Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (15 page)

So, very slowly and haltingly, she described what had happened the previous night with Ricky Smart. Kate felt the pressure on her hand increase as Barnard’s expression darkened. But he said nothing until she came to the faltering end of her story.

‘Where is he now?’ he asked, his face rigid. ‘I’ll bloody have him, one way or another.’

‘I don’t know where he is,’ Kate said. ‘He wasn’t at the studio this morning. Andrei took it all very lightly when I told him what had happened. He tended to be a bit overenthusiastic, he said. Anyway, he said he was out for the day recruiting, whatever that means. Looking for more girls like Jenny Maitland and Sylvia Hubbard, I suppose. Andrei says he’ll talk to him tomorrow, though I don’t see what good that will do.’

‘Do you want to press charges for sexual assault?’ Barnard asked. ‘Did Tess see what happened?’

‘She saw that I was being attacked but I don’t think she could identify who it was, not properly. It was dark in the hallway when she arrived and Ricky went past her like a bat out of hell. Tess thought at first it might have been Andrei Lubin.’

‘So she couldn’t identify him for certain?’

‘Not really, I don’t think,’ Kate said, realizing that this was not the answer Barnard wanted.

‘These cases are always difficult, I’ve told you before,’ Barnard said. ‘It’s almost always one person’s word against another and juries have this fixed idea that women make these allegations up.’

‘Why would anyone do that?’ Kate asked, bewildered.

‘Women scorned, pregnancies that need an explanation, all sorts of reasons. I don’t know how many allegations of rape are real crimes but the courts seem to assume that very few are. It’s just a fact of life. And then you have to ask yourself whether you want to stand up in public and go through all the details. And that’s after being grilled by people like me. I believe you, but lots of coppers wouldn’t. They’d say you led him on, you’re not a “good girl”, you’d be questioned on all that in the police station and then in court if it ever got that far.’ He shrugged.

‘So you’re saying I should just let him get away with it? A word in his ear from Andrei, a slapped wrist, naughty boy, don’t do it again, and that’s the end of it?’ Kate pulled her hand from Barnard’s grasp angrily.

‘I’m just warning you that’s how it may end up,’ Barnard said. ‘I’m sorry, Kate.’

Kate gazed into her empty coffee cup trying to hold back the tears. ‘It’s a bloody man’s world, isn’t it, la?’ she said. ‘You hold all the cards, we get whatever you graciously decide to give us. And if we make a fuss you close ranks, call us liars, cheats, tarts, whatever you like. So I’ll leave it to Andrei to sort out, go back to the studio like a good girl and get on with my job. But I did think you might be more use. I thought you would help. Silly me.’ She got to her feet and pulled her jacket round her shoulders, pulling her hand away from Barnard’s grasp when he tried to deter her.

‘Thanks for lunch,’ she said over her shoulder, leaving Barnard to pay the bill and try to locate Sylvia Hubbard. Then, he thought, he would begin to work out some way of evening the score with Ricky Smart.

Barnard picked up his red Capri from outside the nick and headed east, down New Oxford Street, across the City of London, where building sites were still putting right some of the ravages of the blitz. Then the abrupt plunge into the East End and the Whitechapel Road, a multiracial bustle of small businesses and shops and, down a side street, the gym where Ray Robertson had tried to make a boxer of him while he was still at school. It was the traditional way out for a likely East End lad, but Harry Barnard doubted he would have made the grade even if some latent caution had not pulled him away from the Robertson brothers, whom he saw steadily drifting on to the wrong side of the law.

But even now, twenty years on and a police career going as well as he had ever hoped, he still regarded Ray Robertson – though not his brother Georgie, currently banged up in Pentonville awaiting trial at the Old Bailey – as a sort of a mate, and always a useful source of information on the criminal hierarchies of the capital. He locked his car carefully outside the gym although he did not really believe any little toe-rag would touch it while it was in this particular street, and went into the cavernous gym, which at this time of day was almost empty, just a couple of young boys sparring under the watchful eye of a trainer. There was a light visible in the cubicle Ray called an office and Barnard banged on the frosted-glass door before popping his head in and getting a welcoming grin from the boss who ended his phone call and picked up his cigar with a smile.

‘How are you doing Harry? Long time no see down in this neck of the woods.’

‘I’m OK,’ Barnard said. ‘But you know I think it’s best if we’re not seen together too much till Georgie’s trial is out of the way.’

‘You worry too much about that,’ Robertson said. ‘Though my ma is still fuming, silly old moo, trying to get the lawyers to rig the jury and God knows what. She’s always thought the sun shone out of little bro Georgie’s bum. So what’s so urgent that brings you down here in spite of all that?’

‘I’m trying to get a handle on a man called Ricky Smart who seems to be recruiting very young girls down this way to be models, he says. Very tempting no doubt if all you’ve got in front of you is a dead-end job in Woolworths. But a lot of them seem to end up on the street in Soho, and at least one of them has ended up dead.’

Robertson flicked the ash from his cigar and looked thoughtful. ‘That sort of activity wouldn’t please our Maltese friends, would it?’ he said. ‘The odd freelance they’ll put up with, but anything organized, anything which could seriously impinge on business, they’ll take measures. What did you say this bloke’s name was?’

‘Ricky Smart,’ Barnard said and waited while Robertson mused, blowing a thick smoke ring at the ceiling.

‘Can’t say I’ve heard the name, but I’ll put out a few feelers, see if anyone’s come across him. Where’s he been picking up girls, did you say?’

‘Clapton way, chatting them up as they come out of school apparently.’

‘Naughty, naughty,’ Robertson said. ‘I’ve a few contacts down there. Someone will have spotted him, no doubt. No doubt at all. All I’ve picked up about girls recently is that someone at the Jazz Cellar was trying to get involved, just like you suspected. I was going to give you a bell about it. I didn’t get a name, but whoever it was got warned off by our friends from the Med. And I’m not going to complain about that. I’ve got an agreement with them and I don’t want freelances muscling in any more than they do.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ Barnard said. ‘Can you find out who it was, specifically?’

‘I’ll see what I can do next time I’m up west for business. Always ready to help an old pal, you know that. I took your advice about the boxing gala, by the way. I’m leaving it until the spring when Georgie’s trial will be over. Should go down much better then. But you could keep an ear open for me, as it goes, Flash. Someone told me that some of the nobs I know were being catered for at some place out in the country, special do’s for those in the know. All tastes catered for. I’d like to know who’s organizing that. Could be a nice little earner if it’s as kinky as this bloke thought it was. On the other hand, even if it’s straight up, I wouldn’t mind an invitation now and then. I don’t want to lose touch, do I, just because of Georgie’s shenanigans hitting the Delilah Club just now?’

Barnard could not help grinning. Robertson had walked a delicate line between his natural criminal habitat and his social-climbing activities, between the East and the West Ends of the city, since he had discovered that loads of cash could open even the apparently well-defended doors of the aristocracy, now many of them faced straitened times.

‘’Course not, Ray,’ Barnard said. ‘London would be a much duller place without your little do’s. How could anyone who’s anyone miss you off their guest list in return?’

‘I like a trip to the country now and then,’ Robertson said with unconvincing enthusiasm, knowing only too well how Barnard would remember his dislike of all things rural when they had been pretty unwelcome evacuees together on a Hertfordshire farm. But just what rewards Ray envisaged from wheedling his way into a grand party in the sticks Harry Barnard could not really imagine.

D
S Harry Barnard responded to the call from Casualty with a deep sense of foreboding. He was met by a young, harassed-looking doctor who nodded bleakly to him and led him into a curtained cubicle where a slight form lay on the bed covered completely by a sheet.

‘She died half an hour ago,’ the doctor said. ‘She was brought in after being found in the street, bleeding heavily. We did our best but we couldn’t save her. Can’t you do something about these abortionists? That’s the third we’ve had this month, plus a couple we managed to save. This one’s just a kid.’

Barnard pulled the sheet away from the dead girl’s face and had no difficulty recognizing the body of Sylvia Hubbard, who had sat with him and Kate O’Donnell drinking coffee in the Blue Lagoon a couple of days before.

‘Do you have a name?’ he asked and the doctor responded only with a brief shake of the head.

‘She was barely conscious when they brought her in. There’d been a massive loss of blood.’

‘I think I’ve seen her on the street,’ Barnard said carefully. ‘I know someone who should be able to identify her for us if I’m right.’ Making a positive identification himself was a course that could lead to all sorts of complications, he thought. There were enough other people who could do the job for him.

‘She’ll be downstairs until someone claims her,’ the doctor said. ‘The coroner may want a post-mortem, I suppose, to confirm the cause of death, though I don’t think there’s much doubt myself. The trouble is that if the worst happens you’ve got no chance of tracking these butchers down. She’s probably the only person who knows where she went. And she’s not telling us now.’

‘Tell the morgue we’ll be in touch,’ Barnard said. ‘The coroner’s been informed, I take it?’

The doctor nodded and Barnard made his way out of the hospital wondering how he was going to tell Kate what had happened. She would be distraught and there was no way he was going to ask her to identify the body. He had that task down for Andrei Lubin or Ricky Smart. It was the last service they could do for the girl they had brought to Soho, exploited and then thrown away like so much garbage. The least he could do for Sylvia was to give one or both of them a hard time. But first he had to go back to the nick to clear his lines with the DCI. The second task he knew he would enjoy, the first he guessed he would not.

As the sergeant had half expected, DCI Keith Jackson went into full-scale Presbyterian mode when Barnard told him what had happened.

‘The wages of sin,’ he intoned, and when he pulled open one of his desk drawers Barnard wondered if he was going to pull out a Bible, although all that appeared was a buff file which he flicked through quickly. ‘There are a number of known suspects in the area, are there not?’ he said. ‘You can start by checking them out. I don’t suppose they keep records of who they’re dealing with, do they? That would be too risky for them. But you can threaten them with manslaughter charges if they don’t tell us whether or not they dealt with this girl.’

‘I can do that,’ Barnard said. ‘Though unless you catch them in the act there’s little evidence on the premises as a rule. They tend to provide their services in discreet rented rooms. And there’s plenty of demand in an area with so many on the game.’

Jackson’s lips tightened in distaste. ‘You say you think you know who the dead girl may be? Was she a tart?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Barnard said. ‘She’d been working for a photographer as a model, a fashion model. But according to someone who worked with her, she’s not been seen for a day or two. I’ll check it out. Someone there will be able to identify the body.’

‘How do they find these jobs? What are their parents doing about it? That’s what I want to know,’ Jackson asked.

‘There’s at least one man going round schools in the East End recruiting girls to work as models. Ricky Smart, he’s called, and he’s top of my list of people to talk to if the dead girl really does come from the agency he works for. As far as sex is concerned most of them seem to be under-age, all trying to be the next Jean Shrimpton.’

‘Tarts, models, what’s the difference?’ Jackson snapped. ‘I saw a lassie walking down Oxford Street with her skirt hem up to her knickers only this morning. And shiny plastic boots. I’ve never seen anything like it. If it’s not Sodom, it must be Gomorrah.’

‘Yes, guv,’ Barnard muttered, anxious to placate a man who would inevitably terminate his career if he ever discovered that police funds had helped pay for the unfortunate Sylvia’s illegal operation. ‘Perhaps we’d better get an identification first?’

‘Do that,’ Jackson said. ‘Then get to work on finding the killer. If I had my way the charge would be murder.’

‘Sir,’ Barnard said and thankfully made his escape. He had not yet, he recalled as he left, passed on the information he had gleaned at the American embassy about Muddy Abraham but he guessed that Jackson had not been moved to let the American go. Confirming that he was a wanted man in the States would only slam the prison door even more firmly against him, and Barnard felt a certain reluctance to do that, although he knew in the end there was probably no alternative. The Americans themselves would certainly come running now they knew the former GI was not only in London but in police custody.

Kate O’Donnell met Harry Barnard in the street outside Lubin’s studio looking anxious.

‘I saw you coming,’ she said, nodding at the windows three storeys up. ‘Is there any news of Sylvia?’

Barnard hesitated for a moment and then concluded that there was no easy way of shielding Kate from the news she would certainly not want to hear but would have to. ‘A girl was taken to hospital last night who might be Sylvia,’ he said. ‘I was just coming to see your boss, and Ricky, to ask them to identify her. I’m afraid she died.’

Kate put a hand on Barnard’s arm, as if afraid of losing her balance, her face draining white. ‘I told her to go to hospital yesterday,’ she said quietly. ‘I couldn’t drag her there bodily, could I? But I knew she needed help. But she ran off.’