Dead Beat (22 page)

‘OK, OK,' Barnard came back quickly. ‘Then we have to assume it was either Falzon's mob, for some reason we can only guess at, in which case it's not a problem for you and him, or a loose cannon we know nothing about.'

‘A loose cannon like Georgie, obviously,' Robertson said quickly. ‘This happened in the same building, for God's sake, and maybe with the same knife.' He paused to let the implications of what he was suggesting sink in. ‘Convenient all round, wouldn't you say, in the light of what we already talked about?'

Barnard groaned inwardly, wondering how far he could get Venables to go along with Robertson's ambitious scheme and how successfully he could keep the boy's evidence out of the picture. Jimmy Earnshaw was the loosest cannon of all, and the most vulnerable. ‘I assume you can get Falzon to buy that,' he muttered. ‘If he didn't have him eliminated himself, that is.'

‘I think so,' Robertson said airily, but the more Barnard thought about it the more he became convinced that Ray Robertson was almost as dangerously out of control as his more volatile brother. Venables was simply not going to buy into this, he thought. It was just too bizarre for even Georgie's reputation to bear.

Kate O'Donnell stood in her boss Ken Fellows' office looking baffled. She had got to work slightly late after being delayed on the tube. ‘Some idiot's jumped in front of a train,' the ticket inspector had said with a shrug as she and Marie had tried to join the Central Line at Notting Hill. ‘Take the Circle and then the Bakerloo,' he had offered helpfully before Marie, the more experienced traveller in the tunnels and tubes Kate still found confusing and more than a little scary, had led the way. But when she had got to the office she found the big photographers' room deserted, an acrid smell in the air, and several of her colleagues and Brenda the secretary crushed into Ken Fellows' sanctum, all talking loudly at once. Kate pushed her way into the throng and found Ken at his desk rifling through a jumble of prints and contact sheets on his desk. The agency was never tidy but this morning the room looked as if a hurricane had hit it.

‘What's going on?' she asked Brenda, as the men ignored her arrival.

‘We had a burglar in the night,' Brenda said. ‘Or maybe someone who just didn't like their pic. Ken's trying to work out what they took, if anything.'

Kate glanced back over her shoulder to the photographers' desks which were, as usual, littered with cameras and photographic equipment, some of it expensive.

‘They took prints?' she asked, surprised. She had her own camera in her bag, so she was not worried on that score, but most of the photographers generally left their own heavier gear lying around on open view.

‘Well, they seem to have gone through the files. The stuff was scattered all over Ken's office when I came in. I started clearing it up but he started shrieking at me when he saw the mess so I packed it in. I don't know where it all came from or where it all goes. I expect you'll have to do the filing all over again.' She gave Kate a satisfied smirk and went back to her own corner of the office to put the kettle on.

‘I suppose we're insured?' Kate said to no one in particular, but Ken seemed to hear her higher voice above the hubbub and fixed her with a beady eye.

‘You can't insure pics that haven't been sold yet,' he snarled. ‘Or repeat the moment they were taken, you silly cow. Can you go back and get those shots of randy Lord Francome and his little tart again? Fortunately the negs should still be in the darkrooms. You'd better go and check.'

Kate felt her colour rise and she turned away from the crowd of men quickly and went to do as she was told. But as soon as she opened the first darkroom door she knew that they were not dealing with a casual thief who had wandered in off the street. In one sense, the negatives were still there, but the intruder had carefully piled them into a metal tray and set them alight. All that was left was ash and a smell of burnt film amongst the normal stink of chemicals, and on the floor the shards of glass plates, everything coated with a residue of black smoke, which explained the smell which had permeated the whole office. She put her head round each of the darkroom doors in turn but with the same result. The firm's recent negatives and plates had been destroyed and it was a miracle that the whole building had not gone up in smoke with them. Feeling sick, she went back to Ken Fellows' office and she knew that she did not even need to give him an answer to his question. He could read it in her face. She wriggled through the crowd of photographers to face her stricken boss across the heaps of material on his desk.

‘Smashed up or burnt,' she said. ‘I've got some of my thirty-five millimetre negs. I kept the ones of Dave Donovan's band because I thought he might like them reprinted, and a few of the shots I took at the Delilah Club were on the same reel of film. And the film I shot in Liverpool is still in my camera. I bundled all the negs up together and locked them in my desk drawer as you didn't seem sure you were interested in the bands.'

‘Well, that's great,' Fellows said. ‘So it looks as though the sum total of our recent negs consists of shots of a third rate rock band from Liverpool, some second rate band leader's pregnant girlfriend and a few VIPs who took the trouble to go to Ray Robertson's boxing match at the Delilah. Plus whatever old stuff is stashed in the cellar. Jesus wept, we'll get rich pickings out of that lot. Did anyone else keep their recent plates somewhere safe?' Most of the men laughed and shook their heads ruefully. The plates from their heavy flash cameras were not so portable.

‘Right,' Fellows said. ‘The rest of you get on with your jobs. Kate and I are going to sort through the prints and see what can be rescued and what's been nicked.'

‘Are you going to call the police?' Kate asked timidly after the photographers had left her uneasily alone with Fellows.

‘No point, is there?' Fellows said dismissively. ‘The negs are gone and I guess if they took any prints they'll have destroyed them as well. Though God knows why. So, let's split these prints into a set for each photographer. They've all got the names on the back. Then I'll know what should be there and what's gone. Come on, girl. Don't look so miserable. It's a bloody pain but worse things happen at sea.'

‘I suppose so,' Kate said, but she could not get rid of the feeling that somehow this calamity was connected to her own troubles with Tom, her rejection of Dave Donovan or even, though she quickly dismissed the idea as too far-fetched, with the fact that, as she had been about to leave the Delilah Club the previous Friday night, she had refused a lift with an importunate and obviously drunken Georgie Robertson, who had stormed out of the club ahead of her, audibly cursing as he went. She spent the morning sifting through the tumbled heaps of photographs until they were assembled in some sort of order, at which point Fellows began to put them back into the cardboard folders from which they had been tipped.

‘You know what's missing, don't you?' he asked eventually, tapping a finger meaningfully on a slim folder which she could see had her own name on it. ‘It's the pics you took at the Delilah the other night. They've gone, the whole lot of them. Now why the hell would anyone want those?'

‘But didn't you sell some to the
Evening Standard
diary? They've been published, haven't they?'

‘The
Standard
and the
News
bought a couple of them, but in the end neither of them used them. I thought it was a bit odd, but it happens sometimes, they drop things at the last minute, something juicier turns up. But I would have thought Lord F and that tart would have made it into the diaries.'

‘I told you, I've still got some of the negs from that do,' Kate said. ‘We can reprint them.'

Fellows looked at Kate thoughtfully. ‘Do that,' he said. ‘Let's have a look at what we've still got and see what's so important that someone tried to get rid of them. I can see Francome might have been embarrassed to have them in the papers, but surely not to the extent of getting this place burgled. What's the point? They're old news now. The Robertsons' boxing do was days ago. No one's going to use anything after all this time.'

Kate spent the rest of the morning in one of the darkrooms, developing and printing the stock of negatives which she had kept in her own possession, and then scanning them carefully for any hint of a reason why anyone would want to steal them. Lord Francome, she thought, might not want his flirtation with Christine Jones put on show in the papers, and John Lennon might still be keen to keep Cynthia's pregnancy and his marriage under wraps, but the photographs she had taken were not the only means by which either secret might, and probably would, leak out sooner rather than later. It made no sense.

By lunchtime, she had put the prints in a new folder for Ken Fellows, put on her coat and dropped the folder on his desk.

‘I'm off for some lunch,' she said and he nodded abstractedly. She walked slowly north towards Oxford Street where she normally had a frugal snack by herself in an ABC cafe, given that none of the men in the office ever invited her to the pubs where they had a largely liquid lunch, but before she got to Soho Square she became aware of a figure she recognized and, too late to avoid him, found herself face-to-face with DS Harry Barnard, looking almost as harassed as she felt herself.

‘Come and have a drink,' he said abruptly, glancing up and down the crowded street as if worried that he might be seen.

Against her better judgement, she allowed herself to be led through the doors of the nearest pub and settled into a corner of the smoky bar. She did not trust this policeman who seemed to be able to switch from charming to alarming at a moment's notice. While Barnard went to get their drinks, she took stock. All the pubs in Soho were different, she thought, as she took in the noisy groups who surrounded her, a motley collection of long-haired men in hairy tweeds and one or two women engrossed in fierce debate or poring over books and magazines as if their lives depended on it. It reminded her slightly of Ye Cracke in Liverpool, although these were not students. They were far too old and intense for that.

Barnard came back and put a Babycham, with a cherry on a cocktail stick, in front of her and took a long gulp of his own pint before he sat down. There was not much charm in evidence today, she thought.

‘I'm glad I saw you,' he said. ‘There's been another murder.'

Kate felt her mouth dry. ‘Where?' she asked.

‘More or less the same place. The bookshop under Jonathon Mason's flat, your brother's flat, as it goes. The bookseller's been killed in much the same way as Mason. I thought you'd want to know before it appears in the
News
and the
Standard.
'

She tried to conceal the sense of relief which almost overwhelmed her but she didn't think she succeeded very well. ‘Well, Tom couldn't—' She stopped, aware that she was giving too much away.

‘Couldn't he?' Barnard asked, with a hint of a smile but unfriendly eyes. ‘So you do know where he is?'

Kate shook her head. ‘No, I don't,' she said flatly. ‘He was very careful not to tell me that when I spoke to him.'

‘When you went to Liverpool?'

‘That was a work trip,' she said. ‘Nothing to do with Tom. I went to take some photographs. Ask my boss if you don't believe me.'

‘And that's the late Dylan Thomas pickled in alcohol over there,' Barnard said, waving at a heavily built man already the worse for wear in spite of the time of day. ‘And I'm Father Christmas. This really was his favourite pub when he was in London, by the way. Dylan Thomas, I mean. Anyway, I don't really think the Murder Squad have your brother down for this latest killing, but I know DCI Venables still wants to talk to him about his flatmate. It's not over yet, by any means. The only thing which will get him out of this is if he can prove he has a solid alibi for the night Mason died.'

Kate took a sip of her Babycham and wondered how long it would be before this nightmare was over. ‘We had a burglary at work last night,' she said, wanting the subject changed. ‘Why do you think anyone would break in and steal photographs, and take the trouble to burn a whole lot of negatives?'

Barnard looked at her curiously. ‘What were the photographs of?' he asked.

‘Some of them were the ones I took at the boxing match last week, the Robertsons' big do.'

‘Were they likely to be embarrassing? Someone with someone they shouldn't have been with? Something like that?'

‘I don't think so,' Kate said. ‘They all seemed happy enough when I asked them to pose. My boss tried to sell some of them to the papers.'

‘Not likely to have been much use to a blackmailer then,' Barnard said dismissively. ‘Has your boss reported the robbery?'

‘I don't think so,' Kate said.

Barnard drained his glass and leaned back in his seat, his eyes unexpectedly drinking her in until she flushed slightly. ‘Maybe you should let me have a look at them to see if I can see anyone with someone they shouldn't be,' he said lightly.

‘I might take you up on that,' she said. ‘Maybe you can help me for a change.'

‘When this business with your brother is settled – I mean when he's off the hook, as I'm beginning to think he will be soon – will you have dinner with me?' he asked. ‘I know a little Italian place I think you'd like.'

Kate pushed her half-empty glass away and stood up abruptly. ‘Italian?' she said suspiciously. ‘What's that? Spaghetti and stuff? I don't think so. Anyway, I think that would be a bit difficult in the circumstances, don't you?' And she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving him smiling faintly at his empty pint glass.