Death Trap (6 page)

Mackintosh looked anxious again. ‘Funny?' he said. ‘If he play about in class don't hesitate to wop him. He try too hard to be funny sometimes.'

‘I'll remember that,' Tess said faintly.

‘So what you doing down here, ladies?' Mackintosh went on. ‘It's maybe not the best place to be after dark on your own. 'Specially not jus' now. Some white girl was attacked in Ladbroke Grove the other day.'

‘We live round here,' Tess said. ‘Up towards Bayswater. We were just looking for somewhere to have a drink.'

Mackintosh smiled widely. ‘Well, I can show you the way back to Holland Park Avenue, if its alcohol you want, in a better class of pub, or I can give you a soft drink in my cafe over here.' He waved vaguely down a side road where lights in red and gold and green lit up a shop front decorated with exotic painted trees and flowers. ‘I don't serve anything harder. There's no one likely to give me a license for that.' He laughed. ‘You know I told you I thought my Benjamin has a rare talent for story tellin' that I wanted to tell you about. He gets that from me, you know? But my education was interrupted because I was a foolish boy who thought he should go off and help fight a war for the mother country, you know? So I never finished my schoolin' and have to make my livin' as and where I can. And now I find the mother country doesn't actually like me very much. I want Benjamin to do better than I have. I want Benjamin to do well whatever the colour of his skin. I suppose all fathers want that.' His laughter this time had an edge to it. ‘Let me treat you to a coffee and I'll set you on your way home.'

Kate and Tess glanced at each other and then Kate nodded, aware that a group of white teenagers on the corner of the street was looking at their encounter with some hostility. ‘That would be very kind of you, Mr Mackintosh,' she said, sounding more confident than she felt.

‘Nelson, please,' he said and strode ahead of them to the brightly lit cafe they had seen from a distance.

‘Why Poor Man's Corner?' Kate asked, glancing at the name over the windows.

‘It's a place in Jamaica, where I was born,' Mackintosh said. ‘Not far from Kingston. Seemed like a good name round here. There plenty of poor men.'

Inside the cafe was hot and steamy and he settled them at a table close to the window, sat down at the table himself and waved to one of the young black men behind the counter who began to hover as soon as their boss walked through the door.

‘Is it coffee, or would you like to try some Jamaican soft drinks? Spiced carrot juice, or mango  . . .'

‘Coffee, thanks,' Tess said firmly.

‘And me,' Kate said, feeling slightly ashamed of their caution. But she barely knew what a mango was and spices were a foreign country. She glanced round the crowded tables crammed together in the smoky, low-ceilinged room, and realised she and Tess were the only white faces there. Most people were drinking what looked like fruit-based drinks and a few elderly men in a corner were playing dominoes.

Mackintosh ordered in a patois they did not fully understand, and then slipped easily back into more standard English. ‘Won't be long,' he said.

‘I take photographs,' she said. ‘I'd really like to come back here and take some pictures. I don't think many people realise places like this exist in London.'

‘And those that do wish they didn't,' Mackintosh said without rancour. ‘Still, at least they're not blowing up little girls in church like they are in Alabama. Not yet anyway.'

‘That was terrible,' Kate said.

‘That was pure evil,' Nelson came back sharply, as if suddenly unable to control an anger he usually kept hidden. He handed them their coffee and took a gulp of his own. ‘About your pictures. I'll talk to my customers, maybe. Give me a call in a day or two and I'll let you know.'

They drank their coffee, increasingly the object of curious glances, while Mackintosh told them how he had decided to remain in England when he was discharged from the RAF and had been one of the first to settle in West London.

‘I still get homesick,' he confessed. ‘And my wife more so. She came over later when your government said it wanted West Indians to come here to work. She's a nurse. There've been some bad times round here for us, but I was determined to stay. There's nothing but poverty in Jamaica. And Benjamin was born here. He's a clever boy when he concentrates his mind on his work and I want him to do well. It is possible, you know. I have a friend, like me he stayed after the war, and now he is a lawyer. I'd like that for Ben.'

He watched as they drained their coffee.

‘Come,' he said, standing up suddenly. ‘I'll show you which way to go. You shouldn't be around here at night just now. It's not safe.'

They followed him outside and glanced at each other.

‘I think we'll go home,' Tess said. ‘It was nice to meet you Mr Mackintosh, and I'll keep an eye on Benjamin's work.'

‘Where are you living? Are you sure of the way?' Mackintosh persisted, still looking anxious.

Kate told him the name of the road. ‘But we don't think we'll be there very long. The landlord seems to be trying to get the tenants out. It's not very nice really.'

‘It goes on,' Mackintosh said with a shrug. ‘The trouble is there's not many landlords will take West Indian tenants. There's a lot of pressure and landlords like Rachman cut corners to get people with fixed rents out.'

‘Maybe that's who owns our house then,' Kate said.

‘Peter Rachman's dead,' Mackintosh said. ‘His empire seems to have been split up. A man called Lazlo Roman's bought some of them and is doing them up but I've not heard any complaints about him as a landlord. He came to a meeting we set up here a while ago. Didn't say much but listened, seemed to know what we were talking about. If your skin's the colour of mine doing up the houses is a very good thing. Otherwise a lot of us would be sleeping under the railway arches, believe me. No one else will have us.'

D
S Harry Barnard had wasted the best part of half an hour that Saturday morning trying to get a response from the communal phone in Kate O'Donnell's house and was growing increasingly frustrated. He knew she and her friends lived on the top floor and the phone was by the front door, but he found it hard to believe that no one in the four-storey building was awake enough at ten on a Saturday morning to hear the phone ringing. They couldn't all be that hung over, he thought irritably, and found that wondering what Kate might have been doing the previous evening to keep her in bed so late made him even more angry.

He swung round in his swivel armchair before picking up the phone for the third time and after five more fruitless minutes of ringing at the other end crashing the receiver down again. For another half hour he mooched around his flat, taking none of his normal satisfaction in his carefully chosen possessions, the Scandinavian furniture, the bright rugs and the modern glassware on the windowsills. The only thing to do, he thought, was to drive over to Notting Hill to call on her in person, though he doubted that he would be very welcome if he found her bleary eyed in her dressing gown in the middle of the day. Why was he doing this, he asked himself as he gunned the Capri across the Heath, through Hampstead village and down Fitzjohn's Avenue towards the Finchley Road and then braked hard behind a white Mini which was pootling across the busy junction at Swiss Cottage. They shouldn't allow underpowered little tin cans like that on the road, he thought as he overtook it and turned into a narrow road lined with parked cars which would begin the twisting traverse of north London which would eventually lead him to Westbourne Grove and Notting Hill.

But he knew his irritation was more to do with his apparent inability to impress this infuriating and obstinate little photographer from the north with the nasal accent which he occasionally failed completely to understand. She was argumentative, naïve, and clearly disapproved of his morals and his lifestyle, yet every time he came face to face with those clear blue eyes under the dark unruly curls his heart rate quickened and he sought an excuse to see her again.

This time, though, the news he had picked up from the early edition of the
Evening Standard
when he had slipped out to the newsagents for a morning paper had blown up the anxiety he already felt for Kate into a genuine fear, and his inability to contact her only fanned the flames. He had not seriously believed that the body of a young woman the smudged print of the
Standard
's Stop Press
said had been found that morning just off the Portobello Road was Kate's, but he had been sufficiently alarmed to ring Notting Hill nick to check. Eddie Lamb, on the point of going out to the murder scene, had been dismissive. As he heard it, he had said, the dead girl was a bottle blonde tom who had struck unlucky. The killer was no doubt one of the hundreds of young West Indians only too willing to make use of her services. The worry at Notting Hill nick this morning was that the death would spark off new unrest amongst the hard core of white youth who regarded any contact between white girls and black men as a mortal insult even now the riots were supposed to be a distant memory and community harmony fully restored.

‘Uniform have called extra people in. They're on full alert,' Lamb had said. ‘It could get nasty. Must go, Harry. Silly cow's really mucked up the weekend, hasn't she? But I'll do my best to see you as planned. If I'm not there by quarter to, go in without me. You've got your ticket.'

Barnard drove as quickly as he dared, taking the long east-west roads that led to Maida Vale and finally, over the Harrow Road, to Notting Hill. He parked the red Capri outside Kate's house and gazed up at the crumbling stucco to the small top-floor windows. There was no indication that there was anyone at home, but he ran up the steps to the front door anyway and pushed the bell with Marie and Tess's name on it. To his surprise Marie opened the door quite quickly.

‘Oh, it's you,' she said, peering at him suspiciously. ‘I thought Kate must have gone out without her key.'

‘She's out then?' Barnard asked, his anxiety returning.

‘She went out quite early,' Marie said, and Barnard was aware of the slight hostility in her voice. ‘She had some message to run for the old girl in the basement. Something at Portobello Road market.'

‘But she's OK?' Barnard knew he was giving away more than he intended but could not avoid the question.

‘She's fine,' Marie said. ‘Why shouldn't she be? But we're not very happy with the bizzies round here, as it happens. They won't do anything to help us with the men who keep coming round and threatening people. They've finally driven our neighbours out. They went yesterday after he got beaten up on his way home. But the bizzies here don't want to know, do they? Isn't terrifying innocent people a crime in London? I expect it will be us next. Fancy Smith in
Z Cars
would sort it in two minutes, la.'

‘Tell Kate to let me know if anyone threatens you,' Barnard said shortly, refusing to rise to the taunt. If people were stupid enough to believe in TV coppers, and especially Merseyside TV coppers, he thought, they deserved all they got. ‘I'll see what I can do.'

He went back to his car and slammed the driver's door before lighting a cigarette and switching on the radio. He would, he decided, sit here until the elusive Kate O'Donnell came home.

Kate herself had been as good as her word that Saturday morning. She set out before ten, leaving her flatmates to walk up to Macfisheries at Notting Hill Gate later for some groceries for the weekend, and retraced the route she and Tess had taken the previous night. She found Portobello Road transformed in daylight. The houses, painted in multicolours and mostly slightly shabby and faded, were not as substantial as those to the north in Notting Hill proper, and jostled for space along a road which curved unexpectedly in an area of mainly austere grids and crescents. Pubs with strange names, the Sun in Splendour and the Portobello Gold, hinted at a history which she could only guess at. And this morning market stalls lined each side of the road, laden with all sorts of second hand goods from pots and pans to antique silver, old suitcases to traditional blue and white china and everything in between. Collectors of just about anything, from old clothes to coins and postage stamps, crowded shoulder to shoulder round most of the displays and she almost despaired of being able to find the woman Cecily Beauchamp had asked her to contact. She pushed her way slowly through the crowds almost to the far end of the stalls and eventually glimpsed the name Chamberlain on the front of the stall through the ranks of browsing customers examining the silver items laid out on a white cloth.

She wriggled to the front and caught the eye of the middle-aged woman swaddled in layers of woollies as if expecting a blizzard who was keeping a wary eye on her potential customers.

‘Mrs Chamberlain?' Kate asked.

The woman nodded, not taking her gaze off the hands which deftly reached out here and there amongst the merchandise. ‘Who wants to know, dear?' she asked.

‘Mrs Beauchamp asked me to give you this.' Kate handed over the sealed envelope which Cecily Beauchamp had given her when she had called at the flat earlier. The antique dealer picked up a silver paper knife from amongst her stock and slit the letter open, her eyes still flicking suspiciously over the wandering hands of her customers.

‘Tell her I'll call this evening,' she said when she had read it. ‘This is my busiest day. I won't finish till six and then I have to pack up. Eight o'clock maybe, tell her.'

‘Fine,' Kate said. ‘I'll tell her that.' She began to make her way slowly back home along the length of the market, taking photographs of the ever-shifting scene as she went, until she happened to glance down one of the side turnings heading west towards Ladbroke Grove and was surprised to see it blocked off by police cars and officers who seemed to be clustered around the sunken front area of one of the houses. Curious, she turned into the street and joined a cluster of people who were standing watching the police operations from a distance.