Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (2 page)

‘Should Andrei listen to you?’ Kate asked, puzzled.

‘I’ve started to do some designing myself. My husband has set me up in a bijou studio down the road behind Peter Robinson. The rag trade is big down there. It’s only on a small scale so far, just a couple of girls to help me, but I’ve got friends in Paris who keep me up to date with the latest ideas. No one here is coming close yet. Courrege is way out in front. It’s all changing almost overnight.’

‘I thought there was some shop called Bazaar here in London . . .’

‘Oh, she’s quite clever but she won’t last,’ Tatiana said dismissively. ‘So, what do you think? If Andrei won’t give me any help promoting my designs, how would you like to take some shots for me?’ Kate hesitated.

‘Do you mean me personally or my agency? I’m not sure what my boss would think about me doing a freelance commission. I’ve a nasty feeling he’d want his share of the fee.’

‘Oh, I’m sure we can keep this a little secret between ourselves,’ Tatiana said airily. ‘Let’s not make any firm agreements until I’ve seen what you can do. I’ll have some designs ready to show in a week or so. If you want to see what you can do with them, you can come to my studio one evening and we’ll take a few shots.’

Kate looked dubious. A designer’s studio was hardly likely to have the lights and other equipment a photographer would need to produce high-quality fashion shots. That much at least a couple of days in Lubin’s studio had taught her. ‘It might make more sense to do some shots out of doors. More like the stuff David Bailey is doing for
Vogue,
’ she said.

Tatiana looked interested at that. ‘
Vogue
I like. Give me your phone number,’ she said. ‘When I’ve got something fit to show I’ll give you a ring. And keep a close eye on my cousin while you’re working with him. We’re not really Russian, either of us. It’s all a couple of generations back. But he plays at it and thinks it gives him free license to sleep around with pretty well anything that moves. And keep an eye on Ricky Smart too. He’s mainly into the skinny little models, but he might make eyes at you just for a change. And darlink . . .’ She hesitated for a moment with a wicked grin. ‘Do buy yourself some new clothes,’ she said. ‘You look as if you’re straight off the boat from Dublin.’

‘The train from Liverpool, actually,’ Kate admitted.

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’ Tatiana asked.

Detective Sergeant Harry Barnard sat at a front table in the dim and cavernous Jazz Cellar, nursing a Scotch and half listening to the two musicians rehearsing on the tiny stage. He was not a great follower of jazz but he knew this place was something of a legend and the black man playing the sax a greater legend still. Muddy Abraham was an American who had somehow managed to remain in England at the end of the war instead of returning to the States with the rest of the GIs and claimed to have acquired British citizenship along the way. He would have to check up on that, Barnard thought. Over the last year or two Abraham had become an almost permanent fixture at the Cellar and was now top of the list of staff and musicians at the club that DCI Keith Jackson wanted interviewed, though not, Barnard knew, with any great urgency. For Jackson there was a hierarchy of crime, even when it came to murder, and this case came pretty far down it.

Two days ago Jackson and the full murder team had descended on the club when one of the cleaners had called 999 when she discovered the naked body of a young girl partly concealed by the rubbish bins in the back yard of the club. That the girl was very young – no more than fifteen, the pathologist thought – was obvious from the start; that she was on the game and pregnant, became apparent quickly enough at the post-mortem, which Barnard had attended. Little more came out of the routine examination apart from the pathologist’s conviction that the girl had not been killed where she was found. The blood flow after death showed she had been moved at least once. In any case, he had said, she had been dead, he reckoned, at least twenty-four hours and the body would not have gone unnoticed for long in broad daylight. She must, he thought, have been brought there and dumped in the back yard after dark. Her body was badly bruised, black and blue and yellow, as if she had been beaten over a period of time, but the actual cause of death was a single stab wound to the heart.

That DCI Jackson would soon lose interest in the investigation Barnard had not needed to be told. He had seen it too often before. What he had done to deserve being landed with the cursory interviews, which was all the DCI was now interested in, he did not know. But he resented it enough to feel a growing determination to give the unnamed girl, bruised and battered and finally stabbed and tossed aside in death, while still looking like a child, at least a shot at justice.

The blues being explored on the stage finally wailed to a plaintive close and the two musicians jumped down to Barnard’s level, and glanced desultorily at the warrant card he waved in their direction. They looked neither impressed by his rank nor particularly helpful.

‘I know you all spoke to my boss, or maybe someone else, the other day,’ the sergeant said. ‘But there are a few follow-up questions you might be able to help with,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I can start with you, Mr Abraham, and then catch up with you in ten or fifteen minutes, Mr . . .?’

‘Chris Swift,’ the second man, tall and rangy with a sparse beard, National Health glasses and an open-necked check shirt, offered without enthusiasm.

‘Clarinet, obviously,’ Barnard said.

‘Obviously,’ Swift said. ‘I’ll be at the bar if you want me.’

Muddy Abraham sat down at the table opposite Barnard, putting his saxophone carefully into a case which he pushed under the table. ‘So how can I help you, Sergeant,’ he said, the southern American drawl in no way diminished by almost twenty years in Britain, although Barnard guessed that he looked significantly different from the young GI who must have crossed the Channel from the south coast to Normandy in 1944. His eyes were bloodshot, his jowls loose and his skin an unhealthy colour like chocolate kept too long. ‘It’s a terrible thing to have something like that so close. Poor kid.’

‘Did you know her?’ Barnard asked, but the musician just shrugged.

‘How do I know?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know what she looked like. There’s always a lot of young girls hanging out aroun’ outside here at night. Stan Weston doesn’t like them coming into the club but now and again they come in with some guy and he doesn’t notice. Jail bait most of them. There seems to be something about musicians that brings them in.’ He gave a lopsided smile. ‘It’s not just the Beatles, you know, who pull the girls. Though the ones who hang about here are usually a bit more savvy than that. Generally a bit older, too. Jazz goes back further, much further that this new stuff, even this side of the pond. The club don’t let them inside, the kids. But it’s difficult sometimes to know how old a girl is, ain’t it? Or what she’s up to.’

Barnard reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a photograph which he passed across the table.

Abraham took it and stared, almost transfixed, by the black-and-white image of a young girl’s face, eyes closed, half-turned away from the camera. ‘She dead?’ he asked quietly.

‘Her face wasn’t too bruised,’ Barnard said. ‘It was possible to take a picture at the post-mortem.’

The musician nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘I seen her. I guess a lot of people round here have. She’s been hanging around for a while. Seemed like a nice kid.’

‘She was on the game. A tart,’ Barnard said.

‘That’s a shame, man,’ Abraham said. ‘That sure is a crying shame, a young kid like that.’

‘It happens,’ Barnard said flatly. ‘You haven’t used her services?’

Abraham did not look shocked but shrugged massively. ‘I have a lady, man. I don’t need to be sleeping with no bits of girls who should be in school.’

‘OK,’ Barnard said. ‘But if not you, who? She wouldn’t have been hanging around unless some people weren’t taking an interest in her. Stands to reason.’ Abraham nodded but looked uncertain.

‘I don’t know that, man,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to ask around.’

Barnard did not believe him, but did not want to push him too hard right now. He did not really think that the musician was a likely murderer and he did not look the type to quit a good job and run. ‘Do you know her name?’ he asked instead of pushing harder.

Abraham shrugged again. ‘I never spoke to the girl, man, but I think I heard her called Jenny.’

‘Probably not her real name anyway,’ Barnard conceded. ‘But at least it gives us something to use if we ask the other girls on the street.’

‘How was she killed, man?’ Abraham asked.

‘We’re keeping that to ourselves for a while,’ the sergeant said. He glanced round the dimly lit club, only the lights over the tiny stage and the much bigger bar area casting a glow over the tables. Within hours the place would be packed and smoky and throbbing to the music a self-selected clientele often came miles to hear. And round the edges would hover the Soho locals, the tarts and con men, dealers in dope and fake booze, looking for a mark and, occasionally, surfacing from the sludge, dealers in death who had been crossed in business or even in love and arrived looking for revenge. Barnard had long ago ceased to be surprised by what emerged on his patch, but something about DCI Jackson’s lack of interest in this case offended him. This kid deserved better, he thought.

‘We don’t think she was killed here,’ he said. ‘Were you doing anything unusual the day before, or the night before?’

‘I lead a borin’ life, man, with my woman,’ Abraham said. ‘I come to work, I go home an’ go to bed, I wake up, eat an’ come to work again. My music an’ my woman keep me content.’

Barnard nodded and leaned back in his faded and worn plush seat. This place needed someone with a bit of money to put into it, he thought. He wondered vaguely whether Ray Robertson might take an interest, but he suspected that Ray was only interested in clubs if they paid a social as well as a financial return. This place was being blown out of the water by the sudden changes in taste that had hurtled the Beatles to the Palladium this year. The musicians were middle aged at best and the majority of their fans probably even older.

He glanced across to the bar where Chris Swift was leaning, staring in their direction, a glass raised to his lips.

‘Could you ask your clarinet man to come and have a word?’

Abraham shrugged and got to his feet.

‘You’re not thinking of taking a trip any time soon?’ Barnard added quickly. ‘Not a trip to New Orleans?’

Abraham laughed but it was a sour sound. ‘If I’d wanted to go back stateside I’d have gone a long time ago,’ he said. ‘Bein’ black ain’t all roses here but it’s a damn sight better than there. I’ll get Chris for you.’

Swift took Abraham’s place with even less enthusiasm than Abraham had showed. His expression, Barnard thought, was quite simply hostile, his mouth a pursed line behind the whispy beard, his eyes blank, and he wondered why.

‘What’s all this about then?’ he asked. Barnard showed him the photograph of Jenny Maitland and he looked at it impassively. ‘Who’s she?’ he asked.

‘The kid who was found dead in the club’s back yard last week,’ Barnard said. ‘Have you ever seen her in the club, or anywhere else for that matter?’

Swift shook his head. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘I thought the rumour was that she was a tart. Old man Weston keeps the whores out of here. Quite right, too. They’re a distraction from the music. If people want sex they can find it easily enough on the streets here around here, can’t they? You lot don’t seem to do much to keep it under control. Grease your palms too well do they, the pimps?’

‘All that bothers you, does it, Mr Swift?’ Barnard asked, slightly surprised by the aggressive tack the clarinettist was taking. He hadn’t expected such a puritanical reaction here.

‘Yes it does,’ he flashed back. ‘I’m a serious musician, Sergeant, and most of the people who come to the club are serious about jazz. In many ways it’s a pity the club is in this neighbourhood, amongst the poofs and pimps and good-time girls.’

‘Can’t be much different from New Orleans in the old days,’ Barnard observed mildly.

‘That was then, and in another country,’ Swift said flatly. ‘In America jazz is shaking off that sleazy reputation. Jazz is filling the concert halls. Can you imagine us being offered the Albert Hall?’

Barnard tired of this argument quickly. ‘So do I take it you’ve never seen this girl? Or any others like her in the club?’ he asked.

‘Never,’ Chris Swift said. ‘Can we get on with our rehearsal now?’

Barnard nodded, wondering why Swift was so sure that the club was clean while Muddy Abraham had recognized Jenny immediately as someone who had definitely been around. He watched Swift hurry back to the bar and suddenly recognized a lever, if a dirty one, to persuade DCI Jackson to launch a serious investigation into the girl’s death. Whatever Swift said, Abraham had offered the possibility that soliciting was going on inside the Jazz Cellar and the DCI would not like that one little bit. In fact he would be determined to put a stop to it. And that, Barnard thought, might be just the sort of aggravation, carefully embellished, that would help him find Jenny’s killer.

‘C
ome,’ Andrei Lubin said imperiously. ‘We go on location. If that is what the magazines want, that is what we’ll give them. We’ll do a little recce with the girls we shot indoors yesterday. Offer so-picky Miss Greenaway two sets of prints. See if she seriously likes her clothes being pawed over by hoi polloi, blown about in the rain, all that nonsense.’

Kate O’Donnell and Ricky Smart were crammed into the tiny room Andrei called his office, although it was in just as much a state of disarray as the rest of the studio, with clothes hanging apparently randomly on the backs of chairs and the door, and piled high on a low red-velvet chaise longue that was parked against a wall. She wondered what the purpose of that was at the same time as she felt Ricky Smart’s hand fumbling where it had no right to be. But she had very little wriggle room to escape his attentions and guessed that if she complained to Andrei she wouldn’t get much sympathy.