Blood Brothers (21 page)

‘He’s insisting you pulled the knife on him.’

‘You know that’s ridiculous,’ Beaufort whispered. ‘I’ve never carried a knife in my life. It’s crazy.
You
know it’s crazy, Mr Barnard.’

‘Tell me about Nigel Wayland,’ Barnard said. ‘Are you sure you never had any relations with him?’

‘Never,’ Beaufort said. ‘He had other interests, dear.’

‘Which were?’

‘If you want the unvarnished truth, he liked young boys, at least until recently. He wasn’t very popular in the circles I moved in.’

Barnard stiffened as pieces of the jigsaw began to make a sort of sense. ‘And recently?’

‘Rumour was that he’d suddenly got a steady partner but I’ve no idea who.’

‘Did you ever see Wayland with Georgie Robertson?’

Beaufort nodded imperceptibly. ‘More than once,’ he said.

‘Is that why you disappeared?’ Barnard persisted.

‘When Nigel was killed I wondered if I might be next,’ Beaufort said. ‘I thought I’d make myself scarce for a bit. You know I’m a bit conspicuous around the place. And Georgie Robertson must have known I’d seen him once or twice back then, chatting about boys with Nigel. I just thought maybe they would want me as a prosecution witness after all. He may be banged up but don’t tell me he hasn’t got friends on the outside who’ll be doing their damnedest to make sure he gets away with it. Goes without saying, doesn’t it?’

‘You say you’ve got an alibi for the night Wayland was killed?’

Beaufort nodded again.

‘You’re going to have to use it now,’ Barnard said. ‘Get a brief organized and tell him who you were with. There’s no choice. They’ll charge you for what Copeland said happened in the interview room anyway, however much you deny it. You need to get your defence well organized.’

‘You think that’ll stop Copeland?’ Beaufort said. ‘You know what he said to me in there when he was slapping me around? He said there was no way out for me. I’d go down for murder. He had friends in high places who would see to that.’

‘Did he now,’ Barnard said quietly. ‘We’ll have to see about that.’

In the meantime, he thought, with Georgie Robertson’s friends apparently out to get rid of not just the major witnesses due to give evidence at his trial but peripheral ones as well, he needed to make sure Kate was safe. And that, he knew, might be difficult.

Kate O’Donnell sat in Carter Price’s car which was parked close to Scotland Yard waiting impatiently for him to emerge from police headquarters. He needed to pop into the Press Office briefly before they started another day’s investigations he had said when he picked her up from the agency and headed down towards the Embankment. He had been gone about half an hour before Kate spotted him heading back, looking red-faced and annoyed. He got into the driving seat and headed quickly back into the mainstream traffic.

‘Problems?’ Kate asked.

‘A bloody stone wall,’ Price said. ‘I wanted a chat with Peter Manning, who’s the press officer I mainly deal with. Good bloke normally. He’s given me some cracking exclusives in his time. Mind you I must have paid for them in malt whiskey if not in cash. But not today.’

‘What were you looking for?’ Kate asked. ‘Something to do with the Robertsons?’

‘Not really, no,’ Price said. ‘I got a whisper this morning from a contact that someone took a serious beating at the West End nick this morning. An ambulance was called. But Manning wasn’t having any of it. False alarm, he said. Ambulance attended but wasn’t needed for someone who’d just fainted. Nothing to worry about at all. As if! I didn’t believe a bloody word of it.’

‘I can probably find out for you from Harry Barnard,’ Kate said. ‘Do you want me to call him?’

‘Maybe,’ Price said. ‘But leave it until after I’ve talked to my contact again. Either he’s got it all wrong or the cops are covering up for someone again. And as Vic Copeland’s based there now I wouldn’t bet against him being at the bottom of it. And if he’s done someone serious damage again I promise you I’ll nail him this time. Mind you he’ll have more difficulty getting away with things now he’s in the Met and not the City force. Everyone knows the City police are out of control. The Met’s top brass are at least trying to clean up. John Amis seems to be a good bloke.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Assistant Commissioner. The Press Office says he’s putting pressure on the West End, especially Soho. May not do your boyfriend any good though.’

‘Huh,’ Kate said defensively. ‘The way you talk about Fleet Street it sounds as though they could do with a good clean up as well.’

‘Yes, well, you’re probably right, babe, but as long as we’re all living on our expenses and banking the salary cheques for a rainy day I suppose there’s no one who’ll do anything about that. But the cops? That’s another kettle of stinking fish altogether, isn’t it?’

‘If you say so,’ Kate said. ‘So what are you planning now?’

Price glanced at his watch and sighed. ‘I was hoping we could catch sight of Reg Smith again,’ he said. ‘But what with one thing and another I think we’d better postpone that until tomorrow. I haven’t had chance yet to look at your pictures from yesterday. And I need to talk to my contact again about this alleged violence at your lover-boy’s nick. And I’m waiting for another contact to call me back with some details of Smith’s Masonic Lodge. I reckon I’d best stick to my desk for today. Do you want me to drop you at your agency, or would you rather go home? Ken Fellows need never know. He’ll charge me for today anyway, so it’s no skin off his nose.’

‘Drop me at Piccadilly Circus and I’ll see if I can tempt Harry Barnard out for a quick lunch,’ she said. ‘I’ll find out what was going on at the nick this morning if you like and tell you tomorrow. OK?’

‘Yes, why not,’ Price said. ‘Let’s do that. It may be something or it may be nothing, but if Vic Copeland’s been up to his old tricks again I’d like to know. It’s a cracking story and it’s high time someone exposed that bastard.’

‘Well I don’t think Harry would have any objections to seeing him exposed on the front page of the
Globe
,’ Kate said. ‘He hates him with a passion, believe me.’

Price turned the car and swung round Trafalgar Square and then Piccadilly, dropping Kate at the end of Shaftesbury Avenue.

‘Tomorrow at nine,’ he said as she slammed the car door and he headed east again towards Fleet Street.

She waved in acknowledgement and then looked around for a phone box. Barnard came to the phone quickly and accepted her suggestion that they meet for lunch with an enthusiasm which surprised her.

‘Half twelve at the usual place,’ he said, and she agreed and was not surprised when he hung up quickly. She knew that he would not want to have any sort of a private conversation with her in the CID office where he could easily be overheard.

She spent some time window-shopping in Regent Street and Oxford Street before making her way into the narrow streets of Soho, to find Barnard already at a corner table in the Blue Lagoon stirring the froth on a cappuccino. He gave her a faint smile as she arrived and slid into the seat opposite him.

‘You look glum,’ she said, her own face anxious. She was increasingly convinced that she was in far deeper waters on Carter Price’s coat-tails than she could possibly have anticipated when she took on the assignment and she guessed that if she had problems Barnard’s would be far worse.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked and quietly Barnard told her what had happened to Vincent Beaufort that morning.

Kate glanced around the empty tables around them before she responded. ‘So what will happen to him?’

‘They’ll charge him with assault as soon as he’s fit enough to be taken back to the nick,’ Barnard said. ‘That’s serious enough for him to be remanded to prison where he’ll have a very rough time. Meanwhile no doubt they’ll try to work out how to fit him up with Nigel Wayland’s murder. They’ll put it across as a convenient falling out amongst queers, I guess, and we know how that will go down with a jury. And nothing at all will come out about Wayland’s connections to Georgie and young boys.’

‘Carter Price seems to think that John Amis is a good man. Couldn’t you go to him with your suspicions about Copeland?’

‘John Amis is the man who put Vic Copeland in place to clean up Soho,’ Barnard said angrily. ‘The only mystery about Amis is why he’s not broadcast the fact that the prosecution witnesses for Georgie Robertson’s trial are missing – or dead. I suppose the Yard’s seriously embarrassed if it thinks the prosecution’s going to collapse because of their carelessness with witnesses. So no, I don’t think Assistant Commissioner Amis is going to be much help to me.’ He hesitated for a second before going on. ‘I met Ruth Michelmore yesterday, the prosecution brief. You remember?’

Kate nodded.

‘She hinted that they may have to turn to some of the more circumstantial witnesses if they can’t put the main ones into the box, and that could mean you,’ Barnard said. ‘I just wanted to warn you to be very, very careful where you go and who you talk to for a bit, that’s all. Watch your back.’

Kate nodded warily. ‘I’m with Carter Price most of the time,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t like that much but at least it means I’m not on my own. He may be a bit of a self-satisfied pig but I expect he’d defend me if he had to. So don’t worry. I’ll take care.’

‘S
o how’s it going?’ Kate asked Carter Price when he picked her up at the office next morning looking gloomy.

Price put the car into gear and to Kate’s surprise headed north to Regents’ Park where he parked under trees close to the zoo. He sat in silence for a moment and Kate was surprised to hear the roar of a lion between the noise of passing traffic.

‘You don’t look too pleased with life,’ she ventured as the silence grew.

‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m not. I reckon this inquiry has just run into the sand.’

Kate looked at him, not able to hide her astonishment. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘I thought with the pictures we got the other day we were just beginning to make progress.’

‘We may have bitten off more than we can chew.’ Price said. ‘As Mitch Graveney put it to me last night, even I can’t win them all.’

‘Mitch Graveney?’ Kate asked. ‘You talked to Mitch Graveney?’

‘I did and it was a serious mistake,’ Price said. ‘My Masonic contact came back to me and said that Graveney and Reg Smith were in the same lodge, somewhere in Lewisham. And I thought I’d cracked it. That was the connection we were looking for. So I went for it. I tackled him in the pub after the first edition went. Turned the conversation to ‘the craft’ as they call it, pretending I was interested in joining, asked him where his lodge was and was it a good one to get into. Eventually I raised Reg Smith’s name casually. Said I’d seen him with Smith as I drove through Bethnal Green. More or less asked him in the end what he and Smith were up to and why they were chatting up old Ma Robertson. Said I’d happened to see them there as I passed, him and Smith together. He went doolally.’

‘You were taking a chance, weren’t you?’

‘I told you. I must have been mad to wade in like that. Mitch more or less hustled me out of the pub and backed me up against a wall. I thought he was going to hit me. He told me to lay off. There was no story there. It was union business. And worse, he said if I didn’t lay off he’d see to it that there was a wild cat walkout and stop the paper. Leave it dead in the water and I’d be blamed for interfering in union affairs and provoking it.’

‘Could he do that?’ Kate asked.

‘Oh, yes, he could do that,’ Price said. ‘He could do that very easily. And if he let slip that I’d provoked the union I’d be toast. Bill Kenyon is already moaning to the editor that I’m avoiding his photographers and using you instead. At the moment they don’t really know what I’m digging into. On the whole they leave me alone to research my own stories and they don’t care too much about my methods so long as I come up with a good front page lead at regular intervals. But if the boss asks me point blank what I’m up to I’ll have to tell him and if I let on I’m trying to find out what Graveney’s up to in his spare time I’ll be for the high jump. Provoking the printers’ unions is about as bad as it gets in Fleet Street.’

‘And that’ll be the end of the investigation?’

‘’Fraid so,’ Price said.

Kate gazed out at the park where the still-bare trees marched into the distance making it difficult to believe they were in central London. ‘What do you really think is going on?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Price said. ‘But I know that if you see Ray Robertson and Reg Smith visiting that particular old lady it can’t be for any reason that isn’t seriously criminal. Mitch Graveney is the wild card. I can’t imagine what he was there for. But you can be sure that it wasn’t just to wish her happy birthday.’

‘And Harry Barnard,’ Kate said quietly. ‘He says he was looking for Ray and just missed him.’

Price looked at her hard. ‘You’ll have to decide whether you believe that or not, babe.’

Kate thought about that for a moment and then sighed. She wanted to believe Harry but she had always sensed his ambivalence about Ray Robertson and when push came to shove she did not really know where his loyalties lay. ‘So what do we do now?’ she asked.

‘I’ll drop you back at your agency,’ Price said. ‘We’ll keep a low profile today and see what happens. Tell your boss I’m not sure how much longer I’ll need you. I’ll be in touch.’

Back at the office Kate sat disconsolately at her desk filing some of her recent work. Ken Fellows had not looked particularly pleased when she explained that her collaboration with Carter Price might be coming to a premature end. She might have been bored for much of the time she had spent with Carter Price but she knew that he must be on the edge of uncovering something seriously criminal. And Ken Fellows was very happy to pocket what he was paying for Kate’s services.

‘He’ll have to cough up the full fee,’ Ken had said sourly. ‘We had a deal. What’s the problem anyway?’

‘He’s hit an unexpected snag,’ Kate said. ‘He may be able to find a way round it but I doubt it.’

‘Right, see if he wants you tomorrow. If not, I’ll put you back on our rotas,’ Ken said. ‘But there’s nothing outstanding for you to do today.’ He turned back to the contact prints he had been studying, dismissing Kate without another word.