Dead Beat

by Patricia Hall

  ‘When is this girl’s baby due?’ he asked, putting his finger on one of the shots of Cynthia Lennon.

  ‘In about four weeks,’ Kate said.

  ‘Well, you’d better see if you can get us some shots when it’s born. If this band is really going to be as big as you say it is, we’d better keep on top of them, hadn’t we? And what about the band you snapped in London on your own account? Are they going to be big too?’

  Kate thought of Dave Donovan and his friends, and shrugged slightly. ‘They’d like to think they are, but they didn’t have the girls in Liverpool running after them the way they’re doing after the Beatles and one or two of the other groups. I reckon it’s wishful thinking with them.’

  ‘You say that even though they’re mates of yours?’

  Kate grinned at her boss. ‘Especially because they were mates of mine,’ she said.

  She found the filing and office chores less frustrating that morning, thinking that at last she was making some progress towards making her job permanent. At lunchtime, she put her coat on, glanced in her bag, where she still carried the magazine that Declan Riley had given her, concealed now in a plain envelope, and set off resolutely towards Greek Street. She knew she should really hand the magazine to Sergeant Barnard, but if she did that he would want to know where she had got it, and she guessed that might put Tom at risk. Best, she thought, to check it out first, and she thought she knew exactly where to do that.

  She felt slightly sick as she stood at the entrance to the alley where her brother had shared his flat with Jonathon Mason. There was no policeman on duty there any more and no one else at all in the dead-end street, but she could see a light on in the window of ABC Books, so she took a deep breath, approached slowly and pushed open the door. Pete Marelli emerged from the back room, shutting the door against his dog’s menacing growls but when he saw who had come in he scowled.

  ‘You again,’ he said. ‘I told you already. I know nothing about your brother.’

  ‘I know,’ Kate said. ‘I wanted to ask you about something else.’ She pulled out the magazine Declan had given her and flicked it open at the page where they thought they had recognized Mason in a clinch with another man. ‘This looks like my brother’s friend. I just wondered if you knew where these magazines come from. If Jonathon was mixed up in this sort of stuff I should think he was much more likely to get himself murdered by someone he met through this than by anyone else.’ She knew it sounded lame, but given Tom’s predicament she was determined to explore every faint lead which might help him, and if it came to anything at all she would pass the information on to the police, rather than leave him needing to prove his innocence to Sergeant Barnard or someone even worse.

  Marelli glanced at the page in question and shrugged. ‘It looks a bit like him,’ he said. ‘But I don’t sell this stuff, men with men, men with boys. Never. This one brought boys back here sometimes. I saw him. I don’t like it. Police don’t like it. It cause trouble.’ He glanced at the back page of the magazine. ‘You need to find publisher. No name here. Give it to the police and they will find.’

  ‘If they were using English models they must be producing this stuff somewhere in London,’ Kate insisted.

  Marelli shrugged again. ‘You hear things,’ he said. ‘But it’s not my people. Someone came here the other day and I told him. Women is one thing, men is another.’ He pulled a face and thrust the magazine back at Kate. ‘Give this to police. You can’t go asking questions like this. It dangerous for you. These are bad people.’

  Kate sighed, knowing Marelli was right. ‘If it was your brother you’d try,’ she muttered and thought she saw a flicker of sympathy in Marelli’s dark eyes.

  ‘If it was my brother I would pray to the Virgin he not involved with people like this,’ he said. ‘Talk to police, talk to Sergeant Barnard. For policeman, he not so bad as some.’

  TWELVE

  DS Harry Barnard sat at his desk smoking and drumming his fingers on a pile of paperwork which he wanted an excuse to avoid. He ignored the general hubbub in the busy office, brushing off the banter he regularly met from his uniformly scruffy colleagues, who called him Flash every time he turned up in some newly fashionable item. Since Teddy boy style had caused general outrage when he was barely out of his teens, and still in uniform as a PC, he had spent every penny he could afford on the latest trend. It was a carapace he hid behind, disguising a sharp brain and a steely ambition which he was determined would take him far.

  But the problem he was wrestling with this morning was tricky. He had no objection to putting Georgie Robertson away for life. While he had some affection, and even respect, for his brother, knowing it was little more than luck which had put him on one side of the law and Ray on the other, Georgie was something else. Ray was right. Georgie had been bad and quite possibly mad since he was a boy and Barnard suspected that it was only his brother’s protection that had saved him from a long prison sentence already, though there had been a couple of short ones for occasional manic violence that not even Ray had been able to hush up. Even if he had not killed Jonathon Mason, Georgie Robertson either already had, or soon would, kill someone else, Barnard thought. His only problem was the mechanics of the exercise: how was he to produce Georgie as a prime suspect, like a rabbit out of a hat, when as far as he knew his name had never crossed the radar of DCI Venables’ murder investigation, and especially as Venables had not even mentioned the case to him for days now?

  Still ruminating, he stubbed out his cigarette, walked down the corridor to Venables’ office and put his head round the door. The DCI was at his desk, with a telephone clamped to one ear and a large glass of Scotch in the other hand. That, Barnard thought, might become a serious problem for the senior officer soon. Venables waved him in, concluding his call with a curt ‘I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘Good to see you, Harry,’ he said, before draining his glass and stowing it away in a drawer of his desk. ‘Got something for me, have you? Seen any sign of that young lad I was looking for on your travels?’

  Barnard hesitated for no more than a moment before shaking his head, still nursing the not entirely rational conviction that he needed to talk to young Jimmy Earnshaw himself again before handing him over to the murder team. ‘’Fraid not,’ he said. ‘It’s something else entirely, guv. I was having a drink with one of my snouts yesterday night and he came up with something very odd. He said he’d heard a whisper about your victim.’

  ‘Mason?’ Venables said, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘The very one,’ Barnard said. ‘The gist of what he said was that Mason was in the queer pub about a week ago – he wasn’t told exactly when, but it could have been the night he was killed. Anyway, he started chatting up a bloke my snout’s mate had never seen in there before. Whatever Mason said to him seemed to annoy the other bloke and they went out of the pub together having what seemed like a blazing row. Could be significant, don’t you think? Do you want me to follow it up?’ He would, he thought, play Ray’s game very cautiously indeed.

  ‘Mmm,’ Venables said thoughtfully. ‘May tie in with something someone else told me this morning, as it goes. You know Ray Robertson, don’t you, from way back? How well do you know his brother Georgie?’

  Barnard took a deep breath, trying to conceal his surprise. Ray hadn’t wasted much time, he thought, and he wished he had taken the trouble to tell him exactly what he might be going to say directly to Venables. ‘I knew him when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘I must have told you. We were all evacuated together. But I always thought he was a bit of a nutter, to be honest.’

  ‘Is he queer as well?’

  Barnard shrugged, surprised by the question. ‘Not as far as I know,’ he said. ‘I never saw any sign of that. He’s got a rep as a bit of a ladies’ man. He’d have had a tough time in Bethnal Green if he’d been bent. Nancy-boys weren’t favourite in that neighbourhood. Why d’you ask?’

  ‘Right, well, that figures,’ Venables said. ‘Some tom said a
john refused to pay her and flew into a rage and pulled a knife when she objected. Her description might fit Georgie Robertson.’

  ‘Could be our Georgie,’ Barnard said, without a qualm on that score. ‘Though I’d be surprised if he has to pay for sex. But he’s always had a temper on him. I saw him coming out of the Delilah in a fury after the Robertsons’ do there last week. You were there. Maybe you know what that was all about?’

  Venables looked blank and shrugged. ‘I didn’t really speak to him that night,’ he said. ‘Just passed the time of day in the bog. You were there, weren’t you? I don’t think we need to take this tom seriously, but we are looking for a knife-man for the Greek Street job, so we’d better cover our backs, just in case. Would you like to have a word? It’s your patch, after all. She’s working just off Soho Square. Not out of your way, is it?’ He scribbled a name and address on a piece of paper and handed it to Barnard. ‘And while you’re at it, get some mug shots up to the queer pub if you reckon Mason’s been seen in there, rowing with someone. See if you can pin someone down, though if what you say about Georgie’s right, I can’t see him darkening that door.’

  ‘Unless there’s money in it,’ Barnard said. ‘But it does sound like Georgie’s losing it, one way or another. Did the john use the knife on the tom?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The desk sergeant sent her away with a flea in her ear. If we listened to every aggrieved tom in Soho we’d never finish. You know what they’re like. But he did mention it to me in passing. And he made a note of her description. See what you think. Let me know.’

  ‘Give me the address,’ Barnard said. ‘I’ll have a word later. I’ll be out and about over there this morning.’

  ‘And don’t forget to keep an eye open for that young lad I want to talk to. He’s a possible witness in another case I’m on, and I want him found,’ Venables said.

  ‘Right,’ Barnard said, suddenly intensely curious about what Jimmy Earnshaw might have been a witness to if it wasn’t the Mason murder.

  Later that morning, Barnard went back to St Peter’s, and walked into the twilit nave where an animated group of young girls were gossiping and laughing amongst the surviving pews. There was a light on in David Hamilton’s cubicle of an office and he tapped on the door before going in.

  Hamilton glanced up from the pile of paperwork on his desk with a look of relief. ‘I’m glad you came,’ he said. ‘You need to talk to this lad, Earnshaw. He seems to have stumbled into something really nasty and he needs more protection than I can give him.’

  ‘You got him to talk, then?’ Barnard asked.

  ‘A bit, late last night. I went downstairs to look at the lads late on, as I usually do before I go back to the vicarage. We just have one person on duty at night to keep an eye on the little devils. We don’t want them jumping in and out of bed with each other or we’ll have the newspapers leaping on us from a great height, won’t we? There’s a few of our neighbours don’t like us, as it is. Not much Christian charity around in Soho, is there?’ Hamilton gave a short, sharp bark of laughter. ‘Shouldn’t expect it, I suppose. Anyway, Jimmy was restless, and seemed very nervous, and I brought him up here for a chat. And eventually it all came tumbling out: how men were using him for disgusting photographs, and something else, something he says he saw, someone who invited him back to his flat but got his throat cut by the time he got there. Sounds far-fetched, I have to say, but Jimmy swears it’s true and that’s why he’s so desperate to get out of London, why he wants your twenty quid which he says you’ve promised him, to get away in case the killers saw him in Greek Street.’

  Barnard’s mouth felt dry and his palms sweaty. ‘Killers?’ he asked sharply. ‘No one’s suggested there was more than one person involved. Do you think he’ll talk to me? Or will he just clam up again?’

  ‘You’ll have to take it gently,’ Hamilton said. ‘He’ll run again if he’s frightened.’

  ‘I can’t have him on the loose if he’s got information about a murder,’ Barnard said flatly. ‘On the other hand, I can’t arrest him as a witness. I just need him kept safe, and preferably not in Soho. It’s too damn close to the scene of the crime.’

  Hamilton gave Barnard a long look. ‘It’s a real crime then, is it? He’s not just inventing it?’

  ‘A young homosexual bloke was found with his throat cut a week ago in a flat just off Greek Street. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it, though to be fair the papers didn’t give it much coverage. They knew he was queer, so they didn’t bother. Anyway, we’ve been looking for his flatmate, who’s disappeared, which doesn’t look good. But maybe we’ve got it wrong. I need Jimmy Earnshaw to tell me what and possibly who he saw. Perhaps he’s closer to the truth than we are.’

  ‘I could maybe find him somewhere safe out of town, if that would help,’ Hamilton said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve got a colleague who’s vicar of a parish in Surrey who’s interested in the work we do here. He might just possibly take him for a while.’

  ‘That might be an answer,’ Barnard said. ‘But first I need to get a proper statement out of him. Do you think you can persuade him to do that?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Hamilton said. ‘Let’s go down and see him.’

  He led the way down a narrow stone staircase to where Jimmy Earnshaw was sitting on his bed in the gloomy crypt, well apart from a group of boys smoking and laughing in a corner. He gave both men an anxious look as they approached. He looked pale and tired and had blue-black circles under his eyes as if he had not slept properly for a week which, Barnard thought, was quite likely, given that he seemed to have been at the scene of a murder and had been abused since. His sweater barely covered the bruises around his wrists and neck.

  ‘Can I have my twenty quid now?’ he asked Barnard in a low whisper as he sat down on the bed beside him. ‘I don’t like the other lads here.’

  ‘Soon,’ Barnard said. ‘When we’ve had a little chat about what you told Mr Hamilton last night, and tried to sort you out with somewhere out of London to stay where you’ll be safe for a while. Would that suit you?’

  The boy tried to stand up but Hamilton gently pushing him back down.

  ‘You’re not going to lock me up?’ Jimmy said, with the eyes of a frightened animal.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Barnard said. ‘But it sounds as though you witnessed a serious crime and I need to know a bit more about what you saw that night.’

  There was, in the end, little enough to tell, although all of it grim as the boy described, in a halting whisper, the pick-up in Piccadilly, the walk through Soho with his companion, lagging behind a little as they approached the flat and then going upstairs only when the coast seemed clear and a couple of men in the alleyway had hurried away down Greek Street.

  ‘You knew what you were letting yourself in for?’ Barnard asked, horrified by how matter-of-fact the transaction obviously seemed to the boy.

  ‘’Course,’ Jimmy said. ‘Any road, I knew the bloke. I’d been to his place before.’

  ‘So tell me about the men in the alley. Did you get a good look at them?’ Barnard asked.

  The boy shrugged. ‘I weren’t that far behind my mark,’ he said. ‘But when I got to the corner these blokes were coming towards me. Looked like they were in a hurry. I stood in a doorway in Greek Street and waited till they’d gone. They didn’t see me, at least I don’t think they did. I can’t be right sure. Any road, when they’d gone, I went upstairs and found my bloke dead.’ He shuddered slightly at the memory.

  ‘Can you describe these men for me, Jimmy?’ Barnard said. ‘They may have nothing to do with the murder but they could be useful witnesses if they were there at the same time Jonathon Mason got home that night. I need to know everything you can remember about them.’

  Hesitantly the boy dredged his memory, his eyes flickering between the two men facing him. ‘One were taller, the other shorter,’ he said. ‘One had a coat on, and a hat, the big bloke, but the other didn’t. He were just wearing
a jacket, leather, I think, even though it were right cold that night.’

  ‘Did you see their faces? Would you recognize them again?’ Barnard asked.

  ‘I thought I did the day I had the accident. I saw a man who looked a bit like the big bloke, in one of them camel coats and a brown hat, and I ran away, not looking, like, and got hit by a car. Stupid. There were lots of blokes in coats like that.’

  Barnard produced a mugshot of Georgie Robertson which he had pulled from the files after he had left DCI Venables, and laid it on the table alongside the snapshot of Tom O’Donnell.

  ‘Could either of those two be one of the men you saw?’ he asked.

  The boy studied the photographs carefully but seemed unsure. ‘Nay, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I can’t be right sure. I didn’t get a good look at the smaller one’s face. He had dark hair, and he were younger and skinnier than the big bloke with the hat, but tough-looking. I don’t think this is him.’ He pushed the picture of Tom O’Donnell away. ‘This might be,’ he said, looking again at Georgie Robertson. ‘But I’m not right sure. I got a better look at the big bloke. I might know him again if you’ve got his picture.’

  Barnard smiled slightly. The boy was right. Georgie Robertson had always seemed puny beside his brother, who had fought as a heavyweight, a small volatile boy and a small volatile man, always in the shadow of Ray one way or another, and resenting every minute of it. If it was Georgie Jimmy had seen, was it perhaps Ray he was with that night? If so, Ray’s game might be even more devious than Barnard had guessed.

  ‘So you think you might recognize the taller man again?’

  ‘Maybe,’ the boy said.

  And that, Barnard thought, was a pity. For the moment, he’d put a formal statement from Jimmy Earnshaw on hold until he was sure how Venables’ investigation was panning out. He glanced at Hamilton. ‘I’ll get some more mugshots for him to look at in case he can identify the taller bloke,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, Jimmy, I think we should get you out of London until we catch up with these men, don’t you?’