A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [92]
She spoke about how hot it was in the police station, about it being in the paper and how she supposed her mother would read it, then suddenly became aware Frank was barely listening. He seemed to be in a world of his own.
‘What’s up?’ she asked, kneeling down beside his stool.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘There is,’ she insisted. Normally he would have made a fuss of her, made her tea, even given her a fatherly cuddle. But he had gone right into himself, the same way she’d been all weekend. ‘Tell me, Frank, we’re friends, aren’t we?’
‘You’ve got enough on your plate without my worries too,’ he said.
‘Is it something to do with your daughter?’ Fifi asked. ‘Did you get a letter from her today?’
He sighed. ‘No, it’s nothing to do with her,’ he said. ‘It’s just the bloody police.’
‘What have they done?’
‘They came at midday yesterday. While you were still down the nick.’
‘Well, they would come, they talk to everyone when something like this happens.’
He just looked at her, and it seemed to Fifi that any moment he was going to cry. It was clear something had been said that was worrying the life out of him.
‘Just tell me, you’ll feel better if you share it.’
‘It’s that evil bitch Molly,’ he hissed. ‘I reckon she’s told them it was me who killed Angela.’
‘Oh, Frank.’ She half smiled. ‘I don’t doubt Molly has tried to blame half the people in the street, but the police aren’t going to believe her, not about you. You wouldn’t hurt a fly, and anyone around here would vouch for that.’
‘I’ve been tempted to kill Molly several times in the past,’ he said brokenly. ‘She knows that, and now she’s up to her neck in this, she’s trying to wriggle out of it by pinning it on me.’
Fifi might have laughed if Frank hadn’t sounded so completely serious.
‘I think you’ve misunderstood what the police said –’
‘That slag told them stuff about her and me,’ Frank interrupted her before she could finish. ‘She told them we’d been having an affair and that I wanted her to leave Alfie. She reckons I killed Angela because she turned me down.’
Fifi did laugh then, she couldn’t help it. ‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ she said, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘I didn’t think anything could make me laugh today, but that is so absurd!’
‘It might make me laugh too if it wasn’t for the fact someone else told them that I was overheard saying I was going to kill one of her children so it looked like Alfie’s work.’
Fifi sat down heavily on a garden chair. ‘No, Frank, no one would say something like that about you!’
‘It wasn’t a lie, it was true, at least partly.’ Frank hung his head. ‘It was a sort of joke with Stan. We were in the pub the night after Dan was attacked, everyone was saying Alfie must have been in on it and that. I said I’d cheerfully kill any of the Muckles, even their kids. Stan said something about we could kill one of them and let Alfie get blamed for it.’
‘Who told the police this?’ Fifi asked.
Frank shrugged his shoulders. ‘God knows, someone who was in the pub that night, I suppose. It were just a joke. I can’t stand any of that family, not even the kids, but I wouldn’t kill them.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Fifi said soothingly. ‘Everyone around here makes remarks like that. I’ve even heard Mrs Jarvis saying she wished someone would set fire to their house with them all in it. If the police took all the death threats made about the Muckles seriously they’d need the entire London police force here in Kennington to deal with them. But you mustn’t worry about this, Frank. The police like to shake people up. It’s the way they get information.’
‘Well, they shook me right enough,’ he retorted. ‘I mean, if they can find out about a joke you made a few weeks ago, what else can they dig up? I’m really worried about it.’
‘You mustn’t be. For a start, if they thought you’d had any kind of hand in this, they’d have taken you down to the station for questioning.’
‘But they asked me stuff about being in the Army during the war. I got the idea they wanted to know if I’d ever killed anyone.’
‘Had you?