Dead Beat (14 page)

‘And who's the woman in the gold dress, looks like a film star, talking to Georgie Robertson? Is she a high class tart, too?'

To Kate's surprise, Barnard looked startled by her question and took a moment or two to answer. ‘No way,' he said very quietly. ‘She's Mrs Shirley Bettany. That's her husband talking to Ray Robertson. Fred Bettany is his accountant.'

Kate looked again at the tall, greying accountant with the unexpectedly glamorous wife and raised an eyebrow.

‘Doing very nicely for himself, is Fred, big house in Hampstead . . .' Barnard drew her further away from the VIPs' enclosure. ‘But if we ever pin anything on Ray, I'd put money on Fred going down with him. Now, are you going to let me get you a drink?'

‘I'm working,' Kate said again.

‘So you are,' Barnard said with a shrug. ‘You'd better get on with it, then. I won't get in your way.' And he turned away and disappeared into the crowd, leaving Kate with a slight sense of disappointment.

Later that evening, Harry Barnard stood in a doorway across the road from the Delilah Club watching the swing doors disgorge the Robertsons' guests. He saw DCI Venables and Assistant Commissioner Arthur Wright stumble into a taxi together, spotted Lord Francome pull up outside in his Jag and lean over to open the passenger door for the blonde in the red dress and a fur stole, and Georgie Robertson storm out, his pale face knotted in fury as he hailed a taxi which turned into Piccadilly and headed east at a rate of knots. Barnard was still wondering what Georgie Robertson and DCI Venables had been discussing so animatedly when he had happened to stumble on them together in the Gents. They had cut their conversation short when he arrived, Venables ducking into a cubicle with a muttered greeting to Barnard, and Georgie turning on his heel and letting the door slam heavily behind him. Barnard guessed that the only topic of conversation between the pair would have to be financial but the nature of the favours conferred to whom by whom, and why, he could not even begin to guess.

Next out were the Bettanys, Shirley also clutching a fur stole around her shoulders, concealing her revealing neckline, Fred with a hand raised imperiously for the next cab in the line waiting outside the club doors. Barnard wondered if he imagined that Shirley had seen him across the busy road, and smiled faintly to himself. He would ask her next time he saw her more privately, he thought, confident that it would not be too long before that happened.

Finally the person he was waiting for appeared and he dodged through the traffic to greet Kate O'Donnell for the second time that night, to her evident surprise.

‘It'll cost you to get a cab as late as this,' he said. ‘My car's just round the corner. I'll give you a lift. It's not out of my way.'

Kate shivered slightly, her coat too thin to keep out the evening chill. She wondered if spring would ever come this year. She was tired, she had to get up early next day and her defences crumbled, although she was sure that she would live to regret it. ‘All right,' she said, wearily. ‘If you're sure it's on your way.'

‘Of course it is,' Barnard lied easily. He took her arm and steered her into the narrow streets behind the club where he had parked, and opened the passenger door of the red Capri.

‘This is nice,' Kate said, more out of politeness than because she knew anything at all about cars. Where she had lived in Liverpool for most of her life you took the bus or you walked. Private cars were as rare as hens' teeth. ‘I like the colour.'

Barnard got into the driver's seat and started up, wondering what on earth attracted him to this girl who was so utterly out of her depth in London. So far he had had no more luck tracking down her brother than she had had herself, but maybe, he thought, if he played his cards carefully, she would lead him to the wanted man in the end. But he knew there was more to it than that. Neither of them said much during the short drive down Oxford Street and Bayswater Road to the tall, crumbling house close to Notting Hill where Kate was staying. But when he pulled into the kerb, careful not to switch the engine off, he put a hand lightly on her knee, and felt her tremble under the silky fabric of her dress.

‘There you are,' he said. ‘Safe and sound.'

‘Thank you,' Kate said, fumbling for the door handle. Barnard leaned across and opened it for her.

‘I shouldn't really tell you this, but I think the DCI in charge seems to be cooling on the idea that your brother had a row with his flatmate and killed him,' he said. ‘He's working on other leads which may involve other people. So maybe in a day or so, when it's all a bit clearer, you'd like to come out for a drink with me. I could show you some of the sights.'

Kate slid out of the car and shivered slightly again in the night air. ‘Perhaps,' she said. She glanced at her watch. ‘I have to get to bed. I've got a load of work to do in the morning.'

‘Do you have the phone number for your house now?' Barnard asked.

Kate hesitated for a moment and then gave it to him. She didn't doubt that he could find it for himself if he really wanted to. ‘It's on the ground floor and I'm at the very top, so we don't always hear it,' she said.

Barnard gave her a flashing smile. ‘I'll keep trying,' he promised, closed the car door and watched her make her way up the steps to the front door and close it behind her. As he eased the car away from the kerb he grinned to himself and began to whistle Cliff Richard's latest hit. ‘Softly, softly, Harry,' he said to himself but he was confident that all sorts of things were looking promising. Even so, when he got back to his own flat, gazed at the gleaming parquet and the smart Scandinavian furnishing, and dropped into the bright orange revolving chair where he sat to watch TV or listen to his collection of records on the teak radiogram, he felt a slight niggle of dissatisfaction.

He had married early while still a uniformed copper on the beat and he and his wife had shared a rented two-room flat in Kentish Town for as long as the marriage lasted. Joan had slipped out of his life without much regret on either side, and like most officers in Vice he was not short of sex when he wanted it. But now he had what he considered a proper home, and one which from its vantage point close to Hornsey Lane looked down, literally and metaphorically, on the smoky, teeming expanse of the East End where he had grown up, still pock-marked with derelict bomb sites, he was increasingly aware that there was something missing in his life. He spun round and got to his feet again, tossed his sheepskin jacket on to the tweed sofa, poured himself a large Scotch from the small cocktail cabinet, and put a record of the Shadows on the turntable, more to avoid the question than to seek an answer. He glanced round his carefully furnished living room as the spirit warmed him, every last cushion and glass ornament paid for by the sex trade he was paid to police, and knew that this was not enough.

The boy sat in an armchair in a corner of the room, swamped in a sweater that the man who called himself Les had loaned him. When he had gone round to the flat again, Les had stripped him, in spite of his protests, and thrust him into the bath, washing him all over, shampooing his hair and re-dressing him in fresh clothes. He had stood for a moment looking at the stitches in his head wound and the shaved patch in the blond hair before covering it with a plaster.

‘There,' he had said. ‘You see? You scrub up quite nicely. You're a pretty boy, aren't you? You'll do fine.'

‘I need twenty quid,' the boy said, his voice breathless and small, his heart thumping uncomfortably.

‘Of course you do, and you shall have it, I promise,' Les said. ‘More, maybe. You'll be able to go wherever you like then.'

The boy nodded doubtfully, trying not to think about what would come before, but knowing he had even more to fear from other men at the party Les would take him to than he did from this particular man, even with his soft, probing hands.

Outside the flat, Hamish hovered in the shadows, huddled in his new duffle coat, one hand buried in his pocket and the other clutching a bottle of cider. He swayed slightly on his feet, and propped himself up against the wall, determined, in spite of the grey mist which seemed to clog his brain, to find out exactly where the boy was being taken. He knew the boy was not doing anything he had not done before but he had seen a new fear in his eyes since he had run away from the hospital and felt a new urgency in his determination to get out of the city and go somewhere new. Somewhere deep in his fuddled head he knew that something dangerous was happening which he had not encountered before. The boy had been spooked for a week and his panic was growing. Tonight, he had determined he would keep an eye out for him. Tonight, for once in the chaos that was now his life, he would try to do the right thing.

It was not long before he saw the boy come out of the flat with his companion and head in the direction of the Euston Road with its busy traffic, and the tube and railway stations. If they went far, Hamish realized, he would not be able to keep up. He had no money for fares and his pace was considerably slower than the two fitter, younger people he was following. But just before the main road they turned again into a side street and he watched as they stood for a moment on the doorstep of a tall terraced house, with all its windows lit up, before the door opened and they disappeared inside.

Hamish grunted in frustration and then settled down with his bottle at the top of the area steps of a house several houses down the street. In spite of being so close to the main road and the stations, the street was quiet, and no one disturbed him as he sank into a doze, huddled in his new coat. He eventually woke with a start, with no idea how long he had been asleep or what had broken into his dreams. But when he worked out where he was, and why he was there, he became aware of movement close by and the sound of the boy's voice. He stood up cautiously and noticed a car parked outside the house where the boy had gone. He was there, with two men who opened the car doors, put the boy in the back seat and got into the front themselves. Before Hamish could react in any way the car had pulled away from the kerb and headed east.

‘Where've ye gone now, ye stupid wee fecker?' Hamish asked himself, trying to dull the pain he could scarcely bear to acknowledge with another gulp of cider, draining the bottle as he went. Slowly he trudged his way back to his hidey-hole on the railway embankment, only to find as he turned into Farringdon Road that the street was lined with police cars and vans, blue lights flashing, into which the inhabitants of the encampment were being herded. Hamish hesitated for a moment too long as a couple of uniformed officers spotted him and came running.

‘Here's another of 'em,' one shouted. ‘Come on, grandad, there's nothing for you here. This place is being bloody fumigated. Get in the van.'

Hamish shrugged and did as he was told. Even in his new duffle coat he was cold and stiff. A night in a cell would not be too bad an option, he thought. It was only as he was being bundled into the van he noticed that one of the officers was clutching a crumpled piece of white fabric which looked like a nurse's cap.

Hamish slept only fitfully in the cell he had been put in after arriving with the rest of the vagrants at Sun Hill nick, and he was awake immediately when the duty sergeant opened the door the next morning.

‘Did ye bring a young laddie in last night, a boy about fourteen?' he asked, taking the mug of tea he was offered greedily.

‘A boy?' the sergeant came back, surprised. ‘Not that I know of. He'd have been taken to a juvenile home, anyway, wouldn't he? We'd not have kept him here.'

‘A home?' Hamish whispered, thinking of the homes the boy had mentioned during the brief time he had known him. ‘He'll nae stay in one o'them.'

The sergeant looked at him strangely again, several stray items of information coming together in his head. ‘I heard something about a boy running off from Bart's in a nurse's uniform. Is that why one of our lads found a nurse's cap down by your camp last night – lacy thing, white, would that belong to your boy?'

Hamish gulped his tea and handed the mug back without saying any more, flinging himself back on to the bunk and turning his face to the wall. ‘Gae tae hell,' he muttered.

The sergeant shrugged and left him there, banging the cell door behind him. ‘You'll be in court at ten,' he said through the cell peephole. ‘Vagrancy and drunk and disorderly.'

Hamish did not move, cursing himself bitterly under his breath. He knew he should not have mentioned the boy, and he was not surprised when the door to his cell was opened again and a tall, dark-haired man in civilian clothes came in, pulling a face in distaste at the sour smell in the tiny room.

‘I think you and I need a little chat, Hamish,' DS Harry Barnard said.

NINE

K
ate O'Donnell stood for a moment outside a steamy Lime Street station and took a deep breath of salty air as she looked across at the familiar scene. The Adelphi Hotel with a cluster of taxis outside, St George's Hall and the art gallery away to the right, and a glimpse of the huge hole in the ground, which still shocked her, where St John's market had recently stood. Then, as she slowly crossed the road, there were all the familiar shops, Lewis's, Owen Owens, and the rest. She only had a light weekend bag with her and she did not feel like going home yet, so she made her way down through the shopping crowds in Dale Street and followed Water Street to the Pier Head, where she stood gazing across the choppy grey Mersey, as she had done so often as a restless teenager. Sometimes Tom had been with her, as ambitious as she was, but never so explicit in his dreams, both wondering then how they could get away and now whether she could succeed in staying away and whether her brother would ever come back.