Cover Up

by Patricia Hall

  The sisters stood transfixed by the sheer unexpected complexity of what had happened, as they watched him walk away, shoulders slumped, towards the buses at the Pier Head.

  ‘Wherever Harry is, his car won’t be far away,’ Kate said at last. ‘And it’s pretty noticeable.’ They found it quite easily, parked just a street away from the police station with no sign of Barnard himself.

  ‘Do you reckon he’s still talking to the police?’ Annie asked. Kate shrugged.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, pulling the door handle, expecting the car to be locked, and was surprised when the door swung open. She peered inside and could see nothing out of the ordinary apart from a manilla folder that must have slipped half out of sight under the front passenger seat. From the scruffy state of it, she guessed that she must have been resting her dirty shoes on it, without realizing, the last time she was in the car. She turned to Annie.

  ‘You get off home, la,’ she said. ‘Mam will need to know what’s going on. I’ll wait in the car for a bit until Harry turns up. You can leave a message at the Lancaster Hotel if you need to. We’ll go back there eventually I expect. Ring from the call box anyway. I should be able to tell you what’s happened to Tom by then. We have to keep in touch.’

  Annie flung her arms round her sister for a moment. ‘Take care,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think Harry will be long now,’ Kate said, trying to infuse some reassurance into her voice as Annie turned away and headed for the Anfield bus. Like Kevin, she looked a forlorn figure as the wind from the river blew her hair into a red halo around her head. Something, Kate thought as she slipped into the driving seat to get out of the rising breeze, was very, very wrong. And with Harry Barnard missing, she had not the faintest idea what it was.

  She succeeded in turning the radio on and listened desultorily to the Light Programme, which did not seem to have noticed the existence of rock and roll, let alone the Merseybeat, and to relieve the boredom she picked up Harry’s folder and noticed the Metropolitan Police insignia on the front. She knew she had no right to pry, but curiosity eventually got the better of her and she flipped it open only to feel a sense of anticlimax when she realized that all it contained was a sheaf of copied sketches of a woman with no indication of her identity or even, given the wooden features of the portrait, whether she was alive or dead. She suspected, after gazing at it for a while, that the latter was more likely and it had quite possibly been drawn from a body on a pathologist’s slab. She shuddered, realizing it was probably the woman who’d been found in Soho Square. She peeled off one of the sketches from the bundle, folded it up, and put it into her bag. It would be an interesting if macabre contribution, she thought, to the archives Ken Fellows had at the agency, though she realized it could never be published unless the police circulated it themselves.

  Finally, feeling too frustrated to sit still any longer, she flung herself out of the Capri and made her way towards the police station. The sergeant on the front desk glanced up as she approached.

  ‘What can I do for you, darling?’ he asked, his eyes undressing her as she stood uncertainly in front of him.

  ‘I wonder if a copper called Harry Barnard has come in here this morning? He’s my boyfriend but he’s not from here, he’s up from London, and I’ve lost track of him.’

  The sergeant’s expression turned furtive, and he glanced at the door leading to the interior of the building before he replied.

  ‘What makes you think he’d come here, petal?’ he asked.

  ‘He was going to ask about my brother,’ Kate said. ‘Tom O’Donnell. I think he was arrested this morning.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of either of them, pet,’ the sergeant said. ‘I’ve only just come on duty, but we wouldn’t give out information like that, anyway. Your man would know that.’ It was as if a shutter had come down, and although Kate knew the sergeant must be lying it was obvious that she was not likely to be able to persuade him to tell her the truth.

  ‘So do you know if my brother’s all right? He was brought in early this morning and my mam needs to know what’s going on.’ If anything, the sergeant’s expression became even more distant.

  ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ he said. ‘I told you, I’ve only just come on duty. If he’s been charged he’ll be in court tomorrow morning, I expect.’

  ‘Someone must know where he is,’ she countered. ‘People can’t be dragged from their beds and just disappear.’

  ‘I think maybe you’d better go home, miss,’ the sergeant said, his tone harder now, and Kate was conscious of people coming through the swing doors behind her. She turned on her heel and hurried out.

  ‘Who the hell was that?’ DCI Strachan asked.

  ‘Says she’s O’Donnell’s sister,’ the sergeant said. ‘Looking for him, and for some friend of hers from the Met who’s left her in the lurch.’

  ‘You didn’t tell her anything, did you?’ Strachan demanded.

  ‘I didn’t know anything to tell her, did I, sir?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Strachan agreed. ‘And don’t you forget it.’

  TWELVE

  After her fruitless visit to the police station, Kate went back to Barnard’s car and stood indecisively beside it. But it did not take long for her to decide that the only place for Barnard or anyone else to contact her with any chance of success was the Lancaster Hotel. She walked back through the city centre, which was still uncannily quiet after the excitements of the last few days, and wondered if there would be another film premiere in the Beatles’ home town if they made another film. Or whether the quartet, who seemed to have settled in the south when they were not globetrotting to concerts around the world, had now effectively left the Mersey and the Merseybeat and the faltering docks behind. Her brief acquaintance with John Lennon at the College of Art had never given her the feeling that he was closely attached to battered old Liverpool, still trying to put itself together again after the war. He’d always seemed to have his eyes on something else entirely. And who could blame him now it looked as though he had achieved it in spades? There would be those who begrudged his success, but she was not one of them.

  She took a detour up Matthew Street but the doors of the Cavern were tightly closed, the posters outside beginning to look wind-blown. The underground club where she and so many of her Liverpool friends had sweated so many deafeningly claustrophobic nights away was becoming a blurred memory, effectively cut off from her own new life in London. Those days, she suspected, were over and would not be coming back either for her or for the bands who’d made a success on a bigger stage, however loyal their fans up here might be.

  Before she started to climb Brownlow Hill to the hotel, she looked up to where the stark struts of Paddy’s Wigwam were just visible amongst the surrounding buildings along Hope Street and thought of the two priests who had so arrogantly tried to reorganize her life for her. What made them think they held any sway over her after all this time? How dare they interfere! It was not just for the Beatles that Liverpool was over, it was over for her too.

  The receptionist glanced up from the register as she walked in.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of messages for you, Miss O’Donnell,’ she said.

  The first was from Harry Barnard, simply saying he was going to the police station to find out what had happened to Tom. The second, from her sister Annie, left at reception a couple of hours later, answered that question in a way that filled Kate with horror: Tom had been taken to Casualty, and she was on her way to the hospital to find out how he was and why he had been rushed there by ambulance.

  Kate felt breathless with anxiety. She turned to the receptionist, who was looking at her with concern.

  ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet,’ she said. ‘Is it bad news, la? Are you all right?’

  ‘Not really,’ Kate said. ‘If anyone else calls for me, could you tell them I’ve gone to Casualty to see my brother Tom? He’s been rushed into hospital ap
parently.’ Breathing heavily she turned away, and then had second thoughts as her brain struggled with this sudden new calamity.

  ‘Could you ring for a taxi, please?’ she asked the receptionist. ‘I need to get there as soon as I can.’ She looked in her purse and reckoned she had easily enough of her quite generous expenses left to cover the fare. Ken Fellows, she thought, would understand and she watched as the young woman made the phone call. ‘Ten minutes,’ she said as she put the receiver down. The cab arrived more quickly than that, and in less than ten minutes Kate was walking fearfully into the Casualty Department, where she saw her sister and her mother slumped on hard chairs in the waiting room.

  ‘How is he?’ she demanded. ‘Have you seen him? Is he all right?’ As Bridie wiped away tears, Annie turned to her sister angrily, eyes flashing and cheeks flushed.

  ‘No, he’s not all right, la,’ she said. ‘The nurses took me in to see him and he looks as if he’s been in a car crash. He was hardly conscious. I don’t think he recognized me. They said they were waiting for a different doctor, one of the top doctors. Then we were just holding his hand when two bizzies in uniform came rushing in and said he was still under arrest and we were not allowed to talk to him. That’s if he could talk anyway, I said, and they told me to feck off or they’d arrest me too. And our mam had hysterics and they bundled us out of the cubicle as if we were criminals. Then another officer came and pulled us out here and wouldn’t answer when I asked him what had happened to Tom – not even when I screamed at him. They must know, but they won’t say.’

  Kate looked at the curtains pulled around one of the cubicles.

  ‘Is he in there?’ she asked, and Annie nodded silently. Kate marched across the space between the waiting area and the treatment cubicles and pulled the curtain back to reveal a doctor and two nurses busy around the bed, where she just caught a glimpse of her brother before the two police officers standing at the head of the bed noticed her and rushed in her direction. One was the senior officer she’d seen at the police station when she inquired about Tom. He looked even less friendly now than he had back then. Although they had not exchanged a word then or now, she sensed that the man must be Tom’s most senior tormentor and a threat to her entire family.

  ‘What happened to him?’ she demanded loudly, so that the medical staff would hear her. ‘There was nothing wrong with him when he was taken away. So what happened?’

  ‘An accident,’ DCI Strachan said equally forcefully. ‘He was playing up and fell down some stairs on the way to the cells. Entirely his own fault for behaving like a fool.’

  ‘My brother’s not a fool,’ Kate said flatly. ‘And he looks to me like he’s been beaten up. You don’t get bruises like that from falling down stairs.’

  Strachan came towards her and, taking hold of her arm in a vicelike grip, pushed her through the cubicle curtains.

  ‘This man is under arrest,’ he hissed close to her ear. ‘And you have no right to be here. So get out, now. Get out, or Sergeant Davies here will arrest you and you’ll see the inside of a cell yourself – and I promise you, you won’t like that.’

  Feeling defeated, Kate and Annie sat one on each side of their mother again, leaving Tom white-faced and unmoving, until eventually one of the doctors left the cubicle where he was being treated. He glanced in their direction and Kate seized the opportunity to question him.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked. The doctor looked embarrassed.

  ‘You’re what? His sister?’ he asked and Kate nodded.

  ‘I’ve insisted we keep him in,’ he said. ‘He’s concussed and I’m not happy about the head wound. Plus we need to X-ray his arm, which looks as if it might be broken. We’ll deal with all that and keep him here at least overnight. Apart from that, it looks mainly like bruising. Nothing too serious – maybe looks worse than it is, but you can never be sure.’ He glanced behind him to where DCI Strachan was standing, glowering from the cubicle entrance.

  ‘The police don’t want you to talk to him at the moment,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m sorry but they’re within their rights, I think. And in any case, he’s not very coherent. If I were you, I’d go home and phone in the morning to see how he is. We’ll look after him, I promise.’

  Kate nodded wearily.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t look as if we’ve got any choice, does it?’ But as she turned away, one of the nurses called the doctor back to Tom’s bedside and it was obvious from the flurry of activity which followed that something was seriously wrong. From where she stood, it looked as if Tom had lapsed into unconsciousness again.

  The doctor came back towards her as porters rushed into the cubicle and began to wheel the bed out, with DCI Strachan following close behind, still fuming. ‘We need to operate to relieve some pressure on his brain,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, we’ll do our best.’

  Kate turned to Annie and her mother.

  ‘We’d better call Kevin,’ she said. And as her mother made to protest she turned on her.‘He’s entitled,’ she said. ‘You might not like it, but he is. At the very least he’s a close friend, though you know he’s more than that.’ Her mother nodded reluctantly.

  ‘Then see if you can find your effing father,’ she said. ‘He’s entitled too.’

  ‘Have you any idea where he might be holed up?’ Kate asked.

  ‘No, but I reckon Terry Jordan will know,’ Bridie said. ‘They seem to be thick as thieves again these days.’

  ‘He’s in London as far as I know,’ Kate said. ‘I won’t be able to contact him there.’

  ‘Then ask Carmel, his wife,’ Bridie shot back. ‘I don’t reckon there’s much she doesn’t know about what he gets up to. She wouldn’t have married him otherwise, would she? They live out by a golf course, close to the sea, in Formby. Very la-di-da they are these days.’

  As she left the hospital, Kate struggled to come to terms with the idea of getting out to Formby on a Sunday afternoon. But she didn’t argue, there didn’t seem to be much point adding to the family’s anxieties. And if she could find Harry Barnard, no doubt he would take her in his car. The key to it all, though, was finding Barnard.

  Harry Barnard shot to his feet as the cell door crashed open and DCI Strachan stormed in. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’re on your way back to London. I’ve spoken to your boss. Told him what’s been going on up here and that I want you off my patch. And as it happens, he wants you back there urgently.’ Barnard ran his tongue over his lips, which he realized from the metallic taste must be caked in dried blood.

  ‘Did he say why?’ he asked through swollen lips.

  ‘No,’ Strachan said. ‘Just that he needed to talk to you today. First thing you need do is get cleaned up. And Sergeant—’ Strachan pushed his face into Barnard’s until there was barely an inch between them. ‘If you think you can run complaining about me to the Met – or anyone else for that matter – think again. I warned you what I could charge you with, and that still stands. My reputation up here is rock solid and complaints from a few Fenians won’t touch it. In fact with the people who matter that could actually improve it. And my reach is long. From the sound of it, DCI Jackson has got his own bones to pick with you. Did you come up by car?’

  Barnard nodded wearily, realizing just how thorough a beating he’d been given.

  ‘Are you fit to drive?’ Strachan persisted.

  ‘Not right now,’ he said, only too aware that the DCI’s face was going in and out of focus alarmingly.

  ‘Right, I’ll get one of my DCs to drive you in your own car. Smarten yourself up and you can call your boss and tell him what’s happening. We’ll skip the handcuffs, but if you give my driver any trouble I’ll throw the book at you. Understood?’

  ‘Understood,’ Barnard said. ‘Can I contact my girlfriend? She’ll wonder what the hell has happened to me.’

  ‘That’s the O’Donnell girl, is it?’ Strachan asked. ‘The one with the nasty little pervert for a brother? She’s nearly as much of a pain in
the neck as you are. Is she expecting to go back with you?’

  ‘No,’ Barnard said. ‘She’s here on an assignment and it isn’t finished yet.’

  ‘Leave her a message,’ the DCI said. ‘Where’s she staying?’

  ‘The Lancaster Hotel,’ Barnard said, knowing that Strachan would store that bit of information away and would have no compunction in using Kate as a guarantee of his own good behaviour.

  ‘Tell her to keep out of my hair,’ the DCI said. Barnard’s shoulders slumped.

  ‘Let’s get on with it then,’ he said. The thought of facing DCI Jackson back at his own nick seemed an infinitely preferable option to remaining in the clutches of this Scouse monster who inexplicably thought he’d found himself on the right side of the law.

  Kate walked back to the side street near the police station where she’d last seen Barnard’s car parked. To her horror she found it had gone. She stood looking at the empty space, wondering what to do until she remembered that when Tom returned to Liverpool after his ill-fated attempt to move to London his friend Declan had taken her, in order to meet Tom, on a local train that followed the Mersey shore towards Southport. If the service was running on a Sunday, it would undoubtedly go through Formby. And if she could get that far, she just might be able to track down Terry Jordan, or at least his wife, in their lair.

  The station was not busy and the man in the ticket office was helpful.

  ‘I need to get to somewhere near Formby Golf Club,’ she told him. ‘Which is the best station to go to?’

  After a journey that gave her time to think a bit more coherently about what was happening, she came reluctantly to terms with Tom’s situation but was left agonizing about why and where Harry Barnard had so unexpectedly vanished. The only conclusion she reached was that DCI Strachan, who she firmly believed was responsible for Tom’s injuries, must be involved with Barnard’s disappearance too.

  When she finally came out of the station at Freshfield she found herself faced with a number of large houses in extensive grounds and a road leading away to the right helpfully named Golf Road. Even from where she stood she could see the manicured links stretching away to the dunes that lined the shore and could glimpse the grey waters where the river met the shallow sandbanks and the sea. Looking down the rows of substantial houses to her left, she decided that there was no way she was going to track down Jordan by knocking on those palatial front doors, so she set off up the road to the golf course, hoping she might find someone there who knew Terry Jordan or his wife. From what she had heard about Jordan, she did not think he would be unknown to other members of the club. But what she had left out of account was that this was a club without lady members, and she attracted increasingly quizzical looks from the men, some of them wearing plus fours, that were hurrying in and out of the facilities followed by caddies carrying their heavy golf bags or pulling them along. As she approached what looked like the main club house, a man in a navy uniform stopped her and asked her business in an aggressive tone.