Playing with Fire

by Patricia Hall

  But this time the news from the casualty doctor was encouraging and he waved Barnard into a cubicle where the barman Tony was sitting up against pillows with a bandage around his head wound and a nurse cleaning the more superficial cuts to his face and neck.

  ‘Police,’ he said, flashing his warrant card and pulling out his notebook. ‘DS Barnard. And you are?’

  ‘Tony Mason,’ the patient said, and from the tremor in his voice Barnard realized that he was not quite as unscathed by the assault as the doctor had implied. The physical effects might be relatively minor but the experience had unnerved the young man in other ways.

  ‘You got away lightly then?’ Barnard said, trying to reassure him. ‘That’s good. So do you feel up to giving me all the details on what happened there?’

  Mason nodded uncertainly. ‘They came in so suddenly, it was a quiet lunchtime, only a few people in,’ he said. ‘And it was all over after a couple of minutes. I hardly knew what was happening, it was so quick.’

  ‘Well, I’ve seen what they did to the bar,’ Barnard said. He took down his details and the details of the pub’s owner. ‘So if you just go over it for me, as far as you can remember. And what I’d especially like is anything you remember about what the attackers looked like.’

  ‘They had their faces hidden,’ Mason said. ‘They had scarves up to their eyes and a couple of them had hats pulled down.’

  ‘Yes, I understand that, but think about what you can remember about what they were wearing – coats and jackets, for instance. Or anything you could see of their hair or eyes. They couldn’t hide themselves completely, could they? So we have to rely on what you could see, what was still visible.’ But the description Mason offered was sketchy and no doubt they had intentionally dressed to make themselves look as anonymous as possible. They could have been any group of men out for lunch in Soho’s pubs and cafes until they chose to hide their faces.

  ‘And how many were there of them?’

  ‘Four, I think, or maybe five. They were moving around fast, chucking stuff about, and for some of the time I dodged down behind the bar. That annoyed them. That’s why one of them jumped over to get to me. I thought for a moment he was going to kill me.’ Mason started shaking more convulsively and the doctor began to look more concerned.

  ‘He’s had a nasty shock and lost quite a lot of blood,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should leave your questions till later.’

  ‘Are you going to keep him in?’ Barnard asked the doctor.

  ‘Overnight probably, to be on the safe side.’

  ‘OK, I’ll come in again in the morning to see if you can remember anything else when you’ve got over the shock,’ he said to Mason. ‘A decent night’s sleep might help. Is that all right?’ Mason nodded vaguely and closed his eyes as Barnard turned away with a feeling that he had probably got all he could realistically hope to get out of the injured barman today. And that it would be nowhere near enough for DI Watson.

  Barnard drove past Kate O’Donnell’s agency when he finished work in the hope that he was early enough to pick her up, but the offices were in darkness when he stopped outside and he had driven on into Camden Town, up the hill to Highgate and parked outside his flat in a frustrated frame of mind. To his surprise the flat was also in darkness and he had gone inside and poured himself a whisky before he remembered that this was the evening Dave Donovan was supposed to be arriving in London and he guessed that Kate had gone to Tess’s flat after work to talk to the musician from Liverpool about the inquiries she had made for him. Inquiries he had been talked into as well, he thought irritably. He hoped at least that she had got over the shock of the attack on the pub at lunchtime. Kate was nothing if not resilient, but she was also impulsive and he did not trust Dave Donovan to take care of her or even attempt to hide the fact that she was his girlfriend. As her ex he might well think he could gain some advantage by annoying or embarrassing Barnard.

  Barnard took another slug of the neat spirit and smiled wryly. He knew Kate would accuse him of being jealous at the arrival of her former boyfriend but he knew that was not really true. The root of the problem between them, if there was one, was his own difficulty with commitment, his reluctance to being pinned down, the conviction that there was always something, or someone, better round the next bend in the road. If he and Kate split up the fault would be his and his alone and he hoped that the arrival of Donovan would not be too obvious a reminder for her that there were other fish in the sea, although he reckoned this one would not prove very tempting after all that had passed between them.

  It was after ten when Kate finally got back to find Barnard asleep in his favourite spinning chair with an empty whisky bottle on the floor beside him. She was hot and tired after walking up the hill from the Underground station, thinking it would not be very tactful to call him and ask him to pick her up. She took her coat off and went into the kitchen to make a drink, but before long she felt rather than heard him behind her.

  ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ she asked, without turning round.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, dropping his empty glass into the sink. ‘I flaked out when I got in.’

  Kate turned towards him. ‘You look worn out,’ she said. ‘Sit down and I’ll make you something quick. Tess made spaghetti for me and Dave while we talked. He was a bit desperate when he heard that I hadn’t made any progress. We’re going to see Marie’s manager tomorrow lunchtime to see if he can get more out of him than I did.’

  ‘Right,’ Barnard said. He leaned against the breakfast bar feeling exhausted and fuddled from the neat spirit.

  ‘So what were you doing in the pub that got trashed? Who were the blokes you were with, for God’s sake?’ He tried to keep the irritation out of his voice but he knew he was failing miserably.

  ‘That was Kevin Dunne and another lad from Liverpool who wants to play with the Rainbirds. Dave asked me to try to contact Kevin. I told you about that. I arranged to meet them at lunchtime to ask him if he had run into Marie. Anyway, it was another dead end because he hadn’t seen anything of her. She seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. So it sounds as if we’ve both had a bad day. I couldn’t believe it when those men started smashing up the pub. Is the barman all right?’

  ‘They’ve kept him in hospital overnight but he’s not badly hurt,’ Barnard said. ‘You gave a statement about what happened?’

  ‘It didn’t seem very adequate,’ she said. ‘It all happened so fast and to be honest I was terrified. Kevin pushed me behind him, so I couldn’t see much …’

  Barnard put an arm round her, which was as close to an apology as he felt able to go. ‘That was good of him,’ he said.

  ‘What’s going on, Harry?’ she asked, anxiety gripping her again. ‘It’s like a war out there.’

  ‘It is a war out there,’ Barnard said. ‘And at the moment I don’t think we’re winning.’

  NINE

  Primed with aspirins and three cups of strong coffee before he left home, DS Barnard was first into the squad room the next morning, although only by a hair’s breadth. DI Fred Watson followed close behind him and immediately demanded to know where the night shift was hiding. Kate had watched Barnard get out of bed with eyes that were anxious and dull. Neither of them had the inclination or energy to talk and even when Barnard had walked slowly up the stairs at the nick and had hung up his coat he was even less inclined to answer Watson, although he knew he must.

  ‘They usually go to the canteen around about now for breakfast,’ Barnard said, wondering if it was ever any different in any nick among coppers who had been up all night.

  ‘Leaving the phones unmanned?’ Watson complained. ‘You go and get them back down here and I’ll listen out for the phones until the place is properly staffed.’

  ‘Guv,’ Barnard said, thinking that would give him the chance of taking another cup of coffee on board before he had to concentrate on the morning’s instructions. He found his colleagues halfway through their full
English breakfast and not best pleased to be summoned before they had finished. His own habit of taking a leisurely stroll around Soho before reporting for duty seemed to be on hold while Watson was around. Nothing was said but his preferences were made clear enough. Watson was in charge of the murder case and what he wanted from Barnard was obedience.

  ‘Fred Watson is not best pleased,’ he told them as he queued for his coffee. ‘He obviously thinks the DCI runs a sloppy ship – which is a joke – so I wouldn’t hang about if I were you. This latest attack on a pub wasn’t quite as violent as the one on the Grenadier but it wasn’t pretty.’ He added three heaped teaspoonfuls of sugar to the drink, which he reckoned had no right to be called coffee at all and stirred it hard before following his grumbling colleagues back downstairs. DCI Jackson seldom arrived before nine and was generally happy with a written report of the night’s events. DI Fred Watson was evidently built of even sterner stuff although quite why the south coast – was it Brighton or Hastings? Barnard wondered vaguely – should require a firmer hand than the West End of London he was too fuddled to work out in his hungover state.

  At least the scorn Watson poured on the heads of the hungry night shift distracted the DI from Barnard for a while and gradually the coffee worked its magic so that by the time Watson turned in Barnard’s direction the sergeant felt moderately able to face the working day. The sergeant was aware that he was being watched closely by some of his colleagues who would be happy enough to see him fall flat on his face. They glanced away as Watson turned back to Barnard.

  ‘Right, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘I want you to go back to the hospital and go over every word of the barman’s statement. They don’t discharge people early in the day as a rule, so you’ll catch him before he leaves when the doctor gets around to giving him the all clear. Then report back here. I’m going to check all the statements and see what similarities we’ve got between what happened at the two pubs. So far, we’re just assuming this is the same people. My guess is that it is, but it’s only a guess. I want to know how many people are involved and who should have some idea of who they might be and who they might be working for. And that includes your input. I want to know everything you know about your famous – or is it infamous? – square mile and then some. Understood?’

  ‘Understood, guv,’ Barnard said, putting his coat back on with some relief. He celebrated by taking the stairs two at a time to make his way back on to the busy shopping streets around Piccadilly Circus and then crossed Regent Street into the narrow lanes of Soho, which did not seem to have woken up yet. It was here he felt most at home, although even as early in the morning as this he felt a tension in the air which had not been there just a few weeks previously. Something he did not understand was going on and he found it slightly unnerving.

  As he expected, Tony Mason was still in the hospital ward where he had left him the previous night, fully dressed and with his bandage replaced by a large plaster which had reduced the dominance of the cut he had sustained from the broken glass and which had needed stitches. But he still looked pale and Barnard noticed that his hands were shaking. The shock of what had happened to him might take much longer to mend than the cuts and bruises, and he wondered if he would go back to his pub job at all.

  ‘You look as though you’re on your way home,’ Barnard said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be at work for a bit though. Our forensics people will still be rooting through the debris to see if they can pick up fingerprints or anything else which might identify these people.’

  ‘The bastard who grabbed me was wearing gloves,’ Mason said gloomily, confirming Barnard’s feeling that what was going on was threateningly professional. Someone out there had a plan and, so far, on what he thought of as his home turf, he had not a clue who it might be or where the plan was heading or who was in charge of it. The Robertson brothers had never made much of a secret of what they were up to in Soho, relying on the fact that the police would want to be very sure they had a cast-iron case against them while they were in their pomp, close to so many well-connected friends. The Maltese were secretive and maintained a cast-iron discipline on their operatives which the Met found difficult to break and the Italians found it hard to maintain that sort of discipline when many of them had only a sketchy hold on the English language. This latest violent campaign did not fit easily into any of the patterns he was used to. His attention turned back to the traumatized young man who had sat down on the edge of his bed as if he had difficulty standing for long.

  ‘Did you remember anything else in the middle of the night?’ Barnard asked Mason. ‘Anything unusual they were wearing? Anything unusual in the accents? Anything in the way they walked? It’s sometimes possible to pin people down through quite small things.’

  But Mason shook his head and instantly looked as if that was a step too far. ‘I told you, I dodged down below the bar and couldn’t see much. That annoyed the tall bloke. He probably wouldn’t have hurt me if I hadn’t done that. I suppose he must have been the leader. He behaved like the boss, telling them what to do. And maybe he did have an accent. He wasn’t a Londoner, not a Cockney …’

  ‘Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Northern English …?’

  ‘No, and not foreign either, but a bit different,’ Mason said uncertainly. ‘I might recognize the accent if I heard it again. Or the voice.’

  ‘Were you not worried after the trouble at the Grenadier?’ Barnard asked. ‘Did you not worry that they might come for you too?’

  ‘Not really,’ Mason said. ‘The boss thought they got hit because they were all shirt-lifters in there. He didn’t think anyone would bother us.’

  Barnard nodded, grim-faced. ‘I suppose people might think that,’ he said. ‘But there have been other incidents. Hadn’t you picked up on those?’

  ‘The landlord might have, I suppose. But I’d not heard about anything else. I don’t live round here.’

  ‘OK, we’ve got your details,’ Barnard said. ‘I’ll get someone to pop round to your place in a few days to see if you’ve managed to put your finger on anything more definite when the shock’s worn off a bit. We’ve got the customers who hung around to talk to as well, though not all of them did. I’m sure one of you will come up with something. What are you doing now?’

  ‘Waiting for the doctor to discharge me and then the landlord is coming in to run me home in his car. I don’t fancy going on the Tube looking like this.’

  ‘Well, we’ll be in touch again,’ Barnard said before turning away feeling even more deflated than he had been when he left home. His route back to the nick took him past Evie Renton’s house and he was surprised to see a couple of women he knew deep in conversation outside the door at a time at which most ladies of the night would be fast asleep.

  ‘You’re up early, girls,’ he said as he approached, but the smiles they usually offered back to a good-looking man, even at this untimely hour of the morning, were not forthcoming today.

  ‘Do you know where Evie is?’ the taller of them asked.

  ‘I saw her the other day,’ he said as a worm of concern grabbed him fiercely in the stomach. ‘Is she in trouble?’

  ‘We don’t know, do we?’ the second girl offered, and Barnard could see that whatever was worrying them was serious.

  ‘She’s not answering her door,’ the first girl said. ‘We arranged to go together to sign on with a doctor. There’s not many who will take us on. They reckon we put most of their patients off. But there’s a new woman doctor … Anyway, Evie’s not here and she promised to come with us.’

  The worm in Barnard’s stomach was rapidly turning into something much bigger and more vicious.

  ‘Do you want me to see if I can get inside? It’s not like her to take any risks, is it? If you’re reporting her missing I’d have a legitimate reason to look at her place.’ He did not need to spell out to these girls the risks the toms took every night.

  ‘Go and have a look,’ the tall girl said quietly. ‘There’s funny stuff going on. A
murder at the Grenadier and something else yesterday. The Italian cafe trashed. Everyone’s scared silly. And now Evie. It’s not like her to forget anything important. But I know she was worried about people coming round and demanding money.’

  ‘Did she pay?’ Barnard asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. She doesn’t like being bullied.’

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ Barnard said, though he knew his voice didn’t have the conviction that it should have had. ‘She may have gone to see her daughter. Maybe the kid’s ill. But I’ll have a look. Do you have a key or do you want me to force the door?’

  ‘The outside door’s open. We tried it, but her room’s locked.’

  ‘OK,’ Barnard said. ‘You wait here and I’ll see what I can do.’ He did not want the two women anywhere near the scene if Evie had come to any serious harm and that fear haunted him as he made his way up the stairs alone to her door on the first landing. There was, as the two women had said, no answer to a knock and the door was firmly closed and secured with a mortice key. Before he had time to have second thoughts, he put his shoulder hard to what turned out to be a flimsy lock and found himself looking into what still seemed to him like a familiar room, although it was years since he had spent any significant time here.

  The curtains were still closed and Evie’s belongings were strewn untidily about, but there was no sign of Evie herself. Angrily he pulled the curtains open to let more light in and began a search, although he had no idea what he was looking for, and he was on the point of giving up when he found it. Close to the unmade bed, beneath a sheet which was hanging low to the floor, smeared on the rug and pooled on the linoleum which surrounded it, was a small patch of blood. He stared at it for a long time, telling himself that she could have cut herself and gone to get help at the chemist, but found that impossible to believe. Evie had lived in Soho for years and had enough friends like the two who would by now be waiting impatiently outside the front door below not to have to go far for assistance. The toms tried to look after each other because they believed, quite rightly, that no one else would.