Murder in Waiting (Augustus Maltravers Mystery Book 5)

by Robert Richardson

  “Someone called Tom Wilkie said you knew Barry Kershaw. You might not recall him, but he was a Fleet Street news editor in those days and still remembers just about everything and everybody.”

  “Well, I don’t remember him. But there were so many journalists and general hangers on … God, it’s so long ago now. All right, let’s see how we go. I’ll start by telling you something about myself.”

  White fluted china cup and saucer were gently replaced on the table and a minute crumb of truffle brushed off the skirt, then Louella leaned against the arm of the chair, hands clasped together. “I was a student at the Royal College of Art in the early Sixties. Fashion was all the rage and I was attracted to it. I was never going to be a star, but I could take anything the designers came up with and perfect it. I began picking up freelance work, which was marvellous when you were starving on a grant, and was eventually offered a job which was so good that I left college without completing the course. My boss was Hilly Janes — totally forgotten now, but she really was one of the greats — who made exclusive outfits for virtually all the pop stars of those days. I became part of the scene, and that’s how I met Barry Kershaw.”

  Mentioning the name again appeared to trigger recollections. A flash of distaste crossed Louella’s face before she continued.

  “He was a very interesting man in his way. He came from nothing — his father was a docker in Wapping when it was still an East End slum, not part of yuppieland like today — but he had an amazing capacity for work and a genius for seeing what or who was going to be the next temporary sensation. He was also very, very nasty. He knew exactly how to manipulate people, discovering their weaknesses and exploiting them ruthlessly.”

  “When you say nasty, how exactly do you mean?” Maltravers asked.

  “He was … ” She rubbed her hands together as though trying to remove something from them. “For a start, he was a sadist and I mean that literally. I never had first-hand experience of his sex life, but there were girls who told me some very sick stories. And it went further than that. Humiliating people gave him a kick. I have never met anybody who was so utterly devoid of basic human feelings. He didn’t have an ounce of kindness in him. I don’t think he understood the word.”

  “But he was successful,” Maltravers repeated.

  “Very,” Louella confirmed. “London was full of groups and singers trying to make it in those days and Barry would go to the most awful clubs to check them out. If he thought someone had potential, he would present himself as Mr Fixit — which in fairness he was. They were so grateful at the chance of a break that they’d sign contracts which were as rigid as death warrants. He milked them dry during their fifteen minutes of fame then threw them away. If they became really successful and could afford lawyers to challenge the contracts, he made sure it cost them a fortune — and then destroyed them. Do you remember a group from the Sixties called Jack’s Spratts?”

  “Only vaguely. I was more a modern jazz fan in those days.”

  “Well, they were very good. Jack Buxton was a great bass guitarist and very talented composer. You still hear them on golden oldies shows on Radio Two. Anyway, they had two number one hits in a row and were obviously going to be very big. Jack realised that their contract with Barry would mean him ripping them off for ninety per cent of their earnings forever and managed to get a court to overturn it. Barry received some compensation, but the word was out that you could escape his clutches if you fought hard enough.”

  Louella paused. “A few weeks later, Jack was picked up by three men outside his flat. They bundled him into a car and took him to some house or other where they worked him over … Do you know how many bones there are in your hand?”

  “No. But it’s quite a lot isn’t it?” Maltravers suddenly felt uncomfortable about where the conversation was leading.

  “About twenty-five in each one.” Louella looked straight at him. “They broke all of them with a hammer, right hand and left. Jack passed out with the pain and the next thing he knew he was lying on the pavement where they’d dumped him outside Guy’s Hospital. Considerate in a sick sort of way. He never played the guitar again.”

  “Louella, that’s dreadful!” Tess protested. “Are you saying that Barry Kershaw was behind it?”

  She laughed sourly. “Oh, my dear, Barry had left for the Bahamas a week before it happened. Jack received a grotesque bunch of flowers from him with a letter saying he’d read about it in the papers out there and how horrified he was.”

  “Was he suspected?” Maltravers asked.

  “Of course he was. The police even questioned him, but he simply denied it and they couldn’t prove a damn thing. The men were just hired thugs and probably didn’t know who they were doing the job for. The police never traced them.”

  “But you think Barry Kershaw arranged it.”

  “I know he did. We all knew. And if he could do that to someone as big as Jack Buxton, he could do it to anybody.” Maltravers took out his cigarettes and looked inquiringly at Louella for permission. She nodded and pushed a smoke-blue cut-glass ashtray across the table, but refused when he offered her one.

  “Who else did Kershaw handle?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Quite a lot of people, but they came and went so fast that I can’t remember many of them now. Jack’s Spratts were the biggest group and there was a singer called Tony Morocco — he was really Tony Ramsbottom, but that had to be changed — who bore a faint resemblance to Tom Jones and sounded like Mario Lanza on a bad day. He really was appalling. He had a couple of hits then sank without trace like most of the others. Barry lost interest when anyone stopped making money.”

  “What about Jenni Hilton?”

  “No.” Louella shook her head firmly. “Jenni was originally discovered by Stephen Delaney who was a record producer with Decca. Later he became her manager. Lovely man. He died of Aids about a year ago.”

  “So what connection did she have with Kershaw?”

  “If you were in the music business, there were things you just did,” she explained. “Adam Faith — or was it Mike Same? — said that a lot of male singers were homosexual for reasons of business or pleasure. Your agent told you it would be a good thing to attend this party or be nice to that person and you did it. Barry’s circle spread very wide and a lot of people became part of it, if only temporarily.”

  “That’s too vague,” Maltravers told her. “Can you remember anything more definite between them?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because Jenni Hilton gave evidence at his inquest and vanished only a few weeks later.”

  “Are you saying there was a connection?”

  “No. It may have been nothing more than coincidence, but it’s worth looking into from where I’m standing.”

  “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you. As far as I know, Jenni Hilton and Barry Kershaw were just two people who had a common background of pop music.”

  “But she was at his party the night he died,” Maltravers said.

  “So were a lot of others. Including me.”

  Maltravers noticed that Louella Sinclair looked away as she spoke and had the feeling he was entering delicate ground. He finished his coffee. “What happened that night? Anything you remember particularly?”

  “Not really,” Louella replied. “Barry had put the word out that he wanted company and there was no question of anyone refusing. We drank and listened to some music. Fawned over Barry. I left about ten o’clock with a friend. The next morning someone rang me with the news that they’d found him dead.”

  “I’ve read the inquest report,” Maltravers commented. “He jumped off his balcony when he was high on LSD. Obviously thought he could fly.”

  Louella Sinclair’s caustic “Yes” smothered the word with cynicism.

  “Yes, what?” Maltravers asked sharply.

  “Yes he was high on LSD,” she replied simply.

  “And?” Maltravers pressed. “Or but?”

 
“But Barry never took LSD. Or any other drug.”

  Maltravers frowned. “But at his inquest, people said — ”

  “People lied,” Louella interrupted. “Exactly as I would have done if I’d been called. Before the inquest, we heard that the police had found LSD in his body and everybody realised someone must have tricked him into taking it.”

  “And nobody at the party told the police that?”

  “Of course not. If they had, heaven knows what sort of trouble we’d all have been in. Anyway, we were more inclined to give whoever had done it a medal than turn them in. It only needed enough people to say that Barry was a part-time addict to provide the perfect cover story.”

  “Who for?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t think anybody does. The night Barry died there must have been forty or fifty people wandering through his flat. It was all very casual and nobody could say who was or wasn’t there when they left. But one, perhaps two, people would finally have been left with Barry on his own. He’d have been fairly drunk and the LSD could have been given to him without any problem. Then they’d just have had to lead him on to the balcony and say, yes, Barry, you really can fly.” “And you believe that happened?”

  “I can’t think of any other explanation.”

  “Who’d have had access to LSD?”

  She looked surprised. “Just about everyone. It was almost as common as a pack of cigarettes in that set.”

  “Did you have access to it?”

  “Of course. I even tried it once … but I didn’t give it to Barry. I wasn’t clever enough to think up something like that.”

  “Who do you think might have been?”

  Louella shrugged. “Any one of a dozen people, but I can’t see any way of finding out who it was now.”

  Maltravers leaned forward to stub out his cigarette. “So everybody closed ranks, the witnesses lied about him being a drug addict … and nobody said what you’re now telling me? Didn’t he have friends who must have realised what could have happened and went to the police?”

  “First of all, Barry Kershaw didn’t have any friends,” Louella said. “A lot of people knew him, a lot of people hated him, a lot of people were frightened of him. But nobody liked him — apart from his family.”

  “And what did they do?”

  “His mother was at the inquest,” Louella replied. “Ghastly woman who kept interrupting when people were giving evidence. The coroner nearly had her thrown out. She insisted that Barry never took drugs. She was right about that, of course, but she also had to admit that his life had become almost totally separate from hers, so her evidence didn’t carry much weight. Frankly, I think the coroner wanted to believe that Barry took LSD. He made some standard caustic comments about declines in moral standards. We didn’t like it, but it suited what everyone was saying.”

  “But you say the LSD story wasn’t true.”

  “No.” She sipped her coffee. “Barry Kershaw could get hold of drugs and he supplied them to other people — it was another way of controlling them — but he despised their weakness. ‘Drugs is for mugs’ was his favourite line, and whatever else he was, he wasn’t a mug.”

  “So … ” Maltravers hesitated “ … you’re saying it was murder?”

  “Either that or a joke that went badly wrong.”

  Maltravers leaned back in his chair, looking at Louella Sinclair thoughtfully. She did not strike him as being either fanciful or likely to suffer from hyper-imagination; she had told the story of a possible murder as calmly as someone reading out the ingredients of a recipe.

  “Go back a bit,” he said. “You say that before the inquest the word was out that LSD had been found in his body. Who said so? It’s not the sort of thing the police would have announced.”

  “I can’t remember exactly where I heard it now,” Louella admitted. “Everyone was talking about his death of course and the story just got around.”

  “But at that stage, the only person — or people — who’d have known were whoever gave it to him,” Maltravers pointed out. “So they’d have been the only ones who could have spread the story. This is starting to sound like a plot, Louella.”

  “Possibly, but I don’t think so — at least not if you mean that murdering Barry and covering it up was planned by a number of people. I’m positive I’d have picked up something if that had been the case.”

  “But once the LSD story came out, everyone went along with it and backed it up, either by giving evidence or not saying anything,” he observed. “That was a plot.”

  “You could call it that,” she acknowledged. “But it wasn’t organised. It was just an unspoken agreement between us all.”

  “An unspoken agreement to lie at an inquest? With all the risks of being prosecuted for perjury if they were found out?” Maltravers sounded sceptical. “Come on, Louella, that’s heavy.”

  “I’m still certain that’s what happened and a lot of people would agree with me,” she replied levelly. “If you’d known Barry Kershaw, I think you’d believe it as well. He wasn’t just disliked, we loathed him. Let me put it this way. When Barry held a party, we all turned up; when he died, nobody who knew him attended his funeral. They burned him at Golders Green crematorium and his family were the only people there. I was at a party in Bayswater that afternoon and it was like New Year’s Eve. We counted the seconds, shouting them out until the moment we knew the ceremony was due. Then we cheered and laughed and danced and got tremendously drunk.”

  There was a silence as Maltravers and Tess absorbed what she had said. It was a rare and ugly achievement to have been so hated.

  “Was anyone taking drugs at Barry’s party?” he asked.

  “A couple of people were smoking pot, but that hardly counted. It wasn’t that sort of evening. It was come when you want, leave when you want — just make sure you came or Barry might notice you weren’t there and feel offended. And you didn’t offend Barry.”

  “And that afternoon in Bayswater,” he added. “The day of his funeral. Was Jenni Hilton there?”

  Louella shook her head. “No. I’m sure of that because I remember meeting her the following day and telling her about it. I think she’d been out of town filming.” She raised a plucked eyebrow questioningly. “You’re surely not thinking she had anything to do with it are you?”

  “You said anyone could have given him the LSD,” Maltravers reminded her. “Are you including Jenni Hilton?”

  “Jenni would never have done it,” Louella insisted. “I’ve told you there was no special connection between them as far as I know. They hardly knew each other.”

  “Then if she wasn’t particularly close to Kershaw, why was she called as a witness and, according to you, lied about his drug taking?”

  Louella pursed her lips and glanced at Tess. “Doesn’t miss much, does he?”

  “No, he doesn’t,” Tess confirmed. “And what’s your answer, Louella?”

  “I don’t know. You’re quite right, there were plenty of people who knew Barry much better. I’ve never really understood why she gave evidence.”

  “How about she knew who’d done it and put herself forward to protect them?” Maltravers suggested.

  “It’s as good a theory as any,” Louella agreed. “Are you going to ask her about it?”

  Maltravers stared at one of the Hockney prints without replying. When he had confirmed that Jenni Hilton’s unexplained disappearance had come so soon after Kershaw’s inquest, his professional antennae had locked on to a possible angle, but he had thought it nothing more than that she had been distressed over the death of a friend. That was now obviously not true. When Fleet Street had been trying to find her, at least two reporters had mentioned Kershaw in their stories but had not turned up anything significant. He half remembered a quote from somebody to the effect that she had hardly known Kershaw and had only been at the party by chance. But now he was being told of a conspiracy of silence after his inquest, protecting not only a killer, but also the wit
nesses who had lied to damn a man they all hated.

  “I’ll need to think about that,” he said. “Asking someone if they were an accessory to a murder isn’t the sort of thing you can just casually bring into an interview. And I’ve been told she’s laid down some rules, like no questions about her private life. Tricky.”

  “And does it really matter?” Tess asked. “If Louella’s right and Barry Kershaw was murdered, he sounds as though he deserved it. Even if Jenni Hilton was mixed up with it in some way, it’s been a sleeping dog for more than twenty years. Is it any of your business?”

  “No,” Maltravers acknowledged. “But it’s one hell of an angle.”

  Chapter Four

  Echoing through Tottenham Court Road Underground station, someone was playing ‘Body and Soul’ on tenor saxophone, the melody faintly audible on the westbound Central Line. Across the track, the blown-up image of a minimally-dressed brunette, sprawled in a pose suggesting constant availability, imaginative enthusiasm and inexhaustible sexual energy, stared challengingly. The caption read: WHAT THE AU PAIR WILL BE WEARING THIS WINTER. Virtually every man waiting for the next train had looked at the picture and read the slogan, but none had registered what was being advertised. Dotted orange lights on the platform indicator showed “Ealing Broadway 2 mins” and “West Ruislip 5 mins”. Among the crowd of more than a hundred passengers, tourists anxiously checked maps to convince themselves they had their directions right and were not about to be carried out to unknown Ongar or Epping instead of Bond Street or Lancaster Gate. Most, however, were going through a familiar, repetitive early-evening routine. Some read their papers, others talked, voices gathering into a hum of sound beneath the arched roof. Most just waited.

  Distantly, from out of the black hole at one end of the platform, came a muffled rumble and an unpasted corner of the au pair poster trembled as a faint draught of air began to flow. People instinctively moved forwards as the indicator blinked to “Next train approaching”. The rumble grew louder and the draught stronger. A copy of a giveaway magazine which had dropped on to the track fluttered then was swiftly blown along between the rails. The rumble rose to a roar and lights appeared in the black throat of the tunnel, then the long concrete cavern was filled with the crashing rattle of the train, carriage after carriage pouring out of the tunnel’s mouth.