Wages of Sin (19 page)

‘Right. Leave it with me. I'll pass it on to Forensic.'

‘Yes, sir. Bear in mind that it may be a hoax, though. There are—'

‘I'll be the judge of that, Peach. It's part of being in charge of an investigation, to make judgements on things like this.'

‘Yes, sir. Rather you than me, sir.'

‘That's all right. You get about your business and stop wasting valuable time.'

Tucker's lethargic imagination had been stirred into vigorous life. He picked up the internal phone and began immediate arrangements for a media briefing at three o'clock. With a man under arrest and a DNA semen match, plus a phone call from a man claiming responsibility for this and two other murders, there was much to report. He'd show the critics that Chief Superintendent Thomas Tucker was a man to be reckoned with, a man who got things done.

It hadn't yet occurred to him that these two new items of information were in fact contradictory.

F
ather Devoy liked going into the primary school behind the church. Until the last few months, he had always found it easy to lose himself in his conversations with the children, to forget that other side of his life which was beginning to tear his very soul apart.

He liked the classes for the First Communion best, where you were surrounded by excited innocence and preparing the children for a family celebration. He sometimes thought that if he could have had a family himself, all might still have been well with him.

But the First Confession and First Communion classes were usually in the spring, with the children enjoying the great day of their First Communion on the feast of Corpus Christi in June. At various times during the last few days, John Devoy had wondered whether he would ever see another spring, whether the demons within him would destroy him before then.

He was all right as long as he had the children in front of him. Those round, unlined, credulous faces compelled his attention, made him concentrate on them and them alone. At least, they always had until now. The children told him the old, old things. The things which should have reassured him in his vocation as a priest. The things he had learned when he was a boy, the things his father and his grandfather had parroted off in school until they knew them by heart.

The children didn't sit in desks any more. But a little girl told him from beside her table that God had made her; had made her in His own image and likeness.

She looked very pleased with herself when she had told him that, knowing that she had got it right, that the teacher would be relieved because she had got it right in front of Father Devoy. Teachers were as human, as insecure, as anyone else, and John Devoy knew that the woman who stood out of sight behind his right shoulder would be absurdly pleased that her small charges were not letting her down when the priest came in from the big, high stone church behind the small modern school.

Father Devoy wanted to ask the smiling little girl what she meant by ‘in his own image and likeness', to see what this cocksure eight-year-old would make of the picture of God transformed into a toothy girl in a pretty dress and the green school sweater, but he knew that it would not be fair. Not fair to the smug little child who had given the right answer; not fair to the 23-year-old teacher smiling her approval behind him.

Not fair even to himself, for it might expose Father Devoy as the thinking man he was; the man who questioned what his religion fed to children; the man who had doubts about his calling to the priesthood; the man who knew the way he was living his life was wrong, and yet could do nothing about it.

The man who preached from the pulpit about the dangers of lust and fornication, yet who dared not turn and smile at the young woman behind him, in case her full lips and soft curves made him reveal his lechery in his face. The man who thrust his hands deep into the vents at the side of his cassock lest they too might somehow give him away, as his arms cut through the empty air.

The man who was living a lie and could not go on doing so for much longer.

Joe Johnson enjoyed being in control.

He had never been one for democracy. He realized that as his empire grew he must delegate, so he had brought managers into his clubs and casinos. He was even willing to listen to their views, on occasions: the occasions when he had asked for them. His underlings soon learned not to venture a thought about policy unless they had been asked for it.

Things worked perfectly well, so long as everyone understood that they were working for an autocrat.

The man in front of Johnson on this Monday morning would never have dreamed of offering an opinion. He was a big man, with a powerful torso and massive forearms, but he stood in front of the desk in the boss's office as an abject parody of subjection. He was a man whose trade was physical violence, but at this moment he might have been a puny child.

Johnson looked at the man as if he was something he had just scraped off his shoe. He knew what he was going to do, but he enjoyed watching fear ooze like sweat from the hulk standing waiting upon his judgement. He took a cigar from the box in front of him, studied its band unhurriedly, smelt the Havana tobacco appreciatively whilst his shambling employee suffered. Then he sneered, ‘Enjoy your holiday, did you?'

‘It – it was good, yes. Not that there's a lot to do at the seaside at this time of year. I went—'

‘Well, that's good, then. Got you well away from me, too. Which was a good thing, because I wasn't pleased with you. Not pleased at all.'

‘No. I'm sorry, I didn't think that—'

‘Exactly. You didn't think. Not really a defence though, that, is it?'

‘No. I—'

‘I suppose you'd say I don't pay you to think. Your talents, such as they are, lie in other directions. Well, you must be expecting to collect your cards today.' He paused, waiting for a reaction from the mountain of muscle, but the man merely shifted his weight absurdly from foot to foot, like a small boy unable to stand still before a fearsome superior.

Johnson curled his lip and went on, ‘Well, I've got good news for you. I've still got a job you can do, in one of my clubs.'

The big face, battered as a pugilist's but simple as a child's, cracked from apprehension into a crooked smile. ‘Bouncer, is it, boss? I can do that. I've done it before. No one will get away with anything with me on the door. I can handle any of the roughs we get round here. No one gets past—'

‘Shut it, will you?' Johnson was suddenly sick of the sight of this dullard with danger in his fists. The dolt seemed to take him back to his earliest days, when violence had been the only tool he employed to make his way, before the days of the clubs and the casinos and the upper-class brothels and the capital he now controlled and directed towards the extension of his empire. He'd rather have dispensed with a thug like this, but it was better to have him under his eye, still within the organization, rather than shooting his mouth off elsewhere about the things he'd seen and done.

Johnson did not trouble to disguise the disgust he felt as he said, ‘It's a last chance, this. Don't be under any illusion about that. You go too far once more, and I won't protect you again. Understood?'

‘Understood, boss.'

Johnson looked at the blank surface of the door the man had shut behind him as he left. He thought of how far he had come, of how much more he now had at his disposal than men like that. But you couldn't do without force: it was violence which instilled the fear which was still so necessary to most of his enterprises. He pressed a button on his desk and spoke into the intercom. ‘Send Shepherd in here, will you?'

The man who slipped in and took the chair when it was indicated that he should sit was at first sight very unlike the ponderous bruiser who had just left. He was thin, for a start, and not much over average height. But there was a sinewy power about him, a steel which was more stealthy but just as uncompromising as that of the dull heavyweight who had been here before him. There was also a coldness about his slightly narrowed, watchful eyes which meant that you would not want him as an enemy.

‘Little job for you,' said Johnson. ‘Won't take you long, and you could do it in your sleep, but it's one you might enjoy.' He smiled at the thought.

‘What is it, Mr Johnson?'

‘A girl needs a little – well, a little discipline, shall we call it, Shepherd?'

The thin lips gave him a mirthless smile, a sadist responding eagerly to the sadism in his chief. ‘I'll enjoy that, Mr Johnson. Been stepping out of line, has she, this girl?'

Johnson smiled back. This man was much more on his wavelength than the one he had just seen, though still subservient, of course. He liked that. ‘Young girl who's been flashing her fanny about. Trying to make the most of her arsets, as you might say.' He strung out the word and smiled at his simple joke, showing his staff that Joe Johnson liked a bit of humour, in the right context.

The thin lips opposite him twisted into a soundless, sycophantic chuckle.

A chuckle that never made it into sound would have disconcerted some people, but not Joe Johnson. He said, ‘I've no objection to women putting tasty quims on the market, as you know, but it has to be under our umbrella. This silly tart's trying to work just for herself.'

‘Not a wise thing to do, that, Mr Johnson. Not in this neck of the woods.'

‘Not wise at all, as you say. She's only nineteen, and she needs to be protected from herself. I had a word with her myself last night: explained the necessity for her to have protection. I think that message needs reinforcing. I told her we'd be in touch. She needs looking after, so I thought I'd send out the good Shepherd to have a word with her. To invite her to join our flock.'

It was a joke he had made before, but Shepherd laughed dutifully again at his inappropriate name. ‘I'll see she gets the message, Mr Johnson,' he said.

The birthday tea was a tradition. In the midst of a murder investigation, Lucy Blake had thought it would need to be abandoned or postponed. It was Percy Peach who insisted that tradition should be honoured.

‘Your mum will be looking forward to it. We must fit it in, even if we only spend a couple of hours with her,' he said decisively. ‘And besides all that, she makes the best scones I've ever tasted!'

The lights in the little stone cottage looked unnaturally bright in the early winter darkness as they drove into the quiet lane with its row of cottages in the lee of the fell. Far away from any street lights here, they could appreciate the grandeur of a sapphire sky and myriad stars. To the west, there were no major rises in the land as it stretched away over the plush northern suburbs of Preston to the invisible coast at Blackpool; to the north was the long, low mound of Longridge Fell; to the east a slim bright crescent of a new moon illuminated the great mound of Pendle Hill.

It seemed a long way from the narrow streets and sordid murder they had left behind them.

There was a coal fire burning cheerfully in the low-ceilinged sitting room and Percy warmed his hands at it as he said, ‘Getting pretty parky out there, Mrs Blake. Be a frost before morning.'

‘Not before time,' said Agnes Blake. ‘The geraniums and the dahlias have been flowering on, but tonight will see the last of them.' She spoke without regret. You lived with the rhythms of the seasons in the country: it was time for winter to bite and make itself felt.

Percy tucked into his scones and Agnes watched him admiringly. She was one of the last representatives of a generation of Lancashire women who liked to see men eat and loved it when they appreciated their food. She was sixty-nine today, a child born into the nineteen thirties depression, who seemed to have had some of the lessons of that hard era bred into her bones. She behaved as if the man of the house was still the only breadwinner, the centre of the family who had to be kept healthy and vigorous if the ship was not to founder. She knew she was out of date, was even prepared to laugh at herself. But kept up the pretence before her working daughter as a kind of rebuke to her career aspirations.

Agnes was disgusted with some petty local vandalism, and Percy retailed the details of how years ago he and a fellow DC had trapped some young hooligan graffiti artists in Brunton by posing as bill-posters.

‘You'd make a lovely parent, Percy Peach,' Agnes decided through her laughter. ‘You'd give your kids some discipline – that's what they need. It's the parents we should be fining for all this damage.'

Percy read the warning signs, but he had just taken in the last mouthful of his scone. When he nodded and reached a tentative hand towards the sponge cake, Agnes followed up smartly with, ‘Ever thought of having children, Percy? I expect you must have.'

Percy ignored Lucy's warning look. ‘Can't say I have, Mrs Blake. Never thought I'd make a very good dad.' He shook his head without resentment.

‘Oh, but you would! An extremely good dad. I've some experience, you know, and I can spot a good dad when I see one.' She glanced at the photograph of her dead husband which stood beside that of Percy on the mantelpiece. ‘And you'd be able to teach the lad cricket. You'd enjoy that, Percy.'

He stifled a smile. ‘No knowing it would be a lad, is there, Mrs Blake?'

‘That's true. And you'd want lads, I know. Wouldn't wish girls on anyone. Wilful creatures, girls are.' She sniffed her derision, falling into her now familiar humorous partnership with Peach.

‘Really? Well it's interesting you find it so, with all your experience, Mrs Blake. I certainly find women difficult to work with. You never know quite where you are with them. Unpredictable, at the best of times, they are.'

‘That's modern women for you, Percy. It was different in my time. Women knew their place, then.'

Lucy decided it was time to intervene. She knew from experience that the pair could go on in this vein indefinitely. She said desperately, ‘He probably wouldn't make a good dad at all, Mother. You should see your precious Percy with some of the young people we have to deal with. Nearly bites their heads off, he does. Frightens them to death.'