Dead Beat (8 page)

Nancy-boy, was he?' Robertson asked, curling his lip.

‘Bloody perverts,' his brother muttered from opposite.

‘Actor,' Barnard said.

‘Bloody perverts,' Georgie said again.

‘That's as may be,' Barnard said mildly. ‘But we don't want throats cut on our manor, do we? Gets the place a bad name.'

‘Messy way of carrying on. I don't know anything about it, but I'll put the word out,' Ray said, draining his Scotch in one. ‘But if it's a knife man you're looking for, I'd guess the Maltese, wouldn't you? You could do worse than ask the Catholic priests up at St Aidans. They hear all sorts, they do.'

‘But won't tell,' Barnard said.

‘Don't you believe it,' Georgie said unexpectedly. ‘They'll tell if you ask them the right way.' And he offered Barnard the teeth-baring rictus which passed for a smile with him. A flash of irritation crossed his older brother's features before he too smiled, patted his belly and buttoned up his camel coat.

‘Nice to see you, Harry, but I'm famished,' he said. ‘I'll be in touch if I hear anything.' He got to his feet and allowed his two bodyguards to push tables and chairs out of his way to ease his lumbering passage. ‘I'm having a little party at the Delilah on Friday night, charity do. I'll drop a couple of tickets in at the nick if you'd like to come. Formal togs, you know the score. Bring a lady friend. Should be a good night. Government minister and his latest paramour, Christine, I think she's called, and some theatre people. They might know your dead actor, a lot of them like it up the backside.' Both Robertson brothers laughed loudly and Barnard could see a couple of fellow customers looking anxiously towards the door, not sure whether to stay or attract attention to themselves by leaving. As the Robertsons moved off they decided to stay, but gulped down their pints nervously.

Barnard sat in his seat for a while longer until the disturbed air left behind by the departing quartet had calmed and the barman had stopped staring uncertainly in his direction. The Robertsons had been part of his life for so long that he had almost ceased to see the effect they had on others. But at the back of his mind he recognized Georgie's increasing instability and he reckoned Ray did too. Ray's empire was large and growing larger, spreading from the East End into Soho and even the West End, and becoming ever more profitable. But he knew that Ray's
modus operandi
was to use the threat of violence rather than actual violence to get what he wanted. The odd bar or club might get trashed, but generally no one was physically hurt as protection debts were enforced. But Georgie increasingly looked and sounded like a loose cannon becoming more unscrewed by the day. Barnard wondered how and when he might explode.

FIVE

T
he doctor and the ward sister, magisterial in her starched cap and white apron, gazed at the empty bed in some perplexity and not a little annoyance, every inch of the sister silently saying that things like this did not happen on her ward where grown men were treated like children and expected to behave as such. The doctor, young and uncertain, turned to the elderly man in the next bed, sitting up against his pillows with his heavily bandaged arm resting across his chest and a dazed look in his eyes.

‘Did you see where the young lad went?' the doctor asked.

The patient shook his head. ‘Gone for a widdle, I expect,' he muttered. ‘These bottle things are a palaver and no mistake.'

The sister pursed her lips and scowled. ‘He wasn't fit enough for that,' she said sharply, before turning back to the doctor. ‘We'd hardly got a word out of him since he regained consciousness and came on to the ward, Doctor. If he stirred at all it was only to pull the blankets over his head. It's only today I've made him sit up and eat something. He's certainly not been out of his bed. It's all here in his notes.' She took the chart from the bottom of the bed and waved it under the doctor's nose. ‘See? He was checked just after he had his midday meal. Still confused, the nurse noted. Temperature and blood pressure normal.'

‘You'd better inform the porters, Sister,' the doctor said. ‘If he's wandered off and collapsed somewhere in the hospital we need to find him quickly. He was severely concussed when he was brought in. You'd better get a search going.'

‘Yes, Doctor, of course,' the ward sister said, smothering her anger with some difficulty. Patients didn't simply disappear off her ward. It was an outrage and she would make sure the boy understood that when she laid her hands on him again, the scruffy little urchin.

‘Did you ever get a name for him?'

‘No, we didn't,' she snapped. ‘Whenever we asked him his name he shook his head or said he couldn't remember. I can't say I believed him but what can you do? And when we informed the police his description didn't seem to fit with anyone reported missing. A constable came in to have a word with him yesterday but he got no more joy than we did. Either he genuinely couldn't remember or he didn't want to.'

‘Amnesia's not uncommon after a head injury,' the doctor said mildly. ‘But I'm much more worried that he's lying in a coma somewhere. He can't have left the hospital dressed just in a hospital gown.'

‘His clothes, such as they were, are in my office in a bag, just as they came up from Casualty,' the sister said. ‘Pretty filthy and smelly. Nothing looked as if it had been washed for weeks. I was wondering whether to send them to the hospital laundry myself. He can't put them on again the way they are and there's no sign of a family to bring clean ones in.'

‘Makes you think he must be some sort of runaway,' the doctor said. ‘Poor kid.'

The sister pursed her lips again at that but did not argue. ‘I'll get a search going,' she said. ‘Though that won't be quick in this old place. You could conceal an army down in the basement alone, and every floor's got its nooks and crannies.'

The doctor shook his head in exasperation. ‘He can't have got that far, can he?'

‘Well, I wouldn't have said he could have got to the end of the ward without help, Doctor, but clearly he did. So I just don't know.'

A thought struck her and her mouth turned dry. ‘Just a minute,' she said, and she walked quickly back to her office and closed the door. Just as she had suddenly suspected, her cape had gone, and when she turned round to look she realized that her fur-lined boots had gone with it and a spare cap that had been on the windowsill ready to go to the laundry the next day.

‘The little beggar,' she said under her breath and wondered how she was going to explain this to Matron.

Half a mile away the slightly bizarre figure of a young nurse, her cape wrapped tightly around her against the biting north wind, clutching her white cap as it threatened to blow off, and wearing heavy boots seemingly too large for her, clomped up Farringdon Road towards the bomb sites alongside the Circle Line. The boy inside the disguise fought off the dizziness which threatened to overcome him, determined to make it back to his hiding place on the embankment in spite of the cuts and bruises he had sustained in the accident. He had lain in his hospital bed for two days, much more conscious than he allowed the ward staff to realize, watching closely what was going on around him. He had said little or nothing, especially to the red-faced young copper who had come in to talk to him, but he had soon noticed that the sister, whose small office was at the end of the ward, arrived in the morning in a thick navy cape and boots but appeared soon afterwards on the ward in her starched uniform and black flat-heeled shoes. Somewhere, he realized, the outdoor clothes were stowed away for the day. And somehow, if he wanted to get away, he would have to find them.

In the end it had proved remarkably easy. When his tray of food was taken away after the midday meal, he watched as several of the nurses, including the ward sister, went through the double doors evidently for their own meal. They would not be back, he reckoned, for some time. Glancing at his neighbours, both elderly and falling into a heavy doze after eating in the overheated ward, he had slid out of bed, slipped unnoticed into the sister's office and taken her cape down off the hook behind the door. The boots were under the desk and a spare starched cap, which neatly covered the bandage on his head, was on the windowsill. He had not been challenged on his way out of the hospital into the chilly street outside. He had, he reckoned, at least half an hour before the sister came back and noticed that her clothes had gone, and he had gone with them.

Glancing round cautiously as he came to the broken section of fence leading down to the railway, he waited until he reckoned that most passers-by on this still largely ruined section of Farringdon Road had their backs to him before pulling back the loose boards and slipping through. He pulled off the nurse's cap and flung it away and then stumbled and slid the rest of the way to his hiding place, where he was relieved to see Hamish slumped under a pile of blankets with a bottle in his hand. The older man looked up blearily, pushing his matted grey hair out of his eyes.

‘Wha' happened to ye?' he asked. ‘Ye look like a lassie in that thing. An' wha' did ye do to your head?' He handed his bottle to the boy. ‘Have a wee dram,' he said. ‘Ye look terrible.'

The Scot scrambled to his feet and fetched the boy's blankets from their hiding place and wrapped them round the shivering teenager with surprising gentleness as he choked on the whisky.

‘Will ye no' tell me what's going on?' Hamish asked. ‘Ye've been as nervous as a kitten since that night ye came back late. And how did ye hurt your head? Hae ye been to the hospital? Is that where ye got that thing?' He fingered the thick navy cape in astonishment and pulled it aside to reveal the hospital gown underneath.

‘I got hit by a car,' the boy mumbled, feeling the sip he had taken from Hamish's bottle firing his throat and sparking some semblance of normality in his head. ‘I don't remember how it happened, but I didn't want to stay in the hospital. I need to get away. I need to get out of London. How'm I going to do that with no clothes and no money?'

Hamish heaved himself into a sitting position again and shivered. It had been a long, bitter winter and did not seem to be much better as spring supposedly approached. ‘We can get ye some clothes from the Sally Ann,' he said. ‘Money's more of a problem. Can ye no' earn a wee bit? I thought that's what ye'd been doing, away the nights.' He glanced away. The boy had never told him what he did ‘the nights' but he clearly had a good idea.

‘I can't do that any more,' the boy said. ‘I need to get out of London.'

‘Aye, well, we'll hae to think about that,' Hamish said. ‘Stay here, and I'll go down the road and see what I can find ye to wear. That'll be a start. What do ye say?'

The boy nodded. He was trembling and his head had begun to throb. ‘It'll be a start,' he said, fighting down the panic which threatened to overwhelm him as Hamish got to his feet and wrapped his own blankets around the boy's skinny shoulders. He curled into a ball, still shivering and trying to keep warm as he watched the old man scramble up the steep slope to the road and disappear through the fence. One way or another his short life had been filled with fear but the still vivid recollection of the blood-spattered flat he had stumbled into had added a new dimension. Somehow he had to escape.

‘What are all these?' Ken Fellows asked when Kate dropped several sheets of contact prints on to his desk.

‘I was just getting a bit bored filing prints all day,' she said airily. ‘I thought I'd bring you some more of the stuff I took at home, and a few more I've been taking here, on the street. Soho's full of surprises, isn't it?'

Fellows glanced at her offerings without much interest. ‘What are you doing wandering round the streets at night?' he asked. ‘It's not a very safe area for a girl on her own.'

‘Oh, I've not been on my own,' she said. ‘I've had a friend with me. Actually, I'm looking for my brother. We've lost contact but he's supposed to be working round here and I'm sure he'll be in a pub at night.'

‘There's pubs and pubs around here,' Fellows said, looking again at her prints without enthusiasm. ‘You want to be careful.' He pulled out a set of prints she had taken in Liverpool of Dave Donovan's band.

‘D'you really think these Mersey bands are the next big thing?' he asked sceptically. ‘Aren't they just a flash in the pan?'

‘I'm not sure about this band,' she said cautiously. ‘Though I do know they want some proper publicity pictures taken. They've had a new bass player since I took these. But I'm sure some of the others are going to be huge – Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Beatles. I've got pictures of them I took while I was at college. Look at the crowd in these. This is the Cavern Club. It was like this wherever the Beatles went last year in the north of England. Amazing.'

‘Could you get some more up-to-date ones of the bands you think will be big?' Fellows asked.

‘I reckon I probably could, but it might mean going home for a few days. I knew John Lennon's girlfriend at college. I should be able to make contact again. John can be a bit tricky but Cynthia's OK.'

‘Well, I'll think about it. These shots in the pubs are not bad. Someone might buy a picture feature based on those. Leave them with me, will you? And get on with the filing. Someone's got to do it.'

Kate bit back a protest and turned reluctantly back to her desk. She had been in the job nearly a week and had still not been asked to use her camera once on an official assignment. She was beginning to wonder if Ken just regarded her as a cheap office girl and the precious Voigtlander she carried every day in her bag just a bit of window-dressing. She was due to meet Marie, on her day off, at lunchtime and she determined to carry on snapping as they continued their hunt for Tom. No one took John Lennon seriously at first, she thought, and just look at him now, down here in London and with a record heading for number one in the Hit Parade. She didn't see any reason why she shouldn't make it big in her field too.