Gun Street Girl (2 page)

I watched her take the few steps from the car to my office and the temperature in the room went up another few degrees. I opened the door for her and stepped back as she crossed the threshold. ‘Hello again,' she said. ‘I need your help.'

‘Hello again yourself.' I directed her to the hard wooden chair on the window side of my desk. I went round to my own chair, sat down, pulled a foolscap pad in front of me and fumbled a pen out of the top drawer. In the short silence that followed I gave her the once-over.

Like I said, she was dressed all in black, from the tiny pillbox hat with a short veil that perched on the pulled-back hair, down to the wickedly pointed stiletto-heeled shoes she wore on her narrow feet. It was expensive black. Even without the car she'd arrived in I would have seen that. In spite of the unaccustomed heat she was wearing a suit – a costume, my Auntie Roz, who is eighty if she's a day, would have called it. Costume was a good description. It was cut tight to emphasise her figure. The jacket was short, bolero length, and double-breasted over a pencil-slim skirt that reached just below her knees and had a long split up the back seam. Under the jacket was a black silk blouse buttoned severely to the neck. She wore black stockings on her long, slender legs. Over her shoulder she carried a big, fat, soft leather handbag that screamed Gucci. She wore no jewellery.

Finally she broke the silence. ‘What's the matter, cat got your tongue?'

‘No,' I said. ‘Now let me guess. You've been nicked and you've come to me for a character reference?'

‘Not very funny, Mr Sharman.'

‘It wasn't meant to be funny. What is all this?'

She took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were the most exquisite shade of blue I'd ever seen, the colour of Forget-Me-Nots. And beautiful, even enamelled with grief as they were. Free of make-up and full of tears and slightly puffed. If anything, the naked sadness in her eyes made her more attractive. The cool rich exterior and the terrible sadness within. She was in mourning and on her it looked good. She crossed her legs and the sound of silk on silk was like bated breath. ‘You're staring, Mr Sharman.' Her voice was barely a sigh.

‘It's not every day a beautiful woman comes to see me. I wonder if you'd mind elaborating.'

‘Of course,' she replied, and hesitated.

‘Yes?' I prompted.

‘You don't know who I am, do you?'

‘No.'

‘My name is Pike.' She put her sunglasses on my desk. ‘Elizabeth Pike. My father was Robert Pike.' She started to cry. She opened her handbag and felt around in it until she found a black-edged handkerchief which she pressed to her already bruised eyes.

‘Of course,' I said. ‘RP2, Sir Robert Pike.'

‘You know then,' she said between sobs.

‘I know that he's dead.' Her sobs got deeper. ‘I'm sorry.' I stood up and went and perched on the edge of the desk in front of her. ‘Do you fancy a drink of anything?' I asked. I knew I did.

‘No, thank you.'

I offered her a cigarette from my packet and she accepted. As I lit first hers and then another for myself, I ran what I knew about Robert Pike through my mind. It was quite a lot. He had been that sort of man.

Sir Robert was an entrepreneur, the millionaire owner of a vast publishing empire. He started off delivering newspapers in the thirties and ended up owning them in the eighties. Newspapers and magazines, followed by TV stations, a football team, record companies and other media and leisure-orientated businesses, with branches in property, transport and so much else it would make your head spin. He was rich, stinking rich, and seemed to enjoy it.

He was a man who spent the money he earned. He was a great collector. He bought paintings by old masters and new talent alike. He had a huge library of first editions, from Charles Dickens to twentieth-century writers like Mailer and Ian Fleming. He was also reputed to have one of the most valuable collections of American comic books in the world. Plus he amassed houses in all sorts of exotic locations, where he entertained other rich and famous men. But his favourite hobby, above all others, was collecting rare cars. He had more concourse-condition automobiles than you could decently shake a stick at.

He had managed to amass his great fortune and still remain virtually unknown to the public. He did not like publicity, even though in the scheme of things publicity liked him. The one and only scandalous part of his past, the sudden appearance of a previously unknown illegitimate child who had lived all of her life in Australia, had the great man's lawyers papering the walls with enough writs to keep the courts busy for years. The story vanished from his rivals' headlines almost as quickly as it had appeared.

So when Robert Pike took his old Webley service revolver and stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger a couple of weeks previously, you would have been hard pressed to miss the story. The verdict had been suicide. Pretty reasonable under the circumstances, I would have thought. This time the story had been plastered all over the press with no danger of litigation. His own papers canonised his memory; the papers that belonged to the other press lords dug the dirt.

Then it suddenly came to me where else I had seen Elizabeth Pike. Sir Robert's funeral had been big TV news just a few days ago. Looking at her now, in front of me, holding her tear-stained handkerchief, I remembered seeing her then, being supported by a male relative as she entered Westminster Cathedral for the memorial service, but it hadn't clicked. I also remembered a stunning blonde at the ceremony, described as Sir Robert's other daughter.

‘I saw you on TV,' I said. ‘At the funeral.'

‘Congratulations.'

I felt as if I was going down the wrong road. What the hell do you say? Did you enjoy the service? Did they serve ham or tongue in the bridge rolls at the do afterwards? ‘I didn't recognise you,' was all I said.

‘No, I didn't pinch the altar piece.' Her tone was dry. She dragged the smoke from the cigarette deep into her lungs and expelled it in one long, blue plume.

‘Miss Pike,' I said, ‘if you need my help, I'll do what I can.'

She nodded.

‘So tell me about it.'

‘Where do I start?' she asked.

‘The beginning is usually good.'

‘The beginning,' she repeated, like a child, as I went back to my chair. ‘Yes, that is a good place.'

And so she started. ‘It began a long time ago, before I was born, actually. My father had an affair with one of the women who worked for him. Her name was Joanna Bennett, with two ‘t's. She became pregnant at about the same time as my mother was pregnant with me.'

Inconvenient, I thought.

‘My father offered to pay for Joanna to have an abortion,' Elizabeth Pike continued. ‘She refused. She insisted that she loved him. He couldn't bear the thought of any scandal besmirching the family name. He thought it would kill my mother. It probably would have. My father was a very honourable man, or so he thought.' Her face twisted slightly at that. ‘His idea of honour was to push the poor woman off to Australia. I tend to think he was just an uptight bastard who couldn't bear to have his good name dragged through the divorce courts. That would really have besmirched it. Times were different then, even if they did call them the swinging sixties.'

‘You didn't like your father?'

‘I didn't say that, but you're right, I didn't much. But he changed after my mother died and I did get to like him, and now I miss him. Maybe it really was her he was trying to protect all along.'

‘When did she die?' I asked.

‘Five years ago. In Australia, of all places. She was on holiday and drowned in an accident on the Great Barrier Reef. She'd always wanted to see it, but Daddy just refused to set foot over there. We always said it was because of Murdoch. We know better now.'

‘We?'

‘My brother and I, Mother too, but of course she's not here now to know anything.' She paused sadly. ‘Anyway, where was I?'

‘Your mother died in Australia.'

‘Yes, that's right.'

‘And?'

‘And my father changed. He told us about our half-sister Catherine. It was a hell of a shock. She's the same age as me, and I had no idea she even existed. Then I met her.'

‘How old were you then?'

‘When I met her? Twenty-one.'

‘And she was in this country?'

‘Yes, she just arrived one day not long after my mother's death. She had no relatives in Australia, no one close at all. Apparently she and Joanna had lived like gypsies, moving from place to place since she was born. They always lived in hotels. My father made Joanna an allowance, a generous one at that, but she's never got over being banished. That was one of the conditions my father made, you see. She must live in Australia and never ever return. Apparently she loathed the place. She was an English rose who just dried up in the heat, and she took to drink.'

‘To keep her moist,' I said.

Elizabeth Pike looked at me from under thick, dark eyelashes. ‘You're a cynic, Mr Sharman. I expected as much.'

‘I'm glad I didn't disappoint you. What were the other conditions?'

‘There were two more. The fact of the child must never be made public, and Joanna was never to get in touch with my father again, or else the deal was off.'

‘But he made it public himself, if I remember rightly.'

‘He allowed it to be made public,' she corrected me. ‘He said he wanted to stop living a lie. But as I said, he'd changed, mellowed, and by then both the women were dead of course.'

‘Of course,' I said. ‘Go on with the story.'

She collected her thoughts. ‘Yes, Joanna died in 1982 and Catherine disappeared for a time. There was some trouble with drugs, she went off the rails. She was desperately lonely and scared. Daddy kept paying the allowance into Joanna's bank, for Catherine, you understand. He arranged it so that she could draw the money, but it wasn't touched for ages. And then she turned up out of the blue, one day in London.'

‘Quite a surprise.'

‘It was, Daddy nearly threw a fit. He'd never even seen her. Thank goodness she was discreet, and clever too. It was a hell of a job to get to him. All sorts of crazy people try. When you're as rich and powerful as he was, everyone wants a bit of you, a bit of your time. I think that people thought something would rub off, some bit of his magic.'

‘Or some bit of his cash,' I said. ‘Sorry, I'm being cynical again.'

‘I'm getting used to it. Apparently she got friendly with one of Daddy's secretaries, found out where he'd be one evening and turned up.'

‘Didn't her mother have a contact number or address?'

‘Oh no. No contact under any circumstances.'

‘So what happened then?'

‘Daddy fell for Catherine, literally. He helped her financially – she wanted to be an actress – and bought her a house, although in the end she virtually moved in with us.'

‘Very generous,' I said. ‘But you told me he'd never seen her. What proof did she have that she was who she said she was?'

‘Everything. It's all still at the house in Daddy's safe. Birth certificate, medical and school records, although she didn't go to school much from what we can gather – she got her education the hard way – her mother's death certificate and the record of all the payments Father made to her. She also had a scrapbook of anything she had ever found about Robert Pike. That really did it for Daddy. The fact that although he ignored her, she thought enough about him to collect stories about him. Anyway, no one knew about her but Daddy. She could hardly invent herself.'

‘So she could have blown the gaff on the old man at any time?'

Elizabeth Pike's eyes flashed with anger. ‘Please don't call him that.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said, and I was. ‘But she could have.'

‘She didn't need to. He wanted to help her. He felt guilty about neglecting her and, besides, she's charming as well as gorgeous. You'll see.'

‘I already have,' I said.

‘What?'

‘Seen her.'

‘Where?'

‘On TV.'

‘Of course.'

‘So what's the problem?'

‘There are a couple,' said Elizabeth Pike. ‘Since my father died, Catherine has changed.'

‘How?'

‘I don't know exactly, but I think she's scared.'

‘Of what?'

‘I don't know, she won't say.'

‘You said “a couple”.'

‘I was coming to that. I've been through my father's records with the accountants. His personal financial records. He was paying Joanna Bennett out of his private bank account, you see, to keep the payments secret. He was paying someone else in Australia too.'

‘Who?'

‘Someone called Joseph Lorimar.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know.'

‘What sort of payments?'

‘Regular large payments, larger than he made to Joanna.'

‘How much and for how long?'

‘They started in 1970. At the time, it was ten thousand a month.'

I whistled. ‘That was a lot then.'

‘It was, and they increased. The last payment was for fifty thousand pounds.'

‘When was that?'

‘The same month that my mother died.'

‘And then?'

‘Nothing.'

‘How was the money paid?'

‘By banker's draft to the National Bank of Perth. I had some enquiries made. Apparently Lorimar opened the account with a small deposit. The money that my father paid in was withdrawn from various branches of the bank in cash. Not in large enough amounts to cause a stir. No one remembers Lorimar. The official who opened the account is dead. The account is still open but hasn't been used since the last withdrawal.'

‘So who is Lorimar?'