Playing with Fire

Home > Other > Playing with Fire > Page 7
Playing with Fire Page 7

by Patricia Hall


  ‘I thought I should follow up the death at the Late Supper Club,’ he suggested, but it was obvious that Watson was not interested.

  ‘There’s no evidence that was anything more than an accident,’ he said. ‘Until we get an ID there’s nothing much we can do. Concentrate on whoever is trying to take over the rackets on the streets again. If they’re as ruthless as they seem to be we’ll have a war on our hands before the week’s out. The Maltese had a deal with the Robertsons and that kept the peace for a long while, according to DCI Jackson. I’ve no doubt you knew even more about that than he does. But with Ray Robertson apparently retired now, or at least lying very low, anything could happen. Someone will try to fill the gap. They probably already are.’

  But by the middle of the afternoon Barnard was tired and frustrated and, finding himself passing his old friend Evie’s front door, which was still firmly closed this early in the working day, he banged sharply on it. She opened the door a crack, wearing jeans and a loose sweater, her make-up not yet completed.

  ‘Flash,’ she said with a genuine smile. ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘How’s it going, honey?’ he asked, aware that undressed, as it were, she looked more unwell than she should have done. The circles under her eyes were darker than he remembered them and her face thinner, and the cigarette she held trembled between her fingers.

  ‘A cup of tea?’ she asked, holding the door open for him. ‘Or something stronger?’

  ‘Tea will do fine,’ he said. ‘Are you OK? You don’t really look it.’

  ‘Not too bad,’ she said, but her words carried little conviction.

  He followed her up the stairs to her room and threw himself into the armchair by the window.

  She picked up a bottle of Scotch and waved it in his direction. ‘You sure you won’t?’

  Barnard shook his head but Evie poured herself a generous slug, which worried him even more, although he knew questions were obviously not going to be very welcome. He would have to tread almost as carefully here as he was having to do on the street, and quite likely for the same reason.

  ‘Do you remember DI Fred Watson?’ he asked. ‘Went to the south coast for a while but he’s back and I’m on a case with him. And I’m not his favourite person anyway, without breathing alcohol on him in the middle of the day.’

  ‘I do remember him,’ Evie said. ‘Made a speciality of rounding up as many toms as you could fit in the cells and keeping us there all night. Lovely man. So what are you doing with him?’

  ‘The barman from the queer pub got beaten up along with his bar and he’s not regained consciousness yet. Len Stevenson. You know him?’

  Evie nodded and turned away with a shudder to brew tea and pour him a mug which he sipped slowly as he watched her dress, appreciative but without any sense of temptation. He was, to his own surprise, a changed man, in some respects at least.

  ‘What’s going on, Evie?’ he asked quietly. ‘Everyone’s clammed up. No one’s saying a word. I’ve never known anything like this.’

  She sat down at her mirror and began to paint her face carefully. ‘I know what you mean but I don’t know what’s causing it – or who. People have stopped talking to each other. People are scared but I’m not sure who of. I’m surprised someone hasn’t passed something on to you. That’s unusual, isn’t it? I always thought you had your finger on the pulse one way or another. There wasn’t much that escaped your notice.’

  Barnard drained his tea and sighed. ‘I must be losing my touch,’ he said. ‘Or …’ He hesitated. ‘There are a lot of new faces around, new businesses starting up, new traders on the streets.’

  ‘I heard about the kid who fell out of the window at that posh new club – what’s it called?’

  ‘The Late Supper Club,’ Barnard said. He glanced at his watch. ‘I must follow that up as well as the attack on the barman.’

  ‘That sounded awful,’ Evie said. ‘Was she really just a teenager?’

  ‘’Fraid so,’ he said. ‘And we haven’t even managed to identify her yet.’

  Evie shuddered. ‘She must have parents somewhere worried sick if she’s not come home. If my kid got into that sort of trouble …’

  ‘She’s OK, isn’t she?’ Barnard asked quickly. ‘I thought you said she was being well looked after.’ Perhaps problems with the child, who must be almost a teenager herself by now, was why Evie looked less radiant than she used to. The make-up helped but when he had first known her she barely needed it.

  ‘She is, she is,’ Evie said quickly. ‘She’s still with my mother and doing well at school. She’ll be fine.’

  ‘How old is she now?’

  ‘Nearly eleven.’

  ‘Not taking herself off to nightclubs then,’ Barnard said. ‘But a hostage to fortune?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Evie said quietly.

  ‘I’ll find out who took that kid to the Late Supper Club,’ Barnard said. ‘I promise.’

  But it was almost the end of the day before the sergeant could find time to try to fulfil that promise. The club’s door was locked when he tried it and he had to knock repeatedly before he heard someone thumping heavily down the stairs and opening several bolts and a key before pulling the door slightly open and squinting through the narrow aperture he was holding firm.

  ‘We don’t open until nine,’ a voice said.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Barnard, and you open when I tell you to,’ Barnard said in a tone which did not leave any room for argument. The door eventually inched open but so slowly that Barnard lost patience and pushed so hard that the skinny young man in slightly grubby chef’s whites stumbled backwards and almost fell.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Keep your hair on.’

  ‘Has Mr Mercer put you here to keep the police out?’ Barnard snapped. ‘That’s a dangerous thing for a licensee to do, isn’t it? Is he here?’

  ‘He’s gone out,’ the boy muttered. ‘Told me not to let anyone in. I’m supposed to be prepping stuff in the kitchen. One of us does an early shift every night.’

  ‘Well, I’ll wait for him and in the meantime you and I can have a bit of a chat, all right? I’m sure you can catch up with your prepping later.’

  ‘He won’t like that,’ the boy said, looking even more anxious than when he had opened the door.

  ‘Well, he’ll have to put up with it,’ Barnard said. ‘A young girl died here two nights ago and I’ve yet to hear a satisfactory explanation as to how that happened. So we can have a chat here or you can come down to the police station with me and we’ll have it there, but one way or another it will happen, and so will a lot more questions and answers with a lot more of your colleagues and your boss and as many of your clients as I can track down. I want to know who that kid was and how she died. So what’s it to be?’

  ‘Stay here,’ he said, looking sulky.

  ‘Right, we’ll go upstairs where it’s a bit more comfortable, shall we? Lock the front door again if that’s how the boss likes it.’

  When the front entrance was securely locked Barnard followed the youth upstairs and they sat opposite each other at one of the round tables close to the bar, Barnard with his notebook out and the youth with his hands buried underneath his apron. He twisted his fingers together as he seemed to take on board what he had committed himself to.

  ‘Right, let’s start with your name and address and job.’

  ‘Stephen Bright, and I live at home with my mother in Croydon – though quite often I stay over here if we’re running very late, sleep in the kitchen …’

  Barnard raised a mental eyebrow at that but didn’t pursue it. It could stay in the closet for now for use later if it was needed, he thought. Stephen Bright was obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

  ‘And how long have you worked here?’ he asked.

  ‘Since it opened, but I worked for Mr Mercer before, when he was a manager at Newbury Racecourse. He asked me to come with him.’

  ‘Quite a compliment, wasn’t it? You don�
��t look old enough.’

  ‘I met him when I did my National Service, back a bit now. I was in the Army Catering Corps, in a squad which looked after the officers’ mess at Lincoln. Mr Mercer was an officer there. He was a good bloke and I heard he’d gone to Newbury and I looked him up when I got out. I knew he had a lot of horsey friends. I saw him going off hunting once. Anyway, I’ve worked for him ever since.’

  ‘Right, but I suppose you spend most of your time in the kitchen, so how much do you know about what goes on up here?’ He glanced around the bar and the tables already set for dinner. ‘Do you know who comes and goes? How people carry on? Mr Mercer says he has built up quite an exclusive clientele in quite a short time. Do you get to see any of them?’

  ‘Hear about them, at least,’ Stephen said with a look of animation in his eyes. ‘The waiters are in and out of here all night. They’re busy but we get the best bits relayed – the amount of champagne they’ve drunk, the night a drummer knocked back a whole bottle of Scotch, or the ones who are on drugs. Sometimes I’m up here myself if they’re very busy. I might have to push the pudding trolley round and get an eyeful more than I should if I’m lucky.’

  ‘And are many of them on drugs?’ Barnard asked.

  The young man twisted his hands together even more frantically under the apron, knowing he had said too much. ‘Well, I wouldn’t really know but the word in the kitchen is that some are.’

  ‘Any names?’

  ‘No, no, I couldn’t tell you. It’s just gossip,’

  ‘And any gossip about who brings the stuff in?’

  ‘No, no, I’ve no idea,’ Stephen said, looking several shades paler than he had when Barnard had started his questioning.

  The sergeant guessed he had hit the wall between what the kitchen worker regarded as innocuous ‘gossip’ and what he knew was deadly dangerous in all sorts of ways. Rather more slowly than Barnard had expected, Bright seemed to understand now that he had perhaps said more than his employer would approve of.

  ‘So going back to the night the girl fell,’ Barnard resumed. ‘Mr Mercer had been telling me about his famous clients but when it came to the lists of people who he said were here that night there didn’t seem to be anyone very well known on them at all. I’d expected at least John Lennon and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull but it all looked very tame.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s not always like that, not every night. I think he likes to advertise his celebrities but they’re not here all the time,’ he said. ‘Not every night.’

  ‘You mean your boss tells a few tall tales, or people like that don’t come here at all? He makes it up?’

  ‘Some come, sometimes,’ Bright muttered.

  ‘And the night before last? Was anyone interesting here that night?’

  ‘Someone told me Jason Destry of the Rainmen was here but I didn’t see him,’ Bright said.

  ‘And he’s not on any of Mr Mercer’s lists,’ Barnard said thoughtfully. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?’

  ‘I expect they have to sign in just like anyone else, even if they come in the back way. But if they do that they can stay pretty much out of sight round the back or even go upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘There’s a private room upstairs,’ Bright said reluctantly.

  ‘And that’s where the young girl fell from, the top window?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Well, I’ll check up on that with your boss,’ Barnard said. ‘So let’s get on to what you know about people using drugs in here.’

  ‘Who said that?’ Bright asked, obviously annoyed and deciding rather late in the day to be more cautious. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘It was pretty obvious when I came here the other night that a fair number of people had been using marijuana,’ Barnard said. ‘You could still smell it long after people had gone home. And I’m told the girl who died had taken something, though the laboratories haven’t sorted out exactly what yet. Some things they don’t even have tests for. You said the waiters told you people were using drugs, but did they tell you who was using, and what they were using?’

  ‘Not names, no,’ Bright said quickly, obviously very clear now that he had got himself in far deeper than he intended.

  ‘Did you use them?’

  ‘Course not. I’d lose my job.’

  ‘But you knew they were around, on the premises?’

  Bright nodded reluctantly.

  ‘And did you know who was supplying them?’

  ‘Course not,’ Bright said again. ‘Look, I’ve got stuff to get on with in the kitchen. I’ll be in trouble if everything’s not prepped when the chef comes in. You need to be asking Mr Mercer these things, not me. None of it’s anything to do with me.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Barnard said. ‘I’ll hang on here for Mr Mercer if you’re expecting him soon.’

  ‘You won’t tell him I’ve been talking to you, will you?’ Bright asked, wringing his hands again in his apron. The full implications of what he had told Barnard seemed to have penetrated at last.

  ‘Course not,’ Harry Barnard said blandly. ‘Why would I?’

  SEVEN

  Kate caught up with Dave Donovan when she got back to Barnard’s flat that evening. She guessed he was sitting very close to the phone – it was picked up so quickly – and she could hear the tension in his voice even over a crackly long-distance line.

  ‘Have you found her?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Kate said. ‘Though I have talked to Jack Mansfield, her manager. He says Marie turned up there and made a tape for him and decided on a stage name. Ellie Fox.’

  ‘Sounds awful,’ Dave said angrily. ‘What’s wrong with her own name?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Kate said. ‘I think people often use different names for singing and acting. Look at Ringo Starr. Anyway, that’s not all he said. He said he would offer the reel to some record labels and she should come back to see him. But she didn’t turn up, and the record labels didn’t want to take her on anyway, so he’s more or less washed his hands of her. So we don’t know where she is or what she’s doing. I’m sorry, Dave, but London’s a big place and there are an awful lot of Western Roads.’

  ‘She can’t just vanish,’ Dave said.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ Kate said quickly. ‘The other thing I’ve done is leave a message with the Rainbirds’ manager’s agency for Kevin Dunne but I’ve no idea if he’ll get back to me. He won’t recognize my name so he may not phone me back.’ There was silence at the other end of the line, a faint, empty crackle was all that could be detected across the miles which separated them, and Kate was not surprised when Dave’s choked response came back.

  ‘I’ll come down there,’ he said. ‘I need to be doing something myself. I can’t leave it all to you.’

  ‘I don’t know how that will help,’ Kate said doubtfully. ‘The best bet is if Kevin Dunne contacts me. Let’s see if he knows where the Scousers get together. You can bet your life there’ll be a pub somewhere that’s a little Liverpool Pier Head. And I’ve asked my boyfriend to try to identify the phone number as people at the address in Wimbledon had never heard of her, and they had lived there for years. It wasn’t their number. We went round to check it out. They didn’t even have a phone.’

  ‘We?’ Donovan asked, his voice full of suspicion again. ‘That’s you and your bizzy?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Kate murmured. She could hear that there was still bitterness in Dave’s voice even though the water which had flowed under that bridge would have kept the Mersey in spate for years and Marie was now allegedly the new love of his life, which was more than fine with her.

  ‘I’ll come down,’ he said again. ‘I’ve got to come down.’

  ‘Can you afford it?’ she asked.

  ‘I guess I can manage the train fare but somewhere to stay will be more difficult. I remember when I came down with the band, we slept on blow-up mattresses on the floor in the rehearsal rooms m
ost of the time. Do you remember the pictures you took for us, sitting on a fire escape?’

  Kate hesitated. She remembered very clearly Dave Donovan’s dispiriting attempt to break into the big time himself and his ignominious return home. She did not want Dave Donovan back in her life but she had known him since school and she had to believe he was desperate to find out where his girlfriend had gone.

  ‘I might be able to fix you up at Tess’s place,’ she said. ‘For a few days at any rate. But I’ll have to talk to her about it first.’

  ‘I thought you were sharing with Tess,’ he said sharply. ‘That’s what your ma thinks, anyway.’

  ‘And let’s leave it that way,’ Kate said equally sharply. ‘Call me back later this evening when I’ve spoken to Tess to see if she’ll put up with you for a bit. Though I don’t hold out high hopes. My boyfriend thinks you’re on a hiding to nothing if she doesn’t want to be found and he knows about these things.’

  ‘I suppose he would, being a bizzy?’

  ‘And he’s a Londoner born and bred,’ she said. ‘He should be able to help.’ Although she wondered how willing Harry would be to get involved with anyone from Liverpool after his recent experiences there.

 

‹ Prev