Cover Up

by Patricia Hall

  ‘We’ll cordon the area off until daylight,’ Jackson said. From his tone of voice, Barnard could tell that whoever the woman was his boss had already written her off. In Jackson’s puritanical view of the world, women who allowed themselves to be sexually assaulted and then killed had generally been the agents of their own destruction.

  Jackson turned to the two uniformed officers.

  ‘Have a trawl around the square again to make sure no one apart from the phone caller saw anything,’ he said. ‘Barnard, you can get off duty now. Stansfield can cover anything that needs to be covered overnight. You can take over in the morning.’

  ‘Guv,’ Barnard said, relieved that he would be able to get home to Kate so easily. She had made it clear enough that she was not be best pleased that their evening out had ended so abruptly. But when he pulled into the parking space outside his block of flats in Highgate, his heart lurched uncomfortably. All the windows were unlit. For a moment panic threatened to overwhelm him. Perhaps she had decided to go out again for some reason, he thought, although he knew the idea was irrational.

  He hurried to the front door, and when he turned the hall light on was relieved to see that the coat Kate had been wearing in town was flung carelessly across the chair in the hall. He went quietly into the living room and poured himself a generous measure of Scotch before sitting in his favourite revolving chair. He took a deep draught and contemplated his shaking hands. This, he thought, not for the first time recently, was getting serious. Ever since he had been forced to stand impotently by while others more expert than him were trying to locate Kate in pitch darkness on a lethal marsh, he had known she had a hold over him that few women had gained in his life before. What was driving him to distraction was the life-changing decision about what to do about it. And after what had happened this evening, he guessed that Kate might be as unsure about the future as he was.

  He finished his drink, put his glass in the kitchen sink, and gently opened the bedroom door. He could hear Kate’s even breathing in the darkness. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, then located his pyjamas, retreated to the bathroom to undress, and made himself as comfortable as he could on the sofa in the living room. Whatever remained to be picked over between the two of them about the night’s unexpected events would be better discussed after they had both had a decent night’s sleep, he concluded ruefully.

  Barnard was the first up the following morning, feeling muzzy after a fitful sleep tossing and turning among the cushions on the sofa which made a humid night even more uncomfortable than it would have been between cool sheets. Once or twice he had been wakened by rumbles of thunder and the sound of heavy rain outside, but evidently Kate had not been disturbed. He half-staggered into the kitchen and put strong coffee on to percolate. If there was one thing he congratulated himself on teaching Kate during the months they had intermittently lived together it was to appreciate strong Italian coffee at pretty well any time of the day or night. When he first met her, he recalled with a slight smile, the convent girl from the north had hardly seemed to know what real coffee was, although he remembered a sticky concentrate called Camp that came out of a bottle which she brewed as a very occasional alternative to strong, dark tea. One advantage of living close to the London docks as a boy had been that delicacies of one sort and another occasionally trickled down among the war-battered terraces where he lived – much as Kate had in Liverpool – and he had seized what was occasionally on offer. Early in his teens he’d learned there was another way of life that it did no harm to quietly aspire to in his private moments, careful not to let his friends and relations know his ambitions, which they would have ridiculed and treated with contempt.

  As he poured the coffee, he sensed that Kate had slipped into the room silently behind him and was sliding on to the second stool at the breakfast bar. He raised the pot and when she nodded poured coffee into the second cup.

  ‘All right?’ he asked. She looked at him for a long time with no great warmth in her eyes.

  ‘Did you really have to do that?’ she asked eventually. He sighed.

  ‘I really had to,’ he said. ‘That useless rookie would have made a balls of it, and made sure the guv’nor knew I’d been around and buggered off when I could have helped him out. You didn’t have any problems getting back, did you?’ Kate shook her head.

  ‘Apart from being ogled by some drunk opposite me on the Tube,’ she said. ‘Fortunately he got off at Kentish town. I picked up a cab at the bottom of Highgate Hill, no problem. It was all right.’

  ‘But?’ he asked.

  ‘But,’ she said, draining her coffee. ‘I ended up wondering just where we are going together. If we’re going anywhere together at all, that is.’ She glanced at her watch.

  ‘I have to go to work now,’ she said. ‘I know it’s early, but Ken said he wanted to talk to me this morning. He seemed to have something special in mind.’

  ‘Don’t you want anything to eat?’ Barnard asked. ‘I can make you some toast while you get dressed?’

  ‘I’ll get something on the way in,’ Kate said. ‘Will you be late tonight? We need to talk.’ Barnard’s face darkened as the tiredness lowered his guard.

  ‘I’ve no bloody idea, Katie,’ he said.

  TWO

  Kate left Barnard’s flat with a sense of relief and then had ample time to stoke her sense of grievance on the Tube as she strap-hung most of the way to Tottenham Court Road. She bought herself a couple of sticky iced buns at a sandwich shop on the corner of Frith Street, and had eaten them before she got to the office. She hung up her coat and glanced towards what she could see of Ken Fellows’ office between male colleagues – whose best attempt at a greeting was usually no more than a cursory nod – all busy packing bags and loading cameras, getting ready to go out on assignment. The men were taking their time to adjust to the presence of a female in their midst and Kate guessed that some of them never would, especially the older ones who had come back from the war. They sometimes shared experiences which they seldom spoke of, and certainly not with a woman.

  The door to Ken’s office was closed, but silhouettes of two people were visible through the opaque glass that separated the boss from the photographers’ room. She got herself another cup of inevitably inferior coffee and sat down at her desk, giving more thought to her disagreement with Barnard than to the possible assignment Ken had said he had in mind for her this week. Maybe she should take a break, she thought. She could move back in with her friend Tess in Shepherd’s Bush, where she was still paying rent for her room – a precaution that Barnard had always resented but which she had so far refused to cancel. He did not demand any financial contribution from her for his flat, and nothing she’d said had persuaded him to change his mind on that issue, but the idea that she was some sort of kept woman kept creeping into her mind this morning and she didn’t like it. One of the changes she’d most valued when she moved from the claustrophobic embrace of Liverpool was the freedom to be her own person, making her own decisions with no one – family, friends or Catholic Church – making any demands on her. She did not appreciate the idea that she might have exchanged all that freedom for more pressing personal demands from Harry Barnard. Maybe going back to her own place was the answer.

  She was so engrossed in her own dilemmas that she was barely aware that most of the photographers had moved out with their cameras and bags of equipment, and Ken Fellows had opened his office door and was calling her inside. She ran a hand through her dark curly hair, then went in and sat in the chair he waved her into alongside a man she’d never seen before, lean and angular with a beard and sharp eyes, who offered her no more than a nod and a ghost of a smile.

  ‘This is Derek Matthews from the new magazine Topic,’ Ken said. ‘He has an interesting proposal for us and I thought you would perhaps be the best person to tackle it. I’m not saying that you’re the best or most experienced photographer I’ve got – don’t run away with that impression – but in this case you’ve
a lot of background knowledge which may be very useful. You’re the only person here from north of Watford Gap.’ Kate managed a nervous smile, wondering what was coming, as Matthews subjected her to a thorough scrutiny before he spoke.

  ‘Ken tells me that you know John Lennon and his wife,’ Matthews said. Kate was thrown by the unexpectedness of the question and she hesitated for a second.

  ‘They were at the college of art at the same time as I was,’ she said. ‘We were hardly close but, yes, I knew them. And then I took some pictures of Cynthia for Ken when she was expecting their baby and was living with John’s auntie. I knew her well enough to get through the door when no one else could.’ Matthews nodded and glanced at Ken. ‘OK, you tell her what we have in mind.’

  ‘You know the Beatles’ film is coming out this week, premiere in London and then another in Liverpool on July 10th? A Hard Day’s Night. It’ll be big down here, but it’ll be massive up there when it opens. They don’t get back to Liverpool much these days now they’ve decided to live in the south. Anyway, that’s almost by the way – that’s just the peg to hang a big feature on. Not about the Beatles as such – every paper in the country is besieging them and all the craziness that’s going on around them with the hordes of screaming fans. What Derek is interested in is the city itself, and how it’s changed and is still changing. I don’t need to tell you that Liverpool got heavily bombed during the war, but everyone focused on the Blitz in London …’

  ‘Churchill apparently didn’t want the Germans to know that the ports were being hit,’ Matthews said.

  ‘They weren’t just being hit,’ Kate said fiercely. ‘Liverpool was hammered. I can’t remember the actual bombing, of course. I was only a baby. But I remember when I was a little girl I thought that living surrounded by ruins was perfectly normal. And if the streets hadn’t been completely wrecked by the bombs, it wasn’t long before they sent the bulldozers in to demolish the rest of the houses. We moved to a brand new house when I was about six or seven.’

  ‘You must have heard stories about what went on during the war, though,’ Matthews said.

  ‘Some,’ she said. ‘Some about sailors who’d been lost at sea on the convoys. And stories about what happened to people in the bombing …’ She shuddered. ‘It wasn’t just the docks and warehouses they went for, it was streets of houses too, air-raid shelters, everything. And they used incendiary bombs as well as high explosive. Some of the bomb sites are still there, even now. It’s said the casualties were much the same as in the East End. But people felt as if they were being completely ignored, and that’s still resented. For us kids, especially the lads, the sites were a playground with a spice of danger. They used to swap bits of shrapnel and other bits and pieces they dug up in the ruins. It was horrible, but I suppose we didn’t really understand what had happened. Not really. And the adults didn’t want to talk about it. They must have seen some terrible things.’

  ‘Apparently the government didn’t want Hitler to know how successful the raids had been,’ Matthews said. ‘The ports were crucial, especially Liverpool with the Atlantic traffic.’

  ‘There may have been good reasons for what the government did, but the bitterness went on for a long time,’ Kate said. ‘Long enough for me to be aware of it when I was growing up.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Matthews said. ‘That’s the sort of storyline I want in your pictures. And how Liverpool came back from all the carnage and recriminations to end up with the Beatles generation. You’ll have to do some research for the wartime stuff …’

  ‘You can do that here,’ Ken said quickly. ‘I’ll get you into the various archives. But then we want you to go up and get some pictures of the Beatles going to the film premiere. Pictures of all that. There’ll no doubt be massive crowds, just like there have been in London and pretty well everywhere they go. But we want much more than that. That’s just the peg to hang it on. What we need is some shots of the damage caused by the war and some follow-up pictures of what’s happened in the way of rebuilding – some human-interest stuff with people looking back at what happened in the Blitz, and so on. What the changes have been. How Liverpool bounced back. Or maybe didn’t for some people.’

  ‘I’d have to spend some time up there?’ Kate asked, uncertainly.

  ‘A week or so, I’d say,’ Ken said, glancing at Matthews, who nodded.

  ‘It’s a good story, worth a lot to us while we’re building up a readership,’ Matthews said. ‘I can’t spare one of my own photographers to do the research, so I thought Ken could help. It will be very different from the usual showbiz angle about four likely lads making good. The national paper interviewers have done that to death already. I want something completely different, using pictures no one else has ever seen, or not since the 1940s anyway … So what do you think, Kate? Is it something you could handle?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Kate said, with a sudden feeling of excitement. ‘I could certainly handle that.’

  After Derek Matthews left, Ken Fellows came and stood behind Kate in the now empty photographers’ room, putting a hand on her shoulder, then suddenly thinking better of it and redirecting it to stroke his balding head.

  ‘This is big stuff,’ he said. ‘It’s the sort of photojournalism I’d like to get more of, and it just happens you’re ideally placed to tackle it because of where you come from. You talk the language. So don’t let me down, don’t do anything rash. You’ve got the best part of a week before you need to go up there, so you’ve plenty of time to look at the archives and select some good stuff from the war and the immediate aftermath.’

  ‘It was grim, but we’re a resilient lot, we Liverpudlians,’ Kate said. ‘A lot of us had to be. And we’ve got that famous sense of humour, you know. Arthur Askey, Ted Ray, Tommy Handley … All those radio shows when I was a kid … The radio was always on in the background. What I remember best is that everyone cried buckets when Tommy Handley died. I was quite young and to me he was just a voice on the wireless. I don’t suppose I understood most of the jokes. But my mam was devastated, she took his death personally.’

  ‘Radio was very important during the war,’ Ken said. ‘It kept people going, kept them cheerful.’

  ‘It was never turned off in our house,’ Kate said. ‘But I do remember, as I got older, how people were determined to put the city back together again. It was as if Hitler would have got away with it in some way if the rebuilding wasn’t done.’

  ‘Right, get yourself somewhere to stay before the film premiere and start looking at the archives. I’m sure the local paper will help. What’s it called?’

  ‘The Echo, the Liverpool Echo,’ Kate said.

  ‘Call the picture editor and see if he’ll point you in the right direction. And Kate, this is a big commission for us – so let’s take it carefully. The agency’s reputation’s on the line here, and if it goes well you won’t do your own any harm either. It’s a big chance for you to shine.’

  ‘At least the mortuary’s cool,’ DS Harry Barnard told himself as he and DC Stansfield presented themselves for the post-mortem on the unknown woman whose body had been found the previous evening in Soho Square. According to DCI Jackson, no more senior officers could be spared to attend. But Barnard guessed it was because Jackson had written off the victim as a prostitute, rather than his claimed pressure of work. Watching the routine dissection of a body did not faze Barnard, but as they approached the hospital he realized that his passenger was looking decidedly nervous.

  ‘Have you done this before, Pete?’ he asked.

  Stansfield nodded unhappily.

  ‘The boxing trainer. You remember?’ he said. ‘I didn’t enjoy that much.’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember. Well, try not to pass out. It really annoys them. And if you want to throw up, try to get to a sink.’ Barnard slid the Capri into a parking bay with a doctor’s name on it and led the way to the discreet mortuary door, round a corner away from the main hospital entrance. A technician thrust coveralls into their hands as
they pushed through the heavy swing doors. Several people were already around the table in the centre of the room. The pathologist, who Barnard vaguely recalled was a Dr Kent, glanced round at the newcomers.

  ‘DS Barnard and DC Stansfield,’ Barnard said as he fastened his coverall. ‘We saw the body last night where it was found.’ Kent nodded without much warmth.

  ‘I’ve already made a start on the external damage,’ he said. ‘Extensive bruising and the signs of strangulation.’

  ‘A sexual assault?’ Barnard asked.

  ‘Oh certainly that,’ Kent said. ‘Moreover, some considerable force was used here. And there are signs that her wrists had been secured in some way for some of the time, although there is no sign of ligaments. They must have been removed.’

  ‘Any indication of the time of death?’

  ‘The weather is very warm. So given that you tell me the body was found almost immediately after it was left out of doors, there would have been no undue cooling before the police doctor took a temperature reading that was low.’

  ‘She seemed cold,’ Barnard said, and the doctor nodded.

  ‘Rigor had not set in when she was found, so I would estimate the time of death to be earlier that evening. Can’t be more precise than that at this stage.’ The doctor moved to the woman’s head, and with a puzzled look delicately put a finger close to her mouth.

  ‘There is stickiness here, under the nose and on the chin,’ he said. He picked up an instrument and scraped the skin gently, then put whatever he’d collected on to a slide and into an evidence bag.

  ‘Do you think she was drugged?’ Barnard asked.

  ‘That’s certainly a possibility,’ Kent said. ‘Alternatively, at some time she might have had some sort of a gag across her mouth to keep her quiet. Tests will tell us more. I’ve already taken blood for toxicology and blood type, and there’ll be more samples from the stomach when I open her up. You’ll have to wait for those results, of course.’ Barnard was aware of a slight moan from Peter Stansfield, whose face had taken on a faint green tinge even before the doctor touched the array of cutting tools that his technician had arranged neatly for him.