War Damage (17 page)

‘You did?
Really
? I didn't think you would!' He could hear the laughter in Oliver's voice. ‘Did it work?'

‘Not really.'

‘But you did
do
it.'

‘Yes.'

‘You're not fibbing. You did fuck her?'

‘
Yes
.'

Oliver's laugh exploded down the line. ‘You've pipped me to the post and you sound as if you didn't even bloody enjoy it!'

‘I didn't
not
enjoy it exactly.'

‘Well, go on. Tell me the details!'

But Charles didn't want to talk about it and went on the offensive. ‘I thought you said
you'd
had a woman!'

‘That was a tart. That only half counts. You stuffed a real woman – an
older woman
.'

Charles leaned his forehead against the grimy glass of the kiosk. ‘My mother was home late today. She's – I think she's seeing Carnforth.'

There was silence at the other end. Then: ‘Have you gone completely raving mad?'

It was impossible to explain. He felt very tired. ‘Never mind,' he said, ‘I'll tell you tomorrow.'

‘My father says he'll take us to Twickenham on Saturday, to see the rugby.'

seventeen

M
URRAY THOUGHT THEY'D BE
looking for Stan Pinelli the day after they'd found the bloodstained shirt in Kenneth Barker's bedroom, but Plumer said they should wait until the blood analysis came back and in the meantime Murray was sent off to tie up some work on another case. When the analysis came, it was inconclusive. The blood belonged to group O, which was Frederick Buckingham's; but a third of the population belonged to that group and it was also the same as Ken Barker's.

‘Surely we have to interview Pinelli, sir?' Murray couldn't understand why Plumer was dragging his feet.

‘Yes, yes, we'll go. Find out where he's living. But after that I want you to pay another visit to –' and he reeled off a string of names.

‘But we've talked to them already.'

‘Well, have another go. It's arm-twisting time.'

It took a while to track Pinelli down, but eventually Murray found out he was staying with his sister in a dilapidated terrace off Vallance Road in Bethnal Green. Luckily Stan was in, so they invited him down to the station.

* * * * *

Murray felt at home in the interviewing room. The twenty-year-old who faced them seemed equally inured to the dirty walls, the battered furniture and the smell of stale tobacco smoke, metal and a distant memory of disinfectant.

‘Kenneth Barker – he was a mate of yours, wasn't he.' It wasn't a question. They knew Stanley Pinelli and Kenneth Barker had been at school together – or more accurately had truanted together – had been to Borstal together and had more recently been caught red-handed burgling a pawnbroker's shop in Poplar. God knows how they'd avoided another spell inside; some bleeding-heart magistrate no doubt.

The young man nodded in answer to Plumer's statement. His white-as-junket face, a gaunt face, with features too large – bony nose, full lips, soulful eyes – was handsome in its own way. His quiff of black hair had disintegrated into long, greasy strands.

‘Your friend Kenneth Barker's been murdered,' Plumer said with a deliberately nasty smile. ‘What can you tell us about that?'

‘Dunno nothing about it,' muttered Pinelli. His eyes swivelled off towards the floor and he chewed the side of his mouth.

‘Must have upset you,' commented Plumer quietly. ‘Friends all your life and now he's had his head shot off.'

‘I'd like a smoke.'

‘Of course, Stan.' Plumer offered him the packet. The young man's hands were shaking as he extracted the cigarette and lit it.

The fear interested Murray. ‘You know who killed him, don't you.'

‘
No
.'

‘Tell us what you do know. You must know something about it. Ken told you everything, I expect, he hadn't any secrets from you.'

Stan was slumped low in his chair, chin on chest, and maintained a sullen silence.

‘Come on,' said Murray, growing impatient and thinking a little more menace wouldn't come amiss. ‘We're not accusing you of murdering your mate. But we want to know who did. Look – your best mate's been shot. You're not going to let them get away with it, are you?'

Stan's eyelids flickered. He was genuinely scared, Murray was sure of it. If they shouted at him at bit … but the guv'nor wouldn't hear of that. He played by the book. He was always quiet, formal, polite even.

‘Kenneth Barker was one of Mosley's lads. Are you a blackshirt too?'

Stan shook his head.

‘Last January you were arrested and cautioned after a fight in Ridley Road market.'

‘It was just a rumble with the Jew boys, weren' it,' muttered Stan.

‘But you say you're not one of Mosley's lot.'

‘Nah.'

‘But Barker was.'

Stan acknowledged this with a minimal shrug.

Plumer intervened. ‘What we're interested in is who murdered Ken. Who d'you know who's got a weapon?'

Stan sat up, eyes wide. ‘I don't know nothing about it.'

At this point Plumer, his expression sphinx-like, produced the shirt. ‘What do you know about the shirt? How did it come to be covered with blood and in Barker's bedroom?'

Stan, whiter than ever, denied all knowledge of the shirt.

‘Ken's mother thought it was yours.'

A spasm of fury distorted the bony face for a moment and Murray hoped Stan wouldn't be paying the old woman a visit, but Stanley recovered himself and produced a sullen mutter: ‘I lent it 'im, didn't I.'

‘That doesn't account for the blood.'

‘He cut himself shaving or something.'

This was bordering on the insolent. Murray felt like landing him one on that big conk of a nose of his.

‘When did you last see Barker?'

Stan launched into a long-winded tale of evenings spent drinking and afternoons at the snooker table. ‘Hard to see where you get the money from when you're not working,' Murray commented sarcastically.

But it was Plumer who leaned forward and said: ‘I suggest you consider seriously the danger you yourself may be in. I believe you know more than you're telling us. Whatever Kenneth did, he ended up as the victim of a cold-blooded, deliberate murder. There must be a reason for that.'

But Stan insisted he knew nothing. His memory was a blank page. They'd nothing on him. He hadn't even been arrested. There was no alternative but to let him go.

Afterwards Murray said: ‘We could have pushed him harder on the blackshirt angle. And what about the Milners' friends, sir? You thought they were important to begin with.'

Plumer's glance flickered away. ‘Go easy on all that, son.'

‘But I told you what Mrs Milner said about this man, Arthur Carnforth. A fascist, she said. And Ken Barker was mixed up with them, too.'

Plumer shook his head. ‘Go round the East End – talk to the people we know.'

Noel Valentine's gallery was unlike any place Murray had seen. The paintings on the white walls were not wispily romantic canvases by John Piper or the tougher realism of a Paul Nash, but alienating abstracts from New York and Europe. Murray thought the pictures were a joke, but he liked the white walls and black sofa; very clean and modern.

Murray hadn't been expecting Valentine to be quite so short or so bald, but as he shook Noel's plump hand, he found himself responding to the dealer's smile. The bright eyes were full of curiosity. For once here was someone who actually seemed to be looking forward to an interview with the police.

Behind its modernist frontage the house was unchanged from Georgian times. Noel Valentine led Murray up narrow stairs to the small, cluttered first-floor rooms. A young woman was typing in one; the other, Noel's office, was one of the untidiest Murray had seen. The two men were only able to sit down after Noel had removed stacks of papers, books and art journals and catalogues from chairs to floor, after which he placed himself behind his desk and looked at Murray. ‘How can I help you? It's about Freddie, I assume. Poor old Freddie – he was so full of vitality, it's almost impossible to think of him as dead. Marvellous character. And completely infuriating and irritating. Hardly surprising someone bumped him off in the end.'

‘Why do you say that?' To Murray, the jokey manner was slightly suspect. He wasn't accustomed to people who talked like that. And although he had no reason to suppose that Valentine's gallery was anything other than above board, he cynically wondered about the possibilities for fraud behind a front such as this smart little operation.

‘Freddie liked to throw a spanner into other people's works. Then he'd step back and watch the explosion.'

‘Can you give me an example?'

Noel stood up, accidentally kicking over a pile of books. He moved round the various obstacles to reach the door, where he shouted at the typist to bring them coffee. ‘She's temporary. My real secretary, Dinah Wentworth, she's gone off to the Courtauld. Unfortunately. This girl's hopeless.' He sat down again. ‘Give you an example? I don't know if I can, off-hand. He'd introduce people and see how they got on. Of course sometimes he didn't like the result. Sometimes he'd be jealous if two of his great friends got on too well. He couldn't resist doing it, he'd get carried away and afterwards regret it. Say, if a man and a woman who'd met each other through him started an affair, or something like that. Then he'd have sort of lost control, wouldn't he. Or for instance, I know for a fact he didn't like the way Arthur Carnforth was worming his way into the Hallam household. He thought he was trying to get them to stop Freddie seeing the boy.'

‘Arthur Carnforth? You mean the fascist?'

‘The very same. I see you know all about him. A rather gruesome character in my opinion. I mean to say, sticking up for Hitler these days is just a bit beyond the pale,
non
? But then he's crazy. They put him in a bin during the war. Neville actually suggested I might have a look at some of his daubs. He
actually
wanted me to do an exhibition! Christ! Have you
seen
them! They're worse than Hitler's own efforts. He wrote stuff for the Mosleyites before the war, under another name, I think. Freddie couldn't stand him, “I'd like to murder Carnforth” he used to say.'

The hopeless girl brought them cups of coffee.

‘I'm very interested in what you say about Mr Carnforth. But can you tell me more about the party, the Sunday Mr Buckingham died?'

‘One can turn up any time after three, and most of the guests have usually drifted away by about seven o'clock or half past. I got there at four. I know that, because I'd been expecting a transatlantic telephone call at 3.30. We spoke for quite a while and when it was finished I checked the time, to see if it was too early to pop over to Reggie's. I knew Alan Wentworth would probably be there and he was. We had a chat about a programme we've been working on together, on the air next week: “Surrealism, aftermath or new dawn?”. I remember Freddie talking to Ian Roxburgh. He's a dark horse. Spent the war in the Far East and still seems to have a lot of contacts there. Business interests.' Noel paused. ‘Perhaps I shouldn't say this, but – well, he approached me about some Chinese art works. It's not my area, but I do rather wonder how he got hold of them. According to Reggie he'd become very friendly with Freddie. And then there was Vivienne Evanskaya – Freddie finally managed to get her along. Poor old Reggie. She'd wanted it so much, and now … mind you, Reggie's not one to give up. Never say die, that's Reggie. What a woman! No lack of enterprise there!'

Murray frowned. He didn't like to hear Regine spoken of in that way.

Noel went blithely on. ‘Freddie was also fluttering around Vivienne's son, of course, the one who looks as if he ought to be Jean Cocteau's muse. What a dirty old bastard Freddie was, really. But I expect the boy can look after himself. No flies on him, as the Americans say. Been round the block a few times already, I should think. The American way with language, don't you love it? They're so much less constipated than the British.'

‘Thank you very much, Mr Valentine. You've been very helpful.'

‘Have I? I can't see how anything I've said gets you nearer to finding out who killed poor old Freddie. It's all gossip, really, well, not gossip exactly, just the natural friction of social intercourse. Friendship networks are full of rivalries and minor hatreds, aren't they. In fact, when you think about it, friendship is a very odd human activity indeed. Do animals have friendships? Perhaps the primates do, some of them. Or are human friendships merely part of the struggle for survival, necessary in an economic social order such as orang-utans and chimps don't have?'

* * * * *

Murray travelled straight from St James to Swiss Cottage and as he came out of the tube station, his mind was less on the interview he hoped shortly to be having with Dorothy Redfern, and more on Noel Valentine's throwaway characterisation of Regine Milner as somehow a bit too racy. She was certainly flirtatious. She'd passed on bits of information too, but possibly it was all to put him off the scent. Perhaps the Milners had some guilty secret, were more involved in all this than they'd let on. And after all, she was nothing, really, but a silly, shallow, middle-class hostess. She'd probably married Milner for money, he decided bitterly. God knows the man wasn't much to look at.

And he wished he'd never taken Irene to that Italian restaurant Regine had recommended – Bertorelli's. Irene had hated it, she hated oily foreign food, she said.

Regine had dazzled him. That was the only word for it. He must pull himself together.

Dorothy Redfern watched Terence Cole play at the small sandpit on legs, which stood in a corner of the consulting room. The six-year-old made the miniature dolls fight, hitting one repeatedly with a second, then forcing it into the sand. ‘He's dead now.' He turned to look at Dorothy. He laughed. Then he threw one of the dolls on the floor. He stamped on it; it broke. He laughed again.