Dead Beat (18 page)

Including their pictures, most likely, Kate thought ruefully. But she was not quite ready to give up. ‘But this will be
your
publicity,' she said. ‘There's no reason why you should be left out if they get to be famous,' Kate persisted. ‘I wouldn't want to be kept in the shadows like a guilty secret by my baby's dad.' She glanced again at Cynthia's left hand but could not see a wedding ring.

‘Yeah, you're right. Just let me go and powder my nose and you can take a couple of snaps. What's the harm in that? You can let me have one as well. It'll be funny to see what I looked like in this state when it's all over, won't it?' She lumbered to her feet and went into the hall and came back with her hair combed and her lipstick renewed. ‘Go on then,' she said more cheerfully. ‘Let's have a picture of Mrs Lennon and baby. Why not?'

ELEVEN

D
S Harry Barnard had made it his business to be at the magistrate's court that morning when the vagrant Hamish Macdonald came before their worships. After the hearing, when most of the derelicts who had been picked up the previous night had been handed down fines that they had no possibility of paying, and had resigned themselves to a week or two in jail instead, he went down to the cells and located Hamish sitting on a bench with the rest, waiting for prison transport to arrive.

‘How much was it, Hamish?' Barnard asked, making sure that the Scot could see the ten pound note he had folded in his hand.

‘Ten quid or ten days,' Hamish muttered, his mouth dry as his thirst grew.

‘It's worth that to me to have a chat with your young friend you were telling me about last night,' Barnard said quietly. ‘Are you on?' He was sure that this must be the boy DCI Venables was interested in, his suspicions confirmed by the duty sergeant's report that they had found a nurse's cap lying in the mud on the railway embankment where the vagrants had been rounded up.

‘I'm bloody not on if ye arrest him instead of me, ye devious bastard,' Hamish muttered.

‘How about if I find him somewhere safe to stay? He sounds too young to be on the streets.'

‘Aye, he's that all right,' Hamish said. ‘He's naething but a wee lad, whatever he gets up tae. Says he's sixteen but I don't believe him. And he'll come back to the gaff looking for me. Bound to. He's got nowhere else to go and I keep an eye out for him.' He gave Barnard a pleading glance and got a brief nod in return.

‘So let's clear your fine and go and see if we can find him,' he said.

Barnard ducked the issue of giving the less than savoury-smelling Macdonald a ride in his own car by hitching a lift in a police van which was heading towards Bloomsbury, and getting the driver to drop them off at the corner of Clerkenwell and Farringdon Roads. From there they could walk.

‘Do you think he'll hang about if he finds that your place has been cleared?' Barnard asked as they went slowly past the boarded-up bomb sites beyond the underground station, Hamish looking longingly into the open doors of the corner pub which had somehow survived the Blitz, and which, Barnard thought, would be very unlikely to serve him anyway. Eventually, beyond a ruined warehouse, they came to the fencing where the police had broken through on to the railway embankment the previous night. The encampment appeared deserted from the road, the rough shelters some of the men had made demolished and scattered, bedding in a smelly heap ready to be taken away by the refuse collectors, and the ashes of fires no longer even smouldering. Hamish stood at the top of the steep slope, beneath which a Circle Line train was trundling, evidently seeking out any sign of life, but eventually it was Barnard himself who thought he spotted a movement in a shady corner beneath a few frost-blasted remnants of fireweed and a couple of ragged shrubs which were clinging to life in spite of the fire-ravaged soil and the still bitter weather.

‘There,' he said quietly to his companion. ‘There's someone there. You go over and persuade him to talk to me. I don't want to risk him running so close to the railway line.'

Hamish glanced down the slope and nodded. ‘He'd nae be the first to get electrocuted down there,' he said. ‘I'll fetch him for ye.'

Barnard leaned against the wooden fencing as the old man picked his way through the remnants of the encampment and disappeared into the undergrowth. A few minutes later he came back, helping a young boy along by his arm. Barnard took a deep breath when he saw the state of the boy, who seemed to find walking difficult and was bruised around the face and neck, and with a still livid scar just above his forehead where the hair had been shaved away.

‘You and me need a chat,' Barnard said, taking hold of both the boy's arms in a firm grip as he saw the panic in his eyes. He nodded to Hamish. ‘I'll do what I said,' he promised. ‘Don't worry about that.'

Hamish did no more than grunt in acknowledgement and turned away quickly, to avoid the suspicion in the boy's eyes and to hide the guilt in his own.

‘Bastard,' the boy snarled in little more than a croaking whisper. ‘I thought he was my mate. You a copper?'

‘Detective,' Barnard said. ‘It's all right, he is your friend, as it goes. He's doing his best for you. I only want to ask you a few questions, and then we'll find you somewhere safe to stay. I promised the old man I'd do that. You look as if you need it.' He pulled his unwilling companion back through the fence and turned him up the hill towards Rosebery Avenue where he shepherded him into a cafe and sat him at a table close to the counter while he ordered two teas and bacon sandwiches which the boy fell on wolfishly.

‘How long is it since you had a proper meal?' Barnard asked. The boy gazed at him blankly, shivering inside his over-large sweater. The sergeant took one of his arms and pushed the sleeve up carefully, wincing at the bruises round his wrist where he had obviously been manacled in some way. The boy looked at him with blank eyes, offering no explanation.

‘Don't remember many meals,' he muttered, his mouth full. ‘They gave me a lot of booze last night. I don't remember eating much.'

‘You're not a Londoner,' Barnard said, unable to place the slight northern accent he detected.

‘You're reet,' the boy conceded, and it was obvious he was not going to admit any more than that about where he had come from. He was, Barnard thought, one of the hundreds of runaways who got this far every year and more often than not were never heard from again back in their home towns.

‘Where were you last night?' Barnard asked, guessing he might be more willing to talk about recent events.

‘Dunno. They took me in a car from Les's place. A big car. All leather seats an' that. Right posh.'

‘And then what? You look as if you had a rough time somewhere.'

‘It was a party, wasn't it? Les took me to a party. He promised me twenty quid if I'd go.'

‘And did he pay you?' Barnard asked, his eyes angry.

‘Nay, he didn't, he said he'd give it me next time, didn't he?' The boy's eyes suddenly filled with tears and he dashed them away angrily. ‘Bastard. I really, really need that money.' And he would be really, really unlikely to get it, Barnard thought wearily, while the men who were using him found the promise an easy way of keeping him compliant.

‘And what went on at this party? You don't look as if you enjoyed it.'

‘They took pictures, didn't they? Lots of pictures. With me yelling like a banshee for them to stop.'

‘They hurt you?' Barnard asked although he knew the question was redundant. One look at the boy's bruises was enough to tell him that. ‘So you don't want to go back for your money?' he asked.

The boy glanced away before replying. ‘I need twenty quid,' he said.

‘If you help me find the men who were at this so-called party, I reckon I can find you twenty quid, no trouble.'

The boy finished his greasy sandwich and glanced longingly at the woman behind the counter.

‘I can find you somewhere safe to stay as well,' Barnard said. ‘They'll feed you.'

But the boy still hesitated. ‘Where's Hamish gone?' he asked.

‘Hamish is all right,' Barnard said. ‘He's a tough old bugger. But you're not, are you? You shouldn't have come out of the hospital. You need looking after.'

‘But you want to know stuff? You're not going to gi' me twenty quid for nowt, are you? What do you want to know?'

‘For a start, where this man Les lives, the bloke who took you to this party.'

The boy glanced out of the steamy cafe window. ‘Not far,' he said. ‘Up by St Pancras. I can show you.'

‘Do you know any other names?'

The boy shook his head. ‘Nobody tells you names, do they?' he said.

‘It's a deal, then?' Barnard asked, feeling a stir of excitement. A lot of his work consisted of harassing people he pitied more than he condemned, but the men who had abused this boy he badly wanted to find. ‘I get you somewhere safe to stay and you help me? Starting by tracking down this Les?'

The boy nodded, running a finger round the last remnants of bacon fat and licking it.

‘And the twenty quid as well?'

‘Fine,' Barnard said. ‘The twenty quid it is.'

The Rev David Hamilton had turned to God after his army career had pretty much ended at Dunkirk, where he was one of the troops defending the evacuating army from the rear around Calais. Wounded in the thigh, he had been picked up close to death by the advancing Germans as the last rescue ships and flotillas of small boats headed away into the Channel without him and the rest of the rearguard. In pain and bleeding heavily, he half expected to be shot out of hand but he was lucky with the unit who found him and spent time in military hospitals before being transferred to various PoW camps, and experiencing no more of the conflict. When peace was declared and he came back to the Home Counties with a pronounced limp, he resigned his commission, to his army family's consternation, and signed up for the Anglican ministry at an evangelical training college in the north of England.

He had taken over as rector of St Peter's, a gothic barn of a church on the edge of Soho, five years before, taken a single walk around the red light district after dark on his first evening, and there and then decided that he had found his mission in life. He would use what God had kindly given him in the way of real estate to rescue as many of the benighted young people who earned their livings in the clubs and brothels of the neighbourhood as he humanly could. The very next morning he set in train a military campaign to raise the money and gain the support he needed from his superiors to set up the enterprise he planned.

It was not that he neglected the handful of loyal and mainly ancient parishioners who turned up each Sunday to Matins and Evensong, and the even smaller group who staggered into early Communion once a month. He simply regarded them as a very minor part of his ministry unless they volunteered to help him, as a few of the more able-bodied did. His main objective was to use the space the vast, echoing and almost always empty church offered, both above ground in the nave, which he split in two, the smaller portion at the east end for religious worship, the larger for other purposes, and also underground in the low-vaulted but spacious crypt.

By the time Sergeant Harry Barnard had joined the Vice Squad, St Peter's had established itself as a haven for young people who were either homeless or anxious to escape from the sex trade which had sucked them in and was reluctant to spit them out again. And to the surprise of outsiders, in the police force as much as the church, while Hamilton's religious rhetoric was fiercely ridiculed in what he called the devil's square mile, his refuge worked, not always or with every one of the young people he encouraged in and counselled, but with enough of them to impress those who noticed such things. St Peter's Refuge became well-established and well-regarded and was run with military precision and efficiency and a firm eye on Biblical precepts at all times, no drink, no fags and beds to be neatly made ready for inspection before breakfast every morning.

Sergeant Barnard arrived with his charge late in the afternoon, when he knew that arrangements could be made for new arrivals. The boy followed him in through the church doors, dragging his feet and peering into the gloomy interior with deep suspicion. The Rev Dave, as he insisted on being called, marched down what had once been the central aisle with his hand held out enthusiastically to the sergeant.

‘What have we got here, Harry?' he asked. ‘Come into the office and tell me all about it.' He put a heavy hand on the boy's shoulder and urged him forward. ‘Come on, laddie, don't be frightened. We're here help you.'

Barnard watched in admiration as the vicar sat the boy down and with surprising gentleness explained that he could give him a temporary home, and even help him find a permanent one, but insisted that in exchange he must provide some information about himself. Hamilton's combination of sympathy and firmness, as he sat across the desk from the boy with his pen poised to fill in the application form which he insisted was necessary, succeeded where Barnard's attempts to elicit personal information had failed miserably and the boy at last admitted to a name.

‘Jimmy,' he said hesitantly.

‘And a second name, Jimmy?' the vicar insisted.

‘Earnshaw,' the boy muttered, hunching his shoulders.

‘And where are you from, Jimmy Earnshaw?'

‘Doncaster,' the boy said.

‘Age?'

‘Sixteen.' The boy sounded confident but Barnard did not believe him, aware that he probably knew enough of the law to understand that if he was under that age the police were bound to return him to where he came from. But he let it pass.