A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [113]
‘He’s just foreign and different, not a child molester. I’d stake my life on that,’ Fifi said. ‘Do you know the woman who made the complaint? Her name is Frieda.’
‘Might do,’ Bert said, his eyes narrowing.
‘Well, if you do, you must have an opinion about her?’
‘She’s a scrubber,’ the other man chimed in.
Fifi smiled. She thought she was winning. Neither of these two men seemed very bright, but then Stan had once said that the biggest drawback of the job was the mentality of the men he had to work with.
‘So did you know she was pestering Stan?’ she asked.
‘She’s after anyfing in trousers,’ Bert said. ‘’E were a mug giving ’er kid things, ’er ma must’ve thought ’er luck was in.’
‘And he tried to avoid her, didn’t he?’ Fifi said patiently.
‘Dunno, all we ’eard was that she ’ad the ’ots fer ’im,’ Bert said. ‘We used to take the mickey.’
‘Would you go and tell the police that then?’ she asked. ‘Please! I know Stan would stick up for any of you.’
‘We can’t say nothin’,’ Bert said, and he looked down at the ground and shuffled his feet as if slightly ashamed. ‘We been told not to.’
‘Who by?’
‘Daren’t say,’ he replied.
Fifi sighed. ‘Just you two, or all the men here?’
‘All of us.’
Fifi sensed she was beaten. She had no idea if what the man said was true, or if he’d made it up to get rid of her. But she clearly wasn’t going to get much more out of him.
‘Can you just tell me what road Frieda lives on then?’ she asked. ‘That wouldn’t hurt, would it?’
‘Whatcha want to know that for?’ Bert asked.
‘As you won’t help Stan I thought I might be able to find someone there who would,’ she said.
‘Look, it ain’t that we don’t wanna ’elp ’im,’ the other man said, glancing at his companion as if they shared some secret.
‘I understand, you’re afraid you’ll lose your jobs.’
He nodded. ‘’E’s an ’ard bastard, our boss, don’t care that we got kids an’ all.’
Fifi wanted to smile. He was so thick it hadn’t occurred to him that he’d let slip who had said they were to say nothing. ‘So just whisper what road, I’ll find a way to do the rest,’ she said.
‘Jasper Street,’ Bert said quickly. ‘Now go afore the boss comes back and sees you.’
As Fifi walked back down Miles Lane, she wondered why the men’s boss had warned them to say nothing about Stan. That was very odd – what possible reason could he have for demanding such a thing?
She was at the end of the lane, just about to cross the intersecting road, when a red Jaguar came along. The driver was slowing to turn into Miles Lane, and he looked right at her and grinned lecherously.
He was middle-aged, a big, wide-shouldered man with silver-grey hair slicked back from his tanned face. And Fifi knew she had seen him somewhere before.
She continued across the road but turned and looked back, trying to place him. He turned right and drove into the council depot.
Fifi walked on back to the tube station, but her mind was on the man. He could be the boss the men were nervous about, and she wondered if he had perhaps come into the Rifleman at some time with Stan.
But she couldn’t imagine the foreman of a rubbish depot earning enough to have such a flashy car. She knew very little about cars but she was sure that was the latest model.
Outside the tube station Fifi paused again, wondering what she should do about Frieda. Ten minutes ago it had seemed such a good idea just to go there and have it out with the woman, but now she wasn’t so sure. From what Frank said she sounded very rough, and she just might go for her. On top of that Frieda might report Fifi to the police, and that could get her into trouble. Nor did she know how far it was to Jasper Street, and she had intended to make something special for dinner tonight.
She wavered for several minutes before deciding it really wasn’t her place to go banging on a stranger’s door, and it might make things worse for Stan rather than better.
Once she was on the tube her mind kept turning back to the man in the red car. Dan always remembered people by their cars, but