Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (16 page)

‘She collapsed in the street and was taken in by ambulance,’ Barnard asked, glancing up at the studio windows above them. ‘Is Smart in?’

Kate shook her head. ‘I’ve not seen him this morning yet,’ she said. ‘But Andrei’s up there haranguing a couple of girls who didn’t do exactly as he asked them quickly enough.’

‘He’ll have to do, though I still want to see your Ricky Smart about the other thing,’ Barnard said, his face grim. ‘What do you think about those two, Kate? Do you think they’re recruiting girls deliberately to run them on the street? Is the studio just a cover, do you think?’

Kate looked startled. ‘I don’t honestly know,’ she said. ‘Jenny ended up on the street but I don’t think Sylvia was doing that. I think she just slept with Andrei, or Ricky, or maybe both, and got caught out. They regard the girls as fair game, both of them. But I think the studio’s genuine enough. He’s not a bad photographer, Andrei, though he’s a bit old- fashioned about the fashion scene. Otherwise he’d support his cousin more. She’s a very good designer. I jumped at the chance of taking some shots for her.’

‘But Ricky Smart, what about him? From what you’ve told me about him he’d have no scruples about pimping, would he? Perhaps he put Jenny Maitland on the street.’

Kate shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past him, la,’ she said. ‘He’d put his own grandmother on the street if it suited him.’

Barnard nodded. ‘I’ll have a serious talk with him later down at the nick,’ he said. ‘Are you coming back upstairs?’

‘I’ll go for a coffee,’ she said. ‘I feel a bit shaky. I don’t really want to listen to you grilling Andrei about poor Sylvia.’

‘I’m sorry, Kate, truly I am,’ Barnard said, kissing her lightly on the cheek. ‘We won’t know definitely until she’s been formally identified, but I guess it’s her. I’m really sorry.’

Andrei Lubin looked angrily across the studio as Barnard walked in. He had been talking to a skinny girl who didn’t seem to the sergeant to be more than about twelve years old and whose eyes were red-rimmed from crying.

‘Get out,’ Lubin hissed at the girl. ‘You’re finished. I don’t want to see you again.’ He spun towards Barnard, switching on an instant smile that quickly faded as soon as the policeman mentioned Sylvia’s name.

‘She buggered off,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen her for a couple of days. They’re all unreliable, these girls.’ He waved a hand at the trio who were huddled around the one in tears. ‘Go and get a coffee downstairs, all of you,’ he said, and watched them scuttle away. ‘What’s this about Sylvia then?’

‘We have reason to believe that a girl who bled to death in casualty last night as a result of an illegal operation might be Sylvia Hubbard. We need someone who knew her to identify the body and, if it is her, give us some details about her, where she lived, where she came from, her family.’

Lubin swallowed hard and his face froze. He turned away to riffle through a pile of prints lying on his desk. ‘That’s Sylvia,’ he said, handing Barnard a black-and-white print of a demure-looking blonde in a traditional summer dress.

‘And that’s definitely the girl in the hospital mortuary. Did you know she was pregnant?’ Barnard asked.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Lubin said. ‘Silly cow.’

‘Were you likely to be the father of the child she was expecting, and tried to get rid of?’ Barnard flashed back quickly.

‘No I bloody wasn’t,’ Lubin said.

‘Was Ricky Smart?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lubin said, glancing at his watch. ‘In fact I don’t know where Ricky is. He was supposed to be here at nine this morning and he hasn’t turned up yet.’

‘Well, I’ll want to talk to him but we’ll worry about him later. For now I’d like the details you hold on this girl, and then for you to come to the hospital with me to formally identify the body.’

Lubin looked at his watch again. ‘Does it have to be me?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got an important appointment at twelve. Can’t her parents identify her? I’ve got an address here somewhere . . .’

‘I’d like you to come to the hospital now, Mr Lubin,’ Barnard said, a touch of ice in his voice. ‘You were responsible for this girl, you employed her under-age for sure, and did nothing to prevent her getting into this situation, even if you didn’t personally have sex with her. I want you to come with me straight away, no ifs and buts. And if you don’t, I’ll bloody arrest you for obstruction just for the sheer hell of it.’

Kate did not go back to Lubin’s studio that day. She had already arranged to take the afternoon off to do some preliminary shots of Tatiana Broughton-Clarke’s clothes that afternoon on the South Bank and when she saw Lubin leaving with Barnard guessed that not much would be happening there for a while. She had already recruited two of Lubin’s young models to wear the new designs and when she walked from the tube station at Waterloo towards the Festival Hall she saw Tatiana with the two models by the open back doors of a dilapidated-looking van parked at the side of the building.

‘I’m just explaining to the girls that the changing room is a teensy bit primitive,’ Tatiana said cheerfully. She waved at the interior of the van where Kate could see an array of clothes on hangers at the back. ‘I’ve promised them that when I’m famous they’ll be my first choice of models on the catwalk.’ She gave Kate a broad wink and a grin and tossed back her red hair. She looked tiny beside the two tall willowy girls, but she radiated determination and energy and Kate thought it not at all unlikely that she would succeed in the end.

‘Come on,’ she said to the models as she clambered into the back of the van. She glanced back at Kate. ‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ she said. ‘I even managed to get hold of a spotlight so we can see what we are doing in here.’

The quartet spent the best part of the afternoon on the embankment with Kate arranging the girls in what she hoped were interesting poses that showed off the short skirts and long boots of Tatiana’s collection set off against the modernistic backdrop of the South Bank. Eventually the light began to fade and Kate realized that the two girls were both tired by the constant changes of clothes and poses and chilled to shivering point by the rising wind from the gray river behind them.

‘I think we should call it a day,’ she said to Tatiana. ‘I’ll go back to my agency and develop the film. If you come round about six I should be able to show you some contact prints.’

‘Right,’ Tatiana said. ‘I’ll see if I can manoeuvre this old jalopy back to its garage. Come on girls, jump in, let’s go.’

‘See you later, alligator,’ Kate said as she turned back to the tube station, feeling the cold herself although she had never taken off her duffel coat. She fastened the toggles and slid into the river of humanity that was beginning to make its way home from the City across Waterloo Bridge. London, she thought, was just so big it could easily swallow up the young girls who were attracted by the bright lights and glamour of the West End. Jenny Maitland and now Sylvia Hubbard had been seduced by London itself as well as the men who had brought them there and as she worked her way through the unfamiliar passageways to the Bakerloo line she felt an unaccustomed depression as she realized how very easy it was to get lost here.

It took the unexpected enthusiasm of Ken Fellows to cheer Kate up slightly as a couple of hours later in his office they both studied the still damp sheets of prints which were the result of her first solo fashion shoot.

‘You’ve got some good stuff here,’ he said. ‘I like the modern clothes against the modern backdrop, though if my daughter came home looking like that I’d tan her backside.’

‘I think Tatiana’s got something,’ Kate said, laughing, taken by surprise by the notion of Ken as father figure. ‘This is all going to take off. I fancy some of those boots myself.’

‘God help us,’ Fellows said. ‘Anyway, show the contacts to your Russian princess and see what she thinks. It’s all a waste of time if she isn’t satisfied and doesn’t commission you again.’

‘She’s coming over,’ said Kate, glancing at her watch. It had been a long day, but if Tatiana also enthused over her prints and asked her to have a drink before she went home, she thought she had better accept. She had been in the business long enough now to have learned who called the tune.

Tatiana was late and the office was empty by the time Kate heard her clomping up the stairs in her trademark shiny knee-high boots.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said, evidently picking up a sense that Kate would like to have left for home by now, where she knew that Tess was cooking a meal. ‘So what have we got? The trouble with doing shoots out of doors, darlink, is the weather. It was bloody cold down there. The girls did nothing but complain on the way back. If we’re going to make a habit of it I’ll have to get a heater for the van. And what happens if it starts to rain?’ She took a stool at the table where Kate was sitting.

‘The girls did begin to look a bit chilly towards the end,’ Kate admitted. ‘They look it in some of the pictures too. We’ll have to weed those out. Rain we’ll have to think about. Haven’t you designed any raincoats yet?’

Tatiana didn’t answer and didn’t look amused.

‘But here are the contacts,’ Kate said quickly, sliding the sheets towards her. ‘Some of them are quite good, I think. Ken’s seen them and was quite pleased.’ Kate felt tentative and she realized that maybe she needed more practice in actually selling her work. That, after all, was what Ken was good at and why the agency flourished as it did.

‘Yes, well, he can see the financial possibilities, can’t he, darlink? I was hoping that Andrei would help me as I’m family, but he’s always had a mean streak. Now I’m stuck paying you before I’ve got anything into the shops and got a bean in return. My husband’s not best pleased, I can tell you.’

‘I thought he was funding you,’ Kate said.

‘Well, he is, but he seems to think the profits will come flooding in overnight. He’s completely unrealistic and the old place soaks up money like a sponge. He’s just found a new hole in the roof. I swear when I married him I thought he was loaded, darlink. But it seems that lords and ladies in this country are generally poor as – what is it – church mice? In fact church mice are probably more comfortable tucked up under the organ than we are in our draughty old barn of a place.’

She turned back to the sheets of prints and grunted now and again though whether in satisfaction or irritation Kate found it difficult to tell.

‘Should I mark the ones I think are the best?’ she asked eventually.

Kate handed her a pen. ‘Just a small mark underneath,’ she said, and watched as Tatiana selected about twenty of the prints for enlargement.

Eventually she pushed the sheets back to Kate. ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘How soon can we get them out there?’

‘I can print them tomorrow,’ Kate said. ‘But you need to talk to Ken about what happens next. That’s not really my business. He makes the contracts.’

‘OK,’ Tatiana said. ‘But have you thought any more about how would you feel about taking some shots on a private basis? As he told you, one of my husband’s little projects is throwing parties at our place in the country – it’s all for charity, of course, but he makes a little profit on it too. But you know how people like to have their pictures taken at parties. Andrei had been doing it until he and Roddy fell out, and there was another man in High Wycombe who looked like a possibility but he’s had a car accident and won’t be available for the next one. So we’re a bit stuck. If you took a little more trouble with your clothes and your hair, you’d fit in all right. So long as you kept that accent buttoned up.’

‘Oh thanks, la,’ Kate said, trying hard not to show how insulted that made her feel. ‘Will you lend me something of yours then?’

‘Oh I don’t think so, darlink,’ Tatiana said airily. ‘A bit out of your league. Maybe Andrei would lend you something for the night. I don’t know how well you get on with him. In my experience, if he does you a favour he always wants something in return, so bear that in mind. Or you could buy something. You could try Carnaby Street, or a place called Bazaar. Mary Quant’s place. I’m not the only person doing miniskirts, you know. It’s getting to be quite the thing. People have suddenly woken up to the fact that young people want their own styles now. It’s beginning to take off.’

‘When is this party of your husband’s?’ Kate asked. ‘I might be interested.’

‘I’ll get you the details,’ Tatiana said. ‘But you really will have to shape up clothes-wise. The 1950s is dead and buried now.’

Not where I come from, Kate thought wryly, recalling the congregation at her mother’s church in their sensible coats and fur-lined boots and regulation felt hats as they trooped in to Mass.

‘Would these pictures just be for private consumption or for the society magazines?’ Kate asked. ‘Ken would certainly be keen on that.’

‘Yes, well, don’t try to sell it to Ken just yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to my husband about exactly what would be wanted. Some people like appearing in
Tatler
, and some don’t, in my experience. But you know what the backgrounds are like, now you’ve been down to see us. Leave it with me. Let’s talk when I’ve spoken to Ken and worked out how to use these pictures and get this collection launched.’ With that she picked up her voluminous handbag and, draping her coat dramatically round her shoulders, looked as if she was about to leave.

‘By the way, have you ever met a man called Ray Robertson?’ she said unexpectedly. ‘He’s a bit of a party-giver himself I hear, and a little bird told us he’d like an invitation to our next do. Roddy thought he might be a useful contact.’

‘I have met him, as it happens,’ Kate said carefully. ‘I was sent to take some pictures at a boxing gala at his club, the Delilah. There were a whole lot of people there – a government minister, actors and actresses, people who obviously had pots of money.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Tatiana said. ‘Roddy thought he might be able to pick his brains about what goes down well at these do’s. I’ll maybe get him to send him an invite. If we don’t like him we don’t have to have him a second time.’

‘You do know he’s some sort of gangster, don’t you?’ Kate said.

‘Well, if nobody else is bothered about that, why should we be?’ Tatiana said loftily, and clomped across the studio and down the stairs, leaving nothing but a waft of a cloying perfume behind her.