‘You’ll have to talk to Carter,’ she said. ‘He’s the boss, I’m sure he’ll be very helpful. He’s a crime reporter, for goodness sake. He’s on the same side as you are.’ Although that, she thought, might not be strictly true.
‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you working with him today, anyway?’
‘He wanted to do some work in his office today,’ she said, feeling guilty that she was pointing the sergeant so forcefully in Price’s direction but sure she needed to disentangle herself from Copeland before he started probing even more sensitive areas of her life. She was surprised and relieved he hadn’t gone in that direction. Harry Barnard, she thought, could certainly do without that.
Kate strap-hung most of the way home on the Central Line and arrived at Shepherd’s Bush feeling tired and wrung out. There was a slight drizzle drifting over Shepherd’s Bush Green as she strolled under the wintry trees in the direction of Goldhawk Road and home. She crossed the main road at the lights and headed towards the turning where she lived and glanced over her shoulder ready to cross again but just as she stepped off the pavement she was aware of a car she could have sworn was safely parked heading towards her at speed. In a split second she leapt out of its way, falling heavily back on to the pavement where a concerned passer-by hurried to help her.
Shaking as she tried to assess the damage, hoping that nothing was broken, she allowed herself to be helped to her feet. ‘He came out of nowhere,’ she said. ‘I barely saw him.’
‘The maniac was accelerating towards you,’ her Good Samaritan offered, helping her pick up her bag and collect the bits and pieces, including her precious camera, which had been scattered across the pavement. ‘Are you sure you’re OK? Did he actually hit you?’
‘No,’ Kate said, realizing she was trembling uncontrollably and feeling unaccountably cold. ‘He came close but didn’t actually touch me. I don’t think I’m badly hurt. I’ll have a few bruises I expect.’
‘Where are you going? Do you need a hand?’
‘I live just over there,’ Kate said, waving at the tall Victorian house where she could see lights on in her flat. ‘My friend’s in, by the look of it. I’ll be fine, thanks.’
The two women crossed the road together and her new friend waited at the gate until she saw that Kate had opened the front door safely and made her way inside. But by the time Kate got up the stairs and through her own front door she could not hold back the tears.
Tess was in the kitchen and looked up in alarm as Kate walked in. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit of a wreck.’
‘I think,’ Kate said through her tears. ‘I think someone just tried to kill me.’
Tess gasped and put her arm round Kate, helping her to sit down on the sofa. ‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘I’ll make you some tea. Hot sweet tea, isn’t that what you’re supposed to have for shock? We don’t have any brandy.’
She busied herself in the kitchen while Kate tried to control the shaking which had increased in intensity as soon as she sat down. Her sobs eased as she sipped the tea Tess brought in but it did nothing for the hollow feeling of fear in the pit of her stomach. In a whisper, she told Tess exactly what had happened.
‘I swear the car wasn’t in sight when I stepped off the pavement,’ she said. ‘It appeared suddenly from nowhere, accelerating at me. I only had a split second to get out of the way.’
‘What makes you think he was aiming at you? It could just have been a bad driver who didn’t see you. The lights out there are not very good.’
Kate thought carefully again about what had happened. ‘I don’t think the car had any lights on,’ she said. ‘I think he was waiting for me to come home. Which means he knows where I live.’ She felt suddenly sick and hesitantly she began to tell Tess why Carter Price seemed about to pull the plug on his investigation. ‘He’s not someone who can easily be frightened off,’ she said. ‘He’s done stories about villains for years, and he’s got lots of contacts in the police who should be able to help him. But he’s scared. Really scared. So I think I should be as well, don’t you?’
Tess looked tense. ‘Hadn’t you better ring Harry?’ she said.
‘I’ve been trying to contact him all day,’ Kate said dully. ‘I had a run in with another detective sergeant at lunchtime, asking about Carter Price’s pictures, and I’d like to get him off my back. But this is much worse.’
‘Let’s call him now,’ Tess said. ‘If what you say is true, maybe we shouldn’t stay here tonight.’ She shuddered. ‘You remember what happened last time someone found out where you lived in Notting Hill. We were lucky to get out of that flat alive.’
Kate took Tess’s hand and gripped it hard. She had always blamed herself for the fire which had stranded her and her two flatmates on the top floor of the house they had been living in. The thought of a repeat of that almost panicked her. ‘Will you make the call? I’ll write his number down.’ She scribbled the Fitzroy number and Tess dialled but as they waited, even Kate able to hear the ring tone from across the room, it became clear that Harry Barnard was not at home.
‘Do you want to call the local police?’ Tess asked, but Kate found that an impossible question to answer. Her faith in police officers was at a very low ebb. She shook her head helplessly and Tess nodded.
‘Right,’ Tess said, recognizing that if decisions were going to be made, she was going to have to make them. Kate, she reckoned, was in shock. ‘This is all too much, after what happened before. Let’s spend the night somewhere else. I’ll ring my friend Eileen. She teaches art so at least you’ll have something to talk about and I know she has a spare room. I stayed there after a party once.’
Kate nodded dully. ‘I’ll pack a bag,’ she said, as Tess picked up the phone again. ‘You’re right. We can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous. And if I can’t get hold of Harry I don’t know where else to turn.’
FIFTEEN
Kate did not sleep well on a lumpy mattress on the floor of Tess’s colleague’s spare room. She got up early and the two of them accepted a sketchy breakfast in the kitchen and then walked the short distance back from Hammersmith to their own flat to wash and change for work.
‘Do you think that was a needless panic,’ Tess asked as they unlocked their front door and took a look round their undisturbed home.
Kate shrugged tiredly. ‘I just don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to Harry later and see what he thinks.’
Tess looked at her sceptically, taking in her pale face with dark smudges under her eyes. ‘I’m not sure Harry is any good to you,’ she said with unaccustomed bluntness. ‘And if this job with the man from the Globe is coming to an end that might be a very good thing too. It’s a very odd sort of assignment.’
‘Well it looks as if that’s run into the sand, anyway,’ Kate said. ‘It wasn’t the most exciting job I’ve ever had, though watching Carter run around like a bloodhound is quite fun. But I did think he was beginning to get somewhere and then suddenly he decided to stop. Said he had upset the trade unions at the paper and that could lead to a strike, which sounded very odd. But he said that was the one thing even a paper like the Globe couldn’t afford.’
‘So what happens now?’ Tess asked.
‘I’ll see if he turns up this morning. If not, I think that’s the end of it. Ken Fellows won’t be best pleased. He’ll have to chase Carter Price for what he owes him, I’m sure. But for me it just means I’ll be back on the rotas, doing whatever comes up. It’s no skin off my nose, really.’
‘Well, I think after last night, that might be a jolly good thing,’ Tess said, tumbling a pile of exercise books into her bag. ‘That camera of yours tends to lead to too much excitement, if you ask me, not to say dire trouble. You’d be better off with a quiet life for a bit.’
Kate gave a shrug and did not look entirely convinced. ‘Maybe,’ she said as she pulled on her coat, wound a scarf round her neck and followed Tess out of the flat. ‘I’ll meet you back here
at teatime,’ she said. ‘See you later, alligator.’
‘In a while,’ Tess responded automatically before turning back. ‘Your turn to cook, remember. Or shall we go to the chippie? I could fancy a fish supper.’
Kate laughed. ‘Friday night,’ she said mockingly, with instant recall of fish for tea with confession to follow. ‘We don’t have to do any of that any more, la. Remember?’
At the office after her half hour strap-hanging, Kate waited for Carter Price to contact her but when she had heard nothing at ten o’clock she pushed open Ken Fellows’ door and stuck her head round.
‘Hasn’t he been in touch at all?’ Fellows asked irritably.
‘Not yet,’ Kate said.
‘Give him a call at his office. He can’t expect you to hang around all day on the off chance that he needs you. He either does or he doesn’t. He should know by this time in the morning.’
Kate nodded and turned back into the now almost deserted photographers’ office and picked up a phone. The Globe’s switchboard answered quickly and put her through to an extension, but the phone was not picked up by Price’s familiar voice but by someone she did not recognize at all. ‘I’m trying to contact Carter Price,’ she said.
‘Are you indeed,’ the voice said and she detected an undercurrent which was not friendly. ‘So am I, as it happens. He’s not in yet and he damn well should be. We were supposed to be having a meeting at ten.’
‘Could you please ask him to call Kate when he comes in,’ she asked.
‘Kate? Are you the photographer girl he’s been swanning around with? This is the news desk you’re talking to,’ the voice snapped. ‘Didn’t you know he wouldn’t be needing you any more?’
‘He wasn’t exactly definite,’ Kate stammered.
‘Well, he should have been,’ the voice which now sounded very definite indeed came back before the phone went dead.
Kate sat for a moment staring at the receiver before hanging up. That, she supposed, was that, and she was unsure whether she felt slightly sorry or not that her relationship with the portly reporter was over. In spite of her reservations, and her recent scare, she had become curious about Reg Smith and Mitch Graveney and wondered where Carter’s inquiries might ultimately have led. She reported the result of her phone call back to Ken Fellows, who scowled.
‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘He told me he’d need you for at least a month. I’ll bill him for that anyway. He signed on the dotted line.’
‘I think his boss’s got cold feet,’ Kate said. ‘His investigation was getting a bit close to home.’
‘Well, never mind about that now. I’ll find you something else to do tomorrow. Today you can concentrate on filing what you’ve accumulated while you’ve been swanning around with Price.’
‘Fine,’ Kate said, not at all reluctant to spend a day in the office, though she knew that if Ken became aware that she had no longer got the negatives of Carter’s pictures there might be trouble. But for the moment, as far as Carter Price’s inquiries were concerned, she would talk to Harry Barnard about her scare the previous night and see whether he thought it might have been deliberate. In the clear light of day the idea that someone might have aimed a car at her on purpose had begun to seem more unlikely.
But Kate’s hopes for a humdrum morning in the office in the end came to nothing. Just before lunchtime, when she was planning to call Barnard and arrange a meet at the Blue Lagoon, the door to the office was flung open and DS Vic Copeland walked in looking even more belligerent than usual. He made for Kate’s desk and loomed over her for a moment before he spoke.
‘You again?’ she said faintly.
‘Me again, young lady,’ Copeland said. ‘And this time I do want you down at the station, no messing. Carter Price was found in a back alley near Fleet Street this morning, beaten to within an inch of his life. He’s not going to be talking for a while, if ever, so it’s down to you, isn’t it? I want chapter and verse about what you’ve been doing together all this time. And there’ll be no nonsense about client confidentiality. This is a case of attempted murder already, according to the City force, and according to the hospital it could turn into a murder investigation any time soon. So get your coat on while I tell your boss where you’re going. You may be some time.’
Kate had lost track of time, sitting across a table in a windowless, bleak interview room which smelt of stale cigarette smoke and sweat. Copeland occasionally sat opposite her, leaning menacingly in her face and slapping his hand down flat when he apparently did not get the answers he wanted, but most of the time he strode around, breathing heavily as he waited for her replies, which were often slow in coming.
‘What did Price think Reg Smith was up to?’ he asked repeatedly, and when she insisted that she did not know he became even more aggressive. ‘He must have given you some idea,’ he snarled. ‘There must have been some motive to justify all the time he spent following Smith around. That was costing the Globe money, after all.’
‘Nothing that he ever revealed to me,’ Kate said. ‘I told you before. I was just the hired help. We went where he wanted to go. He did the driving. I took pictures of what he decided to take. Or who he wanted to take. I don’t think his bosses at the Globe had a clue what he was after. He told me they left him to his own devices. So long as he came up with good stories. And he’s famous for doing that.’
‘And this was going to be a good story, was it?’
‘So he said. A bloody good story, were his exact words.’
‘Did he tell you who Smith was meeting, who he was talking to? Come on, girl. If someone’s tried to kill Mr Price, there has to be a motive and the chances are it’s someone he’s annoyed in a big way. So who exactly did you take pictures of?’
‘Smith used to go to a pub in Bermondsey,’ Kate said slowly, feeling sick. ‘We followed him a couple of times and saw him meet people there. There was someone called Graveney who Carter knew. He worked at the Globe and he seemed very surprised to see him there with a major crook.’
‘Anywhere else you saw him. Come on, come on. You have to tell me everything.’
Kate watched Copeland’s fists clench and unclench and suspected that if she had been a man he would have been using them by now. She shuddered slightly. ‘Withholding information in a major inquiry is a criminal offence. You know that, I’m sure. Anyway, you must want Carter Price’s attacker caught.’
Kate nodded bleakly at that and Copeland started his march around the room again, making a claustrophobic space even more panic-inducing than it already was. Kate felt sick again.
‘Did you see Smith with Ray Robertson? I expect you know him, don’t you, given the company you keep.’ His voice was raised to a near shout now.
‘I know Ray Robertson,’ Kate said, summoning up her last reserves of defiance. ‘I took pictures at one of his galas at the Delilah Club.’
‘So did you take any pictures of Robertson on this assignment? Did you see him with Reg Smith?’
Kate shook her head but guessed she had hesitated too long.
‘I bloody well know you took pictures outside his mother’s house,’ Copeland said. ‘You must have seen him there.’
She nodded, guessing where this was leading. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was there. And Reg Smith and Mitch Graveney.’
‘And your bent friend Harry Barnard,’ Copeland said triumphantly. ‘He was there too, wasn’t he? I know he was.’
Kate nodded again, feeling breathless and aware of her own heart racing. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘We saw him there too.’
‘Of course you did,’ Copeland said with an expression of pure satisfaction. ‘Of course you bloody did.’
A tear crept down Kate’s face and she brushed it away angrily.
Copeland watched her in silence for a moment and then grinned wolfishly. ‘Did your mate Harry tell you why he was there?’ he asked.
Kate shook her head. ‘He just said he was trying to catch up with Ray Robertson. He wasn’t there at the sam
e time as Ray Robertson or the other two. He came on his own and went away quite quickly. Harry said he was looking for Ray.’
‘And you took pictures of all these comings and goings?’ Copeland said. It was hardly a question and Kate nodded again. ‘You didn’t by any chance cull the more inconvenient ones?’
‘Of course not,’ Kate said. ‘Carter knew exactly what I’d taken. I couldn’t have done that even if I’d wanted to.’
‘So Carter Price should have all these pictures? At his office? At home? Do you know where they are? Do you know where he kept them? There was nothing on him when he was found.’
‘No,’ Kate said. ‘I’ve no idea. His office would be the most likely place, wouldn’t it? Haven’t you looked there?’
Copeland glanced at his watch. ‘They should have searched the place by now but if they’d found anything they’d have let me know. So why aren’t there any copies? Where are the negatives? That’s not normal is it? Surely your boss keeps some record of what’s been taken, what he can charge for?’
‘It wasn’t like that, it was an unusual contract arrangement,’ Kate said. ‘Carter was buying my time not specific pictures. Sometimes we spent hours without taking anything at all. Surveillance, he called it. And he regarded anything I did take as his property. In fact he took everything. I think he was very frightened of anything leaking out. And it looks as if he was right to be scared, doesn’t it?’ Kate wondered if Price would ever be able to contradict her version of the story. It seemed unlikely.
Copeland scowled at her. ‘You’d better get out,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m not sure I believe you. And if Mr Price doesn’t survive I’ll be wanting to talk again, you can be sure of that. But for now you can go. You can report back to your boyfriend, if you like. I’m not bothered. He’s going to have plenty of other things to worry about very soon.’
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