Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (17 page)

T
he Alfa Romeo Giulietta might have remained unnoticed where it had been left at the end of an alleyway close to Berwick Street if a delivery driver who needed to reach the dilapidated double doors leading into the Italian restaurant’s delivery bay, against which the Alfa was parked, had not driven up bumper to bumper behind it, and jammed his thumb on his horn before he jumped from his cab in a fury.

‘Which effing idiot has left that there?’ he asked himself angrily before walking to the driver’s door and peering through the glass. The window seemed dirty on the inside, which puzzled him at first until he worked out what it was, looked more closely, and then could barely believe what he was seeing.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said at last, appropriately enough, and tentatively tried the car door, which opened easily, revealing without any doubt that his eyes were not deceiving him. A man was lying sprawled across the two front seats, his legs still in the footwell, tangled across the pedals, his head and shoulders on the passenger side covered in blood that had splashed and dripped across the leather seats and the windows. The delivery man found himself panting for breath and fighting off nausea. He had absolutely no doubt that the man was dead. He could not, he thought, be anything else with his head apparently half severed. After a moment he slammed the Alfa’s door and leaned against the side of his own van until he felt able to stand without support and climb back into his cab. He reversed carefully out of the alley and drove round the block to the restaurant that was expecting his load of fruit and veg.

The place was closed not long after nine in the morning but when he banged on the door a waiter opened it a grudging couple of inches.

‘I can’t get round the back, some idiot has parked there,’ the driver said. ‘You’d better take your stuff this way.’ Together the two men unloaded the van and carried the crates and boxes through to the kitchens. Only when it had all been signed for did the van driver mention that there might be rather more than just a car in the alleyway.

‘You’d better call the police, mate,’ he said. ‘But don’t mention my name, eh? It’s bugger-all to do with me.’

The waiter shrugged dramatically, hands waving. ‘I wait for the boss,’ he said. ‘He won’t thank me for bringing police.’

And in the end, more than an hour later, it was a young uniformed constable, sent from the nick to take a look at the badly parked and possibly abandoned car causing an obstruction outside a Soho restaurant’s back doors who opened the Alfa’s door for the second time that morning and had to call in the discovery of a man with his throat cut lying across the front seats.

Within ten minutes it was DS Harry Barnard who was peering at the body and quickly making way for the first arrivals from the murder team, DCI Keith Jackson in the lead, the police doctor and the forensics specialists quickly following behind.

‘A bit of a mess,’ Barnard said to the DCI as he passed on his way out of the alleyway, which was now seriously crowded. ‘Difficult to see without moving the body but it looks as if he wasn’t far off having his head taken right off, whoever he is.’

‘Check out who the car’s registered to,’ Jackson said curtly. ‘It’s Italian, isn’t it?’

‘Nice little motor,’ Barnard said. ‘Pity about the mess inside.’

‘Let me know who the owner is,’ Jackson snapped, and continued his way to make his own inspection of the body before making way for the doctor to confirm, as if he needed to, that the man at the centre of the shambles inside was indeed dead.

‘Right, guv,’ Barnard said placatingly. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as.’ In fact the answer from the licensing authorities gave him nearly as much of a shock as the sight of the body in the Alfa Romeo had done. The car, they told him, after what seemed like an inordinately long wait, belonged to a Richard Anthony Smart, resident at an address in Tufnell Park, date of birth 1933.

‘Well, well, well,’ Barnard said to himself as he put the phone down. ‘That’s a turn up for the books. I wonder who else Ricky Smart has been annoying.’ That, he thought, might turn out to be a very interesting question indeed.

Back at the nick himself, DCI Jackson assembled his murder team in the CID office and conducted an initial briefing.

‘So, what do we know so far?’ he asked. ‘We have a pretty firm ID. The victim was carrying a driving licence and some other documents in the name of Richard Anthony Smart, and the car was registered in his name. We already had an interest in Mr Smart, according to DS Barnard here, and knew he was employed by a photographer called Andrew Lubin . . .’

‘Andrei, guv,’ Barnard said. ‘He’s half Russian apparently. Ricky Smart was his sidekick, fixer, something like that, and recruiter of young girls who wanted to work as fashion models, including Jenny Maitland, the girl found dead behind the Jazz Cellar, and apparently Sylvia Hubbard who died in hospital yesterday after an illegal operation. I’ve already talked to Lubin and Smart in connection with those two deaths. It’s tricky to see at this stage whether there’s any connection with Smart’s own death, but it’s obviously a possibility. Revenge maybe. We’ll need to talk to the families of the two girls. I’ve already talked to the Maitland family and I can’t see any of them being able to find Smart let alone attack him.’

‘The post-mortem will be at three this afternoon,’ Jackson said. ‘It would obviously be sensible if you came with me, Sergeant, as you’ve already spoken to this man. You can confirm the identification.’

Barnard nodded and Jackson went on to detail other officers to visit Smart’s workplace and home address as soon as the ID was confirmed and convene again later in the day for more instructions.

Barnard drove the DCI back from the hospital to the nick, carefully obeying every traffic regulation he could remember and a few extra just in case. Keith Jackson had stood impassively by while the pathologist examined the body of Ricky Smart, his identity easily confirmed by Barnard himself who tried not to let his eyes dwell on the fact that the man’s head was only loosely attached to his body. The pathologist had found no other external injuries on the corpse but surmised, when he opened the stomach, that Smart had consumed a considerable quantity of alcohol before he died and almost certainly should not have been behind the wheel of a car.

‘From the position of the body he must have driven the car to where it was found,’ Barnard said. ‘And from the position of the car, in a dead-end alley up against doors that were obviously regularly used, he was either lured there to meet someone or forced to drive there by someone else in the vehicle.’

‘The blow that cut his throat most likely came from behind,’ the pathologist had offered. ‘You couldn’t easily get that sort of wound from the side in the confined space of a car. My best guess is that someone was sitting behind him and reached round with an extremely sharp knife.’

‘Have we found the weapon?’ Jackson asked Barnard, as he drove across Oxford Circus and swung down Regent Street.

‘Not to my knowledge, guv,’ the sergeant replied. He overtook a bus cautiously, knowing that he must tell Jackson about Kate O’Donnell’s involvement with Smart and Lubin and knowing that the information would raise all sorts of questions in the Scotsman’s mind. Even so, he reckoned that sooner was very much better than later in this case.

‘There is one thing about this case – and the deaths of the two young girls – you ought to know, guv,’ he began tentatively. ‘There’s a young photographer working temporarily in Lubin’s studio, a female photographer, who I’ve known for a while.’

Jackson’s bright blue eyes focused on Barnard’s, his face impassive. ‘And?’ he said as the silence lengthened.

‘She’s called Kate O’Donnell. I met her before your time, guv,’ Barnard said. ‘Her brother was a suspect in a case I worked on while Ted Venables was still around. She contacted me again recently because she was a worried about what Smart and Lubin were up to with the girls they employed. She’s working there for a month to learn about fashion. In fact what she said was very helpful in the Jenny Maitland case. It helped us identify her, and link her to Lubin’s studio. She was sure the two men were sleeping with the models, more or less as a matter of course. Some of them were obviously under-age. Kate told me she was having trouble herself in fending Smart off, but she’s a lot older and more streetwise so she was able to cope with working there. It was only for a short time anyway.’ That, Barnard thought, was as much as he wanted to tell the DCI about Kate’s troubles with Smart. He would warn her not to mention to anyone that she had told Barnard about Smart’s attack on her doorstep. That would open a can of worms for both of them if Jackson found out.

‘Sleeping with the models, even under-age models, is not the same as working the streets,’ Jackson said.

‘I suspect that happened after the girls left the studio,’ Barnard said. ‘A lot of the girls Smart recruited were being sacked quite quickly. Some of them only worked there for a few weeks, and I was beginning to wonder if they were being put on to the streets either by those two themselves or someone they were passing them on to. It was looking very nasty. And then Kate contacted me again when a second girl went missing, Sylvia Hubbard, the one who turned up in casualty after a botched abortion. She wasn’t strictly speaking missing, she was only away for a day or so before she turned up in hospital. But it made me even more suspicious that something odd was going on. I was on the case with Smart and Lubin before someone else decided to take him out a bit more finally than I had in mind.’

‘Are you involved with this young woman?’ Jackson asked coldly.

‘No, guv,’ Barnard said. ‘Not that I wouldn’t like to be, but the answer from her is no. In this case she is strictly a witness and likely to be a useful one.’ He pulled up outside the nick and Jackson opened the passenger door.

‘See you keep it that way,’ he said, before getting out of the car. ‘Briefing at half four.’

Strolling across Regent Street on his way to grill Andrei Lubin about his relationship with Ricky Smart, and hoping for a quiet word in Kate’s ear in case Jackson took it into his head to interview her without him, Harry Barnard noticed a Jaguar parked half on the pavement outside the Delilah Club, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. It was a sure sign that the owner of the club, Ray Robertson, was in residence. Although it was only lunchtime and the place would not swing into action for another eight or nine hours, the main doors responded to his push and he made his way through a deserted reception area, across the dance floor and to a small narrow door beyond the bandstand marked simply ‘Office’. He tapped and a familiar voice called him in.

‘Flash! Come in, come in, I was hoping I might see you. I hear there’s been some unpleasantness on your manor.’

‘You’re well informed,’ Barnard said drily. ‘It’s not in the papers yet, as far as I know.’

‘It pays to be well informed, you know that,’ Robertson said. ‘So inform me some more. Who is this beggar who got his throat cut? What the hell’s going on, Harry?’

‘I came to ask you the same question,’ Barnard said. ‘We know who he is. He’s Ricky Smart who worked for a photographer called Andrei Lubin, organizing models for him. The worst he’d been accused of as far as I knew was sleeping with under-aged girls and fathering illegitimate kids. But I guess there was a lot more than that going on.’

‘You say he was recruiting models? Pretty girls, that’d be, then?’

‘Sure,’ Barnard said. ‘A bit skinny for my taste. Certainly no Marilyn Monroes amongst them. But pretty enough.’

‘You think they were tempted to try to put them on the streets?’

‘Could be.’

‘That would get up Frankie Falzon’s nose, for sure,’ Robertson said. ‘You asked me about the Jazz Cellar and girls, remember? But I couldn’t raise a whisper about that place. But I did get a hint that Falzon’s not best pleased about something or someone. Maybe it was this bloke Smart, not the jazz fellows, you should have been following up.

‘And Falzon’s a man who favours the knife,’ Barnard said. ‘We know that from past experience.’

‘Well, I wish you the best of luck if you’re going to try to get anything out of that mob. It takes me all my time to get to see him even if I want to discuss things that are in his best interest. He’s not really a businessman, at all. He still thinks he’s a clan chieftain hidden in the countryside with his men all sworn to secrecy. Bloody Robin Hood, or who’s the other one, the Scottish one – Rob Roy was it? If you can find a chink in his armour let me know. There’s a few questions I would like a straight answer to as well.’

Barnard laughed. ‘I’m not sure my dour Scottish guv’nor would go with that idea,’ he said. ‘He’s definitely some Scottish version of the sheriff of Nottingham. He’d hang the lot of you, given half a chance.’

Barnard’s next port of call was Andrei Lubin’s studio where, as he had hoped, he found Kate O’Donnell and Lubin himself working with three young models in various outfits that made no attempt to cover up more than was strictly necessary.

Kate grinned at the sergeant while Lubin’s attention was distracted by one of the models complaining that dress was so skimpy it risked revealing her naked breasts.

‘If the skirts get much shorter they’ll have to turn them into shorts in the interests of public decency,’ Barnard whispered. ‘Mind you if we start arresting girls for exposing themselves the custody officers won’t complain.’

‘What do you want, la?’ Kate asked in broad Liverpudlian and Barnard reverted quickly to an official look.

‘A word with you, honey, but later. Just now it’s bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said, turning away. ‘Mr Lubin, can you spare me a few minutes? I need to talk to you about Ricky Smart.’

Lubin turned impatiently in his direction but evidently picked up on Barnard’s seriousness quickly enough. ‘Take five and go and get some coffee, girls. You’d better put your coats on or you’ll catch your death of cold in that gear.’

After they had all left, he perched languidly on the arm of a chair. ‘Ricky?’ he said. ‘Where the hell is Ricky? That’s what I want to know.’