Dead Beat

by Patricia Hall

  ‘Do you think he’ll hang about if he finds that your place has been cleared?’ Barnard asked as they went slowly past the boarded-up bomb sites beyond the underground station, Hamish looking longingly into the open doors of the corner pub which had somehow survived the Blitz, and which, Barnard thought, would be very unlikely to serve him anyway. Eventually, beyond a ruined warehouse, they came to the fencing where the police had broken through on to the railway embankment the previous night. The encampment appeared deserted from the road, the rough shelters some of the men had made demolished and scattered, bedding in a smelly heap ready to be taken away by the refuse collectors, and the ashes of fires no longer even smouldering. Hamish stood at the top of the steep slope, beneath which a Circle Line train was trundling, evidently seeking out any sign of life, but eventually it was Barnard himself who thought he spotted a movement in a shady corner beneath a few frost-blasted remnants of fireweed and a couple of ragged shrubs which were clinging to life in spite of the fire-ravaged soil and the still bitter weather.

  ‘There,’ he said quietly to his companion. ‘There’s someone there. You go over and persuade him to talk to me. I don’t want to risk him running so close to the railway line.’

  Hamish glanced down the slope and nodded. ‘He’d nae be the first to get electrocuted down there,’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch him for ye.’

  Barnard leaned against the wooden fencing as the old man picked his way through the remnants of the encampment and disappeared into the undergrowth. A few minutes later he came back, helping a young boy along by his arm. Barnard took a deep breath when he saw the state of the boy, who seemed to find walking difficult and was bruised around the face and neck, and with a still livid scar just above his forehead where the hair had been shaved away.

  ‘You and me need a chat,’ Barnard said, taking hold of both the boy’s arms in a firm grip as he saw the panic in his eyes. He nodded to Hamish. ‘I’ll do what I said,’ he promised. ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  Hamish did no more than grunt in acknowledgement and turned away quickly, to avoid the suspicion in the boy’s eyes and to hide the guilt in his own.

  ‘Bastard,’ the boy snarled in little more than a croaking whisper. ‘I thought he was my mate. You a copper?’

  ‘Detective,’ Barnard said. ‘It’s all right, he is your friend, as it goes. He’s doing his best for you. I only want to ask you a few questions, and then we’ll find you somewhere safe to stay. I promised the old man I’d do that. You look as if you need it.’ He pulled his unwilling companion back through the fence and turned him up the hill towards Rosebery Avenue where he shepherded him into a cafe and sat him at a table close to the counter while he ordered two teas and bacon sandwiches which the boy fell on wolfishly.

  ‘How long is it since you had a proper meal?’ Barnard asked. The boy gazed at him blankly, shivering inside his over-large sweater. The sergeant took one of his arms and pushed the sleeve up carefully, wincing at the bruises round his wrist where he had obviously been manacled in some way. The boy looked at him with blank eyes, offering no explanation.

  ‘Don’t remember many meals,’ he muttered, his mouth full. ‘They gave me a lot of booze last night. I don’t remember eating much.’

  ‘You’re not a Londoner,’ Barnard said, unable to place the slight northern accent he detected.

  ‘You’re reet,’ the boy conceded, and it was obvious he was not going to admit any more than that about where he had come from. He was, Barnard thought, one of the hundreds of runaways who got this far every year and more often than not were never heard from again back in their home towns.

  ‘Where were you last night?’ Barnard asked, guessing he might be more willing to talk about recent events.

  ‘Dunno. They took me in a car from Les’s place. A big car. All leather seats an’ that. Right posh.’

  ‘And then what? You look as if you had a rough time somewhere.’

  ‘It was a party, wasn’t it? Les took me to a party. He promised me twenty quid if I’d go.’

  ‘And did he pay you?’ Barnard asked, his eyes angry.

  ‘Nay, he didn’t, he said he’d give it me next time, didn’t he?’ The boy’s eyes suddenly filled with tears and he dashed them away angrily. ‘Bastard. I really, really need that money.’ And he would be really, really unlikely to get it, Barnard thought wearily, while the men who were using him found the promise an easy way of keeping him compliant.

  ‘And what went on at this party? You don’t look as if you enjoyed it.’

  ‘They took pictures, didn’t they? Lots of pictures. With me yelling like a banshee for them to stop.’

  ‘They hurt you?’ Barnard asked although he knew the question was redundant. One look at the boy’s bruises was enough to tell him that. ‘So you don’t want to go back for your money?’ he asked.

  The boy glanced away before replying. ‘I need twenty quid,’ he said.

  ‘If you help me find the men who were at this so-called party, I reckon I can find you twenty quid, no trouble.’

  The boy finished his greasy sandwich and glanced longingly at the woman behind the counter.

  ‘I can find you somewhere safe to stay as well,’ Barnard said. ‘They’ll feed you.’

  But the boy still hesitated. ‘Where’s Hamish gone?’ he asked.

  ‘Hamish is all right,’ Barnard said. ‘He’s a tough old bugger. But you’re not, are you? You shouldn’t have come out of the hospital. You need looking after.’

  ‘But you want to know stuff? You’re not going to gi’ me twenty quid for nowt, are you? What do you want to know?’

  ‘For a start, where this man Les lives, the bloke who took you to this party.’

  The boy glanced out of the steamy cafe window. ‘Not far,’ he said. ‘Up by St Pancras. I can show you.’

  ‘Do you know any other names?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘Nobody tells you names, do they?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a deal, then?’ Barnard asked, feeling a stir of excitement. A lot of his work consisted of harassing people he pitied more than he condemned, but the men who had abused this boy he badly wanted to find. ‘I get you somewhere safe to stay and you help me? Starting by tracking down this Les?’

  The boy nodded, running a finger round the last remnants of bacon fat and licking it.

  ‘And the twenty quid as well?’

  ‘Fine,’ Barnard said. ‘The twenty quid it is.’

  The Rev David Hamilton had turned to God after his army career had pretty much ended at Dunkirk, where he was one of the troops defending the evacuating army from the rear around Calais. Wounded in the thigh, he had been picked up close to death by the advancing Germans as the last rescue ships and flotillas of small boats headed away into the Channel without him and the rest of the rearguard. In pain and bleeding heavily, he half expected to be shot out of hand but he was lucky with the unit who found him and spent time in military hospitals before being transferred to various PoW camps, and experiencing no more of the conflict. When peace was declared and he came back to the Home Counties with a pronounced limp, he resigned his commission, to his army family’s consternation, and signed up for the Anglican ministry at an evangelical training college in the north of England.

  He had taken over as rector of St Peter’s, a gothic barn of a church on the edge of Soho, five years before, taken a single walk around the red light district after dark on his first evening, and there and then decided that he had found his mission in life. He would use what God had kindly given him in the way of real estate to rescue as many of the benighted young people who earned their livings in the clubs and brothels of the neighbourhood as he humanly could. The very next morning he set in train a military campaign to raise the money and gain the support he needed from his superiors to set up the enterprise he planned.

  It was not that he neglected the handful of loyal and mainly ancient parishioners who turned up each Sunday to Matins and Evensong, and the even smaller group who s
taggered into early Communion once a month. He simply regarded them as a very minor part of his ministry unless they volunteered to help him, as a few of the more able-bodied did. His main objective was to use the space the vast, echoing and almost always empty church offered, both above ground in the nave, which he split in two, the smaller portion at the east end for religious worship, the larger for other purposes, and also underground in the low-vaulted but spacious crypt.

  By the time Sergeant Harry Barnard had joined the Vice Squad, St Peter’s had established itself as a haven for young people who were either homeless or anxious to escape from the sex trade which had sucked them in and was reluctant to spit them out again. And to the surprise of outsiders, in the police force as much as the church, while Hamilton’s religious rhetoric was fiercely ridiculed in what he called the devil’s square mile, his refuge worked, not always or with every one of the young people he encouraged in and counselled, but with enough of them to impress those who noticed such things. St Peter’s Refuge became well-established and well-regarded and was run with military precision and efficiency and a firm eye on Biblical precepts at all times, no drink, no fags and beds to be neatly made ready for inspection before breakfast every morning.

  Sergeant Barnard arrived with his charge late in the afternoon, when he knew that arrangements could be made for new arrivals. The boy followed him in through the church doors, dragging his feet and peering into the gloomy interior with deep suspicion. The Rev Dave, as he insisted on being called, marched down what had once been the central aisle with his hand held out enthusiastically to the sergeant.

  ‘What have we got here, Harry?’ he asked. ‘Come into the office and tell me all about it.’ He put a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder and urged him forward. ‘Come on, laddie, don’t be frightened. We’re here help you.’

  Barnard watched in admiration as the vicar sat the boy down and with surprising gentleness explained that he could give him a temporary home, and even help him find a permanent one, but insisted that in exchange he must provide some information about himself. Hamilton’s combination of sympathy and firmness, as he sat across the desk from the boy with his pen poised to fill in the application form which he insisted was necessary, succeeded where Barnard’s attempts to elicit personal information had failed miserably and the boy at last admitted to a name.

  ‘Jimmy,’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘And a second name, Jimmy?’ the vicar insisted.

  ‘Earnshaw,’ the boy muttered, hunching his shoulders.

  ‘And where are you from, Jimmy Earnshaw?’

  ‘Doncaster,’ the boy said.

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Sixteen.’ The boy sounded confident but Barnard did not believe him, aware that he probably knew enough of the law to understand that if he was under that age the police were bound to return him to where he came from. But he let it pass.

  ‘Do you have a home address in Doncaster?’ Hamilton continued.

  The boy shrugged. ‘I were in a home, weren’t I? I don’t know where my mam is now.’

  By infinitesimal degrees Hamilton coaxed Jimmy’s story out of him, the early neglect, the abandonment, the transfer to a children’s home, and the abuse which followed.

  ‘Why didn’t you complain about what these men were doing to you?’ Barnard asked, unable to keep quiet any longer.

  ‘We did complain, but we just got a right good thrashing for telling lies,’ the boy muttered. ‘No one wanted to know what was going on. Still is going on, prob’ly. I ain’t going back there, that’s for sure.’

  Barnard promised himself that he would contact the Yorkshire police about the boy’s story and wondered where he did want to go with the twenty quid he had promised him as he listened to the details that Hamilton patiently dragged out of him, of his escape from the home, his train ride to London funded with money that he guessed he had stolen, and then his bewilderment as he stood at the top of the fume-wreathed platforms at King’s Cross station, a tiny island of despair amongst the hustling crowds, with not a clue what to do next. A man, he said, had picked him up, a sympathetic-seeming man who had promised him a bed for the night and help in finding a job. But there had been the inevitable price and he had soon found himself on the streets, penniless and knowing only one way to earn a living. Eventually Barnard broached the subject of Jimmy Earnshaw’s still-healing head injury, but the boy closed up at once.

  ‘How did you hurt your head?’ he asked. All he got was a blank look and a defensive hunching of the shoulders. But Barnard persisted. ‘There’s a hospital said they treated a lad like you after a road accident and they’re worried because he ran away. Was that you, Jimmy?’

  Again the boy shook his head and Hamilton gave Barnard a warning look. ‘Perhaps it would be better if we let Jimmy get some sleep and then you come back to talk to him in the morning,’ he said.

  Eventually Hamilton led the boy away to settle him into the cubicles in the crypt which was where the boys were housed, leaving the girls to sleep in the nave. When he came back he did not hide his anger. ‘It’s becoming quite common for these perverts to pick up young lads, and girls, at the railway stations. You should do something about it.’

  ‘I’ll pass it up the line,’ Barnard said mildly. ‘And I’ll make some inquiries about this home in Yorkshire where it all began.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think he’s given us his real name,’ Hamilton said. ‘They seldom do. Anyway, I’ll see what we can sort out for him. It’s surprising what the Good Lord provides if you give him a helping hand.’

  ‘I really need more,’ Barnard said. ‘I want to find out who’s been exploiting him here in London. I reckon there’s a new outfit using kids for queer porn magazines. The really nasty sort of stuff usually comes in from abroad, but I suspect someone’s had the bright idea of launching a home-grown operation.’

  ‘Let me talk to him,’ Hamilton said. ‘Come back tomorrow when he’s had a good night’s sleep and a couple of square meals. He’ll trust both of us a bit more then and may be willing to talk.’

  Barnard nodded. He was content to leave his questions about the boy’s accident and lurid nightmares to the next day as well. Before he delivered him into the less sympathetic hands of DCI Venables, he wanted to be sure that there was a good reason to give him over to the murder inquiry. As far as he was concerned, the lad was a possible lead into the increasing use of children in home-grown pornography. He didn’t want him swallowed up by Venables’ murder investigation just yet on the basis of nothing more than a nightmare which might or might not be linked to Jonathon Mason’s death. He would talk to the boy himself, in his own time and at his own pace, he thought, and then decide what to do next.

  ‘Meantime I’ll put some pressure on the queer pubs and clubs,’ he said to Hamilton. ‘If someone thinks it’s worthwhile to produce this stuff, someone must be buying it. What adults get up to doesn’t bother me too much but when they’re using kids . . .’ He shrugged helplessly.

  ‘An abomination,’ Hamilton agreed, though Barnard would not have put it quite like that. ‘They’ll burn in hell eventually, but I’ve never believed that’s an excuse to let sinners flourish here. So good luck with your inquiries.’

  Ken Fellows was not a man ever to exhibit great enthusiasm, but he did deign to show some interest when Kate dropped prints of her pictures of Cynthia Lennon on his desk that Monday morning. There was a gleam in his hooded eyes which he quickly veiled.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ he asked, pushing a copy of that day’s first edition of the Evening Standard towards her. The point of interest seemed to be a small grainy shot on an obscure inside page of a group of teenaged girls hanging around in an unidentified street, clutching autograph books and waving towards a group of baby-faced lads with pudding basin haircuts. ‘The Mersey men come to town,’ the headline announced, while the couple of paragraphs beneath the picture showed a mixture of incomprehension and contempt for the hysteria on show, and did not bother to name the band.<
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  ‘That’s them. That’s the Beatles,’ Kate said. ‘That’s John Lennon, who I knew at college, that’s Paul and George and the drummer, Ringo Starr. He’s really called Ritchie. The girls in Liverpool are going mad for them. John’s new wife practically has to hide from them, they’re so ferocious. That’s her.’ She fanned out her prints of Cynthia in front of Ken. ‘No one even knows they’re married but she told me they really were. If they make it, these pictures will be really valuable.’

  Ken raised an eyebrow at that, and Kate wondered how much more sceptical he might become if he knew the four young men had been trying to make it for six or seven years now since they had met as schoolboys and set up a skiffle group. ‘It’s a good story,’ she said defensively.

  ‘So we keep the pics till they make it big?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll have to wait long. Their new record’s in the Hit Parade already.’

  ‘Well, I’ll believe you, though many wouldn’t,’ Fellows said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms above his head. He looked as though he’d had a rough weekend. ‘But I’m more interested in the shots you took at Ray Robertson’s do at Delilah’s on Friday night.’ He fished out a folder and rifled through her prints until he came to several of the government minister Lord Francome and his companion in the revealing red dress. ‘You sure of her name, are you? Is she on the guest list?’ he asked, putting an interrogatory finger on Christine Jones’s well-exposed charms.

  ‘I’m not sure if she’s on the list,’ Kate said. ‘But I do know her name. I bumped into her in the Ladies’ and I asked her. She was quite chatty.’

  ‘Did you now?’ Fellows came back with a leer. ‘There’s a clever girl, then. OK, I think the Standard diary will be very interested in that one, and maybe a few more. Not bad for a beginner.’ And that, Kate thought, was about as much praise as she was ever likely to get out of Ken Fellows. But to her surprise, he had not quite finished.