Dressed to Kill Read online

  ‘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.

  TWO

  ‘Come,’ 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.

  ‘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.