‘I’ll put the immersion heater on, pet,’ her mother said.
DS Harry Barnard parked his car outside a gym in Whitechapel and locked it carefully, checking every door out of habit as much as any real fear that it would be nicked in this street where Ray and Georgie Robertson’s writ ran more or less unchallenged. He went inside and was hit by the familiar smell of sweat and the sounds of gasping breath and monotonous thud of leather on punchbag and, softer but even more deadly, splat against unprotected flesh. Ray himself was standing by the ring watching intently as two well-muscled young men, one black and one white, wearing helmets for protection, sparred energetically with each other until one put up an arm to deflect a blow and sat down heavily in his corner, gasping for air. Robertson had noticed Barnard come in.
‘Leave it at that now, lads,’ he told the sparring partners as he turned away to greet his visitor. ‘Harry, my boy, nice to see you. Good of you to come down. Come into the office, it’s a bit quieter in there.’ The two young boxers scrambled out of the ring clutching towels, the black boy still dancing on his toes on the way to the dressing rooms while the white boy, who had obviously come off worst, and was still panting heavily, took a detour to put a glove on Ray Robertson’s arm.
‘He hits low, that nigger,’ he said, his face pinched with rage.
Robertson pushed the boy off. ‘He’s better than you,’ he said. ‘Don’t come moaning to me. Bloody work at it.’ He led Barnard away, glancing back only briefly. ‘Funny thing,’ Robertson said. ‘I thought that lad had the makings but he’s fading already. You can never tell, can you?’ Barnard shrugged. Robertson had thought Barnard had the makings himself when he was about sixteen but he had not lived up to his older friend’s expectations in the ring and now only came to the gym occasionally to work out and do a bit of training with the younger boys. Robertson took over the tiny office, dismissing the burly man in grubby vest and shorts who was occupying it, and shut the door.
‘Ta for coming over, Harry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem you might be able to help me with.’
Barnard took the only remaining chair in the narrow space and accepted the cigar that Robertson waved in his direction. As he went through the ritual of lighting it and making sure that it was burning satisfactorily, and Robertson did the same, the silence only broken by their furious puffing, he felt a slight sense of unease. He had done Ray and Georgie countless favours over the years, but he had felt recently that the need for his back-up had begun to fade away with the brothers’ success in courting friends in high places. He was becoming surplus to requirements.
‘So what can I do to help?’ he asked, hoping that he was keeping any buried reservations out of his voice.
‘It’s Georgie-boy,’ Ray said. ‘I think he’s going a bit mental.’
Barnard had a sudden vivid recollection of Georgie Robertson hurtling out of the Delilah Club evidently in a rage and being driven off fast. ‘What makes you think that?’ he asked carefully.
Robertson did not reply directly. ‘Do you remember that time, when we was out in bloody Hertfordshire, when Georgie took against that old witch who lived next to the Post Office, the one with half a dozen cats?’
Barnard nodded. The village where the three boys had been evacuated to a farm had consisted of a modest cluster of houses on a narrow lane with a pub, a church and a post office cum village store as its only amenities. The boys, ranging in age from Ray, moving into his teens when they were delivered to the care of Farmer and Mrs Green, to eight-year-old Georgie, with Harry in the middle, had suffered a massive culture shock on their sudden translation from the crowded streets of East London to a landscape of woods and fields and not much else. They had, Harry thought, been knocked sideways for a while and Georgie perhaps the most seriously affected. He gazed at Ray who seemed to be as lost in thought as he was himself.
‘The old witch with the cats? Yes, I remember her. What about it?’
‘Georgie hated her with a bloody passion. She had a go at him one time when she caught him nicking apples from her back garden. Falling off the tree, they were. I saw them meself, lying on the grass. But she didn’t want him helping himself to those rotten old apples.’
Barnard nodded and waited, knowing that there was more to come. As incomers from the big city the village had treated all of them with unrelenting suspicion. Worse, Georgie had been a wild child, given to unpredictable screaming fits when he couldn’t get his own way, and he seldom got his own way with old man Green, the farmer, who expected children to be seen and not heard, and to get on with the chores they had been allocated without complaint, and who gave them a sharp clip round the ear when they failed to meet expectations.
‘Georgie went a bit doolally down there, I reckon,’ Ray said. ‘Especially over those cats. He fucking detested them.’
Barnard nodded. ‘So he did something to the cats?’
‘It was after your ma came to collect you. After you’d gone home.’ Robertson’s tone still gave the impression that he had regarded it as a personal affront that Barnard’s family had whisked him away as soon as he reached the age of eleven to take up a place in the local grammar school which had itself been evacuated to Norfolk. ‘The cats started disappearing, didn’t they? One at a time. I don’t reckon he could manage more than one moggie at once. I saw the scratches he got. It went on for months. We had the police round asking questions because I reckon the old bat must have known who it was. But there was no evidence. She put ’em out at night and every now and again one of ’em didn’t come back. Old man Green reckoned the foxes was getting them. But I knew it was Georgie.’
‘What did he do with them?’ Barnard asked, his mouth dry.
‘You know there was an incinerator thing at the back of the barn?’
‘Jesus,’ Barnard said. ‘They went in there? Dead or alive?’
‘Oh, alive,’ Robertson said. ‘He brought them back in a box, one at a time, and tipped them in. I caught him at it eventually and told him to stop. He usually did what I told him.’ Most people did, Barnard recalled. He had watched the older boy evolve from juvenile bully to gangster from an increasing distance as he had decided that was not a path he wanted to follow, but there had been enough times when he too had done what Ray Robertson had told him, and he feared that this might potentially be another.
‘He’s a nutter,’ Barnard said. ‘He always was.’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Robertson agreed, exhaling cigar smoke like a steam train. The room was thick with it. He waved a hand to clear the air and fixed Barnard with a glare of such intensity that the younger man shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘He’s becoming a liability, Harry,’ he said. ‘I want him off the streets. He’s out of control. You know me. Some of what I get up to may be illegal and all that, but I don’t do violence unless it’s absolutely necessary. Georgie’s gone over the top. He’s gone too far. And he’s threatening to mess up some delicate deals I’m in the middle of. I can’t have that. If it was anyone else, I’d get rid of him, though it’s not really my bag. But he’s my brother, isn’t he? Family?’
Barnard’s mind was racing as he took in the implications of what Robertson was saying. Georgie was not the only one whose sanity might be in doubt in this particular family, he thought. He had never heard Ray talk so openly about how far he might be prepared to go if pushed hard enough, but he did not doubt for a moment that he was speaking the truth. The look in his eyes said it all. ‘So what are you thinking of?’ he asked.
‘I want Georgie locked up for a long time,’ Ray said. ‘No messing. Out of my hair for good.’
Barnard took a deep breath. ‘That’s a tall order,’ he said. ‘What’s he supposed to have done, for God’s sake? Unless you can give me chapter and verse . . .’
‘Oh, I think we can do that,’ Robertson said. ‘You know that lad who was killed in Greek Street, nancy-boy, actor or something? Don’t tell me it wouldn’t do you a bit of good to clear that up.’
Ba
rnard nodded reluctantly. ‘But Georgie’s not a queer,’ he objected. ‘Is he?’
‘Gawd no, my ma would go bananas if she thought that. But what if the lad had propositioned Georgie? What if Georgie was so furious that he followed him home? What if I can give you witnesses who saw all that? You don’t have anyone else lined up for it, do you? Not that I hear, anyway. Clear up a nasty murder, get a feather in your cap, get Georgie out of my road so I can get on with things my way. Everybody happy.’
‘Except Georgie,’ Barnard muttered.
‘I keep telling you, he’s a nutter,’ Ray snapped. ‘He will kill someone one day if someone doesn’t stop him. And they’ve stopped hanging them now, haven’t they? More’s the pity, but there you go. Safe as houses in Broadmoor, he’ll be, when they’ve done all their tests and that. Our ma can live with that. “Poor Georgie’s a little bit mad. Poor Georgie was provoked by one of them perverts.” All that garbage. What do you say, Harry? Isn’t that something you can live with too?’
‘It’s a bloody big thing you’re asking, Ray,’ Barnard objected.
‘Not something you can’t handle, Harry boy,’ Ray assured him, with a fatherly arm on his shoulder. ‘No trouble. No trouble at all.’
TEN
Kate O’Donnell met Declan Riley at the Cracke, spelt Ye Cracke for no very adequate reason Kate had ever fathomed. It was a down-at-heel and certainly not very ancient pub off Hope Street which was much frequented by students, including, she recalled, John Lennon and Cynthia, when they had all been at the art college a few years before. Declan followed her in and waved her from the bench she had chosen in the crowded main bar into the quieter back room, equally mysteriously known as the War Room, and went off to buy her a half of shandy and himself a pint of Guinness.
She had been surprised at the nostalgia she had felt as she had walked past the Institute, with crowds of uniformed boys behind the railings, and Blackburne House, its sister girls’ school, in its stately old merchant’s house nearby. The sense of familiarity reminded her forcibly of what she had left behind. She had not been away long, and the changes were subtle but enough to put another barrier between her future and her past. Another concrete support or two had been swung into place on ‘Paddy’s wigwam’, the modernist Catholic cathedral being built at one end of Hope Street, a much-mocked challenge to the slow emergence of the traditional Anglican pile closer to the Mersey. The boys’ school looked a bit tattier than it had when she used to pass it every day, an elite school evidently losing its gloss in changing times. The students in the bar suddenly seemed much younger to her, as if a month in London had added years to her age, though she guessed that was more to do with the constant drag of anxiety than any suddenly acquired southern sophistication.
Declan reappeared and put the drinks down on the table. He looked pale and anxious, Kate thought, and knew that it must have been as much of a shock to Tom’s old school-friends as it had been to her to be told by the police the unbelievable news that Tom was wanted in connection with a murder.
‘What’s going on, Kate?’ the young man asked after he had taken a long draught from his glass and wiped the froth off his top lip. ‘What the hell are the bizzies on about, for God’s sake?’
Kate shrugged. She spelt out everything she knew.
‘I remember Jon Mason,’ Declan said, looking angry. ‘I met him a few times but I never liked him. And when Tom palled up with him I got really worried. There were a lot of whispers about Jonathon, even when he was a lad. He went to some posh private school in Cheshire and then away to university somewhere, so he wasn’t around a lot. I never got to know him well but there was a group of queer lads used to meet in a pub out in West Derby and he turned up there every now and then, Tom said. Tom took me there once though I think he realized it was a mistake straight away. They said they were a fishing club or something daft but everyone knew they got up to a lot more than fishing. Especially Jonno. He’d got a really weird reputation even before we left school. I told Tom to keep clear but even then he seemed to be fascinated by him. I wasn’t really surprised when he said he was going to London with him, and not to tell his mam or anyone. Not surprised, but pretty worried. But what do you do? If you start making a fuss about lads like that they’ll get the bizzies after them anyway. And I didn’t want that for Tom. Most of us just steered clear in the end. Left him to it, and now I really wish I hadn’t.’
Looking embarrassed, he reached to a pocket inside his coat and pulled out a tattered-looking magazine, which he opened at an inside page before pushing it across the table towards Kate, shielding it with his arm to prevent anyone else getting a glimpse of it. ‘This has been doing the rounds,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who first spotted it, but that’s Jonathon.’ He put a finger on a slightly blurred face, half turned away from the camera amongst a group of naked men. ‘If that’s what his mate’s got into I’m not surprised there was trouble.’
‘I don’t think I ever met Jonathon,’ Kate said, her face flushed in embarrassment. She’d had no idea such magazines existed. ‘After he left school Tom never brought friends home much. Only you and Sean, who he’d known since we were all little kids at St Jimmy’s.’
‘So you really didn’t know what he was like? Why he didn’t have a girlfriend?’
‘No, of course not,’ Kate said. ‘We just thought he was a bit shy with girls. Even now, I’ve only got the vaguest idea what men get up to together. You know what our school was like. It’s a wonder good Catholics like us ever manage to reproduce at all given the sex education we got. Or didn’t get.’
‘They seem to manage all right once they get the hang of it,’ Declan, who had six brothers and sisters, said with a grin.
‘Anyway, never mind all that,’ Kate said sharply. ‘Tom’s still my brother and he’s in trouble. Has he come back up north, do you think? Have you any idea where he might be?’ Declan took a gulp of his Guinness and glanced away for a moment as if in thought.
‘Do the bizzies in London know you’re up here?’ he asked eventually.
‘No, of course not,’ Kate said.
‘Unless they’re following you,’ Declan said gloomily.
Kate had a sudden vivid recollection of Sergeant Harry Barnard’s charming but crooked smile and shivered slightly. ‘Only my boss knows I’m here’,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to be getting some pictures of John Lennon’s girlfriend, Cynthia. And he didn’t know what train I was getting or anything like that. They couldn’t have followed me.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Declan said. ‘You’re chasing the elusive Cynthia, are you? She’s supposed to have married him, you know? Silly cow.’
‘And up the duff, apparently,’ Kate said. ‘I never thought it would take long for those two to find out how to do it.’
Declan laughed. ‘Must be better sex education at Quarry Bank than with the monks and nuns,’ he said, and then buried his head in his drink, avoiding her eyes. Kate looked at him. Her glass of shandy sat untouched on the table between them and she felt the faintest flicker of hope since she had arrived at Lime Street Station.
‘You know where he is, don’t you?’ she said quietly.
‘I think I know someone who does,’ Declan admitted.
Kate felt tears prickle her eyes as she gave a sigh of intense relief. ‘He’s safe?’ she breathed.
‘Safe enough, I reckon, la,’ Declan said. ‘They keep themselves to themselves, these queer boys. I don’t mind. I wouldn’t want the bizzies breathing down me neck. But I’ve always liked Tom, ever since we were at St Jimmy’s together. I used to look out for him right through school but I hadn’t seen him for a long time after we left. He seemed to steer clear, especially after he took me to the so-called fishing club. Then I bumped into him in town a couple of years ago with this kidder, Jon. I remembered him from the first time we met and I still didn’t like him. He was all over Tom, in a really nasty way. Trying to control him. Making snide remarks to him about his school friends, as if we weren�
��t good enough in some way. I think what he really meant was we weren’t queer enough. I told you, I really wasn’t happy when I heard they’d gone off together. At least everyone I talked to seemed to assume they were together.’
‘Everyone knew then? Except his family,’ Kate said bitterly.
‘Well, it wasn’t something we were going to come round and tell your mam about, was it? We knew that Tom wouldn’t want that,’ Declan snapped back. He glanced round the room, where the only other drinkers were two men deep in reminiscences of El Alamein and the war which had been the high point of their lives. ‘Stay here for a mo and I’ll make a phone call and find out what’s what for you. I’ll see if I can track him down. I won’t be long, la. I promise.’
Less than an hour later, Kate found herself following Declan Riley down a suburban road which seemed to end at an indeterminate off-white horizon. She could taste the salt in the air and she knew, if nothing else, that they were near the sea. After he had made his phone call, they had walked back into the city centre and picked up a local train at James Street which followed the Mersey as it widened out to meet the Irish sea. They had got off at a station which seemed to have lost its name board, leaving Kate no idea of exactly where she was. These seaside suburbs were new to her, dormitories feeding the city and further out than she had ever ventured as a child. And as the bungalows and houses grew more isolated but the road continued, getting sandier underfoot, she realized that their destination must be the estuary itself. Eventually the road petered out into a track and then that too ended and only a line of sand dunes and marram grass stood between them and the beach. Declan strode ahead confidently.
‘You’ve been here before?’ Kate asked tentatively.
Having agreed to take her to meet Tom, his friend had been infuriatingly sparing with information. Tom was with another friend, he had said, and would meet them in an hour. The less she knew the less she would have to hide if the bizzies came knocking again, he had said, and she could not disagree. Her good-looking detective sergeant might well wheedle things out of her that she did not want him to know, so she had resolutely kept her questions to a minimum on the journey out of the city. If she saw Tom and reassured herself that he was all right, that would have to be enough for now. Clearing him of suspicion was something else entirely.
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