Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (14 page)

‘Why on earth do you want to know where I live?’ Kate croaked, as he loosened the grip on her mouth enough to allow her to speak. ‘What do you want?’ she gasped, starved of oxygen.

‘Having got so far I thought we ought to finish it off,’ he said. ‘Which is your flat?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said.

He rattled the keys he had taken off her, one for the front door and one for the flat, and even in the dim light she could tell he was smiling, a wolfish flash of teeth that terrified her. ‘No one seems to be at home,’ he said. ‘We could just try them all. Find a nice comfy bed. Come on you little tease. I’ve waited long enough for this.’ And he pushed her hands behind her back and her back against the wall and kissed her hungrily, pressing his body against hers and leaving no doubt what the next step was intended to be.

Suddenly he stiffened in a different way, hit her hard across the face and turned to the front door where someone was silhouetted against the street lights outside.

‘Hello?’

Kate heard Tess’s familiar voice
,
slightly uncertain as she reached a hand in and switched the light on, then gasping as Ricky pushed past her and leapt down the front steps and disappeared into the street. Kate’s knees gave way and she sat down on the stairs, gasping and trying to hold back the tears of relief.

‘What’s going on?’ Tess asked. ‘What on earth is going on? Who was that?’

Hardly able to speak, Kate shook her head. ‘He followed me from my work,’ she said. ‘He’s been pestering me for days. Ever since I got there, in fact. Thank God you’re early. I thought you weren’t coming . . .’

‘Is this the Russian you’re working for?’ Tess said, outrage in her voice. ‘Shall I call the police? Here, let’s get home and see what damage he’s done. Holy Mother of God, what’s going on in that place you’ve been going to? You’ve got to get out of it.’

Tess helped Kate up the stairs and out of her coat, brewed sweet tea, which Kate sipped gratefully, and applied cold water to the bruise on her cheek, while Kate told her haltingly what had happened.

‘This time we need the bizzies before it gets out of control,’ Tess said soberly.

Kate clutched her hand. ‘They won’t do anything,’ she said dully. ‘They don’t do anything about these girls on the street who aren’t even old enough to be having sex. They don’t do much even if you get raped, Harry Barnard says. They don’t believe you, do they? And he didn’t actually get that far, thanks to you.’

‘But you’ve got to do something,’ Tess complained. ‘If you don’t do anything he might try again. What about your Harry? Do you want me to ring him? He fancies you rotten, you know he does. Surely he’d do something about this, if it’s you. You can’t ever feel safe if you just ignore it.’

‘Maybe I’ll tell him tomorrow,’ Kate said. ‘He’s always around. He’s got a murder on our doorstep at the moment, a girl who worked for Andrei for a while.’

‘Maybe Ricky killed her. He’s vicious enough,’ Tess said angrily. ‘You really ought to get out of that place, you know. It’s not safe, is it? Not with someone like that there every day. You’re really not safe.’

‘Leave it till tomorrow,’ Kate said, her head in turmoil. ‘All I want now is a bath and some sleep.’

‘If you can sleep,’ Tess said. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to. I’m only glad he dropped your keys. I picked them up off the hall floor. Otherwise I don’t think either of us would ever have slept here again.’

K
ate had slept fitfully and got up early the next morning still unsure what to do about her previous evening’s encounter with Ricky Smart. Tess pressed her over a hurried breakfast to go straight to the police but Kate knew that would effectively put an end to her connection with Andrei Lubin and she did not want to do something so precipitate without discussing it with Ken Fellows first.

‘I’ll go to see Ken on my way into the studio,’ she told Tess. ‘I’ve some prints to show him anyway. I’ll try again to get him to pull me out, though I know he wants me to finish the course.’

‘He can’t expect you to put up with being treated like that,’ Tess objected. ‘The man should be in jail.’

Kate shrugged, feeling dispirited. ‘And I’ll talk to Harry Barnard about it,’ she offered by way of a compromise, though she wondered if even he would be willing to put much effort into investigating an attack that had petered out without much damage done. He would be angry, she had no doubt, but would he really think he could get a conviction after what he had told her about women and girls not being believed? And when Kate had marched into Ken Fellows’ office and explained why she had come in so early and so full of righteous indignation, she found him less than sympathetic.

‘There’s always some smart-arse who’ll try it on, girl,’ he said. ‘If you want to make your way in this business you’ll have to learn how to handle them. Treat it as a bit of fun, why don’t you? You sure you didn’t give him the wrong idea, lead him on a bit?’

‘This was way beyond a bit of fun,’ she came back angrily. ‘He tried to rape me. And no, I didn’t give him any encouragement. I can’t stand the man.’

‘Well, it may have felt like that, but he probably didn’t mean it. He probably just got a bit carried away,’ Ken said as if that were a consolation. ‘Men do sometimes.’

‘He shouldn’t have been there. He followed me home,’ Kate insisted.

‘I’ll have a word with Lubin, tell him Smart is being a nuisance, and he should tell him to back off. But I want you to stay there until the end of the agreement. Otherwise what you’ve done so far will just be wasted, which would be stupid when it was all looking so promising. Come on, girl, I didn’t think you were a quitter.’

Kate scowled. ‘You know I’m not,’ she muttered through gritted teeth. ‘But this was serious.’

‘There was no harm done,’ Fellows said, clearly dismissing the matter. ‘So, you said you’d have some prints to show me. What have you got?’

‘These are the shots I took in the studio with Andrei, and this is one of the locations I thought would suit Tatiana’s designs. Outdoor shoots seem to be the coming thing, modernist and brutal and seemingly the tattier the better, so as soon as she’s got enough designs available I’ll get the models down there and see what I can do. She’s very enthusiastic. She also suggested doing some at her husband’s stately home, though when they took me down there on Saturday it didn’t seem that stately to me. That’s a bit tatty too.’

Fellows studied the prints keenly and nodded. ‘You’re doing OK,’ he said, which was as close to praise as Kate had ever heard him go. ‘So get on with it, is my advice. You don’t want an idiot like Ricky Smart to mess up your career, do you? Ignore him. And get the shoot with Tatiana organised ASAP. I think we could have a good thing going there.’

Less than happy, Kate collected up her prints and made her way the short distance to Andrei Lubin’s studio, which was almost deserted when she walked in. Lubin himself was on the phone and gave her a vague wave before continuing his conversation and there was no sign at all of Ricky Smart. Kate hung up her coat and began to load her Voigtlander with fresh film and check her stock of flashbulbs. ‘Right,’ she heard Lubin say before he ended his call and crossed the room with a sympathetic smile to put a hand on her shoulder, which he probably thought was avuncular but made Kate squirm.

‘That was Ken,’ he said. ‘He says you’ve been having trouble with Ricky. I’m sorry about that but please don’t feel that you can’t talk to me about it if he bothers you again. He’s got a day out today to do some recruiting, but I’ll talk to him tomorrow. He means no harm but he’s sometimes a bit overenthusiastic.’

‘This was more than overenthusiastic,’ Kate said flatly, slipping out of Lubin’s grasp. ‘The man’s a menace.’

‘I’ll see to it,’ Lubin said, irritated. ‘He won’t bother you again.’

‘Thanks,’ Kate said grudgingly.

‘I have to go out this morning,’ Lubin went on. ‘Will you hold the fort here till lunchtime?’ It was a question to which he obviously expected no objection and Kate soon found herself alone in the office with little to do. She sat on a high stool with a mug of coffee in front of her flicking through the glossy pages of fashion magazines and wondering how the violent contrasts between the traditional and the avant-garde of high fashion would pan out. Would Tatiana’s experimental designs for the young and trendy really triumph, as she so firmly believed? Or would the likes of Hardy Amies make a sneak counter attack, take hemlines down again and waists in and banish shiny boots to the dustbin of fashion history? Lubin seemed to dither while the likes of David Bailey plunged wholeheartedly into the brave new world. Whatever happened, it would be fun to watch, she thought, and maybe, if she was lucky, play her own small part successfully.

Her browsing was interrupted by the sound of the door opening and her heart pounded for a moment in case the new arrival proved to be Ricky Smart. Instead she found herself jumping off her stool to greet Sylvia Hubbard, ashen-faced, and leaning against the wall for support, clutching her stomach.

‘What are you doing here again?’ she asked the girl, taking her arm and helping her on to a stool. ‘You still look terrible.’

‘I just came in to look for Andrei to see if he had any work for me next week,’ Sylvia whispered.

‘You should still be in bed by the look of you,’ Kate said. ‘Here, I’ll make you a coffee.’ She busied herself with the kettle, stirred a couple of teaspoons of sugar into the brew, and thrust a mug into Sylvia’s shaking hand. ‘Did it all really go successfully?’ she asked gently. ‘You really don’t look good.’

‘They said there would be some bleeding, but there seems to be a lot,’ the girl said. The girl was shaking and Kate shuddered.

‘You must see a doctor,’ she said. ‘Or go to casualty at the hospital. These things can go wrong you know.’

‘I can’t go anywhere,’ Sylvia said flatly. ‘They’ll arrest me and lock me up.’

‘Of course, they won’t,’ Kate said, although she was not at all sure that what Sylvia believed was not true. Before she went to college and her horizons had broadened beyond the Catholic church’s rigid views on procreation, she had not even known that what Sylvia had done was a possibility. ‘Look, I have to stay here until Andrei comes back. Why don’t you go down to the cafe on the corner and buy us something for elevenses and bring it back. You look as though you’ve had no breakfast. Something to eat will perk you up.’ She gave the girl a ten-bob note and folded it into her shaking fingers. ‘I’ll come with you to casualty if you like, if you don’t want to go on your own when Andrei comes back. You really need to see a doctor, I think. You must.’

Sylvia nodded uncertainly. ‘All right,’ she said, finishing her coffee and sliding off the stool with a wince of pain. She walked slowly to the door and Kate heard her going down the stairs to the street. She was not surprised that when Andrei Lubin returned after half an hour Sylvia had not.

‘You might as well go for an early lunch,’ Lubin said, much to her relief, but when she ran down the stairs and hurried up and down the street in both directions there was absolutely no sign of Sylvia Hubbard. Heart pounding she slid into a telephone box on the corner of Frith Street and dialled DS Harry Barnard.

‘Can you meet me at the Blue Lagoon?’ she asked when she was put through. ‘I think I’ve got problems I can’t handle. I need some advice.’

Kate had almost finished her coffee when Harry Barnard arrived, hung up his coat carefully by the door and weaved his way through the crowded lunchtime tables.

‘Have you eaten?’ he asked, looking at her sharply.

She shook her head. ‘I’m not very hungry,’ she said.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Barnard said. ‘I’ll get you a sandwich and another coffee.’

‘Now,’ he said when he brought back a tray and arranged their lunch on the table. ‘You look terrible. What’s up.’

Kate fought back the tears that had threatened her equilibrium ever since the events of the previous evening, but chose to deal with Sylvia’s problems before her own. ‘It’s Sylvia,’ she said quietly. ‘She had her operation yesterday and she came into the studio this morning looking like death warmed up. I’m sure she needs to see a doctor but she won’t. She thinks she’ll be arrested if she goes to the hospital. In the end she ran off again.’

‘Do you know where she lives?’ Barnard asked. ‘She might just have gone back home.’

‘I asked Andrei Lubin if he had an address for her but he said he didn’t. I’m not surprised. His paperwork is a mess. Ricky looks after it usually but he’s not in today. And none of the other girls were in this morning so I couldn’t ask anyone else if they knew where she was living. There’s no shoot today. The place is deserted. I don’t know what to do next.’

Barnard frowned. ‘You’re right to think she might be at risk,’ he said. ‘But I can hardly report her as a missing person. She’s only been gone for an hour or so. Uniform would laugh at me. Do you have a photograph of her?’

‘That was easy,’ Kate said, delving in her bag and pulling out a print of Sylvia which she had taken from Lubin’s files, the girl looking demure in one of the more traditional outfits he still made space for.

‘How old did you say she was?’ Barnard asked.

‘Fifteen,’ Kate said.

‘She looks older. Leave this with me. I’ll keep an eye out for her and I’ll check the hospitals. See if anyone like her has walked into casualty or been brought in by ambulance. And I’ll ask one or two uniformed bobbies I trust to keep an eye open too. But you have to accept that we may be too late.’

‘She could die?’ Kate whispered.

‘Of course she could,’ Barnard snapped. ‘Some of these backstreet people are butchers. They’ve got no medical qualifications, they’re here today and gone tomorrow, from one address to another more or less overnight. Some of them get away with something which is very close to murder, and it’s not the babies I’m thinking of. If she was unlucky . . .’ He shrugged.

‘But you gave her the money . . .’ Kate felt confused.

‘She’s a child, Kate, and she needed help. Unfortunately the only place she could get it was in the backstreets. It’s the law that’s an ass, but the powers that be – not to mention my DCI – don’t see it that way.’ He drank his coffee and pushed away his plate impatiently. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said. ‘But I don’t hold out high hopes that it won’t end badly. Now, you said problems. What else is going on? You look like death warmed up yourself.’ He took her hand across the table and she did not pull away. ‘Come on, tell me.’