Wages of Sin (14 page)

Tucker elected to ignore the Masonic slur, deciding that as this year's Master of his local lodge he should be above such petty snipings. ‘We've enough on our plate, without a senior policeman killing whores.' The Superintendent looked at Peach as if he suspected him of arranging this situation especially to upset him. ‘Have you arrested him?'

‘No, sir. He's just one suspect among several. We're checking on commercial travellers and the like as well, to see if there's a possible connection with killings in the Midlands. And there are one or two local possibilities who need following up. But I shall be seeing Inspector Boyd myself this afternoon. We shall see what he has to say for himself.'

Tucker looked very anxious. ‘Go easy, Peach. You're treading on the toes of another force, here.'

‘I'll be my normal diplomatic self, sir,' Peach smiled.

The assurance did not fill Tucker with confidence.

Peach went back to his office and made a swift phone call to the Secretary of the North Lancashire Golf Club. ‘Good morning, David. The C team match against Brunton Golf Club tomorrow. I suppose you have a full team of players?'

‘We had,' said the Secretary gloomily. ‘But Joe Briggs has just rung in to say he's got flu. And Brunton's not the most popular of the courses we play. You don't know of anyone who might—'

‘Look no further, David. I'll be delighted to play myself!'

A man was entitled to a little innocent pleasure, even in the midst of a murder inquiry.

Tom Boyd was doing the autumn tidy-up in his garden when they arrived.

He lived in Poulton-le-Fylde, a few miles inland from Blackpool and the coast, where the land was protected from the worst of the coast's salt-laden gales. Poulton was the nearest place to the coast where trees would grow properly, the locals said, and Boyd, like many policemen, enjoyed his gardening.

He was stacking the dead top growth of phlox and peonies into his wheelbarrow, when a voice over the low wall of his garden said, ‘Burn well, that will, when you get the bonfire going.' He recognized Peach as a copper immediately, as much by his bearing as his appearance. He was less sure about the pretty young woman with the red-brown hair at his side, until she was introduced to him as Detective Sergeant Blake.

Boyd thought of saying that things had looked up since his days as a young constable, but decided that even compliments might be interpreted as sexist: you couldn't be too careful, these days. So he merely said heavily, ‘I was expecting a visit from CID. You'd better come into the house.'

He was ten years older than Peach, twenty years older than the watchful young woman beside him, but he knew that the age differential would afford him no privileges in this situation. He had the kettle ready and the biscuit tin beside it, but they refused tea. They sat in his neat, rather sterile lounge, which had so much less of him in it than the garden outside. He looked not at them but out through the window, at the greenhouse he had just filled with chrysanthemums in bud, as he said, ‘I'm embarrassed by this, but no more than that. I've been foolish, but I haven't done anything criminal.'

‘Remains to be seen, Inspector Boyd.' Peach dismissed the sympathy he felt for a lonely fellow-officer and summoned his normal acerbic tone: this man was a policeman, but he might also be a murderer. Guilty until proved innocent was the watchword here. ‘Kerb-crawling in search of sex. That's an offence to start with. Before you've started, as you might say.'

Boyd looked at him sharply. ‘I'm from the firm, Peach. Surely that should count for something!'

‘Already has done. You know better than most that we could have held you in Brunton nick for twenty-four hours. Thirty-six, with a superintendent's say-so. We could have grilled you there, yesterday. Instead of which, we've driven thirty miles on a Saturday afternoon to see you in your own house.'

‘All I was doing was paying for my sexual pleasures. I was quite frank about that. Surely my honesty and my rank in the service should mean something.'

‘Could do, perhaps, with lesser crimes. But not when someone's committed murder. Was it you, Inspector Boyd?'

‘No, of course it wasn't.'

‘Then convince us of that, and we'll go away and leave you in peace.'

Tom Boyd glanced automatically at the young woman beside Peach. He had long since learned to accept women in the police service, working beside him, sometimes even giving him instructions. Yet his acceptance had not run as deep as he thought it had: in this crisis, he did not relish saying the things he would have to say in front of DS Blake.

He was powerful and broad-shouldered, with hair slicked back on either side of a parting which was nearly central: he looked like a footballer on one of the cigarette cards of the nineteen thirties. He said to Lucy, ‘You're the same age as my daughter, love. It's not easy for me to talk about this.'

‘You don't have a choice, Inspector Boyd.' Peach's words cut like a whiplash across the man's plea.

Boyd looked at him with a face full of fury, so that they glimpsed for a moment a man with the possibility of murder within him. Then his square face resumed its mask and he said, ‘All right. I live on my own. I'm divorced. It's par for the course, in the police. You should know that.'

‘I'm divorced myself,' said Peach quietly.

‘Well then. I'm forty-eight, not seventy-eight. I still have urges. Still need to satisfy them.' He gave an instinctive nervous look at Lucy Blake's face, but her blue-green eyes were on her notebook, her face studiously impassive.

‘So you come and indulge them in Brunton.' Peach's black eyes had never left his subject.

‘Where I'm off my own patch. Where I'm not shitting on my own doorstep.'

‘Where a girl was murdered a week earlier. Where as a copper you should have known you'd be asking for trouble.'

Boyd's lips set in a thin line beneath the broad nose. ‘I didn't kill anyone.'

‘Convince us of that, and we're on our way. We've got better things to do on a Saturday afternoon, like you.'

Tom Boyd allowed himself a thin smile. ‘I've nothing really to add to what I said last night in Brunton. My first inclination was to get well away from Blackpool. Preston was too near. The first place where I felt comfortable was Brunton. I drove out there, had a drink in a pub to bolster my nerve – I'm not as used to picking up tarts as you might think.'

‘Where?'

‘Mellor. The Miller's Arms.'

‘Time?'

‘I wasn't checking that. It must have been nearly half past nine by the time I got there. I didn't stay long in the pub. There were two blokes at the bar talking about the murder of that call-girl the week before. They might or might not remember me: I didn't speak to them.'

‘It's not important at this stage. What time did you start cruising?'

Boyd noticed the use of the offensive word, but did not pick up on it. He knew that if you lost your rag it made you more vulnerable. ‘I told you, I wasn't checking the time, it wasn't important to me. I picked a girl up in Brunton at about ten, I should think.'

‘Why Brunton?'

‘I told you, it was the nearest place where—'

‘Come off it, Inspector Boyd. You're a copper, a man who knows his way around well enough to have made Inspector. You know the ropes well enough not to go whoring in a town where a pro's been murdered seven days earlier!'

‘Why shouldn't I?'

‘Because there was a very good chance of landing yourself in the situation you're in now. A very good chance of being caught with your trousers down and dragged into a murder inquiry.'

‘I – I suppose I should have been more careful, yes. I just didn't think this would happen. I took a chance and—'

‘No, Inspector Boyd! You're not a chance-taker, are you? Your whole career, your progress to date, is evidence of that.'

‘All right, Peach! We're not all the kind of chancers who make DCI in the CID. Some of us play life a bit more carefully.'

He had allowed himself to be angered after all, and it wasn't doing his case any good. Peach looked at him steadily, without the animosity the man had shown to him. ‘You weren't just picking up a tart and paying for it, as you've said so far. You were looking for a particular girl, weren't you?'

Tom Boyd looked for a moment as if he would deny it. Then he said sullenly, ‘So what if I was? If you find a girl you like and go back to her, it makes it a bit more personal, doesn't it?' He glanced into Lucy Blake's unlined face and said bitterly, ‘A bit more like the real thing, see?'

‘So you admit that when you were kerb-crawling, you were looking for a particular girl? That the reason you took the risk of going back to Brunton was to seek out a particular hooker?'

‘All right, yes! Since you seem to know so bloody much about it, yes! I'd seen the girl before. Paid her for sex. Liked what I got. Thought it would be nice to repeat the experience. That's all.'

Peach regarded him steadily as his breathing came in uneven gasps. Tom Boyd had conducted plenty of interviews, even though he was not CID. But he could not remember when he had last been interviewed himself, and he felt unexpectedly helpless in the situation.

Peach looked at him as if he was a fish floundering on a river bank, studying his increasing discomfort with a disconcerting objectivity. Then he said quietly, ‘She gave special services, this particular girl, didn't she, Tom? That's why you were so anxious to find her.'

Boyd was still trying to steady his breathing, feeling that if he could get that back to normal, his brain would work better. He knew he must be careful. For all he knew, these people had already talked to the girl, had received a full account of everything they had done last night. He said, ‘You don't know what it's like being on your own. When you get a girl you like, you go back, even though you're paying for it. You feel better in yourself about going to one you know than going to anyone who will take your money, working your way through a whole succession of girls.'

He looked pathetically at Lucy Blake, as if he might get more sympathy from her, as if she might understand that this was a little less dishonourable, that even among prostitutes you could be less promiscuous if you chose to be.

She smiled at him. She wanted to use his first name, to use her softness to draw from him things which he might deny to Peach's harsh approach. But the training of rank was hard to dismiss: even here she could not bring herself to address an inspector by his first name. She said, ‘What was it that Katie Clegg offered that made you go back to her, Inspector Boyd?'

They knew the girl's name then. Ten to one they'd had her in and got every detail of what they'd done last night out of her. Bloody CID! They wouldn't pull any punches when they saw a uniformed officer from another force in trouble. He muttered, ‘I didn't even know her name. She did a few extras, that's all.'

Peach, sensing that his resistance was ended, spoke quietly now. ‘What sort of extras, Tom?'

‘Nothing much. Nothing very unusual, for these days. An extra ten quids' worth, a bit of fun for me and a nice little bonus for her.'

‘So tell us what you paid the extra for.'

Boyd made a last desperate plea. ‘Look, there's no need to humiliate me like this, is there? What do you want, Peach? A cheap thrill in front of a pretty sergeant, is it? Is that what you get off on, the fantasies some poor old bugger has to pay to indulge? Is that—'

‘Inspector Boyd, this is a murder inquiry! Until we learn something different, you are a suspect in that inquiry. You know the score as well as anyone. Now, answer the question please, or we shall have to record the fact that you refused.'

Boyd looked at Peach's round face, at his unsmiling mouth and the relentless dark eyes which would not leave him. Then his big shoulders gave a hopeless shrug and he said in an even voice, ‘It was no great deal. Not nowadays. I find I enjoy a bit of bondage as I get older, that's all. She got out the fetters and the handcuffs: I can't be the only one, can I, or she wouldn't have them so handy?'

‘And you enjoyed a bit of violence to go with it.' Peach made it a statement, not a question, this time.

‘God, you want your pound of flesh, don't you? Well, believe it or not, I can't recall it very clearly. I got my rocks off, which is what I'd gone there for, and the preliminaries got me pretty excited. We got a bit aggressive with each other as I came towards orgasm, even knocked each other about a bit, I suppose. Is that what she told you?'

Peach smiled. ‘You know the system too well to expect an answer to that, Inspector Boyd. You also know that in the light of the murder of a prostitute a week earlier, we are going to have special interest in anyone who admits getting off on violent sex with a lady of the streets.'

Boyd nodded slowly. ‘All the same, you're barking up the wrong tree here. I'm not your man.'

‘Where were you on the night of Friday the fourteenth of November?'

The tough, squat-featured man glanced from one to the other with something like panic in his eyes. ‘I was at home. I didn't go out on that night.'

They noted that the answer had been ready, that he hadn't needed to think much about it. Lucy Blake, making a note of his reply, said softly, without looking up, ‘And were you alone?'

‘Yes. I finished duty at the Blackpool nick, had a pint with another officer in the pub near the station, and went home. I was at home from six thirty onwards.'

Peach and Boyd eyed each other steadily whilst the implications of this hung heavily between them. Then Peach said, ‘Is there anyone who could vouch for your whereabouts on that night?'

‘No.' The reply came almost too promptly.

‘You didn't make or receive any phone calls during the evening?'