Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (3 page)

‘Stop that,’ she hissed at Smart, who stepped back slightly. ‘Where will we go?’ she asked Lubin, interested in his latest idea almost in spite of herself.

‘David Bailey went to New York,’ Lubin said. ‘But there’s no money for that sort of caper so I think for a start we’ll go to Highgate Cemetery. Lots of nice monuments. Even Karl Marx, that old bastard. A couple of tasty girls round his tomb will make him look like the old fraud he really was.’

Kate grinned in spite of herself. The combination of years of tub-thumping sermons from militantly anti-communist priests and the stark fear, which lingered, of the night the nation went to bed not knowing how Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s brinkmanship would end, gave her little sympathy for the Russians, who had apparently chased Andrei and Tatiana’s ancestors out of their homeland with little more than the clothes they stood up in. The idea of fashion shooting, if not actually dancing, around Marx’s tomb quite appealed to her.

Little more than half an hour later, Kate found herself shivering in the back of Andrei Lubin’s sleek open-topped car with the wind blowing her hair wildly, sitting behind the driver and Ricky Smart. She could feel the power of the Mercedes and held on to the grab handle for dear life as Andrei weaved in and out of the traffic in Camden and Kentish towns and then accelerated with a roar up a steep hill with dense trees on one side until he screeched to a halt outside a massive entrance on the left side of the road and a similar entrance on the right. A funeral cortège was passing slowly ahead of them down the avenue between the trees to the right as they parked the car. Their vantage point high above the city gave glimpses down from Highgate across the river Thames to the hills of Surrey and Kent beyond.

‘They still use it then?’ she asked as she got her breath back and tried to restore her unruly dark curly hair to some sort of normality.

‘Not the Victorian side. That’s more or less full up,’ Lubin said. ‘The east side is still in use. That’s where old Karl’s monument is. Come on. I’ll show you.’ He put the hood up and led the three of them across Swains Lane and into the eastern part of the cemetery, slightly downhill to a fork in the pathway where he swung left and there, looming over them and attended by a handful of visitors was the massive bust of Marx amongst the encircling trees, with a couple of fading bouquets of flowers on the floor at the foot of the plinth.

‘He looks a bit like Father Christmas – or God,’ Kate said, earning herself a filthy look from a serious-looking couple reading the inscription on the plinth closely.

‘A bit of a fraud either way,’ Ricky Smart muttered, glaring at Marx’s disciples and giving Kate a slight shiver at hearing aloud what she might have thought but had never dared voice in the community she had grown up in.

‘Come on, let’s have a recce,’ Lubin said. ‘What do you think, Kate? Cast your artistic eye over it, why don’t you?’ Kate glanced around critically, taking him seriously although she was never sure how serious he was with her. Like most photographers he did not regard his trade as a suitable one for a woman and she guessed that Ken Fellows had paid more than he really wanted to for her temporary apprenticeship in Lubin’s studio.

‘I’m surprised it’s so close to the road,’ she said. ‘You won’t want those buildings in, will you?’ She waved in the direction of Swains Lane where some unattractive modern property could be seen. ‘But maybe this way, in amongst the trees, you could drape a few girls in there p’raps.’

Lubin took out his camera and began to shoot quickly around the monument and a little way into the trees. ‘He’s not under there, you know,’ he said, waving at Marx. ‘He’s actually buried over there somewhere.’ He waved vaguely towards the ranks of tombstones spreading down the wooded hill. ‘
Workers of all lands unite
,’ he quoted from the inscription. ‘That didn’t go so well, did it? There’s as many workers fighting against them as there are for them.’

It was on the tip of Kate’s tongue to dispute that but she decided against it. She was in London now, not Liverpool, she told herself. Best to ignore the politics of the generations of dockers and seamen she sprang from, so far from home.

‘What about all those Victorian monuments over the other side, where we came in?’ she asked instead. ‘Some of those look pretty amazing. They might make an even better backdrop.’

‘Go and take some shots over there then, and we’ll look at all of them when we get back. I think this whole place has real possibilities. Go with her, Ricky. It’s a bit overgrown and gothic over there. You never know who might be lurking in the shrubbery like that old villain in the Dickens story.’

‘I’ll be fine by myself,’ Kate said, but Ricky Smart just gave her a leer and followed her back across the road anyway. Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tombs and the amazing wealth of imagination that had been put into their creation, some of it leaning now at crazy angles, a few showing signs of deliberate damage to the statuary, Kate tried to concentrate on seeking out the backgrounds that Andrei might find attractive for his outdoor shots. But Smart was always there and almost always too close for comfort. Finally, when he had brushed against her suggestively once too often, she snapped and slapped his face.

‘For goodness’ sake, can’t you take a hint, la?’ she demanded. ‘Leave me to get on with my work. I’m supposed to be learning something useful here. You’re just a bloody distraction.’ Smart stepped away and, leaning back against a massive plinth with a one-armed angel on top raising its eyes to heaven in prayer or supplication, laughed loudly.

‘Too good for an East End boy like me, are you, you little Scouse slapper? I don’t think so. I reckon if it was Andrei making a pass you’d be up against the wall in his office like a shot.’

‘Don’t kid yourself,’ Kate snapped, setting off back towards the Marx monument at a brisk pace, just short of a run.

Later, when Andrei had ferried them all back to Soho, and begun to draw up an extensive list of possible outdoor locations which to Kate, who was still learning her way round the West End, seemed like a veritable safari, she decided to call in on her actual boss on the way home. She found the agency almost deserted and Ken Fellows himself in his office studying contact prints in his shirtsleeves with fierce attention. He looked up when she came in without much apparent enthusiasm.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

Kate dropped her bag on the floor and shrugged as she dropped into her chair. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure Andrei knows which way fashion photography is going, to be perfectly honest. I met his cousin, who’s trying to break into the rag trade and she says he’s much happier doing society photography, daughters of the county set in long white gloves and pearls on their way to hunt balls, that sort of stuff.’

‘I shouldn’t think that’s got much of a future in swinging London,’ Fellows said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘It’s not just the poor who are always with us. Who do you think buys those posh frocks in
Vogue
? And what about the
Tatler
, for God’s sake? Or
The Lady?
’ She had done a brisk survey of the upmarket women’s magazines when Ken had suggested a venture into fashion and reckoned she sounded authoritative, even if her knowledge was little more than skin-deep.

‘But someone will be into the short skirts and long boots, won’t they?’ Fellows said. ‘They’re out on the street right in front of our eyes, aren’t they? The lads’ eyes are out on bloody stalks every time they go down Oxford Street. Some girls are wearing combined knickers and stockings as well. Tights, for God’s sake, like bloody Laurence Olivier. That’ll cause a lot of disappointment to the “get a flash of that” fellers, believe me.’

‘Well, that’s one reason why I wondered if I should take Lubin’s cousin more seriously than him. Tatiana may be what we’re really looking for. She’s into designing cutting-edge clothes for the teens and she’s looking for someone to take some pictures for her. Lubin won’t help her, but I could. And I thought if it went well and her collection goes well, we could get a new client . . .’ She stopped, taking in the sceptical look in Ken’s eyes. ‘If you let me use the darkroom?’ she said.

‘In your own time,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s more practice. But I want the rights. If they’re worth selling, I’ll sell them on.’

‘OK,’ Kate said. ‘I’ll give it a whirl, la. See what they both come up with. At least with Tatiana I won’t have Andrei and his sidekick trying to get into my knickers by the minute.’

Ken Fellows threw back his head and laughed. ‘You’ll have to take that in your stride if you’re going to last in this game,’ he said. ‘You’re not in your Liverpool convent school now, sweetheart. You’re on your own. And in a job where girls are a rarity.’

Harry Barnard began to think he might win his point when his boss leaned back in his chair and nodded thoughtfully to himself. He had spent some time poring over the post-mortem report on the dead girl, which catalogued thirty-five separate injuries she had suffered, mainly from a blunt instrument, before she had been stabbed in the chest with what the pathologist judged to be a kitchen knife.

‘A pretty frenzied attack then?’ DCI Jackson asked, placing the report meticulously at the centre of his ultra-tidy desk and steepling his hands thoughtfully, his eyes gleaming. Barnard often amused himself wondering what his Scottish upbringing had been like and whether the DCI had ever worn a kilt. He could see him now casting a disapproving eye over this morning’s new Liberty’s tie and his slim-fitting Italian suit and knew the suspicions both would usually arouse. In self-defence, Barnard never failed to hide his strictly hetero conquests around the nick.

‘Looks like it,’ Barnard agreed quickly.

‘Not a very big girl?’

‘Tall but skinny,’ Barnard said. ‘Quite a looker but very young. About fifteen the pathologist reckons.’

‘But sexually experienced?’

‘Very,’ Barnard said. ‘And about three months pregnant.’

‘Not someone we’re likely to get anguished parents chasing up as a runaway just this last weekend?’ Jackson asked. ‘I don’t want complaints on the front page of the
Standard
or the
News
about us failing to even try to trace this girl when she went missing.’

‘If she’s a runaway it looks like it’s a good while ago and we haven’t had any approaches from other divisions to try to trace anyone who looks like her. I’ll check the missing-person files. Double check to see if there’s a photo that matches. Get a firm ID that way, maybe.’

‘And you say she’s been hanging around this jazz club for a while? Weeks? Months? How long?’

‘One of the musicians I talked to said that, yes. He knew her by sight though he claimed he hadn’t slept with her,’ Barnard said carefully. ‘She’d been around the neighbourhood for weeks, they thought. The other didn’t think he’d ever seen her, but I’m not sure I believed him.’

‘Musicians?’ Jackson said explosively. ‘I wouldn’t dignify them with the name. Jungle music, more like, straight out of Africa. I don’t understand why white men get involved with it. And you say this Abraham is black? I missed him when I was there the other day.’

‘He came here during the war as a GI, he said. Should have gone back to the USA but somehow didn’t. Says he prefers his treatment here to there.’

‘Check out his status,’ Jackson said. ‘Find out exactly why he didn’t go back. Talk to the US army authorities. Get his military record if you can. Bells begin to ring when you get American black men in a jazz club. It’s hard for foreign musicians to get permission to play over here. Chances are he shouldn’t be here at all, or if he should, he’s up to no good. I’ll ask uniform to organize a raid on the club to see who’s got drugs, who’s running the girls in the neighbourhood and in the club. May turn up something interesting on this little tart. With a bit of luck we might be able to close the place down.’

‘So we treat this seriously, guv?’

‘Of course, we treat it seriously,’ Jackson snapped, as though the idea that some deaths were worth more attention than others would never cross his mind. ‘It’s a murder, isn’t it? Why would we not treat it seriously? She’s somebody’s daughter.’ Jackson straightened the papers on his desk into an even more meticulously tidy pile than before and gave Barnard a dismissive nod, as if the very idea of not taking the girl’s death seriously had never crossed his mind. The sergeant knew better. The bait he had dangled in Jackson’s mind’s eye had been snapped up enthusiastically but it was not the prospect of convicting the killer of young Jenny that had tempted him to maybe commit some of his budget to the events at the Jazz Cellar. It was the potent mix of, in his mind, decadent music, drugs and a possible American deserter that had tempted him. And if his trawl netted a few homosexuals – who, to his mind, infested every alleyway and entertainment joint in Soho – so much the better.

‘It’s on your patch. Deal with it,’ the DCI said.

Back at his desk in the CID office Barnard gazed thoughtfully at his phone for a moment, then shook his head irritably, picked up his trench coat from the coat-hooks by the door, crammed his hat on his head at a rakish angle, and left the nick. Heading across Regent Street and into the warren of narrow streets that make up the heart of Soho, he barely noticed the numerous people who either crossed to the other side of the road when they saw him or acknowledged his presence with a more or less shifty nod. This time he had no interest in the tiddlers who inhabited the upper reaches of this murky pond; this time he was after one of the sharks. And he could see as soon as he approached the Delilah Club, where a Jag was parked outside the main doors with two wheels on the pavement and a bulky man in a dark suit lounging in the driver’s seat, that the shark was at home.

Barnard flashed his warrant card at the doorman and crossed the dance floor inside, weaved between tables, where cleaning was still in progress, to a door to one side of the bar marked Office. He tapped on it, and put his head round.

‘Can I have a word, Ray?’ he asked the man who looked up with a flash of extreme annoyance on his face at the interruption. Ray Robertson was sitting at a massive desk with a pile of what looked like correspondence strewn in front of him, envelopes screwed up on the floor, For a moment Barnard thought he would refuse to speak to him but after a brief hesitation Robertson’s heavy face relaxed slightly and he nodded the sergeant in.