Dead Beat

by Patricia Hall

  The question stopped the man momentarily, although if anything his hostility only intensified, turning into a deep suspicion. ‘You know them?’ he asked.

  ‘If you tell us who lives there, we might know if we know them,’ Kate said angrily.

  ‘So you know the dead one, or the other one?’ the man asked harshly and Kate felt the colour drain from her face and her heart skip a beat.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘You should talk to police,’ the man said. ‘Talk Sergeant Barnard. He tell you.’

  Marie squeezed her friend’s arm. ‘Tell us what’s happened,’ she said firmly. ‘This is my friend’s brother we’re talking about.’ She dug around in her bag, pulled out Kate’s photograph of Tom, and put it on the counter in front of the shopkeeper. ‘This is him,’ she said. ‘That’s Tom. Do you know him? Have you seen him? We really need to know.’

  The man glanced at the dog-eared snapshot and shrugged. ‘Maybe him,’ he said. ‘Could be him. His friend is more blond. And he dead. Since last week. Police come. Talk to police, please. I know nothing about young men. I want to know nothing about young men like that. Is nothing to do with me.’

  ‘How did this friend die?’ Kate asked, through dry lips. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Ask police,’ the man repeated. ‘Ask Sergeant Barnard. Now I go out. I take Hector out.’ At the sound of his name the dog began his furious barking again and appeared to fling himself at the door between the shop and whatever rear accommodation lay behind, shaking it on its latch.

  For a long moment Kate stood as if frozen to the ground until Marie took her arm and almost pushed her out of the door and back into the alleyway, where she put a hand out to steady herself against the grimy wall.

  ‘Something very bad has happened,’ Kate whispered. ‘I really need to find out what. I can’t leave it like that.’

  ‘We won’t leave it,’ Marie said, as she grabbed her friend’s arm again and eased her back along the alleyway and towards the bustle of Greek Street. She glanced back to where the man was locking up his shop, and keeping firm hold of the leash of an enormous German shepherd who looked as if he could pull his master for a ten mile run never mind a stroll around the crowded streets of Soho. On an impulse, Kate pulled her camera out of her bag and took a couple of quick shots of the bookshop and its keeper being hauled away by his dog. He scowled at her and waved his free hand as if instructing her to stop.

  ‘Go to the police,’ he shouted. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘I need something to tell my mother,’ Kate whispered. ‘I really need to know what’s happened.’

  ‘We’ll find out,’ Marie said again. ‘Don’t panic, please don’t panic. I’m sure it’s all a dreadful mistake.’

  ‘Mother of God, I hope so,’ Kate said. ‘I really hope so.’

  THREE

  DS Harry Barnard woke with a mild feeling of dissatisfaction the next morning. He prided himself on knowing his patch: if a pimp laid a fist on one of his women, if a cafe failed to pay its protection money and suffered inexplicable losses of stock or a serious trashing as a result, if a pornographic bookshop suddenly found its illicit supplies drying up, he reckoned he should know the where and the what and the why and more often than not the who. But yesterday his trails had all gone cold and he had found next to nothing to assist DCI Venables with his inquiries. It was not, he reckoned, that anyone was covering up at the behest of some of the shadowy figures behind Soho crime, as they often did, but that in this case they genuinely did not know anything about the death of Jonathon Mason, identified by his landlord as the tenant of the flat where he had been killed. And that nagged at him like toothache.

  Not even his sense of satisfaction in his own new flat soothed him as he made some strong coffee in his new Italian percolator and sat brooding at his beech Ercol table on his spindle-legged beech chair. The flat was one in a new block on the fuzzy border between Highgate and Archway, on the hill but not quite at the top of it, literally or socially. But for an East End boy it was a decided step up and he had spent much time and effort getting the new Scandinavian look from the smartest shops he could afford just right, the pale wood, the boxy sofa, the orange revolving upholstered chair, the bright shaggy rugs for the parquet floor and the latest in long-play radiograms.

  Barnard’s passion for the latest fashion in clothes as well as furnishings was a source of much canteen mockery amongst his sweatily scruffy, shirt-sleeved colleagues back at the nick, who commuted in from their semis in the far suburbs every day. But in many ways his style was only a veneer, the lichen clinging to a chunk of rock. He knew, when he bothered to think about the trajectory his life had taken, that it was only the fact that his sharp brain had taken him to a grammar school instead of the dilapidated secondary modern most of his eleven-year-old mates had gone to, which had saved him from going with them down the path into the murky world of East End wheeling and dealing and crime that most had followed.

  Looking back, he thought himself lucky not to have become a copper as such, but to become one of the coppers living on the edge where he could supplement his meagre pay and get some of the good things in life which his criminal acquaintances took for granted. He felt no guilt. He made a sharp distinction between milking the petty criminals of Soho’s sex industry and pursuing real villains. And the latter he took a pride in hunting down. Which was why the fact that DCI Venables was looking for a murderer on his patch and he himself had not been able to elicit a whisper from his informants about either the victim or the perpetrator was causing him serious annoyance which only grew as he went through the motions of shaving, dressing – with his usual attention to detail – and downing a perfunctory breakfast of coffee and toast.

  Somewhere, he thought, as he started his red Ford Capri coupé in a thoroughly bad mood and set off down to Highgate Hill towards the West End, someone knew why an apparently inoffensive queer actor, with no criminal record, either for the bleeding obvious or for anything else, had had his throat slit from ear to ear four nights ago with no one apparently seeing anything, hearing anything or picking up the slightest hint as to why he had met such a gruesome fate. In Barnard’s extensive experience of the overcrowded, crime-ridden streets of Soho, that was impossible.

  He parked at the back of the nick, and made his way up to the CID room where he hung his coat by the door and his jacket over the back of his chair, and carefully rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt with enough attention to cause his colleagues a few amused smiles, before wading into the files piled up in his in-tray.

  ‘Morning, Flash,’ his nearest neighbour greeted him. ‘Where’d you get that tie? It’s a bit nancy-boy, isn’t it?’

  Barnard glanced down at the Liberty silk adornment in question, a floral number which he knew when he bought it would raise eyebrows amongst his severely striped and often gravy-stained colleagues. ‘It’s not bad, is it?’ he said. ‘It’s the latest thing.’

  ‘God, we’ll be getting daisies on our shirts next. If they make it legal, the bummers’ll take over the world,’ his neighbour came back, only half joking.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry, Greg,’ Barnard said dismissively. ‘I don’t think they’ll be trolling down Shaftesbury Avenue after you.’

  He turned away and picked up a scribbled note tucked under a used coffee cup, aware of his colleague taking an interest in what he was looking at.

  ‘He called just as I was leaving last night,’ Greg Davies said. ‘Wouldn’t give a second name, just Pete, said you’d know who he was. Sounded like another bloody foreigner.’

  ‘Right,’ Barnard said. ‘I know who he is. I’ll call in on him later.’ He wondered whether Pete Marelli had had second thoughts about their previous conversation. As soon as he had checked the rest of his incoming phone messages, scrawled on the pad on his desk, and decided that none of the other cases he was working on merited his urgent attention, he put his jacket and coat back on and left, making his way quickly through the crowded str
eet to ABC Books and the now unguarded entrance to Jonathon Mason’s flat. He reckoned the fingerprint operatives must have long finished their dusty work by now and Venables would be waiting for whatever information science could offer him which would not, in the nature of things, be much, he thought, as he waited for Marelli to unlock the door of his shop and let him in.

  ‘You rang?’ Barnard said, glancing round to make sure that Hector was not lurking behind the counter. He heartily disliked dogs, hairy, smelly, slavering creatures in his experience, and in this particular case, potentially dangerous. To his relief, on this occasion there was no sign of the Alsatian.

  ‘Yeah,’ Marelli said. ‘Did those girls come talk to you? I told them to find you. They came round here asking questions.’

  ‘What girls?’ Barnard said. ‘Tarts, were they?’

  ‘No, no, they respectable girls, smart-looking girls, but talk funny. One had a picture of the friend who vanished.’

  Barnard’s interest quickened. ‘You mean the other poofter who was living upstairs?’

  ‘Yeah, looked like him. She say it her brother.’

  ‘Right,’ Barnard said, his interest increasing further. ‘Let’s have a description of these girls, shall we? I want to know exactly what they looked like, down to the colour of their nail-varnish, the length of their skirts and the height of their heels. And exactly what they said to you. I need to find them. This is a murder inquiry and it’s already dragging on. So I don’t want you messing me about for half a bloody second, let’s start with the sister, shall we? Colour of hair? Colour of eyes? How tall? Curves in the right places – or not? Vital statistics, if you want to take a guess. What was she wearing? I want to walk down that street and know her the moment I clap eyes on her. Understood?’

  Marelli nodded, licking his lips slightly. ‘OK, OK, I understand, Mr Barnard,’ he said.

  Marie Best’s flat was at the top of a tall building in one of the decaying terraces close to the railway between Paddington station and Notting Hill. The area had been prosperous once, as the city had spread westward, but since the war it had fallen on hard times, the stucco peeling, the columns of the porticos beginning to crack and lean drunkenly, the basement areas full of wind-blown rubbish and the accommodation built for prosperous Victorian families now, more often than not, divided up into bedsits and tiny flats. Four floors up, in the small rooms which had been provided for the servants, Marie and her friend Tess Farrell, who was training to be a teacher, shared a small bedroom with two single beds and a slightly larger living room with a Baby Belling cooker and a sink in one corner. The bathroom, with its lethal-looking gas geyser, was down a flight on the landing below.

  The two girls had done their best to make the place bright and cheerful, but as fast as they painted over the black mould where the water above was seeping through the roof, the damp returned. The whole building reeked of decaying wood and plaster but Marie had soon found that the heavyweight man who came round weekly to collect the rents simply stared blankly at her when she raised the question of repairs.

  When Kate had seen how small the flat was, she had almost turned away, ready to refuse Marie’s offer of temporary shelter. But Marie had been adamant. Until she found a job, she insisted, Kate must stay. Once she had an income, she could find something better for herself, but she would have to be quick and determined, able to get hold of the first edition of the Evening Standard every day, study the columns of small ads and get on the phone and on to the Tube to hunt down anything that looked feasible within hours of the paper being printed.

  Decent rooms in London were like hen’s teeth, Marie had said. Rents were expensive, competition fierce. And before Kate could even consider renting a place of her own she needed more than a two month trial with Ken Fellows and she must save for a deposit. Which is why at seven thirty the next morning, after an almost sleepless night on the sofa, Kate found herself watching Tess Farrell simultaneously eating a bacon sandwich and powdering her nose in the mirror over the sink before setting off to do teaching practice in a secondary modern school in Battersea.

  ‘One of my friends got stabbed in the bum with a pair of compasses yesterday,’ Tess mumbled, with her mouth full. ‘Had to go for First Aid. How embarrassing. They just think it’s a joke, a lot of these kids, and student teachers are fair game. Get them under control before you try to teach them anything, that’s what our tutors say. But in some schools that’s a joke. It might work in a grammar school but it doesn’t seem to if they’ve failed the eleven plus. They think they’re failures and school’s an imposition, like being permanently in detention. They can’t wait to get out. If I can’t get a job in a grammar when this is all over, I’ll pack it in.’

  ‘You scousers should be used to all that,’ Marie said, half-turning from the sink where she was washing up her breakfast cup and laughing. ‘You’ve got enough schools full of scallies your side of the water.’

  ‘Oh, just listen to Lady Muck from the feckin’ Wirral,’ Tess said, rising as ever to any skirmish in the ongoing class wars between Liverpool and its more select neighbours across the Mersey. ‘You were keen enough to go out with that scally Rick Davies when I first knew you.’

  Marie pursed her lips together to even out her lipstick and refused to respond to that barb. ‘How’s your new job?’ she asked Kate.

  ‘Oh, it’s OK,’ Kate said. ‘But I wonder if they’ll ever let me take any pictures. The only other girl there is a secretary and they treat her as if she’s invisible as well. She’s just a walking tea machine, and if she’s not there I think I’ll get landed with the kettle and mugs. And I’ve not even seen the boss yet. He’s away on some job, leaving me a heap of pictures to file.’

  Marie laughed. ‘We should have listened to them at school,’ she said. ‘Nice girls become teachers, nurses or secretaries and look for a man to keep them for the rest of their lives. But a term of teacher training was enough for me. I always wanted to act, and I’d never have forgiven myself if I didn’t give it a go. If Rita Tushingham can do it, I don’t see why I can’t. It’s not as if she’s even good-looking.’

  Kate broke into the theme from A Taste of Honey and they all sang along. ‘I know how you feel. I was the only girl in my photography class at college. But I really wanted to do it.’

  ‘It’s like the lads and their bands, isn’t it? Tell your Dave to chuck away his guitar and become an accountant and see how far you get,’ Marie said.

  ‘He’s not my Dave,’ Kate said as she rolled out of her blanket and off the sofa while Tess pulled on her coat and made ready to leave. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘And you didn’t come to London to catch up with him?’ Marie scoffed.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Kate said flatly. ‘I came to London to please myself.’ And to find Tom, she added under her breath, though after their encounter with the unsavoury bookshop owner she now dreaded where that quest would lead. She pulled a face at Marie’s sceptical expression. It was true, she thought. No one at school, or even at the art college, had taken her ambitions seriously either. And if she didn’t make a breakthrough in the next couple of months, she had no idea what she would do next. A future of dead-end jobs in coffee bars with Marie, both of them waiting for something to turn up, filled her with dread.

  ‘Do you think the bathroom will be free?’ she asked, with a sigh. ‘I daren’t be late.’

  ‘Probably,’ Marie said. ‘The couple below go out very early. He drives a tube train and I’m not sure what she does, but she disappears early and comes in late. There’s another bathroom on the first floor for the rest of the house.’

  ‘See you later, alligator,’ Tess said. ‘If I survive assault by ink-sodden blotting paper balls and compasses.’

  ‘In a while,’ Kate responded despondently.

  Marie wiped her hands on the tea towel and came to sit beside her friend on the rumpled sofa. ‘Are you going to go to the police about Tom?’ she asked, her eyes full of concern.

  ‘I don’
t know,’ Kate said. ‘I’ve been tossing around thinking about it half the night. If someone’s died in that flat, been murdered maybe, and Tom lived there, I might be landing him in terrible trouble, mightn’t I?’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ Marie said. ‘We’ve no idea how this man died. He could have been ill. He could have committed suicide. You can’t just assume it’s a murder because the police are involved.’

  ‘Will it be in the papers?’ Kate asked. ‘At home, it would be in the Echo . . .’

  ‘You could pick up the Evening Standard on your way to work. It’s usually out very early and it’s the best one for property ads anyway. There might be something, though that man said it happened last week. I’d come with you but I’m not on duty till eleven. But come to The Blue Grotto at dinnertime. They do give you a break, I take it?’

  ‘No one’s told me much about things like that,’ Kate said with a wry smile. ‘In fact, no one’s told me much about anything yet. But I took an hour off yesterday and no one complained. I’m hoping the boss will be there today and I can sort a few things out. I really don’t want to spend two months filing pictures and taking none myself.’

  ‘Come on, cheer up,’ Marie said. ‘I’ll make you some coffee while you’re in the bathroom. Then you can get to work and we can decide what to do about Tom later.’

  Hunger eventually drove the boy out of his hiding place where he had lain, wrapped in his blankets for most of the last four days. It had become harder and harder to resist Hamish when he suggested coming with him to the Sally Ann for a meal, but the boy reckoned that if anyone was looking for him – and he couldn’t persuade himself that someone was not – then the Sally Ann, with its well-known services for the homeless, was an obvious place to start. This particular morning he woke to find that the dull ache in his stomach had turned into a sharp pain. He had eaten nothing since Hamish had offered him a couple of slices of dry bread the morning before, when he had come back from foraging around the neighbourhood for fag ends and food. He eased himself out of the warm nest he had created and stood shivering for a moment, glancing down at an underground train that had just begun to speed up after leaving Farringdon station. The white faces staring out at him became anonymous blobs as the train speeded up for its clattering run up to King’s Cross and the boy waited for it to disappear round the bend before making his move.