Cover Up

by Patricia Hall

  ‘So what’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘You look as if you’ve lost a tenner and found a bent halfpenny. Is it that bird you’re stuck on? Has she dumped you?’

  Barnard managed a faint smile.

  ‘You’re too clever by half,’ he said. ‘She’s gone away for a bit, back to blasted Liverpool where she came from. And to be honest I don’t know whether she’s dumped me or not. If you’re really interested, I always thought it was too good to last. But what do I know? Women are a mystery to me.’ Evie lit a cigarette and drew the smoke in deeply, even though it instantly threw her into a paroxysm of coughing.

  ‘I’m not sure you’re the type to settle down with some provincial lass from the sticks,’ she said bluntly. ‘Strikes me you need someone a bit more sophisticated than that.’ Barnard winced but said nothing for a moment.

  ‘How’s that little girl of yours?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Still doing well with my mother,’ Evie said. ‘And doing well at school.’ She shrugged wearily. ‘But I don’t know if I can go on earning enough to pay her school fees,’ she said and Barnard could see the near-panic in her eyes.

  ‘So why are you here?’ Evie asked eventually. ‘I take it you’ve not just dropped in for a quickie for old times’ sake.’ Barnard shook his head and took one of the sketches out of his coat pocket.

  ‘Have you ever seen this woman?’ he asked. ‘She’s the one who was found dead in Soho Square, dumped half-naked under the trees.’ Evie looked at the picture closely.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘And given her age, if she was on the game round here I’d have come across her, I guess. She’s not exactly a spring chicken, is she? Well-fed, though. Which is more than most of us on the game are.’

  ‘She was wearing silk underwear and a diamond ring,’ Barnard said. ‘So not short of a bob.’ Evie raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘We all do our best to look good when we’re working, but I don’t reckon there’s many real silk cami-knickers round here.’

  ‘So you’ve never seen her before?’

  When Evie shook her head, Barnard leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a second. Evie looked at him, her eyes concerned.

  ‘Have a rest here while I go and do a bit of shopping,’ she said. ‘And there’s someone I know who might recognize your victim if you give me one of your pictures. I won’t be long.’

  Barnard nodded, too weary to argue, and closed his eyes, almost asleep before she was out of the door.

  When Evie let herself back into her flat, she found Barnard stretched out on the bed, face down and dead to the world. She put her shopping away and lay down beside him, putting one arm across his back in a gentle embrace. She did not sleep but synchronized her own breathing with his until, after what seemed like a long time, she became aware that he was beginning to wake. She rolled away, and he turned to face her.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Evie said. ‘You went to sleep, that’s all. You didn’t want anything to happen, did you?’

  ‘No,’ Barnard said, more sharply than he intended. He sat up, put his feet down tentatively, and slid them into his shoes. ‘I’m sorry, Evie. I shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘You’re an old friend, Harry,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about it. You’ve been good to me sometimes when it mattered, but that’s all we’ve ever been.’

  ‘I need to get back to the nick,’ he said, glancing at his watch, although the claim was not exactly true. So long as he reported back to the DCI before the end of the day he reckoned he was his own man, which is how he liked it. His job was more about hoovering up useful intelligence than making arrests.

  ‘But I did find out something interesting,’ Evie said. She picked up a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote something down.

  ‘This is a friend of mine who used to work somewhere up West for a bit. She gave up because there were men there who wanted her to do things she didn’t want to get involved with. Kinky stuff, she said. Nasty. She would be worth talking to, I reckon.’

  Barnard put his coat on and put the piece of paper in his pocket.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘And thanks for everything.’ He kissed her on the cheek and let himself out. Behind him, Evie dashed a tear from her eye before running a bath, dismissing thoughts of what she might have made of her life if things had been different. It was, she knew only too well, far too late for all that.

  Barnard drove along Oxford Street and turned down Park Lane towards Victoria. There were procedures for venturing out of his own patch, but this was too much of a long shot to bother with procedure just now. He pulled up outside a block of council flats close to the river, incongruously sited cheek by jowl with much more pricey blocks sharing the river frontage, able to enjoy views of the dirty brown water rushing by as the tide ebbed and the more distant backdrop of the Houses of Parliament. He parked on the Embankment and made his way up the concrete stairs to the address that Evie had given him and rang the bell. The door was opened by a middle-aged woman in a flimsy silky dressing gown, with elaborate make-up, smoking a Russian cigarette in a holder.

  ‘Did you make an appointment?’ she asked sharply with a trace of an accent that Barnard could not instantly identify. He flashed his warrant card in her face.

  ‘My friend Evie spoke to you on the phone, I think,’ he said. ‘I’d just like a quick word, if you don’t mind.’ The woman didn’t look delighted to see him, but she waved him inside and into a living room furnished in the latest Scandinavian style. Barnard smiled. As a follower of fashion himself, he knew that the place had not been done up on a shoestring. There were things he would have coveted if he’d seen them in Heal’s and that he would have been pushed to afford even on an income more ample than the Metropolitan Police provided. Whatever this woman did for a living, she must be doing well.

  ‘A nice place you’ve got,’ he said as he was waved into a seat and the woman flounced into a revolving chair very like his own.

  ‘You are? She didn’t give me your other name.’

  ‘Alicia will do,’ she said, smoothing her hair. ‘If my clients knew I was talking to the police they wouldn’t be best pleased.’

  ‘If you’re doing what I think you’re doing, I don’t suppose they would,’ Barnard said. ‘You’re on your own, are you?’

  ‘I’m not running a brothel, if that’s what you mean,’ she said sharply. ‘I know the law.’

  He pulled the drawing of the murdered woman out of his pocket and handed it to her.

  ‘She was dumped from a car in Soho Square, strangled and half-naked. Have you ever seen her before?’ Alicia studied the photograph carefully, then shook her head.

  ‘None of the working girls in Soho know her?’ she asked.

  ‘None of the working girls know her. And what little she was wearing was expensive, including a diamond ring.’

  Alicia stubbed out her cigarette and pulled another from the packet on the table. She offered one to Barnard but he shook his head.

  ‘I have never seen her before,’ she said. ‘She is a stranger.’ She lit up and drew the nicotine hungrily into her lungs. ‘What makes you think she is on the game?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing definite,’ Barnard said. ‘Except where she was found. And how she’s been treated, chucked away like a bag of rubbish. But that may be what we are intended to think. I reckon she was taken to Soho Square from somewhere else. It’s secluded there at night under the trees, and she might not have been found until morning. It was pure chance that the car was spotted as she was being dumped. It drove off too quickly for anyone to get a number but apparently it was a big powerful car, not a clapped out jalopy.’

  ‘But if you are here asking me questions you must think she was a tart?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Barnard admitted. ‘But she could just as easily be someone’s wife or girlfriend that was surplus to requirements. Or someone who was picked up – maybe willingly, maybe not – and
abused. But there’s no one like her been reported missing, so far at least. It could be consenting sex that got out of hand. Or it could have been cold-blooded murder by someone with a big car who thought he could get away with it by dumping her in Soho – where every other woman is a tart and when they come to grief those who should be investigating think the worst and don’t try very hard to find the guilty men.’ Alicia nodded and did not dispute Barnard’s analysis.

  ‘Soho’s not the only neighbourhood where prostitutes make a living,’ Alicia said. ‘You must know that.’

  ‘Evie said you’d bailed out of somewhere you didn’t like,’ Barnard said carefully. He knew that if that were true she would be very wary of repercussions.

  ‘There are places where men are taken to meet women, or other men, sometimes even children,’ she said. ‘You must know about that sort of thing. These are very often important men, powerful men, who want their pleasures but very, very discreetly …’

  ‘I’ve heard rumours,’ Barnard interrupted. ‘Is that the sort of place you got involved with?’

  ‘The money was very good,’ she said, glancing away. ‘When my husband left me without a penny, I found this was the easiest way to make a decent living. But the games these people played were not good. I never heard of anyone being killed but certainly some of the women got hurt, and the children. The men thought they could put it all right with money, compensation they called it. They thought they had impunity – is that the right word? It was vile and it was wrong, and I got out as soon as I could. I rented this flat and now only deal with decent men.’

  ‘But you say these were important men,’ Barnard said. ‘Did you recognize anyone, perhaps someone you’d seen in the papers?’

  ‘No,’ she said, her expression freezing. ‘Even if I had, I wouldn’t tell you. But most of them were careful to hide their identities. The light would be poor, or they were wearing very little, or sometimes a sort of fancy dress. One or two wore masks to hide their faces. It was very well organized and it was made clear that if I talked about it there would be repercussions. When I said I would not go back, I was told I would be paid a certain amount of money regularly but if I ever told anyone – anyone at all, never mind a detective – it would be the worse for me.’ She shrugged wearily. ‘I believed them. They were rich, they were well organized and they were involved in various forms of sexual brutality that could have put them in jail if ever revealed. Keeping me quiet would have been easy enough. I would have been just another dead tart who your colleagues would not have wasted much time on. I will never take that risk. So don’t imagine that just because you’ve tracked me down I will talk to anyone about all this. Make what you can of what I’ve said, but I will never repeat it. I would like to see some of those men suffer, but not at my expense.’

  Barnard knew that Alicia’s assessment was realistic, and he could find no words to justify the Met or any other police force’s entrenched indifference to the victims of the sex trade’s punters.

  It was not the first time he had seen senior officers less than serious about investigations like this, or been infuriated by the popular newspapers’ prurience over the activities of ‘good-time girls’ and indifference to the risks they ran. The women themselves came to regard violence, and even death, as an occupational hazard. They looked out for each other when they could, because they knew from experience that no one else was looking out for them.

  ‘I could tell you that we’re not all like that,’ he said. ‘Though there’s no reason why you should believe me.’

  ‘No,’ Alicia said. ‘There isn’t.’

  ‘Do you know where all this was going on?’ Barnard pressed her. ‘You could give me an idea about that, surely?’

  ‘Usually I was picked up by car. I never knew where I was taken except that it was to several different places. Going to one place, I was aware we crossed the river, though I don’t know which bridge we went over. On other occasions I thought we were merely driving around and didn’t actually go very far from here. But I have no idea where these places were. I was taken and brought back, well-paid but threatened that if I said anything out of turn I would find myself in deep trouble. There was only one place I went to more than once – a flat. We went up in a lift and it was quite luxurious. But there are hundreds of flats like that round here.’ She shrugged.

  ‘I’ve made a deal with these people that I’m happy with. It keeps the wolf from the door. I got out, and have found a better way to live where I am in control. I’m not going to put all that at risk.’

  Barnard flung himself backwards in his chair in frustration and Alicia spun round in her chair to turn her back on him, gazing out of the window at a string of barges being towed down the Thames that were picking up speed on the ebbing tide.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I can’t help you any further. I’d like you to go now, please, and don’t come here again. It’s too dangerous.’

  Barnard walked slowly back down the stairs to his car but did not drive off straight away. He sat smoking and gazed out of the window at the passing cars and at occasional glimpses of the river traffic visible over the embankment wall. He had come to West London at Evie’s suggestion and in some ways had discovered more than he wanted to know. Whoever was threatening Alicia had obviously been very effective. He did not think either he or the local CID officers could get any more out of her than he’d done. And it would be very difficult to persuade DCI Jackson that anything he’d been told was relevant to the murder inquiry in Soho he was supposed to be working on – one which had been launched more because the victim looked as though she might be more important than the usual Soho working girl than through any desire for justice for a prostitute. He had, he thought, driven himself into a dead end at the end of which there seemed to be a nameless pit of depravity – possibly reaching into the heart of the establishment – that he was unlikely to uncover without the DCI’s support and help from Scotland Yard. And with his record, that would be the day.

  When he got back to the nick, he didn’t go straight inside. He crossed the road to a phone box, dialled the number of Kate O’Donnell’s hotel, and put his coins into the slot when someone answered.

  ‘Do you have a Miss O’Donnell booked in?’ he asked. A voice with an accent he could barely understand seemed to say yes down the crackling line, so he ploughed on.

  ‘Could you give her a message, please? Could you ask her to call Harry this evening at home?’

  Again the answer seemed to be affirmative, so he thanked the anonymous voice and hung up. He had tried to cut Kate out of his life as that seemed to be what she wanted, but this morning’s hangover looked like becoming permanent unless something was resolved between them sooner rather than later. He went up the stairs to the CID office weighed down with a feeling of impending doom.

  FIVE

  Kate had known better than to ask her mother where her brother Tom was living. But she’d carefully preserved the phone number he’d given her on a remote beach out towards the open sea when caught up in the murder case that had thrown Kate and Harry Barnard together in London. Although he might not still be at that address, at least it gave her a chance of tracking him down.

  She checked in her purse to make sure she had enough change to make calls in a red phone box. The pay phone close to the reception desk seemed much too public for this particular encounter, if that was what it turned out to be. She knew how carefully Tom and his friends guarded their privacy, for good reason. Homosexual men might often be tolerated, if not ignored, in central London but up here different and more draconian rules prevailed, in a city where religion was still dominant and the police were sticklers for enforcing the law as and when the mood took them, in spite of promises of law reform.

  To her relief and surprise, the number she had kept safe was answered by the familiar voice of her brother.

  ‘Katie? Is that really you?’ he asked, sounding tentative as well as surprised.

  ‘It is, la,’
she said. ‘I’m here for a few days on a job and I thought I couldn’t not see you. Mam says you don’t often go home.’

  ‘I never go home,’ Tom said. ‘Dad said that if he ever caught me there he’d thump me black-and-blue, if not worse.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ Kate said, though she was sure he was not. She took a deep breath.

  ‘Are you doing anything this evening?’ she asked. ‘Are you going out?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No I’m not. So why don’t you meet me down at the Pier Head and I’ll take you to a little pub I know which has Irish music? It would be really good to see you.’

  Half an hour later she was standing enjoying a welcome breeze from the river, which ruffled her hair as she watched the ferry pull away from the landing stage to cross the Mersey to the Wirral. It was a sight she had seen hundreds of times, although there had never been enough money for trips to New Brighton to be more than a rare treat. But just standing there, with the towers of the three Graces, the harbourside buildings that had somehow survived the bombing and still dominated the waterfront, made her nostalgic for her childhood, even though it had in many ways been less than perfect. Suddenly she felt more at home than she’d felt for a long time. After five minutes or so, Tom came quietly up behind her.

  ‘Hello, sis,’ he said. ‘You haven’t written me out of the script, then, like the rest of the family?’ Kate turned and gave him a hug.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Why would I ever do that?’

  ‘Lots of people do that,’ Tom said.

  ‘More fool them. How are you?’ He shrugged, and when she scanned his face more closely she could see telltale lines of strain around his eyes and mouth.

  ‘I’m OK,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a job in a little boutique-type shop at the back of Dale Street. A bit like the place where I worked in Carnaby Street. They sell all the trendy gear up here now. Are you going to the film premiere or something?’