Fatal Quest (27 page)

‘But when she took the actual picture, she'd make sure that the man she was interested in appeared at the edge of it?' Woodend guessed.

‘That's right. And later, when she'd had the film developed, we'd go through the pictures together, and try to work out if any of the men she'd taken a photograph of
could
be her father. It was all such tremendous fun.' Rachael looked down at the table again. ‘At least, it seemed like tremendous fun at the time.'

‘How often did she go on one of these expeditions?'

‘She did it four times, altogether. We went to the Birdcage Club, the Blue Angel, the Orinoco, and the Charleston.'

‘
We
went?' Woodend asked, pouncing on the word.

‘I … I waited outside.'

‘Which one was the last you went to?'

‘The Charleston.'

‘An' that was the night Pearl was murdered?'

‘Yes.'

‘Tell me what happened.'

‘There was a thick smog that night. It was very cold, and I was worried about how we'd eventually get home. But I knew that Pearl wouldn't come out until she'd done what she'd set out to do – because she was that kind of girl.'

‘So I believe.'

‘When she
did
come out, she was with a man. He was holding her by the arm. He wasn't exactly
dragging
her, but you could tell that she wasn't awfully keen on the idea of going with him.'

‘What was he like, this man?'

‘He was tall.'

‘That's a start. What else can you tell me about him?'

‘I didn't get a clear view of him, because he had his hat pulled right down. And with all that smog around, you couldn't see much anyway. But Pearl saw me – because she knew where to look.'

‘But you don't think
the man
saw you?'

‘I'm sure he didn't. He looked at Pearl, and he looked up and down the street, but he never even so much as glanced in my direction.'

‘Did Pearl say anythin' to you?'

‘No, she just shook her head, as if to tell me that I shouldn't come any closer. And so I didn't. I just stood there, while he opened the door of his car, and bundled Pearl inside. But I
shouldn't
just have stood there, should I? I should have tried to help her! I knew,
even then
, that I should have tried to help her.'

If you had tried to help her, you wouldn't have saved Pearl – and you'd probably have ended up dead yourself, Woodend thought.

‘You did what Pearl wanted you to do, an' that's all one friend can ever do for another,' he told the girl. ‘Did you leave then?'

Rachael shook her head. ‘No, I stayed just where I was.'

‘Why?'

‘In case they came back.'

‘But they didn't?'

‘The man did – about half an hour later. When I saw that Pearl wasn't with him, I thought about going to the police.'

‘Then why didn't you?'

‘Because I thought that if I did, I would only be getting Pearl into more trouble. But it wouldn't have got her into trouble, would it? It
couldn't
have got her into trouble – because she was already dead by then!'

‘Yes, I think she probably was,' Woodend said.

Tears had started to form in Rachael's eyes.

‘I … I couldn't stay out there all night, and so I went home,' she said, in a thick voice. ‘When Pearl wasn't in school the next morning, I didn't know what to think. I spent the whole day worrying about her. And then, the morning after
that
, I saw her picture on the front page of the newspaper, and I … and I was so scared. And I'm still scared now.'

‘You did all you could,' Woodend told her. ‘Much more than most people twice your age would have managed.'

‘Do you think the man I saw coming out of the club with her was her father?' Rachael asked.

‘I don't know,' Woodend admitted.

‘But just say he was. Say that she'd finally found him, after all her searching. If she was sure enough it was him, she'd probably have told him who
she
was, wouldn't she?'

‘It's possible.'

‘And instead of being delighted to see her, as she thought he would be, he took her to that bomb site – and he slit her throat. What … what kind of man is it who could kill his own daughter like that?'

‘I don't know,' Woodend said again, as an image of his own little Pauline Anne came to his mind.

‘You have to catch him, Mr Woodend,' Rachael said desperately. ‘Promise me you'll catch him.'

‘Oh, I'll catch him, all right,' Wooded told her. ‘However long it takes – whatever it involves – I'll catch him.'

U
nless he is clearly a high roller with money to burn, no man entering a nightclub on his own should expect to be shown to one of the better tables, and since the man in the hairy sports coat certainly did not fall within a million miles of this category, the head waiter led him to a small, cramped table at the back of the room.

Woodend raised no objection, even though the table was so close to the toilets that it was almost a part of them. He didn't even mind that his view of the stage was partially obscured by a large pillar, because he wasn't there to watch the entertainment – instead, he'd come to watch the
people
who were watching the entertainment.

‘Would you care for a bottle of champagne, sir?' the head waiter suggested, snidely.

‘Aye, why not?' Woodend agreed. ‘Bring me a bottle of the Dom Perignon '36.'

The head waiter looked at him with loathing. ‘I'm afraid we've run out of that particular vintage, sir.'

‘Well, don't get your knickers in a twist about it, old lad. The '38 will do me
almost
as well.'

‘We've just run out of that as well,' the head waiter said, not even bothering to try and sound convincing.

‘Oh dear, what a pity!' Woodend said. ‘Never mind, I'll have a pint of your best bitter instead.'

As the head waiter stalked away, Woodend lit up a cigarette and looked around him. The Charleston Club was lacking in many things, he quickly decided, but what it lacked most of all was any sense of zing.

It had none of the sophisticated glamour of establishments like Toby Burroughs's Las Vegas Club, but neither did it have, by way of compensation, that inherently exciting sense of danger which positively crackled through the air in some of the rougher clubs in the East End.

What it was, in reality, was a haven in which the lower middle classes could flirt with the idea of living the high life, and yet remain safe in the knowledge that they had not actually stepped far beyond the bounds of their normal, comfortable, bourgeois existence.

It was certainly not a place where he would ever have begun his search for a shadowy member of the criminal underworld, Woodend thought. But then, of course, he was not a sixteen-year-old girl who had a great deal of imagination, but very little experience of the world as it really was.

And the fact that Pearl had chosen the
wrong
type of club for her investigation didn't really matter at all. The only important thing was that she
had
chosen it – and that that choice had led to her death.

A second waiter, lower in the pecking order, arrived at the table carrying a pint of bitter on a metal tray.

‘That'll be ten bob,' he said, slamming the pint pot down on the table with all the finesse of a riveter hammering in a bolt.

‘Ten bob!' Woodend repeated. ‘Bloody hellfire, I could have bought half the brewery for that!' He took a ten-shilling note out of his pocket, and handed it over. ‘I'd like to see the manager,' he said.

The waiter pocketed the money, then shrugged indifferently. ‘The boss is too
busy
to see you,' he said.

‘How do you know that?' Woodend wondered. ‘Have you checked? Before you serve one of the tables, do you
always
go to the boss and ask him what you're to say if the customer requests an interview?'

‘There's no need to do that,' the waiter said, with a smirk. ‘He's
always
too busy to see the punters.'

Or, at least, he was always too busy to see punters who had been seated at tables close to the bogs, Woodend thought.

‘I'd still like you to check with him, anyway,' he said, producing his warrant card. ‘Tell him I'm the Old Bill.'

‘So yer a copper,' the waiter, giving the warrant card a brief inspection. ‘A detective sergeant! Yer don't expect the boss to be impressed that a
detective sergeant
wants to see 'im, do yer?'

‘No, I don't, really,' Woodend admitted. ‘But I do think he'll be rather interested to hear what this particular detective sergeant's got to say.'

‘About what?'

‘About the safety standards in this shit hole. I've only been here for ten minutes, but without even really lookin' for them, I've spotted five or six serious infringements of the fire-safety regulations.'

‘Yer don't need to bovver the boss about that,' the waiter said. ‘I'll 'ave a word wiv 'im myself, and there'll be an envelope waiting for yer on yer way out.'

Woodend stood up. ‘Do I look like the kind of copper you can buy?' he demanded menacingly.

The waiter took a couple of steps backwards. ‘No offence intended,' he said.

‘Well, plenty
taken
,' Woodend told him. ‘Five minutes from now, I expected to be either talkin' to the manager, or nickin' you for attemptin' to bribe a policeman. Which one is it goin' to be?'

‘I'll tell 'im you want to see 'im,' the waiter said.

‘Good idea,' Woodend agreed.

The manager of the Charleston Club was called Cliff Robinson. He was somewhere in his mid-forties, of medium build, with pale sandy hair, and when Woodend asked him who owned the club, he said, ‘I do.'

‘What I mean is, who
really
owns it?' Woodend persisted.

‘Me,' Robinson said firmly. ‘This is a legitimate nightclub, not some kind of front for laundering dirty money.'

‘An' you expect me just to take your word for that, do you, Mr Robinson?' Woodend asked.

‘No, I don't,' Robinson replied. ‘What I expect you to do is check around. But when you
do
check, you'll soon discover that I've got no criminal record, and no business connection with anybody who has. And if you
still
don't believe me, you can have a word with your pals back at the Yard.'

But I
do
believe you, Woodend thought.

And that was the problem – because this was simply
not
the kind of club that a Ron Smithers or a Toby Burroughs would come to for a night's entertainment. It was not even the kind of club that lesser gangsters, with a pretension to being hard men, would ever want to be associated with.

Yet on the night that Pearl had visited the club, there had been at least one man there who was a cold-blooded killer.

He took Pearl's photograph out of his pocket, and placed it in the middle of the manager's desk.

‘Does she look familiar?' he asked.

‘I thought you were here about my failure to comply with the fire regulations,' Cliff Robinson said.

‘An' now you know I'm not,' Woodend replied. ‘
Is
she familiar?'

Robinson gave the photograph a cursory glance. ‘No, she isn't.'

‘Look again,' Woodend ordered him.

Robinson made some show of examining the picture carefully this time, but when he'd finished, he said, ‘I still don't know her.'

‘Now that is strange,' Woodend mused. ‘Because she was in this club a few nights ago – and half an hour after she'd left it, she was dead.'

Robinson's eyes darted around the room, as if he were hoping to find that what he needed to say next was written in large letters on one of the walls. But there was no such message, so he said nothing at all, but simply stabbed at the button on the corner of his desk.

The door opened almost immediately, and two of the club's bouncers walked into the room.

Like everything else about the place, they weren't
quite
right, Woodend thought. True, they had the
build
to be bouncers, but what they were lacking was any sign of the right mental attitude.

Real hard men exuded a dangerous air which said that while they were willing to hurt others without compunction, they were equally willing to take the same amount of punishment themselves, if that proved necessary. These two were not in that class at all. They were parodies of the real thing – cardboard cut-outs who might fool the mild-mannered clients of the Charleston Club, but would quickly curl up and die when confronted by men like Duffel Coat and his mates, who were the genuine article.

Pearl's photograph was still lying on the desk, but before the bouncers had time to see it, Woodend picked it up, and returned it to his pocket.

‘I want this copper shown off the premises, boys,' Robinson said. ‘Now!'

‘You're makin' a big mistake,' Woodend told him.

‘Listen, if you want to get your fire-safety people in here, then go ahead,' Robinson said. ‘And if you want to close the place down, then go ahead and do that as well. There's nothing that
I
can do to stop you.'

‘I'm not talkin' about fire-safety regulations, an' you know it,' Woodend countered. ‘I'm talkin' about a dead girl.'

‘And I've already told you –
twice –
that I've never seen the bloody girl,' Robinson said, with a hint of desperation in his voice.

‘Let me spell out your options for you,' Woodend suggested. ‘First option! You can continue to obstruct me – in which case, the next time I'm here it'll be to arrest you as an accessory after the fact in a murder investigation. An' how long do you think you'll go down for that? I'd put my money on ten years, at the very least.'