Cover Up

by Patricia Hall

  ‘One of the girls up West told me that the place to look for kinky goings on is a flat in Dolphin Square – you know, that big posh block in Pimlico. That may be the answer you’re looking for.’

  ‘Yes, it well might,’ Barnard said. ‘I’ll bear it in mind, thanks. And now I want to catch my girlfriend if I can and buy her some lunch. I’ve been messing her around and I’m not sure she’s even speaking to me.’

  ‘Good luck,’ Evie said and watched him go with tired, sad eyes, wondering why life had not been different.

  Closing the street door quietly behind him, Barnard pondered whether Dolphin Square could be the place Alicia said she’d been taken to close to home. It was, he concluded, worth a look if he could manage to keep out of DCI Buxton’s way. He walked quickly up Frith Street to the Ken Fellows Agency, where Kate worked. He opened the main door on the first landing cautiously, not sure what her reaction would be, but Kate was sitting facing the door and spotted him at once with a look not of welcome but of shock. She pushed aside the photographs on her desk and stood up with a hand across her mouth.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she asked, coming towards him with anxious eyes.

  ‘Can you come out for a coffee?’ he asked. ‘Maybe with enough caffeine inside me I can tell you about it.’ Kate glanced at Ken Fellows’ office door and shrugged.

  ‘The boss is out this morning, so I can take an early lunch,’ she said and followed Barnard to the door and down the narrow wooden stairs into the street. Outside on the pavement she stopped and turned to face him, putting a finger lightly on the worst of the bruises.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Who the hell did this to you?’

  ‘I got the same treatment as your brother,’ he said. ‘And from the same bastards who nearly killed him. I went to the nick to see what was going on and saw too much – far too much, in fact. The ambulance had just arrived to take Tom away and I thought for an awful moment he was dead. Of course, when DCI Strachan spotted me he was furious. They stuck me in a cell for a bit, but luckily for me they didn’t dare send two bodies to Casualty the same morning so I got away with a beating. But only just.’

  ‘Why on earth did you go to the Bridewell? I told you it was a dangerous place. Going in and inquiring about an Irish queer was asking for trouble, even if you are a copper. And why didn’t you phone and tell me what had happened? You just disappeared without a word. I’d no idea.’

  ‘I didn’t have any choice,’ he said. ‘They shipped me back to London in short order. It was that or face some cooked-up charge in Liverpool. And anyway, I thought you had enough to worry about,’ he said, turning her around and steering her towards the Blue Lagoon coffee bar, where they had shared many lunches. ‘How is Tom?’ he asked.

  ‘I rang the hospital first thing,’ Kate said. ‘They said he’d come round after the operation and had had a good night. Annie’s with him.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘No news. He seems to have vanished into thin air.’ The coffee bar was not busy yet and Barnard chose a table well away from the window, with the worst of his bruises to the wall. Kate looked bleak and, having ordered coffee and sandwiches, Barnard put his hand over hers.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said. ‘When I got back last night I thought someone had been in my room. It didn’t seem to be the way I left it. It wasn’t ransacked like at the hotel. It was tidy, but not my sort of tidy. Things had been moved. What’s going on, Harry? Is someone watching me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Barnard said. ‘There are too many things going on for it all to be coincidence. One thing is for sure. You need to come back to my place tonight, so I can keep an eye on you. I’ll sleep on the sofa if you like, if you’re still angry with me, but I won’t sleep at all if I’m not sure you’re safe. I’ll pick you up from work at five, then we can collect your stuff from Shepherd’s Bush and you can come home with me.’

  ‘And leave Tess on her own? I don’t want to do that if someone really has broken into the place.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone’s interested in Tess. It’s you and me who are the targets, though I haven’t a clue why. I’m seeing the DCI this afternoon. I’ll see if he knows what’s going on. OK? Will you do that?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Kate said feeling a slight sense of relief. For once she felt like allowing someone else to take charge of her life, though she guessed it was probably a feeling that would not last long. She reached out for Barnard’s hand and covered it with hers.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Barnard was strictly on time for his appointment with DCI Jackson and tolerated a searching appraisal of his bruised face before the boss waved him into a chair with some appearance of sympathy.

  ‘I made some inquiries about your DCI Strachan,’ he said. ‘Apparently he’s well-known on Merseyside for his heavy-handed approach to suspects. No one will admit it’s anything other than normal or appropriate, though my guess is they’re just too scared to tackle him about it. It sounds as if it’s a race between his reaching retirement or killing someone before he gets there. He obviously got pretty close to the latter this time, although whether anyone would hold him to account seems very unlikely according to the people I’ve talked to. Are you feeling better, Sergeant?’

  ‘Better than yesterday,’ Barnard said, taken aback by Jackson’s unexpectedly sympathetic approach. Then he remembered that Jackson had spent some of his career in Glasgow and wondered if he had seen some of Strachan’s prejudices in action there. Perhaps he had even come south to try to escape them, although Barnard reckoned things were not much better in parts of the Met. He might not approve of Strachan’s brutality, but there was no doubting that Jackson’s attitude to queers was much the same as Strachan’s.

  ‘How did you get on with DCI Buxton in Pimlico?’ Jackson asked.

  ‘The “Keep Out” sign couldn’t have been plainer,’ Barnard said. ‘I’ve got no idea whether our murder victim and this new death in Pimlico are connected, but if they are we won’t be investigating it from here. He made that very clear. He wants my fingerprints and to pass whatever I was wearing that day to forensics just in case I might have stabbed her myself, but I’m sure that’s just another form of intimidation rather than anything more serious. I seem to have carelessly annoyed two senior officers I could very happily have lived without knowing.’

  ‘Well, we’ve tried all the other avenues, so maybe they’ll have better luck,’ Jackson said equably. ‘The picture of the victim has been circulated widely, even to the provincial forces. Liverpool should have seen it, but no one has come back to us with a missing-person report which might fit. It’s going up on all the noticeboards in the Met and it’s being released to the Press and television. But so far she is as anonymous as on the night she was found.’

  Barnard hesitated for a moment and wondered how far this new, more accommodating, Keith Jackson might go. The fact that he’d been beaten up in Liverpool seemed to have got to the DCI more than he’d expected and, with some trepidation, he decided to play his luck.

  ‘I did go back to the tart who suggested I should talk to Alicia Guest. She’s been digging around among her contacts up West and reckons that, if there is anything in this theory of mine that there is some sort of upmarket sex ring operating, one of its venues could be a flat in Dolphin Square.’

  ‘You said this alleged organization was thought to be using children?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Barnard said – realizing, from Jackson’s expression of distaste, what exactly had touched a nerve.

  ‘If I’m seen hanging around there and Buxton finds out, my feet won’t touch the ground. But I’ve thought of a way of sussing it out without annoying him.’

  ‘Do I want to know about this in detail, Sergeant?’ Jackson asked.

  ‘It’s a bit offbeat,’ Barnard said with an attempt at a grin, which hurt. ‘But nothing illegal. Just a bit of quiet off-the-radar surveillance.’

  ‘Carry on, Sergeant,’ Jackson
said. ‘Just remember you are on your own if anyone complains.’

  Barnard left his car outside the nick and took the underground to Pimlico, then walked down towards the river, coat collar up and trilby pulled low in spite of the heat, until he came out alongside the bulk of Dolphin Square, which must, he reckoned, be one of the largest complexes of pricey flats in London. When he took in the size of it, block after block of anonymous windows looking out on to the street, it seemed so enormous that he could think of no easy way of identifying a single flat among so many. He knew the blocks were built around a central garden, but from the outside the place looked like an impregnable fortress where hundreds of people could conceal themselves and dozens of illicit or illegal activities could flourish undisturbed. Anyone living here with anything to hide had found the perfect place to fade into the anonymity of the eminently respectable crowd. People could come and go here at any time of the day and night, and no one would be any the wiser.

  He slowly walked round the entire complex, close to the river on the southern side and then back up towards Chichester Street, where what looked like the main entrance faced the road. As he completed his circuit, he began to despair of finding any easy way into the bastion that the flats obviously were. And it would be even harder to trace anyone to a specific flat without help from the inside and without a single name of a resident to go on. On the point of giving up and heading back to the underground station, he froze and turned sharply away from the entrance and made a performance of lighting a cigarette against the gusty wind with his head turned away. When he turned back, the man who had made his stomach lurch was heading through the doors. He was in no doubt that it was the man he least wanted to see during his second, and forbidden, foray into Pimlico.

  DCI Tom Buxton had left the doors swinging and Barnard could still see him as he made his way across the hall to the lifts. Barnard moved quickly behind him and watched warily as a lift ascended then stopped at the fourth floor. Almost without thinking, he hurried into an adjacent lift and pressed the button for the same floor. When it got there, he held the door open and glanced carefully out to see which way Buxton had gone, then followed him at a discreet distance until he rang a bell and entered a flat. With his heart thumping, Barnard made a note of the flat number then quickly walked down the long quiet carpeted corridor and descended to the ground floor again. He had no idea what Buxton’s behaviour implied – but he could think of a number of embarrassing possibilities as to what he was up to, which he would take great pleasure in quietly investigating.

  He did not go directly back to his own nick in the West End. Instead, he sat in the Dolphin Square foyer for half an hour reading a newspaper until eventually the lift was summoned to the fourth floor again. Quickly he left the building to watch from round the corner, under the shade of the trees in St George’s Square, until Buxton had passed down Chichester Street and he felt safe enough to fall into step at a discreet distance behind him. When he was sure that the DCI was heading back to the nick, he turned on his heel and repeated the journey to Dolphin Square where he returned to the fourth floor and knocked on the door of the flat Buxton had visited. The door opened promptly and he found himself face to face with a tall woman in a loose kimono, her face elaborately made-up, her lips red, her hair bottle-blonde and her eyes as cold as chips of ice.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Barnard said. ‘I was looking for Nigel Crossley. I thought this was his flat. Or …’ He hesitated and tried to looked flustered. ‘You’re not his wife, are you? His girlfriend, maybe? Or have I got the wrong number? Number 361?’

  ‘This is 461,’ the woman snapped and made to slam the door shut but not before Barnard glimpsed a flurry of movement behind her and a muffled noise that could have been laughter or distress.

  ‘Oh, God, I’ve got out at the wrong floor! I’m so sorry to have bothered you,’ he gabbled before the door slammed in his face and he turned away, quite sure he had hit the jackpot though not at all sure it would do him any good with his superiors if it turned out that DCI Buxton was a regular visitor. Why that should be, apart from the obvious, he could only guess. And if this was the flat Alicia Guest had been brought to, the consequences of his guesswork for his own future could only be threatening. As he walked back to the lift, he glanced out of a window and could see that it was a very long way down to the ground and doubtlessly a very hard landing.

  As Kate watched Harry Barnard carry two suitcases filled with her belongings down the stairs from her shared flat in Shepherd’s Bush, she turned to Tess Farrell and gave her a hug.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be OK?’ she asked. ‘It’s not necessarily forever. I haven’t really made up my mind about that yet. I’m really not sure. And I’ll still pay my share of the rent for now. But I do think Harry’s right. While all this stuff is going on, we’ll both feel better if we’re together. And I don’t want to drag you into anything weird that’s happening.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ Tess said. ‘But yes, you should go. You have a genius for getting into these situations and, to be honest, I’m keener on a quiet life.’

  ‘Is it going well with your new boyfriend, the history man?’

  ‘Yes, I think it is,’ Tess said, her eyes sparkling. She glanced at her watch. ‘I’m seeing him tonight, as it goes, la.’

  Kate followed Barnard downstairs to the car, thinking that Tess might be grateful for unexpectedly having the flat to herself that night. ‘See you later …’ Kate called out to her.

  ‘… alligator,’ Tess said softly, although there was no one to hear her reply. The phrase felt old-fashioned now – so much had happened since they had arrived in London with so many plans and ambitions, riding on the wave of euphoria that had come south with the Beatles from Liverpool. She had no idea what would happen next, but had a hunch that for herself at least it would be good.

  When they got to the flat in Highgate, Barnard dumped Kate’s cases in the bedroom and, after a cautious look around the flat, took her in his arms, wincing slightly as his cuts and bruises objected to pretty well everything he had in mind.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m up to cooking,’ he said. ‘Can I take you out for a meal? Will that help?’

  ‘Let me ring the hospital again to see how Tom is,’ she said. When she had been reassured that Tom was still slowly improving, she put her coat back on and they walked up the hill to the new Italian restaurant that had recently opened in the village and took their time over pasta and a bottle of Chianti and an espresso.

  ‘What’s going on Harry?’ Kate asked as they sipped their coffee. ‘Who’s doing this to me? Is someone trying to frighten me, or what? And if so, why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Barnard said. ‘The only thing that makes real sense is that it’s something to do with your family, or just your father maybe. But it could be that your unexpected arrival back in Liverpool after being away so long upset someone. Or maybe there is some other reason, something more than sheer bigotry, which could explain why DCI Strachan decided to go after Tom in the middle of the night. If it was just happening in London, I’d wonder if it was connected to what I’m working on. But that doesn’t make sense – I’ve got no connections to Liverpool and had never been there in my life until this last weekend. I only went there because of you and I only got thumped because of what I saw by chance in the nick, not anything I was doing down here. Whereas your room was trashed in Liverpool and you think it was searched here in London too. You seem to be the main target, but I can’t imagine why.’

  ‘Terry Jordan’s down here,’ Kate said. ‘Maybe it’s to do with him and my da.’

  ‘Maybe Jordan has something to do with it, but it hardly sounds likely. Didn’t you say he’s in top-level meetings, setting up high-powered deals, entertaining ministers—’

  He stopped suddenly. ‘Did you say his wife told you he’d brought his girlfriend with him?’

  ‘She did,’ Kate said. ‘Doreen something. I wrote it d
own somewhere. I can find it for you.’

  ‘I wonder where she is? She can’t be attending the high-powered meetings, can she? That wouldn’t work. Do you think you could do something for me tomorrow? Ring your Mrs Jordan and ask her if her husband’s home yet. And if so, does she know where his girlfriend is? If nothing else, it would rule Doreen out as the victim in Soho Square. Seeing that she was wearing a diamond ring that big, she’s either part of a wealthy family or a wealthy man’s bit on the side. In the first case someone would have reported her missing, in the second her sugar daddy might have turned very nasty and Terry Jordan might fit the bill perfectly. But I can’t very well go to the Liverpool police for help after everything that happened to me up there.’

  ‘Darcy,’ Kate said. ‘That was her surname. Her name’s Doreen Darcy. I’ll call Mrs Jordan tomorrow and see what I can find out.’

  ‘And there’s another thing you could do for me.’ Barnard said cautiously. ‘I can’t go asking questions in Pimlico because if DCI Buxton found out he would jump on me from a great height. But I wonder if you could come with me to Dolphin Square and discreetly take some snaps of people going in and out? I got the distinct feeling that there was something dodgy going on in the flat DCI Buxton visited. Maybe it’s something he’s investigating. Or maybe not. I could drive you there and stay in the car while you do some snapping.’

  ‘Your car’s a bit noticeable for that sort of undercover operation, isn’t it?’ Kate objected. ‘When I did something similar for Carter Price at the Globe he changed his car every time we went out taking pictures, drove something old and anonymous. This sounds just as dangerous as that turned out to be.’

  ‘Well, I’ll borrow something more nondescript,’ Barnard said. ‘But will you come with me? Maybe after work tomorrow? It doesn’t get dark till late so the light will be OK, won’t it? Obviously we don’t want flash bulbs going off, as that might attract attention. But you don’t need to worry too much. I’ll be with you every step of the way, I promise, and it’s a long shot anyway.’