Deep Waters

by Patricia Hall

  ‘I didn’t know you felt so strongly,’ she said quietly.

  ‘The politicians keep on telling us the good times are coming back, but they were coming back pretty slowly then in the East End,’ Barnard said. ‘But come on, there’s no reason why you should let all that history depress you. It was bad, but it is history now. If they’re rebuilding something better on Canvey Island that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Cheer up, Kate. It wasn’t the end of the world then and it’s certainly not now. Tonight I’ll see what I can remember that might help you and then we’ll do something entirely different. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Kate said. ‘Is that a promise?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ Barnard said, getting to his feet reluctantly and kissing her on the cheek. ‘You can bank on it.’

  The rain had eased slightly by the time Barnard headed back to the nick. To his surprise, as he was waiting to cross at the traffic lights in Regent Street he noticed the smartly dressed woman he had seen heading towards the Delilah Club. This time she slowed down and took a place beside him on the kerb, waiting for the stream of cars to stop.

  ‘Don’t you recognize me, Harry?’ she asked. ‘I remember you from years ago.’ She pushed the flimsy mesh of her veil up and gave him a knowing smile. With a slight shock of recognition he realized that he did know her, although it must have been ten or fifteen years since he’d last seen her.

  ‘Loretta?’ he said tentatively. ‘Loretta Robertson? Where have you been hiding yourself all this time?’

  ‘Not Robertson any more, darling,’ she said, putting a proprietorial hand on his arm. ‘But you know all that. You were around when Ray and me had our big bust-up, weren’t you?’

  ‘On and off,’ Barnard said, taking her arm firmly off his sleeve and steering her across the road with a hand on her back. ‘I’d just joined the Met and was a probationer out in the sticks, in South London. Ray wasn’t best pleased with me either at the time. He took it as a personal insult when I joined the force after my two years in the army. But I had a pretty good idea where I’d end up if I hung around with Ray and Georgie.’

  ‘He took everything as a personal insult if it didn’t go his way,’ Loretta said. ‘You don’t have to tell me that. I lived with it for a good few years before we split up. And Georgie was a complete psycho. I was scared to death of him. He reckoned that the fact that I was his sister-in-law was a challenge rather than a deterrent. Bastard.’

  ‘So what are you doing in the West End?’ Barnard asked, with an appreciative glance at her obviously pricey clothes and carefully made-up face. ‘You’re looking pretty good.’ Loretta flashed him another smile, as much encouraging as affectionate, and pulled her veil down again, concealing her eyes.

  ‘I was looking for Ray as it happens,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d catch him at the Delilah but they said he hasn’t been in there this week. Does he still have the house out Epping way? He bought that house for me, you know. Said he wanted me to be somewhere away from the East End.’

  ‘As far as I know he’s still got it,’ Barnard said, not too surprised that Ray had wanted to keep his beautiful new wife well away from his growing criminal empire. In fact that house was something he had intended to check up on before he talked to the DCI. If Ray Robertson had decided to lie low for a while, that would be as good a place as any to do it. Maybe he could fit in a trip to Epping later in the day.

  ‘It’s a long way out,’ Loretta said, looking sulky. ‘I thought I might catch him here, up West.’ Barnard slowed down as they approached the nick.

  ‘Well, as it happens I want to talk to Ray too. Why don’t you give me a call at the nick on Monday and I’ll let you know whether I’ve tracked him down or not. What’s your surname now?’ He scribbled the number on a Blue Lagoon receipt he found in his pocket. Loretta looked at it dubiously for a moment and then put it in her bag. She did not, he noted, make any attempt to give him her current surname.

  ‘Is it anything I can help you with?’ he asked, pausing just round the corner from the station. He was not confident that Loretta was someone who he wanted to be seen with until he knew a bit more about why she wanted to find her former husband so urgently and, it seemed, anonymously.

  ‘No thanks, Harry. I don’t think so. But it’s good to see you again. I’ll call you Monday to see if you’ve tracked that old bastard of mine down.’ Barnard shrugged and planted a chaste kiss on her cheek, rewarded by a waft of perfume which was obviously not cheap. Barnard stood and watched as Loretta spun on her heel and made her way back towards Regent Street, her hips swaying provocatively above her stiletto heels, her skirt fashionably short and tight, and her hair a definite red where it had once been dark. Fashion, he thought, was a whole new world in 1964 and would give puritans like his boss a whole new raft of worries as they convinced themselves that the younger generation was heading to perdition.

  Loretta had worn well and could just about carry off the miniskirt. But she was an enigma and if she was being as well looked after as she appeared to be he wondered exactly why she wanted to talk so urgently to a man who had not been her husband for at least six or seven years. To his surprise, she did not disappear into the crowd of shoppers but got into a car parked close to the entrance to the Delilah and drove away smartly, heading towards Piccadilly Circus. He couldn’t see the number plate as she immediately overtook a bus.

  She looks as if she has fallen on her feet, he thought, and wondered what she wanted with her ex. It didn’t seem there was much Ray Robertson could offer her that was not already being provided by someone else.

  DCI Keith Jackson did not seem to be in a happy mood when Barnard reported back to him that afternoon. He steepled his hands under his chin and glared at Barnard as he listened to him outlining Robertson’s unusually prolonged absence from the Delilah Club.

  ‘But he’s got this house in Epping, you say?’

  ‘The local nick tells me he still owns it but they don’t reckon he uses it very often, guv. They gave me a phone number but I got no reply,’ Barnard said. ‘They obviously don’t treat him as a local villain. As far as I can remember, he bought the place for his wife. I don’t think he used it much himself and I was surprised he’d kept the place on so long after his marriage broke up.’

  ‘Keep trying, and ask the local nick to send a car up there, see if there’s any sign of life. I’m surprised you don’t know where he actually lives. I thought he was some sort of friend of yours.’

  ‘Not a friend, guv,’ Barnard said firmly. ‘Not now. Not since we were kids and certainly not since I joined the force. He didn’t think much of that move.’

  ‘So you say,’ Jackson said sharply, with a chilly disbelief in his eyes that Barnard had totally failed to eliminate since Jackson arrived to run Vice in the wake of a seriously dubious DCI.

  ‘Ray’s been a useful contact over the years,’ Barnard shot back.

  ‘So long as you’re always clear who’s paying who, and you’re the one who benefits from the arrangement,’ Jackson snapped. ‘Have you been out to this house of Robertson’s recently?’

  ‘Not for years, guv. I’ve usually seen him at the club, or at his gym in Whitechapel. I could check that out later if you like, but it’s not a place he’d be holed up in. He likes his creature comforts, does Ray. He’d be more likely to be at the Ritz than at the gym. You could keep a low profile in a smart hotel for months if you were able to afford it. And there doesn’t seem to be much that Ray Robertson can’t afford.’

  ‘The Yard’s worried that friends of his brother might still try to nobble him before the trial,’ Jackson said, his eyes cold. ‘It goes against the grain to offer protection to the likes of Robertson, but apparently that’s what the Yard thinks we may have to do.’

  ‘I should think Ray’s quite capable of looking after himself,’ Barnard said. ‘He’s been around for a long time.’ He hesitated for a moment, wondering just how much he should pass on about the alluring Loretta. He decided he had better come clean. R
eticence was not a quality DCI Jackson much appreciated.

  ‘I bumped into his ex-wife coming away from the Delilah Club this morning,’ he said at length. ‘I hadn’t seen her for years, but apparently she’s looking for him too.’

  ‘Did she say why?’ Jackson snapped.

  ‘No, she was being very cagey,’ Barnard said. ‘I asked her to contact me if she got anywhere.’

  ‘When was the divorce?’ Jackson asked, his distaste for the very idea easily readable in his eyes, the Scots Calvinist never far below the surface. Barnard often wondered if his boss had been given the Soho job because he was so unlikely to be seduced by its raffish charms.

  ‘The divorce? Years ago, guv,’ Barnard said. ‘It didn’t sound as if she’d been in contact with him much since then. And it certainly didn’t look as if she was short of a bob or three.’

  ‘And what about Robertson’s mother? Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Barnard said. ‘But I will, though I don’t think she and Ray are on speaking terms any more. Not since Georgie.’

  ‘Check her out,’ Jackson said. ‘And keep me up to date. The brass want to wrap him up in cotton wool until the trial, so we’ll have to go along with it. With your history you have to be well placed to find him, so get on with it.’

  ‘Guv,’ Barnard said, ignoring the sinking feeling in his stomach. But he knew that however this assignment turned out it would do his future in the Met no good at all. He would get the blame if Ray Robertson was in deep trouble, and get little in the way of credit if he tracked him down successfully. He would simply be thought to be covering his own back. And not for the first time, the words ‘poisoned chalice’ sprang to mind.

  TWO

  Kate O’Donnell let herself into Harry Barnard’s flat after standing on the crowded Northern Line to Archway station and then walking slowly up Highgate Hill and off into the steep streets to the right, carrying an increasingly heavy briefcase full of pictures and Press cuttings. She envied Harry the ease with which he swooped up and down these hills in his red Capri. She wondered vaguely if he would teach her to drive if she asked him nicely, or whether he was as prejudiced about women drivers as many men she knew. She sighed, paused to hitch her case into the other hand, and plodded on.

  She had been surprised to discover that Harry had actually witnessed the floods she was researching. If he talked at all about his earlier life, which was rarely, it had been mainly about growing up as a small child in the teeming streets of the pre-war East End and then, during the war, witnessing the havoc caused by Hitler’s bombs. He always looked slightly surprised when she told him that her native Liverpool had lived through similar harsh times. Londoners, she had thought more than once, seemed oblivious to the toll the war had taken anywhere else.

  Back then, Barnard had spent a couple of years as an evacuee on a farm in the country where he and the Robertson brothers had been thrown together, sent to the country for safety as the bombs rained down on the docks and factories and huddled homes of East London. Later he must, she knew, have served his two years in the forces – compulsory National Service, which had continued for years after the war ended and had only recently been phased out. But he had never mentioned it. There was, she suspected, a great deal Harry Barnard never chose to talk about.

  The flat was chilly and she switched on the heating before taking off her coat. Central heating was something she had not yet come to terms with. Back home it was still smoky coal fires or nothing and she had gone to sleep many a time as a child under a pile of coats. She made herself a cup of tea in Barnard’s shiny modern kitchen and sat down to drink it in his favourite revolving chair. As far as the rest of the world was concerned she still shared a flat in Shepherd’s Bush with Tess Farrell, the other old friend she had come from Liverpool to London with, all of them eager to try their luck in the capital. Her mother and Catholic family in Liverpool could not have coped with the truth of where she was really living. She smiled to herself. It wasn’t so easy to ask the parish priest to talk to young women who strayed when the young woman was two hundred miles away.

  Marie had gone back home eventually, her hopes of an acting career dashed after endless rounds of auditions left her disillusioned. But Kate and Tess had settled down together amicably enough until Kate, despite many doubts, had let herself be persuaded to move in with Barnard, who had a comfortable flat in Highgate which Kate wondered whether he could afford. She still had her doubts about her future with the sergeant and still paid her share of the rent for the West London flat, popping in now and again to see Tess and pick up her meagre post.

  She suspected she was becoming too comfortable with Harry Barnard, who was unfailingly generous but still showed no inclination to buy her the ring that her family at home would certainly have expected if they’d known how she was living. But they were a long way away and for the most part she put them out of her mind, only taking the precaution of swearing Tess to secrecy if she happened to go north for a visit. For the moment she had no intention of doing that herself and in the dark reaches of the night, awake in Harry Barnard’s warm bed, she persuaded herself that the long train journey would continue to insulate her from Merseyside and her family’s traditionally moral expectations.

  She sighed and finished her tea and got up to spread out her photographs on the shiny beech dining table. Many of them were dark and grainy, taken by amateurs long before the rest of the country learned of the massive storm surge that had swept south down the North Sea and overwhelmed low-lying coastal areas inexorably one after the other. Canvey Island was one of the last places to be engulfed and most of the population were already asleep in bed on that Saturday night when the water swept in. By the time the alarm could be raised, the damage had been done and more than fifty had drowned. When more professional photographs had been taken later the next day the devastation became clear in the wintry light of a blustery Sunday morning, the sea still rough although the tide had receded and allowed the flood levels to drop.

  Stunned survivors turned weary eyes on the rescuers who for so many had come far too late. Canvey Island itself, which had access by a single bridge to the mainland, had been completely evacuated later that day and the next, leaving behind a landscape of mud and water, floating rubbish and dead animals amongst the remnants of small often flimsy homes to which many East Londoners had retired to be close to the sea. What no one had realized before was that Canvey was so low-lying that in spite of its sea walls a combination of a very high tide and a very high wind from the North Sea could overwhelm it entirely.

  Kate sighed again and pushed the photographs into a heap as she heard Barnard’s key in the lock. She turned in her chair and gave him a slight smile.

  ‘This is all very depressing,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I should have brought the pictures back. It must have been dreadful to be there.’ When he had hung up his coat and hat, Barnard stood behind her and held her shoulders.

  ‘You mustn’t make yourself miserable about something that happened ten years ago,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a look at what you’ve got and tell you what happened when I was drafted down there, and then we’ll go out for something to eat. That little Italian place in Hampstead? Will that do?’

  He put the Kinks on the radiogram, newcomers to the charts and their newest passion, and turned the volume down from loud to moderate, before sitting at the table beside her and beginning to sort through the pictures she had collected. But Kate could see that looking at these graphic reminders of what for him must have been a traumatic few days was having its effect on him too.

  ‘We got drafted there on the Sunday evening,’ he said quietly. ‘By that time they’d decided to evacuate the whole island, because the sea walls had been breached and although the water went down at low tide it was going to rise again every high tide. Anyway, very few of the buildings were habitable. Only brick or stone-built structures were usable, at least upstairs. Like the pub. What was it called? The Red Cow, I think. There
was no power, no phone lines, and sewage and debris everywhere.

  ‘At first the rescue effort was just local volunteers, the Sally Army, St John Ambulance, people like that, and anyone who had a boat. When we got there we were supposed to be filling sandbags to keep the sea out, but even that was slow to get started. I managed to hitch a ride on a boat that was going to where my aunt lived, just under the sea wall. But the wall had been more or less washed away at that point. She had just a little holiday house really, very flimsy, which they’d used since before the war, but it had gone. After my uncle died, she went to live there permanently. Some of the houses had been lifted up by the water and dumped down again, but hers had disappeared completely and her with it.

  ‘Later I trawled through the lists of survivors in case she’d got out in time, but I couldn’t find her name. They found her body on the Monday, when they were evacuating, and did a thorough search to see if anyone was still trapped anywhere. But I don’t think they found anyone alive. If they hadn’t drowned, they would have died of exposure by then. Some people were standing up to their chests in the water for hours and small children died of the cold. That first day I waded back to where my platoon was working and got a bollocking for going off on my own. But I had to make sure. I needed to tell my mother I’d done the best I could. I couldn’t get even a day’s leave to go and tell her. She had no phone. I had to ring the police station and ask them to go round. She never really got over it. A lot of people affected never did.’

  ‘It must have been dreadful,’ Kate said, putting her hand over his.

  ‘You’ve no idea. People’s whole lives were just floating around in a sea of mud and sewage – dead animals, furniture, the wreckage of those flimsy holiday houses. No one could have stayed there. They evacuated more than ten thousand people in the end. And I think one of the worst things for the people was that no one knew what was going on. Phone lines were down, the civil defence teams that were there during the war had been more or less disbanded, the police were overwhelmed, they had to call in the army. Even the Americans GIs stationed in Essex came in to help. In the end they requisitioned every bus and car and lorry in the area to get the people out. A lot of them had lost everything.’