Wages of Sin (15 page)

‘I'd have told you if I had done. There's no one who can vouch for the fact that I was sitting quietly in my own house on the night when that girl was killed. And unlike most criminals, I don't have a wife who will conveniently swear to anything her man requires.'

They were policemen together for a moment as he said that, smiling sourly at the petty thief's traditional alibi. But this was not petty thieving.

Boyd took them to the door of the clean, characterless house whose garden said so much more about the occupant than the interior. He made a last attempt to reassure himself as they left. ‘We both know I didn't kill that girl on the fourteenth, Inspector Peach.'

Peach turned to look into the square face beneath the straight, slicked-back hair. ‘We both
hope
you didn't: you more than me. But we haven't got anyone lined up for this, so you know the score as well as I do. You remain in the frame, Inspector Boyd. If you think of anything which might take you out of it, ring Brunton CID immediately and ask for me.'

S
aturday night was quiet in the murder room. The week's information had been logged on to the computers, cross-referenced in accordance with the latest practices. Local prostitutes had been interviewed about their clients. The clients themselves were varied but anonymous, but were in many cases being quizzed about their activities. Tom Boyd wasn't the only man to be asked to account for his movements on the night of the fourteenth of November.

But the few officers who were working on the night of Saturday the twenty-second of November were out on the streets of Brunton. Apart from DC Gordon Pickering, who was alone in the murder room, manning the phones and trying hard to feel like the man in temporary charge of things.

It was ten thirty when the significant phone call came in. Gordon was listening to the sound of the first aggressive drunks of the night being cautioned and put in the cells. It was curious how sound penetrated quite thick walls when all else was quiet in the building.

The voice on the phone sounded a little slurred, as if it too might have been drinking. It said, ‘You haven't caught the man who killed Sarah Dunne yet.'

It was a statement, not a question, and it banished abruptly the yawn which DC Pickering had just embarked upon. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and pressed the buzzer which would tell the switchboard that this call should be traced. He felt a tingle in the short hairs at the back of his head: for the first time in his life he might be talking on the phone to a murderer. As calmly as he could, Gordon said, ‘Who's speaking, please?'

A laugh at the other end of the line. Probably not near to the mouthpiece: it sounded distant, almost as if it came from another room. ‘That would be telling, wouldn't it? Who am I addressing?'

‘This is DC Pickering. What is it you have to report, please?'

‘Nothing to report. Just checking on what
you
have to report, actually. Which seems to be practically nothing.'

‘Give me your name, please.'

Again that distant, sardonic laugh. ‘Is Superintendent Tucker there?'

‘No. I'm the only CID officer in the station at present. What is it you have to tell me?' Pickering was trying desperately to place the accent. He'd thought at first that it might be Liverpool, but this was no Scouser. Gordon wasn't good at accents; it had never mattered until now.

‘I wanted to speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey. Well, never mind. Just you tell your Superintendent Tucker that he won't catch this murderer.'

Pickering had the accent now. It was Birmingham, or Black Country: he didn't know enough to distinguish between the two; wasn't even sure in fact that there was a distinction.

He found himself striving to keep his voice steady as the hairs crept anew on the back of his neck. He'd never met this situation before, never even envisaged meeting it. The secret was to keep the voice talking on the phone until the call could be traced, until you could send a squad car screaming to the scene. Or preferably not screaming: such advance notice of arrival should be confined to television series. ‘I'm in charge here tonight. I'm empowered to record whatever it is you have to tell us. It will be passed on to Superintendent Tucker and everyone else involved in the case. Please start with your name.'

‘In your dreams, lad. Tell your boss I just wanted to make sure the filth were as baffled by this one as by my previous two in this neck of the woods. Good night, son.'

‘Please keep talking, sir. I may be able to—'

To what? Gordon Pickering wondered. But it didn't matter now, for the phone was dead. He was still staring at the receiver in his hand when the switchboard came through with the information that the call had come from a public phone booth in the centre of Birmingham.

Percy Peach was strictly off duty at the moment when Gordon Pickering was taking his call from Birmingham. Even his mobile phone was off duty; it lay on the chest of drawers with its battery switched off.

Lucy Blake looked into the full-length mirror in the wardrobe and saw the lubricious look she had feared lighting up the round features which had terrified so many villains. She said, ‘I think you're a secret knicker fetishist.'

‘Wrong!' said Percy Peach cheerfully. ‘I've never made a secret of it.'

Lucy measured the distance to the bed with her eye, making sure that she was just out of his reach. He might be reclining on one elbow in his bed like a Roman emperor, but she knew from experience that those powerful arms of his were unexpectedly long, when lust drove them on. Almost telescopic, at times.

The emerald green pants and bra had seemed a good idea, in the bright fluorescent lights of the shop. ‘Always buy something which would shock your mum!' the shopgirl had advised, and they had enjoyed a giggle together about the thought. But here in Percy Peach's bedroom the colour seemed to deepen and grow richer; that was all right of itself, but when applied to these garments perhaps it was tarty. The low moan from behind her as she stepped out of her slip did nothing to reassure her.

‘I've told you before, you make me self-conscious, ogling me like that,' she complained.

‘You should be conscious, not self-conscious,' said Percy happily. ‘I've always thought women should be fully conscious of the pleasure they're giving. It is better to give than to receive, they tell me. Never quite fathomed that idea myself, but I feel that I should report that you're giving me a great deal of pleasure at the moment. Very civilized pleasure, of course!' He allowed himself another moan, elongating it further than she would have thought possible without drawing a breath.

‘You're no expert on civilization, Percy Peach!'

‘Much overrated, civilization is. Gandhi said he thought Western civilization would be rather a good idea!'

‘Not a good man for you to quote, Mahatma Gandhi. He believed in controlling his animal instincts where young women were concerned. And I seem to remember that he gave up sex at thirty-six.'

‘More fool Mahatma! It just shows that even great men can have daft ideas for some of the time. Hurry up into bed, will you, or my animal instincts may get the better of me!'

Lucy whipped her bra off and deposited it over the back of the chair above the rest of her clothes, provoking a roar of delight from the bed and a shout of ‘Come and test my Bristol Rovers!'

She paused for a moment in front of the mirror, studying her breasts, keeping her rounded derrie`re carefully just out of the range of those dangerous arms, enjoying the rare feeling of being in control of DCI Peach. ‘There's no knowing where you could go, Percy Peach, if you concentrated on everything in life as intensely as you concentrate on knickers.'

‘Knickers are easy for concentration. They're small, you see, and that helps. And of course their contents are totally delicious. Focus the mind beautifully, your drawers do, Lucy Blake!'

Deciding that attack was the best and perhaps the only form of defence, she turned and leapt suddenly upon him in the bed.

The tactic was successful, up to a point. He wasn't as good at removing knickers as at fantasizing about them. At least the attempt stopped him talking for a while, thought Lucy: she eventually had to provide him with assistance, to prevent her expensive lingerie being damaged by his incompetence.

Percy's telescopic arm eventually emerged from beneath the sheets to turn off the light at the bedside switch. ‘It's my Catholic breeding,' he explained. ‘Even rude thoughts were only allowed in the dark.'

He disappeared comprehensively beneath the bedclothes and a muffled ‘Bloody 'ell, Norah!' was his only verbal outburst during the next few minutes.

After a period of frenzied activity in which she lost all sense of time, Lucy said in tones of exhausted admiration, ‘It takes a lot to shut you up, Percy Peach!'

‘And a lot is what you've got, Lucy Blake.' The reply came promptly through the warm darkness. And then, in drowsy but delighted recollection, ‘I never knew that something so rounded and soft could become so muscular when the occasion demanded it.'

Lucy frowned a little, then decided not to ask him to be more specific. After all, Percy had probably intended it as a compliment.

D
avid Strachan made a desultory attempt at Sunday morning sex with his wife. There was no answering caress when he rolled against the sinewy back and put his arm round her, so he desisted quickly. Sod her! She needn't think that what she had to offer was so bloody marvellous. Unresponsive cow!

He didn't say any of these things, of course. Instead, he rolled on his back, stared at the grubby woodchip paper on the ceiling, and remembered the woman he had enjoyed in Brunton. He now thought of her as Miss Whiplash, and her ample curves represented a new excitement in his drab life. Miss Whiplash wouldn't turn him down on a Sunday morning! Miss Whiplash understood what a man needed after a week in a taxing and demeaning job.

He heard the heavy crash of the Sunday papers on the mat downstairs and eased himself out of bed. ‘I'll bring you a cup of tea up, Eileen,' he said, his animosity already subsumed in his dreams of the blonde woman in Brunton. That was how mature women should look! There was no reason why a few extra years should necessarily diminish a woman's attractions. Eileen! He should have known what to expect of a woman with a name like that: the name had already been a generation out of date when he had met her in the supposedly permissive seventies.

He put the kettle on and scanned quickly through the pages of the
News of the World
and the
People.
There didn't seem to be anything very new about the murder of the girl in Brunton nine days ago. They said it was now clear that the girl had been a prostitute, but that had been obvious long ago. There couldn't be any fresh news: they liked what they termed ‘call-girl killings', these papers, and they'd certainly have fastened on any new details of the hunt.

He knew he shouldn't really go back to Brunton, not yet. But Miss Whiplash was awfully tempting; in the hothouse of his imagination, Sally Aspin's curves grew more ample, her strutting more stately and arrogant, and her dominance more satisfying. And his own retributory violence became more extreme.

And he knew he was due to make a call at a textiles warehouse in Preston on Tuesday. And Preston was only ten miles from Brunton . . .

He heard the toilet flush upstairs as he poured the tea. Eileen was waiting expectantly in bed when he took the tray into the bedroom, lean, frumpish, her hair straggling untidily across her head, the sheets drawn up tight over her non-existent bosom. He forced himself to say cheerfully, ‘I brought the papers up for you, Eileen. If you want to have a bit of a lie-in, I'll make some toast and you can have your breakfast in bed.'

She looked at him steadily from watery eyes that were the colour of slate. Her mouth continued to droop disapprovingly at the corners. ‘Up to something, are you, David?' she said. Then she turned her attention to the papers, not expecting any reply from him.

Sometimes David thought he hated all women. The young ones were the worst: you caught them sniggering behind your back sometimes, in the office. And he was pretty sure that on occasions he glimpsed the same contempt among the receptionists and the secretaries at the firms he had to visit. He couldn't see anything funny in the work he did, the things he had to say when he was trying to get orders. But they did.

And always the young ones, the ones with smooth skins and bright eyes and curvy, supple figures seemed to be the worst. Sometimes David Strachan longed to show them who was really the boss.

He made the toast and another pot of tea, moving very deliberately, because his thoughts were elsewhere. He ate his first piece of toast very slowly, his jaws masticating regularly as his mind dealt with other things.

By the time he had drunk his tea, David Strachan's mind was made up. He listened for a moment to his wife moving about in the bedroom above his head. He went out and looked at the grey sky above the drab grey lawn behind the house, sniffing the damp cold of late November. There was still no one about at this early Sunday hour.

He went out to the garage and put the piece of rope into the boot of his car.

Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was partnering the Captain of his golf club. The Captain was a pleasant chap, who thought it was part of his duties in his year as Captain to play with as wide a cross-section of his members as possible. Such altruism should be rewarded.

Perhaps it is, in heaven. But on the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-third of November, the Captain was very much on this earth. And his charity was to be very much unrewarded.

On a mild afternoon beneath a pale yellow sun, Tucker's first and greatest shock came as he walked around the side of the clubhouse to the first tee. Two figures detached themselves from the crowd on the practice putting green and came over to greet them by the side of the first tee: obviously the men who were to be their opponents in this four-ball match. The first of these was a lithe young man whose practice swings as he waited to tee off looked ominously smooth.