Death Trap (2 page)

‘I went to the police when it first started. My union said to complain. But the Old Bill didn't want to know. Said it was a civil matter and we should get a solicitor. As if I can afford that.'

‘Well, they've gone for now,' Tess said. ‘Perhaps they'll take no for an answer now.'

Geoff Wilson looked at her lugubriously and shook his head. ‘I don't reckon they'll do that,' he said. ‘I don't reckon there's a cat in hell's chance they'll do that.' Elsie began to cry quietly, taking a handkerchief out of the pocket of her flowered apron to dab her eyes. ‘Number three's empty already. Bloke moved out a couple of months ago and they've not put a new tenant in. They want the whole place empty, that's what it comes down to.'

‘I don't know how we'll find another place round here,' Elsie said. ‘I really don't.'

The three friends drank a cup of tea with Elsie and Geoff and then left them to their supper.

‘It's a crying shame,' Marie said as they trouped down the worn stone steps from the front door under its crumbling portico to the street. ‘Can't you talk to your tame bizzy about it, Kate. He might know what to do.'

‘He's based in Soho. You know that,' Kate said. ‘I don't suppose he knows much about Notting Hill.'

‘You could ask him, couldn't you?' Marie insisted snappily.

Kate shrugged, irritated by the question. ‘Maybe,' she said. She glanced back at the tall house with its crumbling stucco and flaking paint. ‘They've got a cheek asking more for flats in this rotten old dump,' she said. ‘It looks as if it might fall down any time.'

‘Elsie's right, though,' Tess said. ‘The staff at my new school say exactly the same. Flats round here are very hard to find. Rents are going through the roof, there's so many new people moving into London. Just like us, I suppose.'

‘Shouldn't we see if the old girl in the basement is all right,' Kate asked, glancing at the gloomy steps which led to a littered area below street level where there was a door and a barred window.

‘Do you know her?' Tess asked, surprised.

‘I helped her down with her shopping one day. She'd got a bit stuck on the steps. She seemed a nice enough old dear, if a bit stuck up. Talks with marbles in her mouth.'

‘I've never seen her all the time we've lived here,' Marie said. ‘I thought she was a bit of a recluse, though there's letters left up in the hallway for her sometimes. Dead posh, you're right there, la. Right over the Wirral is Mrs C Beauchamp.

‘Cecily, she told me,' Kate said with a grin. ‘She insisted on calling me Catherine. You go on, I'll catch you up. I'll just make sure that she's not having any trouble with those scallies with the dog. Won't take a minute.'

Kate negotiated the area steps cautiously, kicking aside piles of litter and the first yellow autumn leaves before knocking on the half-glazed door which she now noticed close up also had bars across the window. There was no sign of a light in what must be a dark and gloomy flat, but as she was on the point of giving up she heard a faint noise inside and, when she tapped on the door again, an almost imperceptible sound of movement before a light was switched on behind the glass. She heard several bolts being drawn and a key turned before the door inched open, held on a chain. Here was someone else concerned about their security, she thought, wondering suddenly if her friends were as safe as they thought they were up in their eyrie on the top floor.

‘Who is it?' The voice, source invisible but which she recognised, demanded from behind the door, only a pair of sharp blue eyes visible in the crack which had opened up to the ill-lit area outside. ‘What do you want?' The owner of the voice might be old but her tone could still be peremptory.

‘Mrs Beauchamp?' Kate said. ‘It's Kate. I live upstairs. I helped you with your bags the other day. Do you remember?'

‘Kate? Catherine? The gel with the very odd accent?' Cecily Beauchamp said, her face appearing fully round the door, the eyes scrutinising Kate closely.

Kate swallowed the insult. ‘From Liverpool,' she said mildly. ‘We wondered if you were all right. Some scallies were making a nuisance of themselves upstairs just now, two men with a big dog, and we wondered if they'd been bothering you.'

‘Scallies?' Mrs Beauchamp said. ‘What are scallies?'

Kate sighed. There were times since she had come to London that she had thought she had travelled to another country instead of less that two hundred miles from the north of England. The cockneys she worked with didn't seem to realise that she had as much trouble with their vowels as they evidently had with hers. ‘Bad lads,' she said firmly. ‘We didn't want you being bothered by bad lads and a big dog, did we? We were worried about you.'

Mrs Beauchamp unhooked the chain on the door and opened it a little wider, pulling a silky cardigan more closely round her shoulders. She was, Kate thought, tall enough to indulge herself by looking down a long aristocratic nose at people on her doorstep with odd accents, but she still looked as thin and frail as she had when she had taken her shopping bags from her in the teeth of her protests a couple of days before. She shrugged.

‘If you're OK I'll catch up with my friends then,' Kate said, stepping back. ‘We're on the top floor if you ever need any help.'

‘No one will bother me,' Mrs Beauchamp declared with total certainty. ‘My son looks after my affairs. It's all taken care of. All in order.'

‘That's all right then,' Kate said, turning back towards the steps and the street above them feeling rebuffed. But before the door behind her closed she was surprised to hear Mrs Beauchamp's voice again.

‘Thank you, my dear,' it said unexpectedly. ‘It was kind of you to call.'

Several miles away in North London, Detective Sergeant Harry Barnard swung desultorily in his favourite revolving armchair – from Heals, no less, in a daring orange tweed on a stainless steel plinth – in his impeccably furnished small flat. He was sipping a single malt and wondering why he felt so curiously dissatisfied with life. Barnard was not much given to introspection. A sharp East End boy who had survived the Blitz as an evacuee, he had surprised his school mates by opting to join the police instead of drifting into crime like most of his contemporaries. One or two of them had done spectacularly well, but most had been in and out of prison for years and seemed to have little to show for their careers as middle age approached, while he had found a niche at least technically on the right side of the law but which had brought him rewards well beyond his official salary. There was more than one way for crime to be made to pay, he thought, with a faint smile, and while his bosses either did the same or turned a blind eye, he felt secure enough in the smart flat he should not have been able to afford.

But the moment of satisfaction was brief. Not all was well with his career in other ways, he thought. What should have been regarded as a triumph – the banging up of a particularly nasty piece of work that summer – had been overshadowed in the eyes of some of his bosses by the closeness the scandal had come to implicating the Metropolitan Police force itself. The case was yet to come to the Old Bailey, and Barnard knew that complicated legal manoeuvrings were in train to keep some names out of court. His own next step should be promotion to detective inspector, though he knew that to gain promotion and still keep on ploughing the lucrative furrow of West End vice might be tricky. Nothing would persuade him to shift to the less productive manors out in the suburban sticks. But now, with a certain chilliness surrounding his name, he thought that might be exactly what his bosses had in mind for him.

‘Hell and damnation,' he said to himself, spinning out of his chair to refill his glass and put Sinatra's
Songs for Swinging Lovers
on the turntable of the neat teak radiogram in the corner. He had no time for the relentlessly cheerful beat of the new bands from the north. He liked something a bit more sophisticated than that. The very thought of the Beatles simply reminded him of another source of dissatisfaction in his life. He had always regarded women as disposable assets, they came and they went, leaving almost no trace beyond a faint nostalgia. Since the woman he had married as a young uniformed copper had walked out on him, without much regret on either side, he had had no real ambition to share his pad or his bed with anyone else on a regular basis, to adapt to someone else's wet towels in the bathroom or toiletries in his bedroom. At least, he thought he hadn't until just recently. But he had to admit, as he sipped his Laphraoig, that he had failed to excise one young woman who had piqued his interest a few months ago as clinically from his mind as he usually did when his overtures were not instantly gratified.

He knew that Kate O'Donnell had regarded him with deep suspicion from the start, far more concerned with her brother's safety than with helping the police in any way. He guessed that where she came from the bizzies, as she called them, were not very highly regarded. She had been free enough with her obvious charms, sparkling eyes, dark curls and a smile a man could die for, but he knew that for most of the time they were deployed in his direction it was with an ulterior motive. Yet the smile kept ambushing him, asleep and awake, and he knew that he would inevitably see her again when the Robertson case came to court. She's too young for you, he kept telling himself, and that bloody awful scouse accent is a pain in the neck. With a bit of luck the Ken Fellows photographic agency, right on his manor in the middle of Soho, would give her the push and she would go back to Liverpool with her tail between her legs. Fellows was dead right to say it was no job for a woman. But for all that, he knew that if one day he bumped into her again, he would be pleased.

He downed his Scotch in one final gulp, grabbed his leather jacket from its hook in the tiny hall, and slammed out of the flat, down the stairs and out into the quiet, tree-lined street to seek out the bright lights and cheerfulness of one of the pubs on the Archway Road. With a bit of luck, he thought, he might find some female company there to pass the time and at least share a meal, if not something more. Brooding, he thought, was not his bag.
Que sera, sera,
as that irritating song said. And if push came to shove, and there was nothing professional or personal to hold him here, he might take one of those ten pound tickets to Australia and try his luck in the sun.

The mansion flat overlooking Lords cricket ground was anonymous and unassuming from the outside, but opulent within. As a manservant took his hat and coat, Nicholas Carey, Old Etonian, heir to an increasingly dilapidated and overgrown estate in Wiltshire, and very reluctant supplicant, took a surreptitious look round. Lazlo Roman, who was so far nowhere to be seen, obviously did not follow the latest fashion for stripped-down Scandinavian furnishings. Everything here was upholstered and swagged and opulent, the wood polished and the cushions plumped, in a way which Carey did not think was possible in post-war Britain any more. But it was new, of course, he thought, wrinkling his nose in disdain. His grandmother would not find the style unappealing but she would demand the genuine article, preferably passed down through many generations. This was a man who bought his own furniture which was
nouveau
and pretty much beyond the pale, even though families like his, whose properties had been more often than not requisitioned and wrecked during the war, were becoming as poor as church mice in comparison.

He felt rather than heard someone else come into the room behind him and turned to find himself facing a squat man with dark hair and a broad face, eyes concealed behind dark glasses, and wearing an impeccable suit which Carey knew could only have come from Savile Row.

‘Mr Roman, it's good of you to see me like this,' Carey said smoothly, holding out his hand which his host shook without great enthusiasm. ‘I hope this will be a mutually beneficial meeting.'

Roman waved him into one of the well-cushioned armchairs and walked to a mahogany cocktail cabinet at the far side of the room. ‘Scotch?' he asked, and poured two generous measures when Carey assented. He sat down himself and Carey felt himself being scrutinised carefully from behind the dark glasses.

‘So what can I do for you?' Roman asked at length. The foreign accent was pronounced but not incomprehensible and the manner pleasant enough but Carey felt that he was being appraised and not necessarily coming out on the credit side of the ledger.

‘I'm here for a friend of mine,' he said. ‘He wishes to remain anonymous at the moment but he is the owner of a property in Notting Hill which he is anxious to dispose of – four floors, four flats at the moment, but with much more potential than that. Unfortunately he is not really in a position to capitalise on that himself and is looking for a buyer who could.'

Roman sipped his Scotch. ‘Tenants?' he asked.

‘At present yes, but only one couple with a controlled rent, and security of tenure, and we think they can be persuaded to leave. We are already working on that.'

‘I was not looking to extend my portfolio at this time,' Roman said. ‘I acquired some of Peter Rachman's properties in that area and wish to consolidate for a while. But what your friend has sounds attractive.'

‘I think it would suit your purposes very well,' Carey said, finding it hard to sound as ingratiating as he thought he should.

‘I would need to visit the property, and have it surveyed,' Roman said. ‘Some of those old places need structural repairs. I never get involved in anything major of that sort.'

‘Of course. I can arrange a visit if that's what you would like.'

‘Then perhaps we might have a deal with your friend, Mr Carey,' Roman said, draining his glass and getting to his feet. ‘Do you have a card?'

‘Of course,' Carey said, digging into his pocket for a slip of cardboard.