Dead Beat (6 page)

‘Oh, just listen to Lady Muck from the feckin' Wirral,' Tess said, rising as ever to any skirmish in the ongoing class wars between Liverpool and its more select neighbours across the Mersey. ‘You were keen enough to go out with that scally Rick Davies when I first knew you.'

Marie pursed her lips together to even out her lipstick and refused to respond to that barb. ‘How's your new job?' she asked Kate.

‘Oh, it's OK,' Kate said. ‘But I wonder if they'll ever let me take any pictures. The only other girl there is a secretary and they treat her as if she's invisible as well. She's just a walking tea machine, and if she's not there I think I'll get landed with the kettle and mugs. And I've not even seen the boss yet. He's away on some job, leaving me a heap of pictures to file.'

Marie laughed. ‘We should have listened to them at school,' she said. ‘Nice girls become teachers, nurses or secretaries and look for a man to keep them for the rest of their lives. But a term of teacher training was enough for me. I always wanted to act, and I'd never have forgiven myself if I didn't give it a go. If Rita Tushingham can do it, I don't see why I can't. It's not as if she's even good-looking.'

Kate broke into the theme from
A Taste of Honey
and they all sang along. ‘I know how you feel. I was the only girl in my photography class at college. But I really wanted to do it.'

‘It's like the lads and their bands, isn't it? Tell your Dave to chuck away his guitar and become an accountant and see how far you get,' Marie said.

‘He's not my Dave,' Kate said as she rolled out of her blanket and off the sofa while Tess pulled on her coat and made ready to leave. ‘Not any more.'

‘And you didn't come to London to catch up with him?' Marie scoffed.

‘No, I didn't,' Kate said flatly. ‘I came to London to please myself.'
And to find Tom
, she added under her breath, though after their encounter with the unsavoury bookshop owner she now dreaded where that quest would lead. She pulled a face at Marie's sceptical expression. It was true, she thought. No one at school, or even at the art college, had taken her ambitions seriously either. And if she didn't make a breakthrough in the next couple of months, she had no idea what she would do next. A future of dead-end jobs in coffee bars with Marie, both of them waiting for something to turn up, filled her with dread.

‘Do you think the bathroom will be free?' she asked, with a sigh. ‘I daren't be late.'

‘Probably,' Marie said. ‘The couple below go out very early. He drives a tube train and I'm not sure what she does, but she disappears early and comes in late. There's another bathroom on the first floor for the rest of the house.'

‘See you later, alligator,' Tess said. ‘If I survive assault by ink-sodden blotting paper balls and compasses.'

‘In a while,' Kate responded despondently.

Marie wiped her hands on the tea towel and came to sit beside her friend on the rumpled sofa. ‘Are you going to go to the police about Tom?' she asked, her eyes full of concern.

‘I don't know,' Kate said. ‘I've been tossing around thinking about it half the night. If someone's died in that flat, been murdered maybe, and Tom lived there, I might be landing him in terrible trouble, mightn't I?'

‘You don't know that,' Marie said. ‘We've no idea how this man died. He could have been ill. He could have committed suicide. You can't just assume it's a murder because the police are involved.'

‘Will it be in the papers?' Kate asked. ‘At home, it would be in the
Echo 
. . .'

‘You could pick up the
Evening
Standard
on your way to work. It's usually out very early and it's the best one for property ads anyway. There might be something, though that man said it happened last week. I'd come with you but I'm not on duty till eleven. But come to The Blue Grotto at dinnertime. They do give you a break, I take it?'

‘No one's told me much about things like that,' Kate said with a wry smile. ‘In fact, no one's told me much about anything yet. But I took an hour off yesterday and no one complained. I'm hoping the boss will be there today and I can sort a few things out. I really don't want to spend two months filing pictures and taking none myself.'

‘Come on, cheer up,' Marie said. ‘I'll make you some coffee while you're in the bathroom. Then you can get to work and we can decide what to do about Tom later.'

Hunger eventually drove the boy out of his hiding place where he had lain, wrapped in his blankets for most of the last four days. It had become harder and harder to resist Hamish when he suggested coming with him to the Sally Ann for a meal, but the boy reckoned that if anyone was looking for him – and he couldn't persuade himself that someone was not – then the Sally Ann, with its well-known services for the homeless, was an obvious place to start. This particular morning he woke to find that the dull ache in his stomach had turned into a sharp pain. He had eaten nothing since Hamish had offered him a couple of slices of dry bread the morning before, when he had come back from foraging around the neighbourhood for fag ends and food. He eased himself out of the warm nest he had created and stood shivering for a moment, glancing down at an underground train that had just begun to speed up after leaving Farringdon station. The white faces staring out at him became anonymous blobs as the train speeded up for its clattering run up to King's Cross and the boy waited for it to disappear round the bend before making his move.

He clambered up the slope towards the main road, and stood for a moment in a clump of desiccated fireweed almost as tall as he was as he tried to decide which way to go. Fireweed, they called it, Hamish had told him in a coherent interlude, or bombweed, because of the speed at which it had sprung up on these derelict sites after Hitler's fires had died away, replacing flames with its tall magenta flowers. It was dying away itself now, he thought, as the calender said spring was coming, although the weather was no warmer than it had been at Christmas. Soon the bomb sites would briefly be more open to prying eyes, another reason why he knew he had to move on, and quickly. He had earned nothing since he had found the bloody body in the flat in Soho, so there was no chance of buying anything. But today he must eat.

He hesitated at the top of the slope beneath the retaining wall and listened to the traffic passing by on Farringdon Road. A left turn would take him towards Clerkenwell and Smithfield Market where he could perhaps beg something from one of the cafes frequented by the market porters who had started work before dawn unloading cargoes of meat from the farms and the docks for the wholesale stalls which sold it on to the butchers clogging the roads with their vans. Londoners liked their meat, and had been half-starved of it during the years of rationing, and the place would be heaving with activity all morning. But heading south meant exposing himself on more main roads and that might be too dangerous, he thought.

Instead he turned north, flitting from one derelict site to another, forced back on to the road at the point where Exmouth Market crossed the underground railway, overground here and snaking away to King's Cross. Here the laden stalls and crowds of shoppers would conceal him and there was food in abundance to be begged or pilfered as he slipped quickly through the crowds, keeping close to the walls and shop fronts, head down, coat collar turned up, only half-confident that no one from Soho or Oxford Street would come this far east. He was determined to take no chances.

By the time he had begged a couple of stale bread rolls from a kindly-looking assistant in a baker's shop, he realized his head was swimming, and he took refuge in an alley where he crouched down behind a row of stinking dustbins to eat his bread and rest until his mind cleared. The food eventually made him feel less groggy, and he continued his forage through the market, picking up a couple of apples while a stallholder was distracted but taking to his heels when a second red-faced stallholder noticed his hand sliding towards a banana. He was soon lost in the crowds again and began to work his way back towards his refuge on the railway embankment when he suddenly froze. A glimpse of a man with dark hair on the other side of the street, deep in conversation with a woman, made his heart thump uncontrollably. He dodged behind a crowd of burly men standing round a stall selling hot food, the smell making him salivate, and looked again. He had already convinced himself that someone must be looking for him and fear turned uncertainty to panic and he ran, soon in streets he did not know and with increasingly little idea how to get back to his base.

The people here were better dressed than those he knew around the markets, men in dark suits or overcoats and hats, carrying small leather cases, women, and there did not seem to be many of them, with faces as glossily painted as masks, in tight skirts and jackets and high heels, almost as sombre as the men. A few glanced curiously at the boy in his thick jacket and threadbare trousers, but most ignored him and each other, hurrying along with abstracted expressions, making for tall new buildings with high windows and the long names of companies and banks the boy had never heard of, buildings interspersed with the gaping holes the bombs had left and which were only gradually being filled with scaffolding. When the boy saw a uniformed policeman in the distance he spun on his heel and turned down another street much the same as the one he had left. There were no shops and few pubs, and not even an underground station to give him any sort of idea where he was or where he was heading.

Eventually he came to a major crossroads, and to his surprise a sign which told him that this was the A1, a road he knew led north, which was the one direction he was utterly convinced he never wanted to take. North lay his home, which he could only vaguely remember, and The Home, which he could recall only too clearly, with all its nightmares. The A1 was a route he did not want to contemplate now or ever, and he spun suddenly on his heel and dodged into the traffic, oblivious to the approach of a car, which hit him a glancing blow, flinging him back on to the pavement from which he had blindly stepped. His head hit the edge of the kerb, and his emaciated body fell, limp and unconscious, at the feet of the passers-by like a piece of rubbish blown there by the wind. One of the apples he had stolen rolled away to be crushed to pulp by a bus.

FOUR

T
he only phone in the house where Kate was staying with her friends was tucked away in a dark corner under the stairs in the musty ground floor hallway, an old push-button affair that the landlord had not bothered to update. There was no chance of anyone in the top flat hearing it if it rang, and calls were often missed if no one on the lower floors was at home, or if they did not feel like climbing the three flights of ill-lit stairs, choosing to leave the receiver dangling while a voice at the other end begged impotently for help. That evening, though, one of their neighbours had made the effort and Kate found herself to her surprise suddenly linked to a familiar voice she had not heard for months.

‘How did you get this number?' was all she could think of to say to Dave Donovan, the boyfriend who had marched out of her life, all tight jeans and leather jacket and attitude, apparently without a backward glance or a trace of regret for fumbling his way to her virginity with vague promises of marriage, before taking off to seek his fortune with his band in the south.

‘From your mam, of course,' Dave said, as if tracking her down was the most normal thing in the world after such a long silence. ‘She told me you were still taking snaps and had moved down here. How's it going, la? Have you got a job?'

‘I have actually,' Kate said, hackles rising. ‘Have you got a record contract yet?'

The question was obviously one Donovan did not want to answer and there was a long pause. Kate could imagine the scowl on his round, freckled face beneath unruly carrot-coloured hair.

‘Would you take some snaps of the Ants?' Donovan asked eventually. ‘We need some to put around the record companies and promoters.'

Kate laughed at the sheer cheek of it. ‘I'm sure you do, but can you afford me?' she asked. She had no idea how much the agency charged for publicity shots but she guessed it was more than the band could pay if they still lacked a recording contract. And in any case she remembered now just why she had been happy enough to see Dave Donovan walk away. His plans for his unexceptional group of musicians were always put ahead of her own modest ambitions. If he wanted ‘snaps', she thought, he could use his own Box Brownie and whistle for anything more classy.

‘Dunno,' Donovan said. ‘You wouldn't charge me, would you?'

‘Ha,' Kate said dismissively. ‘Haven't you got a manager to organize this stuff for you? John Lennon's never looked back since he signed up with that feller from the record shop in Whitechapel. Taking pictures costs money, you know.'

‘They've got another record out,' Donovan said gloomily. ‘That's the second now, and going up the hit parade. Could be number one at this rate.'

‘They're good, though, you know that?' Kate said. ‘Different. Not just another variation on the Shadows. You know how the girls at home were wild for them. I was surprised hardly anyone had heard of them when I got down here. I used to take pictures of them at the Cavern, you know, when they used to play at lunchtimes. We used to take our dinner in from college and they'd be eating sandwiches too, up on the stage between songs. It was like some crazy musical picnic. And it was so hot. I used to go back to class soaking wet. Didn't you come a few times?'

‘I can't remember,' Donovan said, and Kate could hear the sulkiness in his voice, no doubt because his group had a distinct sound and look of the Shadows, the end of the last decade's big thing.