Dead Beat (2 page)

Her reminiscences were interrupted by the appearance of a young woman who poked her head round the single door leading off the lobby with an interrogatory: ‘Yeah?'

‘I've got an appointment to see Ken Fellows,' Kate said.

‘Oh, yeah. You're the girl who wants to take pictures.' The sharp eyes, heavily lined in black, looked her up and down critically. ‘That'd be a first,' she said, scepticism oozing from every pore. ‘He's waiting for you.'

Kate followed her through the door and found herself in a large, cluttered space where every flat surface seemed to be covered with cameras and equipment and all the paraphernalia of a photographer's life, mixed up with overflowing ashtrays, piles of newspapers and magazines and coffee cups in various stages of mouldy senescence. There were tables and chairs, but no one was sitting at them. In fact, the room was empty, although there was a red light showing over one of several doors at the far end, and the sharp smell of photographic chemicals filled the air. The receptionist waved Kate over to another exit without the tell-tale light over it and the boss's name inscribed on the half-glazed door. She opened it and waved her inside.

Ken Fellows did no more than glance up briefly at Kate and wave her into the single rickety chair which faced his desk. He then returned to his study of sheets of contact prints which he held up to a bright desk light, grunting now and again with a sound that Kate found hard to interpret as either satisfaction or dissatisfaction, though occasionally he marked a print with what she assumed was his sign of approval. His inattention gave her the chance to look around his spartan office, a much tidier space than the photographers' room outside, and with a single board displaying some fashion shots which she guessed had been taken for a glossy magazine.

Fellows was a rangy figure, his white shirt open at the neck and the sleeves rolled up. His hair was grey and untidily long and curled, touching his collar at the back, and the lines around the eyes, she thought, could have been caused by looking too long and hard through a lens, or into the sun. When he finally looked up and his eyes met her own, she was startled by how blue they were, and how chilly.

‘So you're the girl who wants to be a photographer?' he said, his voice as unfriendly as his expression. ‘It's not a job for a woman.'

‘So people keep telling me,' Kate said, her mouth dry. ‘I brought my portfolio, any road. I came top of my class at college.'

‘Liverpool School of Art?' Fellows said without enthusiasm. ‘So who've they trained that I'd know about? Wedding and passport snappers? Bar mitzvah and Rotary Club lunches a speciality? This is London, girl, and I intend this to be the best agency in the business. I need speed and flair and a bit of aggression. You don't get first class pics in high heels and a tight skirt.' He glanced contemptuously at the outfit she had spent ages agonizing over that morning.

‘For one of my projects at college I went down a coal mine in Wigan,' Kate snapped back, stung by his contempt. ‘I know what the job takes. If you look at my work . . .' She pushed the portfolio across the desk towards him.

‘What did you use? What cameras?'

‘Whatever was appropriate. It was a good department. But more and more thirty-five millimetre. I've got my own Voigtlander. I sold some pics to the
Liverpool Echo
and bought it out of the proceeds. I was trying to get a job there but they didn't want to know. No vacancies, they said.'

Fellows raised an eyebrow. ‘Not a bad little machine,' he said. ‘The thirty-five millimetre's the future for news. No doubt about that. The old plate cameras are out-of-date.'

‘I notice you're doing a lot of show business pictures, bands and groups and that. There was a group in every street back home. Liverpool's going mad for rock bands. I took a lot of pics of them – just for practice. If you look here . . .'

She flicked through her collection and paused at a couple of black and white glossy publicity shots. ‘This is Dave Donovan – he reckons his band is going to do well – and this is John Lennon. You've got one of him up outside. Both lads are down here in London now trying to get a break. I was at art college with John and his girlfriend, but he didn't stick at it. Spent much more time on his music than his art. Though he's not bad, his drawing's very good in black and white . . .'

‘Are they really going to be a big thing, these groups? They're not going to fizzle out like skiffle did?' Fellows asked, suddenly interested. ‘More than a flash in the pan?'

‘The kids in Liverpool certainly think so. The girls were going hysterical about the Beatles at the Cavern Club. They're quite dishy, especially Paul. He's my favourite . . .' She stopped, realizing she was being too enthusiastic about people Fellows did not seem to know much about.

‘Yeah, I was told they were getting noticed a bit down here, too. We did a few publicity shots for one or two bands. But there's been almost no interest from the papers and magazines really.'

‘I saw your pix of the Beatles on the way in,' Kate said. ‘Mine are better.'

Fellows looked at her sharply, with a ghost of a smile creasing his thin face. ‘Are they now?' he said. He glanced at the pictures she indicated and then leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head, watching her speculatively for a moment.

‘OK,' he said, at length. ‘I'm short-handed as it happens. I've just sent one of my best lads to France on a commission for a magazine. I'll give you a two month trial. What you make of it's up to you. Get rid of the high heels for a start. You'll fall over in the scrum if you don't. Use your own camera. See how you get on. Start on Monday.'

‘How much will you pay me?' Kate asked. Fellows sighed and looked at the ceiling in mock despair.

‘She wants money, too,' he sighed. ‘OK, twelve quid a week, for two months. No more. If I keep you on, we'll see. And a bonus if you come up with something really special.'

‘Done,' Kate said, trying to hide her glee.

‘And don't come running to me if the boys give you a hard time. I told you, it's not a suitable job for a woman.'

‘We'll see about that,' Kate said.

‘We surely will,' Fellows said, turning back to his contact prints dismissively.

Detective Sergeant Harry Barnard scowled across his desk at the DCI from the murder squad, once his boss but no longer.

‘He's got no form that I know of, guv,' he said, glancing down again at the glossy photographs of the almost decapitated body of a young man sprawled across a patterned rug which DCI Ted Venables had just dropped in front of him. ‘Nothing I've picked up, on or off the record.'

‘Ask around, will you, Harry,' Venables said. ‘You know the scene. Post-mortem says he's a Mary-Ellen, a nancy-boy, called himself an actor and we know what they get up to. But he's got no form as far as I can see either. I know you're not officially on the case but I need your contacts. Your guv'nor is going to get aerated about it anyway. You know what he's like with queers.'

Barnard smiled faintly. Venables had been replaced as head of Vice by DCI Keith Jackson, a lugubrious man who took most of the activities of Soho's square mile in his stride, but tended to slip into crusader mode with the area's homosexuals.

‘It'll cost you,' Barnard said.

‘I know the score. You don't have to tell me about Vice. I bloody well invented it,' Venables said. ‘But I'm out of touch now, since they moved me bloody onward and upward, and all the poorer for it.'

Barnard grinned but said nothing. He liked to hear Venables beg, just as much as Venables hated it, but they both knew that there was no way the older man could escape until he completed his thirty years and took himself off to the house he coveted on the coast where he could indulge his passion for sea fishing, fresh crab sandwiches, the best malt whisky money could buy and perhaps even a little boat to indulge his hobby. He would be able to afford it after his lucrative years in Vice, with no need to hunt out a second career as some sort of private investigator. Barnard knew that. The ties which bound CID officers in and around central London were strong and indissoluble, a brotherhood that most joined and few escaped, or ever wanted to. And Venables gave no real sign of being strapped for cash, in spite of his ritual complaints.

‘Living right in the middle of Soho like that, off Greek Street, the locals must have known him,' the DCI went on. ‘See what you can pick up for me, will you? Background's what I need. Who he knew, where he went, who he picked up, who he brought back to the flat. There's signs someone else had been living there but moved out sharpish. No one's turned up yet, that's for sure, and there's not much in the way of personal details, so I reckon the bird's flown. Quite likely the other bugger's our lad, lover's tiff maybe – it's early days. Try the queer pubs.'

‘I'll ask around, guv,' Barnard said. ‘It's over the top of ABC Books, isn't it, the flat?'

‘Right,' Venables said. ‘You have to ask who'd want to live over the top of all that muck, haven't you?'

‘I know the place. Nice little earner Pete Marelli's got there. I'll have a word. I don't think he owns the building but he'll know what's been going on up above.'

‘He called us apparently. Someone had left the street door open and it was blowing about so he went upstairs and found the body. He might have stayed there for weeks otherwise. But apparently Marelli clammed right up with the bloke I sent round. Not a squeak out of him, in spite of a bit of arm-twisting.'

Barnard nodded. He knew that the arm-twisting might have been real but was unlikely to have brought the murder detectives any information which Marelli, one of the clannish Maltese, regarded as private. ‘Yeah, well, you have to know how to handle these boys,' he said. ‘The Maltese, they're very good at keeping their mouths shut when it suits them. And you know as well as I do that it suits them most of the time.'

Barnard stubbed out his cigarette, stood up and stretched lazily. He was tall and slim and fashionably dressed in an Italian suit, button-down collar and a narrow tie, a sharp contrast to Venables' own crumpled grey suit and conservative, much-washed neckwear. Venables, he thought, was noticeably missing the wife, Vera, who had apparently gone walkabout with someone who worked more regular hours and spent less leisure time in CID's favourite watering holes. He glanced around the room with sharp, shrewd eyes before pulling on his trench-coat and pushing his floppy dark hair – an inch or so longer than totally acceptable to his superiors – out of his eyes and putting his trilby on at exactly the right angle.

‘I'll let you know, guv,' he said to Venables, as he headed for the door. ‘I know exactly how to squeeze his nuts if I have to.'

The DCI watched him go and ground his teeth. Another pair of new shoes, he thought. Must have cost a bomb. Barnard seemed a sight smarter than he had been back when he worked as a young DC on his team some years before. Smarter and more successful, obviously, in one way and another, and the owner, he'd heard, of a brand new flat in poncey Highgate. How the hell did he manage that on a detective sergeant's pay? As if he didn't know. Still, he thought, his own prospects were looking up, and might well be enough to tempt Vera back to cook his meals and wash his clothes. She'd soon find out which side her bread was buttered.

Harry Barnard strolled out of the nick and made his way east into the maze of narrow streets at the heart of Soho, luxuriating in the spring sunshine, though it was still cold and there were traces of rock-hard snow and ice lingering in the shade. It had been a long and bitter winter and most of the country was still shivering even as spring officially arrived. Barnard dodged through the bustling crowds, shaking a hand here and there, nodding at the girls he knew and some he didn't, feeling that he was a prince of all he surveyed. It was, and always had been, an area in flux: immigrants came and moved on, restaurants and cafes of every nationality opened and closed, bright neon coffee bars full of sharp young things had recently sprung up alongside the pubs with their smoky, dark wood interiors and clientele where hopeful artists rubbed shoulders with hopeless drunks. And in between it all, the sex trade's tentacles wove and interwove, just as fluid but even more enduring than the rest.

Barnard picked up an apple from one of the stalls packed along the pavement in Berwick Street, with its mounds of fruit and veg and wind-blown litter, giving the stallholder a wave of acknowledgement, getting a smile, or perhaps a grimace, in return. He poked his head into one or two of the gloomy little Italian and Greek shops packed to the ceiling with merchandise, to which people flocked from all over London looking for delicacies they could not get in the suburbs. Impassive faces and dark eyes watched him from behind the counters, unblinking and unsmiling.

Barnard enjoyed working in Soho, and knew its glittering, anarchic, neon-lit night life as well, if not better than its cosmopolitan daylight bustle. That was where he had truly embedded himself as a force to be reckoned with, amongst the porn shops behind their semi-respectable street-front windows, the strip clubs where girls writhed on the edge of what was legal, the clip joints which lured unwary tourists into spending far more than they planned on promises which were never fulfilled, and the tall, dilapidated houses with numerous bells at the side of doors with peeling paint and a peephole to vet visitors. ‘Vice Squad,' he would almost whisper as he opened those doors and got a kick from the fear the words sparked amongst some of his targets and the grudging respect amongst others.

At one point, he was surprised to see a face he recognized, though only just, as the tousled blonde was bundled up in a heavy winter coat and a headscarf effectively concealing the curves and charms he knew very well. The lack of her usual heavy make-up revealed dark circles under the blue eyes and a few wrinkles he had not guessed existed.