Cover Up

by Patricia Hall

  ‘If your colleague is too frail for this, I suggest he waits outside,’ Kent said sharply, picking up a scalpel. ‘I can’t be doing with hysterics in my lab. It’s an unnecessary distraction.’

  ‘Wait for me outside, Pete,’ Barnard said. ‘Get yourself a coffee or something.’ Stansfield scuttled out of the room, leaving the doors swinging behind him and raising again all the doubts that Barnard had entertained about his suitability for his new job. In fact he wondered how Stansfield had coped with his time in uniform as a beat constable if he was such a delicate flower, but guessed that he must have been lucky in the cases he had had to deal with. Given today’s performance, a gory road accident could have scuppered his career at any time. There was no doubt he was bright enough for CID, but Barnard was by no means convinced that he was mentally or physically tough enough.

  ‘Sorry about that, doctor,’ he said to Kent, who had by now made his first incision in the corpse’s chest as the technician readied dishes to receive internal organs. The doctor cast a cold eye in Barnard’s direction.

  ‘I expect you are made of stronger stuff, Sergeant.’

  ‘I expect I am,’ Barnard said quietly. ‘Though whether in the end that’s a good thing or a bad thing I’m not too sure,’ he added under his breath.

  Barnard reported to DCI Jackson when he and Stansfield got back to the nick. He didn’t take the DC with him, and he was relieved when Jackson apparently failed to notice his younger colleague’s absence. Barnard would not drop Stansfield in the sticky stuff unnecessarily, but nor would he cover for him if he was asked a direct question about his performance, or lack of it, at the post-mortem. However, Jackson did no more than raise an eyebrow, which apparently indicated that he wanted to hear whatever news Barnard had brought back from the hospital.

  ‘The doc reckons she died earlier last night. Probably some time before the body was dumped, and we have an exact time for that from our witness. She was pretty badly beaten up – some of the wounds look as if they amounted to torture. As the doc put it, a considered attack rather than frenzied. She was raped, possibly more than once and possibly by more than one person, and eventually strangled. He reckons her hands might have been tied and she might have been gagged, but confirmation will come from the tests. The same goes for blood group, and whether there were drugs or alcohol in her stomach.’

  ‘She’d hardly have got herself into that position without one or the other,’ Jackson said with no sign of sympathy for the dead woman. ‘Not if you’re right about her wearing expensive underwear and a diamond ring. That’s not normal for the usual sort you get on the streets, is it? But if that’s the case, why was she dumped right in the heart of Soho?’

  ‘To lead us down a blind alley, maybe,’ Barnard suggested.

  ‘And by someone who didn’t know that the Vice Squad knows every tart within a mile of Soho Square,’ Jackson said sharply. ‘And that includes you personally. If that’s what they intended, they were unlucky you turned up.’ Barnard sighed. He had slept badly on the sofa and watched Kate flounce out of the flat obviously still in a bad mood, but he bit back the retort that it was part of his job to know the prostitutes and pimps of Soho in all their many manifestations. He wondered just how much Kate knew about the unpleasant details of his job, and its occasional compensations, but quickly decided that was an avenue he did not want to explore, with their relationship in such a fragile state.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said quietly. ‘But if the dead woman was a stranger, maybe whoever killed her was too. After all, she was dumped from a car. She could have come from anywhere in London, or even further afield.’

  ‘Perhaps her killer was not such a stranger not to know what assumptions we’d make if she was dumped in Soho Square,’ Jackson said.

  ‘So you agree it might be intended to mislead us?’ Barnard asked, convinced he was right but knowing he had no real evidence to support his hunch.

  ‘I don’t agree or disagree at this stage. There’s no evidence either way. You’d better get an artist in. From what you say she’s too badly disfigured for a photograph, but an artist should be able to give us a likeness that we can circulate across London and give to the evening papers. Getting an ID is obviously the first step. We can’t do much without that. And have a trawl through missing persons, both for the last few days and ongoing. If the estimated time of death is accurate, she may not have been reported missing yet.’

  ‘Guv,’ Barnard said. When Jackson was not linking him too closely to the criminals he was paid to investigate, he had an unnerving habit of trying to teach a man who was not, so far as he knew, even a parent yet – let alone a grandparent – to suck eggs. Not for the first time he wondered exactly how DCI Keith Jackson had come to be appointed to run the Vice Squad when he so obviously found the whole enterprise so distasteful. Although in this case he had some sympathy for the DCI. Like Barnard himself he must have seen his quota of mutilated bodies over the years and, like him, built up defences. But this woman had been so cold-bloodedly used in ways that must have caused her the maximum amount of pain that those defences were not enough.

  ‘We need to catch this bastard,’ Barnard said.

  ‘We do, Sergeant,’ Jackson said. ‘We certainly do.’

  THREE

  When Kate got back to Barnard’s flat that evening, after a suffocating journey on the Northern Line, she got herself a glass of cold water and sat for a moment in his revolving chair contemplating the smart modern home he’d put together for himself. Her mother, she thought, would be astonished by the sleek lines of the furnishing and the vibrant shades of orange and peacock blue, and in all likelihood would hate them. And she might wonder, as Kate did, how a detective sergeant had paid for them. One way or another London was prospering while other places were not; and the prospect of going back to Liverpool, which she no longer really thought of as home, had unexpectedly sharpened the contrast between the northern city that had fuelled Beatlemania over years – without the rest of the country even noticing – and the capital, which had embraced it so noisily in what seemed like only months. London was undoubtedly swinging to the Merseybeat now, and according to the papers even New York seemed to have unexpectedly gone wild for their music. But she wondered if Liverpool really was swinging so wholeheartedly, or ever could or would. After all, it had taken the Beatles years to make their mark there; and the Scousers were nothing if not sceptical when not downright begrudging, always more ready with a sharp put-down than with a compliment. It would be interesting to see what had changed since her move south and whether a city that had had its heart reduced to rubble – as if Oxford Street, Piccadilly and Knightsbridge had been destroyed in a single night – had really recovered.

  She finished her drink, then went into the bedroom and pulled all her clothes out of the wardrobe and flung them on the bed. Suddenly she turned on her heel and went back into the living room and picked up the phone.

  Tess Farrell answered quickly, sounding slightly distracted.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a pile of marking to do then I’m going to the pictures with my nice history teacher.’

  ‘Is he really nice?’ Kate asked. ‘Is this really it?’

  Tess laughed. ‘Too soon to tell,’ she said. ‘But promising.’

  ‘I … we … saw Viva Las Vegas,’ Kate said. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it, though. But that’s not why I rang. I’ve got a big job on which means going back to Liverpool for a while and I think it would be better if I had my old room back until I go. It will give me a bit more time and space …’

  ‘Of course,’ Tess said quickly. ‘It’s your room. You’re paying for it. Is this a sign you and Harry are splitting up?’ Kate hesitated for a long moment.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said eventually. ‘Maybe. Or maybe I just need some time to think after everything that’s happened lately.’

  ‘Well, you know what I think,’ Tess said. ‘He’s too old, too unreliable, too – oh, I don’t know – too flash for you.
And he gets you into too many dangerous scrapes.’ Kate smiled slightly at that, thinking that she had got herself into many of those scrapes herself and had certainly needed Barnard’s help to get out of them, but her smile faded quickly as she heard Barnard’s key in the lock.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I may come back tonight, but I’ve got my own key so I can let myself in if you are still out. If I’m going to do this, I think I’d better do it quickly. See you later, alligator.’

  ‘In a while, crocodile,’ Tess said, still sounding uncertain. She had always been one of Barnard’s fiercest critics, and Kate guessed she wouldn’t change her mind now she had spotted a possible crack in the relationship.

  Barnard came into the room and flung his coat on a chair before putting an arm round her and kissing her ear. She glanced up at him, trusting that he could not read her mind.

  ‘You don’t look very pleased with life,’ she said. He shrugged.

  ‘That could be what you call an understatement,’ he said. ‘DCI Jackson treats me like a criminal half the time and an idiot the other half. How was your day?’

  ‘Ah,’ Kate said cautiously. ‘My day was very interesting.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Barnard said. He went over to his cocktail cabinet and opened the door. ‘Do you want a drink?’ Kate shook her head, and watched as he poured himself a generous Scotch before sitting beside her on the sofa. ‘So what’s going on?’

  ‘I have to go away for a bit,’ Kate said, hoping she did not sound as nervous as she felt. ‘Ken has been asked to do a major feature on Liverpool to coincide with the Beatles’ film that’s coming out in London this week and in Liverpool on the tenth. He wants lots of pictures showing how Liverpool has changed and how it came to produce a group that’s taking America by storm as well as us.’

  ‘How long is a bit?’ Barnard asked, and Kate could see he was much more perturbed than she’d expected.

  ‘I’ll have to be up there for a week or so. To give me time to see the film premiere and some of the reaction to it, then talk to lots of people about how the city’s recovered from the war and the bombing. And I’ll have to dig around for pictures of what went on then and what happened to people. Of course I was only a baby during the war, but some of it I know about and there’s a lot I can remember. The bombed streets, rationing, never having enough to eat. Tom and me, we had to grow up fast because my mother was pregnant with Annie. He used to take me with him to stand in queues – it didn’t matter what they were for. You bought whatever you could and maybe swapped with the neighbours later …’

  She trailed off, realizing that Barnard was not really listening as he drained his glass quickly and got up for a refill. She hadn’t yet told him what he would no doubt regard as the most upsetting element of her news, but it was almost as if he expected the worst.

  ‘I thought it would make sense to move back to my own place until I go away,’ she almost whispered. ‘Most of my stuff is still there, and there’s more space for me to work. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort even before I go …’ Barnard moved closer to her and put an arm round her shoulder.

  ‘What’s going on, Katie?’ He asked. ‘Is this payback time because I messed you around the other night?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Kate said. ‘It’s just that my job is important to me and this is a chance to show what I can do for a national magazine. It’s a big opportunity and I don’t want to mess it up. I’m going to have to work really hard to do the research before I go north, and then even harder once I get there and when I get back. I need to do this without distractions.’

  ‘Is that what I am? A distraction?’ Barnard pulled his arm away and stood up. ‘Or is it your idea of a kind way to tell me you want to finish with me? Come on, Kate. You owe it to me to be honest at least.’

  ‘I am being honest,’ she said. ‘This is about my job, not you. It’s important to me. For years people have been telling me that being a photographer is not a suitable job for a woman and I’ve been trying to prove them wrong. And so far Ken Fellows has been supporting me. I know he had reservations, and the men in the office have even more. They’re all still sitting there sniggering, waiting for me to fall flat on my face. But so far I haven’t, not professionally at least, and he’s offered me a really big chance. I’ve got to take it with both hands, Harry. That’s what I really want to do. And yes, I’m sorry, in a sense you are a distraction. But it’s only for a couple of weeks. When I get back we can sort ourselves out. Right now, I haven’t got the time or the energy.’

  Barnard walked over to the window and looked out at the tree-lined street. There were still some people hurrying home from work and a couple of others were walking in the opposite direction in tennis whites, heading to the club down the road for a knock-up before the light failed. It was a normal evening in Highgate. But he felt that normality had suddenly and unexpectedly deserted him. His voice was husky when he finally spoke, without turning round.

  ‘When you disappeared in Essex and I thought you were probably dead, I realized that I really couldn’t do without you, Kate,’ he said. ‘While I stood there waiting to find out what had happened, I felt as if I was being destroyed from the inside out. I know your job is important to you, and I can see this is a great opportunity. I understand all that. But please tell me you’ll come back when it’s over and try to mend what’s broken between us. Please.’

  Kate got up and stood beside him with her hand clutching his.

  ‘I promise,’ she said. ‘I will come back. And then we’ll see.’

  Just over a week later when she hoisted her suitcase on to the luggage rack and levered herself into the only empty seat in a crowded compartment on the morning train to Liverpool she heaved a sigh of relief. She was only barely aware that the man sitting next to her on the corridor side had given her a filthy look as he slammed the sliding door shut. People searching for seats on the busy service were still milling about in the corridor, and she wondered whether he was afraid a seventh person would try to cram into the space British Rail had provided for six.

  For the past week she had been just as busy as she had warned Barnard she would be, trawling through newspaper and agency picture archives for photographs of the bomb damage in Liverpool – most of it inflicted in a brutal blitz in May 1941 – and, more rare, pictures of the rebuilding of the ravaged city, which she had been only too aware of as she grew up, with huge areas of the streets lined with scaffolding and echoing to the shouts and laughter of the builders. She found photograph after photograph that brought tears to her eyes – not so much the city’s landmarks and shopping streets in ruins but particularly what remained of the packed tenements around Scotland Road, where she realized she and her family were very lucky to have survived unscathed when so many hadn’t.

  She’d been working in the office during the day and at the flat in Shepherd’s Bush in the evenings, the only respite provided by two tickets to see the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night which Ken Fellows had dropped on her desk one morning.

  ‘You’d better see it down here,’ he said. ‘I’ve no idea how to get complimentary tickets for the Liverpool showing.’

  She’d rung Harry Barnard to ask him if he would like to come with her but he turned her down, sounding distant and preoccupied. So she went with Tess instead, and they swayed to the music and laughed at the antics of the four musicians and Paul McCartney’s grandfather, let loose in London, until Kate almost forgot her problems. Barnard’s chilly answer had upset her, but she refused to let it distract her from the course she’d embarked on. It was, she thought, almost a test of his commitment. He had to come to terms with her job and its demands, in the same way that she had to come to terms with his, or she could see no future at all for them together.

  In spite of her enthusiasm for the task in hand she had found her research a deeply depressing experience, as well as an eye-opening revelation, and was obscurely pleased she didn’t have to share it with anyone. Although some of Liv
erpool’s landmarks had survived, not least the three iconic buildings at the Pier Head, many others both in the city centre and the docks had been obliterated. The Customs House, department stores, historic warehouses on the waterfront and acres of closely packed streets had fallen victim to high explosive and incendiary bombs and an occasional devastating landmine. What must it have been like for her parents, she wondered, living close to Scotland Road and the docks with two small children and another on the way, as death rained down? No wonder they’d never talked about it. For her own part, she could barely remember their wartime home, as their badly damaged street had been scheduled for demolition almost before she started school. A new Corporation house with a coveted indoor lavatory had been allocated to them in one of the first newly built terraces, about a mile away, safely beyond the edge of the Vauxhall slums – a temporary place not big enough for the O’Donnells, but good enough for them to be able to wait patiently for a better council house to come up.

  More surprising, she thought, was the fact that she had never heard her father talk about what he did during the war. He had apparently not been called up and had continued to work in the docks, although whether that was a reserved occupation, like being a miner, she was not sure. For whatever reason, the dockers who remained in the port benefited from extra work when the conscripts left for the army and navy. Only once had she heard him comment on the bombing – when he admitted having helped pull neighbours out of a wrecked house across the street, although that had only been revealed when Winny Dempsey, whose house it had been, turned up one day with a new baby to show off to her mother and it happened that her father was at home as well. Kate reckoned she must have been four or five then because she quite clearly remembered Mrs Dempsey and her mother proudly comparing Winny’s child with her sister Bernadette, whose birth she could certainly remember.