Playing with Fire

by Patricia Hall

  She pulled away angrily but said nothing, wary of reigniting the club manager’s anger before they had got Donovan off his premises. She would settle with Jason Destry another time once she felt better. This evening had not gone well as far as she could tell, although she was not quite sure why. The drinks, she supposed, had been stronger than she was used to and she could not wait to get some sleep now. If she went to Destry’s party she would have to be more careful.

  TWELVE

  DS Harry Barnard had been about to leave the nick for home at about six when a message came from the control room that there had been a report of dead body discovered in a little used passageway linking streets not far from Oxford Street. Barnard knew he must have been there at some time since he had come to Soho, but he could recall little about it except that it seemed to be such a narrow backwater that it was often clogged with rubbish which the bin men ignored. He was not very keen to launch himself into another murder case but he thought perhaps he ought to show willing as he was not regarded as the most cooperative link in the chain by his bosses and the arrival of DI Watson seemed to have made his life even more difficult. He parked his car under the trees on Soho Square where the evening’s revellers had not yet arrived in numbers and walked down Carlisle Street to the alleyway, which so far boasted only one uniformed officer at the entrance, whose brief seemed to have been merely to keep passers-by away.

  ‘What have we got?’ Barnard asked the constable. ‘Another murder?’

  ‘Dunno, Sarge,’ the copper said. ‘They just told me to mind the shop until the big boys arrived. Are you one of them then?’

  ‘Not really,’ Barnard said. ‘I just picked up the shout at the nick and thought I’d better have a quick look as there was no one else around. This is my patch and it could be someone I know. I’ll take a look. You keep anyone else out until CID turn up in force.’

  He stood for a moment peering into near darkness, wishing he had brought his flashlight with him from his car.

  ‘Lend me a light, will you,’ he said over his shoulder, and the constable handed him a torch, which he directed at the ground as he began to walk slowly forward through heaps of accumulated garbage under a light scattering of dry leaves which must have blown in from the gardens in Soho Square. The alley took a right-angled turn and it was only when he went round the bend that he knew that whoever had called in a body had been right. The sudden, panicked scurrying of rodents and the smell only confirmed the worst. He took a deep breath and directed the beam on to the huddled bundle which lay right across the narrow footpath, though he had seen enough already to know that there was no way he should so much as lay a finger on it. It was obvious that not only was life extinct but it had been so for some time.

  In no time at all, he knew, the massed ranks of police and doctor and forensics officers would be arriving and it would be easiest if he himself were safely out of their way. But as he turned and made his way out of the narrow passageway again, handing the constable his torch back, one fear almost clotted the blood in his brain. He was sure that the body lying on the ground behind him, not tall, not heavy and mostly covered by some sort of blanket, was Evie, and if so she must have been thrown away in a dark corner like a discarded toy. It was possible that she had simply been unlucky with a punter who did not know when to stop. But given what had been happening over the last few weeks, it was much more likely that Evie had drawn the short straw in someone’s complicated criminal game. She was the warning to the other working girls that they should fall into line, do as they were told and pay their dues in the new Soho that was being established with ruthless and indecent haste.

  He walked slowly back towards Soho Square and took refuge in the public bar of a pub and ordered a pint. He drank it very slowly and then retraced his steps to the alley which was now surrounded with police cars and vans and crammed with officers almost falling over themselves in the confines of its high brick walls. DI Watson had arrived and glanced in his direction before he extricated himself from the melee with a scowl.

  ‘I heard you’d been here already,’ he said.

  ‘I was on my way home when the call came in and thought I’d better stop and have a look as no one else was around.’

  ‘Did you recognize anyone or anything?’

  ‘I borrowed the uniform’s flashlight but I couldn’t get an ID. It looks like a woman but I thought it could be a child. I didn’t want to touch. There wasn’t any doubt she was dead.’

  ‘You’d better get in there now and have a closer look if you think you might recognize her,’ Watson said begrudgingly.

  Barnard nodded, took a couple of deep breaths and worked his way into the scrum to where the police doctor was crouching close to the body. There was never any way you got used to this, he thought as he met the doctor’s eye when he glanced up at Barnard and pulled what appeared to be the tattered scraps of a blanket away from the battered remains of a face. Barnard nodded, made himself inspect what was revealed but then stepped quickly away before the nausea which seized him took over so quickly it prevented his saying anything at all coherent to DI Watson.

  ‘Evie Renton,’ he mumbled when he got back to the hovering DI. ‘One of the toms. She’s been working around here for years. One of her friends told me she was missing.’

  ‘You’d better go back to the nick and put everything you know about her down on paper,’ Watson said. ‘Chapter and verse.’

  ‘Guv,’ Barnard said, and it was not until he was walking slowly back to collect his car that he realized there were tears running down his face. ‘Hell and damnation,’ he said to himself. ‘Is there no end to this?’ But he knew there would not be an end any time soon. If there was one group of people in the West End who came even lower down the pecking order than homosexual men it was prostitutes, male and female. Watson would go through the motions but unless there was clear evidence that Soho had acquired its own Ripper – and Barnard was not quite sure how many deaths that might take to qualify – Evie’s death would be shunted to one side and her killer was very unlikely to be caught. There was an accepted hierarchy of victims and she was at the bottom of the heap.

  Barnard finally got back to his flat halfway through the evening, leaving his summary of all he knew about Evie Renton on DI Fred Watson’s desk. At least, he thought, someone from the local force would inform her mother about what had happened, but she would be left alone to tell Evie’s daughter. All he could do himself to keep the investigation alive he would do, but he had no high hopes of success in keeping the case active or of finding whoever had killed her.

  He was surprised to find his flat empty but he supposed that Kate was still playing nursemaid to Dave Donovan and he hoped that the musician would soon be on the train back to Liverpool. He was a distraction they could both do without, he thought. He poured himself a large Scotch followed by several more and eventually fell asleep in his chair.

  It was almost midnight when Jason Destry’s driver dropped Kate O’Donnell off at Barnard’s flat and she opened the front door as quietly as she could because she expected Harry to be in bed asleep. But once again he was still fully dressed and slumped in his revolving chair, just about awake and gazing at her with half-closed eyes and a bemused expression.

  ‘You’re late,’ he said, his voice thick, and she could not tell whether he was complaining or relieved.

  ‘I got a lift back in Jason Destry’s car,’ she said. ‘Kevin Dunne took me and Dave to the Late Supper Club because Dave thought his girlfriend might have gone there. Destry was there holding court. But Dave’s completely obsessed and made such a nuisance of himself that in the end we got thrown out. With a bit of luck he’ll be going back to Liverpool tomorrow and he’ll be out of my hair.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Barnard said with an intensity which startled Kate. She sat down heavily on the sofa. ‘I think I had a bit too much to drink,’ she said.

  ‘Not a good idea,’ Barnard said. ‘You need to keep your wits about you when yo
u’re dealing with these musicians. They’re into all sorts of dangerous stuff. You know that.’

  ‘You really were jealous, weren’t you?’ she asked in surprise.

  He shook his head irritably. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It’s just there’s a lot of pressure at work. There’s stuff going on that no one seems to have a clue about, like the attack in the Three Horseshoes you got caught up in. I was going to ask you something about that. The barman thought that the man who seemed to be in charge had an accent, not necessarily an English accent. Did you notice that?’

  ‘No,’ Kate said. ‘I was too terrified to notice anything very clearly, to be honest.’

  ‘And there’s been another killing,’ Barnard said quietly, wondering where he was going with this information.

  ‘Not the barman from the Three Horseshoes? I didn’t think he was badly hurt?’

  ‘No, not him. He’s all right. But the body of one of the street girls was found this evening dumped in a dark back alleyway.’ He hesitated for a moment and then shook his head with a sigh. Kate might have been brought up to believe in the value of confession but he knew that he had to stop well short of that.

  ‘I must get some sleep,’ he said.

  ‘Both of us,’ Kate said, picking up the whisky glass which was lying on its side by his chair.

  ‘One thing Jason Destry told me that will interest you,’ she said. ‘He saw the girl who fell from the window and thought her name was Jackie. Does that help?’

  ‘It might do, Barnard said, although there was not much enthusiasm in his voice. Kate looked at him critically, taking in the dark shadows under his eyes and the hands which were shaking slightly. He was, she thought, pretty much at the end of his tether and she was not exactly sure why, but she knew that she had to find out soon.

  When Kate woke the next morning Barnard was already up and dressed and eating breakfast in the kitchen. She followed him and fed bread into the toaster while she took a closer look at him. He did not look much more refreshed than he had the night before and she felt similarly hungover. She put her arm round his shoulders and gripped him tightly.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Nothing I can put my finger on,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been top of the pops with the DCI, but I seem to be getting more and more hassle, ever since I had that little disagreement with the Liverpool police. And suddenly I’ve got DI Watson brought in from the seaside with sand between his toes to breathe down my neck, questioning every move I make. And Jackson is still obsessed with Ray Robertson and convinced I must know where he is when I haven’t a clue. What’s more, I don’t even want to know. I’d be quite happy if I never saw Ray Robertson again in my life.’

  ‘There was a chap in the Late Supper Club last night who I’d seen before,’ Kate said. ‘He chatted me up one day when I was having lunch in the Blue Lagoon by myself. It was very busy and he claimed a seat at the table I was at, all very polite, bought me a coffee as it goes. But it didn’t feel quite right, la. He was a bit too intrusive and he ended up by asking what my boyfriend did for a living.’

  ‘Did you tell him?’ Barnard said sharply, suddenly interested.

  ‘No,’ Kate said. ‘It seemed a question too far. He reminded me of those secretive bastards who bullied us into protecting people who should have gone to jail.’

  ‘Did he speak to you again?’

  ‘No, he was talking to the manager for quite a long time and he knew I was there. I saw him looking in our direction but he didn’t say anything to us. And he left before Dave began making a nuisance of himself and it all got a bit agitated. Dave made the mistake of hitting the manager and the manager hit him back – hard, knocked him over and then threw us all out. All except Jason Destry. He was obviously too useful to the club to put out on the street.’

  ‘Is Dave going back to Liverpool today? He’s not safe on the streets down here.’

  ‘I’ll see if Tess and I can persuade him to go,’ Kate said. ‘But he’s not easy to persuade. And Jason invited us all to a party at his new house at the weekend. I thought that might be interesting if he will let me take some pictures. The boss would go for that and Jason’s so full of himself that he might agree. They try to avoid the little girls who chase after them but if it’s an article about their new car or their big new house they’ll go along with it.’

  ‘They’re all full of themselves, these rock and roll stars. They sneer at businessmen making lots of money but if they make it themselves prancing around a stage in a red velvet jacket then it’s all fine. They behave like the new royalty.’

  ‘They certainly get treated that way,’ Kate admitted. ‘But you won’t persuade the fans to hold back. Jason Destry’s just another dedicated follower of fashion like the Kinks and he’s beginning to sell records like them too. Not quite the Beatles but heading in that direction.’ Barnard pulled on his coat and clamped his hat to the back of his head.

  ‘So you think Donovan might be heading north today?’

  ‘I hope so,’ Kate said.

  ‘If you can get rid of him I’ll take you out for a meal tonight then,’ he said before he gave her a kiss and went out, looking, Kate thought, just as stressed as he had the night before.

  Barnard knew that the briefing on the latest murder would be difficult. And it threatened to be even more difficult when DCI Keith Jackson arrived soon after DI Fred Watson and just as Barnard himself was beginning to go through his summary of information on Evie Renton, which he had prepared for the DI the night before. This level of interest from senior officers surprised him. He had expected Evie’s death to be low priority given the level of violence which was stalking the streets of Soho and the clear threat of some sort of involvement by organized gangs of apparently unknown origin.

  ‘In your experience, who’s been running the girls?’ Watson asked. ‘Fill me in.’

  ‘It used to be mainly the Maltese,’ Barnard said. ‘The Robertsons concentrated on protection when they weren’t prancing about doing a bit of social climbing. But that came to an end when Georgie decided to try his hand at robbery and murder and Ray more or less retired as far as we can tell. But now we have this new outfit and I’ve not heard anyone with a satisfactory explanation as to where they’ve come from or who’s running them. What’s obvious is that they are very determined and very violent and seem to want to use protection to take a cut of pretty well every criminal and legitimate activity in the square mile.’

  ‘So how does prostitution fit into this?’ the DCI asked with his usual expression of puritanical distaste. ‘Didn’t all the girls already have pimps?’

  ‘Most of them,’ Barnard said. ‘But a few of them managed to organize themselves. They have to be careful or we’ll have them for running a brothel if they share premises, but Evie Renton had her own place. She seemed to attract a different type of client, older men mainly, and she kept out of the clutches of the men who occasionally tried to take over her life. She’s been in Soho longer than I have. I’ve always thought she knew how to look after herself.’

  ‘Right, well, what interests me is whether she’s another victim of the gang which is trying to set up a protection business again,’ Watson said. ‘Is the death of the tart a way of getting the rest of the girls to fall into line and pay their dues? You can follow those leads, Sergeant. Go to the post-mortem, and then talk to the toms and their pimps and find out if they’re being intimidated and who by, if anyone knows.’

  ‘Guv,’ Barnard said, almost overwhelmed by a feeling that this could only end badly.

  ‘And don’t rule Ray Robertson out, Barnard,’ the DCI added. ‘I’ve got the name of his lawyer out of the club manager so you can have a go at him too.’ He handed the sergeant a sheet of paper with the name of a legal firm and its address in Holborn written on it. ‘Don’t let him pull the wool over your eyes either. We need to interview Robertson and we’ll issue a warrant for him if we have to. Right?’

 
‘Right, sir,’ Barnard said, and made for his coat and hat. Interviewing Ray Robertson’s lawyer might be difficult but it was a walk in the park compared to attending Evie’s post-mortem which would come first. It was almost as if Watson knew that his relationship with Evie was closer than it ever should have been, although he could not imagine where he had gleaned that embarrassing information. He was not the only cop in central London who had his own arrangement to tax the local criminals in one way or another. He decided to leave his car parked close to the nick and walk to the hospital as much to clear his head as put off the inevitable. This post-mortem would be seriously unpleasant even if he had not known the victim as well as he did. It would take iron self-control to protect himself from letting the pathologist and his technicians see how vulnerable he was.

  Taking several deep breaths, he pushed open the swing doors which led him from the barren basement corridor to the mortuary and greeted the technicians who were already preparing the body. He turned away to take off his coat and turned back slowly to absorb the shock of seeing Evie’s naked body heavily smeared in dirt and bloodstains from what looked like several deep stab wounds around the neck and face. Barely able to draw breath himself, he could see that her death had not been quick or painless. It had been, he realized, merciless, and he was sure that was quite deliberate. It had been intended to be a very public and utterly ruthless statement to ensure compliance with the will of whoever was orchestrating the campaign of terror which was under way. He turned away from the table again with relief to greet the pathologist who had come into the room and was pulling on his gown and moving to the table to check his array of instruments.

  ‘Do we know who we’ve got here this time, Sergeant?’ the doctor asked.

  Barnard took up an observation point as far away from the table as he decently could without betraying himself. ‘A prostitute who made a mistake,’ he said through bone-dry lips. ‘It happens.’

  ‘Indeed,’ the doctor said. ‘Though strangulation is more common than a knife.’