Cover Up Page 4

  The Dempseys had already been rehoused in West Derby, while the O’Donnells, with two extra mouths to feed after her younger sisters arrived, remained in the same dilapidated house where the younger children had been born, waiting their turn on the housing list because their house was still standing – though, as her mother kept complaining, only just. Like many, it had been shored up with huge wooden beams to make sure it didn’t fall down around them. So far as Kate could recall, that was the only time she had ever met her former neighbour and she did not think she had ever seen her again. Nevertheless, if she could track her down and persuade her to talk about the Blitz, Winny might have a good story to tell even after all these years.

  A whistle blew on the platform and the train lurched into motion, bringing Kate back to the here and now. It was Saturday morning and Tess had come with her on the underground to help with her suitcase, and Kate suddenly recalled what she had said as she hefted the case through the door into the corridor and turned to say goodbye through the open window.

  ‘You need to do some serious thinking,’ Tess had intoned solemnly and Kate did not need to be told what she meant.

  ‘I will do some serious thinking,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘You can’t go on the way you are with Harry Barnard.’

  ‘No,’ Kate said, though it was with more a sense of appeasement than conviction.

  ‘Give my love to Marie, if you see her. And to the Cavern, if you go.’ Marie had come with them to London in the hope of making it as an actress – but after many failed auditions had gone back home in despair, only to find that success was easier to pin down on home ground after all.

  ‘I’ll have a drink in Ye Cracke for old times’ sake too, but I don’t suppose it’ll be the same,’ Kate promised, though she did not expect to have much time to revisit her own old haunts around the College of Art. Her camera and her questions would be focused further back in time than that. She had pulled the window up and slammed the door before pushing down the corridor to find a seat, wondering if this really was the turning point Tess seemed to want it to be.

  She slept fitfully for part of the journey, tired after several late nights working her way through the collections of photographs she had been able to access in London. But it was true enough that in the south pictures of the wartime bombing concentrated on the East End of London and included very little from anywhere further afield. She was awake again when they pulled into Crewe, and wide awake as the train clattered over the points to take her across the River Mersey and the ship canal and veer west towards what had been home for most of her life. Lime Street station was busy and she had to search for the taxi rank. Ken Fellows had ensured she had an adequate advance on her expenses, instructing her merely to make sure she got receipts for anything she spent on the agency’s behalf, and although she was booked into a small hotel not far away in Brownlow Hill she reckoned it was too far to carry her suitcase and decided to indulge herself with a cab.

  She smiled slightly as the car made its way past Lewis’s department store on one side and the Adelphi Hotel on the other. She guessed that the Beatles might already be there, and wondered whether the day might come when she could afford to stay there too. Eventually she was deposited outside a slightly dilapidated four-storey building which on a faded board outside the front door announced itself as the Lancaster Hotel. She signed in and was shown a small single room on the third floor, where she collapsed on to the bed after carrying her case up three flights of stairs. She might dream of the Adelphi but this, she knew, was much closer to her reality. Hotels had not figured in her family’s world, and she felt almost embarrassed to be staying in one so close to home. The room looked clean enough but it was stuffy and the window, which would open only a tiny crack, offered a view of an unkempt back garden and a row of overstuffed dustbins close to what she guessed was the kitchen door. Just as well she was only booked in for bed and breakfast!

  She unpacked and lined up her files, which were thinner than she would have liked, and decided that today at least she would have a scout round her old student haunts before making her way to see her mother and possibly her father – though she knew he was only an intermittent resident at the family home – and possibly her sisters. Tom, she knew, had never moved back in with the family after a traumatic spell in London, and she guessed that some of her devout family were busy praying for him to repent his sins while, if he could ever get his hands on him, her father would indulge in a much more physical response.

  When she was satisfied with the state of her new base, she picked up a jacket and her handbag, left her key at reception, and headed off up the hill towards the university. She could see that a few more beams had been swung into place on Paddy’s Wigwam, the modernist Roman Catholic cathedral which faced off the more traditional Anglican building emerging at a much statelier pace at the other end of Hope Street. It was lunchtime and some of the uniformed boys from the Institute were slipping across the road to chat up the girls at Blackburn House until, as usual, some of the mistresses rushed out to chivvy them away from the railings. She glanced at the art college where she’d spent three years learning her craft and rubbing shoulders with some of the embryonic Merseybeat musicians – including John Lennon, a sharp, funny artist as well as an obsessive guitar player. But the students now looked very young and she turned away, rounded a corner and arrived at the down-at-heel and by no means ancient pub with the decidedly odd name Ye Cracke where she had once spent many hours in the back room making a shandy last as long as possible, while she and her friends put the world to rights and compared the respective merits of the many bands they or their brothers played in. If photography was generally regarded as an odd thing for a girl to be doing, a girl playing – or even singing – in a band was pretty well unheard of.

  She opened the pub door and glanced through the smoky atmosphere, but after a couple of years away there was no one she recognized and by the standards of these lunchtime drinkers, one or two of them in school uniform, she was far too long in the tooth and past it. She smiled ruefully and turned away and made her way past the new cathedral, wondering what her mother would make of the startling circular design when it was eventually finished. It was time, she thought, to go home and ask her mother that and a lot more besides.

  Bridie O’Donnell opened her front door before Kate had time to knock. She looked older than when she’d last seen her, skin greyer and dark circles under her eyes, and her pinafore was wrapped tightly round her waist as if to emphasize that she was losing weight. She gave her mother a hug, and with a pang of deep foreboding realized just how much thinner she was.

  ‘Who’s here?’ Kate asked. ‘Is dad at home?’ The presence or absence, intermittent and generally unannounced, of her father had always dominated even the weather in the O’Donnell house and Kate felt a guilty sense of relief when her mother shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know where your father is,’ Bridie said. ‘He’s not bothering with dock work anymore, he says, though what he’s doing instead he doesn’t tell me. He just says there’s more regular money in other things. Annie and Bernadette are at work. They’ll be back about six. They’ve both still got shop jobs and Bernie’s got a boyfriend, a nice Catholic boy called Gerard from Everton. I’m hoping there’ll be a wedding soon.’ Kate nodded. She had no doubt about what her mother and the parish priest she’d known since she was a small child would make of her own domestic arrangements in London. There would be no nuptial Mass for her, she thought, and quite likely no wedding either, as far as she could see, unless she really did finish with Harry Barnard. She had never seriously thought he was the marrying kind.

  ‘And Tom? Have you seen Tom at all?’ she asked. Bridie’s face closed and she shook her head.

  ‘He doesn’t come here,’ she said. ‘Father Reilly says that’s best. Not while he’s an occasion of sin. Last I heard he was living out in Bootle. He sent me his address, but I don’t know what I’ve done with it. Your da woul
d kill him if he set eyes on him.’

  ‘Is the kettle on?’ Kate asked, changing the subject quickly, with a sigh. She guessed that her queer brother was probably living with someone away from the city centre, where he would be hoping to escape the attention of the police and the suffocating embrace of the Church. ‘I’m parched, it’s so hot.’ Her mother led the way into the kitchen and busied herself warming the teapot and measuring the leaves in – as if they were gold dust, but more likely because she could not bear to meet her oldest daughter’s eye. The spectres of the past never seemed to fade, Kate thought, and perhaps never would.

  ‘So tell me again why you’re here,’ Bridie said, putting the pot on the kitchen table to brew and rinsing a couple of cups from the sink under the tap. ‘Are you taking sugar?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Kate said. She could still remember the family’s excitement when they first visited their new home in Anfield, and she and Tom rushed about turning on taps and flushing the lavatory until their father slapped their legs in a vain attempt to calm them down. The day they had left Vauxhall – where less lucky families were still confined to the slum courts that had survived the war, a dozen families with only one lavatory between them, or in houses shored up, like their own, to prevent collapse – was one of the most exciting she could remember from her early life, and for years the four children had played ‘Moving Day’ until the memory finally began to fade.

  Bridie poured the tea and they sat at the kitchen table to drink it.

  ‘I should have brought you something,’ Kate said, feeling guilty as she glanced around the room and recognized the signs of a life still lived too close to the edge. ‘I got this big job taking pictures of people who lived through the bombing and of how the Pool has recovered. It’s because the Beatles’ film is opening the day after tomorrow. Suddenly people want to know what happened here before the bands started. People down there don’t know anything at all about people up here.’

  ‘Don’t know and don’t care, as far as I can see,’ Bridie said. ‘There’s nothing new about that, la.’

  ‘But it is better?’ Kate said. ‘Isn’t it? It looked better when I came through the centre. Lots of building still going on. That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Your father’s been working lately for one of the construction companies,’ Bridie said. ‘For a man called Terry Jordan he met during the war. One of ours, at least. There’s still them and us even though Labour’s taken over the Corporation from the Unionists at last. And they’ve been pulling down the last of the old tenements down Scotland Road. But it’s very slow, and some people are being moved miles out on to the new estates. They don’t always like that. It’s not the same as the old neighbourhoods where you could always find a friend when you needed one.’

  ‘And a boozer and a betting shop, not to mention a pawn shop,’ Kate said bitterly. ‘I can’t remember much about the war but I can remember living in Scottie Road with an outdoor lavvie and no bathroom. You were pleased to move, don’t tell me you weren’t. Everyone was. It was like we went to heaven.’

  Bridie gave her a thin smile.

  ‘I’ve always wondered who it was made your brother the way he is,’ she said. ‘Did that happen in Scottie Road, or was it after we moved? We brought you up so carefully, took you to Mass, to confession, had you confirmed … Do you remember that dress I made you? A good Catholic family, that’s what we were, and yet look how Tom turned out. Now I’m ashamed …’

  Kate glanced away from her mother, her expression tense and her mouth dry.

  ‘I don’t know how these things happen,’ she said, although she had some ideas about that which she would never have shared with her mother in a thousand years.

  ‘I wondered if I could get Father Reilly to seek Tom out, talk to him again …’ Bridie said.

  ‘Leave it, mam,’ Kate snapped. ‘He wouldn’t thank you. And nor would Father Reilly, I wouldn’t think. Just leave it alone.’

  ‘Are you going to Mass down there?’ Bridie demanded.

  ‘Not often,’ Kate lied, afraid that if she told the truth she might be cast aside like her brother had been. She was, she thought, an out-and-out coward, afraid to share her new life with her mother. Perhaps she should not have come.

  FOUR

  Harry Barnard rolled over in bed and looked at his alarm clock, which must have gone off without waking him. His head was thumping and his mouth felt like sandpaper from the night before. Realizing with the same sense of shock as every morning recently that he was alone, he rolled the other way and groaned.

  ‘Hell and damnation!’ he said to himself as he put a tentative foot on the floor. He reckoned it was probably safe to stand up if he was extremely careful. Still in his pyjamas, and three cups of strong coffee later, he risked shaving, managing not to do himself any serious damage, checked to make sure that all the bottles in the living room were really empty, dressed with difficulty, and then drove very cautiously into central London and parked in his usual spot outside the nick. He picked up another cup of coffee in the canteen, although he knew that it hardly deserved the name, and made his way very carefully up the stairs to the CID office, where he negotiated laboriously to take off his coat and preserve the coffee at the same time.

  ‘God, you look rough,’ Peter Stansfield said from his desk at the other side of the room. ‘Missing her, are you?’

  ‘Mind your own!’ Barnard snarled. If Stansfield, on the strength of a couple of outings together, had appointed himself his best friend, or even worse, his minder, he aimed to disabuse him of that notion very fast.

  ‘Do you want to lend me a hand with these pictures of the dead woman?’ Barnard asked irritably. ‘They’ve taken long enough to turn up, so we’d better get them out and about before everyone’s forgotten about the poor cow.’ Stansfield shook his head quickly.

  ‘I’ll leave that to you, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ve got enough on. But mind how you go.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Barnard said, thinking that maybe a stroll round Soho on his own might keep him well away from the DCI and also do something to improve his hangover. Whether anything would help to ease the empty feeling he felt inside he very much doubted, but he put his coat back on and picked up the sheaf of pictures of the murdered woman – still unidentified and not, he guessed, anywhere near the top of DCI Jackson’s list of priorities. Trawls through lists of missing persons across London had proved fruitless, and none of the other forces had reported a missing person of similar description. Whoever she was, she was as anonymous as on the night she was found. He set off downstairs again, still with a cautious hand on the banister, aware that he was being watched with some concern by the uniformed sergeant on the front desk.

  ‘You all right, mate?’ he asked. ‘You look a bit rough.’

  ‘A touch of food poisoning,’ Barnard mumbled. ‘Bloody canteen sausages!’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ the sergeant scoffed, but Barnard did not have the energy to reply.

  He headed for Berwick Street market where he bought a couple of buns and persuaded his stomach to accept them, washed down by yet more coffee, then began a slow trawl around the cafés, pubs and shops, showing his sketches of the unknown woman. The clubs and brothels would have to wait until lunchtime, when they would begin to come back to life and face a new day already half over. It was there he was most likely to stumble on someone who knew or had seen the dead woman. If, being realistic, he was very, very lucky. He did not think that the woman with the diamond ring had anything to do with the illegitimate trades of Soho. She did not look the part.

  He attempted lunch at the Blue Lagoon coffee bar, where he often went with Kate if she could be prised away from her photo agency in Frith Street. But a single bite of his sandwich told him this was a mistake. He pushed his chair back noisily and walked out and headed instead for the nearest pub, where he ordered a beer and a whisky chaser. He knew that wasn’t a wise choice, but he was almost past caring.

  It was not entirely true that, as th
e DCI believed, he knew every tart within a mile of Soho Square. But he knew a lot of them, and he worked his way systematically from back-street door to back-street door where women of all shapes and sizes and colours and nationalities worked the oldest trade in the world, all in harm’s way from both misjudged clients and the arbitrary assaults of the law. Resisting the odd invitation to come indoors, explicit as well as implicit, he cajoled his contacts, behind their doors with peepholes to vet visitors and columns of doorbells with no more than a first name beside each, to at least put their heads out into the bright light of day. Then he persuaded them to take a closer look at the sketch he showed them, but not a single one admitted to recognizing the murdered woman. Normally he enjoyed his work in Soho – he liked the glittering anarchic neon-lit nightlife as well as its cosmopolitan daytime bustle – but today’s trek was no more than a chore that he struggled to complete in the teeth of his hangover, and it proved as unproductive as he had expected.

  He saved one call until last, simply because he knew he could regard Evie Renton, for old time’s sake at least, as a safe haven from the women who tried to buy favours the only way they knew how and from the demons inside his head. It was early and she did not yet have on the carefully made-up face with which she would greet clients later. Which may have been why she could not hide her shock when she opened the door to Barnard.

  ‘My God, you look dreadful,’ she said. ‘Come in, come in. I’ll make you some tea.’ He took off his coat and slumped into her single armchair, close to the bed from which she looked as if she had only just got up. She left him there then reappeared quickly with a mug of strong tea, into which it was obvious when he tasted it that she had stirred several spoonfuls of sugar. He pulled a face but drank it in the hope it possessed the medicinal qualities Evie seemed to believe it did. Better anyway, he knew, than the alternatives he preferred.