Playing with Fire

by Patricia Hall

  ‘Anything,’ Donovan said. ‘I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t chase up this bastard manager who seems to have taken her for a ride. What’s that all about?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Kate said with a sigh. ‘He seems completely disorganized, though when I went back to get a lead on Kevin Dunne he did say that some record company was interested in Marie’s demo tape after all, a bit late in the day, but she’s not been back to see him yet. Call me back later and I’ll let you know what Tess said about the spare bed at her place. Technically it’s still mine but I need to check it out with her first. I’ll talk to you later.’

  She glanced at her watch. Barnard would be home later than usual and she guessed that with all that seemed to be going on in Soho he might be later still, so cooking would be a waste of time. They could go to the local Italian later. But she knew that Tess Farrell, with whom she had shared a flat in west London when three girlfriends from Liverpool had arrived in the capital to seek their fortunes several years ago, would already be home from her job teaching English at Holland Park School. She might well be up to her eyes in marking but it was probably too early in the evening for her to be out with the history teacher Kate suspected she was seeing regularly these days and, sure enough, when she dialled Tess picked up the phone quickly.

  ‘How’s things?’ Kate asked cautiously.

  ‘All right, stranger,’ Tess said. ‘You’ve been keeping very quiet lately. You’re not planning to come back to claim your bed, are you? Have you finished with your detective?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Kate said. ‘What gave you that idea?’

  ‘It’s just that I keep on wondering what your mam will say if you decide to marry him, let alone if she discovers you’re already living together. We’ll hear the explosion in Shepherd’s Bush, I should think.’

  ‘She’s met Harry already, when we went up to Liverpool to cover the Beatle’s film premier,’ Kate said defensively.

  ‘But I bet you didn’t introduce him as husband material, did you? All primed and ready for the chat with the parish priest and ready to convert? You’re not that brave – or optimistic – are you?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Kate admitted. ‘I’m not sure he is that anyway – husband material, I mean. But my mam’s not as daft as you think. She might have worked it out for herself when I went home, la. Anyway, I think she knows that she’s not going to have any say in what happens in the end. She should have ditched that idea when I left Liverpool.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky,’ Tess said. ‘So what about coming over for a meal soon, la. It’s time we caught up.’

  ‘Yes, that would be good. But the reason I rang was not so much about us as about Dave Donovan. You remember Dave and his slightly off-key band …’

  ‘I thought he went home? He wasn’t exactly Ready Steady Go material, was he?’

  ‘He did, and the band’s still alive in Lancashire apparently. But he’s coming to London for a few days. He seems to have mislaid his girlfriend who came down to see an agent about a singing career. She’s seen the agent but hasn’t got back to him or to Dave and he’s going frantic. I wondered if you’d mind if he had my room for a few days while he tries to track her down.’

  ‘Are you sure she wants to be tracked down?’ Tess asked waspishly. ‘I’m not sure I would from what I remember of your friend Dave. And I’m not sure my boyfriend will approve of me having a lodger – especially a musician from Liverpool.’

  ‘Come on, Tess, do me a favour. It’s my bed, after all. You can tell Dave how long you’ll put up with him if you want. It only needs to be a few days. He wants to see the manager she went to see, and I’ll get Harry to talk to him to persuade him how impossible it is to track down one person on the information we’ve got. He won’t want Dave hanging around for long either. He’s never thought much of Liverpool and he thought even less of it after our trip up there.’

  The silence at the other end of the phone told Kate how seriously reluctant her friend was to agree to the arrangement.

  ‘Three nights,’ Tess said in the end.

  ‘I can tell him that?’

  ‘Tell him my sister’s coming to stay after that and she’ll need the room,’ Tess said.

  ‘You’re quite an inventive liar when you try,’ Kate said, laughing. ‘I hope you don’t miss anything out at confession.’

  ‘I got quite good at that when we were at college and we started to want to go to the Cavern. We had a parish priest who seemed to think John Lennon threatened our immortal souls.’

  ‘There were quite a few of those around,’ Kate said. ‘He wasn’t the only one. More to the point, are you sure Dave doesn’t know you don’t have a sister?’

  ‘Pretty sure,’ she said. ‘I hardly knew him when we were at college. I met him down here when he was trying to get his group off the ground and we were living in the Notting Hill flat.’

  ‘OK,’ Kate said. ‘I’ll get back to him and tell him the conditions.’

  ‘Ask him to phone me and let me know when he’s arriving,’ Tess said. ‘I’ll tell him how to get to Shepherd’s Bush on the Tube.’

  It was almost ten o’clock and the first clients were beginning to filter into the Late Supper Club before Sergeant Harry Barnard decided to call it a day and go home. He had waited for Mercer to turn up and then coralled him in his office to go through the records of who had been in the club at any time on the night of the unknown young girl’s death.

  ‘There’s no record that I can see of anyone signing the girl in,’ Barnard said. ‘I’ll want to talk to everyone who was on the door that night. I want them to look at her description to see if it rings any bells. And try to recall if and when the door was left unmanned and someone could have brought her in without anyone noticing. Are the same people on duty tonight? I’ll probably need to talk to the waiting staff too, to see if they noticed her and anyone she was with.’

  Mercer consulted his lists and nodded reluctantly. Barnard scowled at him. It was incredible how detached the man remained after a young girl on his premises had died, whether by accident or design.

  ‘Can you organize them to talk to me – one at a time, please – so I can check what they can remember? It will be even more messy if I have to take them to the station. Easier for you if I ask the questions here.’

  ‘Anything else, Sergeant?’

  Barnard could see the question was almost dragged from Mercer’s lips, he was so uncomfortable with this interrogation.

  ‘Yes, there is,’ Barnard said. ‘You talked about attracting well-known people, rock stars and such, models, actresses, I suppose.’

  ‘Here today and gone tomorrow,’ Mercer snapped.

  ‘But I don’t see anyone like that on your guest lists for that night. Do they sign in at the door like everyone else or do they have special privileges?’

  ‘I suppose you could call it that,’ Mercer admitted, stony faced. ‘We don’t expect them to run the gauntlet of the overexcited slappers, the girls who gather outside in the street wetting their knickers. The very first week we were open half a dozen kids got hysterical when two of the Beatles turned up. So we put in a private door at the back where taxis could drop VIPs out of sight.

  ‘But you keep a record of who comes and goes that way? Your licence demands that.’

  ‘We have one member of staff on duty there, to be of assistance.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to him,’ Barnard said. ‘And were any of your VIPs here on the night this unfortunate girl fell?’ Mercer’s hesitation was so slight that afterwards Barnard wondered if he had imagined it.

  ‘I will be talking to some of your clients too,’ Barnard said quickly. ‘They would be likely to notice if there were any big stars here. They do use this room, I assume? They don’t have their own private quarters?’

  ‘Some of them we reserve tables for,’ Mercer said. ‘They have their favourites, mainly at the back. Jason Destry was here for a while that night – Jason Destry of the Rainbirds – with some
friends. They have a new record out. I don’t know if you follow that sort of music.’

  ‘That’s the lad who struts about in a red velvet jacket?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Mercer said with a shrug

  ‘And when did they leave, what time exactly?’

  ‘They didn’t stay long,’ he said.

  ‘Well, of all your clients he should be one of the easiest to track down,’ Barnard said. ‘And I understand clients can use a room you’ve got on the top floor, which is where this girl fell from. Is that right? Can you show me that, please? I understood she fell from this level but if she was higher that could explain the severity of her injuries.’

  Mercer opened his mouth to say something but then closed it again, which Barnard regarded as a sort of victory. If the manager had learned nothing else from his questions it must be that he wasn’t going to be deterred from trying to find out what exactly had happened to the underage clubber and who was responsible, and that he would speak to whoever he chose.

  ‘Can you get your staff to talk to me, the door staff first? If I can’t finish tonight I’ll come back tomorrow. It would be helpful if you could ask clients coming in if they were here the night of the death as well. We can track them down from their details in your registers but if they happen to be here tonight that will make the process quicker. I’m sure we’ll all benefit from that, sir, don’t you?’

  Mercer got to his feet, red-faced and breathing heavily. As he was working in his own time Barnard did not worry about any complaints from DCI Jackson for wasting police time. He just hoped that Mercer himself was not a commissioner’s best mate. He knew that there was something very wrong about the young girl’s death – her presence in the club, her lack of identification and anyone who claimed to know her, the drugs the test results confirmed she had taken and the fall itself – but he was not at all sure that Mercer might not be able to gag any useful witnesses among his staff and get back-up in high places to close his own inquiries down if that’s what suited him or if he felt personally threatened by the investigation.

  In the event, Mercer seemed to have decided to capitulate, at least for the time being, and a succession of staff members and a handful of clients approached Barnard with more or less ill grace and answered his questions. But not one of them could offer any information that would help identify the girl or any companion she might have been with, and least of all any information on any illegal substances she might have consumed. And he now understood why no one admitted to seeing her fall – because she had been a floor higher up the building, away from most of the clientele. When he had finished he approached Mercer again, knowing the manager had been watching his every move.

  ‘I’ll call it a night now,’ he said. ‘Thanks for your cooperation. I find it hard to believe that a kid as young as that didn’t raise some questions in somebody’s mind over the course of the evening. And I’d like to know who took her up to the top floor. It doesn’t sound very likely that she found her own way up there.’

  ‘The place was packed and half the population of the West End look like schoolchildren these days,’ Mercer said contemptuously. ‘Skirts halfway up their buttocks and so pumped up with booze or dope or sex that they’re off their heads. Throw in a few rock stars and it can soon go out of control. You should know that working round here, Sergeant.’

  ‘Not many young girls go head first out of windows,’ Barnard said. ‘That’s a first.’

  ‘I want it cleared up. It’s not doing my business any good. There’s only half the punters here tonight.’

  ‘Well, I won’t bother you again, sir, unless I have to, but let me know if anything new crops up,’ Barnard said. ‘Otherwise, I’ll have to track down some of your notable clients myself. Should be an education.’

  Kate was already in bed reading when Barnard finally got home.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I went back to the club where the girl fell. I didn’t have time earlier as the brass are more interested in the murder at the Grenadier. It is a murder investigation now. Did you know the barman died? This afternoon? They think a gang war’s going to break out although nobody’s got a clue who’s going to be fighting who. Nobody’s talking, so either they don’t know – which seems unlikely – or they’re too scared. I’ve never known anything quite like it.’

  ‘And nobody’s identified the dead girl?’

  ‘She’s not cropped up among the missing persons reports so far and as there’s no chance of a picture given the state she’s in we can’t circulate more than a written description. I went to the club in my own time to see if I could find out a bit more, but nobody admits to knowing anything about her.’

  ‘That’s very sad,’ Kate said.

  Barnard nodded gloomily. Sad, he thought was an understatement.

  ‘So how was your day?’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘A bit complicated.’

  ‘That sounds ominous,’ he said. ‘Let me get a drink and then you can tell me the worst.’

  ‘Dave Donovan? Three nights?’ Barnard asked finally when he was settled on the side of the bed with a large Scotch in one hand and the other round Kate’s shoulder.

  ‘That’s all Tess will put up with,’ Kate said with as much reassurance as she could muster.

  ‘And he won’t come here?’

  ‘I don’t think he’d dare,’ she said, leaning round to kiss him. ‘But no, Tess and I will keep him out of your hair.’

  ‘You’re too soft-hearted,’ he said. ‘But I like it.’ He returned the kiss with interest.

  ‘But I will have to talk to him, if only to tell him that I haven’t got anywhere,’ Kate said.

  ‘It looks as if I’ll have to talk to a few musicians myself, as it happens,’ Barnard said. ‘I discovered that Jason Destry was at the Late Supper Club the other night when the girl fell, celebrating his new record, as it goes. It wouldn’t be surprising if his party got a bit out of hand.’

  EIGHT

  DS Harry Barnard knew that he had almost certainly put more than one foot wrong as soon as he went into the CID squad room just after nine o’clock to find it full of officers and an oppressive silence. The reason was obvious. DCI Keith Jackson stood at one end of the room, a chalkboard on one side and a plainclothes officer Barnard did not recognize on the other.

  Jackson looked pointedly at his watch. ‘You’re late, Sergeant,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry, guv,’ Barnard said, hanging up his coat and sitting down at his desk. ‘I didn’t know there was a meeting.’ He glanced at the stranger standing beside the DCI and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘If you had been here a little earlier you would have heard me introduce DI Brian Jamieson, who is one of the officers involved in the Yard’s plans to set up a specialist drugs unit. DS Barnard has considerable experience with gangs in Soho and their increasing involvement in the growing drugs trade. I’m sure you will be of mutual assistance once the unit is up and running.’ The two younger men eyed each other warily and certainly not warmly before Jackson pressed on and Barnard concluded that assistance from Scotland Yard was not necessarily what his boss was looking for in the present situation. Drugs might be involved but the struggle which had broken out in Soho to such a deadly effect went much wider than that. It was about power and control. Ray Robertson’s absence had left a vacuum and Barnard knew that sooner rather than later that vacuum would be filled. He just hoped that there would not be too much blood spilled in the struggle.

  He turned his attention back to DI Jamieson who, in jeans and leather jacket, with tousled hair touching his collar, stood beside Jackson who was immaculate as ever in a well-pressed suit, high-gloss shoes and short back and sides, a whole generation and lifestyle apart. And, of course, it was Jamieson who knew most of what there was to know about the rapidly proliferating drugs scene. It was not yet quite an epidemic but usage and the variety of substances on offer was increasing and senior officers at the Yard were infuriated by the high-profile young users, many of them music
ians, who did not make any secret of their illegal habits. Barnard had no doubt that retribution from the top of the Met was on its way and that if he wanted to survive he would have to adjust to the likes of DI Jamieson and his colleagues just as the increasingly bold dealers and users would. He listened to Jamieson’s A to Z analysis of the growing market, which told him little that he did not know already, and when the DI offered to take questions he asked him how much an ounce of cannabis would cost on the street as if he wasn’t sure, which raised a few eyebrows among his colleagues.

  ‘In the region of seven pounds,’ Jamieson said. ‘That’d be in the West End. You’d get it cheaper in Notting Hill, especially if you were a darkie, know what I mean? So it’s a lot more expensive than a pint of beer but it doesn’t seem to do much more harm. But what’s more dangerous is LSD, and that’s turning up more and more. It can do real damage. It can take people days, weeks even, to get over a bad trip on LSD. Perhaps a lifetime, I’m told.’

  ‘Can it kill you?’ Barnard asked.

  Jamieson gave him a long look. ‘Not directly,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t poison you like an overdose of heroin does, but it can do your head in. Some say they have a lovely time on a trip, like a Technicolor dream. Can’t wait to have another go. Others go off their heads and spend hours in some sort of hell, the worst sort of nightmare. They draw the short straw, have a dream they can’t get out of. Some of them never get to recover.’

  ‘They say some people think they can fly?’ Barnard ventured.

  ‘I’ve heard of things like that but I’ve never met anyone to confirm it,’ Jamieson said. ‘Maybe they don’t survive and the medics say there’s no easy way to test for LSD in the body – it disperses very quickly. And there’s no way of knowing how strong the tablets are or what’s a safe dose anyway.’

  Barnard nodded, aware that the DCI was watching him closely. ‘Thanks for that, guv,’ Barnard said as Jamieson glanced at his watch and then at DCI Jackson himself.

  ‘I need to be off, sir,’ Jamieson said to Jackson. ‘I hope that was useful and I’m sure we’ll all be seeing each other again in the near future. We’ll probably be living in each other’s pockets when the drug squad gets up and running properly. The problem’s getting worse and the top brass are determined to sort it out.’