Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (23 page)

‘And can I ask where you got the key from?’ Barnard asked, taking it out of her hand and opening the door and ushering her inside. ‘I think we won’t talk on the landing where anyone can hear us. I think you’ve a bit of explaining to do, don’t you?’ He ushered her inside and locked the door behind them.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘You can make us both a cup of coffee – I’m sure you know where everything is – and then you can tell me what the hell is going on here.’

Kate did as she was told meekly, too meekly, Barnard thought although he was not bothering to hide the fact that he was furious with her. But the very fact that she did not seem to want to fight back told him that she knew she was in the wrong.

‘There’s no milk,’ she said, putting two mugs of black coffee and a bag of sugar on to the worktop in front of him.

He took a stool and waved her into another. ‘Now, let’s hear it. What on earth have you been up to?’

So she told him how she had got up early that morning to take a train from Liverpool Street to Diss in Norfolk and how she had found her way through the small market town to the Mere and met Andrei Lubin more or less as planned. They had sat on a wooden bench together in pale sunshine watching the swans and ducks, almost like a couple of lovers, she said, though it was obvious that Andrei was an extremely worried man.

‘He’s scared,’ Kate said quietly. ‘He’s very scared and I don’t know exactly why. He wasn’t very explicit but it must be something to do with Ricky’s murder, mustn’t it?’

‘Don’t you think he killed him?’ Barnard asked harshly. ‘Didn’t it cross your mind that you might be going out there to meet a murderer?’

‘No, of course not,’ Kate snapped back. ‘I’m not so stupid.’

‘What you did sounds very stupid to me,’ Barnard said. ‘Not to mention illegal. If the DCI hears about it he could have you in a cell for any number of offences up to aiding and abetting murder, if Lubin was charged with that.’

‘I don’t believe for a moment Andrei killed Ricky. He cut his finger one day in the studio and nearly passed out at the sight of blood. He’s a pussy cat. If you suggested the other way round I might wonder, but not Andrei.’ It was only now, when Kate looked back on the two men’s relationship that she realized that Andrei might have been the boss in name at the studio but Ricky was the boss in fact.

‘So why exactly did he want you to rush off to this place in Norfolk anyway? Is that where he’s holed up?’ Barnard persisted.

‘No, his cousin says he’s got an old cottage on the coast, Southdown is it, no, Southwold. She gave me the address – here.’ She handed Barnard the scrap of paper Tatiana had given her for her cousin’s cottage. ‘There’s no phone. And no railway either. It sounds like the back of beyond. He met me in Diss because I could get there easily on the train. He used his car to get there. I don’t know how far away Southwold is, do you?’

But Barnard shook his head irritably. ‘But when he called, you went running? So why? What did he say on the phone to persuade you?’

‘He said he wanted me to come to the studio and find some documents for him. When I’d got them he said he would come back to London and talk to the police,’ Kate said. ‘If he didn’t come back I told him I would give all the documents to you anyway.’

Barnard laughed but there was no humour in his eyes. ‘My guess is that he’s planning to contact you again and persuade you to meet him again with the documents. He’s got no intention of coming back to London at all if he can avoid it.’

Kate shrugged. There was nothing she could say to prove that she had been right to trust Lubin. ‘The other thing was that I wanted to get in here myself anyway. I really didn’t want to lose the films I’d left here . . .’ Kate trailed off miserably realizing what a risk she had taken, not least from Barnard’s stony expression.

‘Right,’ Barnard said. ‘This is what’s going to happen. We were planning to search this place anyway so you can leave me the key Lubin gave you, and his documents, when you’ve found them, and then you can take your own rolls of film and make yourself scarce. And we’ll ask the local bobbies to pick Lubin up in Southwold. I expect he’s gone back to his cottage. Even if he’s not there I shouldn’t think he’ll be difficult to find. As far as you’re concerned I never found you here. If the DCI wants to talk to you again later you can tell him about your trip or not, it’s up to you. But stick to what happened with Lubin and not a word about us meeting like this or I’ll be for the high jump. I should report you. So be very careful. Jackson’s got a reputation for sniffing out the truth from the most innocent-looking hidey-hole.’

Kate nodded miserably and turned to the door. Barnard did not say goodbye.

K
ate walked slowly back to the agency. She felt humiliated by what had happened and guessed that Harry Barnard’s obvious annoyance would be hard to dispel. How was it, she asked herself, that he and she constantly edged around each other at cross-purposes. Why, she wondered, was nothing between them straightforward?

Back at the agency the photographers’ room was empty, everyone out on assignment, so she set about belatedly developing and printing the photographs she had taken at the Jazz Cellar. They had turned out quite well, she thought, considering the dark and smoky atmosphere she had had to work in and she took the sheets of contact prints in to show Ken Fellows just before lunch.

‘I should think Stan Weston might like to buy a set of these for his publicity,’ she said, dropping the sheets on Ken’s desk. ‘They’ve come out better than I expected.’

Ken glanced at them unenthusiastically. ‘Print a dozen of the best and drop them round to the Jazz Cellar. It can’t hurt. There might even be a bob or two in it. You’re not exactly bringing in much any other way at the moment, are you.’

‘Tatiana Broughton-Clarke may come up with something quite soon,’ Kate said defensively.

‘Have you heard anything from Lubin?’ Fellows asked. ‘Is he actually going to reopen his studio or do we have to call it a day for you there? You did OK but I’d have liked you to stay a bit longer.’

‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘I bumped into Sergeant Barnard and he said the police were still looking for him but hadn’t found him yet. I just don’t know what’s going to happen.’

‘Do you think he killed what-his-name, Ricky Smart?’

Kate shrugged. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know her views on Andrei Lubin as a likely killer. But the more she thought about the man, the more she reckoned it was impossible.

‘I can’t see him saying boo to a goose, quite honestly,’ she said. ‘I don’t like the man but calling him a likely murderer is something else, isn’t it? But running away won’t have helped, will it? It makes him look as if he’s got something to hide when I think in fact he’s terrified he’ll be the next to be attacked.’

‘It won’t have helped, not with the police or his clients,’ Fellows said, with some satisfaction. ‘Well, I can’t complain if the opposition shoots itself in the foot, can I? I’ll give some thought to how we can pick up some more fashion work. I don’t want the cash I’ve spent on you wasted, do I?’

There’s always a ready reckoner behind Ken’s eyes, Kate thought. I suppose that’s how you get on in business. But Andrei Lubin wasn’t like that. It was Ricky Smart looking out for the main chance all the time, almost taking the decisions for him. Maybe that had been his undoing.

She printed a dozen of her Jazz Cellar pictures and then sat with a coffee looking at them critically, thinking back to the evening she had spent there with Tess and Dave Donovan. The place had been packed, the musicians on a roll, and it had been hard to believe that the body of Jenny Maitland had been found dumped at the club just a week or so before their visit. With the pictures now blown up faces were more clearly visible and on one shot, taken while the musicians were having a break and some of them had come into the main room seeking refreshment, she drew a sharp breath when she recognized someone she did not expect to see in the crowd. Behind a shot of Muddy Abraham talking to two intense middle-aged men, she picked out the face of Chris Swift, the clarinettist, seemingly in animated conversation with a young girl Kate recognized.

‘What on earth were you doing there, Sylvia?’ Kate muttered under her breath, knowing with a sick feeling that there was no way of asking her and quite probably no way of ever finding out. Sylvia could not have been there in the audience for the whole evening or she would have seen her, she thought. She must have come in during the interval, presumably to talk to Swift specifically. Could he be the father of her baby, she wondered? Or was there some even more sinister reason for their intense discussion?

She sat at her desk for a long time wondering what to do next. When she’d made her decision she went back into the darkroom and printed a duplicate set of photographs and put them into two separate envelopes. One she addressed to Stan Weston at the Jazz Cellar, the other to DS Harry Barnard with a note to identify the slightly fuzzy image of Sylvia Hubbard. Perhaps Swift was the father of Sylvia’s unborn child, she thought, or perhaps there was more to it than that, but this time, she thought, she would leave it to Barnard to find out. She really did not want to talk to him again today. She would simply deliver her pictures to him and to Stan Weston and leave it at that.

Her first call was at the Jazz Cellar where she didn’t really expect any of the musicians to be around at lunchtime. But when she pushed at the half-open main door she saw Stan Weston by the shuttered bar on the other side of the room, deep in discussion with his drummer Steve O’Leary. She made her way across the room with her envelope of photographs in her hand.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you’d be here so early in the day.’

‘We’re having a rehearsal with a new saxophone man,’ Weston said curtly. ‘A stand-in until Muddy Abraham gets back.’

‘If he gets back,’ O’Leary added, his expression gloomy. ‘I called his lawyer and he seems to think they want to send Muddy back to America. Deport him, that is. It seems completely crazy. He only had a spliff. What’s it all about?’

‘He told me he was naturalized British,’ Weston said. ‘Can they do that to him? He’s been here since the war, for God’s sake.’

‘I’ve no idea what they can do,’ Kate said. ‘I do know some London bizzies don’t like black men, so maybe they don’t like Muddy. Why don’t you ask Sergeant Barnard what’s going on? He’ll know.’

‘Maybe I will,’ Weston said. ‘So anyway, what can we do for you?’

‘I just popped in to bring you some prints of the pictures I took the night I was here with my friends,’ she said. ‘I think some of them might be quite good as publicity pics if you want to buy them off the agency I work for.’ She handed him the envelope of prints.

‘God, I’d forgotten all about that,’ Weston said. ‘What with the police raid and Muddy still banged up, it went right out of my head.’ He pulled the photographs out of the envelope and looked at them critically, one by one, with O’Leary looking over his shoulder.

‘They’re good,’ he said slowly. ‘We could certainly use some of them. Can you blow them up a bit bigger?’

‘Yes, easily,’ Kate said.

‘We won’t want to use the ones with Muddy in until we know he’s coming back,’ Weston said. ‘But the ones of Gerry Statham are good. I’m hoping to have him back soon. Leave them with me and I’ll get back to you. Is that OK?’

‘Of course. The address and phone number are in there.’ She turned away and realized that Chris Swift had come into the club behind them and was heading their way.

‘Look at these, Chris,’ O’Leary said. ‘There’s a couple of good shots of you.’

‘Let me know what you want. You’ve got the agency number on the back,’ Kate said, as she headed for the door quickly, wondering if perhaps she had made a mistake in bringing the pictures to the club before showing them to Harry Barnard. She did not particularly want to be around if Swift saw himself and Sylvia in the background. She hoped she had not got it wrong again.

She hurried through Soho and across Regent Street, packed with shoppers already eagerly thinking about Christmas presents, and made her way to the police station. The sergeant at the front desk looked her up and down admiringly when she asked for DS Barnard and kept on giving her the odd wink while she sat on a hard chair opposite him waiting for the sergeant to emerge from the interior of the building. He kept her waiting and she wondered if it was deliberate. If only she could sort out her own feelings about the good-looking sergeant she might be able to sort out their fractious relationship too, even end it, as her friend Tess was constantly telling her to do.

‘Let’s go and have a coffee,’ he said, when he eventually emerged. He had his coat and hat on and obviously wanted to get out of the building as soon as possible.

‘Nice one, Flash,’ the desk sergeant called out with a knowing leer as they made for the doors. Barnard ignored him and led her to a coffee bar in one of the side streets behind Regent Street, sat her at a table away from the windows and went to the counter to order. He did not seem particularly pleased to see her, Kate thought and wondered if her consistent rejection of his invitations was beginning to get to him. The trouble was, she still could not decide from day to day whether she really meant them or not. When she was out of his sight it seemed logical not to get involved with him more deeply. When she was with him, even when she was fighting with him, she found it very hard indeed to resist his charm. Today though, she realized, the charm was very firmly turned off.

He put a cappuccino in front of her and sat down opposite. ‘I think I’d rather you didn’t come calling at the nick,’ he said. ‘You’re a witness and my boss won’t approve of us socializing.’

‘I didn’t come to socialize, I came to do a bit more witnessing,’ Kate said lightly, taking a sip of her coffee and wiping the foam off her top lip with a finger. ‘I came to give you these.’ She passed her second envelope across the desk. ‘I thought you might find one of them specially interesting.’

He flicked through them quickly at first but slowed to a halt when he found the one she knew would grab his attention. ‘There, in the background, behind Muddy Abraham?’ he said. ‘Is that what you meant? It’s Sylvia Hubbard, isn’t it? And the man she’s with is Chris Swift, the clarinet man? They seem to be having a bit of a ding-dong.’