Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) (6 page)

Barnard put his head round the door of the Jazz Cellar as he strolled back to the nick, but there was no one inside except a couple of cleaners wiping tables and a stale smell including an undertone of marijuana which he knew would be enough to spark DCI Jackson into a raid. He shrugged. There was nothing much he could do to prevent that. He just hoped that Kate O’Donnell was not there when the uniformed plods stormed in.

Back at the nick he put in a call to the nick in Hackney to inquire about missing persons. But according to the WPC who looked at the records for him without much enthusiasm there was nothing there: plenty of teenagers leaving home but no Jenny or Jennifer who fitted his description.

‘They bugger off all the time,’ she said. ‘The bright lights seem attractive, God knows why. Sometimes their parents report them missing, sometimes they don’t. The children’s homes generally let us know if they abscond. But if they’re sixteen or thereabouts, working age, age of consent, all that, and no indication of foul play, we haven’t got the resources to follow up. Some come back, some don’t, some are never seen again. You could try the Sally Army. They try to trace a few.’

‘I need this girl’s name,’ Barnard said with an edge to his voice. ‘This is a murder case. She probably went to a girls’ school near you. Clapton is the best guess. What have you got?’

‘A girls’ grammar and a girls’ secondary in Clapton,’ the WPC said. ‘I’ll get the addresses for you.’

It took Barnard a good half hour to grind out east to an area way beyond where he had been raised in the tightly packed streets of Whitechapel until the land began to drop away into a landscape of marshes and reservoirs and derelict sites left to fester since the war. Hackney, which contained Clapton, was the last of the boroughs he found recognizable as real East End and was where he found the secondary school that he thought Jenny might have attended. An elderly building, much extended over the years, was crammed into a mainly residential road with, as far as he could see, shockingly little outdoor space for the crowds of neatly uniformed girls who were pouring out of the doors at the end of the school afternoon. Asking directions three or four times he found reception and asked to see the head teacher.

The woman on the desk looked dubious. ‘I’m not sure she’s in,’ she said. ‘Are you a parent?’ She looked anxious and he flashed his warrant card impatiently. The woman looked slightly shocked but picked up her telephone without comment and within a minute Barnard was being ushered into the office of a smartly suited middle-aged woman, her gray hair in a neat bun, who glanced up from a cluttered desk with a look of slight exasperation.

‘Mrs Bradley,’ the receptionist muttered at Barnard, and scuttled off, looking as if she feared being chastised for bringing in a visitor, even though he carried a police warrant card.

‘What can I do for you, Officer?’ the head asked. She glanced at her watch. ‘I have a governors meeting beginning in fifteen minutes.’

Barnard pulled Jenny’s photograph from his inside pocket and handed it to the headmistress. ‘I’m trying to trace a girl,’ he said. ‘She can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen and we believe she went to a school around here and wondered if she was one of yours.’

The head took the photograph and Barnard knew immediately from the way her lips thinned in head-teacherly disapproval that he had struck gold.

‘She was one of our failures,’ she said tartly. ‘Jenny Maitland, always a difficult child from the start, by the time she had reached the fourth form she was playing truant regularly and her parents seemed only marginally interested in what she was doing. We try very hard for these girls, you know. This is not an easy area to grow up in. And on the whole we do well by them. Some of them go on to take O levels and A Levels elsewhere. Most of them find reasonable jobs. But some of them we lose. Jenny was one who wasn’t interested. Said she wanted to be a model. One or two others the previous year took themselves off for the same reason. And we all know where that can lead. Why do you have her photograph, Sergeant?’

‘I’m afraid Jenny Maitland is dead,’ Barnard said. ‘Her body was found in Soho, brutally murdered. I need to contact her parents urgently.’

Olive Bradley gave him her full attention then, looking appalled. ‘How dreadful,’ she said very quietly. ‘That is truly dreadful.’

‘Presumably you still have Jenny’s records, her home address, all that?’

‘Of course. I’ll get my secretary to retrieve them for you. Presumably you won’t want this to go any further until you have seen her mother and father.’

‘I’ll ask the local police to contact you when it’s appropriate to tell her teachers and friends,’ Barnard said. ‘When we have formally identified her we will want to tell the Press that we’ve done that. So far all we have is an unidentified body in the mortuary. When I’ve got an address I’ll go round straight away to try to contact her parents.’

Olive Bradley stood up and held out her hand to shake Barnard’s. ‘In a big school you don’t get to know many girls as individuals,’ she said. ‘Mainly it’s the very bright ones – the ones who should have gone to grammar school – or the very naughty ones. Jenny Maitland was both, as it happens, but she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – make use of her brains. A great shame. I will write to her parents in a day or two. It is a tragedy to lose a child, however difficult.’

‘Thank you,’ Barnard said.

The street Barnard located with some difficulty was in the throes of demolition. On the left, as he turned the car in and slowed down, the terraces of small houses had been reduced to rubble, with demolition balls and bulldozers still working in clouds of dust at the far end. On the right, the even numbers were, to his relief still standing, but some were already boarded up. This was local government finishing off what Hitler had begun, he thought. He knew only too well from personal experience how unsatisfactory a lot of these East End houses were, with their outside toilets and no bathrooms at all. But he also knew that many of the communities were strong, three or even four generations living in close proximity, and were unlikely to recover as families were split apart and decanted into more modern housing scattered across the edges of London. He sighed and got out of the car and began to count down to number thirty-four where the Maitlands had lived until recently and he hoped still did.

To his relief he found the house was still standing and the windows were not boarded yet, though the front door looked dilapidated and he knocked on the almost bare wood with some trepidation. To his surprise it was opened quickly by a careworn woman with graying hair who looked surprised to see him.

‘Oh, I was expecting Mr Deedes from the council,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

He showed her his warrant card. ‘Can I come in, Mrs Maitland?’ he asked quietly.

The woman looked up and down the street quickly and then pulled open the door to allow him in.

‘It must be difficult living with all this going on,’ he said as she closed the door with some force against the obviously warped jamb. The door led directly into an untidy living room and she waved him vaguely into a seat which he noticed was faintly covered with dusty deposits which he guessed must have drifted in from outside.

‘Mr Deedes from the council,’ she said, appearing to be on the verge of tears. ‘He was bringing me the offer of a house in Billericay. We need to get out of here but they keep saying they need to know how many people are in the family and my husband’s done a bunk. I don’t know where he is. He buggered off soon after Jenny left . . .’

‘Ah,’ Barnard said. ‘It was Jenny I came about.’ He pulled out his photograph of the murdered girl again and showed it to her. ‘Is this your daughter, Mrs Maitland? Is this Jenny?’

She took the photo from him, her hands shaking. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘That’s Jenny. Have you found her?’

‘I’m very sorry, I’m afraid we have found Jenny dead,’ he said and watched helplessly as her face crumpled into despair. ‘Is there anyone else in the house?’ he asked. ‘Or a neighbour who could come to be with you?’

‘The boys are at school,’ she said. ‘They go out to the Marshes to do sport after they finish lessons. The neighbours have all gone. We’re almost the last to be moved. There’s almost no one here now . . .’ She broke into heartbroken sobs.

Barnard got up and went into the kitchen at the back of the house, rummaged through the cupboards until he found what he wanted and made her a cup of hot, sweet tea. He put it on the table in front of her and handed her a handkerchief.

‘I don’t want to harass you at a time like this but I do need you to tell me a little about Jenny and how she came to leave home. And later, or maybe tomorrow, we’ll ask you to come into the West End and identify her body. So far we’ve been looking for the killer of an unknown girl. What you can tell us about her will make it much easier to track her movements since she left home and find her murderer. Do you understand that, Mrs Maitland?’

She drew a deep breath and dried her eyes, although she was still wracked with shuddering sobs. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell me about your family, for a start,’ he said. ‘What’s your husband’s name?’

‘Walter,’ she said. ‘He was working at Fords in Dagenham when we got married and had Jenny. She was our first and he adored her. But when she was about eight or nine he got laid off and it turned out he’d started drinking, hadn’t he. It was never the same after that. We had the two boys by then and all the kids were affected. Jenny was naughty at school. Her teachers said she should have gone to grammar school but she didn’t pass. I don’t think she tried. Her dad was angry about that. He started hitting the kids – and me – when he was drunk. And then they started talking about all the houses coming down. That made it worse.’

‘I spoke to Jenny’s headmistress. She said she’d started playing truant.’

‘She did. We didn’t know at first but the school told us she wasn’t turning up. She’s got in with some girls who’d all decided they were going to be models. As if that was likely. But she wouldn’t listen. And a year ago she packed her stuff and said she was going. Her father went berserk but she went anyway. We’ve not seen or heard from her since.’

‘Did you report it to the police?’

Mrs Maitland shook her head glumly. ‘My husband wouldn’t let me. He said that if that was all she thought about her family she wasn’t worth looking for. He said she was old enough to look for a job so she could look after herself now, save him some money. And then he went too . . .’ She broke down in tears again.

Barnard sighed. His imperative was to get on to the next stage of his investigation and he couldn’t sensibly transport this distraught woman to the mortuary to make an identification of her daughter right now. It would have to wait.

‘Do you have a phone?’ he asked but she shook her head. ‘Then I’ll ask the local police station to send a woman officer down to see you,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask her to help you get a relative or friend to come round to be with you, at least until your sons come home. And she can arrange for a car to collect you tomorrow to bring you to identify your daughter at the hospital. And I’ll ask the local nick to try to track down your husband. He needs to know about Jenny too, and we will need to talk to him.’

‘He’s at the root of all this,’ Mrs Maitland said bitterly through her tears. ‘He drove her away.’

‘But he didn’t kill her, I’m sure,’ Barnard said. ‘And what I’m sure you want me to do is catch her killer. So I’ll ring the local station and make the arrangements, then I’ll see you tomorrow. Right?’

‘Right,’ Jenny Maitland’s mother said, though it was obvious that for her nothing would ever be right again.

D
ave Donovan had bought Kate and Tess Farrell two rounds of drinks, and Kate was already feeling somewhat light-headed before the Jazz Cellar filled up and a couple of musicians wandered on to the tiny stage to a half-hearted round of applause.

‘Nine o’clock opening seems a bit elastic,’ Tess said sceptically.

Kate had had to work hard to persuade her to come with her at all, as they were both working the next day, but she had persevered and eventually she had agreed. Kate, as always, was curious to see something new but she did not want an evening alone with Dave who still seemed to nurse some ambitions that they could get back together. She had been surprised to hear from him when he called on her brand new phone. The last she had heard of him was that he had gone back to Liverpool with his tail between his legs, his band still not having landed a recording contract in London.

‘You’re back,’ she had said, surprised. ‘How did you get this number?’

‘Rang your office and they gave it me,’ he’d said. They shouldn’t have done that, Kate thought.

‘Why are you back?’ she demanded, not at all sure she wanted him pursuing her again. ‘I thought it was too expensive down here.’

‘It is but we’ve got a session with EMI, a break at last. This could be it, Katie. You’ve got to be persistent, la. Look where the Beatles are now. It could be us next.’

‘Maybe,’ she said, trying to mute her scepticism. Donovan and The Ants sounded remarkably similar to the Shadows and looked, in tight denim and leather jackets, like the Beatles in Hamburg; no longer, she thought, a good look. ‘The pictures I took for you could come in useful, then.’

‘Oh, if we get a contract the record company will do all that for us,’ he said dismissively. So much for appreciating the help she had given him, she thought.

‘That’s not why I phoned you,’ Dave rushed on oblivious to her mood. ‘I wondered if you’d like to come to a place in Soho called the Jazz Cellar? I heard someone raving about it the other day.’

Kate thought quickly and had to admit to herself that she was curious about the place where a young girl had been found dead, just around the corner from the Fellows agency. ‘I’ll come if Tess can come too,’ she had said. She waited while he thought about it but he had eventually agreed with ill-grace and later that night the three of them met in the French pub and wandered up through the early evening crowd, mainly tourists ripe for ripping off in the bars and clip joints of the square mile of sinful Soho which were just opening their doors and swinging into gear.