‘So much for breakfast,’ she said. ‘What about toast? It might be less of a fire hazard.’
Barnard shrugged and ate what she put in front of him, but as soon as he had finished he put his coat on.
‘I’ll get all the papers,’ he said. ‘I want to know if this is just in the Express, just a boxing story basically, or whether they’ve all latched on to it.’ He was not out long and came back with a bundle of Sunday papers which he set about searching for any mention of the murder. Kate watched as he cut out bits from some of the papers and made a neat pile of them on the dining table. When he’d finished he looked slightly nonplussed.
‘Most of them have a bit about the body being found, but it’s only the man at the Express who mentions Ray as anything other than the well-known promoter who owns the gym. The Sunday Times says he has friends in high places, which is true enough, but no one else says the police want to talk to him. I wonder who the Express man’s contact is.’
‘You could ask him,’ Kate suggested.
‘And have it get straight back to whoever he talked to? No thanks. I’m officially off this case, remember?’
‘So you are,’ she said quietly. ‘And if you ask me, you’ve already taken enough chances. Why don’t we have a quiet drink at that pub you took me to at the top of the hill and a lazy Sunday afternoon? I think you’ve done all you can for now. If Ray wants to stay out of sight, I’m sure he’s got plenty of places he can hide. He’ll reappear in his own good time I dare say, but probably not until they’ve arrested someone else for Rod Miller’s murder. That would be the sensible thing to do, wouldn’t it?’
The phone call came after they had come back from standing close to the braziers at the front of the Flask where families with children, who were not allowed inside, congregated to keep warm. The low bars in the old building were packed with adults, and after failing to find a space inside among the Sunday lunchtime crowds they carried hot toddies outside and were put off by the cold from staying very long. They walked briskly back down Highgate Hill to Barnard’s flat, flushed from a combination of the icy wind and the whisky, and could hear the phone ringing as Barnard put his key in the lock.
The conversation seemed monosyllabic at first, as if Barnard was unsure of who he was speaking to, but eventually he seemed to relax and appeared to be making plans for a meeting at a pub near Fenchurch Street with whoever was at the other end of the line.
‘Seven o’clock will be fine,’ Barnard said at length. ‘They’ll only just have opened then and it’ll still be quiet on a Sunday night in the City. You obviously know what I look like. I’ll see you then.’
‘Who was that?’ Kate asked.
‘A bloke who wants to talk to me about Rod Miller,’ Barnard said. ‘Says there was more to Rod than the trainer dedicated to helping lads from the back streets make it with their fists. That could well be right, seeing that Ray took him on. It’s not as if either of the Robertsons was ever squeaky clean. Even as kids their pockets were stuffed full of goodies they’d nicked from the corner shop. I remember Georgie working the bomb sites for scrap metal and anything else he thought he could flog. Some poor beggar’s false teeth once, but he didn’t care.’ Kate pulled a face.
‘Do you really need to see this man?’ she asked. ‘How do you know he’s genuine and not someone trying to catch you out? It’s not as if you’re short of enemies at the nick by the sound of it, quite apart from trying to run a freelance murder investigation.’
‘Well, he seems to have prised my phone number out of someone at the nick, so it might be a good idea if you came with me,’ he said. ‘I might need a witness if it comes to the crunch. No one will know me at the Wellington. I don’t think I’ve ever been inside the door and he certainly won’t have. Apparently he’s coming in from Essex.’
‘Essex?’ Kate said quietly. ‘Not Canvey Island, surely?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Barnard said. ‘But would you believe it? He mentioned Southend.’ Kate met Barnard’s eyes but said nothing. She could see the same anxiety there that she knew was mirrored in her own and could think of nothing encouraging to say.
The Wellington was an unprepossessing pub close to Fenchurch Street station, a brick building on a corner, facing the railway arches under the line that took the trains east, the windows half-obscured by engraved glass that looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned for years. Barnard parked his car some distance from the entrance and sat in the driver’s seat for a long moment before getting out, but the street outside was deserted at this time on a Sunday.
‘Come on then, let’s see what this bloke wants. If he’s taken the trouble to come all this way, it must be something important.’
‘Shouldn’t you tell him to talk to DCI Jackson?’ Kate said, gripped by a sudden feeling of panic.
‘In theory yes, but he didn’t seem very keen on that idea,’ Barnard said. ‘Mind you I didn’t tell him I’d been pulled off the case. Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll tell Jackson tomorrow if it’s anything relevant. I’m not looking to put my head into a noose deliberately.’ Kate shrugged, thinking that DCI Jackson might be only too happy to see him hang. But she had never seen Barnard so morose and didn’t quite know how to handle him in this mood.
‘Let’s get it over with,’ she said without enthusiasm.
There was only one customer in the lounge, a chilly, dusty-looking room with smeared tables and nobody behind the bar at all. He was a heavy-looking, broad-shouldered individual who scanned the newcomers with a slightly hunted expression as if he did not really want to be there. He was sitting in a corner, back to the wall, with an empty whisky glass in front of him and had the collar of his topcoat pulled up round his ears and a scarf tucked in tightly. The eyes he turned in their direction were focused and cold.
‘Barnard?’ he asked.
‘Harry,’ Barnard said.
‘Les Greenwood, also a DS once upon a time,’ the stranger said, waving his empty glass in the direction of the bar. ‘And I’ll have another double Scotch.’ He glanced at Kate.
‘Who’s this? Your dolly bird?’
‘I brought her for the ride,’ Barnard said. ‘We’re going up West later. She’s very discreet.’
He saw Kate into a seat then turned towards the bar, where a boy who didn’t look old enough to be serving alcohol had appeared to deal with his order. Greenwood stared at her silently, loosening his scarf slightly to reveal the several chins it had concealed, and Kate realized that his eyes were bloodshot and the veins in his face reddened. His breath had the smell of a man who was seldom sober. She knew the signs only too well after a childhood spent on Liverpool’s Scotland Road and she realized that she still hated men like this, even after being away from those slums for years now.
‘What’s a nice girl like you doing going out with a dodgy copper like him?’ Greenwood asked in the end, in the gravelly tones of a committed smoker, but he did not seem to expect a reply and she did not offer one. He shrugged and glanced up at Barnard and took the whisky from his hand with enough enthusiasm to suggest he did not just want it, he needed it.
‘I was in the Met once,’ he told Barnard. ‘Went out to Essex just before the Yard had one of its purges. Not that they had anything on me, mind. The Essex force was only too pleased to have someone with my record of arrests.’
‘So what about Rod Miller?’ Barnard asked impatiently, sipping his pint. ‘Did you arrest him?’
‘I did, as it goes, Sergeant,’ Greenwood said. ‘But he wriggled out of it. We couldn’t persuade him to talk, though we tried hard enough.’
‘I can imagine,’ Barnard said.
‘As if the Met’s squeaky clean,’ Greenwood snapped. ‘Anyway, we couldn’t crack him or his alibi, so in the end he walked. But I knew he was guilty as hell. You can always tell.’
‘So what was he guilty of?’ Barnard asked sharply.
‘This is ten, eleven years ago, you understand. I’ve been retired for seven. Must have been ’52. The
re was a nasty robbery in Southend – a gang raided a post office on pension day, an armed gang waving two sawn-off shotguns. They terrorized the customers, got the keys off the postmaster, emptied the safe, and scarpered with the postmaster as hostage. They dumped him later on in the marshes with a cracked skull. He bloody nearly died and they say he’s never been the same since. Anyway, we got the two main men – bloke called Sam Dexter and a bit of a nutter called Barrett. Bomber Barrett they called him, because of his rep from the war. He was some sort of explosives expert who liked big bangs. Those two went down for fifteen years apiece, though I hear they’ve just got out for good behaviour. But two others got clean away. We reckoned Rod Miller was the driver and a lad called Bert Flanagan, Dexter’s brother-in-law, was there on the day as well. Miller wasn’t charged and Flanagan was acquitted. He claimed he was visiting his sister Delia on Foulness Island that day, and as the military keep an eye on who comes and goes there and hadn’t seen him leave we couldn’t prove he could have been in Southend with the others. Not to the jury’s satisfaction, anyway. Later on, people told me you can get on and off Foulness without troubling the checkpoints if you know how. But it was too late by then.’
‘Miller didn’t buy his way out of it, did he?’ Barnard asked. ‘If he grassed his mates up, that might explain why someone’d come for him now. He wasn’t just shot, you know. He’d been badly beaten up before he died. It could be revenge that had to wait until they came out of prison.’
‘No he didn’t grass anyone up,’ Greenwood said sharply. ‘If you knew Barrett, you’d know no one would grass him up in a hurry.’
‘So why are you telling me all this now? How’s this robbery connected to Miller’s murder?’ Barnard asked.
‘Dexter and Barrett have just been released, haven’t they? And nobody ever recovered the loot from that raid and some similar ones we suspected they were involved in. Believe me, we’ve kept an eye on Flanagan in particular, but there’s been no sign of him living it up. Though I hear from my mates in CID that he’s not been seen around much recently. But we always reckoned that there’s at least a quarter of a million stashed away somewhere, waiting for Dexter and Barrett to come home and claim it. Unless it’s been half-inched already by someone who didn’t go down. The Great Train Robbery it was not, but it’s a tidy sum all the same. Quite enough for someone who might have stashed it away somewhere to get roughed up.’
‘And you think one or other of them might have come looking for Rod Miller to see if he knows where the money is?’
‘Exactly,’ Greenwood said. ‘You need to look up the records down in Southend.’
‘As far as I know, Rod Miller hasn’t put a foot wrong since he went to the gym in Whitechapel to work for Ray Robertson,’ Barnard objected. ‘And he’s certainly never shown any sign of being loaded with cash.’
Greenwood got to his feet unsteadily and ordered another whisky at the bar without offering Barnard or Kate a refill.
‘Robertson? There’s another name to conjure with,’ Greenwood said when he came back and slumped into his chair. ‘Maybe he’s picked up the loot somewhere along the line. If I remember rightly, Robertson had some connection with one of the Flanagan sisters. He married one of them and Dexter married the other.’
‘Ray Robertson and his wife were divorced years ago,’ Barnard said. ‘Though I did see her in Oxford Street recently.’
‘You’re not suggesting they’re not dodgy as a three-pound note?’
‘The brother’s gone down and Ray’s gone AWOL as it happens, and my DCI has him down as prime suspect for killing Miller. But I don’t see it myself,’ Barnard said thoughtfully. ‘Ray Robertson and Rod Miller have been partners for years at the gym. And Miller, as far as I know, is officially clean as a whistle.’
‘Well, he wasn’t back then,’ Greenwood said flatly. ‘You need to talk to CID in Southend. There must be records of the little chats I had with Miller about that robbery, even if they haven’t filtered back to the Met. I just hope they’ve been cleaned up a bit for public consumption.’
‘Can the DCI contact you?’ Barnard asked, but the older man shook his head wearily and drained his glass.
‘No way,’ he said. ‘I’m retired and want to stay that way. I’m not in Southend any more, as it goes. I moved to Canvey to get away from all that. It was only by chance I noticed Miller’s name in the papers. I thought I’d better remind someone about what happened back then. If Dexter and Barrett are on the loose again, I want to stay as far away from them as I can.’
‘Can I contact you? You don’t have to do anything official but it might help,’ Barnard persisted.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Greenwood said. ‘This meeting never even happened.’
FIVE
DCI Keith Jackson called Barnard into his office mid-morning. Barnard put his jacket on, straightened his Liberty-print tie, a flowery job that provoked much derision around the station, and gave DC Peter Stansfield an unenthusiastic smile.
‘Thanks, Pete, you’re a mate,’ he said. The younger detective had just been regaling him with the final results of the post-mortem on Rod Miller, and Barnard was puzzled. Apparently it confirmed that the trainer had not just been shot at close range but systematically beaten first, which in Barnard’s book could only mean that whoever had attacked him had wanted information. The shot to the head might have been retribution for some slight, imagined or otherwise. Broken ribs and cigarette burns said something very different. But as he wasn’t supposed to be on the case he would have to keep his thoughts to himself, at least for now. In the end, he suspected, they would have to turn to him for advice if not practical help. Of all the detectives in the West End, he was the one who had been born in the East End and lived and breathed there for most of his life, and the two areas of London were as different as chalk and cheese.
The DCI waved him into a chair, which Barnard reckoned was a good sign after his previous uncomfortable meeting.
‘Have you stumbled on anything that might help locate Ray Robertson?’ the DCI asked. ‘I know you’ve got the contacts.’
‘’Fraid not, guv,’ Barnard said. ‘The local CID came back to me to say there’s no sign of him at his house in Epping, though they’ll keep an eye on the place in case he turns up. And I called in at the Delilah as I was passing on my way in this morning, but he’s still not put in an appearance there.’
‘Right, well you can leave it to the murder team now,’ Jackson said. ‘I want you to concentrate on your home ground from now on. We’re getting more and more complaints about queers in certain pubs and there was another vicious attack on one of the street girls over the weekend. I want you to follow that up. Though I sometimes wonder why we bother when they all so obviously ask for trouble.’ Barnard drew a sharp breath at that but thought it wise not to disagree right now with his career seemingly on a knife edge.
‘Did you want me to have another go at Mrs Robertson?’ he asked.
‘I’ll send someone from the murder squad,’ he said. ‘Or maybe someone local in Whitechapel. We’re working closely with them on this one obviously.’
‘She hates the police with a passion, guv,’ Barnard said quietly. ‘She just might open up to me as she’s known me since I was a kid.’ Jackson hesitated for a moment, obviously calculating the costs and the benefits of this suggestion in the light of Scotland Yard’s clear antipathy to Barnard. Eventually he nodded.
‘Go down there this morning, and take DC Stansfield with you,’ he said, looking pleased to have found a means to cover his own back if not Barnard’s. ‘We want any ideas about where he might hide out. Does he ever go abroad? Has he even got a passport? I’ve put a call out to the ports and airports just in case he tries that on. Both of you report to me as soon as you get back, I want to know exactly what you get out of his mother. Then you can resume your normal duties in Soho.’ Barnard gritted his teeth and took another deep breath. If Jackson was covering his back so blatantly, things must be serious
and he probably needed to cover his own.
‘There’s one other thing you need to know, guv,’ Barnard said. ‘I went down to Canvey Island with my girlfriend this weekend. She’s a photographer and she’s taking some pictures down there for some sort of magazine article on the big flood in ’53. We got talking to a bloke in the pub who turned out to be an ex-copper who used to work in Southend. He’d read about Rod Miller and told us he’d interviewed him years ago after a series of armed robberies in Southend. Before the flood, this was. He reckoned Miller was the driver for a particularly vicious post office raid. They left the postmaster half-dead. Two men called Dexter and Barrett went down for that and some other attacks, but Miller had an alibi they couldn’t break and wasn’t charged. I reckon it might be worth having a chat with Southend CID.’
‘Leave that to me,’ Jackson said irritably. ‘I’ll put someone on to it. If Miller was involved in anything dodgy down there, it’s highly likely Robertson was as well. You let me know what Robertson’s mother has got to say for herself. And then get back on the streets. I don’t want another working girl murdered if there’s some nutcase out there carving women up. It gives us all a bad name.’
‘Guv,’ Barnard said and got to his feet, thinking that the DCI vastly overestimated how much the great British public cared about dead prostitutes. ‘I’ll go down to Ma Robertson’s straight away.’
‘And take Stansfield with you,’ Jackson said again. ‘Don’t forget.’
‘Sir,’ Barnard replied through gritted teeth, thinking that Stansfield would be about as much use talking to Ma Robertson as a vegetarian at Smithfield market. Ray’s mother would chew him up and spit him out if the fancy took her and he was afraid he himself might inadvertently be included in the feast.
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