Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (13 page)

Roddy grunted.

‘Well, we need something to sell,’ he said. ‘Or this old place will have to go on the market. Which after six hundred years in the family would be a ruddy shame.’

There was, Kate thought, a note of real desperation in his voice.

The following Monday morning, Kate O’Donnell stood on Waterloo Bridge, leaning over the parapet, with the River Thames ebbing swiftly eastwards beneath the arches, and the sun glittering on the panorama to either side. On the north bank, Westminster and its Parliamentary towers stood stiffly alongside the fast running water, its familiar gothic outline very definitely not what she was looking for. While to the south, on both sides of the bridge, a more promising prospect unfolded, not pretty, in fact in some ways deliberately stark, but far more in tune, she thought, with Tatiana’s geometric clothes. Better in many ways, she thought, than the old manor house in the Chilterns.

The Royal Festival Hall she had never seen before, though she vaguely remembered that it was all that had survived of the Festival of Britain, of which she had seen pictures when she was at school. She liked its strangely curved roof with the small colourful shield on the left, and the sharp horizontal rows of windows facing the river. The whole modernist structure was oddly complemented by what looked like a much older circular tower or chimney, with small windows running up the side, almost like a decapitated lighthouse plonked down far from the sea.

Across the river itself ran the metal lacework of the Hungerford Bridge across which green trains trundled at regular intervals, and to the east there were tantalizing glimpses of more chimneys and towers, an almost industrial landscape in sharp contrast to Westminster and the dome of St Paul’s on the opposite bank of the river. She felt a shiver of excitement. There was grist to her mill over there, she thought. She could do interesting things with Tatiana’s clothes against that backdrop. She dropped down from the bridge and took a brief excursion along the embankment and her pulse quickened. This would work, she was sure. This was undoubtedly the place to set her shoot. She pulled out her camera and spent twenty minutes snapping the area from every angle before glancing at her watch.

She did not have much time to get back to Lubin’s studio in time for the afternoon session he had planned. She worked her way through the walkways and tunnels that surrounded the Festival Hall and took the underground from Waterloo station back to Oxford Circus and walked slowly down into the narrow streets of Soho, which were relatively quiet as the lunch hour came to an end. She was anxious about Sylvia, who was having her operation today, although she had no idea where. And she wondered if she could persuade Tatiana that she was experienced enough to launch herself on to the fashion sea where the current captains were like cruising destroyers circling anxiously and looking for the chance to blow each other out of the water. Did she stand a chance in that company, she wondered?

The studio was bustling when she arrived and Andrei Lubin soon had her fully occupied organizing the girls and making sure their clothes were just so. She was surprised when half way through the afternoon Sylvia sidled through the door. Andrei glanced in her direction briefly.

‘I wasn’t well this morning,’ she said in little more than a whisper.

‘You look like death warmed up,’ Lubin said with no trace of sympathy. ‘I should get home to bed. You’re no good to me looking like that.’

The girl’s eyes filled with tears but she turned back to the door and Kate, who had been making coffee, followed her. On the narrow landing outside she put an arm round Sylvia’s shoulders. ‘How did it go?’ she asked.

‘OK, I suppose,’ Sylvia said. ‘She gave me some aspirins for the pain and told me to go home to bed.’

‘Then I should do that if I were you,’ Kate whispered. ‘Don’t come in to work until you feel better. If you feel too bad, get yourself to the hospital. These things sometimes go wrong you know.’

‘I can’t do that,’ the girl said miserably. ‘It’s illegal, what I’ve done. They’ll arrest me.’

‘I’m sure they won’t if you need help,’ Kate said. ‘Anyway, go home and go to bed for now. Can you get there by yourself?’

‘I expect so. It’s not far.’ Sylvia said.

Kate looked in her purse and gave her a ten bob note. ‘Take a cab,’ she said.

Sylvia nodded and turned away and Kate watched her make her way awkwardly up the street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. There would be plenty of cabs there, she thought, and walked slowly back to Andrei Lubin’s shoot upstairs. The way these girls were exploited and thrown away like used rags infuriated her but she could not see how she could do anything about it while she was working for him herself. If the commission for Tatiana went well she would tackle Ken Fellows again and try to extricate herself from the current arrangement. But she knew he would not do anything unless she had proved that she could produce fashion pictures on her own that were acceptable to the magazines. Until then she was trapped and she hated it.

She ploughed through the afternoon and once the shoot was finished she developed the shots she had taken on the south bank of the Thames and walked back along Oxford Street to Tatiana’s fashion studio. She found Broughton-Clarke in the cutting room, working on a mannequin and lengths of white and black fabric, her mouth full of pins. Tatiana nodded in Kate’s direction and held up three fingers, which Kate took to mean that she would be free to talk in three minutes or so. She took her pictures out of her bag and spread them out on the large wooden table and eventually Tatiana joined her, pin-free, and cast her sharp eye over Kate’s exhibits.

‘The south bank?’ she said, slightly doubtfully.

‘It’s perfect,’ Kate said. ‘All sorts of ultra-modern buildings in amongst older stuff. Look at this tower thingy. What’s that, for goodness’ sake? It looks like a lighthouse. Your designs will fit the area like a glove. If you’re not sure we could go down there with a single model and take some shots. Set the whole thing up on a small scale and see what it looks like. We don’t have to go the whole hog first time out. Take it a step at a time.’

‘Mmm,’ Tatiana said. ‘I’ve got a couple of dresses we could try out.’ She picked up a couple of sketches showing two short shift dresses in geometric shapes of black and white. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

Kate shrugged. She did not really know what to make of these new fashions and Tatiana laughed at her non-committal expression.

‘You’ll be wearing them yourself in six months’ time, you’ll see. Fashion never stands still and I think it’s on the verge of a revolution. I need to be at the front. In the meantime you just take the pictures, dear. That’ll be your contribution.’

Kate nodded. ‘I’ll run these prints past Ken Fellows tomorrow. Show them to him with some of the stuff V
ogue
is using. See what he thinks as well.’

Tatiana shrugged. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘We’ll give it a whirl. Midweek some time, maybe?’

‘Perfect,’ Kate said, well satisfied. ‘As soon as you like.’ There was a way, she thought, that she could escape from Andrei Lubin’s studio, even if it did mean tying herself to his cousin. At least Tatiana wanted her for her skills not her body.

DS Harry Barnard strolled the short distance from the nick through Mayfair, enjoying the weak sunshine and the classy shops that he longed to patronize, across Grosvenor Square to the still stark new American Embassy on the west side of the gardens. He was admitted without much ceremony to the office of a uniformed army officer who got up from his desk when he was shown in and held out a beefy hand.

‘Lieutenant Tony Saprelli,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Glad to meet you.’ Taking his hand back, feeling as if it had been put through a mincer, Barnard took the seat he was waved into.

‘Good of you to help,’ he said.

‘From what your boss told us it looks as if we might be helping ourselves,’ Saprelli said with undiminished enthusiasm. ‘We didn’t lose many soldiers on the way home. We made it pretty attractive for them to go back, college places, all that razzmatazz. But there were a few strays, and some of them we have unfinished business with. So tell me what you’ve got. I’ve already had a look at our lists and sorted out the coloured guys who went AWOL.’

‘Our man is calling himself Muddy Abraham, plays the saxophone in a jazz band, apparently spent some time in Liverpool before coming to London. There’s a long-standing black settlement in Liverpool, former seamen mainly, so he could blend in without too much trouble up there in the forties and fifties. He doesn’t seem to have got himself naturalized here, not under that name any way, so he’s likely still a US citizen.’

‘Probably some fancy woman at the bottom of it,’ Saprelli said. ‘Let’s have a look at my list, see if we can pin him down.’ He flicked through the papers he had in front of him and underlined a couple of names. ‘No one with Abraham as a surname, but two with Abraham as a given name, Abraham Lincoln Stevenson and Abraham Moses Davis. You got a picture of this guy you’re holding?’

Barnard took a copy of the mugshot that had been taken when Abraham was arrested and handed it to Saprelli. ‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘He’s a big man, over six feet and broad with it, a heavyweight, not a man I’d like to tangle with, though our dealings with him have been pretty amiable so far.’ He thought it best to glide over the beating the musician had suffered when he was questioned.

‘Let’s have a look at their files,’ Saprelli said. He got up and rifled through a filing cabinet behind him and grunted as he located two dossiers. He flicked both of them open in turn and studied them for a moment, and grunted again. ‘This looks like your man,’ he said, coming round to Barnard’s side of the desk with one file and the police mugshot in his hand. ‘A lot younger in our shot of course, but I reckon Abraham Moses Davis is your Muddy Abraham, don’t you?’

Barnard nodded cautiously. The soldier in the file was much younger, of course, thinner faced, but the likeness was unmistakable.

‘He’s the right sort of height too,’ Saprelli said. ‘Six foot two, in fact. And here – there’s a note he played saxophone. There was a lot of music going on in those black units when they got the time. But this one? I guess we’d very much like to see him again when you’ve finished with him.’

‘He has a record?’

‘Oh yes. He went AWOL for a very good reason, if you look at it from his point of view. He came back with his unit to this country, prior to being shipped home, hooked up with a white girl, in a village near where the unit was stationed, was warned off – we don’t put up with that – and got into a fight with a white sergeant, refused to obey an order, hit the sergeant hard and ran. The sergeant hit his head as he went down and died in hospital the next day. Davis may not even know that, but the US Army wants him on a charge of murder. Believe me, we don’t look kindly on negro soldiers knocking off their superiors. I don’t suppose you do either.’

Barnard whistled. ‘He’s not going to want to hear that after all this time,’ he said. ‘Isn’t there some time limit on these things?’

‘Not if I can help it,’ Saprelli said, his face hardening. ‘I’ll look into it straight away, but in the meantime I think we’d be grateful if you kept him under lock and key.’

‘He’s been remanded in custody by the magistrates but he’s only charged with possession of marijuana. We won’t be holding him long unless something more serious crops up.’

‘Well, do what you can,’ the American said. ‘I’ll see how quickly I can sort out a request for extradition.’

‘Right,’ Barnard said, getting to his feet. ‘Thanks for your help, Lieutenant. You know where to find me if you need me, or DCI Keith Jackson. We’ll wait to hear from you.’

Barnard walked slowly back to the nick, and reported back to the DCI, with a sense of foreboding. But Jackson was not in his office and his secretary said he had been called to Scotland Yard for a meeting. Barnard shrugged. It would keep until the morning when he could write a report and avoid actually witnessing Jackson’s satisfaction at the outcome of his American inquiries.

Kate did not notice Ricky Smart as she walked across an ill-lit Shepherd’s Bush Green on the short trip from the tube station to the flat she shared with Tess Farrell. She was deep in thought after her discussion with Tatiana as she walked up the steps to the front door, and was not aware of anyone coming up behind her quietly until an arm suddenly wound itself round her neck and a hand covered her mouth. From the beginning she had no doubt who her assailant was. She had been in close proximity to Ricky too many times to mistake the feel and the smell of him, and even though he only whispered, she still recognized his voice.

‘Come on, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘It really is time we got together. Open the front door, why don’t you then we can get cosy.’

Kate pushed back from the door, hoping that Ricky would lose his footing on the worn stone steps down to the street but he only gripped her more tightly and reached for the key that she had already pulled out of her bag.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You know you’re gagging for it.’

Kate glanced up at the tall Victorian house where none of the windows appeared to be lit. Tess, she recalled, had mentioned that she would be home late as there was a rehearsal for the school production of
Romeo and Juliet
for which she was assistant producer. And none of the other three flats appeared to be occupied. She was on her own and she clung on to the front door key but she was not as strong as Ricky and his hand over her mouth effectively prevented her from calling for help. In spite of her increasingly frantic struggles he got the door open quickly and pushed her inside into the silent and almost dark, cabbage-smelling communal hall, where piles of post for generations of former tenants lay in piles on a table and the payphone hung precariously off the wall. She tried not to panic but her heart thumped painfully and she could scarcely breathe.

‘You can thank Andrei for this, sweetie,’ he said, holding both wrists now so that she could not wriggle away. ‘He asked me to follow you because he didn’t believe you were really going to crazy Tatiana’s place, and then when you finished there I thought I might as well find out where you lived as well. Ken Fellows wouldn’t give us an address.’