Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (28 page)

Tatiana appeared suddenly and stood by his side looking distraught as the trickle of people moving out became a rush. Kate felt tears pricking her eyes and a sense of outrage as she followed the crowd into the dining room where a black-and-white television was showing flickering film of the events in Dallas that had ended in tragedy a couple of hours earlier. Her mother, she thought, an Irishwoman with immense pride in Kennedy, would be in pieces. Roddy Broughton-Clarke’s party, she knew, was effectively over.

After a few minutes she turned away, too upset to watch any more, only to find her path was blocked by Broughton-Clarke himself, with Chris Swift close behind.

‘I want a word with you, young lady,’ Broughton-Clarke hissed and took hold of her arm. Between them the two men marched her towards the back of the house and into a small stone flagged alcove close to the kitchen. They were far too strong to resist, and as she looked around she realized no one else had noticed her plight.

‘What the hell were you doing upstairs?’ Broughton-Clarke asked. ‘No one asked you to go up there, least of all knocking on doors and making a nuisance of yourself.’

‘I was looking for the toilet,’ Kate said. ‘Then I heard someone cry out. What’s going on up there, for goodness’ sake?’ She knew the answer to that but her only defence was to appear naive.

‘That’s nothing to do with you,’ Broughton-Clarke said. It was obvious he did not believe her, and she felt icy cold.

‘And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep quiet about it,’ Chris Swift said quietly. ‘We don’t want any more nasty accidents, do we?’

Kate swallowed hard as various random pieces of information came together in her head and Broughton-Clarke pricked her neck lightly with the point of his knife she had not noticed he was holding. It was not a big knife, she told herself, but it was obviously razor sharp and quite long enough to cut a throat with. She fought a rising panic. She knew how very easy it was to cut a throat.

‘What people do upstairs is their business,’ Broughton-Clarke said, pressing slightly harder so that Kate felt a trickle of blood run down her neck. ‘Nothing to worry about, you nosy little cow.’

‘Nothing to talk about,’ Swift added. ‘Not so much as a single word, if you know what’s good for you.’

What would have happened next she never knew because they all heard someone approaching heavily down the narrow corridor behind them.

‘There you are, Roddy,’ Ray Robertson said heartily. ‘I was looking for you, mate. There’s obviously a lull in proceedings. Can we have a private word?’

Kate slipped out of Broughton-Clarke’s reach with breathless relief as the two men froze. For a moment she almost panicked again as Robertson grabbed her arm but he pulled her firmly out of the alcove and shoved her back towards the subdued crowds in the hall, some of them already milling about and demanding their coats from the harassed butler.

‘Time for Miss O’Donnell to go home, I think,’ he said to the other two men. ‘No harm done, is there Katie? Just a little misunderstanding.’

Kate wasted no time in taking Ray Robertson’s advice. She retrieved her coat and, heart thumping uncomfortably, followed a couple in evening dress out of the main doors. They headed for their car while she began the long walk down the drive towards the road hoping that when she got there she could beg a lift back into Amersham. But when she arrived at the gates she found to her astonishment that several of the departing cars had been stopped by police who had blocked the exit with their own vehicles, blue lights flashing. She stood uncertainly by for a moment wondering if she would be allowed to make her way out when she saw a familiar figure getting out of a familiar red Ford Capri parked behind the official vehicles and coming towards her.

‘I was about to come and look for you,’ DS Harry Barnard said putting an arm round her. ‘Come and sit in my car. This is all about to get very interesting.’ It was only when he got her into the car that he noticed the trickle of blood running down her neck.

‘Who the hell did that to you?’ he asked.

‘Roddy had a knife,’ she said. She felt suddenly sick as she realized how close she had come to a man who would have had no hesitation in using his weapon had Ray Robertson not intervened. ‘I went upstairs and saw – or heard – too much,’ she whispered. ‘Roddy and Chris Swift grabbed me. Your friend Ray found me just in time.’

‘I’ll bloody have those two bastards,’ Barnard said. ‘I followed Swift here. He was delivering girls, bold as brass. Those two won’t see the light of day for a very, very long time.’

It was almost a week before Kate and Harry Barnard met again away from the police station where she had made her statement, handed over the photographs she had taken at Broughton Hall and accepted that she would be an important witness when Roddy Broughton-Clarke and Chris Swift eventually came to trial on a charge of murdering Jenny Maitland and Ricky Smart. They met again at the Greek restaurant where he had introduced Kate to the delights of kebabs and ouzo.

‘You won’t be alone giving evidence,’ Barnard said when they were settled at a table and had ordered
mezze
. ‘When we rounded up all the girls who were at the hall that night, including the ones Swift had delivered personally, they fell over themselves to make complaints against Swift and Broughton-Clarke, and Ricky Smart. Ricky was the one who procured the girls but Swift was the one who found the clients and made sure the girls provided exactly what was required. If they objected to any of their clients’ demands all the men would make sure they did as they were told, mainly by threatening them, telling them they would scar them for life.’

‘I can believe it,’ she said quietly, recalling only too vividly the moments she had spent with a knife at her throat. ‘So who killed Ricky? And why?’

‘Believe it or not, Ricky seems to have drawn the line at murder, and kicked up a bit of a fuss. Jenny Maitland’s death caused the three to fall out completely. We think Jenny was beaten at the Hall by one of the clients at the last party. She might even have been killed there. Roddy Broughton-Clarke wanted the body off the premises as fast as possible so he drove her into London and dumped her, probably stabbing her just to make sure she was dead. She knew far too much to be left alive.’

‘It was a very sharp knife,’ Kate said feelingly.

‘Chris Swift is very keen to deny he had anything to do with either killing. He’s blaming Roddy, though I doubt he’ll get away with that in court. They’ve both been charged with the murders.’

‘So that’s why Andrei was so scared he would be next. He found out what was going on at the Hall and began making sense of it all.’

‘Andrei Lubin knew enough to be very frightened,’ Barnard said. ‘That’s why he closed up the studio and made himself scarce. He turned himself in the morning after he read in the papers what had happened at Broughton Hall overnight. He told us that Ricky had told him he was meeting Roddy to talk business. He’ll be another witness at the trial.’

‘Ricky probably wanted Andrei to know that he was doing well for himself, while Andrei’s projects were running into trouble. He was always full of himself,’ Kate said.

‘He can’t have realized how dangerous Broughton-Clarke and Chris Swift were,’ Barnard agreed.

‘And Tatiana? What’s going to happen to her?’

‘She’s been charged with living off immoral earnings and running a brothel,’ Barnard said. ‘It doesn’t look as if they’ll ever manage to mend the roof at Broughton Hall.’

‘Poor Tatiana, she’ll be mortified,’ Kate said. ‘She’ll never be a top designer either,’ Kate said. ‘And what happens to the men who were so happy to pay them for the girls they used – or abused.’

‘Tricky,’ Barnard said. ‘The girls didn’t know the men’s names, of course.’

‘There were some well-known faces there,’ Kate said. ‘The girls could identify them from my photographs. Or do they get away with it? Wasn’t there a guest list?’

Barnard glanced away for a moment. ‘They were not even arrested,’ he said. ‘The raid was organized by the local police. They made their own decisions, for their own reasons.’

‘Right,’ Kate said, looking bleak. ‘Although one of them may have beaten Jenny Maitland, possibly killed her.’

‘They said they didn’t have evidence to hold them. Using a prostitute isn’t a crime.’

‘And Muddy Abraham?’ Kate asked.

‘He’ll be a witness too, but after that he’ll go back to the States. The extradition request has already been approved.’

‘There’s not much justice there, is there?’ Kate said, her eyes full of tears.

Barnard shrugged and put a tentative hand over hers. ‘You have to learn to live with it,’ he said.