Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  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.

  It was a long time before he ceased to pant, and when his breathing slowed and his eyes opened, he found her looking at him curiously. It took him a moment to return fully to that room with the thick velvet curtains and the deep scarlet lampshade. She said, a little reluctantly, ‘You can have a cup of tea before you go if you like. I shan’t be going out into the cold again. It’s a raw night out there.’

  Katie made it a practice not to rush regular customers out of the place. You wanted to encourage them to patronize you again, and most men were foolish enough to believe that you might have a little affection for them, even after money had changed hands.

  Yet this time she was glad when the man refused. There had been something very fierce about him at the end, some dangerous force she did not want to analyse too deeply.

  Katie Clegg shuddered, wanting only to get back to her children and her other, normal life. She couldn’t see any other way of earning the money she needed, but it worried her, sometimes, how much she now knew about men and the darker side of sexual life.

  Tom Boyd smiled to himself as he went out into the darkness and privacy of the night. It had been good, that. He had gone further than he’d gone before with that line of sex, and discovered how much the brutality of it excited him. He’d used a certain savagery before; he’d even been checked for it in his early days in the police, when he’d given young thugs more than the rules
allowed. But he’d never combined violence with sex in this intoxicating way before.

  Perhaps it was his exhilaration which made him careless. He didn’t even look up and down the quiet road as he emerged from Katie’s house, didn’t see the men waiting in the shadows beneath the straggling shrubs at the end of the short front garden. He was opening the door of the Vectra when the hand fell upon his shoulder and the voice said, ‘We’d like a few words with you, sir. At the station in Brunton, if you don’t mind.’

  Tom Boyd did mind. But as he saw the warrant card in the pale light of the street lamp, he knew there was no escape.

  Ten

  It was a huge modern house on a generous plot. It had six bedrooms, six bathrooms, garaging for five cars, and an indoor swimming pool with its own heating plant and changing rooms. Though the building had been completed only three years earlier, the gardens had an established air. Mature trees had been brought in with their huge root-balls intact and planted with special machines.

  Money was never in short supply here. Some people called the development vulgar, but they were perhaps a little envious. The rawness of the bricks would merge happily into the setting after a few years. Brunton did not have many places of this quality, and this one would become one of the most desirable of all with the passing of time.

  Almost the modern equivalent of the old manor house, where the occupant controlled most of what went on around him. But this was no manor house. This place was an architectural witness to the fact that crime paid. ‘Hurst Leigh’ was the name spelt out tastefully in the plaque on the tall gatepost. It was a name devised for something much more modest and rural than this ostentatious pile.

  In so far as he loved anything, Joe Johnson loved every brick of this house.

  Percy Peach, on the other hand, regarded the edifice with considerable distaste as he studied it through the elaborate wrought-iron security gates at the end of the drive. The place was a reminder to Peach that villains sometimes won, and he did not like that.

  The electronic gates eased slowly back after he had rapped out his name into the microphone on the gatepost, and Lucy Blake drove the police Mondeo over the gravel and parked it neatly beneath the high northern elevation of the Johnson mansion. A maid opened the oak door and said, ‘Mr Johnson is expecting you. He’s in his study.’ Ignoring Peach’s snort at the word, she led them over plush carpets into a room with dimensions which most people would have welcomed in a sitting room.

  Joe Johnson sat behind a big desk and watched their entry with a sardonic smile. It was a big desk, with a red leather top and an elaborate brass inkstand whose pens were never used. There was a leather Chesterfield on one wall, matching armchairs, where he indicated that his visitors should sit, a table of luxuriant house plants beneath the low Georgian window, prints of Alpine scenes on the walls. A copy of the previous weekend’s Sunday Times lay on the table. The room’s atmosphere of uncontroversial good taste might have been fashioned for a show house in a new development of luxury properties.

  The only jarring note was struck by a cinema poster from the Godfather series, showing Don Corleone leering at his Mafia henchmen. Peach decided that this lurid and arresting image was the only thing in the room chosen by Johnson himself.

  Joe Johnson sat back on his desk chair and looked down on the two he had positioned carefully below him in the armchairs. ‘Thought I’d have our little discussion here at home,’ he said with a smile which would have sat well on a shark. ‘Don’t like the filth coming into my working environment: it gives the workers a bad impression.’

  Peach returned the smile with interest. ‘We could always do this at the station, if you prefer it.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s a long time since I was on a farm, but I distinctly recall that I didn’t like the smell of pigs.’

  Peach looked round the luxurious modern room. ‘Didn’t think you’d be a Sunday Times reader, Johnson: part of the image, is it?’

  Johnson gave him an oily smile. ‘It’s not this week’s edition. It’s from January 2003. I keep it for the News Review section. There are two whole pages about the cock-ups the police made in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. I enjoy reading accounts of police incompetence.’

  Lucy Blake decided she’d had enough of hungry dogs circling each other. She said, ‘I didn’t tell you why we had made this appointment, Mr Johnson. We want to speak to you about the murder of Sarah Dunne.’

  Johnson ignored her for a moment whilst he finished his eye contact with Peach. Then he swung his chair through thirty degrees to look her unhurriedly up and down, letting his gaze linger on the nyloned knees where they met the leather of the chair. It took Lucy a real effort of will not to pull at the hem of her skirt; she wished irrelevantly that she had worn trousers to come here. Against her wishes, she found herself saying, ‘That’s the girl who was killed last Friday.’

  Johnson nodded. ‘I thought I’d heard the name. She was murdered, wasn’t she? And you haven’t solved it yet, or you wouldn’t be here looking for Joe Johnson’s help! Isn’t there some statistic which says that if you don’t solve a murder mystery within the first week you don’t solve it at all? Your week will be up tonight – and Miss Marple here obviously still hasn’t a clue!’ He turned back to the scowling Peach, then laughed at his witticism. The mirth did not extend to his cold grey eyes.

  He reached into the top drawer of the desk, extracted a cigar, removed the band, and lit it carefully, in a long drawn-out charade of contempt. ‘I’d offer you one, Peach, but I know you mustn’t smoke on duty. And I’m sure this pretty lady isn’t the kind of dyke who goes in for fat cigars.’

  Peach tried not to show his physical tension. This odious man had defrauded the public of millions, had made more millions from vice, had almost certainly killed men, or had them killed. But in this context he was still officially a member of the public, helping the police with their enquiries. He was not under arrest, could refuse to answer their questions, could dismiss them from his house at whatever moment he chose. He said through clenched teeth, ‘So where were you last Friday night between nine and eleven, Johnson?’

  Johnson grinned, his grey eyes as expressionless as stone. ‘You can do better than that, Peach. For the record, I expect I was in one of my clubs. I usually am, on a Friday night. But you don’t for a moment think that I killed that stupid girl.’

  ‘Your hard men might have killed her. Your enforcers.’ He rolled his contempt round the last word.

  ‘What a vivid imagination you have, Peach! It seems to have become more vivid, since your promotion.’ He tapped the first grey disc of cigar ash into an ash tray, enjoying telling the man three yards away from him that he knew all about his elevation to DCI.

  Lucy Blake said, ‘You said the girl was “stupid”, Mr Johnson. What reason have you to call her that, if you never knew her?’

  For a moment, he was disconcerted. Joe Johnson was not used to being challenged these days. He was surrounded by yes-men; even the most violent people among his entourage were there to do his bidding, not to query his thinking. He said, ‘Did I call her stupid? Well, perhaps that’s because my experience has led me to think of all girls as stupid. Sorry about that, darling!’

  She tried to mimic his insulting grin, to throw it back at him as a mirror would. ‘You can do better than that, Mr Johnson, if you choose to. Even you.’

  He looked at her for a moment, refusing to be offended, letting a leer creep over the flat features, trying hard to convey to her just what he would like to do to her in other circumstances. Then he said, ‘All right. I’m sorry that poor girl was killed, but she was stupid to be roaming the streets of Brunton on her own at that time of night. It’s a dangerous place after dark. The police don’t seem able to keep order, you see!’

  ‘It’s not easy with your gorillas roaming free,’ said Peach.

  ‘Don’t expect me to shed crocodile tears for that girl. Any girl who goes round trying to sell herself is asking for trouble.’<
br />
  It was his first mistake: probably the result of overconfidence, of enjoying the discomfiture of the CID officers too much.

  Peach said, ‘How’d you know she was on the game, Johnson?’

  ‘It was in the papers.’

  ‘No. That information has not been released.’

  A pause. Johnson puffed his cigar and smiled. ‘I must have assumed that any young girl who was on the streets at that hour was trying her hand at tarting. And it seems I was right. Perhaps I should be in the CID!’

  ‘She’d been warned off, hadn’t she? Warned not to interfere in a prostitution racket controlled by Joe Johnson.’

  ‘Don’t know what you mean, I’m sure. Prostitution racket? I make my money legitimately, from my casinos and my clubs. And not just round here, either! I make more than a rozzer could ever dream of making, Piggy Peach!’ Joe Johnson looked unhurriedly round the warm, spacious room and out at the grounds to emphasize his point. ‘She was asking for trouble, being on Alexandra Street at that time of night.’

  ‘Know where she was killed, do you, Joe? Well, we’d expect that, when it was one of your men who topped her.’ Peach’s black eyes stared triumphantly from beneath his bald pate.

  ‘She was killed on the streets, up that way somewhere. I’m sure I read that. Or heard it on the television.’

  ‘You didn’t, because that information also has not been released. Sarah Dunne’s body was found in a shed, on a mill site that had been cleared for rebuilding. The television pictures showed that scene, and the newspaper and radio reports implied that she died there, because we haven’t told anyone any different. We don’t know exactly where she died, or didn’t until now. It’s interesting that you should be able to enlighten us. But not unexpected. That’s why we came to see you.’

  ‘I don’t know where she died.’

  ‘Can’t expect us to believe that now, Joe.’ Peach was somehow making effective bricks out of tiny wisps of straw.