Dead Beat (23 page)

Kate turned sharply after she had flounced out of the pub door and made her way to the Blue Lagoon where Marie was in sole charge of the steamy coffee machine and a handful of customers at the plastic tables. Her friend made her a frothy cappuccino and waved at the array of food.

‘Anything to eat?' she asked. ‘You look a bit fraught.' She brought her a sandwich and slipped into the seat opposite Kate. ‘What's happened?' she asked, and between mouthfuls Kate told her about that morning's discovery of the burglary at the agency, and an edited version of her meeting with Barnard. She did not know what to make of his unexpected invitation or whether her reply had been the right one.

‘But that's good news, isn't it? If they're not so interested in Tom any more? If they've got another similar crime and you know Tom's safely up north.'

‘He didn't exactly say that,' Kate said. ‘And anyway, I'm not sure I trust him an inch.' And that at least was true, she thought, she didn't trust him an inch either as a bizzie or as a potential friend.

FOURTEEN

K
ate O'Donnell walked thoughtfully across Soho Square that evening towards the underground at Tottenham Court Road and, as she snuggled deeper into her scarf, wondered if this long, grim winter would ever end. The snow and ice which had hung about for months in grey, solid piles in the gutters and at the corners of buildings had slowly disappeared but the spring bulbs had barely struggled into life in the flowerbeds and no one had yet given up on their bulky winter coats and warm boots. As she cut through Soho Street towards the glittering lights of Oxford Street, she was suddenly overtaken by a middle-aged woman in a smart coat, with matching hat and gloves, a glimpse of pearls at the neck and a determined expression on her face, made fiercer by the lack of even a smudge of lipstick. She turned unexpectedly into Kate's path, breathing heavily. She looked like one of the women who had occasionally turned up at her school, Kate thought, to present prizes or give a talk about the good work being done by missionaries in the heart of Africa.

‘Are you Miss O'Donnell?' the woman asked, effectively blocking the pavement so that Kate had to stop. Kate nodded, unable to imagine why she was being accosted like this.

‘The young lady who takes photographs?' the woman demanded and again Kate admitted that she was. The woman's face softened slightly, although she had looked slightly startled when she heard Kate's accent. ‘You must think me very rude, my dear,' she said. ‘But I've been looking for you. My name is Veronica Lucas and I called at your agency but you'd already left. I thought if I hurried I might catch you up. They told me what you were wearing. You've made yourself quite noticeable around Soho apparently.' She glanced around. ‘Would you join me for a cup of tea?' she asked.

‘Am I going to be told what this is all about?' Kate asked, feeling resentful at the intrusion.

‘Of course you are, my dear. Here, come on into the warm and I'll explain.' Veronica Lucas, after a careful assessment of just where she was going, preceded her into a cafe in one of the streets on the quieter north side of Oxford Street and had ordered tea for two before Kate could find any reason to object to the way she had been effectively hijacked. She was, it appeared, the answer to Mrs Lucas's prayers, and Kate could tell that she meant that literally. Veronica Lucas explained, in tones of absolute certainty, that she was one of a group of Christian women engaged in cleaning up Soho and she needed a photographer, preferably a woman, to help in that task. Having learned enough about how the square mile of Soho earned its dubious living, Kate knew the unfeasibly vast extent of such an ambition, but it was obvious that this woman would not be deterred by any objection she could make. Her eyes positively sparkled with zeal. In any case, Mrs Lucas seemed to be offering some extra employment which Kate was reluctant to turn down out of hand. It wasn't as if Ken Fellows' wage was generous.

‘What is it exactly you want me to do?' she asked cautiously, sipping tea which Mrs Lucas had poured carefully from a china teapot into a china cup. This was about as far from Marie's cheap and cheerful coffee bar as you could get, she thought.

‘We're preparing a report on prostitution in the area to present to Parliament when they finally get around to considering the Wolfenden Report,' Mrs Lucas said. ‘You know about that?'

Kate nodded. Since she had learned about her brother's tastes she had taken more than a passing interest in one of its proposals which was to make some homosexual acts legal for the first time.

‘We're especially interested in how the law should deal with the exploitation of young girls, runaways mainly. They come down from the north and from Scotland and there are evil men waiting to pick them up at the railway stations. There used to be a lot at Euston but, now they've pulled it down, King's Cross and St Pancras seem to be the favourites.'

Kate knew well enough that what the woman said was true. She had seen girls in unseasonable clothes hanging around the station entrance looking pinched and shivering when she had gone back to Liverpool only a few days ago. Mrs Lucas pulled an envelope of snapshots out of her bag and fanned them out across the table. They were black and white pictures, most of them blurred and slightly out-of-focus, and probably taken, Kate thought, with someone's family Box Brownie in a bad light. Some of Mrs Lucas's pictures showed girls sheltering under the massive stone classical arch, itself condemned, which still stood between the ruins of Euston and the main road.

‘I'm told that these won't print very well in a leaflet,' Veronica Lucas said, a note of irritation in her voice.

Kate smiled. ‘You're right,' she said. ‘You'll be lucky if they'll print at all.' She looked at the pictures more closely. Most of them were of young girls and women on the streets, either looking cold and lost, or approaching men or being approached by policemen. The nature of the trade was obvious.

‘What we want is similar pictures of a better quality, suitable to print in our report. We have a lady journalist on our committee and she says that one photograph is worth a hundred words.'

‘You only have to look at old copies of
Picture Post
to know that's true,' Kate said. ‘Do you remember
Picture Post
? I used to buy it with my pocket money.'

‘A publication produced by communists and fellow-travellers, as I recall,' Veronica Lucas said tartly. ‘I wouldn't have it in the house personally. But I'm sure my colleague from the
Daily Express
is right about pictures. What I want to know from you is whether or not you can take some for us? You're ideally placed working in the area yourself. We'll pay you, of course. Unless you feel you can donate yourself to the cause, as it were.'

Kate smiled. ‘I wish you luck with your campaign, though I think you've got a mountain to climb. But I can't afford to work for nothing. The agency doesn't pay me much and there's the cost of materials for developing and printing. I'll charge you ten per cent less than the agency would charge if they took it on, if I can persuade them to let me use a darkroom.'

‘Fine,' Mrs Lucas said without hesitation.

‘So what exactly do you want and how soon?'

Mrs Lucas pushed her smudgy snapshots across the table to Kate. ‘This sort of thing,' she said. ‘And one more place. St Peter's Church has a refuge which we support. They take in young people at risk on the streets. It's run by a Rev Hamilton, David Hamilton, and he knows someone is coming on our behalf.'

‘Right,' Kate said faintly, alarmed at how efficiently she had been ambushed into helping this woman and wondering whether or not there was catch somewhere. ‘How do I get hold of you?'

Veronica Lucas handed Kate a card with her address in Surrey and phone number and
Clean Up Soho
in red letters across the top. ‘A lot of people are getting to know us,' she said.

‘I'm sure they are,' Kate agreed. ‘You seem to know how to get what you want.'

The next morning, Kate got up early before either Marie or Tess had emerged from the tiny bedroom they shared, with its two narrow single beds and little else. She folded up the blankets from the sofa where she had slept, stowed them away and was out of the tall, dilapidated house by seven thirty, strap-hanging her way to Tottenham Court Road and then making her way through the still quiet streets of Soho to St Peter's which, she thought, might be the one place where people got up early round here. To an extent she was right. The heavy church door opened to her touch and she found herself in the area that had been separated off for the young people's refuge and amongst a dozen or more young girls, some of them still in pyjamas, and, in a separate area, a couple of middle-aged women who were assembling a breakfast of cornflakes, bread and jam and tea on trestle tables.

‘Come on, girls,' one of the women said, with the voice of a schoolteacher who stood no nonsense. ‘Get dressed. The boys will be upstairs in a minute.' With a few shrieks of derisive laughter, the girls retreated into their sleeping area and drew a curtain behind them, while their supervisors turned towards Kate and enquired what she wanted. She explained.

‘Do you know Mrs Lucas?' she asked.

The older woman, who seemed to be in charge, nodded. ‘Oh, yes,' she said. ‘We know Mrs Lucas. She's not directly involved here, but she comes in occasionally when we're looking for foster homes and that sort of thing. We don't always see eye to eye with her but her heart's in the right place, I suppose.'

‘Why's that?' Kate asked.

‘We're Anglicans and she's a Catholic and when it comes down to it she's more interested in finding Catholic homes for Catholic children than helping the rest. And she takes a very hard line on contraception, while we have a sympathetic doctor who will help unmarried girls out with the cap. Not many will, you know. Most want proof of engagement if not marriage before they'll advise.'

Kate knew, but only vaguely. If mention of homosexuality had been taboo at home and at school, birth control had been even more unmentionable. Even now she half believed that it was something which should be left to men. That was what Dave Donovan had assured her in the back of the group's van when she finally gave in to his importuning, and although she had remained almost beside herself with fear for a long month afterwards, the precautions he claimed he had taken seemed to have worked. The idea that a woman might take charge of such things was one she was only slowly getting used to since she had read that there was a pill which might soon allow women to do just that. She was sure that would not please her mam or the Pope, or Veronica Lucas, though she thought she might soon get used to the idea herself.

‘But I thought you were trying to get these kids off the streets,' she said, pulling her thoughts back to the Soho campaigners' concerns.

‘We are, but it's not always easy,' the woman said, buttering bread busily. ‘We try to get them out of London, into foster homes if they're under sixteen, into hostels and jobs if they're older. But there's always some backsliding.'

‘I expect there is,' Kate said non-committally.

The heavy church door behind them opened noisily, letting in a blast of cold air, and closed again with a bang, and the women turned to greet a heavily-built man in casual tweeds and a clerical collar who greeted them cheerfully and glanced at Kate with inquiry in his eyes.

‘Ah, the saintly Veronica,' he said wryly when she explained why she was there. ‘You're one of her acolytes, are you?'

‘Not really,' Kate said sharply. ‘I'm a professional photographer.' The claim still felt strange and gave her a surge of excitement. ‘She asked me to do a job for her, that's all.'

‘Well, you'll have to ask the youngsters if they want their pictures taken,' Hamilton said. ‘I doubt you'll have much luck. There's not one of them would want their families to see where they've ended up, that's for sure. But you can ask, I suppose. Explain to them what it's for.' Hamilton went downstairs to the crypt and came back with a raggle-taggle group of boys, who took their seats for breakfast beside the girls amongst much banter and laughter, but as Kate watched them wolfing down the plentiful supply of food on the table, she could see that many of them were painfully thin and pale and the eyes, which glanced sideways at her, were wary. One boy in particular caught her eye because of the livid cut on his head, where the hair was only just beginning to grow again. She helped herself to a cup of tea from the urn at the end of the table and went to sit beside him.

‘What's your name?' she asked him as he loaded his bread with jam.

He glanced at her like a trapped animal. ‘What's it to you?' he muttered.

Kate explained why she was there, but he was not reassured and looked nervously around the cavernous church as if demons lurked in its shadowy corners.

‘I don't want no more pictures taken,' he muttered. ‘I've had enough of that.' He glanced around him wildly for a moment until David Hamilton came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘I'm sorry,' he said to Kate. ‘Jimmy's not the best person to ask. He's had some bad experiences with photographers. In fact, he's had some bad experiences, full stop.'

Kate found her mind racing with wild speculations as to what possible harm could come to a boy from an innocent tool like a camera but she supposed it had something to do with the sort of magazines in which she had seen Jonathon Mason's photograph. It had not crossed her mind that children as well as adults might be involved in that sort of photography and she felt suddenly out of her depth and slightly sick. She got to her feet and put her hand briefly on Jimmy's shoulder, feeling him flinch from her touch.