Give me a break, guv. I was only trying to . . .’
‘Well don’t. As of now, you’re back on traffic duty.’
‘What about our case?’
‘Gordon bleeding Bennet, give me strength.’ Cummings clapped a hand to his brow and rolled his good eye to the heavens. ‘Even a new recruit as wet behind the ears as you should to be able to see that Fantoni’s murder was a random mugging gone wrong. It’s clear as daylight. The man was scum. He hung out with the wrong crowd and got his due come-uppance. There is no case.’
Prendergast summoned all her shreds of marmaladed pride and said, ‘with the greatest respect, guv, I think . . .’
‘Know what? I don’t give a monkey’s if you reckon the moon is made of cheese. I’m off to the boozer, so you can make your own way back to the station.’ And with that, DI Cummings limped off down the Holloway Road leaving his ex-sidekick to reflect on her shattered dreams in the repairshop window.
Having fought off one panic attack and reached a mutually agreeable accommodation with a second, PC Prendergast dabbed the humiliation out of her eyes, gritted her teeth, clenched her fists, took a deep, deep, breath and told herself, ‘I’ll show him, if it’s the last thing I do.’
