Dead Beat (27 page)

Reluctantly he pulled open the door. ‘I'm in a hurry, Ray,' he protested.

‘So am I, Flash, so am I,' Robertson snarled and hauled him into the back seat beside him. ‘What the hell's going on, Harry? We don't seem to be getting anywhere with the little scheme we discussed. And Georgie's becoming a serious liability. I want him off the streets, and I wouldn't have thought that would do your career any harm either. I've given Venables a sighting of Georgie and the dead nancy-boy together having an argy-bargy. What more does he want?'

Barnard shrugged. There was no point prevaricating. If Venables charged O'Donnell tonight, he would appear in the magistrates' court tomorrow and the news would be in the evening papers when the late editions hit the streets.

‘He still seems to favour the boyfriend for it,' he said. ‘He's had him hauled back from Liverpool and seems to think he's got it all sewn up. And when Ted Venables thinks that, it generally turns out that way.'

Robertson flung himself back into the car's upholstery and sucked angrily on his cigarette. ‘Has he got this lad down for the Pete Marelli killing as well? he asked. ‘Because that'll really piss the Maltese off. He was one of their own.'

‘Not that I know of,' Barnard said. ‘But I wouldn't put it past him to add it to the charge sheet just to tidy up the loose ends. You know how it is.'

Robertson took a deep breath. ‘You don't know where you are with these bloody bent coppers, do you, Harry?'

Barnard could only offer a weak grin. ‘Venables has his own priorities,' he said. ‘Maybe someone else is pulling his strings. I wouldn't know. Or maybe he just wants to get his pension with his record looking good.'

‘Stuff his pension,' Robertson said. ‘See what you can do, Harry, will you? What we need is a witness who'll swear he saw Georgie come out of that flat that night all covered in blood. No one will be able to argue with that, will they?'

‘I think you're more likely to be able to set that up yourself, Ray,' Barnard said. ‘There's only so far I can go or I'll get some busybody from the Yard looking at what I'm up to myself.' And there is the small problem, he thought, that a witness exists who is pretty sure that neither Tom O'Donnell nor Georgie Robertson came away from the murder scene that night but someone else entirely. And the more people there were who did not want to hear what Jimmy Earnshaw had to say, the more precarious his position became. This whole affair, he thought, was turning into a nightmare. And as he slid out of Robertson's limo, right outside the Fellows Agency which was, as he suspected, shuttered and in darkness, he felt an urgent need to check up on Jimmy's safety. In these shark-infested waters, tiddlers like the homeless boy were unlikely to survive long if someone did not look out for them.

So instead of heading back to pick up his car, which was parked outside the nick, he turned north towards St Peter's. The heavy doors were unlocked and he could hear the laughter of young people even before he pushed them open. Once inside, he found the residents around the long dining table eating bread and jam and drinking mugs of tea, loosely supervised by two motherly-looking women in flowery aprons whom he had met before.

‘Is the Rev Dave in?' he asked, but they both shook their heads.

‘He's gone off with that new lad, Jimmy, Sergeant. Said he wouldn't be back tonight.' Barnard nodded, feeling slightly reassured.

‘That's fine,' he said. ‘He told me he'd found him somewhere to stay.'

‘What's so special about Jimmy?' the other woman asked. ‘There's lots of these kids need somewhere to stay.'

‘Oooh, he says he saw a murder, miss,' one of the boys sitting at the table said, full of contemptuous disbelief. ‘He wakes up in the night shouting about blood and knives and stuff. If you ask me, he's nuts.'

Barnard struggled to keep the alarm he felt out of his face. If the kids here knew this much it was only a matter of time before the information leaked out into the wider world. It was no wonder, he thought, that David Hamilton had spirited his charge away so promptly.

‘Do you know where Dave has gone?' he asked quietly, without much hope. If Jimmy's secrets had leaked out so comprehensively, Hamilton would have been extra careful not to tell anyone where he was taking him.

Both the women shook their heads in unison. ‘He never said,' one of them said. ‘Just went off without a word. Someone else was looking for him as well. Someone said they had a boy needed a roof over his head. I told him we were full up but then with Jimmy gone I wasn't even sure about that. I told him to come back tomorrow and there might be a place.'

‘Funny bloke,' the other woman said. ‘Got quite shirty. Kept looking around as if we were hiding something.'

‘Had you seen him before?' Barnard asked, suddenly anxious.

‘I had,' one of the boys at the table said suddenly. ‘I saw him talking to Jimmy yesterday outside in the graveyard. He was asking Jimmy to do something and then he shoved him away and the bloke looked like he was going to hit him but he didn't in the end. Jimmy came back indoors then and went to see the Rev Dave.'

Barnard reached into his jacket pocket for George Robertson's mugshot. ‘Was this the man?' he asked.

The two women and the boy studied the photograph for no more than a couple of seconds before they nodded.

‘Little bloke,' one woman said.

‘Evil-looking,' the other added.

‘Do you know what he wanted Jimmy to do yesterday?' Barnard asked the boy.

‘Nah,' he said. ‘He was talking quiet like. But Jimmy didn't want to, whatever it was. Jimmy was really scared after. Terrified.'

The sergeant turned to the women. ‘You're quite sure Dave took Jimmy away? He didn't go off with anyone else?'

‘'Course not. He said he was going to the station, though he didn't say which one. Very mysterious, he was.'

Barnard sighed. He wasn't going to get any further here, he thought. ‘I'll just leave a note on his desk asking him to ring me in the morning when he gets back,' he said. ‘I need to talk to him.'

At least partially reassured that Jimmy Earnshaw was out of London, he walked back to the nick to pick up his car. There he found an unusual amount of activity outside the station, mainly uniformed officers piling into squad cars and vans with anticipatory gleams in their eyes.

‘What's going on?' he asked a grizzled sergeant well known for keeping his head down while he put in the last handful of statutory months to his pension.

‘The super's been seized by one of his fits of morality,' the sergeant grumbled. ‘Doesn't like perverts cutting each other's throats on his manor and threatening Christian civilization as we know it. We're going to raid the queer pub and put a few of them behind bars for a while. As if that will do any good. Still, it's good sport and a bit of overtime for the lads.'

Barnard felt a surge of anger, which he was careful to keep well hidden. The sergeant's reluctance to launch a crusade just as he would usually be retiring to the pub with his mates for an evening's boozing was down to laziness rather than any remote sympathy with queers. He would leave them to it, he thought. He needed to find Kate O'Donnell, give her the latest news about her brother and tell her in no uncertain terms what exactly she must do about it. He knew he had Jimmy in reserve, but the idea of the homeless boy being cross-examined at the Old Bailey did not fill him with confidence in his witness. Kate undoubtedly needed to take a trip home and drum up some support there for her brother if she wanted to see him get out of DCI Venables' clutches. It was belt and braces time.

Kate herself was slumped in a corner of the Blue Lagoon, gazing sightlessly into an almost empty coffee cup. She had come back to see Marie after finishing work, rather than go home to the flat which she knew would be empty until Marie ended her shift. Tess had announced over breakfast that she had a date with another trainee teacher at her school to go to the pictures to see a new film called
From Russia with Love
, a sequel to
Dr No
which they had all enjoyed the previous year. Kate wondered idly where she might meet anyone who would ask her out to the pictures. The men at the agency were uniformly middle-aged and married, spent their lunchtimes and after-work hours together in the pub, and anyway seemed to regard her with more supercilious amusement than romantic interest. They neither expected nor wanted her to succeed as a photographer.

But the main cause of her depression was her failure to find any way to extricate Tom from the situation he found himself in. She had heard no more from Harry Barnard since the previous day and she seriously doubted that Dave Donovan would help Tom's cause as energetically as she would like him to. She glanced at Marie, who was busy serving a group of lads in Mod suits and parkas, and suddenly felt overpowered by the bright lights, the clatter and chatter and background beat of Gerry and the Pacemakers on the jukebox. On second thoughts, she decided, she would rather be on her own somewhere quiet. She would go back to the flat after all.

She set off in the direction of the Underground, weaving her way through the gathering evening crowds and dodging the cruising cars looking for parking in the narrow streets, until to her surprise found her way blocked by half a dozen police cars and vans outside what she now knew was the queer pub. Intrigued, she pulled out her precious camera and began to take shots of men being led out by officers who did not seem too bothered about how roughly they handled their prey. Trying not to draw attention to herself, she stepped back into a doorway only to find that as she stuck her head out to take a shot of a man with his head streaming with blood as he was shoved into a police van, she had been spotted by a uniformed sergeant who headed in her direction with an angry expression on his face.

‘What the hell do you think you're doing, young lady?' he asked.

‘Taking pictures,' she said with her sweetest smile. ‘Do you always beat up people like that, la?'

‘If they resist arrest,' the sergeant said.

‘And is that what they really did?' she asked innocently. ‘They don't look the violent type to me.'

‘And you'd know all about that, would you? I think maybe you'd better let me have the film out of that camera of yours, don't you?'

Kate froze. There was no way she would hand over her precious camera but she was not sure that she would not be arrested if she did not comply, and that was the last thing she wanted with Tom in his present desperate situation.

‘I don't think my friend Harry Barnard would like you bothering me like that,' she said, putting on her sweetest smile.

‘Flash Harry?' the sergeant said, his voice heavy with scepticism. ‘How well do you know him, then?'

‘Quite well,' Kate said, crossing her fingers. ‘You can check me out with Harry.'

‘Oh, I will, miss,' the sergeant said. ‘I will. Now I suggest you get yourself home. This is no place for a respectable girl on her own at night, especially not drawing attention to herself like you are.'

‘I'm a professional photographer,' Kate said with as much dignity as she could muster as she held her offending camera behind her back.

‘Well, if I were you, the next time you see Harry Barnard I should ask him where it's safe to take pictures and where it's not,' the sergeant said. ‘Now be off before I change my mind.'

Kate took his advice and headed back towards Oxford Street briskly, but before she had crossed the next intersection she felt a hand on her elbow and found the flamboyant figure of Vincent Beaufort, slightly less flamboyant without his hat, which he had scrunched up in his hand, falling into step beside her.

‘I saw you back there, dear, taking snaps. What was all that about?'

‘I just happened to be passing. I thought the police were being very rough.'

Beaufort laughed mirthlessly. ‘You really are the innocent abroad, aren't you, dearie? They come in mob-handed every now and again just for the fun of it, as far as I can see. I expect they get bored at the nick. I was lucky tonight. I slipped out for a slash just as they burst in, and managed to get out of the back door in time. What are you taking pictures for anyway, dear? It's a funny thing for a girl to be doing round here.'

‘Mainly for some people who want to get kids off the streets in Soho,' she said. She guessed that Veronica Lucas would not be too worried about the raid on the queer pub but at least her commission made her interest sound plausible.

Vinnie peered cautiously back the way they had come. ‘Photographs?' he said. ‘There's a lot of people wanting to take photographs at the moment. I hear the lad who got his throat cut was into that sort of thing, and not too scrupulous about how old his friends were either. Now that's something that can really get you into bother, and not just with the Old Bill either.'

‘I heard something about that,' Kate said.

‘And the word is that there's some kid around who knows something about that murder, a little boyfriend maybe, if that's what Mason was into. Maybe you'll come across him on your travels.'

‘Does he have a name?' Kate asked, her mouth dry.

‘Not that I heard,' Vinnie said. ‘If he's any sense he'll have scarpered by now. He's likely not safe on the streets.'

‘And if he hasn't left London where might he be?' Kate asked, wanting the idea which suddenly flashed into her mind confirmed.

‘The holy roller at St Peter's might have taken him in, I suppose,' Vinnie said. ‘Why don't you ask that sweet-talking bastard of a copper who's always about the place? I know for a fact he takes kids down there sometimes to get them out of harm's way. Barnard, he's called. Harry Barnard.'