Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) Read Free Page B

that, Barnard thought, might be just the sort of aggravation, carefully embellished, that would help him find Jenny’s killer.

TWO
    ‘C ome,’ Andrei Lubin said imperiously. ‘We go on location. If that is what the magazines want, that is what we’ll give them. We’ll do a little recce with the girls we shot indoors yesterday. Offer so-picky Miss Greenaway two sets of prints. See if she seriously likes her clothes being pawed over by hoi polloi, blown about in the rain, all that nonsense.’
    Kate O’Donnell and Ricky Smart were crammed into the tiny room Andrei called his office, although it was in just as much a state of disarray as the rest of the studio, with clothes hanging apparently randomly on the backs of chairs and the door, and piled high on a low red-velvet chaise longue that was parked against a wall. She wondered what the purpose of that was at the same time as she felt Ricky Smart’s hand fumbling where it had no right to be. But she had very little wriggle room to escape his attentions and guessed that if she complained to Andrei she wouldn’t get much sympathy.
    ‘Stop that,’ she hissed at Smart, who stepped back slightly. ‘Where will we go?’ she asked Lubin, interested in his latest idea almost in spite of herself.
    ‘David Bailey went to New York,’ Lubin said. ‘But there’s no money for that sort of caper so I think for a start we’ll go to Highgate Cemetery. Lots of nice monuments. Even Karl Marx, that old bastard. A couple of tasty girls round his tomb will make him look like the old fraud he really was.’
    Kate grinned in spite of herself. The combination of years of tub-thumping sermons from militantly anti-communist priests and the stark fear, which lingered, of the night the nation went to bed not knowing how Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s brinkmanship would end, gave her little sympathy for the Russians, who had apparently chased Andrei and Tatiana’s ancestors out of their homeland with little more than the clothes they stood up in. The idea of fashion shooting, if not actually dancing, around Marx’s tomb quite appealed to her.
    Little more than half an hour later, Kate found herself shivering in the back of Andrei Lubin’s sleek open-topped car with the wind blowing her hair wildly, sitting behind the driver and Ricky Smart. She could feel the power of the Mercedes and held on to the grab handle for dear life as Andrei weaved in and out of the traffic in Camden and Kentish towns and then accelerated with a roar up a steep hill with dense trees on one side until he screeched to a halt outside a massive entrance on the left side of the road and a similar entrance on the right. A funeral cortège was passing slowly ahead of them down the avenue between the trees to the right as they parked the car. Their vantage point high above the city gave glimpses down from Highgate across the river Thames to the hills of Surrey and Kent beyond.
    ‘They still use it then?’ she asked as she got her breath back and tried to restore her unruly dark curly hair to some sort of normality.
    ‘Not the Victorian side. That’s more or less full up,’ Lubin said. ‘The east side is still in use. That’s where old Karl’s monument is. Come on. I’ll show you.’ He put the hood up and led the three of them across Swains Lane and into the eastern part of the cemetery, slightly downhill to a fork in the pathway where he swung left and there, looming over them and attended by a handful of visitors was the massive bust of Marx amongst the encircling trees, with a couple of fading bouquets of flowers on the floor at the foot of the plinth.
    ‘He looks a bit like Father Christmas – or God,’ Kate said, earning herself a filthy look from a serious-looking couple reading the inscription on the plinth closely.
    ‘A bit of a fraud either way,’ Ricky Smart muttered, glaring at Marx’s disciples and giving Kate a slight shiver at hearing aloud what she might have thought but had never dared