Dead Beat (19 page)

‘Do you have a home address in Doncaster?' Hamilton continued.

The boy shrugged. ‘I were in a home, weren't I? I don't know where my mam is now.'

By infinitesimal degrees Hamilton coaxed Jimmy's story out of him, the early neglect, the abandonment, the transfer to a children's home, and the abuse which followed.

‘Why didn't you complain about what these men were doing to you?' Barnard asked, unable to keep quiet any longer.

‘We did complain, but we just got a right good thrashing for telling lies,' the boy muttered. ‘No one wanted to know what was going on. Still is going on, prob'ly. I ain't going back there, that's for sure.'

Barnard promised himself that he would contact the Yorkshire police about the boy's story and wondered where he did want to go with the twenty quid he had promised him as he listened to the details that Hamilton patiently dragged out of him, of his escape from the home, his train ride to London funded with money that he guessed he had stolen, and then his bewilderment as he stood at the top of the fume-wreathed platforms at King's Cross station, a tiny island of despair amongst the hustling crowds, with not a clue what to do next. A man, he said, had picked him up, a sympathetic-seeming man who had promised him a bed for the night and help in finding a job. But there had been the inevitable price and he had soon found himself on the streets, penniless and knowing only one way to earn a living. Eventually Barnard broached the subject of Jimmy Earnshaw's still-healing head injury, but the boy closed up at once.

‘How did you hurt your head?' he asked. All he got was a blank look and a defensive hunching of the shoulders. But Barnard persisted. ‘There's a hospital said they treated a lad like you after a road accident and they're worried because he ran away. Was that you, Jimmy?'

Again the boy shook his head and Hamilton gave Barnard a warning look. ‘Perhaps it would be better if we let Jimmy get some sleep and then you come back to talk to him in the morning,' he said.

Eventually Hamilton led the boy away to settle him into the cubicles in the crypt which was where the boys were housed, leaving the girls to sleep in the nave. When he came back he did not hide his anger. ‘It's becoming quite common for these perverts to pick up young lads, and girls, at the railway stations. You should do something about it.'

‘I'll pass it up the line,' Barnard said mildly. ‘And I'll make some inquiries about this home in Yorkshire where it all began.'

‘I shouldn't think he's given us his real name,' Hamilton said. ‘They seldom do. Anyway, I'll see what we can sort out for him. It's surprising what the Good Lord provides if you give him a helping hand.'

‘I really need more,' Barnard said. ‘I want to find out who's been exploiting him here in London. I reckon there's a new outfit using kids for queer porn magazines. The really nasty sort of stuff usually comes in from abroad, but I suspect someone's had the bright idea of launching a home-grown operation.'

‘Let me talk to him,' Hamilton said. ‘Come back tomorrow when he's had a good night's sleep and a couple of square meals. He'll trust both of us a bit more then and may be willing to talk.'

Barnard nodded. He was content to leave his questions about the boy's accident and lurid nightmares to the next day as well. Before he delivered him into the less sympathetic hands of DCI Venables, he wanted to be sure that there was a good reason to give him over to the murder inquiry. As far as he was concerned, the lad was a possible lead into the increasing use of children in home-grown pornography. He didn't want him swallowed up by Venables' murder investigation just yet on the basis of nothing more than a nightmare which might or might not be linked to Jonathon Mason's death. He would talk to the boy himself, in his own time and at his own pace, he thought, and then decide what to do next.

‘Meantime I'll put some pressure on the queer pubs and clubs,' he said to Hamilton. ‘If someone thinks it's worthwhile to produce this stuff, someone must be buying it. What adults get up to doesn't bother me too much but when they're using kids . . .' He shrugged helplessly.

‘An abomination,' Hamilton agreed, though Barnard would not have put it quite like that. ‘They'll burn in hell eventually, but I've never believed that's an excuse to let sinners flourish here. So good luck with your inquiries.'

Ken Fellows was not a man ever to exhibit great enthusiasm, but he did deign to show some interest when Kate dropped prints of her pictures of Cynthia Lennon on his desk that Monday morning. There was a gleam in his hooded eyes which he quickly veiled.

‘Have you seen this?' he asked, pushing a copy of that day's first edition of the
Evening Standard
towards her. The point of interest seemed to be a small grainy shot on an obscure inside page of a group of teenaged girls hanging around in an unidentified street, clutching autograph books and waving towards a group of baby-faced lads with pudding basin haircuts. ‘The Mersey men come to town,' the headline announced, while the couple of paragraphs beneath the picture showed a mixture of incomprehension and contempt for the hysteria on show, and did not bother to name the band.

‘That's them. That's the Beatles,' Kate said. ‘That's John Lennon, who I knew at college, that's Paul and George and the drummer, Ringo Starr. He's really called Ritchie. The girls in Liverpool are going mad for them. John's new wife practically has to hide from them, they're so ferocious. That's her.' She fanned out her prints of Cynthia in front of Ken. ‘No one even knows they're married but she told me they really were. If they make it, these pictures will be really valuable.'

Ken raised an eyebrow at that, and Kate wondered how much more sceptical he might become if he knew the four young men had been trying to make it for six or seven years now since they had met as schoolboys and set up a skiffle group. ‘It's a good story,' she said defensively.

‘So we keep the pics till they make it big?' he asked.

‘I don't think you'll have to wait long. Their new record's in the Hit Parade already.'

‘Well, I'll believe you, though many wouldn't,' Fellows said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms above his head. He looked as though he'd had a rough weekend. ‘But I'm more interested in the shots you took at Ray Robertson's do at Delilah's on Friday night.' He fished out a folder and rifled through her prints until he came to several of the government minister Lord Francome and his companion in the revealing red dress. ‘You sure of her name, are you? Is she on the guest list?' he asked, putting an interrogatory finger on Christine Jones's well-exposed charms.

‘I'm not sure if she's on the list,' Kate said. ‘But I do know her name. I bumped into her in the Ladies' and I asked her. She was quite chatty.'

‘Did you now?' Fellows came back with a leer. ‘There's a clever girl, then. OK, I think the
Standard
diary will be very interested in that one, and maybe a few more. Not bad for a beginner.' And that, Kate thought, was about as much praise as she was ever likely to get out of Ken Fellows. But to her surprise, he had not quite finished.

‘When is this girl's baby due?' he asked, putting his finger on one of the shots of Cynthia Lennon.

‘In about four weeks,' Kate said.

‘Well, you'd better see if you can get us some shots when it's born. If this band is really going to be as big as you say it is, we'd better keep on top of them, hadn't we? And what about the band you snapped in London on your own account? Are they going to be big too?'

Kate thought of Dave Donovan and his friends, and shrugged slightly. ‘They'd like to think they are, but they didn't have the girls in Liverpool running after them the way they're doing after the Beatles and one or two of the other groups. I reckon it's wishful thinking with them.'

‘You say that even though they're mates of yours?'

Kate grinned at her boss. ‘Especially because they were mates of mine,' she said.

She found the filing and office chores less frustrating that morning, thinking that at last she was making some progress towards making her job permanent. At lunchtime, she put her coat on, glanced in her bag, where she still carried the magazine that Declan Riley had given her, concealed now in a plain envelope, and set off resolutely towards Greek Street. She knew she should really hand the magazine to Sergeant Barnard, but if she did that he would want to know where she had got it, and she guessed that might put Tom at risk. Best, she thought, to check it out first, and she thought she knew exactly where to do that.

She felt slightly sick as she stood at the entrance to the alley where her brother had shared his flat with Jonathon Mason. There was no policeman on duty there any more and no one else at all in the dead-end street, but she could see a light on in the window of ABC Books, so she took a deep breath, approached slowly and pushed open the door. Pete Marelli emerged from the back room, shutting the door against his dog's menacing growls but when he saw who had come in he scowled.

‘You again,' he said. ‘I told you already. I know nothing about your brother.'

‘I know,' Kate said. ‘I wanted to ask you about something else.' She pulled out the magazine Declan had given her and flicked it open at the page where they thought they had recognized Mason in a clinch with another man. ‘This looks like my brother's friend. I just wondered if you knew where these magazines come from. If Jonathon was mixed up in this sort of stuff I should think he was much more likely to get himself murdered by someone he met through this than by anyone else.' She knew it sounded lame, but given Tom's predicament she was determined to explore every faint lead which might help him, and if it came to anything at all she would pass the information on to the police, rather than leave him needing to prove his innocence to Sergeant Barnard or someone even worse.

Marelli glanced at the page in question and shrugged. ‘It looks a bit like him,' he said. ‘But I don't sell this stuff, men with men, men with boys. Never. This one brought boys back here sometimes. I saw him. I don't like it. Police don't like it. It cause trouble.' He glanced at the back page of the magazine. ‘You need to find publisher. No name here. Give it to the police and they will find.'

‘If they were using English models they must be producing this stuff somewhere in London,' Kate insisted.

Marelli shrugged again. ‘You hear things,' he said. ‘But it's not my people. Someone came here the other day and I told him. Women is one thing, men is another.' He pulled a face and thrust the magazine back at Kate. ‘Give this to police. You can't go asking questions like this. It dangerous for you. These are bad people.'

Kate sighed, knowing Marelli was right. ‘If it was your brother you'd try,' she muttered and thought she saw a flicker of sympathy in Marelli's dark eyes.

‘If it was my brother I would pray to the Virgin he not involved with people like this,' he said. ‘Talk to police, talk to Sergeant Barnard. For policeman, he not so bad as some.'

TWELVE

D
S Harry Barnard sat at his desk smoking and drumming his fingers on a pile of paperwork which he wanted an excuse to avoid. He ignored the general hubbub in the busy office, brushing off the banter he regularly met from his uniformly scruffy colleagues, who called him Flash every time he turned up in some newly fashionable item. Since Teddy boy style had caused general outrage when he was barely out of his teens, and still in uniform as a PC, he had spent every penny he could afford on the latest trend. It was a carapace he hid behind, disguising a sharp brain and a steely ambition which he was determined would take him far.

But the problem he was wrestling with this morning was tricky. He had no objection to putting Georgie Robertson away for life. While he had some affection, and even respect, for his brother, knowing it was little more than luck which had put him on one side of the law and Ray on the other, Georgie was something else. Ray was right. Georgie had been bad and quite possibly mad since he was a boy and Barnard suspected that it was only his brother's protection that had saved him from a long prison sentence already, though there had been a couple of short ones for occasional manic violence that not even Ray had been able to hush up. Even if he had not killed Jonathon Mason, Georgie Robertson either already had, or soon would, kill someone else, Barnard thought. His only problem was the mechanics of the exercise: how was he to produce Georgie as a prime suspect, like a rabbit out of a hat, when as far as he knew his name had never crossed the radar of DCI Venables' murder investigation, and especially as Venables had not even mentioned the case to him for days now?

Still ruminating, he stubbed out his cigarette, walked down the corridor to Venables' office and put his head round the door. The DCI was at his desk, with a telephone clamped to one ear and a large glass of Scotch in the other hand. That, Barnard thought, might become a serious problem for the senior officer soon. Venables waved him in, concluding his call with a curt ‘I'll get back to you.'

‘Good to see you, Harry,' he said, before draining his glass and stowing it away in a drawer of his desk. ‘Got something for me, have you? Seen any sign of that young lad I was looking for on your travels?'

Barnard hesitated for no more than a moment before shaking his head, still nursing the not entirely rational conviction that he needed to talk to young Jimmy Earnshaw himself again before handing him over to the murder team. ‘'Fraid not,' he said. ‘It's something else entirely, guv. I was having a drink with one of my snouts yesterday night and he came up with something very odd. He said he'd heard a whisper about your victim.'