Exposure (32 page)

The girl had covered her face with her hands. She was sobbing. Mandy Kent had been in the Force for ten years. She was inured to violence and the hideous results of domestic rows. She prided herself on her emotional detachment. It was essential if she was to do the job properly. ‘How did you ever get her into a taxi in that state? Too scared to call an ambulance, weren't you?'

Most battered women refused to lodge a complaint and the bastards got away with it. A badly beaten prostitute was no exception.

She had never seen a girl so smashed up as Tina's friend Tracey, lying unconscious in the ward next door. She knew them both; she'd worked on the Vice Squad and she knew the tarts and the pimps in the square mile where drugs, hookers and every kind of sexual malpractice was on offer at a price. She hadn't seen Tina or her girlfriend on the streets for a long time. She went on, speaking in her calm way.

‘She's got fractured ribs, a broken jaw, a smashed right arm – trying to defend herself, wasn't she? – and the doctor thinks whoever did it kicked her so hard her spleen's ruptured. She could die, Tina. So who did it?'

Slowly, Tina touched her own face, it was so bruised her lip was puffy.

‘She can't die … she can't …' she mumbled. ‘We've been together since we were kids. We were in the same fucking council home …' Mandy Kent said firmly, ‘If her spleen's ruptured, she could. Next time it could be you, lying in there.'

She waited, instinct sensed a change in the weeping girl. It was said very low. ‘Joe Patrick. Joe Patrick beat her up.'

Mandy Kent stood up. ‘I'll get us some coffee,' she said. She came back with two plastic cups from the dispenser in the corridor and gave one to Tina.

‘I put sugar in,' she said. ‘You're in shock. Sugar's good for you. Tell me about this Joe Patrick. Is he your pimp?'

‘No,' Tina shook her head. Sipping the hot sweet coffee hurt her mouth. ‘He doesn't run girls. Doesn't need to. He's a businessman. We picked him up a year ago in the Caribbean Club. He likes coloureds. He's got a hang up about it. We live with him. I dress up like a secretary sometimes. It's not the first time he's laid into us, you expect that. But this time he came in looking for someone to take it out on. He just wanted to punch the shit out of one of us.'

She finished the coffee and winced.

‘Why did he pick on Tracey and not you? She talk back?'

‘Christ no. Tracey never did, she was too scared of him. She was wearing a bracelet he'd given me. A fucking bracelet, just borrowing 'cos she liked it … He went ape. He was like a crazy, yelling and swearing. He just laid into her. I tried to stop him but he gave me a backhander and put the boot in and I just lay there and watched … I thought she was dead. Then he went out. Slammed the door and went out.'

‘And you got her out to the street and into a cab,' Mandy Kent prompted.

‘I said it was a hit and run,' Tina muttered. ‘I had to get her to hospital.'

‘And just because she was wearing your bracelet,' Mandy repeated. ‘Why, Tina? Was it valuable?'

‘No, he never gave us good stuff. Just bits of junk.'

She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

‘I've told you,' she said. ‘But I'm not doing more than that. I'm not giving evidence. You charge him, I'll deny I ever said anything. If I grassed on him he'd kill me. Or get someone else to do it.'

Mandy Kent had not expected anything else. Girls like Tina and the helpless assault victim Tracey would always be beyond the law's protection. They lived by the rules of the criminal underclass, where the grass was deemed worse than a murderer, and the only law that mattered was survival. ‘Maybe Tracey will charge him,' she suggested. ‘If she regains consciousness. If she dies it'll be murder. You won't be able to run away from that, Tina.'

Tina said slowly, ‘She won't grass on him either. I want to go home now. I'll come and see her tomorrow.'

‘You're not going back there, are you? I wouldn't, if I were you.'

‘I'll go to a friend,' Tina said. ‘Just for a day or two. Give the bastard time to calm down. See how Trace is … Thanks for the coffee.'

‘If he kicked you, you should let the doctor in Casualty take a look.'

‘I'm all right. Just a bit sore. It's not the first time he's done it.'

‘I'll get the squad car to take you where you want to go. Keep in touch, Tina. I'm on your side.'

‘Like fuck,' Tina said without rancour. ‘Nobody's on my side except me.'

Mandy Kent saw her into the squad car. She felt suddenly tired and angry. They'd run the name Joe Patrick through the central computer. Businessman he might be, but the attack had the hallmark of the petty criminal and former pimp.

Not that she had any hope of bringing him into a court. Neither girl would press charges or give evidence for fear of reprisals. She couldn't blame them but the frustration of seeing a bastard like that get away with it made her seethe. She went back up to the ward. The doctor on duty came out to meet her.

‘Any luck?' she asked him.

‘No, still unconscious. Lucky for her the spleen's OK. She'll be a terrible mess, though. We've wired up the jaw, but she'll need plastic surgery. No joy with her friend?'

‘She told me who did it, but she won't go into court or swear an affidavit. So there's nothing we can do. Makes me really sick.'

‘Did she say why he did it? What had the poor little devil done to get a hiding like that?'

‘Borrowed the other girl's bracelet. Can you believe it? He was just a thug looking for an excuse to beat up on someone … I know the type. Anywhere I can have a look at her belongings? I might as well see what she got herself half-killed for.'

‘Go and see Sister,' he suggested. ‘Her office's through there. She'll have the stuff till it's documented and locked away. Good night.'

‘Good night,' Mandy said.

‘Oh yes,' the sister in charge was as familiar with the type of incident as the WPC asking to look at the patient's belongings. ‘Yes, I've got everything here, in my desk drawer. You have to be so careful, or some of these people will claim things have been stolen. I'll get out what there is.'

There was little enough. A chain with a lucky charm, three costume rings with blood dried on them like a dirty-brown film, and a thin chain bracelet with little stones that glittered in the light of the anglepoise lamp.

Mandy Kent picked it up. The sister said, ‘I haven't seen one of those for years.'

‘Oh, what's special about it?'

‘It's a DEAREST bracelet,' she explained. ‘My father gave one to my mother for their silver wedding. Not as nice as this, though. Hers came from Bravingtons, I think. This has some nice little stones. They spell dearest. Diamond, emerald, amethyst, ruby, emerald, sapphire … what's the last one … tourmaline. That's right. They were quite fashionable a long time ago. This
is
a nice one, even though the stones are very small.' She had taken it from Mandy Kent and weighed it in her hand. ‘I've got my mother's, come to think of it. She died last year.'

‘Sorry,' Mandy Kent said. ‘If it's not junk, it might be worth running it through the computer for stolen goods. I might just get that bastard on receiving. I don't think it belonged to
his
mother. I'll sign for it, if that's all right.'

‘I just hope', the sister said, ‘you can find something to charge the brute with.'

Mandy Kent looked at her. She put the envelope with the bracelet sealed inside it in her inner pocket. She put on her hat, and said, ‘So do I.'

Ben Harris was waiting at the airport. She saw him outside the arrivals and waved. He hurried to meet her and, for a moment, undemonstrative in public as he was, he took her in his arms and held her for a long embrace.

‘Good to see you, darling,' he said. ‘God it's been a long few days.'

‘Me too,' Julia assured him. ‘I've missed you every minute, but,' and drawing back she looked up at him in triumph, ‘but we've cracked it. We've got Western in our pockets and we'll have Harold King for war crimes.'

Arms round each other, they made their way to the car park. They were only driving on to the motorway towards central London when Joe Patrick got the call to say Julia had been picked up landing from Jersey and they were on her tail.

At last he could face Harold King. He didn't have to mention that they'd lost her on the island. His spirits had been dour and his mood uneasy when he came home and found his birds had left. There was a mess of vomit and blood on his smart carpet, and no-one around to clean it up.

He had gone over the top with that silly black cow. Seeing her with the bracelet he'd given Tina sparked off the blind rage which was seeking an outlet because he was so scared of King. He'd done her over good and proper and given Tina a fistful for trying to interfere.

But they'd be back. He wasn't worried. They knew what would happen to them if they complained or talked to the police. If they never showed their faces again, he didn't care. Plenty more girls where they came from. Might be good to have a change. He made his appointment and set off in his Mercedes to give Harold King a carefully worded report.

‘She went on a holiday,' he said. ‘Spent a few days in Jersey, flew back this morning.'

Harold King stared at him. He seemed to change colour, but Joe Patrick dismissed it as imagination. He had been so shit worried, he was still nervous, that was the trouble. ‘Jersey,' King said. ‘I see. Doing what?'

‘Taking a break,' Joe insisted. He decided to invent. ‘Staying with friends. Harris didn't go with her.'

‘Friends,' King repeated. He got up and walked round his desk to stare at the London skyline with his back to Joe. ‘Jersey. Staying with friends.'

‘Yeah,' he heard the Irishman say, his voice light-hearted. ‘She's a busted flush, like you said. And they're using our plant for the November feature.' He laughed. ‘They paid me good money to prove it.'

King didn't turn round. ‘Who did she see in Jersey?'

Joe said, ‘Nobody. It was just a few days off.'

‘She never went out, she didn't meet anybody?' The voice was deceptively calm.

‘No. Just got on the plane and came back. She's gone into the office with lover boy. He was there to meet her.'

Harold King swivelled round. ‘Those stupid fuckers lost her, didn't they? She slipped them and went to the island and nobody knows what she did or who she saw till they picked her up at Heathrow this morning. Isn't that how it happened, Joe? They lost her!'

Joe bluffed. ‘Jesus, they never told me,' he raised his voice in self-defence. ‘They gave me the info, just as I've given it to you, Boss. Lookit –' he dropped into Dublin slang in his agitation, ‘lookit, if they've screwed up and tried lyin' their way out—'

‘Get out,' King said suddenly. ‘Get out. You're finished.'

Joe stood up. He said in a whine of self-justification, ‘It's not my fault … Anything you've asked, I've done for ye … Anythin'. I've risked my bloody neck for ye. You don't mean it; you won't throw me out.'

‘You've done nothing for me that wouldn't put you away for the rest of your dirty little life, if that's what you're talking about. Or are you trying to threaten me, Joe? Trying to blackmail me?' To Joe's terror he burst into a roar of laughter. ‘You piece of piss, you try anything like that with me, and you'll be scraped from the pavement. I've got friends who'd like to do me a favour. You know them, Joe. You know how long you'd last if I said one bloody word to them, don't you?'

Joe Patrick bit his lower lip. It was a throw-back to his boyhood when he was going to get a strapping from the orphanage principal.

‘I'll go,' he said. ‘And I'll be no trouble to ye. No trouble at all. Ye may change your mind. You may need me again. I don't hold no grudge. You've been fair with me.'

‘Get out,' King said. ‘And keep your mouth shut if you want to stay alive.' Then he turned back to the window again. He didn't hear Joe Patrick close the door.

Joe's firm of private detectives had lost Julia Hamilton when she went to Jersey. But islands were small places, places where gossip spread faster than a bushfire. While the London legmen wasted their time on the hotels and public venues, the fact that the well-known surgeon, David Peterson, had a famous Fleet Street journalist staying with him, was all over the island in a few hours. And the guests at Richard Watson's dinner party had been regaling their friends with stories about Julia Hamilton. King's own contact was a radio reporter on the local station. It was his business to pick up news items, local gossip however slight. For ten years he kept a watching brief for Harold King's publications with particular emphasis on a retired ICI executive called Richard Watson. He had reported direct to King. King had been prepared for Joe Patrick's lies. He knew where Hamilton had been. To see the man who saved the life of an eighteen-year-old German soldier in the Western Desert, fifty years ago. She had found Watson, as he had done, through some unlucky chance. Because she hadn't dropped the investigation. Joe Patrick had been deliberately misled. And misled King in turn.

This was not a problem to be solved by a cheap killer like the Irishman, a rapist and murderer of an old woman alone in her house. This needed sophistication and brains to bring it to solution. He paused, thinking about Joe Patrick. The Irish were a treacherous and vengeful breed. He couldn't leave Patrick like a loose cannon with a grievance. Belt and braces, he said to himself. Patrick would have to go.

He'd deal with him later. He was due in New York at the end of the week. Gloria was flying out with him. He'd make the arrangements then, for that red-haired bitch.