A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [129]
Yet by the following morning she was calm again. Clearly there was a good reason why John had brought Trueman to meet Alfie, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with her. She told herself that businessmen operating in Soho often had nasty characters like Alfie in their pay, and as John had grown up here in Dale Street and known Alfie all his life, perhaps he thought he could be useful to his boss.
She never saw John go into number 11 again after that night, but she had seen Jack Trueman several times, often in the company of a younger, swarthy man who was equally well dressed. She came to the conclusion that perhaps the men didn’t mind slumming it if the stakes were high there or the card games were exciting. She wasn’t at all happy about Trueman coming to the street, of course, every Friday night she was a bag of nerves, but it did spur her on to put her name down with several flat-letting agencies, and she hoped she’d be able to leave very soon.
To her shame she remembered feeling nothing but relief when she heard that the Muckles had been arrested. Not anger at what they’d done to their child, not even a tear for Angela, just relief because Trueman wouldn’t be coming to the street ever again.
But now John was dead, and as Frank had pointed out earlier to Fifi, it was unlikely to be pure coincidence that two people from the same street had been murdered. Nora felt that something more than gambling must have been going on in number 11, and almost certainly John was killed because he intended to expose it.
She knew that she ought to go to the police right now and tell them about Jack Trueman, but they would ask why she hadn’t come forward before. When she was interviewed after Angela’s death she’d been asked if she knew or could describe anyone who attended the card games, but she’d told them quite brusquely that she wasn’t in the habit of watching out of her window. To backtrack now was impossible. She couldn’t name Trueman without explaining how she knew him and that would mean exposing her past and putting herself in danger.
She walked over to the window and looked out. There was a police car outside number 13. ‘Poor Vera,’ she murmured and her eyes welled up with tears of sympathy.
Frank spent the early part of the evening cleaning his kitchen and tidying cupboards, and only went into his living room when it was dark outside. He moved over to the window to draw the curtains before turning on the light, but paused as he saw Yvette coming out of her house. To his surprise she was hand-in-hand with a man.
After all the misery and anxiety of the past weeks, and the news of John’s death today, the sight cheered Frank slightly. He liked the Frenchwoman and in all the years she had lived opposite he’d never known her to have a boyfriend. It was too dark to see if she was dressed up to go somewhere special, but it looked as if she was undecided about something, for she was pulling back.
Frank smiled as the man put his arms around her. Yvette had been living like a hermit for so many years that perhaps she was reluctant to go out. But Frank drew the curtains, not wishing to seem like a nosy neighbour, and he heard the car drive off seconds later.
He turned on the lamp and television and sat down, but as he reached for his pipe he thought he might go and knock at Stan’s door later and suggest they went down to the Rifleman. He’d become almost as reclusive as Yvette in the last few weeks, and it was time he stopped this.
*
The following morning Fifi left the house for work at quarter past eight. She had hardly slept at all, for images of Angela, Dan, and even John Bolton’s body being pulled from the river kept crowding into her head.
It was drizzling and rather cold, and as she walked up the street she thought gloomily of the winter months ahead. The windows in the flat were ill-fitting, the gas fire was ancient and inefficient, and she guessed she’d be frozen most of the time.