Death Trap (19 page)

‘Leonie told me you'd said you'd seen Janice with two white men that night and you didn't think it was a black man who killed her  . . .'

‘Me and Connie did see her. We were working down Westbourne Grove and we came back here for a cup of tea about midnight, and she was out there on the street bold as brass, chatting to two blokes. No way were they black. Black blokes don't generally come up this end. They stay down Notting Dale where all the clubs are. They know a lot of the girls around here won't go with them.'

‘So you'd have noticed if Janice had been with a black man?'

‘We'd have noticed,' Denise said. ‘I might even have said something to her. Us working girls have to look out for each other. No one else will. All Alphonse is good for is taking the cash.'

‘Alphonse? Who's he?'

‘It's not a he, it's a them. There's lots of them about. Alphonse – ponce. Don't you know anything?' Denise was contemptuous.

‘Have you told the police any of this?' Kate asked, already knowing the answer to expect.

‘You joking?' Denise asked. ‘Don't you know the Bill round here are as bad as the bloody criminals? If they want this bloke Mackintosh to go down for killing Janice Jones then that's what'll happen, girl. You can bet on it.'

DS Harry Barnard drove home early that evening feeling unusually dissatisfied with life. He had bought fish and chips on the way home and perched on a stool at the breakfast bar in his kitchen with the newspaper-wrapped parcel open in front of him, picking desultorily at the lukewarm meal which he had somehow managed to over-salt and over-vinegar in the chippie. He was losing touch with his East End self, he thought bitterly as he glanced round his white-and-cream kitchen where he very seldom cooked. Eventually he rolled up the coagulating mess in disgust and pitched it into the waste bin and lit a cigarette before going into the living room he had so carefully furnished. He flung himself into his revolving chair and spun round in frustration.

If he was honest with himself, he thought, he knew exactly what was bugging him and it had very little to do with the back streets of pre-war London where he had spent his childhood. Those he had left without much regret as soon as he left grammar school and by fair means or foul he had achieved most of the ambitions he had started out with. And this flat was the icing on the cake. But he was increasingly aware that there was a vacuum at the centre of his life. More crucially he knew exactly who could fill it, but increasingly doubted that he could persuade Kate O'Donnell into his bed let alone into his life on a permanent basis. He wasn't used to failure with women, though he had never given much serious thought to what might come beyond the chase and the bedding. This time, he thought, giving the chair a vicious twirl and spinning until it made him dizzy, something was different and he had to admit he was at a loss and he did not like it one bit.

He could see the infuriating Kate again though, if he put his mind to it and indulged her enthusiasm for digging into murky areas of supposed injustice. The first time she had had good reason, he admitted, with her brother entangled in a murder case. But this time there was no such excuse and his first instinct was to choke off her interest in the murky side of Notting Hill as quickly as he could. There were ruthless men there, both black and white, and on both sides of the very fuzzy frontier of the law, and he knew that the best thing she and her friends could do was to move out of their flat as quickly and as quietly as they could. But . . . He stopped spinning and sighed, walking slightly dizzily to the phone in the hall and dialling an East London number.

‘Ray?' he said when the phone at the other end was picked up. ‘Harry Barnard. Could you just possibly give me a steer on something.'

There was little more than a grunt from Ray Robertson but Barnard took it as an affirmative.

‘I know you've been down in Notting Hill chatting up the locals,' he ploughed on. ‘Do you know if Devine's extended his protection racket to the landlords as well as the usual businesses?'

‘You what?' Robertson said explosively at the other end. ‘He's doing what? That was one of the areas of business I was talking to him about. If he's jumped the gun I'll bloody have his black balls on toast.'

‘Whoa,' Barnard said, alarmed by this unexpected reaction. ‘It may not be him, but I'm told someone's at it. I've got a girlfriend down there, as you know, and I don't want her involved in any unpleasantness. Can you see if you can get a whisper about exactly what's going on and give me a bell? I'll be seeing her tomorrow with a bit of luck and I really need to know what the hell's going on.'

There was another grunt from Robertson's end, which Barnard took for assent.

‘I owe you, Ray,' the sergeant said.

‘You surely do, Flash, you surely do.'

A
t eight o'clock on Saturday night Kate stood on the doorstep, shivering slightly in a summer dress and sandals, with only a cardigan round her shoulders, looking up and down the street for the familiar red Capri. She was still not sure why she had made this date with Harry Barnard, a spur of the moment invitation to a party which probably said more about her anxieties than any desire to encourage his attentions. What she did need to do, she told herself, was to talk to him and this had seemed at the time like a good opportunity to do just that when Tess had issued a general invitation to her friends to go with her to a party at a colleague's basement flat in Holland Park Avenue.

When she had left the office to snatch a quick lunch the previous day she had not been totally surprised to see a familiar figure lounging on the other side of Frith Street, trilby at a jaunty angle and the collar of his coat well turned up against a sharp autumnal breeze. She had crossed the narrow street, dodging an accelerating taxi and the lunchtime strollers, and given Harry Barnard a tentative smile.

‘I was hoping I might see you,' she had said, ignoring the fact that he had blatantly been waiting for her to emerge.

‘That's encouraging. I tried calling you last night but no one answered your phone.'

‘We don't hear it if we've got the telly on,' Kate came back with a slightly guilty smile. ‘And there's no one else in the house now to pick it up. Which was one reason I wanted to talk to you. Someone lobbed a brick through one of the downstairs windows the night before last and so far we've not been able to get the landlord to even board it up. It's not safe, and to be honest we're getting a bit scared.'

‘I'm not surprised,' Barnard had said. ‘There seems to be a lot of bad stuff kicking off down your way. Have you made any progress looking for another place?'

‘Not really,' Kate said. ‘We're all too busy during the week. We'll have another go this weekend. I need to talk to you though, about other things. It's all getting very complicated and I don't think the police in Notting Hill will listen to me.' Barnard had sighed, knowing she was right.

‘Have you got time for lunch?' he had asked, but Kate had glanced at her watch anxiously.

‘Not really,' she said. ‘I've got to be at a photo shoot near Oxford Circus in half an hour. Ken is keeping me really busy now he's decided I'm quite a good thing. I don't think the others like it very much but that's their tough luck.'

‘What about this evening?' Barnard has persisted.

‘I'm going to the pictures with the girls.' Kate had hesitated. She did not really want a solo date with Barnard. That, she had thought, would give him too much encouragement but she had thought of another possibility. ‘We're all invited to a party tomorrow night, one of Tess's teacher friends who lives near us. Would you like to come? We could talk then.' And slightly to her surprise, he had agreed to pick the three women up at eight.

Kate was ready ahead of time and had gone downstairs first, feeling nervous about introducing Barnard not only to her own friends but to Tess's school colleagues and worried that she was exaggerating their predicament. When she had got home the previous day she had been relieved to see that the smashed window had been boarded up at last, and there had been no further disturbances that night. Perhaps it had just been a bit of casual vandalism by local youths, Marie had suggested over breakfast, but somehow Kate did not think it was as simple as that. So it had been three friends unwilling to discuss their fears who had done the rounds of half a dozen flats to let around Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith, only to find three of them already taken by the time they got there and the other three so cramped and dilapidated that none of them could bring themselves to even consider living there.

‘We'll have to go further out,' Tess had said eventually. ‘There's nothing half decent round here that we can afford.'

Kate pulled her cardigan round her shoulders to keep off the wind just as Barnard's car swung into Argyll Gardens. She turned back into the front door and called Marie and Tess who had been readily included in his offer of a lift to the party.

Dave and Jenny's flat was in the basement of one of the tall villas backing onto Holland Park Avenue, seemingly impressive on first sight as they approached through the gate from the main road, but in fact cramped and dark as the servants' quarters of mansions usually were. Dave, the host, in cords and a short-sleeved shirt, waved the four of them into the kitchen where they deposited bottles in exchange for glasses of indeterminate booze before they rejoined the crowd in the living room where the door and windows onto the garden had been left open to keep the place cool, and the sound of the Merseybeat wafted out into the night. Barnard sipped his drink and pulled a face.

‘I'll see if I can find the bottle I brought,' he whispered to Kate. ‘It's a good deal better than this plonk.'

‘It's pretty foul,' she agreed, though her own experience of drinking any wine at all was strictly limited. She glanced around the crowded room, animated groups of people she did not know mixing and melting in the overcrowded space as they went to and fro for more wine or helped themselves to bread and cheese from the dining table pushed against the back wall, and she felt a moment's panic.

Tess came over with her friend Jenny. ‘Tell Jen it's true you knew John Lennon back home,' she said. ‘She won't believe me.'

Kate grinned, happy enough to be distracted from her worries. ‘We were both at art college together,' she said. ‘We all used to go and see them at the Cavern before they got well known. It was great.'

Jenny looked suitably impressed as Barnard came back with two new wine glasses and handed one to Kate, who sipped it and did not find it much different to what had gone before. Wine was obviously an acquired taste, she thought, but made no comment.

‘We're not going to be able to talk in this crush,' she said to Barnard as Tess and Jenny were swallowed up again and the music switched to Gerry and the Pacemakers.

Barnard glanced around and drew her firmly through the press of people to a door at the far side of the room, opened it and peered in only to find it already occupied by a couple sitting on the coat strewn bed enjoying a passionate encounter. ‘Oops, sorry,' he said, closing the door again quickly. ‘Come on,' he said to Kate. ‘We'll have a look at the garden. There's plenty of light from the main road.'

‘It's a bit chilly,' Kate objected when they got outside and Barnard smiled slightly and put his arm around her.

‘I'll keep you warm,' he said and slipped off his jacket and slung it around her shoulders. They found a garden seat beside a patchy lawn under a tree. ‘Now,' he said when they were settled. ‘What have you been getting into this time?'

Hesitantly she told him her worries about Cecily Beauchamp's death, about their being given notice to quit the flat and feeling they were living under siege, and finally, and most reluctantly, about the trail she had followed around the market from Vera Chamberlain to Leonie Fletcher and finally to the house of Denise Baker and what she knew about the murder of Janice Jones.

‘To be honest I don't know what to do next,' she admitted finally. ‘The police don't want to know about any of this, do they? Back home no one liked the bizzies very much. Some of them were thugs and some of them were not very honest. But if you were in real trouble you could go to them if there was a crime and still think you'd get some help. Here it's just a jungle  . . .' She hesitated, knowing that Barnard himself was compromised and wondering why she expected him, when push came to shove, to be any different from the rest.

Barnard shifted uncomfortably on the wooden bench, his face in shadow. ‘You're not going to give up on this, are you?' he asked quietly, knowing the answer he would get.

‘No, of course not,' Kate said, the yellow light filtering over the high fence between the garden and the busy road outside illuminating an obstinate expression that Barnard was becoming familiar with.

‘Right,' he said after a long pause. ‘Here's what you must do. First tell Nelson Mackintosh's lawyer about the women who have information about the dead girl. That's vital to his defense, so you've done a really good job there tracking them down. But you have to channel the information to the defense.'

‘Do you think it could get him off?' Kate said, feeling slightly more cheerful.

‘Not on its own maybe, but I'm sure his lawyer is already working on an alibi. It's not that easy to set someone up for a murder that they didn't do, if that's what's really happening.'

‘I'm sure it is,' Kate said. ‘Everyone who knows Nelson says killing a street girl is not something he could ever do. He's not that sort of man. Not even the drug charge is right. He's well known for not having drugs in his cafe. They must have been planted.'

‘Either that or they belonged to his son,' Barnard said sharply. ‘Anyway, you must talk to the lawyer and he'll follow up these witnesses you say you've found. Will they give evidence in court do you think?'