Wages of Sin (11 page)

He was trying to excite some deeply based male camaraderie, some moment of mutual recognition of the delights he cherished and carried with him to the musty privacy of his damp bedroom above them. Peach said, ‘On the edge of the park, were you, trying to get the best view you could?'

‘Yes. It's locked up at night, but you can get underneath the big trees on the edge without being inside the park. The willows are best – they hang nearly down to the ground.'

‘And how much did you see of this young girl who was killed?'

‘Nothing, Mr Peach, honest! Nothing at all!' Bedford was pathetically anxious to convince. For a man who concealed the truth as a habit, it was a difficult and rather pathetic performance.

‘Sure of that, Billy, are you? Now's the time to speak, if you saw anything at all that might be suspicious. Accessory after the fact, you could be, if you concealed information. Wouldn't like to see you in the dock for that, would we, Mrs Bedford?'

The old lady's sharp sparrow eyes peered hard into her son's fearful countenance. ‘He don't know nothing, Mr Peach. More's the pity. I want you to get the bugger who killed that girl, even if she was a tart.'

‘We will, Mrs Bedford. And sooner rather than later, if we get the help from the public that we need. Listen, Billy, you hear a lot of what's going on around here. That's why I'm here, if you want to know. You must have heard something that might be of use to us.'

Bedford's thin lips set into a sullen, instinctive mask of non-cooperation. ‘Ain't no grass!' he said automatically.

‘Accessory after the fact,' Peach reminded him.

Bedford fought a small battle in his confused and sordid mind. ‘I did 'ear something in the Coach and Horses last week. Might have nothing to do with this girl, though.'

‘Let's have it, Billy.'

‘It might be nothing.'

‘Of course it might. And it might be important.'

‘Well, I 'eard someone saying as one or two young tarts who were putting it about had been warned off. Told they sold it through the firm or not at all, as you might say.'

‘One of the big pimps, was it?'

‘The biggest round 'ere.' For a moment, Bedford was proud of the claim and the importance it gave him. Then fear submerged that tiny, unaccustomed pride. ‘You won't tell him, will you, Mr Peach? Be more than my life's worth, if it got out I'd been talking to you.'

Peach reflected that this man's life wasn't worth very much, but he didn't say so in front of his old mother. ‘No one will know what you said, Billy. Some pimp's gorillas were putting the word about, were they?'

‘Yes, that's it.' Billy was glad to have the detail voiced by the filth; somehow it made his own treachery less heinous if someone else provided most of the words. Then a crafty look belatedly replaced the fear in his face. ‘Anything in it for me, is there, if this information should be useful?'

Peach sat back a little from the foul breath and regarded his man with distaste. Then he said, ‘Yes, there is, Billy. Payment in advance, before we've even tested your information. Another small reward for the only woman who loves you.' He reached down to his briefcase and produced the second bottle of Guinness he had kept for his departure. He placed it beside the empty one on the scarred table and said, ‘With my compliments, Mrs Bedford.' The old lady raised her tankard towards him in a gesture of delighted acceptance.

Peach had never taken his eyes off the disappointed Bedford. He now said, ‘And which pimp would this be, Billy?'

Bedford looked automatically to right and left, in a Pavlovian reaction which suggested that even here there might be listening ears. Then he said in a low voice, ‘Joe Johnson, Mr Peach.'

The computers were ticking up a lot of information, a lot of cross-referenced files. There was a murder team of thirty-four working on the murder of Sarah Dunne in and around Brunton.

On the night of Thursday the twentieth of November, six days after Sarah had died, there was also another policeman in the area. This one was not only in plain clothes but very much off duty. He was not even stationed at Brunton. If he had been, he would have been seeking what he wanted many miles away from the old cotton town.

Inspector Boyd was from Blackpool, thirty miles to the west. All seaside towns are difficult to police, and Blackpool, as the largest holiday town in Britain, is the most difficult of all. The problem is a simple one of numbers, but the solution is not so simple. The winter population of Blackpool is under two hundred thousand. At the height of its summer season, the packed hotels and boarding houses of the town and its satellites house almost ten times that number.

A permanent police force to cope with that number would leave the town vastly and expensively over-policed during the winter months. Yet a winter-sized police service would invite anarchy in the summer. One of the solutions is to import police officers from the towns whence the visitors come, and this works very well with the big influxes, such as those who throng the town in what is known as the ‘Glasgow weeks', when Scottish banknotes fill the tills of the shops and Scottish drunks fight the good fight outside the town's multitude of pubs.

Whatever logic is employed by the planners, one of the results of the situation is that the Blackpool police work a lot of overtime in the summer and are correspondingly much freer in the winter.

Tom Boyd knew by now that for him too much freedom was not always a good thing. He was forty-eight, divorced, and without many hobbies to occupy him when the winds howled over the deserted Blackpool promenade in winter. He was too old now for the football he had enjoyed in his youth; he regarded golf as a game for fops and posers; he was not yet old enough to immerse himself in indoor bowls. He wasn't a great reader, and he was so busy with his job in Traffic Control in the summer that he had lost the habit of watching television.

Inspector Boyd was divorced, with a daughter who lived in East Anglia whom he saw twice a year. He was lonely: he admitted that to himself now, though he had denied it for years. But only to himself: you didn't want to be classed as a sad loner when you went into a police station where most people seemed quite suddenly to be much younger than you.

It was all right in summer. You could work up to twelve hours a day, snatch a meal in the canteen, and enjoy a quick pint afterwards. If you wanted it, there was usually sex on your day off, if you weren't too choosy. Some of the women who visited the town in these enlightened days considered it part of their holiday to put it about a bit, and Tom knew where to go to pick them up.

He had enjoyed a threesome in his flat with a couple of married women from Yorkshire which had taught him quite a lot. They'd only been on a day trip on a coach, those two, but they'd made the most of their day! They'd only just caught their coach home and Inspector Boyd had been sore for a week afterwards.

But in the winter, it was different. Tom Boyd had accepted philosophically that he would have to pay to get what he wanted, if he wanted it regularly and with no strings attached. He didn't mind that. But you didn't go paying for it with the local toms in Blackpool. In the crude but universally accepted police parlance, you didn't shit upon your own doorstep.

The crude expression was quite good enough for Tom Boyd. He had some fairly crude sexual demands to make, and it was better to pay for them than to suffer the rejection which came your way from ordinary encounters.

He'd made the mistake at first of taking the youngest tarts he could get: they couldn't turn away your money, however ancient they thought you were. But they hadn't given him much satisfaction, the young ones. More like kids they were. You ended up frustrated, likely to do things you shouldn't think of doing. Treating them cruelly, the way you wouldn't do at all, in normal circumstances. Doing things you were ashamed of, that you certainly couldn't talk about to anyone else.

Tom Boyd had hesitated a little on that Thursday about whether to go into the Brunton area at all. It didn't take much of his police brain to work out that there would be heightened activity in the district in the week following a murder. But Tom was into bondage, and he had found a woman there last time who had suited his tastes exactly. It had cost a little more, but the woman had appeared to enjoy it. Perhaps she was just a good sexual actress – people said that was part of the equipment of the best tarts – but Inspector Boyd could have sworn she had actually shared his sexual tastes.

She was tall and statuesque, dark-haired and powerful, and she had strutted about most impressively. It was even more exciting to Tom that she had seemed to enjoy it when he had pranced about around the bed while she lay helpless upon it. He was sure he had glimpsed excitement in the glint of her dark eyes when he had laid his hands playfully and lightly upon her throat, letting the pressure of his fingers die softly into a caress.

It was all play-acting between the two of them, of course, nothing serious. But it made Tom Boyd more excited than he could remember feeling before.

That was why it was worth seeking this particular tart out, even if it involved a little danger. That was another thing he had admitted to himself in the last year: he enjoyed having a spice of danger in these encounters, found it added to the excitement. And you got precious little excitement in Traffic Policing. The better you were at your job, the less the excitement, as a rule.

He drove his Vauxhall Vectra unhurriedly along the M55 and skirted the plush suburbs on the north side of Preston. The roads were quiet and the Vectra was a good car for a mission like this: swift, reliable and, most important of all, anonymous. There were a lot of Vectras about and their styling was not particularly individual; Boyd knew from years of police experience that those were the two most important things if a car was not to excite too much notice.

He took the A59 for a stretch, then turned off it and went for a drink in a quiet pub in Mellor. Two men at the bar were talking about last week's murder in Brunton. He listened carefully whilst apparently immersed in the
West Lancs Evening Gazette
he had brought with him from Blackpool, but it was no more than desultory pub gossip: he already knew more about the crime and its investigation than these two had learned.

The DCI who was driving the investigation had been in touch with the station at Blackpool to see if they'd had any similar murders in the last two years, so Tom Boyd had every reason to be on his guard. He'd seen the e-mailed reply from Blackpool to Brunton. Blackpool CID had told this DCI Peach that they hadn't had any murders which remotely resembled the one in Brunton in the last five years. And the two prostitute killings they had experienced in the last five years had each been solved within a week: rival CID sections liked to get things like that in.

He couldn't see much evidence of police activity as he cruised around the nearly deserted streets of the district of Brunton where she operated. But that was what he would have expected: policemen were as human as the rest of the world, and the majority of even a large murder team wouldn't want to be walking the streets of a drab industrial town at ten o'clock on a cold November night. Besides, the overtime budget would be scrutinized, even when it was a murder case. Some superintendent would be shaking his head over the extra payments.

On his first round of the familiar circuit, Tom Boyd thought that the woman he wanted wasn't about either. Then he saw her, walking tall and lithe, a little faster than those of her trade normally did, turning with practised provocation as she heard the car slowing behind her. She didn't know it was him at first: the Vectra proving itself again.

He pressed the button and lowered the window on the passenger side. ‘Before you ask, Katie, I fancy a good time, yes. The mixture as before would do very nicely, thank you!'

Katie Clegg slid in beside him without hesitation. It was good to have a voice you recognized, after what had happened to that girl last week. And in a trade where people paid well to bonk you and be gone, she found she was disproportionately grateful when someone remembered her name. ‘Nice and warm in here!' she said appreciatively, and gave his left arm a squeeze. Like any ordinary girlfriend appreciating a lift. She knew that it was safest to let them make the first move, but there couldn't be any harm in a little reassuring squeeze on the forearm. Not when you knew the punter.

‘And I bet it's nice and warm in there!' he answered promptly, reaching across and stroking the inside of her thigh. She wished she had a pound for every time she'd heard that or something similar: the standard of wit among clients anxious to get their ends away was not high. But you mustn't set your sights too high; this man had caressed where many just grabbed, and his hand was warm. She inched herself forward in the seat, allowing his fingers to sweep up on to the lace of the knickers she wore for this job, easing her mound of Venus expertly back and forth between the quickening fingers. Then she whispered, ‘All in good time, sweetheart,' and detached that left hand unhurriedly, pretending she was reluctant to let it go.

Tom was glad enough to drive on: he didn't want a stationary car exciting any attention in this situation. He remembered the turns to take and found her house without any guidance. She seemed impressed by that. He was a policeman, of course, but Katie didn't know that, didn't even know his name.

It was only ten pounds extra for what he wanted: a bargain if ever he saw one. And he saw quite a lot; Katie wasn't wearing much as she got out the fetters and fixed them to the top and base of the bed. The handcuffs were toys compared with the ones he had clapped on in many an arrest in the old days, but it wouldn't do to show professional knowledge, so he made no comment.

It was as good as he had anticipated. Better. As always, he found that the simulated cruelty excited him. By the time he reached orgasm, he could have ceased to pretend and committed some real aggression, done real damage to some human body. His head swam with the excitement of it all, sex and violence mingling in that now familiar compound which made his head swim and his body seem to belong to someone else, someone much wilder and less inhibited, less bound by the rules of a dull world.