Free Dressed To Kill (A Kate O'Donnell Mystery) by Patricia Hall Page B

pushed him away.
    ‘What’s your problem? By invitation only, is it? You don’t know what you’re missing, sweetheart,’ he said.
    ‘Go away, Ricky,’ Kate said. Ken, she thought, had to get her out of here.
    ‘Are all the girls in Liverpool as uptight as you?’ Ricky sneered. ‘You’re all getting above yourselves since the blessed Beatles hit the big time. It won’t last, you know. It’ll all be over in six months, you’ll see. They’ll be dead and buried and forgotten.’
    ‘I doubt it,’ Kate said. She had got back to the studio before Andrei and Ricky and had time to help Sylvia tidy her hair and repair her make-up before the men arrived. It was obvious as soon as they came up the stairs that their trip had not been a productive one. Andrei had flung his portfolio of photographs on to a chair and pulled the rack of clothes which they were booked to photograph that day into the middle of the floor.
    ‘Kate, will you make a start on this shoot,’ he said. ‘Sylvia’s early but the rest of the girls will be in any minute. We can’t waste time. Here, I want them to wear these. I reckon stockings will be obsolete soon.’ He dropped half a dozen pairs of tights in plastic packets on to a table.
    ‘Oh, Gawd help us, what will we do without a flash of stocking tops and knickers?’ Ricky Smart wailed. ‘It’s one of the pleasures of a summer day in London. All those girls sitting on the grass eating their sandwiches and showing their suspenders and, if you’re lucky, a little bit more than that.’
    ‘Shut up, Ricky,’ Lubin snapped. ‘Come in here and tell me what we did wrong for that prissy cow at
Vogue
. You realize that was Bailey himself with the models, smirking in the corner. What’s he got that we haven’t?’
    ‘I told you we were trying to walk before we could run,’ Smart said, following Lubin into the tiny space he called his office. ‘We haven’t got the experience yet.’ He shut the door but Kate could still hear the two men’s angry voices. ‘I think maybe you’d better talk to Tatiana. Maybe take some pics for her after all. She’ll know what all the designers are up to, and what the girls are buying. She might be really useful.’
    ‘She’s an amateur. She’s just playing at it,’ Kate heard Lubin object before he slammed the door, muffling the rest of their conversation. She turned her attention to the girls who were drifting in one by one and began to distribute the dresses – more avant-garde
than anything she had seen here before – to the models and make sure that they adjusted their make-up to suit the heavy, dark-eyed look Andrei liked. The trouble with this assignment, she thought, was not that she did not like fashion but that she really could not see herself devoting her career to it. The people she had met so far in the rag trade would drive her doolally in a very short time, she thought.
    Sylvia, who had struggled into her short dress with some difficulty, grabbed Kate’s arm as she spotted DS Harry Barnard walking through the open studio door.
    ‘That was quick,’ Kate said quietly.
    ‘I told you I needed to talk to your Mr Lubin about Jenny Maitland,’ he said. ‘Is he in?’
    Kate waved at the closed office door. ‘He’s in there,’ she said.
    Barnard squeezed his way through the bustle of semi-dressed girls with every sign of enjoyment, tapped on the door and went into Lubin’s sanctum. He closed the door behind him but Kate wondered if he had deliberately raised his voice because she could still hear most of what was being said. It was obvious that both Lubin and Smart resented any suggestion that they should be held responsible for Jenny in any way once she had left their employment. Kate marshalled the girls into their position on the set, and began to take some preliminary shots, positioning herself as close as possible to the office door so that she could still hear the conversation, which seemed to be rapidly turning into a rant on