Feeling sick and desperate, Kate took the train back to the city. Her first instinct was to go straight to the hospital, but as she was close to the police station she thought she would call in there to see if she could track down Harry Barnard. The sergeant on the desk looked at her as blankly as his predecessor had done earlier.
‘Never heard of him,’ he said, his eyes so opaque that she knew he could only be lying.
‘Well thanks,’ she said and turned on her heel. She hurried back to where she had last seen Barnard’s car and her heart lurched when she saw that there was still no sign of it. Harry could be looking for her, she thought, although she did not really believe it and in any case she knew she could not leave her family any longer. She needed to know how Tom’s operation had gone and confess to her mother and sister that she had made no progress in finding her father. She half walked and half ran the rest of the way to the hospital, arriving hot and breathless. She found her family and Tom’s boyfriend Kevin huddled in the waiting room more or less where she had left them and could tell from their pale, anguished faces that nothing much had changed while she was away.
‘How is he?’ she asked her mother, who merely shook her head, too overcome to speak.
‘He’s not come round from the operation yet,’ Annie said. ‘The doctor said it had gone as well as could be expected, whatever that means.’
‘They’ve still got two bizzies sitting by his bed, even though he’s unconscious,’ Kevin said bitterly.
‘Did you find out where your da might be?’ Bridie asked and tears rolled down her face when Kate shook her head.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I managed to track down Mrs Jordan in Formby but she didn’t know anything about him. And her husband’s still in London, apparently. She didn’t even know there’d been an accident at the building site. I went all that way for nothing, really.’
‘Didn’t your boyfriend take you in his car?’ her mother asked. ‘He is your boyfriend, isn’t he? Though I only had to look at him to see he wasn’t the sort of good Catholic you should be going with. Aren’t I right?’ Kate ignored the angry catechism.
‘I’ve lost track of him,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t know where the devil he is. His car’s not where he left it. He said he was going to the police station but they don’t seem to know anything about him. He must have gone somewhere else instead.’
‘I’m sure he’ll turn up,’ Annie said, giving her a quick hug. Bridie sat scowling in silence for a long time, glancing endlessly towards the recovery ward where Tom lay and then at Kate, who refused to meet her accusing glances.
‘Are you living with him?’ she asked eventually.
‘I share a flat with Tess,’ Kate said, refusing to be drawn further, and watched her mother sink back into what looked like despair.
Eventually Bridie stirred herself again.
‘Katie, can you do us all another favour, la?’ she said tentatively. ‘Can you get hold of Father Reilly for me? I wouldn’t want Tom to slip away without the last rites. I know he’ll not be in a state of grace but I’m sure Father Reilly will find an answer.’ Kevin immediately got to his feet and, obviously biting back his anger, flung himself out of the room. Kate followed him and found him staring out of the window into the car park below. She put a hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s not what Tom would want,’ he said bitterly.
‘I know,’ Kate said. ‘But she’s his mother.’
‘And as far as the clergy are concerned I’m nothing, less than nothing. I’ve no right to even exist. Isn’t that right?’
‘As far as most people are concerned, you and Tom are both less than nothing. I’m sorry,’ Kate said. Kevin looked at her with his eyes full of tears.
‘I don’t think I can live without him,’ he said.
‘My mother would say pray for him. But you’re like me, you don’t do that anymore. All we can do is hope, so let’s do that.’ She gave him a quick hug. ‘I want to go back to my hotel and see if Harry has left me a message there,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come with me? It’s not far and the fresh air will do you good.’
‘Will you get the priest?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Kate said. ‘As you say, it’s not what Tom would want.’
‘We’ll all go to hell together, then,’ Kevin said with a crooked smile. They left the hospital together and slowly made their way to Brownlow Hill, buried in their own thoughts. As Kate had expected, the girl on reception handed her a piece of paper as they walked into the hotel. The message was very brief.
‘I’ve been called back to London urgently by the DCI. Don’t worry. Harry.’ She crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it into a wastepaper basket, feeling totally bereft. At the moment when she needed him most, Barnard seemed to have deserted her.
‘Why don’t we get a drink?’ she said to Kevin, with the world apparently crashing around their ears, and led the way to the nearest pub.
‘I won’t say “Cheers!”,’ she said, pulling a face at the kick of the raw spirit as she sipped the Jameson’s he brought her. ‘It doesn’t seem the right thing to say.’
Harry Barnard was sitting in the front passenger seat of his own car as the Liverpool DC, who had not bothered to offer a name beyond Jim, drove quickly out of the city, making him wince every time he misjudged the gears. As they ground their way through heavy traffic to Widnes and over the Mersey to Runcorn, before heading south, he drifted in and out of sleep, pleased to leave a city he devoutly hoped he would never see again but knowing that he had left Kate deeply in the lurch.
They stopped briefly at a service station somewhere in the Midlands, and although DCI Strachan had left off the threatened handcuffs he knew Jim must have had orders not to let him out of his sight as he ostentatiously accompanied him to the gents. He wondered what sort of message had already gone to Jackson, but agonized more over what reason his boss had for summoning him so urgently back to base on a Sunday when they should both have been off duty. Sleep was easier once they joined the newly minted M1 motorway, although his aches and pains had gradually resolved themselves into a generalized discomfort that now seemed to extend from head to toe. The next time he struggled back to consciousness they had slowed down on the approach to Edgware, and Barnard fought to regain some semblance of coherent thought.
By the time they’d driven into the West End and Barnard had guided Jim to a parking space near the nick, his mood had switched from depression to a fierce anger about what had happened in the north. The two men walked into the police station together, and Barnard led the way two steps at a time up the stairs to the DCI’s office and knocked. Jackson called them in and they found him at his meticulously tidy desk, as usual, with a distinctly unfriendly expression on his face.
‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘At last. And this is?’
‘DC Jim Bailey,’ the younger man said. ‘My DCI said he wasn’t fit to drive back on his own. He’d had a bit of an accident. But you wanted him back urgently, so here we are.’ Jackson looked more closely at Barnard and took in the black eye and visible cuts and bruises.‘You’d better sit down, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Thank you, DC Bailey, that was very helpful.’ The Liverpool detective shrugged and turned away.
‘Euston station is it, to get back home?’ he flung over his shoulder as he slammed the door behind him.
Jackson leaned back in his chair for a moment, steepling his hands in front of his face as he surveyed the damage carefully.
‘So exactly how did you end up in this state?’ he asked at length.
‘I’m not sure you’re going to believe it, guv,’ Barnard said wearily. ‘But you got me out of a very nasty situation.’
‘A bit of an accident, your colleague said?’
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Barnard said. ‘No way was it that. I went to the nick in Liverpool to ask about my girlfriend’s brother who’d been arrested. You remember he was a suspect a couple of years ago in a murder case?’
Jackson looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded.
‘Not a case we’re likely to forget,’ he said. ‘So what was he arrested for this time?’
‘He’s a homosexual, so the usual, I suppose. They dragged him out of bed, which seemed a bit extreme.’ Jackson did not hide his distaste but waved Barnard on.
‘When I got there, he was being taken away in an ambulance and it was obvious he’d had a vicious beating. I evidently saw too much for the DCI up there, a bastard called Strachan, and they put me in a cell.’
‘He arrested you?’ Jackson snapped. ‘For what?’
‘They didn’t bother with legal niceties,’ Barnard said. ‘Anyway, something I said annoyed them and two of them started in on me. Strachan and a sergeant. I guess they were carrying on where they’d left off with Tom O’Donnell. They obviously both had a taste for it.’ He slipped off his jacket awkwardly, wincing, and unbuttoned his shirt to reveal the bruises on his chest and arms. ‘And then there were threats to charge me with pretty well anything they could think up. Even to implicate me in O’Donnell’s case. It’s like the Wild West up there, guv. I couldn’t believe what was going on in that nick.’
‘Do you want to press charges?’ Jackson asked. ‘I’m not going to pretend it’s a course I would recommend, it could turn into a very unpleasant stand-off between the two police forces.’
‘I’ve got no witnesses to what happened,’ Barnard said, grateful that the DCI seemed to believe him implicitly. ‘I was in a cell. And I can’t imagine anyone would give evidence against DCI Strachan, anyway. He’s got that nick in an iron grip.’ He managed a weak smile. ‘You think you’re tough, sir, but he’s the hard man, believe me.’
‘Tough but fair, I hope, Sergeant,’ Jackson said sourly. ‘You’d better see the medical officer straight away, because there have been developments here that I need to talk to you about urgently. Arrange to see the doctor first thing in the morning, then report to me. You need to know that the woman you interviewed in Pimlico who called herself Alicia – Alicia Guest as it turns out, a known call girl apparently – has been found dead in her flat. The DCI down there is very anxious to have words with you.’
Barnard drove home at a funereal pace and found his flat stuffy, untidy and tangibly empty after his absence. He flung his holdall into the kitchen, ran a bath, and lay in the faintly pink-tinged water until it was almost cold. Gingerly patting himself dry with a towel – which revealed where his cuts and grazes were still raw – he concluded that, in spite of the way he felt, the beating had inflicted no serious damage. He made himself an omelette, ate it while listening to the Kinks, and struggled to keep himself awake until he reckoned he could contact Kate back at her hotel. She took a long time to come to the phone, and when she did she sounded more forlorn than he could imagine her ever being.
‘How’s Tom?’ he asked quietly, expecting the worst.
‘He’s through the operation,’ Kate said. ‘But he’s still critical. My mother and sister are staying there tonight. I came back to the hotel partly because I need some sleep if I’m going to do some work tomorrow and partly because I hoped you’d be here. Where are you Harry? You disappeared just when I needed you most. I was going frantic.’
‘I’m at home now,’ he said. ‘I ran into some trouble when I asked about Tom at the nick and then DCI Jackson called me back to London. There are some problems here too.’ He heard her sigh heavily.
‘I’m so sorry, Kate. Truly I am. They gave me no choice.’ That at least was true, but he thought it best not to tell her now what had happened to him at Strachan’s hands. It could wait until he saw her, by which time perhaps the damage would look less obvious and her own family problems would have eased.
‘I have to go to work tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Something’s come up which according to the DCI is important. But at least you now know where I am, so you can phone me if anything happens. Will you do that?’ There was a long silence at the other end before Kate spoke again.
‘I’ll keep in touch,’ she said eventually, and he could detect no enthusiasm in her voice and knew she would stay in Liverpool for as long as her family needed her. Where he figured in her plans he had no way of knowing, and dared not ask.
‘I love you, Katie,’ he said softly, but suspected she had already hung up. He slept only fitfully in spite of the Scotch he’d knocked back in the hope of oblivion, and by eight o’clock he was driving down Highgate Hill to meet the police doctor at the nick. The medic confirmed his own assessment that although he was black-and-blue he had come to no serious harm, but said he should confine himself to light duties for a few days.
When he opened DCI Jackson’s door ten minutes later, he was not surprised to discover that his boss was not alone. A heavily built man in plain clothes was standing by the window gazing out at the heavy Monday morning traffic below easing its way into Regent Street. He spun round with unexpected speed as soon as the DCI called Barnard in.
‘Did you see the MO?’ Jackson demanded.
‘Yes sir,’ Barnard said, aware that this time he had not been asked to sit down and that the stranger by the window was weighing him up with unfriendly eyes, as if assessing his visible bruises before deciding to speak.
‘Nothing seriously damaged,’ Barnard said. ‘I’m OK on light duties for a couple of days.’
‘Right,’ the second man snapped. ‘No reason then why you can’t explain in detail why you were on my patch messing about with a woman who is now dead. Was it ill-placed duty or pleasure, Sergeant? Or a bit of both? She seems to have been a tart and I’m aware you know plenty of them.’
‘Only in the line of duty, sir,’ Barnard said quietly. It was obvious this was a man he would be unwise to provoke. And although there had been times in the past when that answer would not have been strictly true, since he met Kate O’Donnell it was.
‘This is DCI Tom Buxton from Pimlico,’ Jackson interrupted irritably. Barnard merely shrugged and faced down Buxton’s scowl.
‘As you probably know, I’ve been working on the Soho Square murder, sir,’ he said to Jackson rather than his colleague. ‘We’d found out absolutely nothing about the dead woman or where she came from, but the obvious thought was that she was on the game – not necessarily in Soho but dumped there after being killed somewhere else. One of my regular contacts said she knew someone who’d told her there was a network of people offering dubious sex to upmarket clients and she’d got out because she didn’t like it. After all the trouble there was last year with John Profumo and Christine Keeler and the rest, I thought I would suss it out quietly to see if it stood up. It seemed like a very long shot to me.’
‘And that long shot turned out to be Alicia Guest?’ Buxton snapped.
‘Yes, sir,’ Barnard said.
‘What else did she tell you?’ Buxton persisted.
‘That it was very well paid, that she had little or no idea where she was being taken by car, and it wasn’t the usual adults with too much money and kinky tastes. And she said that children were sometimes involved.’
‘Did she recognize your sketches of the dead woman?’
‘She said not,’ Barnard said.
‘And you didn’t think to come and tell me about your little excursion into Pimlico?’ Buxton almost snarled.
‘I didn’t think she’d told me anything of any significance. She wouldn’t name names. In fact she said she didn’t know any. And she said if anyone else came round asking questions she would deny the whole lot, say it was all wild rumours.’
‘Which happens to be what we believe,’ Buxton said. ‘I could have told you all that for nothing. Tell me exactly what time you called on Alicia Guest – when you arrived and when you left.’
Barnard thought back to an afternoon when he had been only marginally aware of time.
‘I must have got there about three and stayed half an hour or so, not more.’
‘Did you see anyone else around Alicia Guest’s flat? Anyone going in or out? Or hanging about outside?’
‘No, sir,’ Barnard said. Buxton glanced across the desk towards an impassive DCI Jackson but made no comment.
‘Did you drive straight back to the nick after that?’ Barnard struggled to recall what he had done next.
‘I sat in the car for a cigarette for a while thinking about what Alicia had told me,’ he said slowly. ‘I wanted to work out if there was another way of tracking these people down. But nothing much suggested itself, so I drove back to the nick.’
‘And decided to tell me or your own DCI nothing about it?’
‘It didn’t seem worth bothering you if she was going to deny it all anyway,’ Barnard said. ‘To be honest, I’m still not sure why she told me any of it. I didn’t push her particularly hard, she just came out with it. Maybe she felt threatened in some way and wanted someone to know what she knew. And it seems she was right to be afraid. Maybe she knew what was coming and I didn’t pick up on it.’
Buxton snorted his disbelief and turned to Jackson again.
‘I’d like you to keep this officer under your thumb until we can eliminate him from our inquiries. The medical evidence suggests that Alicia Guest died that afternoon or evening. Anyone who was in the vicinity of the flat has to be regarded as a suspect.’
Barnard suddenly felt very cold. He glanced at Jackson but there was apparently no help available from that quarter.
‘You must be joking!’ he said, his mouth dry and his heart thumping.
‘No Sergeant, I am not,’ Buxton said, turning on his heel and flinging open the door behind him. ‘I’ll see you for a formal interview very soon.’