Dead Beat

by Patricia Hall

  Feeling slightly sick, Kate kissed Tom and followed Barnard out of the cell and back up the ground floor and out of the court building, with not a word spoken. Back in the bustle of the city, she looked at him and found him grim-faced.

  ‘Do you really think we can get him out?’ she asked.

  ‘It should be easy if he’s telling the truth, but to be honest there are things going on around this case which I don’t understand, not least why the DCI in charge seems so convinced Tom did it when there are good leads to follow in other directions.’

  ‘This witness, this boy you never bothered to tell me about, is he the one who was at St Peter’s?’

  Barnard looked at her curiously. ‘How do you know that?’ he asked.

  ‘I came across him when I went there to take some photographs. Most of the kids thought having their picture taken was a great lark, but he wouldn’t let me take one. He was very nervous, terrified in fact. I thought it was odd.’

  ‘That lad’s existence is the worst kept secret in Soho, and it’s his friends who look like landing him in trouble. Anyway, it’s all taken care of now. He’s somewhere safe.’

  ‘You mean you took care of it?’ Kate asked, her perception of Barnard taking another unexpected lurch, but the sergeant merely shrugged.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Where are you going now? Will you be OK?’

  ‘Back to work,’ Kate said. ‘There’s still masses of filing to do after the burglary. Seems to be my role in life as far as my boss is concerned. It looks as if that boxing do at the Delilah Club will remain the highlight of my career. At least some of those pictures survived. I’d kept the negatives myself so they didn’t get incinerated.’

  ‘Do I appear in any of these pictures?’ Barnard asked, slightly amused, not wanting to let Kate go, but also intrigued by this bizarre burglary which had been seemingly aimed only at destruction.

  ‘I don’t think so, unless you’re in the background somewhere.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Do you want to have a look? It’s lunchtime and they’ll all be in the pub. They never bother to invite me. The place will be empty.’

  They walked back to Soho slowly and, as Kate had anticipated, found the office empty, her desk piled even higher with loose prints than she had left it.

  ‘You have to sort all this lot?’ he asked. ‘I thought you were a photographer, not a filing clerk.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve quite proved that to Ken Fellows yet,’ she said gloomily. ‘He’ll probably have me back in Liverpool for good when my two months are up. In the meantime, I’ll go up at the weekend to talk to Tom’s mates. That won’t be much fun.’

  ‘Let’s see some of the pictures you took at the Delilah then,’ Barnard said. ‘I’ll soon tell you if you’re any good or not.’

  ‘Well, thanks,’ she said drily, opening a drawer in her desk and pulling out a folder of the pictures which had survived. He flipped through them idly, looking for himself at first, but then going more slowly as a quite different face kept cropping up.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of wee Georgie Robertson,’ he said. ‘Any particular reason?’

  Kate came round the desk and stood beside him, suddenly very aware of his closeness. ‘He was everywhere, that man. Ken said get the Robertsons’ main guests, and Ray introduced me to them at the beginning, but it was Georgie who seemed to be sticking close to them. And I must say, I got the feeling some of them didn’t like him much. Look at that one of Lord Francome, there, with Georgie. He looks furious about something.’

  ‘What’s that Georgie’s got in his hand?’ Barnard asked himself as much as Kate, spinning the picture round to try to see more clearly.

  Kate looked more closely but in the end could only shrug. ‘Can’t tell,’ she said. ‘I could enlarge it for you if you think it’s important.’

  ‘Might be,’ Barnard said. ‘I’d really like to know what Georgie’s up to that’s annoying his brother so much. And a few more people by the look of it. Could be blackmail.’ He flipped through the rest of the photographs and drew a sharp breath as he came to another close to the bottom of the pile, this one of Georgie with another man in the background, both smiling broadly this time and offering each other a mock toast with their glasses of champagne, and he wondered why DCI Ted Venables had claimed he’d barely seen Georgie Robertson that night.

  ‘I don’t know who that is,’ Kate said. ‘But he looks a lot happier than most of them.’

  ‘He certainly does,’ Barnard said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder why.’ He turned and put an arm lightly round Kate’s shoulder. She flinched slightly but did not pull away.

  ‘I know you’re not very keen on the police at the moment. That’s understandable, but Georgie Robertson is a nasty piece of work and I’d dearly like to get him off the streets for good. These pictures might be useful to me. I don’t want to get you into trouble with your boss but could you make me copies of all the ones with Georgie in the frame?’ He could see the hesitation in her face as she pulled out of his grasp. He knew he could make the request official but he did not think that would do her much good with her boss either.

  ‘And in return?’ she said. ‘Will you help Tom?’

  ‘In return, I’ll do everything I can to make sure your brother is cleared when he comes back to court next week. I’ll get a cast-iron statement from my witness and make sure it goes to his brief. If you can stand up his alibi in Liverpool the prosecution won’t have a case.’

  Kate nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Meet me at the Blue Lagoon about five. I’ll be there as soon as I finish work, la, with a set of prints. And you’d best not let me down.’

  It was just before five that Kate glanced through the steamy windows of the Blue Lagoon and failed to spot Harry Barnard. She shrugged and decided that there was time for her to do one more thing before she kept her appointment. She had a brown envelope full of enlarged photographs for him and she did not doubt that if she was late he would wait for her. She knew that there was something in the pictures which had excited his interest, though she did not know what it was. She turned away and wove her way through the homeward-bound crowds to St Peter’s, hoping that she might catch David Hamilton and persuade him to take her to see the boy on whose evidence the fate of her brother seemed to rest. Before she went back home to persuade Tom’s friends to help, she thought, she needed to know how firm this boy’s testimony was.

  It was already dusk, and almost dark amongst the unkempt yews in the churchyard, and as she made her way up the pathway to the doors, she nearly screamed as a figure loomed towards her from the side of the porch.

  ‘Dinna fash yersel’, lassie,’ the man said in a broad Scottish accent. ‘I was just in the churchyard hoping I might see a wee laddie, if he came back here, but then I found something bad. I dinna want to be talking to the polis again, but somebody needs tae.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Kate asked, her mouth dry. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Ye’d best come and see, though ye’ll not want to go close,’ the old man said, and he took hold of her arm, pulling her round the side of the church towards a lean-to outhouse at the back where the door was ajar.

  ‘I saw two men come out,’ he said. ‘And when they’d gone, I put my heed round the door. And I wished I hadnae.’

  Kate looked at him doubtfully. ‘Is there a light?’

  ‘Ye’ll not need a light to see what ye need to see,’ Hamish said. ‘Best not.’

  Kate swallowed hard and pushed the door open. It was almost completely dark inside, but there was a throbbing noise from the back of the small space which she guessed must be the boiler which heated the church. Close to the door she could just make out a huddled figure which she knew instantly was human and instinctively was dead. Tentatively she touched a limp wrist but could feel no pulse. She stepped backwards out of the door and glanced round to find that the old man had vanished. Swallowing hard she made her way back round the side of the church and opened the main doors where she found David Hami
lton’s ragtag assembly of youngsters noisily eating their supper, with, to her relief, Hamilton himself presiding over the tea-urn. He glanced at her in surprise which turned to consternation as he took in her shocked face and wild eyes

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you again,’ he said quietly. ‘You look as if you need a cup of tea?’ Kate nodded and felt her knees sag slightly.

  ‘Please,’ she said, stuttering as if words were hard to find. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  Hamilton quickly stirred sugar into a cup of tea, handed it to her and shepherded her to a pew much further down the nave where no one could overhear them. ‘Drink first’, he said.

  She sipped the sweet brew, realizing that her hands were shaking almost uncontrollably.

  ‘I’ve found a dead body in your boiler room,’ she whispered. ‘It’s difficult to see very much but I think it’s Mrs Lucas, the woman who asked me to take photographs for her campaign. Someone’s killed her. Why in the name of God would anyone do that?’

  EIGHTEEN

  David Hamilton seemed to have aged ten years in ten minutes. He sat opposite Kate O’Donnell in his tidy study at the vicarage from where they had made their phone calls, he dialling 999, and she the Blue Lagoon, where she asked Marie to give a message to Harry Barnard, who she guessed would by now be waiting in the coffee bar for her with some impatience. Not surprisingly it was Barnard who turned up at the vicarage first.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he asked Hamilton, offering Kate the merest nod.

  ‘I’ll show you in a minute,’ Hamilton said. ‘It’s not pretty. I’ve not seen anything so bad since I was at Dunkirk.’

  ‘Do we know who it is?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Hamilton said. ‘It’s a woman called Veronica Lucas.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Kate said faintly to herself.

  Barnard turned towards her quickly. ‘You know her?’

  ‘She’s the one who asked me to take pictures of prostitutes,’ she said, her mouth dry. ‘I told you. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘She works for a Catholic charity trying to get kids off the streets,’ Hamilton explained. ‘She’s a good woman. I didn’t touch the body, of course, except to feel for a pulse. There was a lot of blood. I don’t know what they did to her but it looks bad.’

  ‘You’d better show me,’ Barnard said. He glanced at Kate. ‘Will you stay here and show the Murder Squad where we are when they turn up? They’ll want to know how you found her. And answer the phone if anyone rings? Technically I’m off duty and haven’t got a radio with me.’

  Kate nodded, feeling numb and grateful that she did not have to go anywhere near the huddled body again. ‘You’d better take these now you’re here,’ she said, taking her collection of pictures out of her bag and handing them to the sergeant.

  He nodded and put them in his inside pocket. Then he turned back to Hamilton. ‘What have you done about the kids? We don’t want them running riot round a murder scene.’

  ‘I told my helpers to keep them inside,’ Hamilton said. ‘They don’t know what’s going on but they know something is. They’re not stupid.’

  ‘When we get some reinforcements, I’m sure DCI Venables will keep them where we want them,’ Barnard said, looking grim. ‘I’m glad we got young Jimmy well out of the way. Are you all right, Kate? Can you cope?’

  Kate nodded and the two men left her alone, sitting close to the phone on Hamilton’s desk. The silence in the old Victorian vicarage was intense and slightly unnerving and she passed the time surveying his bookshelves, and flicking through the magazines on his desk. Only then did she notice Jimmy Earnshaw’s name on the notepad by the phone, together with a phone number and the address of a vicarage in Guildford. She drew a sharp breath, not in any doubt that this was where Jimmy had been taken but not sure what to do about it. Then she took her diary out of her handbag and carefully noted down the information. She was sure that when Barnard said he would obtain a statement from Jimmy Earnshaw, he meant it, but her faith in the police had been profoundly shaken and she decided to talk to the boy herself if she possibly could. She pushed the notepad under a magazine so that it could not be seen by a casual observer, just as a thunderous knocking began at the front door. She went to open it and found herself face-to-face with a well-built, florid man in camel coat and trilby standing impatiently on the doorstep, with a couple of other men hovering in the background.

  ‘DCI Venables,’ he said abruptly. ‘I was told there was a dead body. Where’s the bloody vicar and who are you?’

  Kate told him and in return he studied her more closely.

  ‘Haven’t I see you somewhere before?’ he asked.

  ‘You might have done. I was at the Robertsons’ do at the Delilah Club last week. I was taking photographs. I think I saw you there.’ Better that connection, she thought, than allowing him to recall that she had been at the magistrates’ court that morning where he might also quite possibly have seen her.

  ‘Photographs,’ Venables said, obviously surprised. ‘I didn’t think girls did that.’

  ‘You’d be surprised what girls do these days,’ Kate came back sharply. ‘But if you’re looking for the body it’s not here. It’s at the church. The vicar’s gone over there with Sergeant Barnard. The boiler room’s down the left side from the main door.’

  ‘Harry Barnard? What the hell’s he doing here?’ Venables asked, looking even more surprised and certainly not best pleased.

  ‘I think he just happened to be passing,’ Kate said quickly. ‘He’ll be waiting for you.’ She suddenly wanted rid of this man before he connected her with her brother. Venables spun on his heel, not thinking to ask her why she happened to be there, and Kate heaved a sigh of exhausted relief. It was time to get back to the job she really had to do, which was to get her brother out of jail. She put her coat on, turned out the light, and closed the vicarage door behind her, wondering how far away from London Guildford was. As she passed the gate to the churchyard, she could see the police milling around inside and there were several squad cars parked in the street. She walked quickly past in the direction of Oxford Street and was soon swallowed up by the home-going crowds of commuters heading for the tube.

  Harry Barnard picked up his car and drove east faster than was either safe or legal. All the anxieties which had plagued him over the last week had come to a head as he had stood in the dim light of St Peter’s boiler room looking down at the tormented body of Veronica Lucas. There was, as Hamilton had warned, a great deal of blood and Barnard did not think that she had died quickly, though the dirty rag stuffed into her mouth had probably guaranteed that in the end she had died quietly. But what possible motive could there have been for anyone to kill this God-fearing woman, in her smart coat and hat, court shoes flung to one side, with such psychotic ferocity?

  DCI Venables had arrived quickly, in a flurry of blue lights and aggression, and Barnard took the first opportunity to get away, leaving the scene to the Murder Squad. The DCI had seemed to accept Barnard’s excuse that he and Rev Dave Hamilton were old friends and that it was pure chance he had arrived when he did, although he made it perfectly obvious he did not want him involved in the investigation. But as Barnard walked slowly back to the nick to pick up his car, the more sickened he felt at what had happened and the more the one person who had always been able to produce this sort of revulsion in him intruded.

  When he got to Whitechapel, he found the young men in the gym hard at work and Ray Robertson watching at the ringside where two boys were sparring.

  ‘A word, Ray?’ Barnard said quietly.

  Robertson gave him a sharp glance and led the way to his office, waving Barnard into a chair. ‘What can I do for you, Harry?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you know where Georgie is?’

  ‘Have you got him pinned down then?’ Robertson shot back. ‘I got the impression Ted Venables wasn’t biting, though I can’t imagine why.’

  ‘There’s been another killing,’ Barnard said. ‘And this
time it’s got Georgie’s MO all over it, if you know how to read it. And it’s not some low-life Maltese pornographer, or some queer, that no one gives tuppence for this time. It’s a respectable middle-aged woman who looks as though she’s been deliberately tortured to death. Scotland Yard’s going to take an interest in this one. They’re going to pull all the stops out. So if Georgie’s involved, you’ll get what you wanted without anyone perjuring themselves to kingdom come. Satisfied?’

  ‘But you’re not sure?’

  ‘Not yet, no,’ Barnard said. ‘And before I tackle Georgie, I need to know what the hell he’s up to. Otherwise I’m floundering around in the dark.’

  Robertson nodded slowly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But this is for your ears only, not for the whole of the Metropolitan bloody Police. Understood?

  ‘Understood,’ Barnard agreed.

  Ray steepled his hands under his chin as if considering some business problem, which Barnard supposed in a way he was. Whatever affection there had been between the brothers when they were kids, he thought, and he didn’t think there had ever been much, had long ago gone rancid.

  ‘Right, let’s put it this way,’ Robertson said. ‘My aim is to expand the business. I think you know that. We’ve done very well here in the East End, but there’s richer pickings up west and I want some of them. This doesn’t please a certain Maltese gentleman who’s got a lot of fingers in a lot of Soho pies. You know who I mean?’

  Barnard nodded.

  ‘So there’s two choices, right? We can muscle in on his territory, and there’ll be a bloody war. Or we can do it more civilized, and split the trade up between us. And that’s what I want to do. Saves a lot of aggravation. Basically, I want the protection business and he can have the porn and the women. But wee Georgie thinks different. He seems determined to get into the sex trade, porn magazines, women, blokes, boys, the whole bloody lot, queers and all. And Mr Falzon doesn’t like that. The last straw was when I caught him blackmailing someone who’d been at some steamy party out in Essex, using my contacts in high places, guests at my parties . . . One of them came to me complaining. That was when I decided Georgie had to be stopped. Falzon won’t have anything to do with queers. Georgie’s putting everything I’m working for at risk. So how can I help you, Harry boy? How can we pin the little bastard to the floor?’