Playing with Fire

by Patricia Hall

  ‘A moment of your time,’ Barnard demanded. ‘I get the distinct feeling that something’s going down on my manor that I don’t know about. Protection from a new source, maybe – a cafe trashed this very morning by a passing car? Ring any bells for you?’

  Beaufort attempted a smile, but it did not seem to Barnard that his heart was in it and he shrugged instead. ‘You know I don’t get involved in anything like that,’ Vincent said, aiming for a look of injured innocence which did not quite convince.

  ‘I know all that,’ Barnard said. ‘But I also know you keep your eyes and ears open. So what have you heard?’

  Beaufort scanned the busy corner outside the Delilah and dropped his voice until Barnard had to struggle to hear him. ‘A lot of people thought it was Ray Robertson making a comeback, but I’m not sure that’s right,’ Beaufort said in little more than a whisper. ‘There are new faces. And new tactics. Violent tactics, like a car going through a cafe window and not stopping, just reversing away in a cloud of dust. And there seems to be more drugs on the street too, and new varieties we haven’t seen before. But that’s all I know. And all I want to know. Asking questions seems to be a very bad idea according to anyone who’s tried it.’

  ‘Anyone I should look out for in particular?’ Barnard asked. ‘I need a bit of help here.’

  ‘There’s a tall, dark bloke around who seems to be taking an unusual interest in some of the businesses who are complaining. The people who make the threats are the usual riff-raff – sounds as if they’re parroting someone else, though. And someone told me they had seen this dark bloke talking to some of them, as if they were in charge.’

  ‘A description would be good,’ Barnard suggested. ‘Or even a name. D’you mean dark as in West Indian, someone up from Notting Hill?’

  ‘No, no, not black,’ Vincent said. ‘Dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, could be Italian maybe. Smart suit and hat. Quite dishy, a friend of mine said. But I’ve not heard a name.’

  ‘Let me know if you do,’ Barnard said.

  ‘Sure, but now I have to go. I’m going to be late for my date.’

  ‘You live dangerously,’ Barnard said, making a half-hearted attempt to stop him, but he knew he was wasting his time. If Beaufort felt like helping with his inquiries he would usually do it willingly, if discreetly, enough. But today he was clearly not in a very helpful mood, and Barnard felt it was more and more urgent to find out who was spreading this level of anxiety among the locals and why.

  Watching Beaufort dodge the traffic around Piccadilly Circus, DS Barnard made a decision which he did not intend to pass on to DCI Jackson at this stage in the game. His first call tomorrow would not be in Soho but further east. That was where, if he could not track down Ray Robertson in person, he could at least chat to his mother, who was the one person who might know where her older son was hiding. Whether he would be able to prise the information out of the old lady he somewhat doubted, but it had to be worth a try.

  When he finally got home to his flat in Highgate that evening, Harry Barnard was almost as frustrated by the lack of information he had gained from the Late Supper Club’s documentation as he had been at the start of the day. The DCI had not been impressed but had contented himself with urging the sergeant to try harder tomorrow. Barnard found Kate in the kitchen beginning to cook supper. He put his arms round her and kissed the back of her neck.

  ‘I thought you’d be hungry,’ she said. ‘I certainly am.’

  ‘I looked for you earlier but no one at your office seemed to know where you were.’

  ‘Right,’ Kate said. ‘You’d better sit down. I need to talk to you.’

  ‘That sounds ominous,’ Barnard said, selecting a bottle of wine and pouring her a glass. But he listened with growing disbelief as she described how she had spent part of her day since she had spoken to Dave Donovan that morning.

  ‘He must be joking,’ Barnard said, not bothering to hide his anger. ‘How the hell does he think you can track down one girl somewhere in London? It’s not possible.’

  Kate shrugged and passed him the envelope with Marie’s photograph, the usual glossy black and white publicity picture, a bit tattered round the margins. She wondered how long Brian Epstein had kept the picture around his office before handing it back with the desperate disappointment that would have gone with his decision not to take Marie on.

  ‘You said you were dealing with a case, a girl who was killed,’ Kate said. ‘That isn’t her, is it?’

  Barnard shook his head. ‘No, that’s not her. The girl who died was a bottle blonde, straight hair, not curls, a short cut – you know, Vidal Sassoon style. Much younger than this one, too, though it’s difficult to tell very much about what she looked like. She had terrible injuries to her face. And anyway, Dave’s girlfriend looks like a redhead. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ Kate said. Marie was a new addition to Dave’s line-up around the Merseyside clubs and Kate only vaguely remembered her from the days when Dave Donovan had played at the Cavern once or twice and tried out various singers, though not many of them were women. But as soon as Cilla Black had made her breakthrough she imagined that there would be any number of young women and girls in Liverpool attempting to ride on her coat-tails once it was plain that a girl could make it just as well as the boys. And perhaps dying your hair red was part of every female singer’s strategy now Cilla had hit the big time. Marie was unlikely to be the only one.

  ‘So what else did Dave give you?’ Barnard asked, knowing that he would be wasting his time trying to talk Kate out of trying to help. He had known her long enough now to realize that Scouse loyalties were strong and long-lasting.

  Kate pulled a sheet of lined paper from a notebook out of her handbag and passed it to Barnard.

  ‘A phone number and what he said he remembered of the address she had given him. But I looked in the A to Z. There are dozens of Western Roads in London. There’s no district code so it could be any of them. And that’s the name of the manager she was supposed to be coming down to audition for. Jack Mansfield. I haven’t tried him yet but Dave said he made some sort of promise to Marie.’

  Barnard ran an eye over the list. ‘It would take you weeks to work your way round these roads,’ he said. ‘Is that what you were doing when you asked the boss for time off at lunchtime?’

  Kate shrugged slightly. ‘Just a couple of the central ones,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t get anywhere. No one had heard of her. I’ll have to go to see this manager. He may know where she is. If she’s really been to see him he must have an address in London for her.’

  ‘Till you do, the phone number is the best bet,’ Barnard said, unwilling to pour too much cold water on Kate’s plans. ‘Keep trying that. If you can’t get a reply I can probably get it traced. What’s the district code?’

  ‘LAK,’ Kate said. ‘I’ve no idea where that is. Have you?’

  ‘Not offhand, but it’s easy enough to find out,’ Barnard said, reaching for the telephone directory. They looked in the index of exchanges. ‘Lakeside is Wimbledon. That’s an odd place for an ambitious rock and roll singer to hang out, isn’t it? Maybe she knows someone who lives down there and she’s staying with them. Are you sure this isn’t just a lovers’ tiff? She’s disappeared because she wanted to disappear and leave Dave behind?’

  ‘I don’t know, Harry,’ Kate said. ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘Well, I reckon it’ll be easier to try the manager first to see if she turned up for her audition, and if so what he told her afterwards. Didn’t Dave think of that?’

  ‘He’s not got a phone at home,’ Kate said. ‘Not many people have up Scotland Road, even now a lot of the slum houses have been pulled down. And trunk calls are expensive anyway. And he may not have the manager’s number. But I’m sure this Mansfield man won’t be too difficult to track down from this end. It’s Friday tomorrow. I’ll try then, before the weekend. And he gave me the number of a bass player down from Liverpool, who’s been playin
g with the Rainmen. He might have heard of another Scouser looking to make it big.’

  Barnard looked at Kate for a long moment.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ he asked. ‘It’s not as if you owe Donovan anything.’

  ‘Are you jealous, Harry?’ she asked him with a grin. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Of that Scouse freeloader? Never in a million years,’ he said, refilling their wine glasses and raising his in an ironic toast. ‘He had his chance and you blew him out of the water. That should be more than enough.’

  Kate spent her lunch hour the next day tracking down Jack Mansfield, who turned out to have an office in Denmark Street, London’s so-called Tin Pan Alley, which was an easy walk from her own office in Frith Street. Although she reckoned that she knew Soho pretty well by now, she had not been to Denmark Street before and was surprised to find it a bustling haunt of musicians – mainly young men in jeans and leather jackets hurrying between the surviving tall houses on both sides of the road which she reckoned must date back a couple of centuries at least. The beat of music thudded out of premises which offered everything from sheet music to recordings, even seeping out of steep entrances here and there leading to staircases evidently going down below ground into basement studios. For a moment, she stopped dead in her tracks as she came face-to-face with a familiar figure she knew she should recognize, but it was not until he had turned quickly into a studio entrance and disappeared that she realized it was Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

  She worked her way down the rows of houses looking for the number where the phone book had indicated that Mansfield’s management agency was based, but she had to search the list of occupants outside the door more than once before she spotted his name. She had no idea how Marie Collins had heard of the man but his small, slightly tarnished nameplate did not indicate a flourishing business of any kind, least of all one which aimed to secure publicity and contracts for singers and musicians. She pushed open the street door streaked with flaking paint and followed the signs pointing up the bare and rubbish-strewn wooden staircase. The place looked as though it would go up in flames in minutes if you dropped a lighted match. At the top of the stairs she found another door with Mansfield’s name on it and pushed it open to find herself face-to-face with a girl who looked as if she was still in her early teens. She was the sole occupant of a tiny, cluttered office, sitting behind a typewriter, totally absorbed in painting her nails.

  ‘I’m looking for Mr Mansfield, Jack Mansfield,’ Kate said sharply. ‘Is he in?’

  ‘Who’s asking?’ the girl questioned, glancing up without enthusiasm.

  ‘My name’s Kate O’Donnell but I’m really here because I’m trying to track down someone I think is one of his clients. A singer called Marie Collins from Liverpool. Do you know if she’s made contact yet? She had an appointment but I’m not sure when it was.’

  ‘Another one from Liverpool,’ the girl said sulkily. ‘Strikes me the whole bleeding town’s heading south. You too by the sound of it.’

  ‘Has Mr Mansfield seen Marie then?’ Kate asked with a sense of relief, ignoring the not very veiled insults to her accent and her home city. ‘People back home are worried about her …’

  ‘I’ll ask him,’ the girl said. ‘I’m only a temp. I don’t know much about what he does. I just do the typing and answer the phone. I’ve only been here a week.’ She got to her feet, pulling her miniskirt down below her knickers as she straightened up before she knocked on the inner door behind her and put her head round it.

  ‘There’s someone here asking about one of your clients, Mr Mansfield,’ she said. ‘Do you want to see her?’

  Kate could only hear a muffled answer which did not sound at all enthusiastic but, as the girl pushed the door open further and waved her inside, she assumed the reply was affirmative and went in. She smiled with as much confidence as she could muster but could tell from the even denser clutter in the rather small main office that Mansfield was not in the same league as Brian Epstein who, even outside the music business, had become something of a legend who could, many ambitious musicians believed, turn base metal into gold on the strength of what he had achieved for the Beatles. Here, files and posters and tapes were piled on every surface and, as Mansfield turned the record which was playing down a notch, he looked distinctly the worse for wear. He was in shirtsleeves and looked as if he had not slept for a week, with purple bags under his eyes and deep creases around his mouth. He lit a cigarette from the butt of the previous one with hands which shook, threatening to thicken the already dense air to a serious fog. Kate found herself watching carefully where he put the dead match and wondered how singers coped with the atmosphere, which was already catching at her throat.

  ‘Who is it you’re looking for, darling?’ he asked, closing one of his desk drawers with a clunk, leaving Kate unsurprised to recognize the distinct whiff of alcohol hanging in the air beneath the cigarette smoke and the heaps of shaking sheet music.

  ‘Marie Collins,’ Kate said. ‘She came down from Merseyside a couple of weeks ago but she hasn’t been in touch with her boyfriend since and he’s worried about her. Did she come to see you? She told him she was going to.’

  ‘Don’t remember the name,’ Mansfield said, digging into the paperwork piled on his desk and pulling out a dog-eared desk diary. He turned over the scrawled pages slowly. ‘She can’t have made much of an impression even if she did turn up. You’ve got to be a bit special to make it as a girl in this game. There’s not many that succeed. There’s not many Cilla Blacks out there.’

  ‘She’s doing OK,’ Kate said sharply. ‘And Sandy Shaw.’

  ‘With the bare feet?’ Mansfield asked dismissively. ‘She won’t last. You need something a bit more sexy than bare feet.’

  ‘So did Marie turn up here?’ Kate persisted. ‘If so, I thought you might know where she was staying. Her boyfriend really wants to know where she is. He’s not getting an answer to the phone number she gave him.’

  ‘I don’t remember her and I can’t find her in my book. And believe me, everything goes into this book.’

  Kate could imagine that it was genuinely his lifeline, given the state of chaos which surrounded him. ‘If she wrote to you wouldn’t you have kept the letter?’ she asked. ‘Won’t your secretary have a file?’

  ‘She’s only a temp,’ Mansfield said dismissively. ‘I don’t think she’s got around to filing. The girl who was here left me in the lurch a couple of weeks back. They never seem to stay long.’

  Kate could easily understand why that might be the case.

  ‘So how would you listen to her voice if she did come in? Would she bring a tape herself or would you take her to a studio to record a reel? I saw there were some studios downstairs.’

  ‘I’d listen to a tape of her own first off. I haven’t got time or money to nursemaid them myself. And if she sounded any good I’d help her make a showreel, professional quality. But she’d have to be bloody good. Girls can’t get away with the grunting and shouting and a few stock chords some of the boys can get by with. It’s a different ball game. They don’t usually play guitar and they have to sing in tune. And after that, if it was OK, we’d play it to the record companies. But as I say, it’s mainly lads in groups who come looking for a break. I had the Kinks in here once but they moved on.’ Mansfield stared into the distance for a while and Kate wondered how many chances like that he had missed. The Kinks were riding high now.

  ‘So you haven’t done any of that for Marie?’

  ‘Nope, I don’t think so,’ Mansfield said. ‘I told you, I don’t get many girls coming through here and I’d certainly remember anyone with an accent like yours. Sorry.’ His hand hovered over the telephone and it was obvious that he was anxious to get rid of her.

  ‘Can I leave you my number in case she turns up?’ she asked.

  ‘Give it to the typist girl,’ Mansfield said dismissively.

  Looking at the heaps of paper on his desk, Kate
decided that was probably a good idea. Anything left with Mansfield looked as if it would sink without trace. Kate went back into the secretary’s office and gave her a sheet from her notebook with her name and details on it.

  ‘Did he see her?’ the girl asked.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to remember whether he did or not,’ Kate said. ‘Is he always like that?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ she said. ‘He’s better earlier in the day. He generally starts drinking at lunchtime. We usually close the office up by about four o’clock.’

  To Kate’s surprise, the connecting door was suddenly flung open and Mansfield stuck his head out.

  ‘Did she have red hair, your Liverpool friend?’ he asked. ‘A mop of red hair?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. She was a blonde but we think she dyed it,’ Kate said. ‘So you did see her?’

  ‘Ellie Fox, that’s who she is. Not Marie at all. Not any more. We decided on a new name so she’s down in my book as Ellie Fox. I did a reel for her and she was supposed to be coming in to see me again yesterday. But she didn’t turn up, did she? I’ve not seen her again. They’re none of them reliable these kids. Pain in the bloody neck, most of them. No wonder they don’t get anywhere.’

  ‘She gave her boyfriend a phone number, a Lakeside number?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Where is bloody Lakeside?’ Mansfield said.

  ‘Wimbledon,’ Kate said. ‘Sounds as if I’ll have to track her down there. If I find her I’ll tell her to get in touch.’

  ‘I shouldn’t bother,’ Mansfield said. ‘She seemed to be more interested in her ruddy social life, to be honest. Said she’d met someone from a major group. Didn’t say which so I don’t know who she considers major. And the record company wasn’t interested in her stuff anyway. I told her to come back so it’s down to her, isn’t it? If she can’t be bothered why should I be?’

  FOUR

  Sergeant Harry Barnard sat in his parked car just off the Whitechapel Road feeling unusually and unexpectedly emotional. He must be getting old, he thought irritably as he surveyed what was left of the gym Ray Robertson had set up before Barnard himself was more than a skinny East End teenager, hovering on the edge of a criminality which was where he knew Ray was already well entrenched. In his case it was obvious Robertson was essentially joining the family business and Harry had no doubt that if he had asked he would have been recruited too by Ray’s mother, who took over after his father had sailed with the troops to Normandy and failed to come home. But for reasons which he had never fathomed, Ray seemed to have different plans for Barnard. Far from encouraging him to join the gang, he went out of his way to tell him repeatedly that he showed promise with his fists in the ring rather than on the street and had put a lot of time and a lot of effort into his training at his newly launched gym down the road in Whitechapel.