Wages of Sin (2 page)

November the fifth had been and gone a week ago, but half a mile away, somewhere on the edge of the town, a belated rocket soared and burst into a dozen brief comets, startling them both with the sharp crack of its explosion. She found that she was gripping his arm quite hard, and had to force herself to release the tightness in her fingers.

It was that relatively quiet hour before the pubs finally shut and deposited winter revellers upon the chilly streets. Sarah found herself wondering whether there might be hidden presences in the shop doorways which lined this side of the street. Her companion's nervousness was communicating itself to her, when she had quite enough of her own.

‘It isn't far,' she said, and he looked sharply back at her, as if for a moment he had almost forgotten her presence and what they were about. He smiled down at her, forcing himself to relax, and, as his features softened in the weird white light from the lamp, he reminded Sarah Dunne of her father. She wasn't ready for that thought, and her stomach churned anew with it.

Her head swam, but he put his arm round her shoulders, then slid it down to her waist and marched her in step with him along the street. He looked into each doorway as they passed, checking that they were empty. Her heightened awareness seemed to stretch distance as well as time. The road they must turn down to reach her bed-sit loomed like a cavern of darkness, still a hundred yards away as they reached the bend in the road. ‘How far now?' he asked urgently.

‘Not far. Along that street over there and then the second on the left.'

‘Further than you said. I haven't much time, you see.' Still he didn't ask her name. He slowed, then stopped, snatching a look behind them towards the distant amber windows of the pub, far enough away now for them to catch no sound from it. ‘I haven't much time, you see,' he repeated. He was almost apologetic, and she felt a sudden shaft of sympathy for him.

It was going to be off, she knew it was. Whatever the reason, he was going to renege on their deal. She should have known it couldn't be as easy as this. Yet the only emotion she felt was relief.

Then he said, ‘How about a quicky in the car? I'll give you twenty-five and you can be back at work in no time.'

Sarah knew should refuse him, she knew that. Insist on the fifty they had agreed or nothing. Give him a mouthful of obscenities for the insult he was offering her. Stalk away on these ridiculously high heels, if he wouldn't play fair with her. But his compromise offer came almost as a release. She said simply, ‘All right. If you're in a hurry, it's all we can do, I suppose.'

He lengthened his stride, as if he had known she would agree. She wondered for the first time just who he was, what background he came from. She had been too preoccupied with her own anxiety to think about her client so far. But that was all right. When you were on the game, you didn't ask questions about your customers, if you knew what was good for you. One of the rules of the game, one of the things they paid for, was anonymity.

She was on the game now, she thought, with a little spurt of excitement. She had the money from her first jobs, and the first week would soon be over. Tonight would be the end of the initiation rites.

His car was in the shadows, beside a group of unlit lock-up garages. The clouds must be lifting, for here, without the street lights above them, she could see a few stars, small and white against the navy sky above the rooftops of the mean houses. He looked swiftly around him, checking again that there was no one here to see them, then turned the key and threw open a rear door of the big old saloon.

The back seat was musty with disuse. She noticed that he had both of the front seats forward, to allow the maximum room in the back of the car. Perhaps this is what he had planned all along. She caught him looking around again before he almost threw himself into the car beside her and slammed the door shut.

His arms enveloped her in the clammy darkness. ‘Money first!' she said firmly. ‘We always insist on that. And you've got to use a condom.' She was surprised at her boldness.

But he didn't argue. He grunted, fumbled into some inner pocket of his jacket, and produced notes. ‘A twenty and a five,' he said, and held them against the damp rear windscreen of the car, so that she could check them in the dim light. She couldn't see enough to be sure, but she said, ‘That's all right, then!' and tucked the notes hastily into the pocket of her jacket. He turned away from her, cursing under his breath as he struggled with the condom.

Then he was on her, urgent, breathy, his strength immensely greater than hers with the compulsion of his need. She was glad she had worn the stockings; they said you had to do it because the men found them such a come-on, but in the cramped space here tights would have been another encumbrance. He said nothing, not showing even the semblance of affection she had expected. It was better really, she told herself; there was no need for her to pretend to be enjoying the exchange.

Sarah felt as if she was sitting on some viewpoint above and watching the loveless struggle on this fusty couch. It did not last long. The man came with a short, gasping climax, and she held him hard with her arms, grateful that there seemed no need for her to simulate orgasm. Then, as their breathing slowed, she eased herself slowly apart from him.

It was over.

She had got the punter's money. She hadn't thought it would be like this, in the back of a cold car with their breaths condensing on the windows. But it hadn't been long or complicated, and she had twenty-five pounds to show for it; her hand crept to the pocket of her jacket and found the notes still there.

Perhaps the man took the movement as a sign of her anxiety to be away, for he eased himself upright beside her and said. ‘It's all right, love. You can go whenever you like. I need to get away myself.'

Sarah Dunne grinned at him in the darkness, grateful that he was not going to ask her how it had been for her. Perhaps this was how it usually was when men paid for it; perhaps they neither expected you to fake an orgasm nor to praise them afterwards. And you got money as well! Impulsively, she leaned forward and kissed her benefactor on his forehead.

He grunted what might have been a thanks, then flung open the door. ‘Have a good weekend, love. And take care! I must be away.'

It was a dismissal. He was round at the other side of the car and into the driver's seat without another look at her. She had scarcely time to snatch her pants up from the floor and slam the rear door shut. The car's engine roared into life as she moved uncertainly over the uneven ground on her high heels. The big car moved swiftly past her and back to the street they had left, its headlights briefly brilliant on the wet cobbles left from a vanished age.

Sarah took a deep breath and pulled her scarf up over her chin and her jacket tight about her slim shoulders. This last encounter of her first week had been easier than she had expected. She hadn't envisaged it happening in the back of a car, with the foetid smell of disuse in her nostrils and the man not troubling even to know her name. But he hadn't hurt her, hadn't asked her to do any of the things which lurked among those secret fears she could scarcely formulate. And she had her money: her fingers felt yet again at that reassuring paper in her pocket.

She could take a short cut back to her bed-sit from here, get herself a shower and a warm drink in front of the telly. She was finding her feet in this lucrative game – that was the important thing. There'd be more and better pickings to come in the weeks ahead.

She thought she heard a footstep behind her as she strode through the back entry. She didn't see anything when she looked fearfully back over her shoulder, but it was too dark here to discern anything clearly. She wished now that she had taken the longer way home, beneath the high, comforting lights of the street.

She tried to hurry, but the tightness of her skirt and the highness of her heels did not allow speed, especially over the uneven cobbles which had been laid a hundred and thirty years ago and never altered since those palmy days of the old cotton town. She was certain this time that she caught the noise of someone behind her. She would have called out, but her voice was stilled in her throat. Fear dropped silent as a cat on to her back.

She didn't stand a chance. It was the scarf which was the instrument of her downfall. Strong hands pulled it from behind her, so that it snapped down from her chin to her neck as if it had been a steel cord. In twenty seconds she was dead, her throat crushed by the scarf as her limbs thrashed briefly and hopelessly at the damp air.

The arms which lifted Sarah Dunne's body found it surprisingly light.

I
t was Monday morning and Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was feeling depressed.

He had endured a trying weekend with his wife, Barbara, who was built like a Wagnerian soprano and just as bellicose. She had carried him off to her parents' house and he had been forced to make conversation instead of watching the television. That was unreasonable enough, but Barbara had required him to address the family at large upon his most recent triumphs in detection.

As these didn't exist, he had been sorely taxed. Modesty was not an option with Barbara hanging upon every word of his heroic tale, but Tucker was a man of limited imagination and his well of invention soon ran dry. He had looked forward to Monday morning as a welcome deliverance.

That was another mistake. These days there was no relief for him at work. His role as Head of the CID section in the Brunton police had always been a nominal one: he was an expert at seizing the praise for his staff's successes and dodging the brickbats for their failures. For eight years, the system had worked well: Tucker had basked in far more adulation than abuse, since the Brunton clear-up rate on serious crime was as good as any in the country.

The man his staff knew as Tommy Bloody Tucker had been Superintendent Tucker the super-sleuth in the eyes of the public. He was a good front-man: urbane, silver-haired, immaculately uniformed, ready with a quote for the media and a smiling acceptance of their plaudits for his latest brilliant piece of detection. His superiors knew what the real story was, of course, but that was the system. If you carried the rank, you collected the rewards.

The other side of the coin was that if things went wrong it came back to you like a load of wet sewage. And in the last year, things had been going seriously wrong at Brunton CID. It had all happened since Superintendent Tucker had been promoted to Chief Super. It had been no more than his due, as far as Barbara was concerned, and she had trumpeted the promotion loud and long at coffee mornings and among the ladies attached to the men who attended Tucker's Masonic lodge.

The snag was that Tucker had had to ensure that Detective Inspector Peach had been promoted at the same time to Chief Inspector.

Percy Peach carried the bumbling Tucker upon his sturdy Atlas shoulders. He was a thief-taker, a cop respected by cops, a cop whose reputation among serious villains carried much further than the patch of town and country in north-east Lancashire where he hunted down killers and fraudsters.

It was inconceivable that Tommy Bloody Tucker could make Chief Superintendent without taking Peach, the man who had preserved and enhanced his reputation for so many years, up the ladder with him. So Percy Peach, coppers' copper and villains' scourge, had been promoted to Chief Inspector, a rank supposedly abolished but still found useful by police promotion boards.

The snag from Tucker's point of view was that he was deprived of Peach's services in CID. The police rules said that anyone promoted to Chief Inspector should spend a year in uniform. It was daft, but there was no escaping the rule. Tucker consoled himself with the fact that he would at least be rid of the taunts of the egregious Peach, who exploited his usefulness to his chief quite shamelessly.

The paradox for the Superintendent was that the man who had made his reputation for him, the man who had made police committees purr over his efficiency, had also made his daily life a misery with his insolence. Well aware that Tucker could not afford to transfer or demote him, Percy Peach had amused himself by seeing just how far he could go in baiting the man who in theory directed his working life.

It had been nice to be rid of him. Detective Inspector Collins, the man who had taken over from Peach, had been pleasingly obsequious. For a little while, Tucker had thought how splendid it would be to be get rid of Peach for ever.

The euphoria had lasted less than a month. Collins and the other inspectors demanded day-to-day direction, and Tucker was no good at that. He told them they must use their initiatives: his job was to maintain an overview of the situation. So they took their own decisions, and made mistakes, which came back to him. He tried to rally the troops with inspirational addresses, but they attended dutifully and then asked awkward questions about responsibilities.

So, as things went from bad to worse, Tucker gave them bollockings: he'd always fancied himself as rather good at those. They listened sullenly, without the interruptions Peach would have made. But the bollockings had no effect. The CID men below him played things by the book, and Tucker was required to do the job he could not do. He was forced to direct investigations instead of maintaining his lofty overview, and he made embarrassing mistakes.

It was very nearly a year now since Peach had left the CID fold. He could be out of uniform and back in the CID soon, but Tucker was determined to do without him. He would work his way through to retirement without that unique form of mock-obsequious insolence which was Peach's forte, whatever the cost.

On this grey and gloomy Monday morning, when the November cloud hung low over the drab old cotton town, that cost seemed considerable. There was a sheaf of statistics comparing the Brunton crime clear-up rates with those of other areas in the north-west: it made melancholy reading. There was a memo from the Chief Constable which was no more than a terse command to see him at eleven thirty that morning to review these figures.