A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [38]
‘It was shameful,’ Ivy said indignantly. ‘That poor man lost his wife and two daughters in the Warsaw uprising, and all he had left was the two pictures of his family. They meant everything to him, and those children must have thrown the pictures away before they sold the frames.’
Wally said that Alfie was a peeping Tom.
Fifi didn’t like the look of Wally at all. He had a beer gut spilled over his trousers, and food stains down his shirt. Although he was only about thirty, she thought she wouldn’t be surprised to find he was a flasher himself.
But he claimed Alfie was in the habit of climbing along the wall at the backs of the houses, looking into lighted rooms. He warned her she should keep her curtains closed at night.
Despite the rather tedious repetitions about the Muckles, the warmth of the welcome from their new neighbours went a long way to reassure Fifi that Kennington wasn’t such a bad place to live. By the time they got home after the pub had shut, with a bag of chips each, she was feeling much happier and a little drunk.
‘It’s beginning to grow on me,’ she said as she sat down and looked about the living room. With just the light from the table lamps and all their things in place, it looked quite homely.
‘Even with the monsters across the road?’ Dan asked, raising one eyebrow. ‘Or is that part of the attraction?’
Fifi giggled. Dan was always teasing her about her curiosity. ‘They sound much too awful even for me,’ she said. ‘That woman with the black hair who said she lived next to the coal yard said their house is absolutely filthy. She said none of the children were ever toilet trained, and they’d just do it on the floor. She claimed the council has been round to fumigate the place loads of times. She said they have terrible fights in there, and there’s always dodgy people coming and going.’
‘Don’t take it too seriously,’ Dan said evenly. ‘People do get a bit vindictive about anyone different from themselves.’
Fifi knew he was right about that. Her own parents had proved it by being so nasty about Dan.
‘Perhaps I’ll put them under close observation,’ she joked. ‘I could make a study of them. Log what they do and at what time. If they really are responsible for all the crime around here, it could be useful to the police.’
‘Then you’d better have a chat with the French dressmaker,’ Dan said with a wide grin.
He had been far more intrigued to hear about the woman from Paris who sat sewing by her window all day than by the more salacious stories about her next-door neighbours. Apparently she only went out to give fittings for her wealthy clients, but it was generally supposed she knew everything that happened in the street. ‘She might do some shifts for you. Or maybe I should study her!’
‘We could call ourselves “Super Snoops”,’ Fifi giggled. ‘For a slogan we could have “Nothing gets past us”.’
Dan laughed. He was so relieved Fifi seemed happier now. For a minute or two this afternoon he’d thought she was going to take the next train back to Bristol.
He loved her to pieces, just to look at her lovely face made his heart melt, and he still couldn’t quite believe that a girl like her could love him. But there were times when she was like a spoiled child, expecting life to be one long picnic in the sun. He’d got her well away from her parents’ influence at last, and though it would probably be another nail in his coffin that he’d brought her to live here, Fifi needed a dose of reality.
Chapter five
Fifi bounced along the street. She was happy because it was Saturday, a lovely sunny day, and once she’d got the shopping she and Dan were going out for a picnic in Hyde Park. As she reached Mrs Jarvis’s house at the end of the street, on an impulse she knocked on her door.
‘Hello,’ she said as the old lady answered. ‘I’m going down to Victor Values,