‘He arrested you?’ Jackson snapped. ‘For what?’
‘They didn’t bother with legal niceties,’ Barnard said. ‘Anyway, something I said annoyed them and two of them started in on me. Strachan and a sergeant. I guess they were carrying on where they’d left off with Tom O’Donnell. They obviously both had a taste for it.’ He slipped off his jacket awkwardly, wincing, and unbuttoned his shirt to reveal the bruises on his chest and arms. ‘And then there were threats to charge me with pretty well anything they could think up. Even to implicate me in O’Donnell’s case. It’s like the Wild West up there, guv. I couldn’t believe what was going on in that nick.’
‘Do you want to press charges?’ Jackson asked. ‘I’m not going to pretend it’s a course I would recommend, it could turn into a very unpleasant stand-off between the two police forces.’
‘I’ve got no witnesses to what happened,’ Barnard said, grateful that the DCI seemed to believe him implicitly. ‘I was in a cell. And I can’t imagine anyone would give evidence against DCI Strachan, anyway. He’s got that nick in an iron grip.’ He managed a weak smile. ‘You think you’re tough, sir, but he’s the hard man, believe me.’
‘Tough but fair, I hope, Sergeant,’ Jackson said sourly. ‘You’d better see the medical officer straight away, because there have been developments here that I need to talk to you about urgently. Arrange to see the doctor first thing in the morning, then report to me. You need to know that the woman you interviewed in Pimlico who called herself Alicia – Alicia Guest as it turns out, a known call girl apparently – has been found dead in her flat. The DCI down there is very anxious to have words with you.’
Barnard drove home at a funereal pace and found his flat stuffy, untidy and tangibly empty after his absence. He flung his holdall into the kitchen, ran a bath, and lay in the faintly pink-tinged water until it was almost cold. Gingerly patting himself dry with a towel – which revealed where his cuts and grazes were still raw – he concluded that, in spite of the way he felt, the beating had inflicted no serious damage. He made himself an omelette, ate it while listening to the Kinks, and struggled to keep himself awake until he reckoned he could contact Kate back at her hotel. She took a long time to come to the phone, and when she did she sounded more forlorn than he could imagine her ever being.
‘How’s Tom?’ he asked quietly, expecting the worst.
‘He’s through the operation,’ Kate said. ‘But he’s still critical. My mother and sister are staying there tonight. I came back to the hotel partly because I need some sleep if I’m going to do some work tomorrow and partly because I hoped you’d be here. Where are you Harry? You disappeared just when I needed you most. I was going frantic.’
‘I’m at home now,’ he said. ‘I ran into some trouble when I asked about Tom at the nick and then DCI Jackson called me back to London. There are some problems here too.’ He heard her sigh heavily.
‘I’m so sorry, Kate. Truly I am. They gave me no choice.’ That at least was true, but he thought it best not to tell her now what had happened to him at Strachan’s hands. It could wait until he saw her, by which time perhaps the damage would look less obvious and her own family problems would have eased.
‘I have to go to work tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Something’s come up which according to the DCI is important. But at least you now know where I am, so you can phone me if anything happens. Will you do that?’ There was a long silence at the other end before Kate spoke again.
‘I’ll keep in touch,’ she said eventually, and he could detect no enthusiasm in her voice and knew she would stay in Liverpool for as long as her family needed her. Where he figured in her plans he had no way of knowing, and dared not ask.
‘I love you, Katie,’ he said softly, but suspected she had already hung up. He slept only fitfully in spite of the Scotch he’d knocked back in the hope of oblivion, and by eight o’clock he was driving down Highgate Hill to meet the police doctor at the nick. The medic confirmed his own assessment that although he was black-and-blue he had come to no serious harm, but said he should confine himself to light duties for a few days.
When he opened DCI Jackson’s door ten minutes later, he was not surprised to discover that his boss was not alone. A heavily built man in plain clothes was standing by the window gazing out at the heavy Monday morning traffic below easing its way into Regent Street. He spun round with unexpected speed as soon as the DCI called Barnard in.
‘Did you see the MO?’ Jackson demanded.
‘Yes sir,’ Barnard said, aware that this time he had not been asked to sit down and that the stranger by the window was weighing him up with unfriendly eyes, as if assessing his visible bruises before deciding to speak.
‘Nothing seriously damaged,’ Barnard said. ‘I’m OK on light duties for a couple of days.’
‘Right,’ the second man snapped. ‘No reason then why you can’t explain in detail why you were on my patch messing about with a woman who is now dead. Was it ill-placed duty or pleasure, Sergeant? Or a bit of both? She seems to have been a tart and I’m aware you know plenty of them.’
‘Only in the line of duty, sir,’ Barnard said quietly. It was obvious this was a man he would be unwise to provoke. And although there had been times in the past when that answer would not have been strictly true, since he met Kate O’Donnell it was.
‘This is DCI Tom Buxton from Pimlico,’ Jackson interrupted irritably. Barnard merely shrugged and faced down Buxton’s scowl.
‘As you probably know, I’ve been working on the Soho Square murder, sir,’ he said to Jackson rather than his colleague. ‘We’d found out absolutely nothing about the dead woman or where she came from, but the obvious thought was that she was on the game – not necessarily in Soho but dumped there after being killed somewhere else. One of my regular contacts said she knew someone who’d told her there was a network of people offering dubious sex to upmarket clients and she’d got out because she didn’t like it. After all the trouble there was last year with John Profumo and Christine Keeler and the rest, I thought I would suss it out quietly to see if it stood up. It seemed like a very long shot to me.’
‘And that long shot turned out to be Alicia Guest?’ Buxton snapped.
‘Yes, sir,’ Barnard said.
‘What else did she tell you?’ Buxton persisted.
‘That it was very well paid, that she had little or no idea where she was being taken by car, and it wasn’t the usual adults with too much money and kinky tastes. And she said that children were sometimes involved.’
‘Did she recognize your sketches of the dead woman?’
‘She said not,’ Barnard said.
‘And you didn’t think to come and tell me about your little excursion into Pimlico?’ Buxton almost snarled.
‘I didn’t think she’d told me anything of any significance. She wouldn’t name names. In fact she said she didn’t know any. And she said if anyone else came round asking questions she would deny the whole lot, say it was all wild rumours.’
‘Which happens to be what we believe,’ Buxton said. ‘I could have told you all that for nothing. Tell me exactly what time you called on Alicia Guest – when you arrived and when you left.’
Barnard thought back to an afternoon when he had been only marginally aware of time.
‘I must have got there about three and stayed half an hour or so, not more.’
‘Did you see anyone else around Alicia Guest’s flat? Anyone going in or out? Or hanging about outside?’
‘No, sir,’ Barnard said. Buxton glanced across the desk towards an impassive DCI Jackson but made no comment.
‘Did you drive straight back to the nick after that?’ Barnard struggled to recall what he had done next.
‘I sat in the car for a cigarette for a while thinking about what Alicia had told me,’ he said slowly. ‘I wanted to work out if there was another way of tracking these people down. But nothing much suggested itself, so I drove back to the nick.’
‘And decide
d to tell me or your own DCI nothing about it?’
‘It didn’t seem worth bothering you if she was going to deny it all anyway,’ Barnard said. ‘To be honest, I’m still not sure why she told me any of it. I didn’t push her particularly hard, she just came out with it. Maybe she felt threatened in some way and wanted someone to know what she knew. And it seems she was right to be afraid. Maybe she knew what was coming and I didn’t pick up on it.’
Buxton snorted his disbelief and turned to Jackson again.
‘I’d like you to keep this officer under your thumb until we can eliminate him from our inquiries. The medical evidence suggests that Alicia Guest died that afternoon or evening. Anyone who was in the vicinity of the flat has to be regarded as a suspect.’
Barnard suddenly felt very cold. He glanced at Jackson but there was apparently no help available from that quarter.
‘You must be joking!’ he said, his mouth dry and his heart thumping.
‘No Sergeant, I am not,’ Buxton said, turning on his heel and flinging open the door behind him. ‘I’ll see you for a formal interview very soon.’
FOURTEEN
Next morning Kate stood by her brother’s hospital bed with a sense of relief, though struggling to overcome the fierce anger that had flared when she saw the battered state of him again. His head was heavily bandaged and as far as she could see every inch not covered by the hospital smock was black-and-blue. But at least he was conscious, his eyes half-open, and he struggled to smile when he saw her, and the uniformed police officers who had been kicking their heels by his bedside seemed to have disappeared, at least for the time being.
‘Sorry, sis,’ he whispered as he took her hand.
‘What on earth was that all about? It’s not you who should be sorry.’
‘Strachan’s a throwback,’ he said. ‘He hates queers, hates Catholics, hates what he calls Fenians.’
‘Surely that was all over years ago?’ Kate objected. ‘The IRA’s long dead and buried.’
‘Of course it is, but men like Strachan never forgive and never forget.’ Kate ran a hand through her hair in fury. She pulled out her camera and took a couple of flash photographs of the battered figure in the bed.
‘I’m taking these in case we ever get the chance to hold Strachan to account. He nearly killed you,’ she said.
‘There were no witnesses,’ Tom said dully. ‘They can do what they like in that place. I’ve known that for a long time. What I don’t understand is why me.’
‘Kevin said you’d moved out of the city to get away from this sort of thing. He said you kept a low profile, kept out of trouble.’ Tom nodded cautiously and Kate could see he was still in pain.
‘Kevin was beside himself,’ she said. ‘I like Kevin, by the way, though mam can hardly bear to look at him.’
‘Yes, well, you can’t say it’s only Strachan who’s a dyed-in-the-wool bigot, can you? It cuts every which way.’ Tom turned his head away and winced again, and Kate could see he was not nearly as resilient as he was pretending to be.
‘Mam wants me to come back to live in Liverpool,’ Kate said. ‘There’s fat chance of that!’ Tom struggled to find another smile.
‘I should stay well away if I were you,’ he said. ‘If she finds out you’re living with Harry Barnard, she’ll set the inquisition on you.’ He looked beyond her and found another smile, and Kate turned to find her sister Annie and Tom’s boyfriend Kevin making their way into the ward, followed by a slightly flustered-looking nurse. Kevin glanced around nervously to see who was watching before giving Tom a hug.
‘The bizzies said no visitors,’ the nurse said.
‘Then the bizzies will have to chase us away – if they dare,’ Kate said and the nurse withdrew looking even more flustered.
‘They think he’s on the mend, I hear,’ Annie said to Kate and she nodded.
‘I bumped into one of the doctors on the way in,’ Kate told her, ‘and he said Tom should be fit to go home in a week or so. But I suppose that will depend on the police. Perhaps they won’t want to take him to court in the state he’s in. It wouldn’t look good.’
‘Mam wants him to stay with her,’ Annie said and Kate caught the look of horror Tom and Kevin exchanged.
‘No way!’ Kevin said flatly. ‘He’s coming home with me. I’m the one who should look after him.’
‘She doesn’t really mean it,’ Tom said. ‘She’d be mortified if what I am and what’s happened to me was common knowledge around the parish. And da couldn’t put up with it for a moment.’
‘I wish I knew where da was,’ Kate said. ‘I’ve been running round in circles trying to find him. I’ll call in the police station later to see if he turned up this morning for his interview about the accident.’
‘You need to watch yourself there,’ Tom said, his bitterness suddenly on show.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Annie said, grabbing Kate’s arm. ‘It doesn’t sound safe for you to go on your own.
‘We’ll be careful,’ Kate said. ‘I have to go home tonight too. I’ve a few more pictures to take this morning and then I must get the train. My boss will be expecting me back.’ She looked at the three of them in turn. ‘I’m so sorry it turned out like this,’ she said. She kissed Tom gently with tears in her eyes before turning away feeling torn in two.
Kate and her sister felt nervous as they went into the police station, but the young constable on the desk didn’t appear too intimidating and agreed readily enough to check if Frank O’Donnell was due in to make a statement concerning the death of the young builder and whether he had turned up. But after disappearing into the bowels of the building for a short time he came back looking worried.
‘He was due to come in at nine this morning with a solicitor from Macdonald-Jordan Construction, but he hasn’t turned up or let anyone know why not,’ he said. ‘Who did you say you were? His daughters?’
‘He’s not been home all weekend,’ Kate said.
‘Is that unusual?’ the constable asked.
Annie shrugged.
‘He goes on a bender sometimes. He doesn’t always tell our mam where he is. But after someone got killed … We thought he’d be here.’
‘If it’s that important, I should think we’ll start looking for him. He must be a crucial witness. The coroner will want him traced to give evidence. Give me your details and if we track him down I’ll let you know.’ Kate and Annie trailed out into the street again.
‘I have to get on now,’ Kate said. ‘I want to be on my way by teatime, but I’ll need to collect my luggage from the hotel so you can leave a message there if you need me.’
‘I’m sorry this has turned into such a mess, la,’ Annie said. ‘Mam was really hoping that da had turned over a new leaf with a steadier job, but it looks as if that idea’s blown sky high.’
‘Keep me in touch,’ Kate said. ‘You’ve got the phone numbers in London, haven’t you? Both my flat and Harry’s? Don’t hesitate to call if you need me. Promise?’
‘Of course,’ Annie said, turning away. Kate watched her walk slowly away towards the buses at the Pier Head, her shoulders slumped, and wondered how her family could have disintegrated so violently and completely in such a short time. She felt very much alone.
She spent the next couple of hours taking pictures of new buildings in fitful sunshine and then, as she was passing the Liverpool Echo building, wondered if Liam Minogue was free for a coffee or even a sandwich. She felt like talking to someone who was not part of her private life. He would talk music and city gossip and might provide a welcome antidote for her troubles.
The young man on the reception desk made a phone call and told her that Minogue would be down in five minutes. While she waited, she passed the time reading the first edition of the Echo, where Liam was still speculating about the success or otherwise of the Beatles’ return home and whether or not they could be expected to come back to Merseyside to live. Local opinion seemed to be divided, with some locals arguing that the F
ab Four had already sold out to the south and even to America, while others were keen to see them returning to the roots where they belonged. The perspective was parochial and the tone a bit snarky. Kate would have put a Grand National-size bet on the four of them never coming back.
Liam Minogue caught her smiling over the front page.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I thought you had probably gone home by now,’ he said. ‘Have you finished your assignment?’
‘Just about,’ she said. ‘I’m getting a train at teatime. I have to be in the office tomorrow morning. But I thought we might have a coffee before I go. There’s been some stuff going on which you might like to know about here at the Echo.’
‘Come on then,’ Minogue said and led the way to the café across the street that they’d been to before. ‘Tea, coffee? A toasted teacake or a sandwich maybe?’
‘Just coffee,’ Kate said and when it came she gave Minogue a hard look.
‘I know you’re the Beatles correspondent,’ she said cautiously. ‘But maybe your crime correspondent would like to know about what happened at the Bridewell over the weekend. My brother’s still in hospital as a result of it.’ Minogue’s face darkened and he took a sip of coffee.
‘Your brother?’ he said when Kate didn’t immediately continue.
‘He was arrested on Saturday night and by Sunday morning he was in hospital after what looks to have been a severe beating. They had to operate to relieve pressure on his brain. He could have died, Liam, and we can’t get a word of sense out of the police. My boyfriend is a detective with the Met and he couldn’t get a word of explanation for what happened from the DCI – what’s his name, Strachan?’
‘Hang on, hang on!’ Minogue said. ‘How did he come to be arrested? Was he in a street fight or what? Liverpool can be a bit rough on a Saturday night. Especially after all the excitement there’s been with the film premiere.’
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