Dead Beat (10 page)

‘Or your brother for two? Quite a family for walkouts then?'

‘I suppose so,' Kate said, feeling suddenly miserable and trapped. ‘I don't know much about what happened between my father and mother, but I know Tom had been unhappy at home for a while. He never talked about it, but I could tell.'

‘And he worked in shops, you said?'

‘Yes, he worked in various fashion shops in Liverpool – Lewis's, Bon Marché, before it joined up with John Henry Lee. He lost his job after that and went to work in a little place near St John's Market, selling cheap gear, up-to-the-minute men's stuff, Mod suits, all that. He was always into the latest thing. Loved his clothes. Spent all his pocket money on them when he was at school. Drove my mam mad.'

Barnard smiled faintly and straightened his Liberty tie. There was something in the description that he could identify with. ‘So we're looking for a young man in the latest trend, then. Did you bring his picture?'

Reluctantly Kate took the snapshot of Tom out of her handbag and handed it to Barnard. ‘It's the only one I've got down here,' she said.

‘You can have it back,' Barnard said. ‘I'll get our people to make a copy of it.'

‘You won't—'

‘Won't what?' Barnard snapped. ‘Use it to help find him? Of course we will. This is a murder inquiry.'

‘Did he live in that flat, then? The one over the shop?'

‘With Jonathan Mason, the dead man? Yes, as far as we can tell, he did. Did you know Mason? Or ever hear his name mentioned?'

Kate paled and shook her head, gripping the edge of the table tightly for a moment. ‘No, never,' she said. ‘If he met him in London, I wouldn't have, would I? I told you, we've barely heard a word from him since he went.' She took a deep breath. ‘Tom couldn't kill anybody,' she said. ‘He's a gentle person. My mam used to have to make him stand up for himself at school. He never got into fights. Not like my da – he was always coming back from the pub with black eyes and cuts and bruises. I'm more like him. My mam used to say I should have been the boy and Tom the girl.'

Barnard took a sharp breath. She really didn't know, he thought. But he was going to have to tell her. ‘Did you realize that your brother was . . .' He hesitated, wondering which word would shock her least. If possible, he wanted this girl on his side in spite of the difficult position she found herself in. ‘Not quite normal?'

‘You mean homosexual?' Kate came back fiercely. ‘It's not something we talked about at home, if that's what you mean. In fact, I never heard my parents talk about sex at all. What I knew I learned at college, when I got away from the nuns at school.' She smiled slightly at the memory and Barnard realized again just how very attractive she was. But the smile was just a flash of sunlight and the clouds descended quickly again. ‘Yes, I did wonder about that, anyway,' she said quietly. ‘I had an idea, but I never found the courage to ask him straight out. People explain these things to you, but I never really understood it, deep down.'

‘We think he and the dead man were lovers,' Barnard said carefully. ‘It's illegal, of course, but it goes on.'

‘But Tom wasn't like that man Marie and I talked to this morning, Vincent, the man in the purple checked suit. Tom liked his clothes but he wasn't weird, like that.'

‘They say with most of them, you can't tell,' Barnard said. ‘Anyone can be queer, in any job, even a copper, though that sounds a bit unlikely to me.'

‘I suppose if they think they could go to prison, they hide it,' Kate said quietly.

‘You say your brother never got into fights? If that's the case, he must have hidden his tastes quite well. A lot of normal blokes would have given him a good thumping if they'd guessed.'

‘He did get beaten up once. He'd been to Anfield to watch Liverpool and he said he got set on by supporters from the other team. I can't remember who it was now. Manchester United probably. There's no love lost there. But I suppose there could have been some other reason, apart from the football, I mean.'

‘Do you know if Tom had friends in London when he came down here?'

‘We never really knew where he'd gone. We just guessed it must be London because he used to say how much he'd like to work in one of the big shops in Oxford Street. It was his ambition, like all the boys in the bands want to come down here to make their name now. But I never heard Tom mention anyone he knew in London.'

‘But he could have known someone in the music business maybe?' Barnard persisted. ‘Someone else who's come down from Liverpool, just like you and your brother?'

‘I suppose so,' Kate said doubtfully. ‘Though I never heard him mention anyone in a band. But every other lad was playing in some group or other the last few years, so it's quite possible some of his mates did.'

‘So we need to talk to his mates in Liverpool, see what they can remember? See if they might have any idea where he could have gone? Or even if he's been in touch.'

Kate nodded gloomily. ‘I suppose so. We asked around when he went but no one seemed to know anything. And what about the family? Will you have to talk to my mam?'

‘We already have,' Barnard said. ‘We asked the Liverpool police to call round as soon as you told us who our missing flatmate was. Then they'll chase up any friends they can trace.'

Kate felt sick and numb. She should have expected that, she thought, but she still could not get her head round the idea of Tom on the run, living hand to mouth maybe, afraid of his own shadow. In spite of being the younger, she had always tended to look out for Tom, protect him, even at times from their father, whose explosive temper had frightened all his children.

She looked at the man on the other side of the table, well-dressed, good-looking but with a bleakness in his eyes which she supposed came with the job, seeking a hint of sympathy which was not there. Her mouth felt dry, the room was airless and she desperately wanted to leave, but she needed the answer to one last question.

‘Do you really suspect him of killing this man in the flat? What's his name?'

‘Jonathon Mason,' Barnard said.

‘How . . . ? How did he die?'

‘His throat was cut,' Barnard said bluntly, knowing the answer would shake her.

Kate went pale and swallowed hard. ‘Tom couldn't have done that,' she whispered.

‘In my experience, people involved in sex can do pretty well anything,' Barnard said flatly, leaving no space for contradiction.

Kate sighed. ‘I don't see how I can help you,' she said, struggling to hold back tears.

‘You can't, unless he gets in touch,' Barnard said. ‘If he does, I want to know about it. No excuses, no family loyalty, no messing me about at all. I want you to phone me. And if I hear nothing from you, believe me, I'll be in touch with you myself. If he knows you're in London, you're the obvious person he'll get in contact with. Do you understand, Miss O'Donnell?'

‘Yes,' Kate said. ‘I understand.' But she knew with absolute certainty that if Tom got in touch, she would do no such thing.

Hamish and the boy walked slowly up Farringdon Road, turned left into Rosebery Avenue and then, just beyond the sorting office, alive with postmen and delivery vans, dodged into a warren of derelict bombed sites and the vestiges of former streets until they came out into Gray's Inn Road.

‘Are ye sure ye know where ye're going?' Hamish asked anxiously as he stood on the edge of the pavement opposite a pub, waiting for a gap in the traffic speeding towards King's Cross.

‘There's flats over there.' The boy waved vaguely towards Bloomsbury.

‘Big houses,' Hamish said. ‘I ken them.'

‘Flats,' the boy said, his face obstinate. ‘I know where he lives.'

They dodged through the traffic as the boy led the way north again and then into side streets lined with nineteenth century terraces, grey and decrepit in the bright morning sunshine. They could see the gothic brick bulk of St Pancras now at the end of the grid of streets, like some dilapidated medieval castle looming over the neighbourhood. Still within sight of the station, the boy stopped at the doors of a neglected-looking six-storey mansion block, its brickwork chipped and its windows grubby.

‘This is it,' he said. ‘I'll be all right now.' He glanced down at himself with some satisfaction. ‘Good old Sally Ann,' he said. He ran his hand down the green duffel coat he was wearing over a warm wool shirt and dark slacks which were only slightly too big – nothing that could not be disguised by turning over the waistband to stop them flapping too obviously round his ankles, and the nurse's warm boots he had insisted on keeping. His new outfit was topped off with a tweed cap which covered the dressing he still wore on his head.

‘He won't know me in this clobber.'
And nor will anyone else
, he thought, with some satisfaction. In the end he had given Hamish a sketchy version of the murder scene he had stumbled into, but had not admitted that his accident had been the result of panic at the thought of being recognized in the street. His fear now was that the old Scot would abandon him if he thought he was at risk of violence. Best, he thought, to keep that to himself.

‘I picked the smallest things I could find,' Hamish said. ‘I told them you'd just come out of hospital, which was true enough.' He was wearing a thick duffle coat himself, which he had also acquired that morning, and he had tucked his matted grey beard and hair into the collar, but his boots were split where the soles joined the uppers, revealing a couple of filthy toenails like claws on his left foot. While the boy, in his new clothes, could pass for normal, in spite of his thin features and the fear in his eyes, Hamish had failed to disguise what he was.

The boy looked at him warily. ‘You can't come up with me,' he said.

‘Aye, I know that, laddie,' Hamish said, but still seemed reluctant to turn away. ‘I wish . . .' He did not finish the sentence.

‘It's all right,' the boy said. ‘This bloke's all right. He won't hurt me.'

‘And he'll give ye money?'

‘He will.'

‘Aye, well, if ye say so. I'll wait for ye over there.' Hamish waved at a small patch of grass with a couple of wooden benches overshadowed by the tall brick blocks all round. ‘Naebody'll bother me there.'

The boy watched as his friend crossed the street, settled himself on a bench and pulled a bottle from his pocket. Then he turned and walked up the steps to the heavy doors which swung open with a push to let him in and made his way up the stairs with more confidence than he felt.

Barnard leaned back lazily in his chair and smiled at the man across the beer-stained table between them. But there was no warmth in the smile, more the anticipation of a shark circling in murky water knowing that sooner or later a swimmer's leg would conveniently appear above his head. The man opposite wriggled uncomfortably and took a sip of his half pint. Barnard's companion was small and dark-haired, with a thin, almost wizened face, calculating eyes and an ingratiating smile which he was offering Barnard now, between sips.

‘I haven't heard a whisper, Mr Barnard, and that's the truth.'

But Barnard did not believe him. ‘Come on, Joe. You know that's not good enough. We've known each other a long time, haven't we? You've done very well out of it, too. You could have been deported after that last little episode and you got away with six months. But I need something back. You must have heard something.'

Joseph Inglott shrugged helplessly. ‘Nothing,' he said.

‘What I don't understand is why?' Barnard said, barely able to contain his frustration. ‘Here's a couple of queer boys, an actor and some sort of a minor player in the rag trade, both apparently working, quite legit, no police records, low profile, and some beggar cuts one boy's throat and the other's disappeared. Maybe he did it, or maybe he's lying dead somewhere too, with his throat cut, for all I know. And no one, and I mean no one, not a soul, has heard a whisper.'

‘The boy who ran away cut his friend's throat,' Inglott said. ‘Is obvious. It happens all the time with these queer boys.'

‘Sure, it happens,' Barnard said. ‘After a quarrel, a lover's tiff, jealousy, all that, but there was no sign of that. The place was neat and tidy, no sign of a fight, no jealous frenzy, just a dead body and a lot of blood. Nothing smashed, nothing broken, except the table he fell against. It doesn't look right. There's more to it. Must be.'

‘The Man has nothing to do with queer boys,' Inglott said. ‘You know that.'

Barnard nodded. It was true that the man Inglott was referring to, another Maltese, Frankie Falzon, who controlled much of the prostitution and pornography in Soho, had apparently steered well clear of the homosexual scene, perhaps from religious scruple, as hangers-on like Joe Inglott piously claimed. Barnard thought it more likely it was simply because Falzon had not yet succeeded in ousting someone else who was controlling that segment of the business in Soho.

Whoever ran the trade, homosexual pornography was increasingly getting on to the streets and Barnard was sure that not all of it was any longer being smuggled in from abroad. Some of what he had seen recently had a distinctly home-grown look. And while his bosses tolerated, and in many cases connived with, most of what went on in Soho, the head of the Vice Squad, Keith Jackson, disliked queer porn with a particularly visceral hatred. Jackson wanted to stamp out the trade in what he called ‘queer filth'. It was a vain hope, Barnard thought, but he was wise enough not to share that view at the nick.