Wages of Sin

Table of Contents

Previous Titles by J M Gregson from Severn House

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

AN ACADEMIC DEATH

DEATH ON THE ELEVENTH HOLE

GIRL GONE MISSING

MORTAL TASTE

AN UNSUITABLE DEATH

TO KILL A WIFE

THE LANCASHIRE LEOPARD

A LITTLE LEARNING

MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD

MURDER AT THE LODGE

A TURBULENT PRIEST

THE WAGES OF SIN

WHO SAW HIM DIE?

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First published in Great Britain and the USA 2004 by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2004 by J.M. Gregson

This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Select an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

The right of J.M. Gregson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Gregson, J.M. (James Michael)

Wages of sin

1. Peach, Percy, Detective Inspector (Fictitious character) – Fiction

2. Police – England – Lancashire – Fiction

3. Prostitution – England – Lancashire – Fiction

4. Detective and mystery stories

I. Title

823.9'14 [F]

ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0057-0 (Epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6055-2

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

To all the ladies who helped me
with the research for this book!

T
his would be the end of her first week of doing it for money.

She still didn't like to call it ‘on the game', still didn't wish to acknowledge to herself the reality of what she was doing. She thought of it as a temporary phase; as a means of raising the money necessary to her independence; as something a future husband would never need to know about.

She was still very young.

She'd been petrified by the man she'd met on the first night, the man who'd held her chin in his hand and snarled fierce words into her face from no more than six inches. But she hadn't seen him since then, though she'd looked fearfully over her shoulder for him each time she'd been out.

This man didn't look dangerous. Well, nothing like as dangerous as that man who had clenched her face in his gloved hand and spat his contemptuous words into her terror-stricken face. That man had been a nutter, for sure. The girls said you got a lot of nutters in this game, but most of them were harmless.

She mustn't let this man know how new she was to this, mustn't let him sense her nervousness. You had to remain in charge of the situation; treat the punters as schoolboys, Karen had said. If you dictated the terms, told them what to do, you kept control, so that they couldn't take advantage of you. Always remember they were desperate for it, or they wouldn't be here: that way you would keep the advantage. They were probably just as nervous as you were about the transaction.

This man didn't look nervous. When you are only seventeen, you aren't good at ages, but Sarah guessed that he was in his late twenties. He had sharp features, with a growth of black stubble around his chin and the back of his cheeks. His black hair was straight; perhaps it would have benefited from a wash, but it was parted neatly enough. She didn't know much about men's clothes, but she fancied his had been expensive when they were new, though they were indisputably shabby now. He might have been good-looking if he hadn't looked so hunted, with his red-rimmed eyes and his anxious glances over her head towards the door of the pub.

But to Sarah Dunne late twenties seemed old, and there was a staleness about the man that she couldn't quite define, but couldn't make herself ignore, however much she tried. She hadn't yet the experience of life which would enable her to recognize a user of hard drugs.

In any case, it didn't matter whether he was good-looking or not: she was much too nervous to be attracted to anyone.

She ran her fingers round the top of her glass, willing herself not to lift it and down the gin and tonic in one to give herself the courage she needed to carry on with this. She longed to feel the alcohol burning her throat, warming her chest, giving her back the confidence which seemed to have drained away. Instead, she said, ‘You're not from around these parts.'

He looked at her sharply, and she realized she had broken one of the rules. You didn't ask them about themselves; above all, you mustn't give them the impresssion that you were prying. They came to you for sex, but sex that was anonymous. They might be inadequate in their own lives, and sometimes it paid you to think of them like that, to give you the confidence to handle things. A little contempt could be useful, but you must always conceal that contempt to the men who were paying to be between your legs.

Or in other places. They had bizarre demands, some of them. Listening to the older women, she had been filled with horror, which she had fought hard to hide beneath her sniggers. She'd keep this one to straight sex, she told herself firmly. But if he started asking for things like the golden rain she could hardly tell him she'd never done that, could she? He'd laugh in her face, or wherever else he was at the time. More important, he might refuse to pay. And she needed the money: how she needed the money.

He pulled his attention back from what was going on behind her in the rest of the saloon bar and gave her a crooked grin. ‘No, I'm not from round here. You are, though, aren't you? I can tell by your accent.'

Sarah Dunne was absurdly discomforted by his words. For an instant, she was back in school, with the teacher making her repeat what she had said without ‘talking Lancashire'. She thought she had been speaking to her pick-up in a neutral accent, and here he was spotting her as local from the few phrases she had uttered. ‘Yes. I was brought up not far from here,' she said.

He looked down appreciatively at the swell of her thighs where the short, cheap skirt ended. ‘And very well brought up, too, I'm sure.' He reached forward and put his hand on the hem of her skirt, letting his fingers caress the soft flesh with gentle appreciation.

She managed to avoid tensing the thigh and snatching it back from him, as she had thought she would do when she had imagined this gesture in the privacy of her room before setting out. She even managed to rock her leg a little beneath the fingers, in an answering erotic movement.

The response was easier because he did not look into her face, but kept his eyes upon his hand, as if he could control both its actions and her minimal movements of response by the intensity of his attention. Sarah sipped her drink, gave him a little smile of encouragement when eventually he looked up at her, as she had known he must.

He didn't seem a bad bloke, really.

He smiled quickly at her, then transferred his attention back to the scene beyond her, to the noisy conversations she could hear but not see as she sat facing him across the small round table. Apparently what he saw reassured him, for she caught a tiny nod of satisfaction before the grey, red-rimmed eyes came back to her face and he said abruptly, ‘How much?'

It was like a slap in the face. But he wasn't to know how few were the times she had done it for money. And he'd done her a favour, really: she knew you had to tackle the subject of money early in any transaction; you couldn't negotiate, once the punters had got themselves aroused. She glanced automatically down at his crotch, but there was no sign yet that Percy was calling the tune.

‘It's fifty,' she said firmly. ‘And that's for straight sex. I only do straight sex.'

Sarah was going to throw in her spiel about the rate for blow-jobs, but she saw that he was nodding. ‘So do I!' he said, with a laugh which never properly developed. ‘So that's a relief for both of us!'

It was, really. She smiled and allowed herself another sip of her drink.

But he lifted his whisky and downed it in one. ‘That's settled, then. Let's get going.'

He hadn't even asked her name. But that was all right, she decided. There wasn't supposed to be affection in this, so why pretend that you were going through the motions? It was better this way, for her as well as him. She downed her own drink in a parody of his gesture, then said, ‘You'll have to leave straight afterwards. I don't have clients staying overnight.'

‘Suits me.' He was on his feet, pushing his arms into his well-worn leather jacket, leaving her to pull her coat around her as well she might. There was no squiring here: just a straightforward financial transaction.

Now that the moment was here, her anxiety came back with a rush. Surely he must realize at some stage how seldom she'd sold herself like this before? And what would he do then? Make fun of her? Refuse to pay her the price they seemed now to have agreed?

Her knees seemed to have deserted her in her hour of need. They trembled so much that she had to hang on to the back of the chair he had just left as he turned his back on her and made for the door. She shut her eyes and pushed herself forward in his wake, wondering if her legs would support her, or plunge her face downwards on to the grubby carpet.

It was all right. After the first faltering steps, she moved normally, catching her man up at the door, taking his hand as he moved out into the street and the sudden cold of the night hit them.

He held her hand until they had moved no more than five yards from the door of the pub, whose orange lights seemed suddenly warm and attractive in the darkness behind her. Then he dropped it abruptly, looking not at her but up and down the street, as if he feared there would be someone waiting for him here.

Sarah Dunne surveyed the street in her turn, her gaze automatically following her companion's. It looked to her deserted. The flagstones glistened, wet with the thin drizzle which had been falling when she went into the hotel. It was fine now, but the wetness threw back the glare of the lights from high above them. They could see for a hundred yards and more down the street before the row of terraced houses curved gently to the right, and there was not a soul visible.