Death Trap

by Patricia Hall

  He watched as they drained their coffee.

  ‘Come,’ he said, standing up suddenly. ‘I’ll show you which way to go. You shouldn’t be around here at night just now. It’s not safe.’

  They followed him outside and glanced at each other.

  ‘I think we’ll go home,’ Tess said. ‘It was nice to meet you Mr Mackintosh, and I’ll keep an eye on Benjamin’s work.’

  ‘Where are you living? Are you sure of the way?’ Mackintosh persisted, still looking anxious.

  Kate told him the name of the road. ‘But we don’t think we’ll be there very long. The landlord seems to be trying to get the tenants out. It’s not very nice really.’

  ‘It goes on,’ Mackintosh said with a shrug. ‘The trouble is there’s not many landlords will take West Indian tenants. There’s a lot of pressure and landlords like Rachman cut corners to get people with fixed rents out.’

  ‘Maybe that’s who owns our house then,’ Kate said.

  ‘Peter Rachman’s dead,’ Mackintosh said. ‘His empire seems to have been split up. A man called Lazlo Roman’s bought some of them and is doing them up but I’ve not heard any complaints about him as a landlord. He came to a meeting we set up here a while ago. Didn’t say much but listened, seemed to know what we were talking about. If your skin’s the colour of mine doing up the houses is a very good thing. Otherwise a lot of us would be sleeping under the railway arches, believe me. No one else will have us.’

  FOUR

  DS Harry Barnard had wasted the best part of half an hour that Saturday morning trying to get a response from the communal phone in Kate O’Donnell’s house and was growing increasingly frustrated. He knew she and her friends lived on the top floor and the phone was by the front door, but he found it hard to believe that no one in the four-storey building was awake enough at ten on a Saturday morning to hear the phone ringing. They couldn’t all be that hung over, he thought irritably, and found that wondering what Kate might have been doing the previous evening to keep her in bed so late made him even more angry.

  He swung round in his swivel armchair before picking up the phone for the third time and after five more fruitless minutes of ringing at the other end crashing the receiver down again. For another half hour he mooched around his flat, taking none of his normal satisfaction in his carefully chosen possessions, the Scandinavian furniture, the bright rugs and the modern glassware on the windowsills. The only thing to do, he thought, was to drive over to Notting Hill to call on her in person, though he doubted that he would be very welcome if he found her bleary eyed in her dressing gown in the middle of the day. Why was he doing this, he asked himself as he gunned the Capri across the Heath, through Hampstead village and down Fitzjohn’s Avenue towards the Finchley Road and then braked hard behind a white Mini which was pootling across the busy junction at Swiss Cottage. They shouldn’t allow underpowered little tin cans like that on the road, he thought as he overtook it and turned into a narrow road lined with parked cars which would begin the twisting traverse of north London which would eventually lead him to Westbourne Grove and Notting Hill.

  But he knew his irritation was more to do with his apparent inability to impress this infuriating and obstinate little photographer from the north with the nasal accent which he occasionally failed completely to understand. She was argumentative, naïve, and clearly disapproved of his morals and his lifestyle, yet every time he came face to face with those clear blue eyes under the dark unruly curls his heart rate quickened and he sought an excuse to see her again.

  This time, though, the news he had picked up from the early edition of the Evening Standard when he had slipped out to the newsagents for a morning paper had blown up the anxiety he already felt for Kate into a genuine fear, and his inability to contact her only fanned the flames. He had not seriously believed that the body of a young woman the smudged print of the Standard’s Stop Press said had been found that morning just off the Portobello Road was Kate’s, but he had been sufficiently alarmed to ring Notting Hill nick to check. Eddie Lamb, on the point of going out to the murder scene, had been dismissive. As he heard it, he had said, the dead girl was a bottle blonde tom who had struck unlucky. The killer was no doubt one of the hundreds of young West Indians only too willing to make use of her services. The worry at Notting Hill nick this morning was that the death would spark off new unrest amongst the hard core of white youth who regarded any contact between white girls and black men as a mortal insult even now the riots were supposed to be a distant memory and community harmony fully restored.

  ‘Uniform have called extra people in. They’re on full alert,’ Lamb had said. ‘It could get nasty. Must go, Harry. Silly cow’s really mucked up the weekend, hasn’t she? But I’ll do my best to see you as planned. If I’m not there by quarter to, go in without me. You’ve got your ticket.’

  Barnard drove as quickly as he dared, taking the long east-west roads that led to Maida Vale and finally, over the Harrow Road, to Notting Hill. He parked the red Capri outside Kate’s house and gazed up at the crumbling stucco to the small top-floor windows. There was no indication that there was anyone at home, but he ran up the steps to the front door anyway and pushed the bell with Marie and Tess’s name on it. To his surprise Marie opened the door quite quickly.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, peering at him suspiciously. ‘I thought Kate must have gone out without her key.’

  ‘She’s out then?’ Barnard asked, his anxiety returning.

  ‘She went out quite early,’ Marie said, and Barnard was aware of the slight hostility in her voice. ‘She had some message to run for the old girl in the basement. Something at Portobello Road market.’

  ‘But she’s OK?’ Barnard knew he was giving away more than he intended but could not avoid the question.

  ‘She’s fine,’ Marie said. ‘Why shouldn’t she be? But we’re not very happy with the bizzies round here, as it happens. They won’t do anything to help us with the men who keep coming round and threatening people. They’ve finally driven our neighbours out. They went yesterday after he got beaten up on his way home. But the bizzies here don’t want to know, do they? Isn’t terrifying innocent people a crime in London? I expect it will be us next. Fancy Smith in Z Cars would sort it in two minutes, la.’

  ‘Tell Kate to let me know if anyone threatens you,’ Barnard said shortly, refusing to rise to the taunt. If people were stupid enough to believe in TV coppers, and especially Merseyside TV coppers, he thought, they deserved all they got. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  He went back to his car and slammed the driver’s door before lighting a cigarette and switching on the radio. He would, he decided, sit here until the elusive Kate O’Donnell came home.

  Kate herself had been as good as her word that Saturday morning. She set out before ten, leaving her flatmates to walk up to Macfisheries at Notting Hill Gate later for some groceries for the weekend, and retraced the route she and Tess had taken the previous night. She found Portobello Road transformed in daylight. The houses, painted in multicolours and mostly slightly shabby and faded, were not as substantial as those to the north in Notting Hill proper, and jostled for space along a road which curved unexpectedly in an area of mainly austere grids and crescents. Pubs with strange names, the Sun in Splendour and the Portobello Gold, hinted at a history which she could only guess at. And this morning market stalls lined each side of the road, laden with all sorts of second hand goods from pots and pans to antique silver, old suitcases to traditional blue and white china and everything in between. Collectors of just about anything, from old clothes to coins and postage stamps, crowded shoulder to shoulder round most of the displays and she almost despaired of being able to find the woman Cecily Beauchamp had asked her to contact. She pushed her way slowly through the crowds almost to the far end of the stalls and eventually glimpsed the name Chamberlain on the front of the stall through the ranks of browsing customers examining the silver items laid out on a white cloth.

  She wri
ggled to the front and caught the eye of the middle-aged woman swaddled in layers of woollies as if expecting a blizzard who was keeping a wary eye on her potential customers.

  ‘Mrs Chamberlain?’ Kate asked.

  The woman nodded, not taking her gaze off the hands which deftly reached out here and there amongst the merchandise. ‘Who wants to know, dear?’ she asked.

  ‘Mrs Beauchamp asked me to give you this.’ Kate handed over the sealed envelope which Cecily Beauchamp had given her when she had called at the flat earlier. The antique dealer picked up a silver paper knife from amongst her stock and slit the letter open, her eyes still flicking suspiciously over the wandering hands of her customers.

  ‘Tell her I’ll call this evening,’ she said when she had read it. ‘This is my busiest day. I won’t finish till six and then I have to pack up. Eight o’clock maybe, tell her.’

  ‘Fine,’ Kate said. ‘I’ll tell her that.’ She began to make her way slowly back home along the length of the market, taking photographs of the ever-shifting scene as she went, until she happened to glance down one of the side turnings heading west towards Ladbroke Grove and was surprised to see it blocked off by police cars and officers who seemed to be clustered around the sunken front area of one of the houses. Curious, she turned into the street and joined a cluster of people who were standing watching the police operations from a distance.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked a harassed-looking woman with a couple of shopping bags at her feet.

  ‘Someone’s dead,’ she muttered, glancing sideways at Kate. ‘Found some girl down by the dustbins. Some little slag, I daresay. They come down here messing about with the black men. Don’t seem to care if they’re black or white, as it goes. They’ve only themselves to blame if they come to grief. They should be ashamed of themselves. And now I can’t get back home because the Old Bill are blocking the road. I’ll have to walk right back up to Ladbroke Grove and then back down the other way.’

  ‘You mean it’s a murder?’ Kate asked, pulling her camera out again with a sense of excitement. Pictures of a murder scene she was sure would go down well with Ken Fellows, her boss, who would sell them on to one of the papers. She was going to have quite a haul of interesting pictures and ideas to offer him on Monday morning, she thought. She eased her way to the front of the small crowd so as to see round the dark van which was parked amongst several marked police vehicles and spotted DS Eddie Lamb amongst the officers just climbing up the steps from the area. She started snapping busily as a uniformed officer waved the van to move closer and two men with a stretcher emerged and went down the basement steps. She kept her camera by her side as she waited for them to reappear, afraid that the officers might object to what she was doing, but no one even glanced in direction, most of them beginning to move back to their cars without much urgency. Eventually the stretcher bearers manoeuvred their burden awkwardly back up the steps, laden now with a blanket-covered shape which Kate realised with a sick feeling could only be a shockingly small human body, and slid it into the van.

  The crowd let out a faint collective sigh and fidgeted slightly as a couple of uniformed officers began to take down the barrier which blocked the street, the vehicles began to move away and the waiting pedestrians were allowed through. Kate made her way slowly to the now empty basement area, glanced around and took a couple of shots of the narrow leaf and litter strewn space, and of the shabby house above it. It was, she thought, a miserable place to die.

  She turned away slowly and stowed her camera back in her bag. What she had just witnessed had taken the edge off the bright morning she had begun to enjoy. She turned back to the main road and began to weave her way between the market customers again in the direction of home. She was suddenly aware that the crowds had begun to change their complexion. On almost every street corner groups of young white men had begun to gather, and they were being watched, she realised, by an unusual number of uniformed policemen, patrolling up and down the road and in amongst the market crowds.

  She made her way back until she came to the side street down which Nelson Mackintosh had led her and Tess the night before to his cafe. Just steps from the market the streets became much quieter and there seemed to be little activity close to the cafe. Perhaps it did not open in the morning. But then she realised how odd that seemed when there were so many potential customers about, and walked a little way down the street until she could see the closed notice on the door. Only then could she see a uniformed police officer standing in the recessed doorway. Intrigued, she strolled closer and confronted him.

  ‘Isn’t the cafe open?’ she asked innocently. ‘I was looking for a cup of coffee.’

  The policeman, a tall, thin, lugubrious man with his helmet pulled unusually far down over his eyes and a rather damp, pink nose, sniffed massively. ‘Closed for the duration, miss,’ he said, with a smirk. ‘Proprietor unavoidably detained.’

  ‘I was in there last night,’ Kate protested. ‘He was there then.’

  ‘Well, he’s not there now,’ the constable said, more sharply. ‘And not likely to be for some time, from what I hear. So I should run along, if I were you, miss. There’s a murder inquiry on.’

  ‘And Nelson Mackintosh is involved?’ Kate said sharply.

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said. ‘And what’s it to you anyway? This isn’t the sort of cafe a nice girl like you should be patronising, is it? A West Indian joint? What sort of a name is that – Poor Man’s Corner?’

  ‘It’s a place in Jamaica,’ Kate snapped and then wished she had not.

  The policeman stared at her and sniffed again, his face even more unfriendly. ‘Don’t you know a lot about it?’ he asked. ‘Maybe you’d like to come down to the nick and help the police with their inquiries too, would you?’

  Kate shook her head angrily. ‘Of course not,’ she said. She turned away, her face flaming, and when she had gone fifty yards up the street turned back to take a photograph of the cafe as much out of bravado as anything else. The policeman had retreated back into the doorway by now and had become invisible again, but a group of young West Indian boys had congregated on the opposite pavement, chattering with what looked from a distance like anger. What on earth, she wondered, had happened to Nelson Mackintosh, and what effect would his abrupt disappearance have on the neighbourhood. Surely she and Tess could not have been so gullible that they had fallen for the self-serving deceit of a murder suspect.

  Feeling slightly weary, she set off back home but as soon as she turned into her street and saw the red car parked outside the house she realised that here was another complication that she was not sure how to handle. Harry Barnard stepped out of the car and came down the road to meet her, a cigarette in one hand and a crumpled copy of the Evening Standard in the other.

  ‘Morning,’ he said, slightly brusquely. ‘I was down this way and decided to see how you were getting on with your house hunting. I thought maybe you’d like a chauffeur for a morning instead of grinding round London on the tube. I’m going to the Chelsea match this afternoon but I’ve got a couple of hours to spare.’

  Kate hesitated and then smiled ruefully. ‘It’s a nice idea,’ she said. ‘But Tess and Maria have decided that they want to move too so we’re looking for somewhere for all three of us. We need to go together and Marie’s working today so it’s not a good day. Sorry.’

  ‘You were out so early that I thought you must be looking at a flat already,’ Barnard said, and Kate realised that he must have been sitting outside the house for some time.

  ‘No, I had a message to do for the old lady in the basement,’ Kate said, wondering why she felt she had to explain herself to this importunate policeman to whom she had never given the slightest encouragement. ‘Did you know there was a murder off the Portobello Road this morning?’ she rushed on. ‘I think maybe you’re right, this isn’t a very nice area. And our neighbours moved out yesterday, the ones who had the bully boys at their door. Geoff got beaten up on the way home from w
ork, so they decided they had to go. The other girls are frightened it might be us next. I’m not even supposed to be in the flat, am I? I’m just a lodger.’ Kate stopped, feeling breathless. She had clamped down the fear she had felt since they had faced the menacing Alsatian with its stuttering owner on the landing, and now it all seemed to come spilling out and she guessed Barnard could see it written all over her face.

  ‘Hey, calm down,’ Barnard said, startled.

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ Kate said, taking a deep breath.

  Barnard put a tentative hand on her arm and his most expansive smile on his face. ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said. ‘The pubs won’t be open yet but there’s a coffee bar up by the tube station. I’ll treat you to the stickiest cake you can find and the frothiest coffee. Come on, get in the car.’ Kate shrugged and did as he asked. She felt so confused by her experiences the previous night and that morning that she could not find any words to argue with Barnard. And she desperately needed a coffee. She would have to report back to Mrs Beauchamp soon, but that could wait for as long as it took to have a drink and see what she could learn from Harry Barnard about the murder and the apparent arrest of Nelson Mackintosh.

  He parked just round the corner from the tube station and they took a table close to the counter in the sergeant’s chosen coffee bar, and he ordered coffee but no cakes.

  ‘I’m not hungry, la,’ Kate had said dismissively, angry with herself now for succumbing to his blandishments. She sipped her drink slowly for a moment and then offered him a slightly wan smile. ‘I didn’t imagine staying with my friends for a while would lead to all this stuff,’ she said. ‘People getting driven out of their flats, girls getting murdered just down the road. It’s as bad as Soho . . .’

  ‘Not quite,’ Barnard said with a grin. ‘But the chances are she was a prostitute. There are plenty round here too, and there’ve been a few girls attacked recently. It’s a risk they run.’