Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  ‘If I happened to realize she’d been killed elsewhere and then dumped in the shed, it was just a lucky guess.’

  ‘You’re too modest, Johnson. Not lucky, and not a guess, I’d say. Just well-informed.’

  ‘I know nothing about this girl’s death. You can’t pin it on me, Peach!

  ‘Make a note of this conversation, will you, DS Blake? Put down that Mr Johnson knew that the girl was on the game and knew exactly where she died, when that information has not been given in any official press release.’

  Lucy went through the elaborate ritual of producing her small gold-plated ball pen and making an entry in her notebook. Johnson affected a lack of interest, but his nerve broke as the silence stretched and DS Blake wrote diligently. ‘You can’t use any of this in a court. I haven’t even been cautioned.’

  ‘True, that. But a prosecuting counsel may ask us about the impressions we formed at this stage of the inquiry, you see. Make an additional note about Mr Johnson’s attitude, will you, DS Blake? I leave the actual words to you.’ He turned his attention back to the flat-featured man across the desk. ‘She’s very good with words, DS Blake. Not just a pretty face, you see.’

  ‘You won’t pin this on me, Peach.’ The cloak of urbanity, which had never sat easily upon Joe Johnson, had dropped away completely now. The lips were thin with fury and the scars were showing more clearly on the forehead above the thin, sallow face.

  Peach stood up. ‘Not yet, maybe. But give us time. The only weapon the dead have is that they can afford to be patient, you see. One of our officers will be in to your office for a list of your staff: we shall need to question them – thoroughly, in the light of what you’ve revealed today.’

  ‘I haven’t revealed anything.’

  ‘Really? Note that, DS Blake. Even the nastiest members of our society are vulnerable, when they do not have self-knowledge. You’re making me into quite a philosopher, Joe. Don’t leave the area without informing us of your movements, will you?’

  Father Devoy said his prayers, but they didn’t seem to work. His most frenzied supplications to the Lord seemed worthless, these days, whenever he prayed about himself.

  It was Friday night again, a week since that poor girl had died, and Satan was taunting Father John again. He could keep the Devil at bay when he had the work of his ministry to help him. He had put evil to one side whilst he heard Confessions for an hour, listening behind the screen of his airless cubicle to the petty sins of the parish, summoning his weightiest tones for the occasional adulterer or wife-beater. Sometimes, in the worst cases, the two came together, and Father John wondered which was the greater of the evils.

  He warned the sinners sternly that they must be genuinely penitent for their sins, must genuinely regret the pain they had caused to God and the damage they had done to their immortal souls. For without real repentance there could be no forgiveness for them, no sloughing off of their sins.

  Even as he pronounced the words of absolution, Father Devoy was acutely aware of his own damned soul. How could he pretend that he regretted what he did, yet still go out under the cloak of night and do it again? Here was the very basis of the sacrament of Penance, the thing non-Catholics did not understand. You didn’t just confess and wipe the slate clean, you had to be genuinely sorry for what you had done, genuinely resolved not to do it again.

  So when his parishioners had gone away and he had shut up the church for the night, Father John prayed in front of the high altar, by the single dim red light that was kept burning always before the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle. Yet even as he prayed for the grace of repentance and the strength to resist temptation, he could not be certain that he wanted his prayers to be answered.

  He put on grey slacks and a roll-necked sweater and combed his hair, studiously avoiding meeting his own eyes in the mirror. He went across to the youth club, played a vigorous game of table tennis with a boy who had been an altar boy with him for years, made his usual good-natured fool of himself when he was called to make up a game at the dartboard.

  At least he never felt any stirrings of desire towards these boys, he thought. The Church would get no scandal from him there. Nothing queer about Devoy, as they used to say in the seminary. There’d been some odd buggers there, when he thought back on it. Most of them hadn’t lasted the course, but some of them were priests now, and God alone knew what problems they would be causing.

  Well, there would never be any sexual abuse of minors from Father John. Even the girls were safe from that. Father John took his filthy urges off elsewhere, didn’t he? Took them where they could affect only those who were already strangers to God’s grace.

  There was dancing in the youth club now; it was time for Father John to go.

  He went to the caretaker’s room and picked up the dark blue anorak which someone had left behind in the club a year or more ago. It was a little too big for him. He was not even conscious of putting it on. But when he found its familiar looseness about his shoulders, he knew what he was going to do.

  There were low clouds scudding across the sky. There was no moon and only the occasional, fleeting star. It seemed a good night to him; there wouldn’t be many innocent people abroad tonight. Just Satan’s priest and the women of the Devil.

  Father John thrust his hands deep into the pockets of the anorak, pulled up the collar, sunk his head like a tortoise deeper into his shell.

  ‘Looking for a bit of fun, love?’

  He was startled by the words. He had been marching along with his eyes still on the ground, only dimly aware that he was entering the area where these women operated.

  And Toyah Burgess was glad as she looked into the startled face to see a man who did not look like a killer. She was nervous despite herself, after what had happened to that girl last week. The rumour was that she’d been trying her hand at this game, without a pimp to give her his dubious protection.

  The man responded in a voice that was absurdly polite, ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of fun, no. So long as it isn’t too expensive.’

  You were supposed to be curt with the tightwads, to tell them that prices were not negotiable, that if they didn’t want to pay for the goods that they could piss off and wank. But this one seemed nice. There was a gentleness about him that she didn’t see in many of the men who paid for her services.

  So Toyah said, ‘You’ll get value for money, love. That’s what counts, isn’t it?’ She wrested his hand from his pocket and placed it against her breast, feeling it tremble violently as she held it there. Fear? Excitement? Christ, there weren’t too many who were excited by the touch of a tit nowadays! Which was a pity, because it meant that girls like her had to work harder.

  He looked into her face as she moved his hand up and down against her cleavage. ‘You’re beautiful!’ he said. ‘And so young.’ He stooped and buried his face suddenly and without warning between her breasts.

  It was curiously innocent. These were the same words Toyah got from lots of her clients, but spoken as if they were a surprise to the speaker, not practised and feeble chat-up phrases. Most men thought there was no need for chat-up with a whore, anyway. Toyah hadn’t seen this kind of fearful and tremulous excitement since she had had her first boyfriend at fourteen.

  And guilt. She met that often enough of course, when a frigid or hostile wife had been left at home. Perhaps this man had a wife like that. He was about the right age, older than she had thought at first, with an open face and desperate blue eyes. Quite attractive, really, in an arrested sort of way. Somehow she couldn’t see a wife spurning this man.

  She took a firm grip on his hand, lowered it to her side and kept hold of it as she moved him into a walk. He seemed grateful for that; it was as if he wished them to be seen as an ordinary pair of lovers. ‘Do you have a car?’ she said.

  ‘No. I’m on foot. Does it matter?’ It hadn’t ever mattered before.

  ‘No, of course it doesn’t. If you’ve got the money, that is.’

  He nodd
ed, seeming suddenly afraid to speak.

  ‘It’s not far,’ she said, and led him swiftly away into the side road and towards her bed-sit.

  He kept glancing right and left as they moved over stone flags which glistened with moisture from the showers earlier in the evening. So he was scared of being spotted. Well, she was used enough to that in her clients. He said again, ‘You’re very young,’ almost as though it were an accusation.

  ‘I’m nineteen,’ Toyah whispered into his ear. ‘Quite old enough to give you a good time!’ Usually she added a couple of years, but for some reason she wanted to be honest with this one. She wasn’t much good at ages, but he must be over forty. Yet he seemed to her absurdly young in some respects. He made her feel that it was she who was in charge of the situation.

  He had the money ready as soon as she had shut the door into the bed-sit. He brought it tumbling from his trouser pocket without being asked for it: one tenner and seven fives, with the last five in coins. He was like a child emptying his money box, tremulous with excitement for something for which he had been saving for a long time.

  He turned his back whilst she stripped. That made her feel quite odd. Most men took the stripping as part of what they had paid for. She took his hand and ran the back of it against her naked side, then took his fingers round to the curves of her firm buttocks. Toyah was proud of her bottom, though no one had called it that since her mother many years ago. Somehow this man reminded her of those years, which she had not thought about in many months.

  His hand shuddered when it touched her naked flesh. He said again, ‘You’re very young!’ in a breathy, uneven voice, and she feared suddenly that she might have to lead him on, that he might even be impotent.

  She eased her body against his, and they fell on the bed together with giggles of release. He seemed still reluctant to move, so she eased himself on top of him. ‘Stroke my arse for me!’ she said into his ear. Most men liked to call it that, and when the word and the command came from her it usually excited them.

  He certainly wasn’t impotent. He was rough once he started. Straightforward, but rough, carried forward by his passionate urge as his inhibitions dropped away. It was swift, concentrated, violent. It left both of them panting for breath.

  He didn’t move afterwards but remained clinging to her, his face buried in the softness of her breasts. It was not until she eased herself gently away that she was even sure that he was awake. Sometimes men dozed off afterwards, when they had spent themselves inside you, and not all of them took it well when you had to wake them and send them out into the winter night.

  He didn’t ask whether it had been good for her, thank goodness. Some of the less experienced men did that, as if it had been a normal, voluntary coupling. And this one, for all that he was in his forties and should have known more about life than her at nineteen, seemed curiously inexperienced, so that Toyah expected naïve questions from him. She would be kind if he asked them: he had been a good if rather disturbing customer.

  But he didn’t ask her anything. Indeed, once it was over, he never looked at her again. He dressed quickly, with his eyes on the ground, zipping his anorak to the neck and pulling its collar high about his face, even in a room now made oppressively warm by the gas fire. Toyah Burgess repeated the light-hearted formula she gave to all satisfactory clients: ‘Glad to see you again whenever you fancy it, sir. Come up and see me some time!’

  She usually struck her Mae West pose against the corner of the bed on that line, jutting her hip appreciatively towards the customer. But it would have been useless with this one. He didn’t acknowledge that she had spoken, didn’t even look at her. His eyes remained steadily on the fraying carpet as he dressed. He did not even look into the mirror to take away an oblique remembrance of her.

  She saw him to the door of the house, muttered a ritual ‘Take care, then!’ But he disappeared without a backward glance into the darkness. A queer fish, that one, for all his boyish ways. A strange mixture of tenderness and something very like danger. Toyah Burgess shivered a little as she shut the door upon the night.

  Her customer did not check his stride nor lift his eyes from the glistening flagstones until he was back in the presbytery behind the church. He went straight to his room and sat on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands. He was safely back in the place where he was Father John Devoy, respected priest and counsellor.

  But he felt like Jekyll and Hyde.

  Jekyll wanted to go out and save the sinner. And Hyde wanted to go out and punish the girl who was beyond redemption. Hyde wanted to get rid of that Jezebel before she led further men astray.

  Hyde wanted to kill the woman who had sold herself to him.

  Eleven

  Percy Peach wasn’t used to seeing Superintendent Tucker on a Saturday morning. But you had to prepare yourself for anything in the modern police service. Even the most unpleasant surprises had to be taken in your stride.

  ‘Thought it would help to keep the team up to the mark if they saw me slaving away over the weekend,’ said Tucker cheerfully.

  Peach didn’t think Tommy Bloody Tucker had ever slaved away over a weekend. Not at work, certainly: he couldn’t be sure about what lengths Brünnhilde Barbara Tucker had driven him to in bedroom and kitchen. He said enigmatically, ‘I’m sure the officers working ten-hour days will be impressed, sir.’

  ‘Of course, I won’t be here tomorrow. I’ve been selected for an important match at my golf club, actually. We’re taking on the North Lancs. But we’re playing at home, so I’ve every hope of success.’

  So that was why he was here. To boast about his golf. Ill-advised, that, when you were as bad at the game as Tommy Tucker. Percy said, ‘Congratulations, sir. The first team, is it?’

  ‘Oh no, nothing like that. It’s the social team – the C team, I think they call it. We play off handicaps. I don’t approve of all this cut-throat competitive stuff. I play the game for enjoyment.’

  Which is shorthand for saying you’re a bloody awful golfer who would never even be considered for any serious golf team, thought Percy. ‘I see, sir. What handicap would you be playing off, nowadays?’

  ‘Oh, I think I’m around twenty. I haven’t played in many serious competitions whilst you were away.’ Having introduced the subject of golf to allow himself a modest bit of boasting, Tucker now wished he could get away from the game. But invention deserted him and he said lamely, ‘Still playing at the North Lancs, are you, Percy?’

  ‘When I can get the time I am, yes, sir.’ The North Lancashire Golf Club had the best course in the area and was the one most golfers wanted to join. It was a source of great satisfaction to Peach and of intense irritation to Tucker that Percy had been accepted for membership there when he had only been playing for a couple of years, whereas Tucker’s reputation as a golfing hacker meant that he had been repeatedly turned down.

  Tucker sought desperately for something insulting to say. The best he could come up with was, ‘Got an official handicap, have you? It’s a tough course, the North Lancs.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m still nine there. Hope to get it down next season, if the crime figures allow it.’

  Tucker knew that he would never get down to a nine handicap, even if he were able to practise all day and every day. He said fretfully, ‘Speaking of which, you still don’t seem to be anywhere near an arrest in this Sarah Dunne case.’

  ‘That’s right, sir. A masterly summing-up, if I might say so. Shows your usual grasp of the whole picture, your usual understanding of the difficulties of a particular case.’

  ‘Well, it’s not good enough, is it? I expected better than this when I promoted you to DCI, you know.’

  So he was claiming the promotion was all his own work now. Peach wondered how best to send Tucker away disturbed for the rest of his weekend. He said mysteriously, ‘We do have certain leads, sir.’

  ‘Ah! At last! This is more like it.’

  ‘One of them’s a copper, sir.’ Peach dropped
his bombshell with an expertise bred from much practice.

  ‘A policeman?’ Tucker’s jaw dropped most appealingly. ‘One of our men’s going around the town killing whores?’

  The word sounded curiously old-fashioned, coming from Tucker. ‘He’s not a local, sir. One of the boys in blue from Blackpool, sir. Inspector, as a matter of fact. Forty-eight years old. Probably hoping to make Superintendent, before he retires. I haven’t been able to check whether he’s a Mason or not, yet.’

  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.