Dead Beat (11 page)

He sighed regretfully in the face of Joseph Inglott's ingratiating look. ‘It's a pity, Joe,' he said. ‘And you're the poorer for it. I'm not going to shell out when you've got nothing to offer.'

Inglott nodded enthusiastically. ‘Of course not, Mr Barnard,' he said. ‘I wouldn't expect—'

‘And I may not be able to hold my bosses off on that other matter for much longer. You and I both know you were involved in smashing up the coffee bar on Wardour Street. The manager's still in hospital.'

Inglott's face paled and he licked his dry lips but he did not deny the charge. ‘I'll keep my ears open, Mr Barnard,' he said. ‘I'll ask around. I promise I'll do my best for you.'

Barnard got to his feet lazily and put a hand on Inglott's bony shoulder as he squeezed past him, with a lot more pressure than was strictly necessary. Inglott winced.

‘I'm sure you will, Joseph, I'm sure you will. So let's not be strangers, eh? I'll hear from you soon?'

‘You can bank on it,' Inglott said in a whisper, missing entirely Barnard's satisfied smile as he made his way out of the bar. Inglott remained slumped over his half-finished half pint, until the tremor in his hands subsided sufficiently to let him pick it up again. He was a very small fish in a very large and dirty pool and he was beginning to think, in the light of events he had heard whispered and that the police had not even come across yet, that he might be better off in jail.

Barnard continued his slow perambulation around his manor, feeling frustrated by his lack of progress. It was a matter of pride that if Venables asked for his help, he could come up with something more than his former boss could uncover for himself. Inglott was just one of a stable of informants whose palms he greased regularly for information, or whose own misdemeanours he downplayed or ignored in the interests of keeping the facts flowing. He wondered if it was his imagination or whether his contacts were really thin on the ground this morning.

Coming full circle he found himself back in Greek Street outside the queer pub where he found Vincent Beaufort staggering out of the door, looking very much the worse for wear in spite of the relatively early hour. Barnard took Beaufort's elbow and drew him into a doorway with six separate doorbells, each labelled with a separate woman's first name.

‘Vinnie, you old poofter,' Barnard said, leaning heavily against him to thwart his feeble arm-flapping attempts to move away. ‘I don't think you lot are being entirely open and honest about this boy who got his throat cut. What do you think?'

‘I don't know what you mean,' Beaufort said, subsiding slightly and leaning against the door, which creaked under his weight.

‘Oh, I think you do,' Barnard insisted. ‘Are you telling me those two lads never came down here to the pub? That can't be right, can it?'

‘Not when I was in here,' Beaufort said. ‘Believe me, dear, I'd have noticed those two through the wrong end of a telescope.'

‘You're a dirty old queen, Vincent. But I'll let you off if you do me a favour. There's no point me or those two girls asking questions in there. You know as well as I do that all we'll hit on is a bloody brick wall and a cascade of that bloody secret lingo you talk. So I want you to ask the questions for me. All right? I'll give you a couple of days and then you call me at the nick. That's fair enough, isn't it? A good deal for a twisted old pervert like you?'

Beaufort slumped against the door. ‘And if I don't, or can't?' he whispered, although he knew the answer from long experience.

‘Then you'll all be getting a visit from DCI Jackson's heavy brigade, and I can't guarantee what'll happen to any of you girls after that, can I?' Barnard gave Beaufort a grimace which might pass for a smile in a poor light, and took his weight off the other man's shoulder. ‘See what you can do,' he said and spun away to make his way towards Soho Square and fresher air. He fancied a pint himself but he made a point of not drinking in the crowded pubs of Soho itself. He reckoned you never knew what undesirables you might bump into.

‘What do you think of the new clobber, la?' Dave Donovan asked Kate O'Donnell, spinning on his axis, with his guitar at arm's length. ‘Dig this? Cool or what?'

The last time Kate had seen the band they had been wearing tight black jeans and leather jackets so the shiny new suits in a slightly electric blue came as something of a shock.

‘OK, I suppose,' she said non-committally. ‘But won't they say you're copying the Beatles?'

‘Nah,' Donovan said. ‘They don't make the fashion, do they, la? This is the latest gear, a bit Mod, you know? Not so rock and roll? But we really need some good pictures. Everything we've got is so Fifties now, antwacky, really out-of-date. It's all happening down here, you know. Up-to-the-minute stuff.'

‘Did you try to get a better manager?' Kate asked. ‘You said you would.'

‘Brian Epstein didn't want to know us. I sent him a demo tape. Didn't even bother to reply.' Donovan scowled, looking slightly ill at ease in his new suit which looked a bit tight around the shoulders. ‘And you know? He took on that Judy, what's her name, Cilla something. And she's just a flipping typist who reckons she can sing. So will you do us some glossies? It's really important to have something good to take to booking agents, all that stuff. We'll never get anywhere without.'

‘All right,' Kate agreed reluctantly, looking round the bleak and very chilly rehearsal room near Tufnell Park which she had found with some difficulty after rattling up the overcrowded Northern Line from King's Cross at the end of the working day with her precious Voigtlander in her bag clutched tightly to her chest. She slipped off her coat and hung it on the row of wall hooks by the door and glanced around to try to find some angle from which to shoot which would not expose the grubby walls and stained wooden floor in all their glaring inadequacy.

‘We need a better background,' she said uncertainly. ‘What's outside there?' She waved at an emergency exit on the opposite side of the room.

‘Nowt much,' Donovan said. ‘Just a yard and a fire escape coming down from upstairs.'

Kate pushed past Dave and his three fellow musicians and through the fire door, searching around for some sort of background against which the band could maybe look just a bit original. Donovan watched her anxiously until she finally nodded her head.

‘Set up the drum kit in the corner there and then the rest of you fellers get one above the other on the fire escape with your guitars. I think I can make that look quite good.'

Donovan looked at her doubtfully for a moment and the boy she knew as Miffy sniggered slightly, but the drummer, Stevo, nodded and Mike, the quiet one with the bass guitar, looked interested.

‘That's clever,' he said. ‘It'll look like New York. Know worra mean?'

‘Exactly,' Kate said. ‘Now let's get on with it.' She spent almost an hour coaxing the four of them into various poses on the fire escape, until the light had faded and she had run out of fittings for the flash. She pushed her hair out of her eyes wearily and turned back into the gloomy rehearsal room again.

‘I'll do you some contact prints and we can choose the best,' she said.

‘Ta, Kate,' Donovan said. ‘I'm really grateful, you know.'

‘And what about your side of the bargain?' she asked anxiously. ‘Did you ask around about our Tommy?'

‘I did, babe, and I had a stroke of luck,' Donovan said, putting a proprietorial hand around Kate's waist which she firmly pushed away. ‘I told you Miffy would scout out the fashion scene for you. He was the one who found these suits. Dead cheap, they were. He says he saw Tom a couple of weeks back, bumped into him outside the tube station at Oxford Circus, and he told him he was working in a little men's shop in a back street behind a big shop called Liberty's.' He turned to Miffy, who was the only one who looked at home in his smart new suit. ‘Where was it Kate's brother was working, kidder?'

‘Can't remember the name of the shop but it was in Carnaby Street,' Miffy said as he zipped his guitar into its case. ‘Never been there meself, but Tom rated it, said it was the coming place.'

‘I've never heard of it,' Kate said. ‘But I'll go and have a look anyway. It sounds just the sort of place he would be, doesn't it?'

‘We're going for a bevvy now, babe. D'you fancy coming down the boozer?' Donovan said, when the band had packed their instruments into a battered van parked just behind the rehearsal rooms.

Kate hesitated for a second and then shook her head. She and Donovan had been together for almost a year back home, a relationship which had been more on-and-off than the Liverpool docks, and she did not want to give him even the slightest impression that she might be ready to resume where they had finally and acrimoniously left off. ‘It's a long way back, and I told Marie and Tess that I'd be in for something to eat. I'll phone you when I've developed the pics. So I'll see you soon.'

‘Tarra for now, then,' Donovan said, as she turned to head back to the tube station and slipped her camera into her bag and zipped it up, feeling a sense of relief that he had not insisted.

SEVEN

T
he boy stood with Hamish at the top of the embankment, looking down and breathing more freely behind the fence which concealed them from the road.

‘D'ye ken there used to be a river down there?' the old man asked the boy, as they gazed down at the Circle Line below. ‘The Fleet it was called, like Fleet Street, ran right down to the Thames at Blackfriars till they filled it all in because of the stink and the rubbish, and put it in a drain. Terrible thing that, putting a river in a drain. Like putting it in jail.' For once Hamish was relatively sober and pulled a dog-eared book, with only one frayed hard cover, out of his pocket.

‘It's all in this wee book I found,' he said. ‘Did ye ken London was once a Roman city?'

But the boy was not listening. He was worried about the promise he had given his client to go with him to a party the next day. The lure was the promise of more money, enough, he reckoned, to pay his train fare far away from this terrifying place in whose history he had not the faintest interest. ‘Is Scotland a nice place to live?' he asked.

Hamish looked at him sharply. ‘How much did that pervert gi'ye, laddie?'

‘Not enough for the train,' the boy said. ‘But he said if I go with him tomorrow he'll give me more.'

‘Go where?'

‘Just to a party,' the boy said. ‘No harm.'

‘Nae harm?' the old man said, raking his fingernails through his matted hair. ‘Nae harm? Ye must be kidding me, laddie, ye really must. Where's this party?'

‘I dunno,' the boy said. ‘He wants me to go round to the flat at teatime. Says he'll take me in his car. I've not been in a car since . . .' He stopped and Hamish glanced at him, his rheumy eyes blurring his vision too much to see the skinny boy, still a child in all but experience, clearly. The boy did not talk about his past or the reasons he found himself on the streets but Hamish guessed from the nervous tics he showed when he was tired that wherever he had come from had been grim and probably brutal. When he was not drunk the old man was frequently angry and the boy's life made him angriest of all.

Detective Sergeant Harry Barnard sat at his desk in the cramped quarters which were allocated to Vice at West End Central, and turned back again to the page which had originally caught his attention in the magazine and grinned. So that's what you were up to, you naughty boy, he thought. There was nothing there that particularly shocked him. Very little did these days. He was inured to the wilder shores of human sexuality by now, and there was far more hard core pornography in the back rooms of Soho, of both the normal and the more unusual variety, than the slightly grainy photographs he was looking at now. What he had been seeking was another glimpse of a face he thought he recognized, amongst the writhing limbs and buttocks of this particular offering, but so far he had failed. Picking out individual faces was not always easy, especially as the activity these models were engaged in was strictly illegal simply on the basis of their gender. There was not a woman to be seen and for that reason faces tended to be blurred or half-hidden, turned away from the cameras rather than towards them. But on just one page, Barnard was sure that he had found a recognizable image of Jonathon Mason, the dead actor from the flat off Greek Street.

He got up and went upstairs to DCI Ted Venables' office and tapped on the door. ‘Think I might have something here, guv,' he said, when summoned in. He dropped the magazine on to the cluttered desk, avoiding a couple of empty whisky glasses and the overfilled ashtray. ‘Isn't that our pansy thespian who got his throat cut? Seems to have been doing a bit of modelling on the side.'

Venables glanced at the picture with more weariness than apparent interest, though he looked rather more cheerful than Barnard had seen him recently. Perhaps Vera had come back to cook his dinner, he thought.

‘Not much of a surprise, is it?' Venables said. ‘You know what these actors are like. I don't know why we have to waste our time chasing these buggers when they fall out and get carved up. It's like the toms, isn't it? They all put themselves in harm's way and then run whingeing to us when it turns nasty.'

Barnard looked at the older man for a moment, his face impassive, but he said nothing. If he had learned one thing during the course of his career it was that it did not do to question the wisdom of those even one step above you on the ladder. Since the first time in Soho, still a wet-behind-the-ears recruit in CID, when he had been slyly offered a fiver to turn a blind eye by someone he and his puppy-walker had stopped in the street, and he had waved it away, he had learned that you conformed to the culture or you got nowhere as a detective in the Met. The DC who had been with him that day had turned on him furiously after the encounter and told him in no uncertain terms which side his bread was buttered in Soho if he wanted to progress. The bread had been well buttered ever since and Flash Harry Barnard had progressed to detective sergeant accordingly.