Page 295 of The Hallmarked Man
Strike headed for the stairwell visible on the corner of the middle building. The interior walls were graffitied, too, and someone had recently either thrown a takeaway curry over the banisters, or vomited. Strike, who’d lived in places like this with his mother, offered up an inner prayer of gratitude that he no longer had to.
He reached the second-floor balcony and knocked on the door of flat 39. Nobody answered.
Glancing down into the forecourt he saw the five youths staring up at him.
‘D’you know Nancy Jameson?’ he called down at them.
One of the two South Asian boys, who had a patchy beard, called back,
‘She’ll be pissed.’
His companions laughed. Strike knocked again. Nobody answered.
He moved to look through the window, but the very dirty net curtains made it almost impossible to make out more than the fact that a lamp was switched on. Nevertheless, after watching for a few seconds, he thought he saw a movement in the corner of the room.
He returned to the front door and knocked a third time. There was no response. He returned to the car park.
‘You know Nancy, do you?’ he asked the bearded youth, as he approached the group.
‘Yeah, she’s a right old bitch,’ said the teenager, to mutters of agreement and laughs from his friends.
‘Seen her lately?’
The boy shook his head.
‘Any of you?’ said Strike, looking around the group.
‘I seen her,’ said the second white boy, who was wearing a Millwall football strip. ‘Wiv a fat bloke.’
‘Younger than herself?’
The boy shrugged. Strike remembered being that age himself; everyone over forty looked decrepit.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I have reason to believe Nancy might’ve done herself an injury and is unable to open the front door.’
It was a flimsy excuse, but as the youths would be witnesses to what he was doing in any case, Strike thought he might as well lay the foundation of a defence now. He returned to his car and extracted his bunch of skeleton keys from the glove compartment.
‘You gonna break in?’ said the bearded youth, in interest.
‘It’s not breaking in,’ lied Strike.
‘Can we come?’ said the youth in the Millwall top.
‘Worried about Nancy too, are you?’ said Strike.
‘Yeah,’ said the second of the South Asian boys, who alone was wearing a coat, and whose acne looked painful. ‘We’ve been dead worried.’
‘And you think I ought to get in there and check on her, do you?’ said Strike, still thinking of what he might have to tell a lawyer.
The boy with acne laughed.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Def’nitely.’
Strike supposed it was the skeleton keys that interested them, or perhaps they wanted to witness the old woman’s drunken outrage at a stranger entering her flat. He doubted there was much else to do in Magdalen Court on a Sunday night in February.
‘I need at least one of you to keep an eye on my car,’ he said.
‘Does the one minding the car get the whole twenny-five quid?’ asked the black youth.
